Developers Corner

This is a general concept I want to discuss guys. I want to get a brainstorm going for everyone to toss ideas how Game Developers can achieve player dependence WITHOUT long time investment

If you have an idea you can share please discuss.

Example:
Imagine a game (maybe its an MMO or maybe its not) where players are allowed to create a fully maxed out avatar. This title has various crafting roles and other sort of identities you can pursue

This is what I came up with only way to enforce a player dependence of sorts:

1) Let NPCs be the Crafters. So a player will sort of hire / find/ acquire an NPC that will make the goods. They can specialize their NPC so it can perhaps make the best guns (something like that)

2) Allow players to become any profession but they can only have a limited number of character slots (like 3). This title would need all kinds of detailed crafting. So one account can never be able to have full knowledge of how to make everything the best. This option my least favorite because I love to have LOTs of Alts. Like at least 9 in such a title. Especially for this title would be fun to experiment with different builds. So I dont like this idea

So I hope this is clear. How would you go about creating unique roles for a game that is NOT relying on huge time investment. I also do not want to argue about how critical time nvestment is to mmorpgs. This is a brainstorm for titles not MMORPG perhaps. Perhaps its just an MMO (no huge RPG element). Or perhaps its a fast progress MMO where you unlock things super fast

Not quite sure why time investment would cause higher player interdependance but,

Some things I thought up for this idea,

1)  Similar to the NPC idea, players can own shops that hire NPCs to sell the goods, players have control of the design and business process and have to make the goods or get help from NPCs to make more goods. Also meaning players can make all goods, essential and luxery.

2)  Players can own raw materials, instead of running around aimlessly trying to find veins or plants etc.  Players could own the land containing raw materials, allowing NPCs and players to gather resources there for a share of the sale price.  This means that if a player surveyed land with a vein on it a mini mine dungeon could be created to let other players and NPCs mine ore, or open farm land to let players and NPCs farm plants.

3)  Investment, this is getting into real world economics but if you let players save money in a bank and gain interest on it and let players borrow money from the bank, then you create an eviroment that make players dependant on each other, whether they know it or not.  This also helps in game economic stability, which is another topic.

4)  Taxes, if the town you are a resisdent in collects taxes and has a public fund that can be used to finance building projects like bridges roads and the like, voted on by players then that makes players interdependant both for services and for income, if they are a worker on the project that is.

5)  Commodities trades and stock, you could let players invest money into certain commodities.  To make a dividend the commodity has to do well, so this makes it so that the success of resource gathering effects more than the entrepenuer, and other players care more about the success of player businesses.

6)  Perishable goods, not neccasarily dissapearing forever, but breakable or consumable goods that have to be replaced/fixed to help control stagnation and create jobs for crafters.

7)  Player made objectives, like building projects or PvP objectives, voted on by players, partisipating can earn you some money.  ie a building project costing $$1,000  and you do one tenth of the work so you get  $$100.  Same for PvP, community set objectives and pay rewarded to those that help.

8)  Limiting the number of abilities possible for characters, this could be done by making some abilities an either or option meaning when you take training you can only get this ability or this one not both, this means it is impossible to get all the abilities in the game, and it promotes playing through multiple times.

9)  Make money finite, instead of money spawning out of dead thing and dissapearing into thin air when used, make money a finite quantity.  Like the real economy, money would be cycled around, when you spend money at an NPC shop the NPC uses the money to buy goods from another player, money is never spawned nor deleted.  It isn't obvious but this make players dependant on each other very much so, because to make money people have to be willing to spend it, combined with the above and it works better. even if a character was deleted the money can go back into the public fund, unlike the real economy money cannot be lost or destroyed in this setting.

Catus made some good suggestions.  I want to go in a different direction. 

Rome wasn't built in a day and it wasn't built by a single person. With that, you could have goals which require lots of people to complete.  It could be as simple as building a village when you enter the game world, or building a bridge or advancing science and math.

The easy way to do this is to have tech levels.  Let people craft away and make their money.  But add in larger tasks which are not about selling products, but are to advance your sides technological levels. As you advance some aspect of technology you might hit a bottleneck which requires advancement of some other technology or requires research.  Do it in a way where techlevels are intertwinded with each other.  It gives a long term goal as a society.

You guys have very awesome ideas I am seriously floored. I've really felt like I've learned a ton. Never thought of these ways to achieve dependence

The only format I've really been familiar with is through time investment. Like in EVE, you have unique builds because it might take a year to focus on that build. So you might have this specialized crafter because he waited a year to train that build

How would you pursue unique builds? I suppose such a title like I proposed originally couldnt really have unique builds. So- uniqueness would have to come from other ways. Interesting....

edit- in particular what Freedy said about requiring the community to build high tech items is a great idea right? Its simple and its tough to get a group of people to coordinate. you get player dependence that way

Cactusman ideas are more freeform and indirect ways to arrive at player dependence. It's teamwork- but less direct

I like both angles

I'm not quite sure what your actual goal is.  Do you want players interacting with each other or do you just want the world to be dominated by player actions?

If the former, I'd warn you off of the idea of having players rely on other logged-in players for essential game services.  Purely optional services can be handled with direct player interactions, but I hope you don't want anyone to have to wait until they can find a player providing the requisite service before they can enjoy some aspect of the game.  That sort of thing should be reserved for the hardcore players.  It uses too much play time.

If the latter, look no farther than Eve Online.  They have extensive player interactions through NPCs.  Players buying player-made items, taxes, corporations, contracts, alliances, shared tasks such as fleet mining and combat operations, and many more besides.  What is Eve Online lacking in examples in this space?  (no pun intended)

Some good ideas already mentioned.  I think you'd need something along the lines of UO, SWG, EVE...

Bascically, more of a sandbox style MMO where combat and character progression are not the major focus of the game.  There needs to be a fully functioning, player driven world. 

What I am ultimately brainstorming on is creating a dependence on a unique role a player can fulfill. EVE Online achieves this through the time based progression system. I wouldnt want to make players wait a year or what have you to produce a unique build

I think mostly everyone got it and nailed it.

So think of it this way. There is a ship in this hypothetical game that is really powerful. How do we limit access to this deathstar? In eVE, this is controlled via time based progression. It takes bout a year to train to fly a Titan. It also takes no doubt a year or so to learn how to make the various components to construct this device.

We have a player dependency because this deathstar cannot be built without specialized crafters

So, how do we limit access to a powerful deathstar without huge time investment?

I suppose the existence of a deathstar in the first place is an extreme carrot you put out there for hardcore players in the first place. And it is merely a reward for the hardcore vets. And its a device that would merely put a big distance between a hardcore vet guild and newbie guilds. The only reason this is balanced in EVE is because it cost so much to make and its so easy to lose forver (it cant really be insured)

So I suppose it would be best for a more casual title to not even have a Deathstar in the first place...

If I do not make sense dont worry about it I really like the ideas put out so far

Originally posted by CactusmanX

9)  Make money finite, instead of money spawning out of dead thing and dissapearing into thin air when used, make money a finite quantity.  Like the real economy, money would be cycled around, when you spend money at an NPC shop the NPC uses the money to buy goods from another player, money is never spawned nor deleted.  It isn't obvious but this make players dependant on each other very much so, because to make money people have to be willing to spend it, combined with the above and it works better. even if a character was deleted the money can go back into the public fund, unlike the real economy money cannot be lost or destroyed in this setting.

I feel like being nit-picky.

In real life, money is as finite as the material from which it's made (practically infinite). New money is constantly being printed, and old money is constantly being destroyed and recycled.

To support a growing economy, you must have money 'spawn' to accommodate it.

So the way games do it now is fine, it's just that they have the same problem that we do in real life: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer through hyper-inflation. This is because they aren't balancing high-level to low-level players in a proper economic model.

Instead what developers are doing is separating players into independent income tiers (levels 1-10, 11-20, etc.), which all in turn blend into a singular economy (the Auction Hall); which really is quite bad for low-income players and why gold-sellers are so common.

Well as long as we are talking about money,

When the government makes money and destroys the old, they are still controlling the money supply to a finite ammount, they may expand it or contract it at times but in a game however the money supply constantly grows the more you farm mobs and quests it has no set ammount and can be grown indeffinatly.

The problem most MMOs have isn't just inflation which is increasing price without increasing the real wage it is also stagnation, the accumulation of money with little incentive to spend it.  So when you increase the money supply continuously prices will increase as well, yet the rewards for quests do not, it is impractical to continously increase quest rewards to curb inflation, so if we control the money supply we can do the same thing.

If the money supply were exogenous, meaning not set by players so finite, and there were plenty of reasons to spend money then you have a situation where money changes hands often.  This increases players marginal propensity to expend, meaning desire and need to spend money, this makes it so that there is much less hording, as we are controlling prices and also making players spend more money.

Combine this with the concept of player shops and resources and player's ability to make all goods and community objectives for pay  and the concept that NPCs spend their income too and you make players dependant on each other for income, since now you can't kill monsters to get it.  The devision of labour and the velocity of money make it where the difference in income is decreased, to make more money requires lots of land and business ownership or being a good fighter etc. which also requires lots of other players to do work and lots of goods to be made to up keep it.

This also makes it so that if there is an injection of income such as a communi