To try and add cohesion to several recent threads and solidfy some personal ideas... Imagine a MMORPG where the story is secondary. Where the plot is secondary. Where NPC''s speech and plot involvement is not a dagger in the side of every designer posting in this forum. Where no story created by the original designers constitute the goal of, fun behind, or reason for playing the game. Imagine a game shaped primarily be the social structure of the gamers. A game where you are inconsequential without your alliances. Implement guilds, and let the focus of this game be the power struggles of these guilds--internally, with other guilds in their towns, all of the guilds of one town uniting against a rival town, etc. The most basic and primary goal is to belong to the most powerful guild possible. This requires aiding your guild (by performing duties, etc.), disrupting other guilds, and increasing personal character stats to become a stronger asset to your guild. Guild structure is generically outlined, but as each guild undergoes internal power struggles, their individual political structures will vary and change. Leading to guild politics. Not only must you try and strengthen your guild and weaken other guilds, you must try and increase your position in your guild if you feel you are better qualified for a superior position. Coups, assassinations, outright challenges and battle--all acceptable means, but with ranging side effects. Guilds do not need to be made of all one class (for instance, a thieves guild) although that is certainly allowable. Guilds can be created by any band of players, with some set minimum, and some set way of in game establishment. Guild creation will become less habitual as the game progresses, because territory will be taken and contested vehemenently. All guilds will have general statistics available, in game and through web interface DB access. Territory, primary power locations (known HQ''s), commanders, estimated # of members, admission policies, rivalries, etc. will be made available. Each guild may gather its own intelligence on other guilds, available to all other internal guild members. To create turbulence and activity, players must feel urgency. They must always try and solidify their power at every possible opportunity. To create this urgency, increase time and the affects of aging. Players age (1 yr/wk, 1 yr/2 wks?...) and aging has side effects. Players past there prime will never be able to physically rest control from another, and no player will be immune from the effects of agin forever, ensuring that no one will control a guild forever. Players will die from aging. There will still be plenty of "go out, kill goblins and giant". But for the regular, the true intrigue will be political struggle. Guilds will be encouraged to setup outside of the game (as a clan has a website, so would a guild). A server would be dedicated to Guild info, constantly updating information, and most importantly, hierarchy. Thoughts, additions, implementation, advice, and discussion welcome. --OctDev

Er, most MMORPGs are at least half like that already. Nobody cares about NPCs or plot. The only thing they''re lacking is the detailed guild tools.

Personally I hate guilds and the like. Especially in player vs. player games. They breed antagonism. And to borrow a phrase from another thread, such organizations are a mark of poor game design as it''s a tacit acknowledgement that you can''t provide enough gameplay for them and that they should make it up for themselves through the politics and battle.

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A neat idea for a game, but one that I would never play.

Allow me to introduce you to Tarsis. Tarsis is my character, an aspiring bladesmith, who wishes to someday craft blades of such quality that carrying a blade made by him is a mark of honor, and find himself a place within a guild. But right now, Tarsis is broke, and a neophite. So, he goes out, and starts mining/killing monsters/gathering materials/whatever and scrapes away at it slowly. Soon a couple of people head by, say "This is Red Fang territory" and kill him. After getting back together (either by starting another character, or ressurection) Tarsis heads out, into a different area where he is promptly slaughered again. After repeating this process a few times, he tries to defend himself, but is easily dispatched by his more practiced foes. Finally, he realizes that he won''t be able to survive on his own, and approaches the Red Fang guild, in hopes of obtaining their protection. Unfortunately he''s told "You''re a N00B" and then killed for good measure. After several days, Tarsis manages to find a guild who will accept him. Unfortunately this doesn''t help, as the only guilds who accept newbies are so weak as to be no protection.

Ok, so I''m exaggerating quite a bit. But remember whenver you make a game about crushing your foes, there''s always the poor guy who gets crushed underfoot. And often, he can''t defend himself.

Perhaps a set of laws? Make the guild responsible for the actions of its members (beyond just the perceptions of other guilds)?

Good luck, as I believe that this is a tough type of game to get to be fun.

K--Perhaps nobody cares about NPC''s or plot, but I have not played one where politics were organized and central. Note I do not consider leveling and trading powerful items to trully be politics. Nearly every thread in this forum seems to deal with improving NPC''s and plot. By acknowledging that in this genre noone cares about them anyway, coupled with the general consensus that providing a trully interactive and evolving environment is too complex right now, then a set of political rules seems to be a logical way of adding replayability. The detailed guild tools and rules are exactly what I am trying to provide. Sorry if that was unclear.

ThoughtBubble--Good point, and sorry I didn''t elaborate more on this issue; I was getting tired of typing earlier. A set of rules is what I am hoping to generate here, and was focused more on background. There should be little to no gain for random killings, and killing non-affiliated chracters and weak characters constittue extremely random. Implementation of punishment may involve giving each guild some sort of criminal rating, which dissipates with time. If a guild''s rating gets too high, a small army of the king''s men or such may attack. Not necessarily to destroy the guild, just to weaken it (possibly to the point of another guild trying to destroy it). Each guild would know who is contributing to their criminal rating, and why. This would give them time to punish that character responsible for needlessly PKing. However, joining a guild is a central theme. My thoughts were that aging will require that new members do join the guild at some point if the guild hopes to survive, and that a guild can only accept non-established characters (>= level 5). This ensures that low level characters must be accepted into established guilds. Any powerful non-affiliated character is somewhat of a free agent, but working for competing guilds chould possibly get you killed.

--OctDev

So, why would one guild attack another? What would they have to gain? Territory perhaps? If a guild could control, say the mercantile area, they''d get a cut of the taxes in that area?

And, as far as guild memberships go, won''t one player just constantly cycle his characters through the guild?

And even if killing weak people isn''t profitable, I can guarntee you that unless it''s distinctly unprofitable, it''ll happen all the time.

I''m sorry I can''t offer any help on this, but dealing with the attitudes of many online players is a difficult thing.

Attacking another guild could result in increased territory, items, money, and protection. All territory would generate some basic revenue, with choice locations generating larger cashflow.

People will cycle characters through the same guild, but that is good as it creates a sense of attachment to a particular guild. People will be limited to X number of character per subscription. Guilds should be on the scale of 100-300 player members.

Killing weak players in unprofitable. By killing a weak player (especially non-affiliated), your guild''s criminal rating would rise. The entire guild knows specifically why their public criminal rating is rising, as it is clearly documented when Sir Death kills Johnny NewB to add 20 points to the guilds criminal rating. The entire guild will police itself on unnecessary killings, because if the rating gets too high, then they will be forced to fight an overwhelming NPC army, resulting in the deaths of most who are around at the time of attack, and the random deaths of a significant portion of the non-currently playing characters. No one wants to lose their character because of another''s repeated stupidity, and this will finally encourage some sort of player policing within the mmorpg world.

Im realize the online attitude revolves around inconsequence of action, and this entire proposal is an attempt to add a more defined socio structure to the world, thereby hassling the online "bully."

--OctDev

Isn''t Dark Age of Camelot sort of like this with it''s realm fighting?

Step back a bit, what you are proposing is active competition between players and groups. (As opposed to simple stats comparisons, which are passive competition)

Perhaps groups fight, perhaps people vie for positions of power...it''s perfectly reasonable. Right now MMORPG don''t have a plot OR a social structure of any kind.

I don''t think it is a cop-out to have some player driven dynamics, any more than providing mod tools is a cop-out. You would still have to put a lot of thought into developing the system.

IIRC Lineage the Blood Pledge has some sort of social structure, you pledge to serve lords and rise though the ranks or something...basically imagine actual history, feudal lords and such, but everyone is a player.

Didn''t Asheron''s Call institute a more social environment with the pledgeing support and such to characters in return for protection?

Although it has yet to be released the mmorpg Atriarch uses a very complex political system. Thier world starts off controlled by npcs but players can eventualy build up in prestige and take over cities and go to war with other cities. As for how they handled the senseless pking, thier solution is 2 parts. One, permament death and two,karma . Killing a new player of low level severly effects your karma.Negative karma causes the player to be a target for bounty hunting and "karma birds" wich carry the players to extreemely dangerous places where they could easily be killed. Players who work thier way up through the political system begin to be worth less negative karma for thier murder. Killing a county leader hardly effects you but killing a lowley merchant hurts.

Very cool. When is it released?

--OctDev