I am actually doing something like this in my game. One aspect where discovery is important is the magic system. Players who want to be mages must explore the world and locate dungeons/ancient cities/temples/wizards towers and find books/scrolls/parchments which contain words of power used to craft spells. Players then remove the items from the location and thus no one else can learn those words of power. Further some areas contain more words of power than a player can carry away at once, and some areas contain rooms that can't be easily accessed without preparation. Players would be well advised to avoid revealing these locations if at all possible to preserve their control over said words of power.
Players may also discover hidden mountain passes, hidden passages, secret doors and other such things that would provide them various advantages in travel or attack and so forth. In some cases these locations are hidden and you need various skills to discover them, but in other cases its simply a matter of every player or even guild not being able to explore every single area of the map, so any player could use these locations, if they had happened to go to that particular place. However in all of these cases not revealing these geographical secrets can give players or groups of players an advantage.
The location discovery also applies to various resource spawns in the game as well.

I suppose a group of players could try to map the world anyways, even if it cost them such a large advantage to give away all these secrets, but it would be pretty dumb if they wanted to do well in the game.

And there are ways to implement exploring in a lot of other cases, too across many genres.

An MMO lasting only two months a go would not work. Casual players would be irate and for good reason.[/quote]All my MMOs so far have up to 3 month rounds, so the hatred by casuals is exagerrated (I have not noticed any exodus of players upon round end, the number of players always go back in first 3 days of a round, don't ask why, I have no clue). Althrough, I have no means of comparing it, so maybe it could be that my games are niche and have only hardcore players (still, so many of my players are half literate that I can't really call them hardcore )...

Ability Example: You delve deep into the enemy stronghold. The stronghold was once a great city where scholars would pilgrimage to study in the great library. Over the years the city has been corrupted by the taint and documents had been pillaged and since disappeared from the known world. Due to it's nature there would be a very limited supply of these scrolls. You discover one of these documents, a scroll perhaps, where if you have the proper understanding(skill requirement) you can learn the knowledge of the scroll and gain access to a new ability. The ability would then need to be refined(skilled up) to make it more effective/useful. In essence some abilities do not exist until they are found and they won't be commonly found. You could also have it that if you have the required knowledge to study it, abilities cast against you can be learned through experiencing them. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but after several run-ins with the spell you could learn a very basic version of it and practice it to improve it.

Can other players explore the same stroghold too? I don't understand what is the defference of this "discovered scroll" from a rare standard loot? It seems to me that it works identical?

Crafting Example: You are working diligently on making a weapon. You start to make a dirk and your crafting skills are sufficient enough where you, unintended by the player, create a very very basic curved dagger, which is unusable in combat. You can then study the curved dagger to unlock it as a future craft recipe. Once you unlock/discover it, you can craft curved daggers, low quality to begin, but better the more times you make the item.[/quote]I can tell you right away, they will measure the chance of "unlocking curved dagger" and will post it on fan websites. Yes, they will manually produce dirks and manually add the numbers and will come up with the chance. It happens all the time in my games, they are crazy, at least some of them
I'm not sure if this is what you want or not, but well, that's what will happen. It will be seen as an undocumented feature, not a discovery.

An MMO lasting only two months a go would not work. Casual players would be irate and for good reason.

All my MMOs so far have up to 3 month rounds, so the hatred by casuals is exagerrated (I have not noticed any exodus of players upon round end, the number of players always go back in first 3 days of a round, don't ask why, I have no clue). Althrough, I have no means of comparing it, so maybe it could be that my games are niche and have only hardcore players (still, so many of my players are half literate that I can't really call them hardcore )...

Ability Example: You delve deep into the enemy stronghold. The stronghold was once a great city where scholars would pilgrimage to study in the great library. Over the years the city has been corrupted by the taint and documents had been pillaged and since disappeared from the known world. Due to it's nature there would be a very limited supply of these scrolls. You discover one of these documents, a scroll perhaps, where if you have the proper understanding(skill requirement) you can learn the knowledge of the scroll and gain access to a new ability. The ability would then need to be refined(skilled up) to make it more effective/useful. In essence some abilities do not exist until they are found and they won't be commonly found. You could also have it that if you have the required knowledge to study it, abilities cast against you can be learned through experiencing them. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but after several run-ins with the spell you could learn a very basic version of it and practice it to improve it.

Can other players explore the same stroghold too? I don't understand what is the defference of this "discovered scroll" from a rare standard loot? It seems to me that it works identical?

Crafting Example: You are working diligently on making a weapon. You start to make a dirk and your crafting skills are sufficient enough where you, unintended by the player, create a very very basic curved dagger, which is unusable in combat. You can then study the curved dagger to unlock it as a future craft recipe. Once you unlock/discover it, you can craft curved daggers, low quality to begin, but better the more times you make the item.[/quote]I can tell you right away, they will measure the chance of "unlocking curved dagger" and will post it on fan websites. Yes, they will manually produce dirks and manually add the numbers and will come up with the chance. It happens all the time in my games, they are crazy, at least some of them
I'm not sure if this is what you want or not, but well, that's what will happen. It will be seen as an undocumented feature, not a discovery.
[/quote]

Because standard rare loot has an established percentage chance of dropping. This discovered loot would be able to be discovered in a variety of ways, be it from a mob, a chest, or some other acquisition method. It wouldn't be as simple as X monster drops Y loot Z percent of the time. Perhaps you will find a traveler that provides it as a reward for completing a quest. This traveler would not be available to all players and wouldn't be something that can be camped every few hours/days.

The goal is to provide a variety of ways for players to experience the same gameplay across different servers. Sometimes the experiences will be the same, it is still a program after all, but if it can help make things a bit more random and unknown it should be able to work. One must remember that being able to compete in this game would be less gear dependent than most games. Gear still possesses inherent benefits(in action and aesthetics) and some is better than others, but not to the extent that it over powers a player.

As for crafting, or any other game mechanic for the matter, with enough study and theory I don't see how anything can be kept a secret. Frankly, that is how some people actually play games. They decode them, that is where they find their fun. It may not be as simple as having a recipe and crafting. Perhaps you need to know how to create two or more different recipes before even having a chance of getting another. Where the combination of recipes known accounts for what you can potentially unlock for future recipes. Again, people will break it down, but if it can be a bit more elaborate than go to NPC trainer and pay cash for recipes, why not try it?

I spend a lot of my time decoding and analyzing games to find optimal progression paths. Sometimes I post them and sometimes I don't.
Its called math/listing. You work out equations, for instance the gold or time value for every resource and then you create a list of tasks to be completed and suggested order.
I did something like this for www.war-facts.com where I postulated that given 1 main account + 1 multi for every 5 players in an enemy faction I would be able to compete with any number of players in an opposing faction all by myself. However I could only face off against 100 enemy players before being outmatched because certain specific game features like exploring required constant attention. However given a person of equal drive i could scale all the way to 200 v 1000 before sheer numbers defeated me. I never did convince the devs to let me try it out, but one day when I amass a group of 10 friends willing to run an account each we shall use the math/list to play 10v100 in a 1v1 faction deathmatch and make even the hardcore vets cry, because without the checklist you cannot keep track of all the things to do and do them in the right order.
In theory I could break any limitation on power players vs casual with effective math/listing whereby a power player with a math/list would be effective against 5 or more casuals given the time for the superior gameplay to over power numbers. Obviously if the game allowed a zerg rush a group of casuals may win, but thats provided they can organize. A group of casuals trying to organize is often entertaining in and of itself.

If you want something to be a secret you have to incentivize players to keep it a secret with game mechanics.

I spend a lot of my time decoding and analyzing games to find optimal progression paths. Sometimes I post them and sometimes I don't.
Its called math/listing. You work out equations, for instance the gold or time value for every resource and then you create a list of tasks to be completed and suggested order.
I did something like this for www.war-facts.com where I postulated that given 1 main account + 1 multi for every 5 players in an enemy faction I would be able to compete with any number of players in an opposing faction all by myself. However I could only face off against 100 enemy players before being outmatched because certain specific game features like exploring required constant attention. However given a person of equal drive i could scale all the way to 200 v 1000 before sheer numbers defeated me. I never did convince the devs to let me try it out, but one day when I amass a group of 10 friends willing to run an account each we shall use the math/list to play 10v100 in a 1v1 faction deathmatch and make even the hardcore vets cry, because without the checklist you cannot keep track of all the things to do and do them in the right order.
In theory I could break any limitation on power players vs casual with effective math/listing whereby a power player with a math/list would be effective against 5 or more casuals given the time for the superior gameplay to over power numbers. Obviously if the game allowed a zerg rush a group of casuals may win, but thats provided they can organize. A group of casuals trying to organize is often entertaining in and of itself.

If you want something to be a secret you have to incentivize players to keep it a secret with game mechanics.

Yes, it also adds to the social dynamic if people are able to maintain secrets. Rather than running right out to go to your secret place you may feel the need to make sure you aren't being trailed or spied on by other players. A world where more than character death is at stake.


To clarify a bit more about this "discovery" based game I should also use the word Progressive. I was thinking back on to what games may have done something similar in the past and Everquest came to mind. They opened progression based servers that through play the players were able to start with the basic world and unlock the already existing expansions giving a very remote feeling of reliving the original lifespan of Everquest. This also gave birth to those hardcore EQ players that just wanted to burn through the content to be the first to get it done which advanced the servers faster than casual players could ever hope to keep up with. The main difference I see is that EQ was a game where levels and progression in character development were all that there was. There was no housing. There were no secrets. It had all been done before. As I recall the progression servers actually had quite the influx of players from it's normal amount so I do believe that the concept does have promise. As dynamic content may be too difficult a task to work with currently for independent teams I see no issues with working from inception on a concept that has the game world progress through play.