I'm going to outline some of the concepts of my mmosrpg and hopefully get some feedback, I could do this on a dedicated website but, why bother, this community is pretty brutal, and that's the way I like it.

Ok, basic high concept.

What's the game?

The game has its roots in old style RPG systems, think D&D style statistical attributes and levelling, each player controls a "Warband" that can contain up to 18 characters/creatures within alignment and scale restrictions, creatures are represented in a card like fashion similar to something like magic the gathering. Players will move around the map using a turn based system or can use actions on the tile they are on, such as Forage/hunt/search etc..

What are the key features ?

A key feature of the game is that the main mechanisms are "crowd forged" by the players, this allow players to create systems mechanisms, creatures, spells, weapons, armour, and crafting items. As players create these, they are uploaded to a pending status on the server and checked to see if they follow the correct rules set for statistics before being approved, once approved they are instantly implemented through silent steaming.

Players traverse the land encountering creatures NPC's and warbands, to fight/befriend/ignore.

A dynamic encounters system using a "chat based" AI communication system, that will provide information (effectively dynamically assigned questing), recruitment, and reports. Players will physically need to type keywords to interact with NPC's (although sentences will produce better results).

Combat, this is a mixture of classic RPG systems and Card based game strategy, revolving around turn based control of creature/character actions, such as attacking, spell casting.

Factions,  alignment is a key concept of overbearing map control of city structures and ownership, players can influence control and dedicate ownership, structures provide map based influence that can affect players aligned to that faction in actions and combat. Pvp is fully open based.

Rogue like elements are an additional feature to managing your warband (food, moral, alignment), members of your warband may have their own agenda that could be influenced by the dynamic encounters system or warband alignment indirection.

Ok maybe this idea isn't that interesting, 17 views and nothing (i at least expected some to come in and say rubbish move on hehe).

Ive added some screen shots of the prototype/alpha to my profile gallery, its only been in development for under a month, and i havent felt the need to source some artists for the base races yet so its a bit raw, name subject to change, gui etc....

It's more a matter of people being tired of explaining the same things over and over that it actually being a good or bad idea.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

It's more a matter of people being tired of explaining the same things over and over that it actually being a good or bad idea.

 

Well the idea was to get some feedback on the concept, maybe people could look at the concepts approach of mainly user designed mechanisms, the freedom to create portions of the game, one of the nice things I feel about the concept is that much of the work load for me is give to the users, as they  effectively create much of the game content.

One of the issues of this is that when say races are created, all users need to provide graphic assets for that race, or the deafult blank image is loaded. But this may turn out to be good, as artists could create graphic packs for users, this provides an outlet for artists where they could sell their art work.

Another cool thing is modding, since everything on the client side can me modified, there would be no reason for the client not to become a sci fi game, just editing the clients data files to change something like "human" to "cyborg" and a overhaul of the graphics.

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

well i think that problem with "path of least resistance" can be in this case solved quite easily: make rewards purely timebased. then sure, you can run easiest one again and again but 1. it will be boring, 2. you will not get more/faster

Originally posted by Benedikt

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

well i think that problem with "path of least resistance" can be in this case solved quite easily: make rewards purely timebased. then sure, you can run easiest one again and again but 1. it will be boring, 2. you will not get more/faster

If it's based on time logged in, then that's extremely bottable.  It doesn't even matter what the bots do, as you get the rewards regardless.  When the bots don't have to play well, you can easily make them so that no automatic measurements will detect that they're bots.

If it's based on real-life time passed since character creation, then you run into the same problem EVE has where new players don't want to start because they'll never be able to catch up.  That doesn't necessarily kill a game outright (it has, after all, worked for EVE), but it isn't what most players are looking for.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

Yeah this is some work in progress , the prototype was started on the 19 of feb, the whole base system should be finished in 2 months (i hope), I built the servers systems a year ago or something (generic tcp/udp multithreaded, multistream, so I can use them for any prototypes/game, hell I could wrap it to a dll and sell it as a lib), all c\c++.

Yeah the content creation could be an issue in some cases, but I have to manage all the content ( I can limit upload content per-user, per time period), it's no different to game balance in any typical game RPG game, but all content will follow strict formulas, and I'll show some of that that when I've finished the weapons/spells/armour systems, it's a bit easier as the game mechanisms are turn based so allocation to movement systems is nulled from equations.

Players won't have control over difficulty or loot, they will be able to farm, but since experience in level growth follows a formula they will need to travel to areas of greater influence(each structure provides a influence value, travelling closer to a structure such as a dungeon, means more difficult creatures and better loot) which ties into the crafting system, such as 4 items say swords that combined to create a better single sword weapon.

One of the things I'm looking at is insuring that creatures/characters meet level requirements to weapons, armour and spells to remove twinking, but it's not set in stone, sometimes I think it may be fun to see a level 2 human with armour of god and the sword of light running round scaring the hell out of enemy warbands (people can flee from combat, but have to give up one of their creatures).

I don't want players to become too attached to their entire party, and gold will allow players to replace characters of equivalent level or lower level to their highest. Other rogue like game elements can also affect the party.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you look at it, it's not a game creator, it's a game that allows you to create content for it, the game system formulas are set in place, ready to be tweaked when needed.

TBH I think it's worth it, I think this kind of game will break the boundaries that have been in place in almost every RPG I've played, I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but this is a niche game, so it will be a bit of a silent start and I can additionally put in content limitations if I feel the need to. Additionally you can only effectively create content as a single instance, such as if there's a Troll race, that's it Troll is done, no more Trolls, but because of the essence (elements ) system, players can select to align their creature/character to an element, ie Earth Troll, Fire Troll etc..

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Benedikt

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

well i think that problem with "path of least resistance" can be in this case solved quite easily: make rewards purely timebased. then sure, you can run easiest one again and again but 1. it will be boring, 2. you will not get more/faster

If it's based on time logged in, then that's extremely bottable.  It doesn't even matter what the bots do, as you get the rewards regardless.  When the bots don't have to play well, you can easily make them so that no automatic measurements will detect that they're bots.

If it's based on real-life time passed since character creation, then you run into the same problem EVE has where new players don't want to start because they'll never be able to catch up.  That doesn't necessarily kill a game outright (it has, after all, worked for EVE), but it isn't what most players are looking for.

Yeah botting can be an issue as in any game, for instance there may be a level 1 botter who just farms outside his city, now he can do that, but he's limited to the maximum amount of turns per day and limited by the loot for that influence level, it's nice that the limitations of influence, define the possible looting outcome, and as a warband expands to 18 creatures/characters maximum, the required tactical play is increased, for bots to farm higher level content will require some serious AI systems, and since combat is turn based action control, the variance in opposition and tactics will require multiple AI system to counter act my AI.

I'm hoping I can just put in a repeat action detection system that will flag constant repetitive actions.

Small update, been a busy month :(, so not much to see really, I've updated the creature "Cards" with the information tab's (hidden in minimize mode, open when a creature is viewed), these provide the additional growth to any creature a player owns, from a concept perspective its very similar to an RPG game, but somewhat simplified as the player will have up to 18 creatures in their warband, players are allowed to choose and change freely these additional variances to any creature.

• Essence, the essence provides additional bonuses to creature attributes, but is limited to creature level, and increments in power are determined by the Essence attribute core costs and Attribute values.
• Weapons & Armour creatures that do not use the natural weapon type can arm weapons which will be level dependent.
• C&B, Condition & Buffs, any creature may have up to 3 conditions and 3 buffs, currently the limitation of 3 each will hopefully force players to decide how to spread conditions and buffs rather than stack everything on one enemy or character.
• 10 Spells and 10 Attacks, while no single creature is a fighter or spell caster, the players may choose certain creatures with levelling attribute increments to fill a specific role they are looking for, creatures will gain access these at set level intervals (1&1 @ level  1-10 etc.).
  •  Attacks are primarily based on the weapon being used, basic attacks use no energy, advanced attacks will use energy, or in the case of creatures with natural weapons ; bites, claw, charge, kick etc...
  • Spells are player designed and use a spell power increment to creature level system, this allows the player to say create a paladin like dragon(buff/self heal dragon) if they really feel like it. I may possibly use the essence attributes as an additional combination to spells (not  100% decided yet).

Originally posted by BahamutKaiser
SRPG as in Fire Emblem?

Yeah its a little like fire emblem (& other JRPGs), mixed with a card game, mixed with classic RPG elements set in a mmo universe, its has a lot of scope due to the user created content (creatures, essence, spells, weapons, armour, attacks)(maybe more), for instance atm I have 30 different essence types and only 4 creatures in the game (both of which take very little time to create), so there's 120 variances, each essence provides a spell tree (which you can add too), and can provide conditions.

For instance if you choose a Dragon then attune it to Fire you get a "Fire Dragon", which can then gain the bonuses to any fire spells (although a creature is not limited to just that spell tree), and gains the burning condition to any of its attacks.

The strange thing about the systems ive created is that, they could be used to create any context really, atm im just working towards mythical and fantasy, but it could be just as easy to make it scfi, roman, cartoon, what ever really, heh.

Originally posted by Benedikt

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Quizzical

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

If you're going to rely on user-generated content, then you should be aware that more than a few people who create content will try to make their content as easy as possible while giving as great of rewards as possible.  Other people will figure out what content is tuned that way, and then farm it endlessly.  That can break a lot of things in your play balance, and "as easy as possible" doesn't tend to be interesting to play.

I'm not saying you can't have user-created spells, armors, etc.  But if you give players any control over difficulty or loot, you're likely to regret it.  It may be practical to let players design whatever they want, and then automatically tune the power of things up or down, but that would be tricky, and players would try to find ways that your auto-tuning mechanism is off somewhat and exploit that.

^ this. You are nowhere close to being as smart as your playerbase in aggregate.

Agreed. And to try to manage and regulate the content starts to require a larger team than is worth it. What the OP wants to make is a game creator, not a game. either way, I don't think he understnads the amount of support this project would require.

Interested in the answer to Quiz's question:

Is this something you're actually creating, or just "it would be cool if someone did this"?

well i think that problem with "path of least resistance" can be in this case solved quite easily: make rewards purely timebased. then sure, you can run easiest one again and again but 1. it will be boring, 2. you will not get more/faster

 Time based is a good first thought but it falls apart as people can control how long it takes.

An alternative would be to have dev created dungeons with complex ratings. A player can opt for a loot drop or tokens reflecting the complex rating. So now that they have spent the time doing the hard stuff, they can spend the tokens in a player created content with a matching rating.

You can add all kinds of extras like Diminishing returns on content runs, lockout, tokens,  increasing token costs as players use player content.  Hard limits on number of PC dungeons would be nice.

Is it perfect no.  Any system has it's flaws, but if you do the costs well and place limits, it could be ok.

There is the  other option to not give xp or loot for PC dungeons.

The concept sounds pretty good and promising on it's own but I don't know how well it work in an MMO. Does it even need to be "massive"?

You create all of your 18 creatures from the start? That sounds like a lot of work to set up for a new player. I'd imaging a new player start with 3-6 standard creature types and is at little risk of loosing them until the player gets used to how the game works first. Then as they continue to play the warband size will increase and they can aquire/loose more.

18 creatures and each can have weapons and armor? Sounds like a lot to manage. I'd think 8-12 would be plenty if you are going to have to equip them too. Once you get so many creatures you simply won't care if you loose them. With so many of them they will be viewed as disposable cards instead of 'your' creatures. Maybe that is what you are reaching for, I do not know.

I like that you atleast have essences that can change your strategy some. I just hope you can have enough variety in tactics or playstyles. "Here's my tank cards and here's my damage dealer cards" would be very boring. What I love about TCGs is that the cards have not just the special atributes (protector, frenzy, flanking) but that they have unique effects which you can identify to the card by name. And such effects like: +10 defense for each enemy exceeding your creatures, +20 attack for each 10 points of damage, If damage was recieve when attacking -10 defence but if recieved when defending +30 attack, and so on, they need to be created and tailored to that creature. I know most players won't be able to or want to come up with such interesting effects.

I also think letting all of your players make your (and their own) content will result in less interesting content. Definately need to have atleast 50 creatures premade or have a lot of templates to work from.

Originally posted by mmoguy43

The concept sounds pretty good and promising on it's own but I don't know how well it work in an MMO. Does it even need to be "massive"?

You create all of your 18 creatures from the start? That sounds like a lot of work to set up for a new player. I'd imaging a new player start with 3-6 standard creature types and is at little risk of loosing them until the player gets used to how the game works first. Then as they continue to play the warband size will increase and they can aquire/loose more.

18 creatures and each can have weapons and armor? Sounds like a lot to manage. I'd think 8-12 would be plenty if you are going to have to equip them too. Once you get so many creatures you simply won't care if you loose them. With so many of them they will be viewed as disposable cards instead of 'your' creatures. Maybe that is what you are reaching for, I do not know.

I like that you atleast have essences that can change your strategy some. I just hope you can have enough variety in tactics or playstyles. "Here's my tank cards and here's my damage dealer cards" would be very boring. What I love about TCGs is that the cards have not just the special atributes (protector, frenzy, flanking) but that they have unique effects which you can identify to the card by name. And such effects like: +10 defense for each enemy exceeding your creatures, +20 attack for each 10 points of damage, If damage was recieve when attacking -10 defence but if recieved when defending +30 attack, and so on, they need to be created and tailored to that creature. I know most players won't be able to or want to come up with such interesting effects.

I also think letting all of your players make your (and their own) content will result in less interesting content. Definately need to have atleast 50 creatures premade or have a lot of templates to work from.

Well really, in truth, it could easily be a single player game, and for the most part, if players do not flag themselves for "faction warfare", they will be kind of playing a single player game with a chat room, but they still feel the effects and changes to the world from factional warfare.

What happens is you start in a city of your chosen alignment with a single human, and some gold, as you play you can purchase creatures, as well as find, slave, recruit through other means(which I will discuss at some point) and add them to your warband, this allows for a progressive early game, allowing the player to learn the ropes. Mid to late game you may find that you need better creatures and obtaining them will be somewhat based on your warband's reputation and rating.

The weapons and armour management not really that bad, since its only 2 objects per creature, so you will only ever need 36 items maximum, which is similar to say a party in Baldors Gate, Ishtar, Might and Magic or many other RPGs, and that's only if your creatures do not have natural weapons/armour, you could have an entire warband with nothing.

Yeah I want to limit the player attachment to their creatures (until very late game), it will be similar to something like UFO unknown, where you just hired more men, and as you play, some die, but the ones that survive get stronger, so as the game progresses and your creatures start becoming hero's, you start to care for some of them, it may be the case that other member of the warband will just be meat shields that you can recycle with new recruits.

I completely understand this, currently the combat system is something similar to the game "disciples", but I will be trying to improve the combat system as I go to add good variation, much of this will come from the conditions and buffs that can be assigned to the spells, weapons, armour and combat actions(I'll go into them, and iterate once the basic simulator is completed), hopefully players will notice that they can build different types of warbands, such as spike, de-gen, attrition, lock, balanced etc..

Yeah there will be a large number of creatures, I can't say what figure as it will depend on what art work I can afford, but one of the key things is allowing players to create creatures, this means that they have freedom to extrapolate on design or be totally creative, for instance I have "Dragon", there's no reason that they couldn't design  Dragogian(Small horse size spiky horned dragon), or Dragoriant(A human sized lizard like dragon that walks on its hind legs).

Small update.

Spell creation is now tied to the essence types, this means that if a creature has a essence type any spells cast from that essence tree will get a multiplier bonus, additionally graphics feed directly from the essence graphic icons into the particle system.

Weapons and Armour creation is now completed with, magical enchantment trees and randomisation, the system follows typical RPG's style prefix, suffix enchantments..

Work on the simulator is commencing, this basically combines all the previous elements into a single simulator, this will allow players to see all the creatures and items in the game, including creating an entire warband, loading/saving individual creatures or entire warbands to templates, and will contain a combat simulator.

I'm a turn-based junkie and will be watching this for updates... I'd love to try it out as well...

I'm praying for a triple AAA turn-based Western MMO but I don't think it will ever happen.