Ultimate MMORPG!

[Jonathan]

This is for Peijen so he can start his company and we can all pay him $$$.

No shards. Shards suck.
Dynamic grouping beyond FFXI's. Automatic discovery of people near you spatially is good. Automatic discovery of people near you socially is better. MMORPGs should have FOAF code built in so you can dynamically find people in your social network who are online.
Dynamic privileges. In guild hierarchies, there should be a way for people with authority to delegate that authority dynamically. When guild leaders are offline, their powers and responsibilities should automatically devolve to other guild members of their choosing.
Your appearance should not be tied to your effectiveness in battle. Otherwise all high-level players look identical.
Like Yuen says, no one plays MMORPGs to Explore. All the system (combat, crafting, experience) mechanics should be open and explicit in your documentation and interface. Damage, chance to hit, special interactions, duration, and any other pertinent information should be available to both attackers and defenders.
No cloaking or other easily exploitable "features". By exploitable, I mean exploitable for griefing.
Vehicles, and vehicle combat would be nice.
Chat options: voice, direct, asynchronous, or through dynamically created rooms (a la IRC). No limits on chat due to distance.
LOD that allows hundreds of players onscreen with smooth performance.
Zero boring parts. Anything that is a chore shouldn't be in the game.
Should have playable parts for solo, small group, or large group play for PvE and PvP. All of these should offer opportunities for advancement.
No hard limits on group size.
The player should be reasonably powerful from the very beginning. He should have abilities and need to use them.
No mandatory down time. You should always have the option of down time, though.
No spawn camping. If you want to enforce rarity, do so through exciting PvP confrontations, not boring camping. Otherwise, instance bosses and dungeon crawls.
Players should be able to change the gameworld. Some battles should have permanent effects. Some bad guys should not respawn.
No spawns, no camps. Well, maybe not zero spawns/camps. A few well-designed zones with carefully placed camps might be worthwhile. However, on the whole, spawns and camps are alternately boring and aggravating ways to engage in combat. This is why no other game genre employs them besides MMORPGs. Design your monsters and encounters so they're exciting, not pedestrian. In the same vein, design some other encounters besides "heroes invade the camp." Starcraft had interesting mission design years ago. How about MMORPG monsters who routinely test the town's defenses?
No stability problems. People looking for escapism don't like to be jerked back into their own worlds.
No empty landscape. The game world is only as big as the interesting parts of it.
The player should advance by doing what he wants to get better at. No exceptions. If he wants to craft, he shouldn't have to fight. If he wants to fight, he shouldn't have to craft. If he wants to be in charge of a guild, he shouldn't have to fight or craft. If he wants to chat, he shouldn't have to join a guild or a group.

Feel free to use all these ideas in your game.

[Jonathan]

I like the Planetside/COH-style of advancement where almost all players can use any given power by itself, but it takes an extremely powerful player to use all the powers simultaneously.

Personally, I think a loss in combat should result in the loss of all your equipment (unless your allies win the battle while you're dead), but the balance should be such that the player is not constantly wearing the bulk of his wealth. You could accomplish this in several ways, I imagine. For instance, limit the equipment by statistic (level, strength, etc.) and give the player a lot more gold than the cost of the best equipment at his level. Or, you could allow players to own land. Or peons. Or hirelings. Or castles. You should never lose time or experience (which is just another measure of time) through death.

I can see arguments against both of these ideas, though, so I didn't include them in the list. Everything in the list should be in every single MMORPG, as far as I'm concerned.

[Peijen]

There are a few good ideas, and some of them I had thought about. I will sure to keep them in mind when I am making a MMORPG for you.

What's your oppinion on skill based vs level based advancement? It's easy to figure out I am bias for skill based, but I am interested in what you think.

[Jonathan]

Personally, I don't think it matters. The important parts of the system are that it exhibits "The player should advance by doing what he wants to get better at" and "the style of advancement where almost all players can use any given power by itself, but it takes an extremely powerful player to use all the powers simultaneously." That does seem to lend itself to a skill based advancement, I suppose, though I think you could design a level based system with the same characteristics. Ultima Online almost had this system, but they had other problems, like "boring parts" and "players who were not reasonably powerful from the very beginning."

I thought of another one overnight. Too few MMORPGs give players the opportunity to customize their weapons. FFVIII and FFX showed the world how easy and fun customizing equipment can be. In fact, I prefer that to a Diablo-style table of bonuses.

For PvP, you could have uniques. WOTmud has several different uniques, all of which are quite powerful. The tradeoff is any player with a unique risks losing the unique when taking it into battle, which I think is a good one.

[Jonathan]

One of the most frustrating things for a casual Griefer is that you have to kill a lot of mobs before you can start killing players. In all the games out today, there's no way to kill players and advance in power. This is for a good reason, namely that players could abuse the system if they could make exp off each other.

I think if you could solve the problem of players advancing through PK without exploits, you could simultaneously add a player-run mission system with advancement. As in, fetch me this item or kill this monster and I will award you 800 exp.

When a group of monsters strikes a killing blow, intelligent monsters should add your equipment to their inventory, to give you a chance to reclaim it.

[Peijen]

One of the most frustrating things for a casual Griefer is that you have to kill a lot of mobs before you can start killing players. In all the games out today, there's no way to kill players and advance in power. This is for a good reason, namely that players could abuse the system if they could make exp off each other.

I think if you could solve the problem of players advancing through PK without exploits, you could simultaneously add a player-run mission system with advancement. As in, fetch me this item or kill this monster and I will award you 800 exp.

When a group of monsters strikes a killing blow, intelligent monsters should add your equipment to their inventory, to give you a chance to reclaim it.

I have the solutions to all of these problems except for abusing the system(some of them was designed for somethingelse, but just happens to work for this). Solutions to come when I have time.

[Peijen]

what are you guys' take on traveling, teleporting, and other traveling related issue?

[Peijen]

When a group of monsters strikes a killing blow, intelligent monsters should add your equipment to their inventory, to give you a chance to reclaim it.

UO already had solution to this. When you died and leave your body and equipment behind, the monster would rumble through your eq and take a few random pieces. It should be easy to make smarter monsters take better items from your body. I agree with Jon that death should make you lose all your equipment not xp or time, and you can go back to reclaim it, or your teammate can pick them up for you / resurrect you. "What do you mean I took your Ultimate Sword of Killing Everything? I gave you back all of your stuff, I got this loot off the monster after you died ..." hehehe

[Jonathan]

what are you guys' take on traveling, teleporting, and other traveling related issue?

Tricky. You need to balance the boring against the exploitable.

Walking places is boring once you've already seen them. If you can still make exp off bad guys that you've killed millions of times already, then casting a swathe of destruction while you stroll from town to town would be mildly amusing, but not enough to justify the aggravation it causes all the newbies trying to level. Therefore, you should never have to walk places you've been before.

However, if you can teleport anywhere, you have made it so game distance doesn't matter. Now, in a lot of MMORPG designs, distance shouldn't matter, so that's OK. If you want to have any type of land control, though, you need to make game distance matter. If you're not making land control matter, then definitely make teleporting simple and powerful. Just make it interruptable so people can't use it for griefing.

If people have land control, then you need to balance ease of use against balance. I would say make teleport locations controllable, immovable artifacts. If you are my friend (or you pay me money or xp) I will let you teleport to my teleport circle, which gives access to the southern peninsula of Peijen Land. If you are my enemy, you can't teleport to my location, but only the nearest circle you control. Alternatively, you could make them immovable but player-constructible, or neutral but you can't access them until you've walked there. It all depends on the type of game you're designing. I prefer the method I outlined in detail, though, because it lets you the designer set the balance. If there is no point to holding land, though, let players teleport any damn place they want.

I want vehicles with a combat advantage and multiple seats.

[Peijen]

I want vehicles with a combat advantage and multiple seats.

That's an idea I haven't explore. How about stuff like war elephant, sits 5 players and shit vs war horse where it sits one person? Or chariot? Hmm, this is definitaney a good idea I should explore.

[Jonathan]

People piss themselves over vehicles. Vehicles are always a good idea.

Yeah, war elephant, ship (if you have a dynamic ocean, boring otherwise), big eagle, dragon, wyvern, griffon, war monkey, mech, spaceship, glider, tank, or anything else you can think of.

Something I think is spiffy but which I think is also very difficult to do technically would be combat mechanics which are substantially different from the original Final Fantasy (i.e. distance doesn't matter, hits and misses are calculated using probabilities, size doesn't matter, formation doesn't matter, etc.). Games are slowly moving away from this model as the network gets better, but I think that's about the only way to fix it. I think it would be spiffy if a Frost Giant could pick me up and throw me.

[Peijen]

I agree with your point on distance, formation. I even thought of 3D combat, but at this point I dont think it would work well. But in five years it might be easy to do.

[quantus]

what are you guys' take on traveling, teleporting, and other traveling related issue?

You should have an exploring skill with which they can make world maps. Kinda do it like PP did with the memorizing a route and you no longer need a map. If you don't know the route, then you dead end into trees. If you do, you know where to walk through the trees and go to the next area. The same thing can be done with mountains/caves. If you're grouped with someone who knows the way, then you can learn the way too. It's controlled exploration.

In PP, when you fought briggands, you pick up a map sometimes. I think you could do something similar, where a monster might drop a map to their crappy hoard somewhere... Of couse, the player should always have a random chance, based on their exploring skill, to find their way into the next area and learn that route.

[quantus]

Oh, will you have an underdark and/or city sewer system to fight baddies in too?

[quantus]

what are you guys' take on traveling, teleporting, and other traveling related issue?

I don't think that walking around towns are necessary. Clicking where you want to go on the town map should be sufficient. I don't think that teleporting outside town over long distances is a good idea. Maybe from certain cities to certain other cities. PP had the teleport to other islands in the same archipellago thing and I thought that was a very good balance.

Vehicles need to be expensive or restricted in some ways like they're too big to use certain paths. Some vehicles, just might not be able to handle rough terrain like slow moving catapults or siege engine type vehicles. Are you going to allow flying vehicles or flying animals?

[Peijen]

I think teleportation between cities should be good. There will be maps and mapping skill (it's actually an ability of lore).

[Peijen]

In PP, when you fought briggands, you pick up a map sometimes. I think you could do something similar, where a monster might drop a map to their crappy hoard somewhere... Of couse, the player should always have a random chance, based on their exploring skill, to find their way into the next area and learn that route.

There is also tracking abilities, making ranger/thief useful

[Peijen]

Oh, will you have an underdark and/or city sewer system to fight baddies in too?

There will be dungeons beyond that I don't know.

[quantus]

Exploring and mapping are bad skills. No one has fun using those skills, and people who lack the information are annoyed by it. You should never hide information like that. All players should have access to a world map that shows the important features and a minimap that shows the exact location of certain items.

People should have to have been to places before they show up on their world map except for MAYBE the most obvious places on the map, like the north pole or the ocean or something. There will probably be obvious roads from city to city, but there should be hidden areas off the beaten path that people get to spend time exploring. Maybe have ancient city ruins in the deep deep forest and such. These are excellent places to embed side quests and put immersive histories. Not everyone needs to know how to get to these places if they aren't interested in exploring. Everyone needs to explore though if they're going to pick up that cool ancient trinket, or unique single use artifact. In other words, it's another barrier to camping.

I think a good game will have plenty to do in and around town, that people won't need to go and explore for most things.

I think having tracks be left behind is an interesting idea. Only as your tracking gets better will you start to see more kinds of tracks or more signs that something has passed by and know things like how old the tracks are, as the tracks are newer, know what left the tracks, and even start to get an idea of how powerful the individual animal/monster is relative to some average.

[Peijen]

the world is somewhat dynamic, that's why mapping is necessary. it also has to do with treasure hunting.