f13.net

A variation on F2P and hardcore mode: you can play for free until you die,  at which point your credit card is billed $5, and your account is canceled. You can start a new account if you wish.

Next?

A knife mounted on a linear electric motor perched on a stand sitting on your monitor.  For Schild. :why_so_serious:

My recent attempt to balance weapons and armour in Morrowind.

FFA PvP.

3 health bars.

A game that charges you $.25 every time you kill a player and pays you $.25 every time a player kills you.

This gives me an entertaining idea for a NetHack league, when you die, you pay into the pot, first person to ascend wins the pot. Would be hard to police it though.

Solved problem, actually. There's software (http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Dgamelaunch) that lets you play over Telnet/SSH and makes everybody's morgue files and whatnot available for viewing. Like so (http://alt.org/nethack/).

I laughed.

A single health/mana/stamina bar.

Health is a basic red fill traveling from right to left as the character takes wounds. Stamina is a black line starting at the LEFT and traveling to the right as the character exhausts it. If it passes the end of the depleted health bar (or vice versa) the character passes out until it restores. Mana takes chunks of the bar off from the right, shrinking it. Health and stamina are shrunk proportionally, and return proportionally as mana is restored.

Many weird risk/reward strategies result.

Me too.

You create PvP-centric mmorpg then make character advancement so grindy or long that new players have to spend many month just to be able to contribute, less compete in PvP.

or

You design a DIKU clone and get popular on a premises of being more accessible than your predecessor. You spend couple years ironing kincks out and making it even more accessible. Then you release an expansion aimed at pleasing top 5% while effectively making it too difficult for bottom 50% and see it all burn while casuals leave in droves to play bad ripoff of you title simply because it isn't nearly as punishing.

or

You release PvP-centric mmorpg based on land control then implement instant travel. This makes possible for a single group to control entire map while running the rest of the players out of the game.

I don't think Rift is a "bad" ripoff of Wow, but that's a matter of opinion, and otherwise example #2 is a pretty good skewering of Blizzard.

I'm not studied up on my History of Failed PvP-Centric MMOs, so I can't even figure out if examples 1 and 3 are each aimed at single games, or the whole lot mashed together.

People can play online for free, but they play a laggy sprite-based top-down 2D version of the game for phones and mobile devices. Paying customers play in 3D on regular computers and their packets are prioritized. Also they are ninjas.

1 sounds like DAOC, 3 sounds like EVE.

Here is extremely dumb idea from DFO:

Crowd Control (think Eye Rot) actually turn your screen off (distorts to the point that your screen might as well be off), so you are functionally disconnected from your character as a result. As a result PvP devolved to who gets first cast off. To address this problem developers implemented "Effect Immunity" spell with a short duration. You are expected to spam it or die horribly.

Blindness in DDO actually does black your screen out (or did, dunno if they eventually changed it.)

EQ did that as well.  I'd forgotten about it until I was on the EZEMU in Mistmoore the other day and my screen went black but I heard combat.  At first I thought the game crashed.

So let's also add "blanking out the UI without giving feedback to the players as to WTF is going on" for the bad ideas list.

Rift does it too, sorta. If you get stunned, your screen gets all woozy; if you're low on HP the screen turns greyscale and you lose sound effects except for a 'heartbeat' sound... and if you lose control of your character you can't do anything with the UI (like change targets) until you regain control. That last one is really, really, really annoying in pvp.

brb, posting in rift gripes/complaints thread.  :why_so_serious:

Tab targetting that targets something through a wall instead of the thing in front of you.

Creating an encounter that relies on one randomly chosen player to succeed at a totally esoteric mini-game, or the entire group fails.

Z-axis combat in a laggy world.

Levelling your pants.

In the frontier, while it is raining, on days that contain the letter T in their names, from killing Albs below RR5.

Whatever, that ruled.

Blindness always pissed me off no-end in Anarchy Online, also because the only way to remove it was a rare drop consumable. Having your screen blacked out by a spammable ability as a melee class sucks.

Attunements.

Allowing players to believe that "Sandbox" means zero rules.

The original version of WoW meeting stones.

Client-side anything important.

Crafting fails.

Death by crafting.

Player justice.

Creating new features, but never talking to your art team, or client team to even see if its feasible. But still pushing it to live.

The Fins list, camping items for rare spawns, and jboots.

Gravity?

Because I rather like client side gravity.

Selling the UO server in a box ala EMU servers.

Levels in non-RPGs.

This thread started in a good place and going to a bad place.

eh?

This is the design subforum; the whine-about-existing-games forums are up there ^.

JRPG that decreases your power as you level, so you're forced to keep advancing the story at a steady rate or the random battles will kick your ass harder and harder.