Tell me what you think of my post. Believe it or not, it's an abridged version of what's in my head. If only knew the proper code to put something into a demo!

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/125252

Tell me what you think of it, maybe even make a reply?

And yes, I'm binny45 hehe. ;)

The level system is in place in Eve Online. You learn skills over time, but you can team up with a seasoned player right off the bat. Or The Realm had a similiar system where your initial class didn't matter, and you could spec out the way you wanted to play ... and a level 100 and a level 500 had very few differences between hp gained over time and the 500 had all the skills, the 100 had just a certain type or something.

As for the multi-sided pvp, thats in place in both Planetside and Dark Ages of Camelot - 2 pvp heavy games - and I think it works well. Shadowbane you created your own factions (your #6), and that had intense pvp besides the game sucking and never getting a good release.

Then #4, I think thats a resource thing. I work in the television film world. And yes, it sounds great to make a film appealing to all audiences ... but that film will probably be crap. It will only have the resources to graze the surface of all of these genres and its best to pick a few and focus on them and make them great.

City of Heroes handled levels the best with sidekicking I think. You can play with your buddies, they are just -1 your level and have the skills they learned thus far. So you're weaker than the average -1 your buddies level, but you can still play together. But you need some reason for a player to want to level, and to feel they accomplished something when they leveled, or they won't want to play. Or the game shouldn't have levels all together if they're meaningless, but then you just have a counter-strike clone or something. Think of how meaningless level 70 would be if you could raid Black Temple at level 4 just being sidekicked?

The #5 is nice, but not realistic. It worked in small scale muds when the populations were small. Imagine if every one of World of Warcraft's 5 million subscribers wanted something custom for them. You'd have to spend probably 10 million man hours on it ... and thats a lot of moneys to do that.

*nod* -- if a player wanted a custom mech, the costs would be:
1> Maybe 100 to 1000 man-hours of modelling and animation, at 50$ per hour (including overhead).
2> If you wanted the mech to be uniquely different than existing content, a metric butt-tonne of game balancing
3> The additional bandwidth costs of distributing the mech graphics.
4> The additional system costs to every player of having an extra mech look visible in-game.
5> The keeping the game flavour decision costs "do we want mechs in this world?"

So, an estimated 1 k$ to 100 k$ in development, distribution and balancing costs per custom mech, depending on how different and how fancy the mech is.

Some of the above could be done by a player: for example, modelling and animation can be done by players. Other parts are a "must be done by central authority".

In essence, they would have to charge 1,000$ to 10,000$ to seriously consider a mech proposal, and the player would have to provide detailed modelling, drawing, in-game mechanics, and flavour for the mech. And even after that kind of cost, the proposal could be rejected.

You might be able to fold it into in-game resources, but the real-life money to pay the real-life people who have to look at the proposal has to be collected somehow: either by direct payment, or by redirecting game purchase/monthly fees.

Ie, I see that part of the proposal as problematic.

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As for "one character that changes", for the most part people create alts not because they want to abandon their main, but because they want to play both the main and the alt. The ability to change a character simply means that they have to be careful not to ruin their character by using the wrong skill, and does not eliminate the wish to play an alt.

To eliminate the wish to play an alt, you would have to allow players to have multiple different skillsets they can swap between.

So if you are a master ninja, and you wanted to become a cook, you would first create a branch of your current skillset, then start skilling up cooking. You could swap back to your ninja skillset whenever you wanted.

...

Levels are useful: they provide a way to meter content to the player. They provide a means of achievement, and in-game rewards for completing in-game tasks.

They are often used poorly in games, but getting rid of them is problematic.

When you gain a level, it does two things:
1> It encourages you to leave the old area that you are familiar with by reducing the rewards.

2> It allows you to enter new areas, by making the area possible to fight in.

Without this 1-2 punch, it can easily become optimal (in-game resource-wise) for players to grind away in the most familiar zone forever. As they play in the area more and more, they get better at it. Another location would have to have exponentially better rewards in order for it to be worthwhile going through the learning curve process for that area. You see this in EQ when they add new content whose rewards are not sufficiently better than the old content.

EQ aliases leveling into AA+Gear progression, but the fundamentals are the same.

Well, actually, AA sort of sucks: it doesn't obsolete old zones, so you get the "it is optimal to grind AA repeatedly in the exact same spot forever" syndrom. You gained AA much faster by snoozing at Tables rather than exploring new, dangerous GoD content, unless that new content has massively higher base reward-per-effort built in. And if it had that higher reward-per-base-effort boost, it becomes insanely better once people master it, and the next expansion has to continue the exponential escalation.

If one had to earn say half of your AA to purchase an ability from that expansion's content, it would change this. (ie, if instead of spending 9 AA on an ability, you had to spend 9 ZA and 9 AA, where ZA are expansion-specific AA points you earn by fighting in that expansion)

Gear advancement is very level-like, except the ability to easily power-level characters past the older content (a player can hang around a high-gear set of people, and be given gear that advances them very very fast) because of it's non-incrementalness.

Oh, I know that people need a way to measure their achievement, however I find Levels to be very limiting.

If you ever get the chance to play the Shadowrun P&P RPG, you would quickly see that a game can be awesome, provide LOTS of flexibility, allow for all sorts of play styles (had one guy play a rock star who never lifted a pistol) and not require a leveling system. It's all skill based.

Granted your skills are a measure of your achievement, but the person going against you doesn't know this until they actually take you on.

Damn I miss that game, it's the main inspiration for this game I've had in my head.

Even in Shadowrun, you see the problem with skill-based system.

I can throw together a demigod starting Shadowrun character. He simply destroys nearly any challenge he runs into.

As an example, in SR 1st, build an elemental summoner adept cybersamuri.

It comes down to: skill based systems are ridiculously hard to "balance", because it is easy to make a gimped character, and it tends to be really easy to make characters far more powerful than intended by the designer.

Level based systems provide a cap on that, because they can encode "even a demigod L 20 character cannot defeat a L 30 creature". Archtype based systems also provide a cap on it -- by making sure that each Archtype has a "weakness" that needs to be patched by the other Archtypes.

You could have a skilled based level system.

You can have an archtype levelless system.

And you can have a archtype level system.

And you can have a skillbased levelless system.

Levelless makes it harder to balance, and makes progression harder to meter out.

Skillbased makes it harder to balance by insane amounts, and makes inter-character synergy harder to meter out.

If you ever get the chance to play the Shadowrun P&P RPG, you would quickly see that a game can be awesome, provide LOTS of flexibility, allow for all sorts of play styles (had one guy play a rock star who never lifted a pistol) and not require a leveling system. It's all skill based.
Lots of flexibility can also be a problem.
I remember when we tried to play shadowrun, and I was the GM.

2 of my 4 "usual" roleplay buddies were (and still are) what we call now powergamers, always looking to the best way to build their characters (the best way to abuse the mechanism?).

And after reading everything about characters creation, they made their character almost invicible, with best cyberstuff and vehicules. So I had 2 "semigods" and 2 archetypes in my group. What kind of adventures could I bring them in? Or it would be too easy, or too hard.

So I decided to "gimp" them, they could only take "2nd rank money" option (from 1million to 600.000 credits, hudge nerf!), but still they were all powerful, maybe not the best vehicules or that golden emergency card, but best cyber implants and flirting with the "human-to-cyborg" line.

"Nerf after nerf" (ok guys you can't have the best cyber stuff, only 3rd or 4th ranks), my friends became disgusted, and decided to switch to casters. And then again, semi gods etc etc.

Put that back in a MMO world, you will always have players who will find the best of the best combo for their char. Look how many nerfs/fixes we have in current MMOs because devs "didn't think about that, oops!". And then every players will follow, because "it's the best way to do things".
Fexibility is good, but often leads to balance issues, when it's not content issues.

And I'm with Kelraz about MMO "goals". It has to specialize to be good in one, or it will bring crappy ones.

I beg to differ. I find that these days the MMO focus is still scattered...or specialized if you want to call it that. There will come a day when an actual RP world (You know, the RP in MMORPG) will emerge that will allow for people of all play styles.

Regarding your Shadowrun game, I don't think you were looking at the availability and the cost adjustments on the rare gear. A new player only has 1 million new yen to spend, and whatever is left over that isn't spent is cut down to 10% when the game starts. Then there's the contracts from your Mr. Johnsons. I got news for you, if they're getting 1000000 new yen contracts up front, without having proved themselves, again, you're giving away the goods.

If the players were able to start as "uber leet" characters, it was because you let them. I've played Shadowrun for years, and it has taken me YEARS to even be remotely considered uber, though with that game the fun is in the journey. Different players play different ways I guess, but I can tell you from all the times I've played, the only twinked starting characters I've seen were a direct result of the GM being a "Monty Hall" GM, giving away Karma points and money like it was candy.

Yes, in a tabletop game, the GM can spot glaring flaws in player builds.

They can even tell players "don't build characters that are too powerful" and "build characters so that each player's character has a definite role".

This, however, requires a somewhat skilled GM, players who are open to social pressure, and 1 human GM for every 2 to 5 players, who spends more effort on the game than the players do on average.

MMORPGs don't have that luxury. Heck, ORPGs don't have that luxury. The game system and it's rules must provide, when GM attention cannot.

You see this in The Elder Scrolls: in Morrowwind, you could create a character with infinite stats, spells that where "I win", and other ridiculously unbalanced results.

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Now, don't get me wrong: I love character customization. But Archtype systems are so much easier to balance and provide character role defense in than open skill based systems it isn't funny.

And that ease of balance means you can have more interesting and strange game mechanics, because you can spend your balancing efforts on those mechanics rather than on skill trees.

Laeyakk summed it up better than me.

Of course I was able to "nerf" my roxx0rz players, but how can you do that with hundreds or thousands of suscribers, when you *know* that a significant purcentage will try AND find the "legit exploit"?

You know what? Though it's not an MMO (at least it doesn't appear to be), I take back saying that it was too bad Microsoft got their hands on this game title.

From what I can see through the previews, this game looks helluva fun!

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2664

You know what? Though it's not an MMO (at least it doesn't appear to be), I take back saying that it was too bad Microsoft got their hands on this game title.

From what I can see through the previews, this game looks helluva fun!

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2664
This is the first game linking PC and XBox players in an FPS?

Wow, I can't wait to hear the uproar as all the console guys get shellacked by people with a mouse/keyboard.

LOL, you and me both!

I can't wait to make my brother eat his words! :devil

They'll just release a mouse for the xbox soon afterward.

You can already use a mouse, I'm pretty sure. But, those guys always insist that they're just as good with a joystick as PC people with a mouse. Delusional wishes, from fantasy island.

So, here is a comparison game design that shares many of the features of Binus. It is a level-based archtype game, however.

5 core group roles. If you are missing one of the core group roles, your group is screwed. The second of each core group role is less useful. (Example of 5 roles: Tank, Healer, Arcane Offense, Melee Offense, Crowd Control. "Offense" classes specialize in deconstructiong the defense of the target (phase 1 of killing a creature), and are much much better at it than a normal character (3 to 5 times better). The second phase is raw damage, for which all classes are about equal at.)

There are 10 classes. Each class can fill 2 different group roles. (This means a random group of 6 classes has a 95% chance that a given role is availiable in it)

Each class has stances. These stances can be specialized around one of their group roles. In general, you can be 50/50 effective at your roles, or 100/20 effective, or linaer combinations thereof.

Stances can be switched between, but it takes a relatively long time, and uses up lots of in-combat resources.

Mundane gear is almost as good as the best specialty gear. Having the right gear is important (ie, wearing plate is important if you are a Paladin).

Character progression comes in a few dimensions:
1> Level.
2> Style cards.
3> Stance mastery.

A Stance is a WoW-esque talent tree selection, except you can "loot" upgraded talent tree nodes. You earn a Stance in an AA-point like system, where you burn XP to get talent points (and you get some free when you level). The number of points in a given Stance is capped based on your character level, but a character can learn more than one Stance. This means, unlike WoW, a player won't be locked into a sub-class by a talent point selection, and unlike EQ you don't accumulate an infinetly large pool of AA abilities that are all availiable.

Styles are combat moves. You build a "deck" of styles. The cards that can go in this deck are determined by your gear, your Stance, and by Styles you have learned (like treasure) from creatures and quests. (ie, a Dagger of Gouging might insert 4 "Gouge" cards into your deck while you have it wielded) In combat, you have a "Hand" of Style moves that refreshes over time, and you can pick any one of the moves in your "Hand" to use. This means the moves you have availiable to attack with or defend with at any one time is randomized. Think "Magic".

Changing your Style deck in combat is a matter of discarding your hand and effects in play, and starting to draw from another deck.

Decks have a minimium size, and a maximium number of any one given card or category of card.

Conflict resolution is based off of Penetration and Power. All effects have both dimensions, from Healing to Nuking to Tanking. Penetration is your ability to overcome the target's resistence, and Power is how much effect is done. Penetration gives non-linear returns: after you have "enough" penetration, getting more doesn't boost your ability to effect the target that efficiently. Power has linear returns. Power grows much slower than Penetration. Creatures in a given zone will have a variable Penetration and Power, so a low-level player in a high-level dungeon will be reasonably effective against some of the creatures, but useless against the others.

...

It isnt' perfect, but it is an alternative approach.