MMORPG revisited
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Peijen
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MMORPG revisited
If you allow people to be able to control and destroy towns, how do you keep an uber group from going around and destory everyone's town? I think this was a major problem for shadowbane (beside the fact it sucks). I have been thinking about this all weekend and I can't come up with anything useful.
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Jonathan
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Well, you can't, not fundamentally. Either it's possible and thus it will happen, or you have perma-towns.
There are things you can do to make it difficult.
* No shards. If all the uber players are on the same world, that makes it much more difficult to conquer everyone.
* Strong defenses. Make town defense cheap, easy, and not transferable to offense. I'm specifically thinking of things beyond walls and guards like town defense spells, items, or abilities.
* Cheap towns. Make it easy to rebuild even if you lose your town.
* Long sieges. On the order of a week, to give people time to mount sufficient defense.
* Multiple towns. If each player guild controls several towns, it means less when one town is lost.
* Location matters. Weak teleports or penalties for being far afield. This ties into my lost post about North vs. South and points of control on teleport portals. Perhaps you could have generalized North vs. South. If a player takes control of an NPC fortress, the NPC vassals declare fealty to the player.
* Drastic measures. Losers get a boost?
* Fallback positions. Have instanced private towns and public towns, so that when you lose your public town, you don't lose everything.
* Good hierarchy. Allies are the key.
* Balance. Need the ability to take on large groups (to defend against the zerg) or very experienced players (to defend against uber groups).
There are things you can do to make it difficult.
* No shards. If all the uber players are on the same world, that makes it much more difficult to conquer everyone.
* Strong defenses. Make town defense cheap, easy, and not transferable to offense. I'm specifically thinking of things beyond walls and guards like town defense spells, items, or abilities.
* Cheap towns. Make it easy to rebuild even if you lose your town.
* Long sieges. On the order of a week, to give people time to mount sufficient defense.
* Multiple towns. If each player guild controls several towns, it means less when one town is lost.
* Location matters. Weak teleports or penalties for being far afield. This ties into my lost post about North vs. South and points of control on teleport portals. Perhaps you could have generalized North vs. South. If a player takes control of an NPC fortress, the NPC vassals declare fealty to the player.
* Drastic measures. Losers get a boost?
* Fallback positions. Have instanced private towns and public towns, so that when you lose your public town, you don't lose everything.
* Good hierarchy. Allies are the key.
* Balance. Need the ability to take on large groups (to defend against the zerg) or very experienced players (to defend against uber groups).
Last edited by Jonathan on Mon Dec 13, 2004 4:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I'd say the best option would be to give each town an "alignment", kind of a level of loyalty towards each guild. Depending on how guildmembers interact with NPCs, they can influence the town's alignment. Donate to the local temple, solve a bunch of local quests, do lots of business with the local merchants, and the town's attitude towards your guild improves. Fight with the ruling guild, break the local laws, or gouge the merchants and the town's attitude worsens. At any given time, the guild with the highest loyalty will be the legitimate rulers of the town. This creates the possibility of "peaceful", or even diplomatic conquests of other towns.
Now, a guild other than the legitimate rulers can gain control of the town by driving out opposing guilds by force too. However, they become conquerors rather than legitimate rulers. NPCs will charge higher prices to conquerors and provide inferior goods or services. Temples might be unable or unwilling to offer healing if the associated deity is opposed to the guild. Periodically, non-critical NPCs will rise up in violoent revolt against conquerors. In order to maintain control of a town, the guild will have to either station PCs there 24/7 to put down revolts, or they will have to purchase NPC garrison troops. These will of course cost upkeep--more if they are in a town where the occupiers are very unpopular. Suddenly, conquering an unfriendly town and holding it becomes costly (though over time, you could win the conquered population's loyatly).
Holding a conquered town against attempts by the legitimate rulers would be difficult also. The legitimate rulers would gain bonuses in and around their town to represent the support of the population. Automated defenses would fail or break down to represent sabotage. Also, an uprising at the wrong time would distract the conquerors and force them to split their forces.
Ok, the obvious problems with this solution are that over time, a guild could gain control and loyatly of so much territory that they become practically invincible. Spontaneous shifts of loyalty in their heartland could represent the emergence of dissenters or a splinter faction. Several powers emerged this way historically--Christians being the obvious example. Suddenly Guild X becomes the vogue in Guild Y's northwestern territory. Alternatively, you could have nationalist type movements that reemerge as loyatly shifts in conquered territories that were successfully assimilated.
Also, there's still the uber problem. History unfortunately doesn't provide any solutions that wouldn't cause complaints. If you're willing to ignore their hit points, try sniper NPCs, road-side bombs, slitting their throat while they're asleep, shoot them in the back while they're distracted, etc. Now all of that implies that a low level character can kill an arbitrarily high-level character with a well placed attack. Not all such attacks have to succeed. Just make them more frequent as the uber group destroys more towns. If they make enough enemies among the NPCs, eventually one of the enemies will get lucky. If you think this level of reality (only to be used against the abusive players) would drive otehrs away, then I;m not sure what other options there are.
One final thought. The legitimate rulers would have to keep the local monster populations down. Goblins wandering the streets would probably make the NPCs wonder if they need a more active government.
Now, a guild other than the legitimate rulers can gain control of the town by driving out opposing guilds by force too. However, they become conquerors rather than legitimate rulers. NPCs will charge higher prices to conquerors and provide inferior goods or services. Temples might be unable or unwilling to offer healing if the associated deity is opposed to the guild. Periodically, non-critical NPCs will rise up in violoent revolt against conquerors. In order to maintain control of a town, the guild will have to either station PCs there 24/7 to put down revolts, or they will have to purchase NPC garrison troops. These will of course cost upkeep--more if they are in a town where the occupiers are very unpopular. Suddenly, conquering an unfriendly town and holding it becomes costly (though over time, you could win the conquered population's loyatly).
Holding a conquered town against attempts by the legitimate rulers would be difficult also. The legitimate rulers would gain bonuses in and around their town to represent the support of the population. Automated defenses would fail or break down to represent sabotage. Also, an uprising at the wrong time would distract the conquerors and force them to split their forces.
Ok, the obvious problems with this solution are that over time, a guild could gain control and loyatly of so much territory that they become practically invincible. Spontaneous shifts of loyalty in their heartland could represent the emergence of dissenters or a splinter faction. Several powers emerged this way historically--Christians being the obvious example. Suddenly Guild X becomes the vogue in Guild Y's northwestern territory. Alternatively, you could have nationalist type movements that reemerge as loyatly shifts in conquered territories that were successfully assimilated.
Also, there's still the uber problem. History unfortunately doesn't provide any solutions that wouldn't cause complaints. If you're willing to ignore their hit points, try sniper NPCs, road-side bombs, slitting their throat while they're asleep, shoot them in the back while they're distracted, etc. Now all of that implies that a low level character can kill an arbitrarily high-level character with a well placed attack. Not all such attacks have to succeed. Just make them more frequent as the uber group destroys more towns. If they make enough enemies among the NPCs, eventually one of the enemies will get lucky. If you think this level of reality (only to be used against the abusive players) would drive otehrs away, then I;m not sure what other options there are.
One final thought. The legitimate rulers would have to keep the local monster populations down. Goblins wandering the streets would probably make the NPCs wonder if they need a more active government.
I feel like I just beat a kitten to death... with a bag of puppies.
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Peijen
- Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
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hmm, that's a very interesting point. I wonder what kind of computing power is required to implement a subset of that idea. Thinking about towns, and power player between factions, sort of start to make sense of the role newbie would play. Newbie would be in high demand because every faction would like to keep their force strong and they will need to recruit newbie whenever possible.
I'm not sure why you think it would take a lot of processing. Maybe I radically underestimated the number of guilds you plan to have in a world.
It seems like each town would only need to store a single value per guild. Pick the highest value and that's the legitimate ruler--one more value. You don't have to recalculate legitimate ruler second by second; do it a couple times a day. Updates to loyalty should be pretty low frequency also. At any given time, any player is affecting at most one town's loyalty with respect to one guild. None of the loyalty affecting actions could possibly be performed more than once every few seconds. How often can you give gold to the temple or complete a quest? When a player completes an eligible action, the engine only has to compute which guild they're part of, which town they're in (if any), and adjust a single value.
Similarly, it seems like the bonuses and penalties are pretty easy to compute. When you talk to a merchant, as single lookup is performed to see how much the current town likes your guild. Services and goods available and their prices are a funciton of that loyalty. Most RPGs already have bartering skills that affect NPC transactions, this is just a second adjustment. The NPC rebels are just monsters that spawn in response to the town being controlled by an unpopular guild.
If you want to reduce the storage requirements even further, decay all loyatlies toward neutral periodically. Only store loyalties for guilds that the town isn't neutral towards. That way you don't store loyalties for guilds that have never been to a specific town.
Side note: The only towns that cost money are the ones you conquered and haven't assimilated yet. So as long as your guild doesn't expand its territory too fast militarily, upkeep shouldn't be too much of a problem.
It seems like each town would only need to store a single value per guild. Pick the highest value and that's the legitimate ruler--one more value. You don't have to recalculate legitimate ruler second by second; do it a couple times a day. Updates to loyalty should be pretty low frequency also. At any given time, any player is affecting at most one town's loyalty with respect to one guild. None of the loyalty affecting actions could possibly be performed more than once every few seconds. How often can you give gold to the temple or complete a quest? When a player completes an eligible action, the engine only has to compute which guild they're part of, which town they're in (if any), and adjust a single value.
Similarly, it seems like the bonuses and penalties are pretty easy to compute. When you talk to a merchant, as single lookup is performed to see how much the current town likes your guild. Services and goods available and their prices are a funciton of that loyalty. Most RPGs already have bartering skills that affect NPC transactions, this is just a second adjustment. The NPC rebels are just monsters that spawn in response to the town being controlled by an unpopular guild.
If you want to reduce the storage requirements even further, decay all loyatlies toward neutral periodically. Only store loyalties for guilds that the town isn't neutral towards. That way you don't store loyalties for guilds that have never been to a specific town.
Side note: The only towns that cost money are the ones you conquered and haven't assimilated yet. So as long as your guild doesn't expand its territory too fast militarily, upkeep shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I feel like I just beat a kitten to death... with a bag of puppies.
I think I suggested this in tha old thread somewhere about 6 months ago, This mmorpg should only have ONE server for EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!! like omgwtfbbqsaucewithextramayo. And mirror the real world with the mmorpg world where the location where you log in from is your hometwon! Then you can have actual rivalries and get lots of people addicted - "we need more people to defend against those Canadian Legion!!!"
and the eventual murder/suicide when someone assasinates a rival guild leader to initiate the raid of their country
and the eventual murder/suicide when someone assasinates a rival guild leader to initiate the raid of their country
It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face.