I wanted to post here so that people could post their opinions and if it is popular enough, perhaps some companies will pick up on it and make an amazing game. If you like these qualities please post a positive comment so that it will be noticed by gaming companies.

A good MMORPG ought to have the following qualities:

No character levels

No stat points, only skills

A very limited quantity of armors (this means that all leather armor is equal in how it protects the wearer)

Different armors of the same type ought only to be for fashion.

Armor may have a bonus such as fire proof/resistant

Must have a vast explorable world

Skills must be discovered from different trainers - let the list of skills be a mystery and not all known to one person, since it is unlikely that one person really should know literally everything about their trade

Npc's must not have tags explaining who they are unless it is royalty or unless it should naturally be common knowledge to your character or their clothes may show who they are - this forces players to talk to people and makes it more challenging to find an npc that knows a skill

Combat ought to be swords clashing with swords, not swords clashing with armor unless one person fails to respond to the attack

Every sword clash must be a skill used because some skills will clash with other skills while others will not

Every skill must have some kind of uniqueness that will allow a foe the chance to block or counter

Magic ought to be similar to melee combat in that certain spells may be defensive and block some spells; some may need to be dodged because a blocking spell is unknown or nonexistent (it may be out there known to some trainer)

Armor may be enchanted to counter or block certain kinds of spells

All counters ought to also be resistible or able to be countered - in other words, instead of stats and hp vs stats and hp with a little bit of skill on the side it ought to be strictly skill vs skill, and if two people are fighting and it results in neither one can kill the other because they lack any skills that the other is unfamiliar with, it is not necessary that one eventually win (so what? doesn't Hollywood do this all the time?)

There ought to be magic for more than just combat but also for convenience of other aspects of the game (this includes affecting the environment, building things, etc)

Archery is very dangerous; armies ought to choose their battleground wisely against archers - in real life I think an arrow is fatal unless it hits something other than the head or torso, in which case they would be somehow disabled and if left untreated become incapacitated for loss of blood (for injuries like this, hp could be used as a factor here, but it is not the main thing that determines if a person is still alive; and when the hp falls to 0, they become incapacitated until they are healed or die)

It is permissible for magic to exist to block an arrow or disrupt the archer's concentration with something such as an earthquake - an arrow is pretty deadly so it seems fair

Disrupting an archer's concentration can result in the arrow firing in the wrong direction

Archery obviously ought to be useless up close considering there are other kinds of weapons just as effective up close that require no concentration

Magic ought to control battles if left not countered nor resisted by enemy mages - Does it make sense that an army of mages would lose to an army of melee soldiers? No. This does not mean that mages are the only useful person in combat. But this just makes sense.

It is permissible to let mages and hunters be able to "sense" creatures sneaking about or magical enchantments nearby

Invisibility ought not to exist except as cloaking (they ought to be very hard to see but not invisible; they may be seen because they warp the light where their body is)

Enchantments, including invisibility, may be dispelled

Invisibility ought not to be naturally dispelled when they attack something - It makes no sense that because you attack someone everyone can see you. You ought to remain invisible.

It is permissible for some magic wielders to be able to enchant a person's vision to see invisible people

Every quest or mission ought to be geared as tutorial and help players learn that they must find trainers in order to learn skills and to practice them - obviously quests should not lead players to very many skills, only some basic ones - considering the world is so vast it ought to be theoretically impossible to find all skills in the game - the mystery is the fun part

Some skills ought to depend on the environment and unusable in other places

The environment ought to be responsive - for example fire spells may catch a forest on fire; catapults may shake the ground; etc.

Some skills may be learned simply through practice on enemies if they are simple enough

Skills ought to be teachable to other players

There must be many nations in the world . This means there are at least three nations, preferably more so that alliances may be made. Politics are important. Each nation has more than one starting place. 

If a guild builds a village, they ought to be able to hire npc's that may allow a new player to start a character in their village (the village has all the npc's necessary for any kind of tutorial the game may start with)

"I wanted to post here so that people could post their opinions and if it is popular enough, perhaps some companies will pick up on it and make an amazing game. If you like these qualities please post a positive comment so that it will be noticed by gaming companies."

It doesn't work that way.  People who make games have their own ideas of what they want to make that they like better than your ideas.

"Skills must be discovered from different trainers - let the list of skills be a mystery and not all known to one person, since it is unlikely that one person really should know literally everything about their trade"

What happens when someone posts all of them on a wiki?

"Combat ought to be swords clashing with swords, not swords clashing with armor unless one person fails to respond to the attack"

Good luck trying to animate that.  I think it's possible, but it would be tricky, unless it's the horribly fake swordfights such as you often see in movies where they're mostly trying to hit the other guy's sword and wouldn't actually hit the other guy even if his sword weren't there.

As for most of the stuff near the end, the devil is in the details.  Which skills counter which others at what cost?  The details are the tricky part, not the high level "combat should be interesting" stuff.

It's true that it would take a lot of work. The idea with the skills is as I said. The world theoretically is large enough that no one could find all of the skills in the world. They could post a wiki but it would be incomplete unless everyone worked together. As for which skills counter which skills. My idea is not that skills would be as crazy as they are in most games. A skill would be more like a combo which involves the direction the sword is moving at a certain angle. So any skill that clashes at the right angle at the right time would counter it. And some skills might be more complicated than just one swing. 

My hope is that maybe some company would be looking for ideas. And my hope was that other people might this popular. If it does become popular I'm sure some company would pick up on it because they might make a profit if they do a good job.

Also, in my opinion figuring out stats and balancing out all the classes in games these days seems way more complicated than my idea.

Arrows actually aren't terribly fatal even if they hit you in the torso. It's generally the infection that most soldiers worried about, not the actual wound itself. Archers tended to create casualties not fatalities in combat.

Also why would it not be effective to counter a mage with a melee soldier? That would imply archers have to maintain signifcantly more concentration to fire an arrow than a mage has to to be able to use magic.

If magic exists, why would invisibility need to involve something like bending light? Its magic, it doesn't have to make scientific sense. They can just be invisible and not exist in any visual sense.

People work together on wikis. That is sort of the entire idea behind "anyone being able to edit anything." So that skill idea would be defeated pretty quickly.

You think its easier to balance the physics and all the other calculations that would be required to use skills if you had to react based on the angle your weapon impacted anothers or is currently swinging than it is to look at the algorithms for abilites that are largely definded by stats? Why do you think that is easier? I'm genuinely curious about all that to be honest.

Sad truth is, while i like a lot of your ideas, a game like that won't be all that successful atm. People are just not supporting innovation in MMOs in any real capacity.

We have some pretty good ones, but not nearly enough people play them. We've had 3 MMOs come out this year that do things differently, and every last one got bitched at to no end.

I look forward to the day when peope get off their vertical progression mindset and start realizing that there is more to games than loot. Too many people have forgotten what it means to have actually challenging gameplay. As a result we're left with a majority of games designed around the idea of making someone feel powerful, instead of rewarding players for actually being good.

If an MMO released with jedi-knight - like combat I'd be extatic. I think the one thing most newer MMOs are doing pleanty of, is creating massive worlds. Problem is most people don't seem to actually give a damn about that. It's just one more thing to complain about.

This reminded me of something... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Qd9VR1gD8

It's a lot of ideas on how you want to see an MMORPG. I'd say: make your own!

I just want a game  where combat has a little variety to it, but not so complex that it requires the fingers of a concert pianist or the mind of Sheldon Cooper to be successful at it.

I would like a persistent virtual world.

Good crafting with the ability to upgrade and make the best items given to players.  Loot drops should not be gear.

Player housing and player economy.

Questing aimed at social interaction.  Lets say you are given a quest to perform a task that task might require building something that other players have to make.  Perhaps a specific type of player is required to use the item.  Perhaps a large sum of money is required meaning players must pool resources and share loot etc.

I prefer the level by doing things type.   Chop wood increases your chopping skill and strength.  This encourages you to do other things rather than just go out and kill stuff.

Anwyway what it all comes down to is the feeling that you are crafting your own destiny in the game, and helping other players with their destiny.   Win all around.

And sorry but no PVP.    Therefore NPC combat has to be good!

Originally posted by aesperus

Sad truth is, while i like a lot of your ideas, a game like that won't be all that successful atm. People are just not supporting innovation in MMOs in any real capacity.

They're not supporting WoW clones like Rift and SWTOR either, yet publishers keep tossing money at them.

Actually they do support Rift. It's subscriber base is quite healthy and has been growing at a resonable rate, and they just released their first xpac which brings subs back as well if only to try the new content. So clearly people support that game enough to continue releasing content outside of xpacs and to fund an enormous first one.

Just because you don't like a game or its style doesn't mean others don't like it. Stop making such poorly informed generalizations.

Originally posted by RandomDown

Actually they do support Rift. It's subscriber base is quite healthy and has been growing at a resonable rate, and they just released their first xpac which brings subs back as well if only to try the new content. So clearly people support that game enough to continue releasing content outside of xpacs and to fund an enormous first one.

 

Just because you don't like a game or its style doesn't mean others don't like it. Stop making such poorly informed generalizations.

Umm... they've had to merge the servers four times. It's been in a steady decline since it came out. I wouldn't call that doing well.

And even so, Rift is surrounded by the corpses of other big budget WoW clones.

So making a profit, large enough to regurlarly release content and still have enough of a development team to make such a large scale expansion is not doing well? Great business sense. Its better to merge servers than let ones with an almost non existent population sit around, that would just drive plays away for lack of people to play with. All games merge servers eventually, and its not always a bad decision to do so.

Also doesn't matter, then don't use it in your example if its not true to begin with. Hurts any kind of legitimacy your statement may have had in the first place.

As others have already begun to point out you have a very unrealistic understanding of some aspects of combat and some idea's the internet itself will undermine.

Ill settle for undermining your melee combat system by showing you something leagues ahead of anything else being done. No skills, just skill.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang

While it seems many of your own points attempt to belabour some form of realism as a large factor in the game you then add army controlling melee resistant mages...this doesnt seem to offer balanced or fair gameplay. Neither does perma-invisible opponents for that matter.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by RandomDown

Actually they do support Rift. It's subscriber base is quite healthy and has been growing at a resonable rate, and they just released their first xpac which brings subs back as well if only to try the new content. So clearly people support that game enough to continue releasing content outside of xpacs and to fund an enormous first one.

 

Just because you don't like a game or its style doesn't mean others don't like it. Stop making such poorly informed generalizations.

Umm... they've had to merge the servers four times. It's been in a steady decline since it came out. I wouldn't call that doing well.

And even so, Rift is surrounded by the corpses of other big budget WoW clones.

actually the sever merges were to consolidate the trial servers and addtionally they introduced new server technology which enables them to have double server capacity.  

I'm not sure I was misunderstood or not with invisibility. It is visible mostly if the person is moving because the light moves around them (like in Fantastic 4). I also said that it ought to be dispellible, so it may be difficult to see but not impossible. It also would be very dangerous to sneak about if there is someone that can dispell you especially if you are alone. 

My idea for invisibility also is that it might come from using a potion. It could be available to anyone, not just "rogues."

So an arrow may or may not kill you if it hits you in the torso, but it can. At the very least it should make the person unable to fight without a healer's help. 

Would you think a mage needs to concentrate more than an archer? Anyway, if a mage gets hit with a weapon it should be fatal if it is a good hit. In my mind, a mage ought to have a backup if the enemy gets too close. He really stands no chance without a melee weapon when the enemy is close. 

I'm not saying that mages make all the difference in battle. Now that I think about it, if both teams have the same number of people, and one team lacks melee or mages, the other team has a huge advantage. If a team lacks melee then the mages on one team could use defensive spells and let the melee do the fighting. 

I don't mean the angle stuff is simpler than current games. That would be the challenge. But I do think that balancing classes and stats is way more challenging than it's worth because it is not realistic. The angle stuff doesn't have to be so challenging, though. It can be limited to the angle the skills define them as. But the real challenge would be in making those skills unique so that the player can recognize them and counter them with his own skills.

I wish this title said the word "combat" in it. That's really the only thing focused on. There are so many other things about making a game like an mmo that need to engage people that the original post seems shortsighted. Had I not known it was in the mmorpg forums, I could have thought it was about a FPS game.

I agree with the sentiment that ideas are a dime a dozen, unless you flesh it out and do it, it's going nowhere. To believe that someone that can code and plays games has no ideas on how it should be done is almost comical. You think coders are incapable of imagination, nah, we have gobs of it. Usually the only reason we don't follow through is because we are getting paid on other jobs and it's hard to give up a well paying job to just run off and make a game that people may or may not be warm to.

This is how far I've gotten on mine http://i45.tinypic.com/2ywiivp.png, nothing but the basics and everything is placeholders just to get some of the logic done. The beautification comes later and the networking... oh the networking - that I expect to be my real challenge. This is under 40 hrs of work, the char moves and has a basic bag system. It has nothing to do yet, that "what it does" is the game, not just the combat. I have spent more time on the website than the game lol Blah, I'm focusing too much on details now that don't matter to your topic. After 4 mos. I can pick it up again because work is slowing. I have 4 notebooks of information relating to this game FOUR! Every night before bed I added in things. Ideas are not at all hard to come up with so you know and I doubt the "big guys" are in this forum looking for ideas so I would be the type of person that could hear your plea.

Maybe you want to learn to code and do this yourself? Maybe you want to know that your game is a hit? Can't guarantee that, you have to try it to find out.

Originally posted by Druzzy

It's true that it would take a lot of work. The idea with the skills is as I said. The world theoretically is large enough that no one could find all of the skills in the world. They could post a wiki but it would be incomplete unless everyone worked together. As for which skills counter which skills. My idea is not that skills would be as crazy as they are in most games. A skill would be more like a combo which involves the direction the sword is moving at a certain angle. So any skill that clashes at the right angle at the right time would counter it. And some skills might be more complicated than just one swing. 

My hope is that maybe some company would be looking for ideas. And my hope was that other people might this popular. If it does become popular I'm sure some company would pick up on it because they might make a profit if they do a good job.

Also, in my opinion figuring out stats and balancing out all the classes in games these days seems way more complicated than my idea.

And how do you make a world that large?  How do you make so many skills?  It doesn't take all that many people to find a skill before someone posts it on a wiki and then everyone can find it.  You'd probably have to go with a heavy dose of randomly-generated content.  Randomly-generated content that is actually good is basically the holy grail of MMORPG design.  That doesn't mean it's impossible; Fermat's Last Theorem was a holy grail type of problem, too.  But that's why it took more than 300 years for someone to solve it.

For a game company to say, we'd like to make a game, but don't have any ideas, so let's go check Internet forums, doesn't happen.  They can ask their own employees, who will have far more ideas than they can make.  What does happen is for a company to know what sort of game they want to make, but take gamer suggestions on filling in details.  Make this particular skill stronger or weaker, tweak the UI in this particular way to make it more convenient, or whatever.

If you want a game to be built the way you want it, you pretty much have to either make it yourself or hire others to do so.  And even then, there's a good chance that what you wanted will end up being impractical.

Originally posted by Laross

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by RandomDown

Actually they do support Rift. It's subscriber base is quite healthy and has been growing at a resonable rate, and they just released their first xpac which brings subs back as well if only to try the new content. So clearly people support that game enough to continue releasing content outside of xpacs and to fund an enormous first one.

 

Just because you don't like a game or its style doesn't mean others don't like it. Stop making such poorly informed generalizations.

Umm... they've had to merge the servers four times. It's been in a steady decline since it came out. I wouldn't call that doing well.

And even so, Rift is surrounded by the corpses of other big budget WoW clones.

actually the sever merges were to consolidate the trial servers and addtionally they introduced new server technology which enables them to have double server capacity.  

PR speak for - we're bleeding subs out the ass, we need to merge servers.

Mmorpg is too broad term.  It currently includes games so distant that could easily be descibes as other genres and audience composes from groups of players that are of diffrent sizes and want completly diffrent things.   So it is impossible to answer.

What you listed are all just the mechanics of how a game is played, it doesn't equal to MMORPG, it can be used in any Single Player game. 

What MMORPG needs is a reason to be part of that Online community, a reason to stay, a reason to wear that leather armor that everyone gets that has the same stats. A reason to participate in the virtual world and becoming its citizen. 

Without any reason to be involved, you lose the will to keep playing, you pick a reaon and once its completed, you move on to other games, or that reason burned out earlier than you expected, and you lose the will to continue. 

I believe that today's gamers wants to feel a sense of belonging. But we don't want to forge it out of thin air, instead we are hoping for the developers to develop a means to help us establish that bond. 

It used to be easy, a big monster with high HP was enough to get people together and fight together and then socialize together. But its becoming a chore, its risks and rewards aren't balanced, and the bond we share are easily destroyed and replaced. 

Guilds are being formed left and right, without purpose. 

I think the only way to make MMORPG stronger is to make the Guilds that players makes, have an impact in the game world. Large guilds should have benefits but also it should have negatives that balances them out. So that we have alliances, instead of Huge Zerg Guilds. 

There should be Politics, there should be objective raids, there should be zerg raids, there should be survival raids. A game with the guilds and players in mind. 

When that happens, then I think MMORPG will forge an unbreakable bond between players that makes the game strong.