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Crazy MMO Ideas
I've got these ideas in my head, and I wonder if they'd be feasible. Not for this game, mind you. No, we don't have the resources to try out such major changes. But if some MMO, somewhere down the line, implemented these ideas, do you think they'd take off?
Don't be Zimbabwe
Why does every game continuously throw more gold into circulation? Every monster and every quest is basically a money-printing machine. They try to counteract it with “gold sinks,” why not address the root of the problem?
Create a finite cap on how much gold can be in circulation. When player's reach the cap, monsters no longer drop gold, quests no longer reward it, and NPCs can't buy from players. This situation persists until someone spends gold on something.
I know what you're thinking, what about the players that will inevitably hoard gold, then stop playing. The answer is, taxes. (There is no escape, even in fantasy realms!) Every player, active or inactive, will be periodically assessed a tax equal to some percent of his wealth.
All gold rewarded can be scaled based on how much the game has available to give out. Similarly, how much an NPC asks for his wares can be based on the total wealth of the playerbase.
No Grinding
So, a while back, I was playing Gemcraft: Labyrinth. In that game, you get rewards from each level based on how well you do. You can replay previous levels, but there's no inherent reward for doing so. If you want to get something for playing a level you've already beaten, you have to do better than you did before. Even then, you only got the difference between your previous reward and the new one.
Whereas many games encourage grinding, this one makes it impossible. Advancement doesn't come through mindless repetition. It comes through doing well.
When I was telling a friend of mine about this idea, I suggested one criteria for the highest reward on group content could be no one dying. His response was, “Yes! Turn the players against each other!” I don't think he was being sarcastic.
Constant Numbers
So, a common element among MMOs (and lots of other games), is that, the longer you play, the bigger the numbers get. But it's not just your numbers. Your enemies get bigger numbers too. “Yay! Now I deal twice as much damage, and enemies have twice the HP! There's no discernible difference!”
The changes only come up insofar as people play level-inappropriate content. Some games won't even let you try that though. When you go to a low-level zone, you're automatically leveled down to match. You can't go to a higher-level zone.
It's as if game designers said, “This system we put in place changing all the numbers sure is getting in the way of providing players with appropriate challenges! Let's fix it by adding even more systems that change all the numbers!” Really, once you decide that players shouldn't encounter content that is either trivial or impossible, the obvious solution is to get rid of levels. The only function levels have ever served is to create situations where players find content either trivial or impossible.
No Vendor Trash
I don't think I really even have to present an argument for this one.
Pay with CPU Time
You can pay for things in this game by taking surveys. Why not pay with CPU time? There have been plenty of projects demonstrating the effectiveness of distributed computing. Researchers often rent time on supercomputers to run simulations. Why not turn your client base into a distributed supercomputer and sell time on it?
Worst case scenario, you can't sell the time, and you use it to mine for bitcoins instead. The electricity it takes to mine bitcoins costs more than you can sell them for, but you won't be footing the player's electric bill. Anyway, it shouldn't be hard to find more profitable things to do with the computing power.
No Item Degradation/Repair
Okay, so this isn't in all MMOs. But it's in some. And some is way, way too many.
Don't be Zimbabwe
Why does every game continuously throw more gold into circulation? Every monster and every quest is basically a money-printing machine. They try to counteract it with “gold sinks,” why not address the root of the problem?
Create a finite cap on how much gold can be in circulation. When player's reach the cap, monsters no longer drop gold, quests no longer reward it, and NPCs can't buy from players. This situation persists until someone spends gold on something.
I know what you're thinking, what about the players that will inevitably hoard gold, then stop playing. The answer is, taxes. (There is no escape, even in fantasy realms!) Every player, active or inactive, will be periodically assessed a tax equal to some percent of his wealth.
All gold rewarded can be scaled based on how much the game has available to give out. Similarly, how much an NPC asks for his wares can be based on the total wealth of the playerbase.
No Grinding
So, a while back, I was playing Gemcraft: Labyrinth. In that game, you get rewards from each level based on how well you do. You can replay previous levels, but there's no inherent reward for doing so. If you want to get something for playing a level you've already beaten, you have to do better than you did before. Even then, you only got the difference between your previous reward and the new one.
Whereas many games encourage grinding, this one makes it impossible. Advancement doesn't come through mindless repetition. It comes through doing well.
When I was telling a friend of mine about this idea, I suggested one criteria for the highest reward on group content could be no one dying. His response was, “Yes! Turn the players against each other!” I don't think he was being sarcastic.
Constant Numbers
So, a common element among MMOs (and lots of other games), is that, the longer you play, the bigger the numbers get. But it's not just your numbers. Your enemies get bigger numbers too. “Yay! Now I deal twice as much damage, and enemies have twice the HP! There's no discernible difference!”
The changes only come up insofar as people play level-inappropriate content. Some games won't even let you try that though. When you go to a low-level zone, you're automatically leveled down to match. You can't go to a higher-level zone.
It's as if game designers said, “This system we put in place changing all the numbers sure is getting in the way of providing players with appropriate challenges! Let's fix it by adding even more systems that change all the numbers!” Really, once you decide that players shouldn't encounter content that is either trivial or impossible, the obvious solution is to get rid of levels. The only function levels have ever served is to create situations where players find content either trivial or impossible.
No Vendor Trash
I don't think I really even have to present an argument for this one.
Pay with CPU Time
You can pay for things in this game by taking surveys. Why not pay with CPU time? There have been plenty of projects demonstrating the effectiveness of distributed computing. Researchers often rent time on supercomputers to run simulations. Why not turn your client base into a distributed supercomputer and sell time on it?
Worst case scenario, you can't sell the time, and you use it to mine for bitcoins instead. The electricity it takes to mine bitcoins costs more than you can sell them for, but you won't be footing the player's electric bill. Anyway, it shouldn't be hard to find more profitable things to do with the computing power.
No Item Degradation/Repair
Okay, so this isn't in all MMOs. But it's in some. And some is way, way too many.
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Comments
^...ive heard enough....bang
Courage is doing what is right even when it isn't popular or safe. Honor is retaining the dignity and virtue in one's self, so it can light the way for others in the darkest of times. Compassion is showing patience and mercy towards others, even when it isn't returned or deserved. A hero is defined by these 3 words, they set him apart from others as a beacon of hope and excellence.
Yes, it's an awful system. That's what got me thinking about how a non-terrible system could work.
Your Zimbabwe comparison missed the mark because it's an example of overprinting of paper money. In MMO terms it's what you would get if the devs literally gave you resources for logging in.
Real-world commodities exchange is the basis of the economy, in an MMO that's gear. But you don't need a steady supply of new gear unless you always go for the newest and best every time new stuff comes out.
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My characters
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
I'm not convinced that gear should exist. It's really just another way of making numbers get bigger over time.
Nevertheless, consumable items could still have a place in MMOs. Potions to heal mid-combat or gain temporary buffs are probably fine. Also, the ever-popular (at least in this game) costume unlocks. Of course, you could just skip the middle man and drop the potions/unlocks instead of gold.
If gold were strictly used to facilitate trading between players, you wouldn't even need to award it to players or charge them gold for anything. The amount of gold in circulation would never change, except when a player quit the game with some still in his bank.
The game could automatically adjust for that by purchasing items from the auction house itself. That's how real money gets added to the economy, the government uses it to buy something. Just make sure the purchasing algorithm tracks the actual market price of things. You wouldn't want people listing items at ridiculous prices on the off chance the algorithm will buy it.
The same method would work to increase the gold supply to match an increased number of players. The game could post some consumable items for sale if gold ever needed to be removed from circulation.
I'm prepared to call one idea that people like a victory.
I see what you're getting at here. An MMO, by definition, has a persistent, shared world. A “shared” world that has no one else in it is functionally no different than a single-player game. So, to function as intended, an MMO needs to have people playing it constantly.
Still, I feel there must be some way of creating replay value other than having players continuously grind out slightly larger numbers.
I don't understand.
That's an interesting issue. But couldn't it be solved by giving the same problem to multiple computers and checking that they all return the same result? Even if hackers figure out how to fake the communication, figuring out the right answers to send back will consume just as much CPU time as letting the program run normally.
I'm told Google uses Recaptcha to decipher text that their OCR software couldn't handle. If they've figured out a way to get useful information despite all the bots trying to guess the answers, my idea should be possible too.
I forgot one of my crazy ideas in the first post.
No Aggro Manipulation
Doesn't it seem strange that some games allow players to dictate actions the AI takes. More specifically, force the AI to take actions against its own self-interest.
The entire point of a tank is that it's good for your party if he'd the one being attacked. So why would any intelligent enemy attack the tank. In MMOs that have multiplayer PvP, no one attacks a tank that was foolish enough to join. They gun for the glass cannons and healers, because that's what will help them be victorious. Meanwhile, the tank does… not much, because his damage sucks and his entire class only functions if enemies are stupid.
Why not program enemies to make smart decisions? An enemy should prioritize his targets in whatever order gives him the best chance of victory.
It's not like we need the traditional aggro system just to have different types of characters. Lots of multiplayer-only games have several different categories of characters that play differently. They even have tanky characters, but their tanks are designed to be able to function without needing to be able to tell the enemy what to do.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
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My characters
One part would be the game. This would operate just as any game does. It would have its dedicated servers, the client computer would do the graphics, et cetera. There would be no attempt to offload the tasks normally handled by the server to client computers.
The other part would be a business that contracts with scientists and the like to solve computationally-complex problems. There are existing businesses that rent out time on supercomputers for just this purpose. The difference here is that this company wouldn't have a supercomputer. They would in turn pay various users all over the internet to run their distributed computing software. Essentially, they're middle men between users selling CPU time, and organizations paying to use it to solve complex problems.
The problems being solved would be things like protein folding, things that don't have any kind of strict time limit. I had never meant to suggest using a distributed computing system on real-time applications. I mean, people generally schedule applications like this to run overnight, when they won't care about the drain on their computer resources, because they'll be asleep. Conversely, the time when a game's servers experience the most load is not the middle of the night.
Now, how are these two things related? Why did I introduce them as a single idea? Well, paying people actual money to run your distributed-computing software is kind of a bother. Firstly, if you give them money, you no longer have that money yourself. Secondly, we'd be talking about a vast number of individual transactions for small amounts of money, with many semi-anonymous individuals. I'm no finance expert, but that sounds less than ideal. If you could instead give people something that doesn't really exist, like an item in a game, that sounds much better.
So, if you already run a game, tossing out free items to people who let you borrow their computing power at night doesn't exactly cost you anything. I mean, it will decrease sales in your cash shop, but it gives you a whole new revenue stream in selling all that processing power. In a sense, the money earned from the distributed computing pays for the cost of running the game servers. But the distributed computing environment is not actually doing the work of the game servers, for various logistical reasons.
Now, of course, you're spending a lot of money to create and maintain the game, but you're saving money by not having to pay for any of the CPU time that you then turn around and sell. Really, the game is just a loss leader. Then again, all free-to-play games are already loss leaders to their own cash shops. And maintaining a subscription game long-term is unlikely to work if that game is not warcraft, so free-to-play is kind of the only option for an MMO, even if it starts out with subscriptions.
As you know, many people are averse to spending money on free-to-play games. They'll spend time and resources that are objectively worth more than the cash they would have spent instead. If you present a player with an option like this, getting stuff in game without forking over any cash or spending a lot of his time, it will be incredibly tempting. It wouldn't even matter if the cost of the electricity and air conditioning he winds up paying is more than he would have spent for the items. Most people will never look that deep, and will feel like they're getting something for free. But I don't believe it's necessary to screw people over on the sly. Really, the collective power of all the worlds computers sitting unused overnight is a major economic resource going to waste. It should easily be possible to turn a profit off it while still giving a fair payment.
I should also note that this would allow you to charge a monthly “fee,” instead of resorting to the usual cash shop gimmicks that tend to be so annoying. However, you can still retain all the allure of a free-to-play game. In fact, it would be a truer free-to-play game than any other, because no one is even capable of spending money. None of that “pay to win” crap.
I suppose tying a game and distributed-computing service together made for a confusing pitch. It would be far simpler to explain the idea of being a middle man between people who aren't using the full power of their computer at all times of day, and the people who need to solve complex problems. But they hust seemed to fit together so well.
Exactly what reassurances do the users have that they can trust these companies not to abuse access to their PCs and not overload / overheat them, potentially causing irreversible damage in turn? What happens when the company folds and is not able to pay the user any outstanding payments they are owed? What legal recourse can these users take?
What makes you think that ISPs would be agreeable to third-party companies, especially foreign ones, utilizing their bandwidth for business activities via proxy through the ISPs' customers, without there being a business agreement between these companies and the ISPs?
This centralized, shared PC resource concept sounds like something can that potentially create a legal ****-storm that makes it not even close to being feasible.
For any well-run currency in the real world, there is a finite amount that exists, which the issuing government changes only rarely. People talk about “making” money at a job, but the money is not made; it is transferred. The only way for one person to earn money is for another to willingly part with it.
The idea is that currency circulates, rather than being created and destroyed. Circulating the same money around endlessly has served us quite well in the real world, and I see no reason it couldn't be made to work in the digital world.
The only real danger is people who hoard currency and never spend it. In the real world, people are forced to spend money on food and shelter at the very least. The digital world doesn't have this, which is why I proposed my “tax.” Really, a better term would be cost of living. It ensures that a bank account cannot be a black hole from which money never escapes.
You'll also notice that I have suggested this “cost of living” scale with player wealth. This is in keeping with the fact that the wealthy almost invariable spend more on food and shelter than the poor do. It also creates a system where it's easy to put together a small amount of money, but hard to put together a large sum. The larger your account balance, the faster it will trickle out of its own accord.
While I have just spent five paragraphs defending the original idea, I actually like it less and less the more I think about it. My reasons aren't quite the same as yours though. For one thing, I think it may have been too simplistic. (Okay, that might also have been one of your reasons.) For another players would almost certainly feel cheated if gold left their account of its without them actually doing anything. But, most importantly, I think I was still clinging too much to the usual way of doing things.
So here's my new idea. No monster ever drops gold. No quest ever rewards gold. No in-game service ever costs gold. The only time players spend gold is when they buy something from another player. The only time a player ever receives gold is when they sell something to another player.
When you really think about it, why does money exist? Ultimately, it's to streamline the process by which people trade goods with each other. There's no particular reason gold has to show up anywhere in game other than when players exchange goods with each other. What has there ever been in an NPC shop that couldn't be dropped by a monster, then traded from the player who got it to a player who wants it? What services have NPCs ever provided that couldn't be free? If you don't want players respeccing all the time, you can just put a 1/day limit on it, or 1/week if you're stingy.
Now, this of course begs the question “Where does the money come from to start with?” Well, the game should have at least one dummy account. This account actually has unlimited gold, but it only buys things when the game determines there should be more gold in circulation. This will happen when the number of players increases, or when players with lots of gold stop playing, effectively taking their money out of circulation.
You'll be happy to know that, in this version, the mysterious algorithm that determines when more gold should be injected into the economy is not based on the total amount of gold currently in existence. I'm giving up on the idea of bleeding gold from inactive accounts and perpetual hoarders. This means the amount of gold that exists and the amount of gold that is actively circulating can and will be different. The latter is what's actually important, and I only suggested going by the former because I was proposing a scenario where those two numbers should tend to resemble eachother. Whatever algorithm the game uses to judge the health of the economy (and determine if it should add some gold into it) it won't have the luxury of being that simple.
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My characters
Um but um, this probably defeats the very point of playing a Role Play Game. I still like the idea though.
(°∇° ) #megalodon2015
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My characters
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I'd say the defining characteristic of an MMO is a persistent, shared world where you can play solo, or team up with other players you encounter.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
The game's running again, though I no longer have the confidence to refrain from adding “for now.” I've been playing it a lot lately, because I'm not sure if it'll be around later.
The funny thing is, I got back into it only about a week before the layoffs and the start of the radio silence.
(°∇° ) #megalodon2015
*looks it up*
BEHOLD: http://www.neoseeker.com/monster-lab/
The mini games were actually a lot of fun.... at tier 2. Tier 1 was stupid easy. 3 is frustrating but doable.... 4.... get a cheat code. Last I checked certain monster parts had not been documented at full power.... IE no one had ever managed to get a perfect score on the minigame.
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My characters