Skippy’s Dream MMO Part 2
So it looks like I may be turning this into a regular weekly thing.
Because I am hardcore about being a geek like that. Plus I like finding out about which games are already doing ideas similar to mine.
Player Interaction
First and most basic thing: Universal Friends List. If you ever wind up making an second character, it can be a huge pain in the ass to have to re-enter all of your friends into a new list. City of Heroes has already done this, so there really isn’t an excuse for every new game that comes out to not include this.
Ditto for the ignore list. The idiot RoxUrSoxor, who is filling the newbie chat full of Chuck Norris jokes didn’t get any more interesting just because you decided to switch characters. In fact you should be able to select the guy, and put his whole guild on ignore with one or two button clicks. Because if there’s one thing you know, its that no one who would admit him to a guild has anything to say that’s worth listening to.
To avoid any problems from these universal lists, give the players the ability to “Opt Out”. Maybe a player has a character that they don’t want everyone to know about. Along those lines, perhaps a player just wants to play without his friends for a while. So make “Lurk Mode” an option. That way if you don’t want to hang out it tells all of your friends that you are offline.
Another related idea is an enemies list. Every game on the market provided options to keep track of all of your buddies. But so far I haven’t seen any that help you to keep track of all of the people who have ticked you off. To prevent this from being used as a tool for griefing it shouldn’t show certain details, like their location or even whether or not they are online. But the characters could be marked with an icon to help remind you that this is a player who has annoyed you in the past. This has the potential to actually be combined with the PVP mechanics to make a whole “blood-debt” system.
Yet another idea that I haven’t seen yet is Character Notes. The ability to basically make a little in-game post-it note and attach it to another player. Not physically in game, but just an icon, visible only to you, that showed that you had some notes written down about that player. Maybe another player was gracious about settling a dispute. Or maybe he sprinted past you to steal your treasure chest. Either way, now you can check your notes on how he acted in the past. I predict this turning into a great big pile of fun when combined with the enemies list.
Another problem area is quest tracking. Every one of these games has a either a journal or a log to track what quests you have available, and what your current progress is. And some of them even let you see if any of your teammates are on the same quest. But most don’t let you track your friends progress on their quests. I think you should actually be able to open up the quest log of any of your member of your team, right next to your own. This will make it far easier to keep everybody organized. Also, I think the whole “quest sharing” feature that many games already have should be mostly automatic. If you’re in a party with a guy who’s going to get a magic sword for rescuing a princess, then the king should just pass out blades to everyone at the end of the adventure.
One feature I have seen under-used is side-kicking. CoH did it first, Age of Conan has it now (they call it mentoring) but for the most part I haven’t seen any other games adapt it. I have no idea why not. The whole point of an MMO is that you are playing it with other people online. And unless all of your friends have exactly the same amount of free time, discrepancies in levels will develop. Anything that will allow players to overcome this sort of obstacle is a good idea. And since this feature has already been used in a well-known game, its kind of stupid that everyone doesn’t have it.
And the last idea I’m going to jot down tonight is my way of dealing with spammers. Especially the guys that sit there and send private messages to every person on the server, trying to drum up business for their slave labor gold farm. One relatively simple way is to charge in-game money for sending tells out to people who have not friended you. Losing 2 copper coins to send some random guy a private message about his cool armor would probably be inconsequential to you. But if you are trying to send out 1000+ messages an hour about your awsome power leveling service, your character mights start running low on funds. I’m pretty sure that Eve Online is doing this one already.
But to take this idea to its logical conclusion, make a simple addition to the end-user agreement. If a player advertises out-of-game commercial services, then the game company will charge that player $100 per infraction. Plus their computer should explode. But I’m not sure how to do that last part.
Discuss.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I like the addition of more ideas, i see you’re posting late nights too haha,
“most don’t let you track your friends progress on their quests”
AWESOME add-on for WoW called quest helper, search it on wow.curse.com, it puts all your quests on your map and minimap, as well as showing the quests of party members, but i do agree it would be awesome to go through your friends list and see what quests you have in common.
I’ve never played CoH, would you mind elaborating on the side-kicking idea?
Great idea for the spam, and once again haven’t played mentioned mmo (EVE online), possibly add something which stops the player from sending more whispers/tells after a certain amount in a short period of time given the people they are sending them to are not on their friends list.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Side-kicking is where a lower-level player teams up with a higher-level player, and has all of their abilities that they already have adjusted to near that level, enabling them to adventure together. I forget exactly how the XP breakdown went, but I believe it was more or less proportional in terms of XP till next level.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
oh wow, that is a good idea, thanks for the follow up
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June 22nd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Also note that CoH has reverse-side-kicking, called Exemplaring, which drops a high-level character’s skills down to a lowbie’s level. They don’t get XP, but they get more influence (money).
And, Skippy, City of Heroes introduced your Notes system with Issue 12.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
EVE online charges about 3000 isk ( in wow maybe 2 silver) to open a private conversation, They try and spam the new corporation channels but as a large number of players have left the new ones to start their own there is no free way for these sellers to get to them.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
As of Patch 2.4.1 WoW lets you assign notes to people on your friends list, but they are woefully short – something along the lines of 128 characters.
It goes something like:
SkippyList
Level 58 Warlock
Note: Leader of
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June 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I’m just happy with how Warhammer Online is going to play out. Finally, a system based on PvP that makes SENSE.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Everquest 2 has a mentoring system. It was actually the first game I know of to implement one and it probably works the best. It works a bit differently then sidekicking. When menotring another player you lower your own level DOWN to theirs while keeping a toned down version of your own abilities. This way the lower level player can still quest only now with your help. It’s a great system, one of the things I miss most in EQ2 which I no longer play.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Oh…also, the lower level player gets a small bonus to experience earned while being mentored. The higher level player also gets exp but not as much.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 10:05 pm
lol…and another one more thing. In EQ2 you can actually see what quests your group mates are on as well as which step. It’s not side by side with yours but it’s there if you want to look. You can see details all the way down to which mob he still needs to kill for an update I believe.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Final Fantasy 11 has a “Lurk Mode”, when you have it on, you don’t show as logged on on peoples friend lists.
However, you still show up on manual searches of the games logged on player list.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 pm
There’s a nifty addon for WoW called Karma that does some of those things–lets you rank people on your Karma scale, and make notes to remind yourself why this one is at the top and that one is near the bottom.
Of course, having this stuff in the game itself would be even better!
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June 23rd, 2008 at 3:12 am
You could always use have a few lines of code in the game, that can be activated at the discretion of the admins. That code may contain a virus that can do everything from purge the game files from the computer to shutting off the cooling fans. That could potentially be fun
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Stickfodder reply on June 23rd, 2008 6:43 am:
Yeah but knowing hackers if they found out about it they would use it to attack people. Just imagine if WOW had that 10 million computers fried yeah so much fun.
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PFC Wilson reply on June 23rd, 2008 7:48 am:
Yeah, but it’s fairly easy to hide the code as something inconspicous. Or have a number of components disguised as something else.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 3:51 am
Regarding the last part about the computer exploding: A friend of mine knows how to make a computer virus that causes the processors to work so much that they overheat and explode. But I’m fairly sure that sending it to people would be just a tad illegal…
Captcha: mattress in – Bedroom? Dining room? The latest *insert franchise here* film? WHERE THE HELL IS THE MATTRESS?!?!?
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June 23rd, 2008 at 7:47 am
All good ideas.
EVE Online has already adopted a few of them, and they work quite well.
1.) It costs in game money to send in game mail or chat requests to any player that is not mutually friended with you. AND you get the choice to set the amount they have to pay to talk to you. Dont want to be bothered? Crank it up. Want to be bugged? set it to 0.
2.) You have the ability to set notes on any character you see, on a tab that is attached to their bio. Whenever you come across a character for the first time, they have no character portrait. Whenever you check them out, their portrait becomes visible to you, and stays in your cache. So you check someone out, write your notes, and then every time you see them again, you know they have notes because you can see their face.
One feature that I would like to see is a reverse ignore, or a squelch. Not only can I not see your posts, but now you cant see ~mine~.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
One thing I would love to see an MMO effectively implement, and none really has yet on a widespread level to my knowledge, is multi-classing or prestige classes. The way I would propose it (using WoW’s model, as it’s honestly the only I’ve played), is that at say, level 45, the option would become available to take on another class, at an accelerated, but truncated, progression. In other words, they would get to the top tier of what’s available to them quicker, but only have what would equal level 30 abilities at the end of the tree. It would introduce new mechanics to combat, roleplay possibilities, but their base class would still impose its limits and weaknesses. Also, the classes available would be limited to what would actually make sense or compliment the base class. Something like a Warlock/Rogue would make sense, as the warlock could use the stealth (at a lower proficiency) and some basic abilities to augment the abilities of the warlock class. But the warlock obviously would not have priest/paladin abilities (warlock=dark ju-ju). It wouldn’t be complicated to code, as WoW has already introduced the concept of a “master” class after level 70 with the upcoming update. But if they could manage the multiclass system, it would open up possibilities to make people play more, and for different reasons. Also, it’d make it possible for people to use/find different armor and weapons, so you dont have fifty people with the same damn armor sets running around (I’m sorry, but it’s just ridiculous now).
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skippy reply on June 23rd, 2008 10:56 am:
D&D Online had that. Every time you leveled up you could pick any class you were qualified for as your new level. Thus you could hybridize anything. Also some of the “classless” games, such as Eve and SWG pretty much allowed you to create a custom class each time you play.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
I hear that Dark Age of Camelot had something similar–at certain levels you had to choose between certain classes.
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June 25th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Actually, EQ2 has had the ability to check other members of the groups quests and where they are at in those quests since the very beginning and it is great thing with awesome sauce on top.
It is great for catching folks up on a quest string since you you or anyone can see where you are at. Also, it will list every quest that everyone has in common, so that you can see who has which quests in which zone for easy questing.
As to gold farming spam, EQ2 has the most agressive anti-spamming I have seen in a game so far.
Love SK’ing and Mentoring from CoH/CoV and I think it should be standard in every MMO.
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June 30th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Skippy? CoH has Character Notes implemented. Visible only to you. Part of I12. Neat stuff abounds. Try clicking on people’s names in chat channels, too. You can ignore them right from chat, or friend them, or invite them to team.
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July 2nd, 2008 at 7:28 am
WoW has a character notes system for your friends list, although it isn’t advertised.
As for Eve Online, the amount charged is set by the player you send the in-game mail to. They don’t recieve the money, or anything, but they can set the price anywhere from 0 to billions of isk, if they really really want to be left alone.
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November 28th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Here’s an idea, ability-specific chatting. Being that I’ve only played WoW, I’ll use that as an example. Say you need to get somewhere fast, and either you can’t get there in a timely fashion, or not at all. You need a mage who knows how to portal, so you select the option of PortalMage, so that you’re yell only goes to Mages who can portal. Maybe you need a Warlock with a certain demon for your team, so you send a recruiting message to only Warlocks with access to that demon, and that way, it doesn’t bother anyone else.
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Suomynona reply on November 28th, 2008 10:24 pm:
Editing myself:
This could extend to items too, if you need someone with the Battle-axe of Leetness, because maybe there is an enemy that can only be defeated with that item or something.
Being that there would be a huge amount of abilities or items, this ability-specific yelling should work on entry boxes, one for class (or job, or whatever system you are going to work with), one for item, one for ability. If you don’t get the name right it will have an auto-complete or “did you mean this” feature. This whole thing would probably need it’s own dialog box.
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