First up, having a random result from a recipe. This mechanic is in the game Age Of Conan, and it came across to me as just an unnecessary hassle. If there's only a 10% chance of successfully making the desired item and a 90% chance of just wasting resources creating junk, the result is going through the tedium of doing it ten times to achieve the goal. But in the game of Perfect World, adding plusses to equipment can fail and destroy all the previous additions. In this case it works like an escalating gamble, and the player has to choose to stop adding plusses and be satisfied with what they have, for now. I found this situation entertaining.

Second up, the business about only one player having control of one recipe is going to be...problematic. There would have to be a set of unique recipes for every player in the MMO. So either there's going to be a very small group of players or an extremely energetic team of recipe creators.

And finally, an opinion on the popularity of levelling: It has some psychological connections with growing up, in the same sense that smoking has something to do with eating and taking a rest, or that religeous figures have something to do with ancestral figures. And growth is a powerful biological motivator; it's hard at work in games like SimCity, the entire 4x genre, and nearly any facebook game. So if the commonly thought of Toon Levelling process is to be removed, the idea of growing will need a new place to hang it's hat.

On your first point: I wasnt imagining it in the same vein as AOC, but more so in the same vein that is Diablo 2. Whereas each and every item you make has the chance to be great ... for someone. There would also be 100% chance recipes which would be the unique items...these are the ones you could pull up on the net. However, the random items would have the potential to give wacky combos and possibly be better. Now since you have the ability to save/trade those recipes, you now have a really complex system...imo.

Second point. People could have the same recipe...just one person who creates it can not make multiple copies of it and distribute it throughout the game. If he pulls up a really nice recipe that he thinks will be popular, he can choose to sell it outright for a high price, or start making items, and hope that down the line he might get another lucky random draw.

Third point. I agree, leveling is a great way to show progression, and is almost required in a way. My original point, though cloudy, was meant to imply that players could get stronger and progress outside of continually doing quests and killing monsters. Ala being part of developing a town, doing a mini game to find monsters, crafting items, exploring the world, etc.

Although I'm interested in the concept of a levelless MMO (it could be great for pvp equality and characters with different numbers of hours put into them being able to pve together) and although I'm generally interested in crafting, the game described in the first post doesn't really interest me. For one thing the experimental crafting system and monster tracking system would be solved and documented in a wiki within a few months. For another thing, being forced to carry only one set of gear when each set of gear is of extremely restricted use just sounds obnoxious. For a third thing it sounds like even though you are removing leveling, characters that have had a lot of time put into them will still be able to kick the butts of those that haven't, which IMO defeats the who point of a levelless MMO.

I dont see how the experimental crafting system could be cracked if it was random. Again, think D2. While the ingredients would play some role into what your getting (and this would be documented IN GAME, no need for outside resources), the majority of the stats woudl be randomized, just like finding an armor on the ground. My idea is that in the mini-game created to make crafting fun (and this idea is without limit...use your imagination to make it as fun as you'd like), would have some effect on the final outcome. For instance, how long you leave it in the furnace down to the milliseconds (as i said in the OP).

The monster tracking system....I dont know if you ever played SWG, but each quest was always in a different place, and spawned in relation to your character. On top of that, the quest would involve a tier system and working with other players. For instance, tier 1 tracking would simply require easy fetch quests, or having to run through the woods and finding randomly spawned items. tier 2 quests would require items from the monsters you tracked down in the tier 1 quests. For example. T1 you track down a Giant Bird. One of the items it drops is a "Smelly Gland" which you buy from a Monster Hunter. You then use the smelly gland to finish up the tier 2 quest, which might randomly spawn an instance entrance somewhere. My thought was that thanks to the fact that players have to interact with each other to complete quests, it would help break up the monotony. Plus, you are inevitably doing it to make money, and thats always fun...as is getting a really rare monster.

I just described my 'Octopus' concept for a levelless MMO in the Community Brainstorm thread, so I won't repeat that. But overall I'd like to see an MMORPG progression, whether you call it levelling or not, which does not overall make the character stronger/faster/etc, but instead allowed the character to obtain a variety of alternative combat skills which enable different fighting styles. You can equip a limited number of them at a time (8 or 10), but can change them around for free whenever you are not in combat. You are intended to change them around all the time experimenting with different tactics. Different combinations of skill would effectively change your class - Place Trap is a classic assassin/thief/hunter skill, but whether you combined it with Short-term Invisibility, Archery, Ice Bolt, Mind Control, Statue (take reduced damage but you can't take actions either), Speed Burst (lowers defense), etc. would result in a wide variety of different possible play styles that would be roughly equally powerful.

That sounds a lot like Guild Wars. Sure they have levels, but only 20, and you level pretty much solely to enjoy the story. GW had classes, but you could change the subtype of your class by changing abilities.

Crafting on the other hand I'd like to see aimed at crafting a lot of tings which each player crafts once for themselves (backpack, house, appliances which enable crafting processes, stable for pets, and breeding pets/mounts is a form of crafting) as well as items mainly intended for aesthetic use (clothing, ornamental weapons (equipping a sword might be necessary to use a sword skill but all swords have the same stats so the reason to get a different one is looks) and especially dye to change colors of everything (hair, skin, eyes, tattoos/clothing/jewelry, clothing/weapons, house walls and roof, pets, mounts).

See, this idea seems fun on the outside, but to me, it seems to just be a lot of requirements you have to get out of the way before you can do anything. While aesthetics is fun, and certainly something players care about...it just seems too much like a farmville game, and i feel an MMO can be much more. I don't see any reason not to include this, but there would have to be more to it than simply changing the looks. Look at the SIMS. You can customize every facet of your world and characters, but there is still a game behind it all.

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The other thing I'd really really like to see in an MMO is more of an interactive fiction experience. The goal would be for the game to feel more like being the main character of a good science fiction or fantasy novel. Some of the mechanisms used to accomplish this would be a more in-depth and fleshed out system of building reputation with NPC factions and a dating sim like system of building relationships (positive or negative) with individual NPCs. Overall the game would have a lot fewer NPCs and the player would interact a lot more times with each one; questgivers would not be throwaways used for one thing and then never spoken to again.

Sounds like what Oblivion tried to do. Each NPC had a daily routine, and walked around during specific hours of the day. It was a nice start imo. They also reacted differently to you depending on your notoriety. I personally would like to eventually see NPCs completely done away with in the MMORPG genre, and replaced by players. Whereas players can come up with quests and other players can finish them. I feel like the first step to that is making players more dependent on each other in the economy and in the accomplishments they can finish throughout the game.

I dont see how the experimental crafting system could be cracked if it was random. Again, think D2. While the ingredients would play some role into what your getting (and this would be documented IN GAME, no need for outside resources), the majority of the stats woudl be randomized, just like finding an armor on the ground. My idea is that in the mini-game created to make crafting fun (and this idea is without limit...use your imagination to make it as fun as you'd like), would have some effect on the final outcome. For instance, how long you leave it in the furnace down to the milliseconds (as i said in the OP).

A minigame controlling the stats of a produced item could be fun, but controlling how long something is in a furnace sounds like the most obnoxious parts of a tale in the desert's crafting system. I don't see how something can be experimental if it is random. Is is random per user, but consistent in each user's experience? Because experimenting is about testing combinations of factors and recording the results with the goal of being able to predict the results of future combinations. If it's random, it's not predictable, and if it's not predictable it can't be functionally experimented with.

To me randomness isn't fun. I really hate trying to drophunt rare drops (especially from bosses), and I really hate crafting with a possibility of failure causing expensive loss of ingredients. I like having a recipe, knowing what ingredients I need, being able to get all the ingredients for one attempt in a few hours' work unless it's a truly epic thing I'm trying to craft, and successfully carrying out that one attempt without being terrified it might fail and waste all my work.

The monster tracking system....I dont know if you ever played SWG, but each quest was always in a different place, and spawned in relation to your character. On top of that, the quest would involve a tier system and working with other players. For instance, tier 1 tracking would simply require easy fetch quests, or having to run through the woods and finding randomly spawned items. tier 2 quests would require items from the monsters you tracked down in the tier 1 quests. For example. T1 you track down a Giant Bird. One of the items it drops is a "Smelly Gland" which you buy from a Monster Hunter. You then use the smelly gland to finish up the tier 2 quest, which might randomly spawn an instance entrance somewhere. My thought was that thanks to the fact that players have to interact with each other to complete quests, it would help break up the monotony. Plus, you are inevitably doing it to make money, and thats always fun...as is getting a really rare monster.[/quote]
Making money is only fun if you have something you want to spend it on. I've played many games where I ended up with a pile of money and nothing to spend it on. More importantly, eww procedural quests. Procedural quests are almost as bad as AI characters; I'll rant about those below.

See, this idea seems fun on the outside, but to me, it seems to just be a lot of requirements you have to get out of the way before you can do anything. While aesthetics is fun, and certainly something players care about...it just seems too much like a farmville game, and i feel an MMO can be much more. I don't see any reason not to include this, but there would have to be more to it than simply changing the looks. Look at the SIMS. You can customize every facet of your world and characters, but there is still a game behind it all. [/quote]
What requirements you have to get out of the way before you can do anything? One of the major goals of the octopus design is that a new player entering the game can immediately start doing whichever gameplay type they want to do, whether that is pvp, killing monsters for drops, playing minigames, or crafting. You craft yourself things like a house, but a house is mainly useful for crafting, and not required for pvp, minigames, or monster-hunting. I haven't played farmville *shudder* but from what I've heard it's totally different - you can't walk around inside the game world, I don't think it even has monsters to kill, and it seems to be mainly about getting people to send facebook messages to each other *eww* and spend money in the cash shop.

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The other thing I'd really really like to see in an MMO is more of an interactive fiction experience. The goal would be for the game to feel more like being the main character of a good science fiction or fantasy novel. Some of the mechanisms used to accomplish this would be a more in-depth and fleshed out system of building reputation with NPC factions and a dating sim like system of building relationships (positive or negative) with individual NPCs. Overall the game would have a lot fewer NPCs and the player would interact a lot more times with each one; questgivers would not be throwaways used for one thing and then never spoken to again.

Sounds like what Oblivion tried to do. Each NPC had a daily routine, and walked around during specific hours of the day. It was a nice start imo. They also reacted differently to you depending on your notoriety. I personally would like to eventually see NPCs completely done away with in the MMORPG genre, and replaced by players. Whereas players can come up with quests and other players can finish them. I feel like the first step to that is making players more dependent on each other in the economy and in the accomplishments they can finish throughout the game.[/quote]
Err, no. NPC sims driven by AI are the exact opposite of an interactive fiction game where every NPC has multiple quests and conversations to have with the player. Here's my rant about procedural quests and AI NPCs: they blow chunks. Giving a quest or npc a minimum amount of scripting just makes them seem even more robotic and and meaningless than they already do. Characters in novels DON'T go about their own meaningless routines, they don't even exist when they are not participating in the plot, carrying out a role with the main goal of developing the themes of the story and driving the plot forward. In a novel every character is there because the author put them there for a reason. The author carefully chose every word to come out of the character's mouth, and their appearance and body language. Linear games like jRPGs have the best stories in the realm of games because their stories were written like screenplays or manga by actual professional writers. A good interactive story like a high-quality dating sim is the same way - one or more writers plan out potential stories and write the dialogue and stage directions for them, then the player's choices direct them through a subset of these stories. One of these stories might be about an NPC falling in love with the player. If the NPC doesn't seem to be a person with feelings instead of an automaton there would be no value to the player in experiencing this story. NPCs are supposed to exist in whatever form and functionality creates the best story experience for the player, period. Okay, end rant. But also, *shudder* at the horrifying idea of a game that tries to force me to interact with other players instead of NPCs; now that would make for a craptastic 'story experience'.

Here's my bits on a diffrent MMORPGs:

In my opinion the most underused aspect in MMORPGs is the fact that the player cannot affect the world, you should implement whatever you can to make the world evolve with the players rather then making it a them-park ride.

Also getting inspiration from great single player games like Patrician, Annon,Total War,Dwarf Fortress and so on can help allot for a vareity of things including implementing tricky things like economy and logistics.

On the progression debate I view the skill pool system as the best,where your number of points are limited and focusing on another skill will decay an unused one,tht way you can have proper specialization of various degrees

NPC can be allot more useful as anything other then quest givers, since they can be regarded as workers while the players as adventurers/entrepreneurs you can delegate normal boring things to the workers in the services of players, this would both enrich the world as well as provide higher levels of play, especially if the NPCs can be a potential weakness if the NPCs themselves are a limited resource.

Player created quests are and interesting idea especially if implementing, if played right you might even get emergent storylines.

Also interesting is user unique crafting utilizing a type of noise function to get quality with different local optimums representing effects,this way it will negate looking at outside sources and be based only on your own research

I think Adrix89 mentions a really interesting thing, players creating content. I think a big problem in the MMO industry is the need to constantly produce new content for the players. Content variety and originality drops and time to develop new mechanics/features simply ain't there. If you let the players contribute with even the simplest things like quests, the company themselves could focus on other things.

Example: I was quite disappointed when the WoW guild patch was deployed (guild achievements ...) and I think it could have been a lot more interesting if the players got total control over guild reputation and the possibility of creating quests.

Imagine using the reputation as a way of really showing how much you've done for the guild. Maybe the guild is in need of certain materials for crafting equipment, so the guild master creates quests that people can do to gather these. The guild could add their own reputation rewards, like titles or custom tabards. Everything paid by the guild and created by the guild, allowing everyone to do it their own way, but also having to get the resources for it.

So what keeps people coming back day after day, week after week, month after month? Although I can understand not liking procedural quests, they do give the players something to do at a relative cheap investment (programming-wise). Just for fun, I designed a single storyline that contained 9 quests. It had three quests where you could make a decision that impacts the storyline and makes it more personal. The result? I had to make 39 total quests and had 8 possible endings. Which is about 4 times the work as a procedural quest (unless I'm missing the definition of 'procedural' which is highly probable). And even then, I was starting to see a lot of quests were grinding of some sort: grinding X amount of Y material, X amount of Y reputation, kill X amount of Y creatures. How do you make quests original and (semi-) unique to the player while maintaining an immersive narrative?

And while I'm at it, I disagree with having the players create the quests resulting in decreased workload for the developers. Because for every submission it has to be spell checked, grammar checked, reality checked, and lore checked. Plus they have to make sure there's not a huge influx of cool new quests that all happen to take place in a single area, making it congested and frustrating for players.

I was thinking more of guild internal quests and I'd say those don't need any sort of check from the developers.

I was thinking more of guild internal quests and I'd say those don't need any sort of check from the developers.

Aha, gotcha. Yeah, I'm surprised more MMOs don't have that option. The only one I can think of is Eve, which has a contracts system where a corporation (guild) can set up buy orders for stuff.

I think Adrix89 mentions a really interesting thing, players creating content. I think a big problem in the MMO industry is the need to constantly produce new content for the players. Content variety and originality drops and time to develop new mechanics/features simply ain't there. If you let the players contribute with even the simplest things like quests, the company themselves could focus on other things.

Example: I was quite disappointed when the WoW guild patch was deployed (guild achievements ...) and I think it could have been a lot more interesting if the players got total control over guild reputation and the possibility of creating quests.

Imagine using the reputation as a way of really showing how much you've done for the guild. Maybe the guild is in need of certain materials for crafting equipment, so the guild master creates quests that people can do to gather these. The guild could add their own reputation rewards, like titles or custom tabards. Everything paid by the guild and created by the guild, allowing everyone to do it their own way, but also having to get the resources for it.

I agree, which is why I originally thought that random items were a good idea for crafting. It makes it maintainable by using a nice simple algorithm for item creation, while making it expandable and gives the player the ability to materialize and trade their creations.

The system would be "Random" but certain factors would sway the end process towards a specific direction. Once they made something that seemed useful, they could sell the recipe..one that many others would not have due to the nature of random. Of course, you can't leave out static unique recipes that everyone can get.

Player built homes and evolving cities really helps the world become the players. Every server would have different looking cities and with the system I described, It wouldnt be too hard to build. Just a simple grid, and something to track the value of the neighborhood around you that increases the overall "experience" of your real estate and allows you to upgrade it further.

Allowing for player-built structures does raise the question whether it needs to be instanced or not though. Instancing it sort of defeats the purpose you are describing but not doing it would require a large area that was easily expandable. At the same time, I feel that the area and the structures needs to feel "important" and "original" If everyone built the same structures over and over, it would be better to keep it instanced.