My Dream Game. Probably TL;DR

[Chiropteran]

I love the concept behind an RPG MMO. I hate virtually of the MMOs currently out though.

My perfect game:

1- Very Steep, Very Fast Leveling Curve. It feels like each new MMO has to one-up it's predecessors. Oh your max level is 50? Well in my game max level is 70! Oh you think 70 is high? Well we have a cap of 90! This is pointless and annoying. My optimal game would have a level cap of 10, or maybe 15. Any higher isn't needed for a new MMO. Maybe years later, an expansion will raise the cap to 20, but it doesn't need to be that high upon release! Whatever the max level is, you should be able to reach it or get "close enough" within 12 hours of game time. This might seem absurdly fast for someone accustomed to other games, but the real game is at max level. That 12 hours would be for a good player who knows how to play, a newbie would still take far longer with good reason- the newbie needs more practice. This leads into my next requirement:

2- Harsh Death Penalties. When you die you drop most of your gear. You can get it back if a friend picks it up for you, or if you reach your corpse yourself, but there is risk of losing it forever if someone else steals it. Also, when you die you lose a lot of experience. Maybe 1/3 of the XP to level, so if you die 2-3 times in a row you will actually lose a level and go down to the previous level. I may be in the minority here, but I really do want this. Diablo 3 is a great illustration of why this system can be good. Diablo 3 normal mode is an utter joke. Even inferno, with mobs ridiculously scaled such that they can kill players in a single hit, was finished almost immediately by the most serious players. No matter how hard a fight is, you can brute force your way through it if you have infinite lives and attempts. Dying in D3 was meaningless- unless you played Hardcore. Hardcore was a whole other game, you had to worry about defenses more and you couldn't zerg things down. IMO it was a much better game, BUT it had a serious issue in that most casual players didn't want to play it at all, because losing literally days worth of work due to a brief lag spike was an unacceptable risk. Why do we only have these two incredible extremes? Where is the middle ground? The middle ground is exactly what I want. Death penalties that hurt, can result in permanent loss, are very harsh, but ultimately don't completely erase days worth of work.

3- Easy Come, Easy Go, & Some Permanent Progression This goes along with points 1&2. It's easier to xp, it's easier to gain gear, but it's also easier to lose those things compared to other games. However, there should still be some things you can earn which you never, or virtually never lose. This is something that is hard for me to define exactly, but I am thinking a rune system like league of legends, and skills which are very difficult to train, find, or even learn but are not lost upon death. These give you something to work for that even in a worst case scenario you don't lose all your progress. After playing a character for a week you die in a horrible situation where you can't recover. You lose your gear, you lose some xp, but you still have unique skills you unlocked in the past week, and you still have some rune bonuses. You might not get back the exact same gear, but your recovery will be much easier than it was to collect the gear the first time, because of the benefits of your skills and runes.

4- PvP, for Real In a way, I think the best MMO PvP environment could be compared to League of Legends or DoTA style games. Easy to get in, easy to level up, but also easy to die (lose the game) and lose your gear (starting your next DoTA game with a new character and no items). PvP is something I feel no MMO has handled optimally. Original Ultima Online had a good starter concept, but it needs to go further. I feel like you should be able to do virtually anything you want, but depending on what you do you might be a varying degrees of advantage or disadvantage. You want to be a real jerk and gank everyone you see? You can do that, but you won't have any safe place to rest, you won't be able to use any regular towns, everyone will know you as evil, etc. You can do it if you want but it won't be easy. On the other hand, maybe you want to PvP your faction's enemies but not your allies. You will be safe in your home faction's towns (mostly), and you will have some allies, but you will also have enemies.

5- A Real MMO World I hate the idea of instances. Instances should not exist. Grinding shouldn't exist. Repeating content shouldn't exist. The world would be all one world, no boundary lines, no instance portals. No queue into a random dungeon group. Experience, as I said before it would be easy to reach max level. Well, there is a catch. You would get greatly reduced XP for killing the same mob more than once. 100% first kill, then 60%, then 30%, then 10%, and then 3%. Grinding in one area wouldn't get you anywhere. If you want to level you need to explore new areas and do new things. Quests as they exist in world of warcraft? No. Quests as player driven singular events? Hell yes. Zones would be static, but mobs would not. A cave near your starting town has goblins. You go clear it out, get some treasure and xp. Someone else comes along, it's empty, sorry, check elsewhere. The next day, someone else goes in the cave and finds that a family of bears has moved in. After slaying the bears, a few days pass and a dragon takes over. Each zone could have dozens of potential mob configurations.

6- Player Driven Shadowbane had some cool concepts as far as building player towns. I liked the idea, but i'd suggest something simpler. Zones that can be taken over. There would be dozens of these throughout the MMO world. One zone might be a small castle and keep full of "evil knights". You go in with some friends, fight hard and overcome all the enemies, and kill the evil knight's king. He drops a crown. The player who picks up the crown can use it to interface with a town control UI. He can set tax rates, assign money to be used for various tasks, hire NPC town guards, etc. However, there is a restriction. The crown must stay in the zone. You could leave it in a chest but if enemy players kill your guards and loot the chest they can take control of the town. Or if you are in a large clan you can trade off the crown and have different players hold it a different times of the day. Some towns would be massive powerful and very valuable to control, others would be small hamlets with only small bonuses.

7- Get Rid of Information Overload, and Player Expectations No levels visible. No item stats visible normally, although certain loring magic might reveal item stats temporarily. Other players are not visible in a list, you can't arbitrarily /who someone, you can't see other players class or level or equipment except what is visible in game graphically. Some fights will be too hard! This isn't a bad thing. Part of the game will be attempting to kill monsters you can't handle, and you will have to run away.

Bleh, I feel like I could go on forever and this post is probably already a huge wall of text, so I'm going to stop there. I just feel frustrated because I can't find any MMO that is even remotely close to what I'd like to play. Everything is moving in the other direction.

 

[sm625]

Shadowbane's building system was pretty simple. It would be a lot more complex if people are constantly camping your tree preventing you from placing your buildings... but that would only happen in an extremely high population. I never saw that high of a population, but there were times like when Corruption launched, where we'd fight these huge epic battles just so we could clear track and place a church and a runemaster. lol

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

 

[Chiropteran]

Ultima Online was great in it's sandbox format, but it really lacked content. As well, the pvp system was a good basic start but had too many loopholes. It could have worked if they continued to patch and adjust the system to close the loopholes, but instead they just removed pvp entirely by adding no-pvp shards.

Shadowbane's town building system was cool, but I felt like it was too complex and the cost of entry was too big, that is the amount of gold needed for even the most basic town. I think it would be more interesting with lots of smaller towns, as it would give reasons for smaller groups to pvp. I like pvp (player vs player), I don't like ava (army vs army). Shadowbane was a great concept but there wasn't really any incentives to fight in smaller groups, the advantage of numbers was huge. Despite that, if someone bought shadowbane and re-released it and cleaned up the nasty sb.exe crash bugs and other basic flaws i'd pay money to play it again- it's "close enough" to what I want.

 

[diesbudt]

I love the concept behind an RPG MMO. I hate virtually of the MMOs currently out though.

My perfect game:

1- Very Steep, Very Fast Leveling Curve. It feels like each new MMO has to one-up it's predecessors. Oh your max level is 50? Well in my game max level is 70! Oh you think 70 is high? Well we have a cap of 90! This is pointless and annoying. My optimal game would have a level cap of 10, or maybe 15. Any higher isn't needed for a new MMO. Maybe years later, an expansion will raise the cap to 20, but it doesn't need to be that high upon release! Whatever the max level is, you should be able to reach it or get "close enough" within 12 hours of game time. This might seem absurdly fast for someone accustomed to other games, but the real game is at max level. That 12 hours would be for a good player who knows how to play, a newbie would still take far longer with good reason- the newbie needs more practice. This leads into my next requirement:

2- Harsh Death Penalties. When you die you drop most of your gear. You can get it back if a friend picks it up for you, or if you reach your corpse yourself, but there is risk of losing it forever if someone else steals it. Also, when you die you lose a lot of experience. Maybe 1/3 of the XP to level, so if you die 2-3 times in a row you will actually lose a level and go down to the previous level. I may be in the minority here, but I really do want this. Diablo 3 is a great illustration of why this system can be good. Diablo 3 normal mode is an utter joke. Even inferno, with mobs ridiculously scaled such that they can kill players in a single hit, was finished almost immediately by the most serious players. No matter how hard a fight is, you can brute force your way through it if you have infinite lives and attempts. Dying in D3 was meaningless- unless you played Hardcore. Hardcore was a whole other game, you had to worry about defenses more and you couldn't zerg things down. IMO it was a much better game, BUT it had a serious issue in that most casual players didn't want to play it at all, because losing literally days worth of work due to a brief lag spike was an unacceptable risk. Why do we only have these two incredible extremes? Where is the middle ground? The middle ground is exactly what I want. Death penalties that hurt, can result in permanent loss, are very harsh, but ultimately don't completely erase days worth of work.

3- Easy Come, Easy Go, & Some Permanent Progression This goes along with points 1&2. It's easier to xp, it's easier to gain gear, but it's also easier to lose those things compared to other games. However, there should still be some things you can earn which you never, or virtually never lose. This is something that is hard for me to define exactly, but I am thinking a rune system like league of legends, and skills which are very difficult to train, find, or even learn but are not lost upon death. These give you something to work for that even in a worst case scenario you don't lose all your progress. After playing a character for a week you die in a horrible situation where you can't recover. You lose your gear, you lose some xp, but you still have unique skills you unlocked in the past week, and you still have some rune bonuses. You might not get back the exact same gear, but your recovery will be much easier than it was to collect the gear the first time, because of the benefits of your skills and runes.

4- PvP, for Real In a way, I think the best MMO PvP environment could be compared to League of Legends or DoTA style games. Easy to get in, easy to level up, but also easy to die (lose the game) and lose your gear (starting your next DoTA game with a new character and no items). PvP is something I feel no MMO has handled optimally. Original Ultima Online had a good starter concept, but it needs to go further. I feel like you should be able to do virtually anything you want, but depending on what you do you might be a varying degrees of advantage or disadvantage. You want to be a real jerk and gank everyone you see? You can do that, but you won't have any safe place to rest, you won't be able to use any regular towns, everyone will know you as evil, etc. You can do it if you want but it won't be easy. On the other hand, maybe you want to PvP your faction's enemies but not your allies. You will be safe in your home faction's towns (mostly), and you will have some allies, but you will also have enemies.

5- A Real MMO World I hate the idea of instances. Instances should not exist. Grinding shouldn't exist. Repeating content shouldn't exist. The world would be all one world, no boundary lines, no instance portals. No queue into a random dungeon group. Experience, as I said before it would be easy to reach max level. Well, there is a catch. You would get greatly reduced XP for killing the same mob more than once. 100% first kill, then 60%, then 30%, then 10%, and then 3%. Grinding in one area wouldn't get you anywhere. If you want to level you need to explore new areas and do new things. Quests as they exist in world of warcraft? No. Quests as player driven singular events? Hell yes. Zones would be static, but mobs would not. A cave near your starting town has goblins. You go clear it out, get some treasure and xp. Someone else comes along, it's empty, sorry, check elsewhere. The next day, someone else goes in the cave and finds that a family of bears has moved in. After slaying the bears, a few days pass and a dragon takes over. Each zone could have dozens of potential mob configurations.

6- Player Driven Shadowbane had some cool concepts as far as building player towns. I liked the idea, but i'd suggest something simpler. Zones that can be taken over. There would be dozens of these throughout the MMO world. One zone might be a small castle and keep full of "evil knights". You go in with some friends, fight hard and overcome all the enemies, and kill the evil knight's king. He drops a crown. The player who picks up the crown can use it to interface with a town control UI. He can set tax rates, assign money to be used for various tasks, hire NPC town guards, etc. However, there is a restriction. The crown must stay in the zone. You could leave it in a chest but if enemy players kill your guards and loot the chest they can take control of the town. Or if you are in a large clan you can trade off the crown and have different players hold it a different times of the day. Some towns would be massive powerful and very valuable to control, others would be small hamlets with only small bonuses.

7- Get Rid of Information Overload, and Player Expectations No levels visible. No item stats visible normally, although certain loring magic might reveal item stats temporarily. Other players are not visible in a list, you can't arbitrarily /who someone, you can't see other players class or level or equipment except what is visible in game graphically. Some fights will be too hard! This isn't a bad thing. Part of the game will be attempting to kill monsters you can't handle, and you will have to run away.

Bleh, I feel like I could go on forever and this post is probably already a huge wall of text, so I'm going to stop there. I just feel frustrated because I can't find any MMO that is even remotely close to what I'd like to play. Everything is moving in the other direction.

1. Your opinion. It sounds like you enjoy way much more the last few chapters of the book, rather than the start/middle of the book being full of lore and content. That is one flavor. However I don't know how many people will also enjoy your flavor of game.

And If you actually pay attention to some games (WOW, SWTOR) quests and what NPCs say through the slow leveling process, you can even find information that can astound you lore wise. Also, level 10 can take longer then level 100. If they make it so you barely earn xp on anything. (First MMO I played was Asheron's call, max level? 226. So each one isn't one upping, the general speed of achieveing max level has quickened since the dawn of MMO)

2. And what would that achieve with such a end-game design you want? 3 whipes and you can no longer equip the end level gear or continue raiding until you all relevel? I will agree corpse running as a ghost sucks, as it is boring and trivial. But some games out there already have some negative impact on death (like Guild Wars 2, Asheron's Call, and a few others) when you die you get a -% to all your stats. As you gain xp that % lessens back to 0. (More severe the more times you die before resetting it and at higher levels)

3. Going to skip this one as a easy to gain and easy to lose system wouldn't succeed at an MMO scale. (single player yes, MMO no)

4. LoL and DOTA style pvp is amazing, I won't disagree there. But allowing a player to do whatever they want? that would just open people up to be constant trolls to people. You have seen the online environment I am sure, and many people are pricks just to be it. If people had this option, a lot of people would quit as those pricks will pick on and grief pvp teams by taking out own NPC or members. There has to be structure, as remember this is based on a story/lore, so some structure has to be followed.

5. Grinding is something many MMOs are trying to do away with. Look at how easy it has gotten to level in some games where quests are enough, or where if you grind you are doing it wrong (Guild wars 2). However no repeatable content? That is impossible. They can't keep pushing out content at such a rate that you don't end up repeating content, the time and money required to do this would stop any company. Only way would be to store up enough content filled patches before releasing the game... which by the time they release it, it would be behind any new MMO created. Open world 100% would take way too much processing and power on computers, it would be too rough to make and uphold. Even big open worlds like Elder Scrolls/Fallouts run instances in dungeons and cities, to reduce the stress on the server/computer running it.

6. I really Like this idea and thought of it before. However this would require many people part of a group to have members on 24/7 to make sure enemies don't attack the crown. And as the trend has been showing, the days of players spending 10+ hours on 1 MMO is dwindling with most just being on for a few hours and thats it.

7. So basically taking all the strategy out of a game genre that has grown into being very strategic and theorycraftying. And forcing people into battle in which they must always be on their toes and/or into clusterF***s as they can't do any planning before hand.


I understand it is your dream game, and by no means mean to bash it. However you should (if you dont already) realize the difficulties a game like this would have to over come to succeed. Especially in todays markets of gaming. It sounds like You want a game to be extremely difficult and time consuming, yet extremely easy and quick at the same time. Which is a paradox within itself.

 

[Chiropteran]

1. No, I think you got the wrong impression. I like all parts of the book, but I'd prefer a short and exciting book over a long book with lots of boring repetition in the middle

All the lore can still be in the game, it would just be optional. If you play through multiple characters you could easily see it all, or you could explore it all on one character even though it's not needed to progress.

Part of my motivation in this aspect is to get people playing together. So many times playing World of Warcraft or other MMOs I've not been able to group with friends due to the arbitrary leveling system. With a short steep curve with nearly everyone except brand new players near the max level there isn't the same artificial barrier to grouping. And even in the case of wanting to play with a brand new player, you could help him/her catch up to "endgame" level in a couple game sessions, instead of months.

2. Well, in such a game artificial level-based equipment restrictions wouldn't be needed, so dying wouldn't make you unable to wear your gear. However, YES, if you wipe on a boss multiple times you absolutly should quit your "raid". I didn't point it out directly, but I guess I never inteded the game to have raiding as a thing either, although group limit of 5 is arbitrary as well- I'd like to see a system that rewards players who do challenges in smaller groups while allowing larger groups. Death penalties needs to be serious and real. The idea that you can wipe on a fight 10 or more times to "learn" it is absurd to me. Going back to the book example, how many entertaining books have you read where the main character died dozens of times while trying to kill some big bad guy until he finally got lucky and succeeded? It doesn't really make for a very epic story.

3. Nonsense. It's even been proven to work, I.E Diablo 3 hardcore. I'd just like to see a slightly more middle-ground option in a commercial game, where dying hurts a lot but isn't so bad that you instantly lose days of work.

4. Like I said, "able to do virtually anything you want, but depending on what you do you might be a varying degrees of advantage or disadvantage." If you act like a pure troll, just attacking anyone and everyone, you will not live long. Remember, you dropped your stuff when you died. Since you were attacking everyone, you don't have any friendly faction to call upon to help you regain your gear. Basically you are SOL. I feel that early on in the game's lifecycle there might be a lot of trollish behavior like this, but very quickly these sorts of players would get discouraged as they realize after dying they just can't get reequip without going through a lot of work and give up. On the other hand there will be a few players who legitimatelly want to play as an "evil murderer" type role, who are willing to jump through the extra hoops and put forther the extra effort to reequip after dying, but they will be in the minority.

5. You don't need repeatable content when the leveling curve is so steep you reach max level in a couple days, and the endgame is largely fueled by PvP. Technically, there is nothing to prevent a full open world from working. World of Warcraft nearly does this, in the old days before you had queue into dungeons and crap where everyone had to walk I bet there were often 1000+ players on a single continent, which is all directly connected without instances. Sure, there will be some limitaitons compared to an instanced game, but I personally would rather play a single-instance world with 600 players than a multi-instanced world with 500 instances but only 30 players per instance.

6. Small and large towns. The small towns wouldn't be valuable enough to try to camp 24/7, so you might lose them at night when your guild can't protect them, but you can just try to retake them the next day. I don't see a big problem with this. Though, alternativly there could be a system where towns are vulnerable to take-over only during a 4 hour prime-time window.

7. You make it sound like it's a bad thing. Consider this scenario: as you said above, some newb thinks it'll be funny to just be a pure troll and run around killing people. He comes upon a player in a brown cloak with a simple looking sword, fighting goblins... whatever, looks like some easy prey, attacks him. That player turns around and destroys Mr. troll, and camps his corpse so the troll can't get his gear back either. Now Mr. troll isn't going to quit so easily, so over the next few days he rolls up a new character, gets new gear, and goes out to kill again. But his mind keeps messing with him, what if that guy who looks like a newbie is really just another high level hiding in a lowbie zone? I feel this adds much more to the game than it takes away. Any MMO with levels plastered above your head is a gankers paradise. In world of warcraft, as a level 50 rogue for example, you know you can pretty much eat anyone below your level for breakfast with no chance of repercussions. Taking away that free information makes this much less of a sure thing.

For the most part, all the stats would still be accessible, but not freely and easily. You would need to identify items with costly scrolls.

 

[diesbudt]

1. No, I think you got the wrong impression. I like all parts of the book, but I'd prefer a short and exciting book over a long book with lots of boring repetition in the middle

All the lore can still be in the game, it would just be optional. If you play through multiple characters you could easily see it all, or you could explore it all on one character even though it's not needed to progress.

Part of my motivation in this aspect is to get people playing together. So many times playing World of Warcraft or other MMOs I've not been able to group with friends due to the arbitrary leveling system. With a short steep curve with nearly everyone except brand new players near the max level there isn't the same artificial barrier to grouping. And even in the case of wanting to play with a brand new player, you could help him/her catch up to "endgame" level in a couple game sessions, instead of months.

2. Well, in such a game artificial level-based equipment restrictions wouldn't be needed, so dying wouldn't make you unable to wear your gear. However, YES, if you wipe on a boss multiple times you absolutly should quit your "raid". I didn't point it out directly, but I guess I never inteded the game to have raiding as a thing either, although group limit of 5 is arbitrary as well- I'd like to see a system that rewards players who do challenges in smaller groups while allowing larger groups. Death penalties needs to be serious and real. The idea that you can wipe on a fight 10 or more times to "learn" it is absurd to me. Going back to the book example, how many entertaining books have you read where the main character died dozens of times while trying to kill some big bad guy until he finally got lucky and succeeded? It doesn't really make for a very epic story.

3. Nonsense. It's even been proven to work, I.E Diablo 3 hardcore. I'd just like to see a slightly more middle-ground option in a commercial game, where dying hurts a lot but isn't so bad that you instantly lose days of work.

4. Like I said, "able to do virtually anything you want, but depending on what you do you might be a varying degrees of advantage or disadvantage." If you act like a pure troll, just attacking anyone and everyone, you will not live long. Remember, you dropped your stuff when you died. Since you were attacking everyone, you don't have any friendly faction to call upon to help you regain your gear. Basically you are SOL. I feel that early on in the game's lifecycle there might be a lot of trollish behavior like this, but very quickly these sorts of players would get discouraged as they realize after dying they just can't get reequip without going through a lot of work and give up. On the other hand there will be a few players who legitimatelly want to play as an "evil murderer" type role, who are willing to jump through the extra hoops and put forther the extra effort to reequip after dying, but they will be in the minority.

5. You don't need repeatable content when the leveling curve is so steep you reach max level in a couple days, and the endgame is largely fueled by PvP. Technically, there is nothing to prevent a full open world from working. World of Warcraft nearly does this, in the old days before you had queue into dungeons and crap where everyone had to walk I bet there were often 1000+ players on a single continent, which is all directly connected without instances. Sure, there will be some limitaitons compared to an instanced game, but I personally would rather play a single-instance world with 600 players than a multi-instanced world with 500 instances but only 30 players per instance.

6. Small and large towns. The small towns wouldn't be valuable enough to try to camp 24/7, so you might lose them at night when your guild can't protect them, but you can just try to retake them the next day. I don't see a big problem with this. Though, alternativly there could be a system where towns are vulnerable to take-over only during a 4 hour prime-time window.

7. You make it sound like it's a bad thing. Consider this scenario: as you said above, some newb thinks it'll be funny to just be a pure troll and run around killing people. He comes upon a player in a brown cloak with a simple looking sword, fighting goblins... whatever, looks like some easy prey, attacks him. That player turns around and destroys Mr. troll, and camps his corpse so the troll can't get his gear back either. Now Mr. troll isn't going to quit so easily, so over the next few days he rolls up a new character, gets new gear, and goes out to kill again. But his mind keeps messing with him, what if that guy who looks like a newbie is really just another high level hiding in a lowbie zone? I feel this adds much more to the game than it takes away. Any MMO with levels plastered above your head is a gankers paradise. In world of warcraft, as a level 50 rogue for example, you know you can pretty much eat anyone below your level for breakfast with no chance of repercussions. Taking away that free information makes this much less of a sure thing.

For the most part, all the stats would still be accessible, but not freely and easily. You would need to identify items with costly scrolls.

1 + 2. Well first time through any book, large or small is interesting. Learning the story behind the people, the places, why is there danger, and is that danger scary or not? If a certain one isn't interesting (Then it is probably a story you are not interested, not the actual length of said story) Also everything you want changed in 1 and 2, is something that was added to GW2, which in that thread you were saying the game didn't have a lot of things you liked. (You de level if your too high for a zone to the highest level of that zone applicable. So you can play with a friend who just started and is lv 2, and your level 8- will delevel tolv 5 (and stats will scale too)) And events (small and large) force people to play together and learn what is going on since Guild Wars 1 ended.

3. Diablo 3 is not a MMO. No MMO has anything hardcore about it, as it is expected dying is part of the games process. Some have it worse then others, but last game I saw with a massive dying penalty was Asheron's call. In which A) you took a 5% state penalty that took xp to remove B) Half your gold and X random items from your inventory in which you would have to go retreive. And that game is...14 years old? 14years... geez... that was so long ago. /end sidetrack

4. Yes trollish behavior would die out, but not just because of less trolls, but less population. PvP in Asheron's call you could loot your opponent and take everything from them. So people would take new characters gang up on a higher character until they happen to kill him, take his stuff and get rid of it. (aka troll). And if they died too much (too much penalty) just remake a character, no big deal. Was fun for a little while but that pvp died down fast because people wanted no part of it anymore. Trolls and non Trolls alike.

5. Yes, but warcraft's heavily graphiced areas (besides big cities) were instanced. And they had plenty of them from lv 10 - 60. Also a PvP endgame is good and all, but more people in MMORPGs enjoy PvE over PvP. So directing an endgame to PvP would also bring down population. Need to find a balance between the 2, which MMos are still trying to do.

6. That would be the only way for it to work, would be a set time and day in which atatcks could happen. People have started hating on MMO raiding because it required people to raid X hours a day for X days. If someone had to log on for 3-4 hours every day they force a "raid-time frame" players would hate it too. They like the option of it being open. Which means it would be forced into a "que system" in which an attacking army gives an X time notice it will start an attack on day/time Y so both sides can schedule a time of conflict. Again it is a great theroy and idea, but its practicalness into a game would be full of flaws and issues.

7. It isn't a bad thing. But the majority of players who get enveloped into games LOVE to theorycraft and plan strategy beyond strategy. Same for me. Wouldn't be my cup of tea.

Now a game with what you want could be made. But if 3-4 of your 7 wants would reduce the popularity/playerbase of said game, it isnt something a company wants. They all want as many people playing as possible. So not only will companies shy away from some of those because of that, but it would get boring when you can't find enough people to raid a city, or play with because of population issues. (No game will ever see WoW sub numbers ever again either).

Again like you said it is your dream MMO so I am certain you know that it would probably never happen. Just stating the flaws/issues would be too much to overcome for a company to build something with all of it (though some of it could be implemented)

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

honestly your description sounds like a MUD. That's probably the truest RPG experience.

 

[Chiropteran]

honestly your description sounds like a MUD. That's probably the truest RPG experience.

Bingo. That is what I played back before the whole graphic MMO craze. I don't understand why adding graphics removes the potential dynamics and possibilities of a game like this. Give me a game with the rule-set of the old MUD I played, and at least somewhat modern graphics. Alas, it doesn't exist.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Eve Online. Wormhole space.

Close enough.

 

[Chiropteran]

1 + 2. Well first time through any book, large or small is interesting.

The GW2 solution you mention is only part of a solution. I suppose it lets you play with your newbie friend, but what use is it to you to do the low level instance over again that you already finished long ago yourself? I'd rather be able to take me friend along with me and explore the areas I was trying to explore without him, instead of artificially lowering my level and repeating old content (or doing old lowbie content I skipped).

As far as story and lore, why must they be limited to the leveling process? It makes more sense to me to tell the stories and reveal lore in the endgame adventures instead of early on while leveling.

The definition of MMO has changed dramatically over the years. Diablo 3 isn't really classified as an MMO, but would my dream game be an MMO either? Maybe not. The point is a huge commercially successful games does have a large following in hardcore mode, where items are lost forever on death. So I don't think it's far fetched to think there might at least be some niche for a game where dying results in XP loss and items dropped to your corpse. It might not be for everyone, but no game will ever be for everyone.

3. Diablo 3 is not a MMO. No MMO has anything hardcore about it, as it is expected dying is part of the games process. Some have it worse then others, but last game I saw with a massive dying penalty was Asheron's call. In which A) you took a 5% state penalty that took xp to remove B) Half your gold and X random items from your inventory in which you would have to go retreive. And that game is...14 years old? 14years... geez... that was so long ago. /end sidetrack

You present an interesting scenario, re: multiple lowbies ganking a high level to reduce the risk and stealing his gear, but there are a lot of potential mechanics and methods to discourage such behavior. Player behavior can be both incredibly predictable and yet unexpected at the same time. Ultimately, if the effort to gank much higher than the potential reward the activity will be discourage. For example, leveling lowbies with your three friends might take each of you 6 hours. Finding and killing an endgame level character might take you another hour. Great, you accomplished that gank through 28 man-hours, but the high level can just go out and re-equip himself in half an hour, and/or less if he simply calls on his own friends and hunts you down to get his gear back from your corpse. Ultimately, if you did it right you might succeed in killing someone and getting away with it, but the reward vs time and effort required wouldn't be any better than what you can get fighting mobs, while the risk would be much higher.

The point was that in WoW, if you ignored everyone in instances, there were still 600+ players per continent all in the same seamless world. This was also nearly 8 years ago, servers are multiple times more powerful. I know instances make it "easier", but it's not worth the destruction of reality caused by instance lines and artificial barriers. Whatever the cost, I want a game with a seamless world without travel limitations.


"but more people in MMORPGs enjoy PvE over PvP. So directing an endgame to PvP would also bring down population"

Again, you can't please everyone. If you try to cater to everyone, nobody is happy. My idea is a very focused game that those who enjoy it will love it and those who want to kill dragons in massive raids can skip it.

RE: prime time vulnerable cities, I think you misunderstood me. I guess some players might be upset at the idea that they need to play 24/7 to protect their precious city. The point would be that you CAN'T always protect it. Game would get very stale if you just took over a city and had it forever. It would change hands when you don't have enough on to protect it, and then later when you have the players to take it back by force you would do so. They wouldn't really be intended to just be controlled forever.

"if 3-4 of your 7 wants would reduce the popularity/playerbase of said game, it isnt something a company wants. They all want as many people playing as possible."

Yep, I agree. Sad thing is though that all the games end up looking the exact same, because they all want to please everyone. I think that a different enough game would actually have a great chance of being a success in it's own niche, because even if it only appeals to 10% of the MMO players, that 10% would flock to the game because it's the only thing out there with those features, while the remaining 90% would be spread among 40 different "popular" MMOs giving most of them less overall market-share.

Eve Online. Wormhole space.

Close enough.

It's so close, except it's also so far. Instead of a short leveling curve, it has a skill system that flat out REQUIRES 6 months + to reach the optimal skill levels. I've also looked at Darkfall & Mortal Online. Similar problems.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

You can't have a MMO without a long learning curve. It will be boring as shit.

 

[Chiropteran]

You can't have a MMO without a long learning curve. It will be boring as shit.

Why do you think that? Is the leveling part of the game the only fun part for you?

Actually I realized you said learning curve, not leveling. Who said this hypothetical game would have a short learning curve? Just because you are max level or high enough to attempt "endgame" content doesn't mean you are done learning. The majority of focus would be at endgame content and there would be more to do, not less.