Originally posted by paulscott

@GT

As for people abuse it, I have a feeling that most players will laugh at those that try to.   "So your guild leader wants you to take the summoning penalty when you don't have to, and then when taking the penalty forcing you to use a build that isn't optimal for your situation".  

I can't even fathom such an odd siutation occurring but I can easily see powerleveling services being really popular.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by paulscott

@GT

As for people abuse it, I have a feeling that most players will laugh at those that try to.   "So your guild leader wants you to take the summoning penalty when you don't have to, and then when taking the penalty forcing you to use a build that isn't optimal for your situation".  

 

I can't even fathom such an odd siutation occurring but I can easily see powerleveling services being really popular.

 

Me too. There's also the issue of reliability, ie what happens when your friend logs back on? Does your summon suddenly vanish mid-fight? Do you get a warning when your summon's owner first attempts the login screen?

I think the idea, but I think I'd rather see it exist in an MMO that wasn't lvl / exp heavy. I think it would fit much better in a game that's more skill dependant (both player skill, and active/ in-game skills). This way you could summon your friend's spirit to help you with a difficult quest / mission, or to help you advance your own skill proficiencies.

Well I still say organized use to gain XP for offline chars is an issue. You can lose out on a lot of XP, but unless you are locked from XP gain at max level you will then have nothing but incentive to drag your offline buddies around and raise them up, and unless XP gain is tied only to the online character, then granted/distributed from what he gets at his level alone, the offline chars will stll level with no setbacks. Plus, this actually will increase a "twink mentality" in people that want to stay at peak range for a tier of PvP (if in-game) by only questing with friends/alts in order to level them and stay in range to dominate the tier they are in. I am sure at some point they will find themselves with a lack of quest content and stuck at a certain level where the stuff becomes too hard to do anymore, but then that shows a bit of issue with the philosophy beinhd the game in allowing that to happen. You would need some kind of cyclable or randomized quest-matter or there will be a self-inflicted wound to players where they "hit the wall in the content early", and it would actually be your fault for allowing them to be led to that. Punishments and sacrifices are a needed counterpoint in design, but it's your job to avoid leaving these holes in a way where players will still line themselves up for a world of hurt without really realising it.

Plus I am sure there is some way to abuse it further that I just haven't thought of yet, it'll come to me though.

Thanks for the concern I'll try to think of some other way and micro reward to make it obvious to a person logging in that they were summoned in some way or another.   It has to be able to let the player know about how much they were summoned as well.

As for reaching low/high level that isn't really a concern in most the games I'm working on since everyone starts close to the max powertier, and leveling just involves picking up more skills so you have access to some areas solo easier and more ability to choose how you play at any one time(versitility).   basically I don't want to have to review mid level content every few months.

Edit:

Having very little reliability isn't really an issue.   If the person logs in the spirit just decided to leave early,  If the particular spirit decided to look/play differently this time around so be it.   Don't question the spirits even though you really can :D

Originally posted by paulscott

Most the skills a Bot Can't do aren't relevant 99% of the time after a human has prodded and mapped out the system(the only place this stat changes are in an insanely small handfull of games and in real life).   While not related to this idea improvision is rewarded in large ways by having NPC mobs that change behavior over time, and having a mix of behaviors active at any one time.    Summoned AI doesn't "learn" in the same way as other AI but rather tries to poorly mimic human behavior.

Jabberwacky is still a bot even if it is a massive crowdsourced database.

_____

The summoning idea is there to purposfully trigger social implications, so it's looking reletivly sucessful in that aspect.

If someone would rather play twice as long for the same result as someone who parties with another person(Lets say by design when we group we don't start to reduce experiance till the third person).   Then they made their choice to do so.

Though to be perfectly honest the idea is spending way too much time on advancement than is really needed for the game that I had this idea for, since advancement is a lot more freeform than typical.

I'm not sure what you mean by skills a bot can't do being irrelevant. Real life examples should be enough to tell you otherwise, it's really easy to spot a multitude of things we can't automate and may never be able to. Just look at where robots come from: robotics engineers. We don't have robots that design robots, and if we do, they still need a lot of human input and don't always turn out the way we want them. Just in the same way that we don't have auto-programming bots that can design a game.

What we're doing is designing games that robots can easily be designed to do. Move your character around with the mouse and keyboard, solve the block puzzles to proceed through the next door, kill mobs to gain experience points. There's no art to them, only a science that is all too easily figured out. Anything that isn't an art - isn't entertaining experimentation - is boring.

Where's the art in video games?

Let's look at origins: video games are software. What other kinds of software are out there? Is there software that isn't linear?

Yes. For one, spreadsheets. Spreadsheet applications are non-linear because you can do more than what was intended with it.

If you created a spreadsheet application, you probably have a few ideas of what it will be used for. That's why you made it, right? ...but what if somebody decided to use it to make a game? To design a robot? To plot assassination? You could not have forseen those uses - you didn't know all the possibilities of the tool you created, and you didn't limit those possibilities, either.

With oil on canvas painting, the paint makers didn't expect the Mona Lisa to be completed with their products. They also didn't expect a 2nd grader to use them to blob out a picture of a dragon fighting a knight. The intended use was so general and open, that anything could happen. Nobody was there to tell Da Vinci or the 2nd grader that they could not paint what they wanted.

Look at Photoshop for another example: the creators didn't intend for it to be used to frame people for crimes, which does happen. They also didn't intend for you to use 400 different artistic filters in the specific order you did to make a texture on a jacket sleeve for an animation hobby-project. But it happened because it could happen. There were no specific limitations or goals set for the tool, so those things happened because the general use turned out to be more general than originally intended.

I think we're doing it wrong. We're making these games with a very specific intended use and we're taking as many security precautions as we can to disallow all other uses. We're making dogmatic, linear content by nature of desired control. We choose to govern our players rather than collaborate with and encourage them.

Just think, there are so many things that could happen in games when you imagine it, but those things don't happen and never will so long as you don't let them. It's very disappointing.

So maybe if we didn't automate so much for the players, we could let them make their own automations; let them make their own toys and games. Would it be so bad to allow players to be the designers of their own fun?

This whole issue should be entitled "Sorry for the Convenience" because we should be sorry. These conveniences limit our scope and focus to a single goal.  We have to be able to explore things for ourselves, and we often take pleasure in doing so. Fun, by the root of the cause (creative experimentation), does not come from linearity.

Do you want to give people another reason to like or hate everyone else? The summoning system may do just that. It's just segregation of another kind.

The reason why some people opt out of grouping is because it isn't fun for them. They either don't know how to get fun out of it or they've had a previous experience that made it seem frustrating. In their minds, soloing is not a choice, it's the only way to have fun.

What kind of free-form advancement do you speak of? I'm really curious now. You describe this linear system planned about experience points and a rudimentary AI that can interact with players (and do the same things as them in the game), so I'm a bit skeptical about how free-form it really is.

Is it an art or an algorithm? A game for a human or a Jabberwacky bot?

I'll go over the advancment tomorrow in a different thread, and a tiny bit about the combat.