Originally posted by Truthseeker

Ultimately it is really about consistency in your design choices for gameplay. I have been playing Oblivion and I have to say that I would like to play this game without having to see my character's stats. I noticed how playing to level up or gain the next ability screws up my fun. I begin to race and optimize my character growth in the minimum time possible to challenge myself, because there is usually no challenge. By challenge I mean what us old timers liked about arcade games.

Anyways these reads raised many doubts about how much information should be hidden, and I guess that having options is the best. Perfect information is okay for competition but make a game abstract, less information is maybe more immersive. Some of you already know my taste for PvP (strategy and tactics based gameplay), what do you think ? A recurrent problem within games is the lack of diversity in viable tactics ans strategies, once the optimum templates, builds are discovered.

I guess that evolving conditions, is the only way to avoid boredom. In magic the gathering, each new expansion creates a new metagame with tones of experimentation and fun. This keeps the game alive and refreshing. I think that if a game was set to evolve from the very first design steps, like maybe having mobs moving to other regions, or the weather influencing many of the actions you might engage, you would never feel boredom. Just my two cents, this is indeed a very complicated issue... worthy of a thesis .

The numbers can't simply be hidden.  A game has to be created such that there is no value in knowing the numbers.  Players won't care to know the numbers, so they can be hidden.  Players don't care how many megabytes of textures there are in World of Warcraft because it doesn't affect their success.  What if the numbers that described a character didn't affect the player's success?  That would mean that something else would have to affect the player's success.  Such as player skill.

Chess is a game of player skill.  The pieces don't have any numbers attached to them because pawns don't have levels.  Everyone's pawns are the same.  The player skill comes in when the players have to adapt to evolving conditions by using those standard game pieces.

That's what I'd like to see MMOs do.  Try this on for size.  I just made it up.

Make the game pieces (our characters) standard, and then require us to use them skillfully in evolving conditions to accomplish whatever we're after.

The twist with MMOs is that any player is operating only one game piece.  So one opportunity to make things interesting is to include skills at the group level.  I mentioned the technique of group skill rebalancing in a blog comment.  A group forms from standard characters.  Suppose it's a group of 10.  They are given 10 rebalance options where they agree to specialize different members in different ways.  It's a bit like choosing who is going to be each type of game piece in Chess, only with many more types of pieces.

Equipment simply appears once the specialization is complete.  If someone is specialized from standard sword to halberd, their sword turns into a halberd.  If someone is specialized from standard sword to some kind of mage, they are changed to look like a mage.  If  a hunter with a pet, their pet trots up.

Once formed, the group goes off and battles other groups that started from the same basic game pieces and customized according to their own desires.  As a result of battles, players are ranked by their skill.

Now for the MMO bit.  The combat happens on a massive battlefield.  Call it 100km x 100km large.  This is the strategic map of the game.  Initially it is divided by a vertical line separating the two sides.  A group of a given rank declares an attack at a particular stretch of the battle line.  An opposing group of equal or lower rank must oppose them. They battle in the terrain of that section of the battlefront.  The winner moves the battlefront line in that section.  The amount of movement is determined by the rank of the groups involved and the degree of the success.  The result of many battles is a sinuous line that wobbles and weaves all over the place.

It's likely that some kind of time delay would go into the declarations of battles.  The point is to ensure that both sides get a good solid fight.  Nobody walks over anybody else.  There might even be handicapping to balance out skill levels.  Or it may be that skill rankings have to be matched.

Across the map are victory points.  If your side can push the battlefront line over a victory point, it automatically gains control over the terrain surrounding that victory point.  So your side might battle several kilometers to fight to a victory point, but as soon as it is reached, the battlefront line pops out from the victory point in a circle for 500 meters.  They are incentives to push in certain directions, not unlike the node building task in Unreal Tournament.  I withhold judgment over whether or not capturing a victory point should have any effect on the options available to the two sides.  Something cosmetic could certainly be done, but I'm not sure about in-game achievements.

Note that because the battlefront line can be pushed in any direction, it is possible to drive hard into enemy territory in an attempt to reach a victory point, producing a long tendril of captured terrain.  At the same time, however, your enemy can try to push in from the sides of that hard drive and try to pinch off that tendril.  This is the Battle of the Bulge effect.  Charge hard through enemy territory only to have your flanks compromised and be cut off.  If territory is cut off, it is forfeited.  The circular area around a victory point is retained, however.  A victory point must be recaptured.

On top of all this is the opportunity to have the developers keep changing the rules.  The rules are the same for everyone, and nobody is permanently configuring a character to match a particular set of rules.  Each time a group is formed for a battle, they specialize however they want.  So when the developers tweak the rules, it changes the way the game is played.  Potentially, the two sides of any given battle could choose the rules that they want to fight under.  "No magic"  or  "No flying"  or "No mounts" and so on.  Duel at dawn, choose your weapons.

I haven't gone into the actual PvP combat, but given that any character could be any MMO class that you've ever encountered, I figure people can come up with combinations that they would enjoy.

You have to build a reputation if you want people to pay attention to your ideas.  You can do that by posting erudite critiques of other people's ideas, expanding on why they do or do not work.  You can also do it by implementing some of your ideas and showing them to the world in order to garner a reputation for yourself.  Build free demos of those great ideas.  Either approach will demonstrate your grasp of MMO design principles.

An alternative is to present your ideas to someone that you both respect and trust - and who also has experience with implementing game systems.  They will give you a sanity check on the practical limitations and possible ramifications of your design decisions.  You may want to search through some of the MUD-Dev archives to see if your game ideas have popped up before.  That is a now-defunct mailing list that was used by a number of the multiplayer game luminaries to discuss game issues.  There are lots of very serious reality checks in there.

Game ideas are not covered under patent law or copyright law.  You can patent any novel algorithms that you come up with, and the code itself can be copyrighted, but game ideas are as common as the stars.  The U.S. Patent Office requires something concrete.

I look forward to seeing how the system works out with your customers.

Your Vital Energy system is going to have the same issues as pay-as-you-go cell phones.  For those who carefully monitor how they spend money, they'll be sweating every action that they make that consumes Vital Energy.  If  a death consumes non-trivial amounts of Vital Energy, they will be given to playing the game safely.

For those who don't watch how they spend money, they're going to blow through their paid-up Vital Energy quota.  Do you permit overuse?  If not, then their characters will revert to ones that cannot perform any Vital Energy actions, including recovery from death.  If they're in the middle of a fight, their characters die and they have to buy more Vital Energy to get their characters back.  Not a decision that a consumer wants to make.

If you permit overuse of the purchased quota of Vital Energy, then players will be racking up overage charges.  Kids are particularly good at not monitoring how much overage they're accumulating, leading to irate parents.  If it's not the parents, then it's the aghast adult customers themselves who didn't realize what a hole they were digging for themselves.

World of Warcraft is the success that it is partly because people don't feel stressed while playing.  Customers make a one-time decision to play, and a reminder of that decision quietly visits them each month along with all their other itemized charges on their credit card statements.

The other successful approach is to make the game free to play, and then charge for special items.  This matches the model of our own lives.  We live our lives freely and we pay if we want something special.

That's the sort of pattern that any billing system needs to follow: people are already of a mind to make those sorts of decisions, and they're comfortable with them.  A third approach, which I abhor, is play for free and pay to have advertisements around.  Consumers love this because there is no apparent payment being made on their part.  They are paying for the game, of course, but indirectly through the advertising.  The perception of it being free is clearly enough to support the technique.  The web would not be what it is today without advertising.

Originally posted by Nazaros

My suggestion is this though; Good game play doesn't need top notch graphics. So if you think you have an idea that is appealing and fun, find the cheapest way to implement it and you can be surprised how well it can be received by the community if you put your heart and soul into it. (So long as you don't produce another clone of what's there of course) Runescape is a good example of horrible graphics, but compeling game play with smooth learning curve. Those guys where 6 to make this game, and they are millionaire today, while 90% of the MMO launch in the past 5 years have merely break even with their original cost.

A game or a MMO doesn't have to be the next WoW killer in order to be worth playing. A true good game will age well, and will be worth playing decades after it's creation...

Here's a link to Nick Yee's Daedalus project page on player server preference type.   It compares PvE and PvP preferences of players, and also takes a stab at discovering people's interest in roleplaying.

For those uninterested in following the link, the PvE to PvP preference is about 2:1.  Women are rather strongly averse to PvP.  Roleplaying preferences seems to lean in the direction of "I might try it, but it's nothing I'm concerned about."

Both this post and Nick's research involve self-selecting voters, so both will be skewed a bit.  I believe Nick canvassed active players, while this forum is populated by more enthusiastic players in general.  It only makes sense that we'd have a higher density of PvP players here.  It matches my experiences in other online forums.

My vote was strongly negative because we're talking about MMOs.  In FPS games, I don't have any accomplishments hanging in the balance, so I'm just looking for a good fight.

I highly recommend reading Nick Yee's Daedalus project site.  If you want to get your head on straight about the demographics and motivations of MMO players, Nick has provided a wealth of working material.

Axe, I did a blog on this recently, talking about how close we are to bringing some rather interesting technologies together.  The article links in some videos showing the technologies in action.

Oh, and the Wii has a Harry Potter game where you use the controller as your wand.

If you're curious about MMO player statistics, you should take a look at Nick Yee's work.  He even did a study looking into the time spent playing MMOs and the time spent watching television.  It dates from 2005, but should still be accurate.

Short form: players play games and watch TV as much as the average person watches TV.  The average hours devoted to these electronic passtimes tends to hover just under 30 hours a week.