The Theory Of

Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

Author: JB47394

Here's another game idea for you to chew on.

Instead of creating a new character and starting off on a chain of quests that you can accomplish with one hand tied behind your back, how about creating a new character and immediately going off to the nearby dungeon or fortress or battlefield or whatever and joining in a fight?

It's an open raid.  There are no groupings, no official raid leaders, etc.  There is a goal, however.  It can be capture a bridge, or defeat the boss, or rescue the captive, or any other simple goal that everyone playing the game can understand.

How can that be done?  How do we divvy up experience?  Aren't players who are higher level going to come in and just plow through the open raid?  Who gets the drops off the boss monster?

If you must have levels and experience and drops, then do it this way.  The area is locked for anyone not in a given level range.  They just can't get in.  Anyone who can get in gains experience according to their actions.  Damaging monsters, healing friends, disarming monsters, sneaking forward undetected, etc.  It's that old "use 'em to advance 'em" skill and experience model.  How that ties into levels is left as an exercise to the reader.

I wouldn't put item drops in from kills, but I'd hand out cash the same way I'd hand out experience.  After hunting a while, If you want something, you go buy it.

Then there's the raid win condition.  Everyone is working towards achieving the win condition (capturing the bridge, etc).  When that win condition is achieved, the experience that a given character has accumulated get magnified, and special rewards are granted to everyone via that same scale.  So the more healing you do, the more healing reward points you get.  The more damage you deal out, the more damage reward points you get.

Those reward points can be structured in numerous ways.  My preference would be to make them an award of faction points with temples devoted to various goals such as war, medicine, stealth, etc.  Or we could replace temples with NPC guilds, etc.  Once faction points are accumulated, they can be redeemed as favors that the guild or temple will grant the player character.  That might mean items, or it might be skills or anything else that a designer cares to make available through those institutions.

The primary goal of this open raid system is to bring players together towards common goals, just as they are required to do at the highest levels of most games - raids - or in PvP games.  The structure employed is intended to avoid the hassle of forming official groups and to simply have the players wade in with their characters.  The more the merrier, and rewards are granted on the basis of how you contribute.

I prefer to think of this system as a means of letting characters without levels forge through a series of ever-changing landscapes and goals.  However, it works equally well with levels and repeatable content.  These would replace the notion of zones devoted to level ranges.  Instead, there would be a castle that would be cleared out over and over again during the course of the day.  Each reset, the monsters could be varied a little.  Perhaps even the structure of the encounter could change.

At the lowest levels, open raids are simple.  Players charge in and kill everything.  As the levels increase, so does the difficulty of the tactics required.  This continues until the highest levels where the players either know and trust each other well enough to handle challenging situations, or they have formed official guilds of players who stick together to tackle the tougher raids.

My version of a tough raid is one that requires reactions from the players, not just planning for a fixed encounter per World of Warcraft raids.  The monsters may ambush the group at one of a dozen spots.  Or they may have blocked off certain approaches to the end goal.  I definitely want the geometry to change, even if the changes are modest - to forestall people constantly using the same geometry exploits over and over again.  As in my article about Depth, the opponent monsters themselves may change and different groups may use flavors of different tactics against the player characters.  Charges, defensive actions, ambushes, etc.  Those can easily be handled with current pathfinding AI.

Ultimately, I'd just like to be able to get into a game and find myself embroiled in some action with other players.  That's what massively multiplayer games are all about, in my opinion.  Those who prefer to do things on their own even within an MMO should still be able to do that, even within these open raids.