My MMO ideas expanded upon (really long!)
This is really long guys, not kidding. 4,420 words. Just warning you. So here it is, copy pasta from my Word document:
Ok so this is my super long post about my MMO ideas. As the title says this will be a long read so maybe you should split it up into a couple days to read. Hopefully, it will catch your attention the full way.
So first I will talk about the purpose of the MMO or I should say what defines it. This came out of the “if you have $100 million to make a game…” thread where some people were receptive to the idea that I basically posted saying “a MMO with consequences” and were eager to have me elaborate upon it. That sounds so vague and how many RPG’s have touted that line “LOTS OF CONSEQUENCES!” for hype? A lot. So here are the details of the main message before I go even further into the ideas I have to improve it.
One last warning, I will not be elaborating on an entirely new MMO I want to make from scratch. For all intents and purposes, these are simply ideas that came in my head to correct/improve the type of MMO structure found in World in Warcraft, because that is the vast majority of my MMO experience.
The most successful MMO, WoW is by far the most repetitive and consequence free game in present times (lol hyperbole much?). However, its strength is the community you can be a part of when you play at higher levels. These communities however are all artificial and not natural to the game. Guilds are artificial constructions that essentially create sub gangs that compose the larger “gang” (AKA the side that you choose in the MMO like Alliance or Horde in WoW). One of the biggest things that frustrated me in WoW was how the game itself was no longer the main driving force at the upper levels. Disclaimer, I never got past level 20 in WoW but I would watch and listen to four of my friends who played it regularly for a good chunk of our time together in high school as well as people online I know who also played many MMOs, I also did research for a couple weekends on Wow's version of wikipedia. However, most accounts of what my RL and online friends did everyday was rolling in the same instances over and over again, every week. When I would ask my friends why do them over and over again most didn’t have any real good reason besides “better loot”. It was obvious that they just loved the interaction with their guild members. This set up has its perks, mainly which guilds serve to keep players playing long after the game has become more “work” and not “play”. But this also has its flaws, not many (as I will explain later the beginning and middle of the game is much more problematic). The fact is that guilds simply work to cover up the weakness of the game instead of enhancing it naturally. Not only in how repetitive, but also in the fact that the game has a **** community at large to begin with that spurs people reorganize themselves into elitist groups that have to filter out untrustworthy or bad players from playing with them. As is the case with most games that only promote and don’t demote, player that absolutely **** get into the top levels by sheer tenacity and pollutes the community that relies on the talent of others to accomplish more complex goals. Essentially, the system of WoW works because the players made it work. Now you can say, “What is wrong with that? It’s what the players’ want that matters.” This is true, but what do players want? They want community, they want challenge, and they want competition. So far the only thing that WoW purposely gives to players is competition in the forms of PvP. Communities have been undertaken by the players. Challenge you can contest me on this but here is my brief argument on that point. The challenge found in WoW in higher levels amounts to nothing more than overpowered, ****** AI that is 10 levels above you in strength and more numerous than your gang in order to mask the fact that it is dumb. The tactic of “agro on the warrior, priests healing and everyone else attacking from a far” is a tactic only the slowest of AI can’t counter. Personally, I don’t consider that a true challenge. You can argue that as long as the task is difficult, it is a challenge, but I will just have to disagree with you there. But even when it comes to competition, this is on such a small scale, you have free for all arenas and you have ladder matches that don’t exceed 5v5. Like I said in my original post, there is no real competition on the macro level. In fact there is no macro level, nothing changes! Every “quest” is scripted, or constructed for them (instances); most bought stuff comes from NPCs etc… WoW is basically you and your friends doing the same stuff over and over again, that sounds stupid because it is such a “duh” statement, but the point I am making is why are you doing the same **** all the time? Don’t you want variety with what you do with your bros?WORK IN PROGRESS
So let me pull back on this rambling, and now just tell you what the flaws I see are of WoW (or any MMO with an imitation WoW like structure). I am focusing on WoW the most because it is the biggest and constitutes most of my experience with MMOs.
1. Repetition
2. World environment that does not change.
3. Lack of Macro involvement
The one strength it does have however is:
1. The community (which I guess in the end is all a MMO needs to be successful)
Basically I am going to write (hopefully in a more organized fashion) the solutions to the three issues without losing the strength of finding solid communities.
Ok, so let’s go over the first issue to tackle, repetition. Now every play through of an instance is different from every other time you play it. As I briefly said earlier, the levels before the “end” levels are the real problem. I will be honest with you guys; I couldn’t play WoW for more than a month and a half because I just could not get past the grinding. I couldn’t take it. It wasn’t fun for me. Doing the same **** over and over again was not fun. Kill five of this, bring six of these etc… This is a crippling factor for MMOs in my opinion. In fact I believe that the grinding in WoW was so horrifically boring and such a turn off for players that you can see a clear trend of Blizzard minimizing the grinding. They continually add more and more races which mean more and more “variety” in quests you do (because the different races have different boar for you to kill lol). They have reduced the amount of xp needed to level which means less time leveling and thus grinding and finally it has gotten to the point where they basically redid the entire game world in Cataclysm to change things up! (They also had to add more races of course.) Now like most problems, this isn’t so cut and dry. The problem of repetitive grinding comes with a beneficial side effect, simplicity. Accomplishing a task is fun and quests are very easy to understand and set about accomplishing. Without someone telling you, “Hey, do this!” playing a game can easily get confusing to casual players. I think I have a work around for this though.
My ideal MMO consists of an almost complete lack of grinding and NPC given quests. I fell that it would be much more enjoyable for players to naturally give each other quests and recruit each other in tasks that consist of raids on enemy territories (most likely outlying areas far away from important towns). Now these low level raids to boost xp would naturally have the same problem of current raids/instances which is stupid players/bad community to trust in playing as a team. I would counter this problem by implementing what most games don’t have, a demotion system that knocks you down a level or levels if you keep ******* it up. For every raid you fail, your xp will decrease by the same amount a successful raid would give you. (It would actually have to be more complex than that.) By having this you can have the players naturally separate into the levels that are consistent with their skill, making their entrance into the game as challenging as their second year into the game. A brand new character has one NPC given quest, which is to form a group or join a group to complete “boot camp” which is a raid on an NPC camp that requires players to work together in order to “graduate” into the actual game world. You have to learn to be a teammate or you won’t be moving up anytime soon. Players in all levels would have an entire menu where players can choose a “request” and then head over to the meeting spot and sign up, where they can then attempt to capture a spot/camp/whatever to gain xp. This is not that complex when implemented effectively. Your “quest menu” is an updating list of raids being organized in your area, broken down into categories by the levels of the player requesting teammates. You click the raid you wish to join, and the map tells you where the “recruiter” is, when you get near him/her you click the option that pops up to join and you are now part of the raid. This is essentially the entire game (combat wise) and it is for all intents and purposes not much different than the life of a current level 80 in WoW.
I feel that by pushing a punishing demotion protocol, the community of higher levels are improved and are removed of bad players and players that don’t communicate or play as a teammate. This negates major reasons for guilds and I feel that this is an overall good sign, because (I feel) the lack of player solutions to game structure is a strong indicator that you are doing things right (that is…if the game is doing well, otherwise of course it tells you that you have a bad game that no one wants to play). However, I will not say that guilds will never occur, and I wouldn’t want that anyway. People should be able to easily organize with friends they make in game, I just want raids of more or less random people to work as well, and to provide a great experience as you interact with people you have never met before to do difficult tasks. The entire promotion/demotion system turns what are otherwise meaningless levels into one big ladder match structure. So that is basically how my ideal MMO would work to eliminate repetition in tasks. Every raid, even if on the same place is different, especially when you are fighting human opponents and not NPCs. As I talk further, the main game play question you all probably have of “what are you doing exactly in these human vs. human raids?” will become more clear.
So after talking about repetition for a little bit, a question naturally arises. How do raids against opposing “sides” work anyway? Do you actually take them? Well, yeah pretty much. So now, I am going to move onto problem number two, a world environment that does not change. This is the main component in making any game with “consequences”; you want to feel like you have actually done something worthwhile. The pioneers in doing this currently are imo, Bioware, especially with the Mass Effect trilogy. It’s a very complex problem to tackle though, as we can see even Bioware had to relegate many quests from the first ME to a simple paragraph in an “in game e-mail” in ME2. An MMO however, doesn’t need to be this complex. And really it is much simpler to accomplish once you get rid of grinding and NPC quests, and thus the NPCs that populate areas, bound to a certain side and a certain region. In WoW, the Alliance and the Horde are supposed to be more or less at war (Idk how this changed in Cataclysm). Except, it isn’t, even if you lead a huge group to attack a major city, eventually you get worn down and die and that’s that. It is pretty much futile. However, by removing most if not all NPC’s land can be exchanged without things getting too messed up.
This is how the raids work and how the individual can see himself change the game world. Each raid that a player participates in is essentially part of a macro sized game of war. Except, In FPS’s there are usually 3-5 spots to capture, in an MMO, ideally there would be thousands spread across large swaths of land to be captured, too many for all of them to be guarded or even taken. Many of which would be susceptible to being overrun. Simply holding the “town square” or whatever (in a Total War like fashion is what I imagined), for 5-15 minutes would be enough for the region to switch hands.
Now, with is the ability for sides/teams to capture territory, the possibility for one side to completely dominate now needs to be addressed. Well, inspiration can be taken from a MMO that actually does exactly this setup, Eve Online. Eve is interesting in that, the only sides are guilds called “corporations” and that there are so many in a map that is truly galactic. In Eve, it is impossible for one corporation to take control of the entire map; all the others will gang up on the pack leader naturally. I want to see a winner though, I want one side to win and take control of the entire map. The winners would be rewarded somehow and the map would be reset, back to the default battle map (with everyone’s character saved). This reward should be the ultimate driving factor in why players compete. Virtual and material goods would be a good end incentive for people to play and for people to start playing in the first place. If the end prize is a box of goodies including T-Shirts, mugs, props, posters, lithographs, OST that would be pretty great. The expenses of these goodies (I hope) wouldn’t be that expensive because it probably still wouldn’t happen even in a one side vs. another type of game like WoW, which is smaller, map wise. The amount of profit taken in over time would hopefully far exceed the cost of goodies to send out when one side wins on a server. This obviously is not that thought out. The setup of your character not really dying wouldn’t change but there would be differences in how it is handled. As one side loses territory (due to various reasons) the average # of players per sq. mile in the remaining controlled territories is going to increase which means that future territories are going to be increasingly populated and guarded. The momentum of capturing territory becomes more difficult to maintain the further in one side pushes.
When an area is attacked those defending it would need some mechanism to suffer from when they are killed, so that tactics taken by the attacking force are not immediately repelled by defenders respawning so close to the battlefield (or even in it). In an established contested zone, those that die would respawn on the other side of the world map (depending on which side they are on), which allows for surprise attacks to work successfully if a camp is quickly swept. Those nearby in other zones would need to continue the fight, as those that have died would essentially be taken out of the battle (unless the battle lasts so long that those that have died can cross the entire map in time to reach the contested zone again).
I hope this section has shed some light on the meat and potatoes of this game I am envisioning in terms of combat. Obviously, there would be some PvP for people to practice on each other. However, there are other meaningful tasks I have in mind for players which will tie in to my solution for the third problem I have outlined earlier.
So now, I guess I will talk about the third and final issue I have with many MMOs, which is the total lack of macro involvement. In WoW, realistically, the biggest entity you are playing for is your guild and not the larger Alliance/Horde side you are on. For all intents and purposes, there really is no allegiance for a WoW player to anyone other than his guild teammates. I think MMO’s can do better. So by already establishing that in order to level up, you must gain xp by raiding the other team and take territories away from them, you already get this level of macro involvement on the individual level. Players will care about losing territory, they will care about organization and the game at large. I would love for guilds in this idealistic MMO of mine to transform from groups of buddies that have become friends online, to take up the role of naturally occurring command structures that dominate the direction of people’s raids in different regions. With so much territory and so many players, the guild with the best leadership will still be able to have a bit of competition among each other by trying to have the most players operating within their sphere. A bad analogy popping into my head would be how the military has different branches all competing for resources (money), well the different guilds would be competing for human resources (players) in order to create larger raids and waves of raids to overrun areas they are concerned with.
At this point I want to introduce a concept that relates to the issue and promotes further macro involvement among players and guilds, forcing them to worry about this things happening on a macro scale even more.
So currently in WoW the economy is partly determined by the players. The amount of demand is determined by the amount of players in the server and what levels they are and what items they need etc… The supply side of the WoW economy is from what I could tell largely based on NPC sellers which essentially have an infinite supply in which to sell items. If you have the money, you are guaranteed the item from an NPC seller. This makes the global economy very restricted and controlled to the point where it becomes very odd in how it assigns prices of buying and selling sometimes. For the most part and infinite supply coming from NPC sellers puts the economy in the back of someone’s mind while they play the game and put no additional challenge on the player, no additional thought other than “I need this much money.” In order to have an economy that actually gets people involved I personally think you need to scrap the NPC sellers and have a real proper free market going on, where the supply and demand of any and all items are determined solely by the players (including all weapons and all armor, I mean everything). Loot could still be gained by successful raids on important towns and cities but all items from weapons and armor to potions or what have you should be able to be bought and created by a player. Rarity would factor in when raiding is concerned, but those items should be the most difficult, time consuming, resource using items to make in the game, only able to be made if you are at the top levels. This would serve to add another task at hand when playing your character besides raiding (combat). People would depend on others for the materials they need to win battles and the dynamic that will (should) come from this set up is that players begin to try and create the most stuff to out produce the other team in order to gain an advantage. The way the supply creation would work would be almost exactly the same to WoW’s crafting which already has you make a bunch of different things to sell which are valuable to players or NPCs, except As you craft you gain crafting experience which allows you to craft more and more complex and powerful objects in the category to have experience in. Since there is no grinding in this ideal game of mine, all players in order to gain money must contribute to the market and craft items and sell them to other players to gain money. This forcing of players to become part of the supply side of the game’s economy will prevent monopolies of one to twelve dudes who are at the top levels of crafting experience to control the markets by producing the items everyone needs at a fast rate because of their high skill levels. Everyone has to participate, so there is always competition. To make this system even more complex, I would like resources to be more centralized in certain areas on the world map, which adds a more strategic element to the macro level organizations of raids in where they want to target them. By having for instance copper found in large quantities only in let’s say 1 or 2 places, those areas will be a constant fight in order to control the resource, and keep up the supply of goods that requires copper to be manufactured. In my head it adds a “Company of Heroes” kind of characteristic to the large scale of the game. By holding critical regions and resources, the amount of resources that comes in will be able to fuel lots of supply by players which in turn would lower prices and make it more affordable to that side’s players to gain better items. That in turn gives players an advantage when raiding which allows them to level up faster, creating that individual-macro interaction that I feel is missing. The way this system would work is by the auction house’s that are already in WoW. The problem with auction houses in WoW right now is obviously rare-ish to rare items come from looting and have prices that are completely over what it’s worth actually is, while any lower level items are going to be underpriced because of the NPC sellers that push out their infinite supply. The only change would be that I would get rid of the auctioneer NPC and instead set up an updating list in your UI similar to the quest list I talked about earlier, which would serve as an in game eBay list to buy and sell from.
Another idea which I have not thought out a lot is the inclusion of building more…engineering projects I guess you would call it. In my head, the thought came up “how would you stop being people simply targeting small, out of the way regions for free xp all the time. Why would anyone attack the larger areas if there is always some distance farm that can be taken?” Well I guess one answer would be a difference in xp, but to even things up a bit more when it comes to that discrepancy I have this idea that players should also be able to build actual buildings and objects in game. Things such as turrets, or stationary robots or radar dishes depending on whatever the lore is of the MMO, but the basic premise is to create towers and other assortment of “Independent Support Objects” that could be placed where you build it on the map and it will stay there until destroyed by an enemy. I kind of got this idea from playing as the engineer in Team Fortress 2 one day and I think that if implemented correctly you could get an interesting dynamic going. These ISOs would take a lot of resources to construct, a bit of time and necessary skill (so very similar to crafting again) but would be a secondary way of accumulating xp. You wouldn’t get xp for what it did, just for having built it. In order to prevent spamming, there would be a limit on how many you can build of each ISO.
Quick add on here (thought of this last minute), to anyone who might be wondering exactly why you would need money if you could theoretically make everything: In case I wasn’t clear, most objects obviously would have a minimum character level in order to be crafted and your skill in crafting would be worthless if you tried and spread it across all the different categories of objects. The only way you could do this is if you really set out to prove you have no life and you were to harvest and craft and gain skill in every single category for the 10,000 hours it would take to become an expert in crafting all the different categories of game objects.
At this point, I don’t know if there is anything else I want to talk about. Those are basically my ideas for what they are worth. For anyone that has read all of this, thank you. Please criticize my ideas. I am positive that most if not all of this is **** because my experience with MMOs first hand is decent…at best (although I have read countless hours online on aspects of how WoW and Eve Online work from wiki’s). I only really set out to type out my ideas in my head because someone on the forum asked (which was encouraging) but alsoone of my RL friends (who will be reading this) has said a couple of times that WoW is pretty much perfect and/or you can’t really improve upon itEDIT: I misremembered what he said (he said WoW will always be the best not that it was nearly perfect). So many other MMOs have tried to be as successful but have failed. I disagree with that statement, I think that that statement is as flawed as saying that Halo is perfect or near perfect because all those “Halo killers” that companies made to try and one up Halo all turned out be failures or mediocre. And most people would agree that Halo isn’t the perfection of FPS’s. So yeah, that’s it. Thanks for reading this. You are welcome to tell me how much of an idiot I am now and/or ask me questions.
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