Archived... Needs attention. Please Read!

Mattskee wrote:

Before I get into it, let me tell you a bit about myself so you can see where I'm coming from. I'f you'd like to skip straight to the suggesting hop on over to paragraph 4. I'm a roleplayer who played COX for 3 years, starting in the second round of closed beta. I'm also less then a year away from graduating with a degree in Game Design, and, even though school takes up most of my time now and I don't sub to any MMO's 'cause I'm a poor college student, I squirm my way into any beta I can get my hands on. I love participating in them, plus it's a cheap way to feed my inner MMO addict. :P

Roleplaying-wise this game is RICH with possibilities. The open-ended power selection, power customization, great costume choices, and Nemesis system all scream to me as catering to the RP crowd that was prevalent in COX. However, as a Roleplayer I see the "One Server, many Instances" approach actually as a downside. The Roleplayers are dispersed amongst the instances with no reliable way to find each other other then staring a supergroup, which is sad.

One of the great parts about being a roleplayer is stumbling upon other roleplayers. Friendships are created when you least expect it. On a RP server even "Kill Stealing" can lead to an interesting conversation. My closest friendships in COX were the ones that were made randomly, either stumbling upon someone in the Park, or at the club. This is completely lost in this system and, even with all the services you've given the RPers, I believe you'll lose them eventually due to the loss of this aspect.

Okay, my Game Designer side knew he had to figure out a way to fix this, and I think I came up with a pretty good idea. Fairly simple, players can "tag" themselves in their profiles. They could type in their interests, even their playstyle, and when changing instances the game could use those tags to search for people most like them. This wouldn't just help the Roleplayers, this would help everyone! Pickup groups would be more interesting, its likely that you'll have something to talk about. PVPers could find other PVPers and challenge them to duels, the lone sharks out there could be alone without having to worry about people randomly inviting them to group, and RPers would be able to "stumble" upon each other. Spore already utilizes this. Players can tag their creations and when someone creates a new game they can choose to populate their world with things based on these tags. This would do the same thing, only it would populate your MMO with people that are most like you.

If the tag system is too grandiose an idea there could be something smaller or more manageable like a dropdown menu with playstyles to choose, and then the game automatically fills instances based on just playstyle. Sample playstyles include: Recreational, PVP, RP, Lone Wolf, Explorer, Grinder. This allows people to play with others that play the same way as them without having to create more servers or rely on blindly joining a Supergroup..

Any thoughts?