quantus wrote: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.
Exploring is boring. Almost no one enjoys exploring. It's essentially the same as easter eggs in a single player game. There are five guys in the world who go looking for that type of stuff. Everyone else learns it from a web page. If there are areas of interest, the game should direct the player towards them. The game should encourage people to find things, not obscure them.
If you are going to have secrets, it should be roughly the same ratio of easily explained things to secrets as FFT. That is, almost everything should be easily explained and open to the player.
Players going to places before they are on the map is fine, though I fail to see the reasoning. But your map should get filled in automatically. There shouldn't be an associated skill. It should work more like Diablo or NWN than FFXI or PP.
If you're mapping dynamic geography, you're essentially scrying or tracking, which is fine.
here is how I see map works. you can go from point A to point B all you want there is nothing stopping you. But like you said walking/traveling from places to places is boring. You can teleport between towns through whatever teleport service available, but not into dungeons or enemy camp that was formed last night. If you want to walk by land using x, y coordinate that fine, or you can buy a map, and plot your route and *bang* you are there 2 minutes later.
This will reduce the useless walking as you put it but travel to places is not instantanous.
Of course this is just an idea, suggestions are welcome.
There are many different kinds of traveling one must do. It is best not to conflate them. Indeed, you might have a different solution for each. Let's distinguish between the possible situations and possible means.
Here are the kinds of travel I can think of:
Emergency travel versus mobs to safety.
Emergency travel versus players to safety.
Emergency travel versus mobs to healing.
Emergency travel versus players to healing.
Emergency travel to an ongoing battle versus mobs.
Emergency travel to an ongoing battle versus players.
Travel to a potential battle with mobs.
Travel to a potential battle with players.
Travel away from a potential battle with mobs.
Travel away from a potential battle with players.
Travel to purchase equipment.
Travel to sell equipment.
Travel to group with friends.
Travel from the site of a completed battle for healing.
Travel to your corpse.
Travel from your corpse.
Here are the different methods of travel I can think of:
Walking around terrain, mobs, obstacles, other players.
Running or flying around same.
Teleport instanteously.
Teleport with interruptible casting delay.
Teleport with time delay before location is reached.
Teleport which can only be initiated at certain locations determined by the developers.
Teleport which can only be initiated at certain locations determined by the players.
Teleport which can only be completed at certain locations determined by the developers.
Teleport which can only be completed at certain locations determined by the players.
Teleport which can be initiated anywhere.
Teleport which can be completed anywhere.
Teleport whose destination is random.
Travel with a known destination.
Travel with a known path.
Of course, you can combine these various aspects.
So, what are the characteristics of a fair system?
I think for any kind of emergency travel that constitutes fleeing, you need a chance to fail so you can be killed. For any kind of emergency travel that constitutes rescue, it needs to take time and carry the risk of being foiled.
Trips regarding equipment or socializing should take no time at all and should be conducted with safety.
Now, traveling to a potential battle with players ought to take some time and carry the risk of being foiled, because they will complain if one side has an unfair advantage or if a pitched battle can never be fought. However, I think traveling to a potential battle with mobs should not carry the same penalty, because mobs don't care if the players stack the deck. Plus, this is equivalent to players waiting in town to gather a large group, only they have congregated near the mobs.
It almost goes without saying that you shouldn't be able to easily avoid battle with players. You should get slightly more choice with mobs, perhaps, but sometimes mobs should be able to force an engagement.
Trips for healing should be easy to minimize downtime. Lying in the dirt waiting for your HP to recover is boring.
Death should not involve downtime. Downtime is boring. However, there should be risk of failure when attempting to loot your corpse, even assuming no one else does.
I hope I have captured all aspects of travel situations and means and
that I have listed the bare minimums for a fair system with minimal
downtime. If I have failed to do either please correct me.
I have two ideas of specific implementations for systems with these characteristics.
1. Portals
Travel outside town is conducted through portals, placed by the game developer. Within town, you can instantly move anywhere in the town. Every town has a portal; indeed that is the fundamental building block of the town.
Travel between portals is instant. It takes no time to activate a portal, either.
Portals can only be used when they are controlled by your nation. When players of two different nations are within range of a portal, the portal automatically is in contention after a brief period of time and is owned by neither nation. A portal in contention must be held by a single nation for a significant period of time before it is controlled, on the order of a minute or two. A portal must be visited periodically to retain control of it, on the order of once per day or week. Outside of towns, the portal are located near mobs. If mobs are capable of dynamically forming camps and fortresses, the portals are dynamically created near the camps and fortresses.
It takes several minutes to run between any two nearby portals, long enough for one player to kill another. When players are in combat and they wish to flee, they must physically run to the nearest portal, giving their opponent plenty of opportunities to strike a final blow. If a player reaches a portal controlled by his nation while another player is chasing him, the fleeing player will be able to escape, but his buddies will not unless they fled together.
Rescue attempts will sally forth from the nearest portal controlled by the nation of rescuers. In PvP battles, they will then need to run to the site of the battle which may take several minutes. During that time, advance scouts or mobs could intercept them and prevent them from performing a rescue. In PvE battles, they will likely be quite near the battle already and the delay will be significantly less. PvP always trumps PvE because a single player from an opposing nation is sufficient to put a portal into contention.
In more dangerous zones, the portals will be spaced farther apart.
Some portals are national portals. They can be disabled by the opposing nation, but never taken over. This prevents the opposing nation from teleporting deep into the heart of their enemy's nation.
No player can teleport exactly where he wants to go except within a town owned by their nation. There is a special which initiates a teleport to the nearest open portal. It has a significant interruptible casting delay. This prevents people from using the special to flee unless they are out of danger, but allows people to return home to sell equipment, buy equipment, or seek healing quite easily.
There is another special which initiates a teleport to a random location out of bowshot of the current location, but within radar range. This has a small casting delay and is designed to give the fleeing player a chance to scramble away. You might also have quick dash specials with extra running speed.
Running is used only for fleeing and rescuing. You don't need it for normal non-emergency travel.
Death teleports you to your home town at full health. If you were killed by mobs, you may jump in the portal and attempt to slay them before your party is killed to loot your corpse. It will take you a short time to run to where your party is; other mobs may intercept you along the way. If you were killed by players, you may jump in a portal, but you will have several minutes to run before you will get to your corpse unless your party defeated the other players.
The system allows you to use any portal and will automatically take you to the one closest to your destination if you so desire. All destinations are known and all paths are marked dynamically through the interface (not the game world). Use of minimap and nav points is heavily indicated.
2. Mechs
All players can teleport from anywhere, to anywhere, with no delay whatsoever. However, players cannot teleport their equipment. They must own equipment in each area they wish to teleport to in order to have any hope of doing anything in that area. Without equipment, they are a battlefield liability.
Depending on the game design, you might wish to keep players from teleporting to enemy cities. You could constrain them by saying they can't teleport to places where they have no equipment. The player must drag his equipment there manually, and then he is able to teleport within that area.
Players can teleport instantly, but equipment must be moved manually. Since you have to walk equipment to and from the battle, you introduce delay and opportunities for interception. The player can always abandon the battle and his equipment, but he loses his equipment to the enemy in that case.
A well-defended area then becomes one which has a great deal of equipment stored near it, not one with a great many players occupying it. The equipment movement is relatively static in comparison to the player movement.
You may adjust the mob chase code to give players a reasonable chance of saving their equipment in a PvE emergency. The only retreat available is to a nearby stronghold of equipment, where other players can deal with offending mobs.
You would let players know where other players and where other equipment is at all times through the minimap. You may decide to allow enemy players a chance to hide their location or the location of their equipment on the minimap to allow surprise attacks, but they should always be physically visible.
Looting requires time, so a player may attempt to retrieve his equipment using other equipment if available. A player with many sets of equipment in a particular area would be much more powerful than an enemy who invaded in just a single set.
You could adjust the running speed to allow some kinds of equipment the ability to enter battle quicker at the cost of battlefield power.
The player can always teleport to his home city to purchase more equipment or sell the equipment he has captured. Presumably you'll want to transfer deeds rather than actually transporting the equipment itself, since that is slow.
One thing I've never heard of before but which makes perfect sense to me is rentals for equipment or housing. Pay a certain amount of money and you can use a sword or house that is far beyond your means to own. Could be a good source of income for players with interesting assets.
One idea might be to first separate teleportation to a known target from teleportation with a random target as teleport and blink respectively. There might then be freedom to do any of them any time, but people (and monsters?) could carry area of effect items which would keep players from blinking and/or teleporting as long as they're withing the sphere of influence or at least add a penalty to the likeliness of success. Blinking should be limited to somewhere within sight of where you are. Teleportation can be over long distances, but the further away, the more likely it will fail. This can be offset by a familiarity with the target. If a person has been to an area often, then the distance penalty is decreased, maybe give an extra bonus when teleporting to town to make it virtually unmissable since you don't want to piss off your players too much.
The problem I see with unlimited directed teleports is every single battle becomes a pile-on. When leveling and skirmishing, you tend to fight in the same places over and over. If that is the case, then everyone can teleport there reasonably easily. Any fight turns into a massive pile-on as players immediately jump to the battle location. The only way to win is through zerg, not through character or player skill.
If the area of effect items you describe are common and have sufficient range, that's an interesting system. I don't think you would want to restrict blink as much as teleport, though, because if teleport is restricted in a mobile AoE, then a fleeing player has no way to flee. If the area of effect is a few minutes walk across, then you are doing reasonably well at preventing the zerg. If the area of affect is that large, though, it will be annoying. Any action-at-a-distance (or restraint-at-a-distance) has the potential for griefing.
Dwindlehop wrote:The problem I see with unlimited directed teleports is every single battle becomes a pile-on. When leveling and skirmishing, you tend to fight in the same places over and over. If that is the case, then everyone can teleport there reasonably easily. Any fight turns into a massive pile-on as players immediately jump to the battle location. The only way to win is through zerg, not through character or player skill.
Well, there can be the idea of a mob graveyard, where mobs are just less likely to go as the number of corpses build up... This fits nicely in with dynamic lands.
Dwindlehop wrote:If the area of effect items you describe are common and have sufficient range, that's an interesting system. I don't think you would want to restrict blink as much as teleport, though, because if teleport is restricted in a mobile AoE, then a fleeing player has no way to flee. If the area of effect is a few minutes walk across, then you are doing reasonably well at preventing the zerg. If the area of affect is that large, though, it will be annoying. Any action-at-a-distance (or restraint-at-a-distance) has the potential for griefing.
Well, maybe there should be instances where you can set up a "safe" point which you can teleport to through interference. You're right that blinking would have to be much harder to limit. I think that monsters should have wider range effects to limit teleporting while players have more limited range affects to minimize griefing. Maybe also add items that also cancel out the teleportation limits that other players might carry and lessen monster area of effect. It would have to be equiped though in place of something else of course.
One thing that applies to almost any solution you can dream up is this: you should have an explicit interface for towns if you're going to allow instant travel in them.
For example, let there be a town menu. The town menu is only active when you are in a town. Each town menu is dynamically generated and shows the services available in that town, both NPC and PC. There is also a list of other towns you can visit.
Clicking on a particular item in the menu, e.g. the auction house, will open up the auction house menu. Behind the interface, though, the character has been teleported to the auction house building. He never had to figure out where the auction house was or remember the location, but he is physically occupying the space. The other characters doing their shopping are also there, with their avatars visible and their talk on local chat.
This way, each player has his choice whether he wants to deal with the town as a physical space or a logical one.
For a nice town setup, see PP. They do what you describe with the lack of going directly into the building interface. I think the reason for that is that some people are shop keepers while others are customers.
Last edited by quantus on Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
quantus wrote:I think that monsters should have wider range effects to limit teleporting while players have more limited range affects to minimize griefing. Maybe also add items that also cancel out the teleportation limits that other players might carry and lessen monster area of effect. It would have to be equiped though in place of something else of course.
Could work. You need a method of discovery so players know why they can't teleport to a particular place. Players hate it when shit happens and they don't know why.
quantus wrote:I think that monsters should have wider range effects to limit teleporting while players have more limited range affects to minimize griefing. Maybe also add items that also cancel out the teleportation limits that other players might carry and lessen monster area of effect. It would have to be equiped though in place of something else of course.
Could work. You need a method of discovery so players know why they can't teleport to a particular place. Players hate it when shit happens and they don't know why.
Maybe allow a view mode in which the aura is visible... if you're stealthed, then the aura won't show up.
Did anyone here besides Dave, Paul, and I experience teleports, airships, boat rides, warp1, warp2, escape in FFXI? I hope you're not unnecessarily reinventing the wheel...
VLSmooth wrote:Did anyone here besides Dave, Paul, and I experience teleports, airships, boat rides, warp1, warp2, escape in FFXI? I hope you're not unnecessarily reinventing the wheel...
We are not really reinventing the wheel, we are trying to find a wheel that works.
Also you need to post more on this subject. I am pretty sure you have plenty of good suggestions.