benlehman

Inbox/Outbox: Realize this needs to apply to everything. By definition, if the income is easily greater than the capital required, you're going to have inflation of resources. In MMORPGs of the day, this is both a bad thing and demanded by the player base. And for that reason I think a more 'mean GM' stance is needed: the players will thank you in the long run.

>The excitement here seems to be the social interaction / levelling up, >rather than the actual gameplay.

Yes and no. Thats the way gameplay is now, and the truly hardcore people stay with a game for social reasons, largely. But the games are marketed as adventure games (have you seen the new Playstation commercial for EQ?) and that is why people gain interest - and lose it. I no longer play EQ because beyond a certain point (Level 20 by my *very* scientific analysis) its simply a glorified chat room. Good computer games have always been more than that, and the current generation of MMORPGs have failed to be - but thats fine, the area is still maturing.

>In Feudalism, there are some complications to resource gathering. First of >all, a wood-cutting expedition is dangerous shit.

And, unfortunately, cutting wood only holds so much thrill. I can see doing it under fire as being interesting, but I gaurentee that 95% of your player base doesn't want to be combat engineers - they want to be combatants. And thats simply not reasonable if you're trying to realistically model a society.

>On civilization and culture -- From what I've heard, Everquest clans are >quite organized.

The EQ clans are stupidly well organized. The problem isn't that - its that it doesn't encourage any real development of a society. They've found the ideal setup for a clan, and stick to it. There is no real incentive to improve it or change it. Everyone is assigned a role - often very meta roles - and they're expected to fulfill it to maintain their social standing in their clan. Which is a civilization of sorts, but I don't think the sort of thing you're looking for - more of a real-world sort of model.

>But... there are two important things here. First of all, twinks are vastly >underpowered compared to garden-variety minmaxers.

Well, I'm curious as to how you'd design it so that twinks are distinct from min/maxers. But also realize that the disruptive quality of players is much higher than anyone ever assumes. If you give people the opportunity to mess with other players, they will. You have to be incredibly careful with the controls over how they are allowed to do it if you don't want it blown out of porportion. Do not underestimate the annoying 13 year old who spends months working his way up in the hierarchy to get pissed one day at something stupid and then marches an army of other players to their death. A good example in this context is the following: do you allow walls to be moved? Ie, torn down and rebuilt?

If you do, then the players can move walls as things change, as their tactics improve, as new things are needed. Also, in an emergency they can tear down a wall to get at a threat.

But also expect annoying players to run around tearing down walls for no reason other than to mess with other people's work.

If you don't, however, then you can avoid that problem. People's works are protected and more permanent change on the world. On the other hand, now the twinks switch sides and suddenly you have a wall in front of the gate to your castle, a wall in the middle of the street, a wall facing your wall. Walls everywhere you don't want them to be.

Clearly neither solution is really useful; you have to find something in between, but if you make the rules draconian then it becomes less enjoyable to play. (Wait, I need a permit, and permission from 10 other players and have to lay a foundation which has to survive for 10 days out of game and gather special stone and ...?) Likewise, with such things you have to find the right balance between ease of Doing and ease of Undoing.

[Ego]out