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DarkSign
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Posts: 698


on: June 29, 2007, 04:25:26 AM

One of the things we are debating is having killable vendors. When you first think of it, it seems like such a bad idea, but is it really?
I tried to think about how things would work in the real world and walked myself through things this way...

Vendor A sets up shop in outland town of small size or larger.
He either:
  • decides to guard the place himself - player fights npc
  • decides to buy scanning equipment - player inventory checked upon entry, weapons immobilized
  • decides to hire security to help guard the place.
  • installs a security call button

A wealthy/scared vendor might very well do all three. Of course if you want to have killable vendors you couldnt let every one of them  require that the player put his guns away.

So let's say you have Vendor B who chooses just to fight for himself with no call button. Players will definitely decide to gang up on him to clean him out. If you have a realistic inventory system then you couldnt just walk out with everything unless you toted stuff to a player vehicle that could carry lots of stuff. Either new players could come to the store and then go report to the poilice...or perhaps there could be a random chance that a town NPC would go to the store, then report to the police?

Then what? Would you wait on a timer a few days then replace him with a similar NPC and just say he's family that's taken over the shop? Or would you let it go out of business? If you replace him, would you set the next vendor up with a) more security b) more police checks? Perhaps the local gang could pay the police to look the other way...(extortion of NPC vendors is something we're planning on doing actually)

I guess Im thinking out loud here, but Im wondering it the realism and world reaction is worth implementing when there's a huge chance that roving gangs will just try to clean out all the vendors? Hmmm that's the way the apocalypse works any way I supposed :)

Thoughts?
Vinadil
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Posts: 334


Reply #1 on: June 29, 2007, 06:05:51 AM

This could easily work in a free PvP world (where other players could attack the gangs killing the vendors without penalty).

You might help your situation by assigning Costs to the vendors, such that a Vendor who has chosen high security will be more safe, but his goods also Cost more.  That way your gangs will have to decide if they want to risk killing off their source of cheaper wares (again I am assuming a full PvP, full loot world here since you said you want real loot on the Vendors, only fair that the players drop the same).  If gangs start picking on the Low-security, Low-cost vendors it will also likely have a greater impact on the player-base, causing them to come to the rescue of such vendors more frequently... or you might create an in-game slum where the other players hide out with the higher-cost, higher-security vendors and the gangs just "own" the low-rent district.
KyanMehwulfe
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WWW
Reply #2 on: June 29, 2007, 07:59:12 AM

It's hard to say so simply. It depends on a lot of things. The purpose of vendors, for example.

I'll cite an experience with WoW since its recent, for example. As a whole, vendors in WoW are just basic utility. Killing them typically served no purpose other than to cause grief.

However, during the Ahn'Qiraj war effort, many servers turned into massive battlefields. During one event on my own server, world logistics suddenly came to hold great [war] value. Namely, flight vendors in this case. This turned the NPC flight vendor from just basic utility into an actual war objective. For all intent and purpose of its role in the war, the vendor could of been a tower rather than a human. Killing or controlling one turned from a grief mechanism into an element of strategic value.

The point this example tries to illustrate is the importance of said vendors in regards to whether or not they should be killable. You have to consider their purpose. Why are they there? Are they critical to the everyday game experience of casual players? Nothing more than that? Are they meant to interact with the FFA PvPers (move around the world dynamically, get robbed, etc)? You have to judge the value the death of the vendor adds to the gameplay of the world versus how it detracts from it. In a FFA PvP sandbox, there's potential for much gain from it; in a more linear PvE-heavy themepark, it could  detract exponentially more than it adds (if it does at all).
« Last Edit: June 29, 2007, 10:35:06 AM by KyanMehwulfe »
Lightstalker
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Posts: 306


Reply #3 on: June 29, 2007, 09:47:07 AM

Killing vendors to cripple economic capabilities (refit/repair/reload) is great, until someone kills your vendor (and kills your vendor while you are at work/asleep/not logged in).  Then it isn't fun anymore.  Folks don't log into a world to pull guard duty on the local strip mall, they want to be heroic and if your hero can't go down the street and satisfy basic shopping needs before he heads out to slay a dragon or overturn an enemy empire it breaks something of the heroic setting.  Vendors in games are abstractions.  In the real world if a vendor's shop is being overrun or the guy just dies people can go to another nearly equivalent vendor to satisfy their needs.  In video games we don't have all those other options, we often have the idea of many vendors represented by a single vendor (or set of vendors small enough that players could suppress them totally).  How much value is there in allowing killable vendors when the cost is filling the virtual world with virtual sellers each supplying a slightly different set of goods?  That additional complexity and splitting of resources smacks of work to keep sorted out and find the one you need right now.  I like the one stop shop in games because I'm not usually playing a game for a supreme shopping experience, I'm usually after something else.

I've often thought about a game where guilds represent banks and vie for world banking domination.  One feature would be the ability to rob rival vaults.  One requirement of this is that any successful vault robbing not remove any items belonging to any particular player, while still reducing the overall value of that guild's holding.  There is a lot of abstraction in a game that excludes the player from making wise decisions or following reasonable courses of action to remedy such losses.  There is an out-of-game dynamic to consider and anything that leaves a player feeling cheated (especially if they've been disadvantaged while offline) is going to cause people to leave your game.

I guess what I'm saying is: Unless your game is all about being a merchant prince (starting from an entry level shoptender), don't bother with killable vendors.  Get the core of the game done well and leave the rest (support of that core game concept) as fun abstractions.

lesion
Moderator
Posts: 783


Reply #4 on: June 29, 2007, 10:30:11 AM

massively multiplayer "cops and robbers" featurette!

only the cops are mercs on a repo-net and the robbers are...robbers--in the future

steam|a grue \[T]/
LK
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Posts: 4268


Reply #5 on: June 29, 2007, 06:16:05 PM

I find that games that allow you to have player vendors are extremely ineffective and time-consuming when it comes to shopping for something.  I would go to a bazaar in Puzzle Pirates, for instance, and there'd be a dozen different shops.  It was a pain in the ass to go to all the shops and keep track of which had the lowest prices (do I need to bring pen and paper to take notes during my MMO? If so, bad design).  Plus, vendors tend to clutter the world more often than not. Look at *ANY* Korean MMO with player vendor options.  Your towns are just nothing but AFK players hawking a multitude of wares.  FFXI does this too and while it can be cool in a voyeur way to browse through the stuff people are offering to sell, it's not like they have stalls or anything that are setup, so it's just people standing around. I would rather that the following occured:

A) Placeable / Killable NPCs be resource gathers or producers, but not vendors.
B) Player-made shops are production facilities, perhaps like an attachment to their home, or their home, where they can place products into a centralized marketplace (Auction House).  If you support player cities, they can make their stuff in the field and transfer it to the commerce centers of the game (the major NPC cities) to sell.  So instead of stores, you have factories, and a singular method available to everyone in your town / planet / system (more range = higher cost to list and fees?).
C) Centralized Marketplace with multiple access points to the same service that players can browse all items and place buy orders or purchase the lowest offer of the goods they need.
D) NPCs vendors can work and won't clutter if there are restrictions, like only able to be placed in property you own, but this only works if player cities and property and a non-static environment are implemented.  Then if some player city creates a clusterfuck of NPC Vendors, it's not affecting the main city hubs.  But placing stuff in your owned property for sale wouldn't be preferable to reach a large market, but does save you time in transporting it yourself, or makes it so that you only post stuff people will need out there.

Think about it when you're traveling around visiting towns.  There's a bunch of services, like food, fuel, etc.  Unless you're living there that's all you need.  Vendors in the field would serve this purpose (ammunition, repairs, consumables).  But unless your ship factory is in the city, you wouldn't expect people to buy that type of stuff except in the major hubs.

Eh, I'm sure there's a nugget of wisdom in there somewhere.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
tazelbain
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tazelbain


Reply #6 on: July 01, 2007, 10:20:44 AM

>It was a pain in the ass to go to all the shops and keep track of which had the lowest prices (do I need to bring pen and paper to take notes during my MMO? If so, bad design).
Well, this pretty much leaves ebay as the only model.

"Me am play gods"
WindupAtheist
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Badicalthon


Reply #7 on: July 01, 2007, 02:33:50 PM

Killable town NPC vendors is Kosteresque hogwash.  All the vendors that can be successfully robbed will be farmed 24/7 like just another mob, while the ones that are too hard will never be robbed at all.  If you want to break the "lifeless themepark diku" MMO paradigm, there are easier ways to do it that will have greater impact.

And player vendors on player property can work fine, but only if you have insta-travel to any arbitrary player-selected location.  Like runes in UO.  But that brings it's own set of headaches.

"You're just a dick who quotes himself in his sig."  --  Schild
"Yeah, it's pretty awesome."  --  Me
Vinadil
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Posts: 334


Reply #8 on: July 02, 2007, 08:29:06 AM

I see a system combining EVE and Shadowbane.  I liked the way SB vendors interacted with people (not the way they crafted, but you could also just drag items onto them).  I see a system where player vendors live in Player-built cities.  So, it seems wierd that they would NOT be killable/lootable.  EVE would fit in by giving some sort of "Market" that players could access to get an idea of prices within a certain region.  Perhaps they could even make purchases there, but they would have to travel to the location of the specific vendor to get the goods.  Better yet they could make a "mission" for the player to transport the goods to them or something.

I don't think killable vendors is the best plan for NPC cities, but I don't like building a game around an NPC city anyway.
Stephen Zepp
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Posts: 1635

InstantAction


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Reply #9 on: July 02, 2007, 08:34:39 AM

I see a system combining EVE and Shadowbane.  I liked the way SB vendors interacted with people (not the way they crafted, but you could also just drag items onto them).  I see a system where player vendors live in Player-built cities.  So, it seems wierd that they would NOT be killable/lootable.  EVE would fit in by giving some sort of "Market" that players could access to get an idea of prices within a certain region.  Perhaps they could even make purchases there, but they would have to travel to the location of the specific vendor to get the goods.  Better yet they could make a "mission" for the player to transport the goods to them or something.

I don't think killable vendors is the best plan for NPC cities, but I don't like building a game around an NPC city anyway.

Here's the dichotomy though:

Players want to have vendors in their cities. We want cities to be destructable (broad assumption, although much of the discussion has been along these lines). If NPC vendors aren't destructable, that either implies that they are only available in fully controlled NPC cities that can never be destroyed (immersion breaking--why not?), or when you destroy a city, all the vendors remain.

I just see it as a much more complex and inter-related problem than "can we kill it? yes/no. can we farm it? yes/no".

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bhodi
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Posts: 6817

No lie.


Reply #10 on: July 02, 2007, 09:32:00 AM

NPC vendors have always been silly to me for being single individuals that whip entire arsenals out of their pants on command. I like a sort of bazaar or auction house type building over individual vendors, not just for convenience and a one-stop-shop, but so that they don't clutter the street. If you want a good example, just check out Jueno in final fantasy. It's stupid.

You're freer to manipulate the rewards of killing a building than killing an NPC. When you kill a vendor, people feel that the entirety of vendor goods should be on the body. When you kill a building, you can grab 25% of the goods and say the rest were destroyed in the collapse. In a war situation, when a city (and the bazaar) falls, you could say '25% got out and redistributed to other cities (or refunded to the players), 50% was destroyed during the sack, and 25% is given as booty to the plundering players.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2007, 03:03:19 PM by bhodi »
LK
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Reply #11 on: July 02, 2007, 02:36:54 PM

I'd like to hear Darksign's response on the comments.  Discussion is a two-way street.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
DarkSign
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Reply #12 on: July 02, 2007, 07:55:03 PM

Killing vendors to cripple economic capabilities (refit/repair/reload) is great, until someone kills your vendor (and kills your vendor while you are at work/asleep/not logged in).  Then it isn't fun anymore.

That's true and it's not true. Sure griefing vendors sucks, but losing is part of the game. If you're arguing against losing...no one likes to lose, but if you cant take it, dont play that type of game.

Folks don't log into a world to pull guard duty on the local strip mall, they want to be heroic and if your hero can't go down the street and satisfy basic shopping needs before he heads out to slay a dragon or overturn an enemy empire it breaks something of the heroic setting. 

No one wants to babysit a vendor, but some risk in guarding your town should exist. Either a town or a vendor is worth having and defending or it's not.  One of the problems with MMOs today is that everyone wants to have it all with no risk. I remember LOVING corpse runs especially in dangerous areas. I forget the name of the zone, but there was one time where I lost my body in a place where you had to have a really hard to get key. I met two of my really great EQ friends getting it back.

I agree with part of what you're saying though because no one wants the Rolling 30s or C$O (SB reference sorry) to roll through and trash your vendor just because they can. That's part of why Im starting this dialog.

Vendors in games are abstractions.  In the real world if a vendor's shop is being overrun or the guy just dies people can go to another nearly equivalent vendor to satisfy their needs.  In video games we don't have all those other options, we often have the idea of many vendors represented by a single vendor (or set of vendors small enough that players could suppress them totally).

Vendors arent distractions to a LOT of players. It can be really really engrossing to build stuff then sell it. Creating an empire (especially after the apocalypse) would be fun as all get out to me. Realism at the cost of fun is something to be avoided, but the static mannequin-esque vendors of today are pathetic. Sure auction save time, but it distills down the experience to a min-max experience when it has the potential to be part of a living breathing world.

How much value is there in allowing killable vendors when the cost is filling the virtual world with virtual sellers each supplying a slightly different set of goods?  That additional complexity and splitting of resources smacks of work to keep sorted out and find the one you need right now.  I like the one stop shop in games because I'm not usually playing a game for a supreme shopping experience, I'm usually after something else.

Again, merchantilism is something perhaps you dont prefer, but others do. I think success will come from an approach where you can go to an auction in certain locales and not in others. BUT there has to be some reward for taking the harder option. Surely you'll have an easier time getting a wider range of item at the auction house in the large city (either player or NPC)...but come on there's a great feeling when you stroll into an out of the way vendor waaaaaay off on the corner of the map and he has some items that you've never EVER seen before.  I remember I went to a vendor in Shar Vahl (back when no one was going there) and found a helmet that made it look like I was wearing a skull on my DarkElf character! I put it on my Iksar and it looked totally different! Man that was a great find and it rewarded me for exploring. The key is rewarding ease of use AND exploration.

I've often thought about a game where guilds represent banks and vie for world banking domination.  One feature would be the ability to rob rival vaults.  One requirement of this is that any successful vault robbing not remove any items belonging to any particular player, while still reducing the overall value of that guild's holding.  There is a lot of abstraction in a game that excludes the player from making wise decisions or following reasonable courses of action to remedy such losses.  There is an out-of-game dynamic to consider and anything that leaves a player feeling cheated (especially if they've been disadvantaged while offline) is going to cause people to leave your game.
One of my favorite SP games was a game called Street Hacker. You played against AI characters to steal money and computer parts through "hacking". Man that game was fun. There's also some abandonware game on HotU that's all about planning and executing fine art thefts. Talk about fun.  Part of what I want to do is take the approach of giving players multiple ways of completing the same quest (action boy, stealth boy etc.). Perhaps not killing a vendor but setting up the chance to steal from his store room.

I guess what I'm saying is: Unless your game is all about being a merchant prince (starting from an entry level shoptender), don't bother with killable vendors.  Get the core of the game done well and leave the rest (support of that core game concept) as fun abstractions.

You've helped me realize that I shouldnt make killable vendors universal across the game. If they happen, there would have to be game logic that stopped griefing yet incorporated risk.

I find that games that allow you to have player vendors are extremely ineffective and time-consuming when it comes to shopping for something.  I would go to a bazaar in Puzzle Pirates, for instance, and there'd be a dozen different shops.  It was a pain in the ass to go to all the shops and keep track of which had the lowest prices (do I need to bring pen and paper to take notes during my MMO? If so, bad design).

Hmmm. Well having things easy, as I said above, is both good and bad. I for one, dont mind putting effort into games and writing down stuff like that. Some people dont and want shopping to be easy. I dont fault you for that I suppose. To me, I love making notes about where to come back to and what I saw where etc. because it makes the world seem unique and vibrant. But schlepping all over can get wearysome. There would have to be some reward or game mechanic behind it all to make it worth doing.

Plus, vendors tend to clutter the world more often than not. Look at *ANY* Korean MMO with player vendor options.  Your towns are just nothing but AFK players hawking a multitude of wares.  FFXI does this too and while it can be cool in a voyeur way to browse through the stuff people are offering to sell, it's not like they have stalls or anything that are setup, so it's just people standing around.

If the vendors have their own buildings and arent like the original EQ bazaar, then they aren't bad at all. But yes, 9000 dummy-terminals gets to be a bit much.

I would rather that the following occured:

A) Placeable / Killable NPCs be resource gathers or producers, but not vendors.
That's definitely doable - you're farming NPCs for resources rather than xp or gold.

B) Player-made shops are production facilities, perhaps like an attachment to their home, or their home, where they can place products into a centralized marketplace (Auction House).  If you support player cities, they can make their stuff in the field and transfer it to the commerce centers of the game (the major NPC cities) to sell.  So instead of stores, you have factories, and a singular method available to everyone in your town / planet / system (more range = higher cost to list and fees?).

Our game ranges from wasteland post-apoc outposts to techy cyberpunk cities. I can see a system like this working decently in both. You'd have a courier charge. Id love it if people could stomach there being a 2% chance or somethign that the courier got waylaid on the trip to deliver, but people would just get annoyed by that. I guess Im waaaay too RPG for most MMOers ;)  But perhaps you could have some that were part of the auction system and some that eschewed using it.

C) Centralized Marketplace with multiple access points to the same service that players can browse all items and place buy orders or purchase the lowest offer of the goods they need.
D) NPCs vendors can work and won't clutter if there are restrictions, like only able to be placed in property you own, but this only works if player cities and property and a non-static environment are implemented.  Then if some player city creates a clusterfuck of NPC Vendors, it's not affecting the main city hubs.  But placing stuff in your owned property for sale wouldn't be preferable to reach a large market, but does save you time in transporting it yourself, or makes it so that you only post stuff people will need out there.

Good points.

Think about it when you're traveling around visiting towns.  There's a bunch of services, like food, fuel, etc.  Unless you're living there that's all you need.  Vendors in the field would serve this purpose (ammunition, repairs, consumables).  But unless your ship factory is in the city, you wouldn't expect people to buy that type of stuff except in the major hubs.

Eh, I'm sure there's a nugget of wisdom in there somewhere.

Definitely several nuggets.

Killable town NPC vendors is Kosteresque hogwash.  All the vendors that can be successfully robbed will be farmed 24/7 like just another mob, while the ones that are too hard will never be robbed at all.  If you want to break the "lifeless themepark diku" MMO paradigm, there are easier ways to do it that will have greater impact.

And player vendors on player property can work fine, but only if you have insta-travel to any arbitrary player-selected location.  Like runes in UO.  But that brings it's own set of headaches.

Insta-travel does invite RPKing. (For the record I have some RPK in me) But Im really tempted to try to find the balance between too hard and not hard enough for killable vendors. I know that players will just take 90 guys at a time and farm, but couldnt there be some way to combat this? Some way that makes the town more interactive? What if you have a bounty system where if they kill the vendors then the police come to help. If the police come to help but fail, the killers are marked for death and other players can help make their lives hell. Or the next city they go to is ready for them.

But I see what you're saying. It's probably too easy or too much work. The idea is that it be fun :P

Here's the dichotomy though:

Players want to have vendors in their cities. We want cities to be destructable (broad assumption, although much of the discussion has been along these lines). If NPC vendors aren't destructable, that either implies that they are only available in fully controlled NPC cities that can never be destroyed (immersion breaking--why not?), or when you destroy a city, all the vendors remain.

I just see it as a much more complex and inter-related problem than "can we kill it? yes/no. can we farm it? yes/no".

Agreed. You want them to be lifelike but still fun to own/interact with. The question becomes how do we craft a scalable response so that sometimes you win sometimes you lose but you have fun doing either :P ?

NPC vendors have always been silly to me for being single individuals that whip entire arsenals out of their pants on command. I like a sort of bazaar or auction house type building over individual vendors, not just for convenience and a one-stop-shop, but so that they don't clutter the street. If you want a good example, just check out Jueno in final fantasy. It's stupid.

Well if they have their own store, shelves and storerooms, then its not so silly. But yes, EQ1 vendors with a 10ft staff in their backpack are a bit ludacrous.


You're freer to manipulate the rewards of killing a building than killing an NPC. When you kill a vendor, people feel that the entirety of vendor goods should be on the body. When you kill a building, you can grab 25% of the goods and say the rest were destroyed in the collapse. In a war situation, when a city (and the bazaar) falls, you could say '25% got out and redistributed to other cities (or refunded to the players), 50% was destroyed during the sack, and 25% is given as booty to the plundering players.

That's not a bad idea to tinker with as one of many alternatives. I think that if you limit players to what they can realistically hold in their personal containers and what they can put into vehicles, you kind of cut down on the whole "Im looting everything under the sun" mentality. Of course if they bring 9 friends and work as a group it just becomes farming the vendors.
LK
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Reply #13 on: July 03, 2007, 10:25:18 AM

I like you.  You said nice things about the stuff I said.  So I'm going to constructively criticize some statements in the last thread, because I'm seeing some follies that need to be addressed on a core level.

Quote from: DarkSign
I remember LOVING corpse runs especially in dangerous areas.

I think you're in the minority there.  Frustration would be the first adjective I'd come up with when describing troublesome corpse runs.  If you haven't already, take a look at all the death options out there, and see which is the most popular across different audiences and cultures.  Then implement the best solution.

Quote from: DarkSign
Creating an empire (especially after the apocalypse) would be fun as all get out to me.

Seeing a statement like that set off all kind of red flags.  Are you creating a game you'd play and find fun, or one for your audience? Not everyone can create an empire.  Are you going to play your game and be the Emperor? Are you taking lessons from CCP? :P  Managing people underneath you as a leader can be very stressful.

Quote from: DarkSign
I remember I went to a vendor in Shar Vahl (back when no one was going there) and found a helmet that made it look like I was wearing a skull on my DarkElf character! I put it on my Iksar and it looked totally different! Man that was a great find and it rewarded me for exploring. The key is rewarding ease of use AND exploration.

That type of system would only work for NPC vendors that have items that PC Vendors couldn't have.  If a player was really interested in selling something, he would position his vendor smartly, not in the boonies somewhere to make it hard for someone to find his wares.  Go where the money is.

Quote from: DarkSign
I for one, dont mind putting effort into games and writing down stuff like that. Some people dont and want shopping to be easy. I dont fault you for that I suppose. To me, I love making notes about where to come back to and what I saw where etc. because it makes the world seem unique and vibrant.

Please stop thinking like that! It's not about what you'd do.  It's about what the best path is for your audience and makes the barriers between them and the game as minor as possible.  If the game can keep track of data in some fashion rather than the player, then that is a more optimal path to allow a player to worry about other things.  I think that was one of the top ten problems of a Game Designer, where they'd design a game they'd want to play, but not think about the larger audience.

Quote from: DarkSign
That's definitely doable - you're farming NPCs for resources rather than xp or gold.

When it comes to something harvesting resources from the environment, it would look better if it was mechanical or a building where the workers were inside that a friendly player can see but a hostile player can't.  There are multiple ways this could be implemented, but placing an NPC in the world would seem inherently vulnerable if unattended.  So you'd need guards, either player or NPC, or make the NPC much sturdier (mechanical/structure).

I have to agree with some original points though: guard duty would be very, very boring.  Guard duty in any game is usually done only when trouble is expected, otherwise you're just sitting there doing nothing.  Nobody pulls guard duty in Planetside.  There's only the front, and the preparations being made behind the lines close by.  Perhaps being able to setup some form of radar system to inform you when hostile players have entered the area where your resources are collecting and whether they persist would be a good method to get players back into the area and perform guard duty, because then they KNOW trouble's coming.

Here's something to try: You've got a wasteland you can probe for resource points.  If you find one, you can construct a small building (mine) that if you go inside you'll see your NPC workers doing their thing.  The item to do this would be a contract with a mining organization.  Outside, players will see the building and can attack it.  If this happens, your workers will do what they can to defend it and can't be killed unless the building blows up, at which point they are killed.  The resources collected are available for looting. 

Now these mines have several options.  One is that they have absolutely no warning systems or radar.  Those are the cheapest option available.  This is the option for the people who want to watch and wait and perform guard duty on their workers.  Then you get larger operations.  More workers, more expensive.  A warning system can be set to warn guildmates or yourself of an attack and give you enough time to get back and deal with it, maybe with a two-way portal from wherever you are.  A radar system that warns you when hostile players come within range of your stuff giving you even more time to prepare.

The resources that are harvested through this method would need to be consumable though ... siege weapon construction (that can be destroyed), ammunition, temporary offensive and defensive boosts.  Perhaps you can even use these resources to craft your own buildings that utilize NPC robots to mine instead of the grunt humans you'd have to hire without the necessary materials.

<3 ideas.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
Morat20
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Reply #14 on: July 03, 2007, 11:34:06 AM

I have to agree with some original points though: guard duty would be very, very boring.  Guard duty in any game is usually done only when trouble is expected, otherwise you're just sitting there doing nothing.  Nobody pulls guard duty in Planetside.  There's only the front, and the preparations being made behind the lines close by.  Perhaps being able to setup some form of radar system to inform you when hostile players have entered the area where your resources are collecting and whether they persist would be a good method to get players back into the area and perform guard duty, because then they KNOW trouble's coming.
A word on guard duty -- consider WoW's Battlegrounds. Do you know how flaming difficult it was to get people to do guard duty? To sit on top of flags, or hang out at the base? They only time they'd do it was when they knew the other side was rushing the base, and they'd get easy kills from all the crossfire.

Guard duty is inherently boring, and no one wants to do it. Your elite, hard-core, cat-asses might be able to force some of their players to do it -- but the bulk of your players aren't going to, and if your game more or less requires it, they'll find a different game.

My instinctive response to killable vendors is this -- you better be shooting for a niche game, otherwise it's a non-starter.
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Reply #15 on: July 03, 2007, 01:44:47 PM

Sounds nichey, no doubt.  I'd leave them dead until Player Activated Mechanism brought back one.  If the player(s) that wanted the vendor there would like to defend him, they can "invest" in his defense system, which would be automated.  I might also worry about supply lines for the goods, since having some guy in the middle of nowhere shit out weaponry is not terribly realistic.  But see, I'm turning this into a RTS.  I'm not to be trusted.

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Reply #16 on: July 04, 2007, 05:31:13 AM

Insta-travel does invite RPKing. (For the record I have some RPK in me) But Im really tempted to try to find the balance between too hard and not hard enough for killable vendors. I know that players will just take 90 guys at a time and farm, but couldnt there be some way to combat this? Some way that makes the town more interactive? What if you have a bounty system where if they kill the vendors then the police come to help. If the police come to help but fail, the killers are marked for death and other players can help make their lives hell. Or the next city they go to is ready for them.

If it's worth doing at all, there will be guilds who refine it into a science and do it like clockwork.  The harder you make it, the more likely it will be that those guilds are the only ones doing it.  That's just MMO reality.

The question is, why do you want killable vendors?  What do they add to the game?  If it's simply to add color and "virtual worldness" then you're better off making vendor-killing relatively easy but not a terribly efficient way to make money.  Easy enough that the casual player who decides "Hey, let's rob the armor shop, it'll be fun, whee!" has a chance of pulling it off with a few of his friends, but inefficient enough that the hardcore guilds don't bother farming it.

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Reply #17 on: July 04, 2007, 08:30:28 AM

Vendors arent distractions to a LOT of players. It can be really really engrossing to build stuff then sell it. Creating an empire (especially after the apocalypse) would be fun as all get out to me. Realism at the cost of fun is something to be avoided, but the static mannequin-esque vendors of today are pathetic. Sure auction save time, but it distills down the experience to a min-max experience when it has the potential to be part of a living breathing world.
I'm usually in favor of 'harder = good' in the style of old EQ, but vendors is NOT one place where I find that appropriate, at least.  Unless the game has a built in Allakhazam like feature where anytime you see an item it goes into a searchable journal that tells you where you can get it and how much it cost when you saw it, it's not fun.  Even that is basically not fun, if you have to go around and check 300 player vendors.  I remember trying to buy something in Lineage II.  I knew what I wanted, and I learned what city was the primary trade city.  When I get there, the entire ground is littered with sitting characters each selling stuff.  I had to check gods know how many vendors before finding what I was looking for, and even then I have no idea if I got it for a decent price.  This system is VERY NOOB UNFRIENDLY.  I mean, REALLY, REALLY noob unfriendly.  As opposed to the FFXI auction house, which was the easiest economy to get into ever.

Furthermore, if the game is set in the future, there's no reason at all for computers not to have taken over cataloging and advertising goods.  Even if only in the primary city/cities, you should be able to walk up to a terminal and search through every single item selling in the city, it's price, quality, details, and then you can have the player order the item and either go pick it up or have it delivered to them within a reasonable period of time.  In outlying towns, there shouldn't be so many NPC vendors that it becomes a headache to figure out who's selling what at what price.  And in player-built towns, the option of installing a computer system identical to the main city one - perhaps even linked to the main city one - should be available.  Towns with them would become much more popular for shopping than towns without.

Again, merchantilism is something perhaps you dont prefer, but others do. I think success will come from an approach where you can go to an auction in certain locales and not in others. BUT there has to be some reward for taking the harder option. Surely you'll have an easier time getting a wider range of item at the auction house in the large city (either player or NPC)...but come on there's a great feeling when you stroll into an out of the way vendor waaaaaay off on the corner of the map and he has some items that you've never EVER seen before.  I remember I went to a vendor in Shar Vahl (back when no one was going there) and found a helmet that made it look like I was wearing a skull on my DarkElf character! I put it on my Iksar and it looked totally different! Man that was a great find and it rewarded me for exploring. The key is rewarding ease of use AND exploration.
Uhh.  You played EQ how long?  EVERY plate helmet looks like a skull on a dark elf, and they all look different on other races.  Appearrance is dictated by race, not by the item.  Even before Luclin models where they actually had more textures for stuff, helms only had two or three textures/models.  Regardless, sometimes it's nice to have out of the way vendors selling unusual items.  But...unless the vendor moves around, if the item has any value as soon as a few people discover it, it'll be on sites like Allakhazam, at which point it will merely be an annoyance for people to have to go way out of their way to get it.  If the vendor does move around...well, people will find that annoying too, probably.  And map his route.  Vendors should be in logical places, not out in the middle of fucking nowhere.  It's not good marketing to set up a shop in the middle of nowhere, so nobody would do it to make a profit.

Hmmm. Well having things easy, as I said above, is both good and bad. I for one, dont mind putting effort into games and writing down stuff like that. Some people dont and want shopping to be easy. I dont fault you for that I suppose. To me, I love making notes about where to come back to and what I saw where etc. because it makes the world seem unique and vibrant. But schlepping all over can get wearysome. There would have to be some reward or game mechanic behind it all to make it worth doing.
Personally, I can't think of a single logical reward or mechanic to add that would make this worthwhile.  If different vendors are priced differently, it's annoying, because it just means people have to keep track of prices, or search items on spoiler sites before buying anything, for fear of buying it at a more expensive vendor.  There is some use for non-searchable, non-centralized vendors.  Look at FFXI for one example - while it has been noted that the collections of people with personal shops in town were relatively meh, which is true, and the vast majority simply used the auction houses, the personal shop was a useful tool for people who did things like cooking or the creation of other consumables.  Often in adventure zones one might see someone with a personal shop and find just the resource you were running low on, negating your need to return to town.

B) Player-made shops are production facilities, perhaps like an attachment to their home, or their home, where they can place products into a centralized marketplace (Auction House).  If you support player cities, they can make their stuff in the field and transfer it to the commerce centers of the game (the major NPC cities) to sell.  So instead of stores, you have factories, and a singular method available to everyone in your town / planet / system (more range = higher cost to list and fees?).

Our game ranges from wasteland post-apoc outposts to techy cyberpunk cities. I can see a system like this working decently in both. You'd have a courier charge. Id love it if people could stomach there being a 2% chance or somethign that the courier got waylaid on the trip to deliver, but people would just get annoyed by that. I guess Im waaaay too RPG for most MMOers ;)  But perhaps you could have some that were part of the auction system and some that eschewed using it.
This idea is probably the best choice.  I would still have stores, or at least, warehouses.  Give people the choice of, after buying the item, either going to the warehouse for pickup, which transfers the item to them in complete safety, or having it delivered via courier, which gives a small chance of it being stolen.  Or, make the courier option on the vendor side - if the vendor wants to risk delivering his items by courier, he has to return the money or issue another item if the first one is stolen, making the vendor the one liable for any losses.  This gives the vendor the option of upgrading his courier defenses.  Just make sure that there is the option for a completely safe way to retrieve your item.

Insta-travel does invite RPKing. (For the record I have some RPK in me) But Im really tempted to try to find the balance between too hard and not hard enough for killable vendors. I know that players will just take 90 guys at a time and farm, but couldnt there be some way to combat this? Some way that makes the town more interactive? What if you have a bounty system where if they kill the vendors then the police come to help. If the police come to help but fail, the killers are marked for death and other players can help make their lives hell. Or the next city they go to is ready for them.

But I see what you're saying. It's probably too easy or too much work. The idea is that it be fun :P
Part of the problem is obsoleting the player.  Logically speaking, anyway.  Either the player is needed to perform great actions and be a hero or otherwise a significant and powerful force in the world, or they aren't.  Take early Ultima Online, for example, and the instakill teleporting guards of death.  Looked at logically, such a system makes players seem entirely superfluous.  Why not send a squad of guards after <insert great evil> if guards can defeat even large groups of players?

No, I would definitely say that the disadvantage to killing vendors can't be in straight combat.  Certainly vendors should be powerful and/or guarded to an appropriate degree as compared to the goods they sell - any vendor who you can kill and get powerful magical items from won't be easy to defeat.  In this way, vendors are basically identical to powerful loot-dropping monsters of equivalent level.  However, the real disadvantage to killing them must be faction-based or something similar.  It must make the game considerably more difficult.  The worst part of this is how to avoid the problem of people getting around such restrictions with friends or secondary characters.  If you restrict their ability to purchase goods, could they not have secondary characters purchase goods for them?  The token systems in place in some games like WoW provide an interesting answer to this.  If, in order to obtain loot from doing dungeons and other such things, one must turn in nodrop tokens that result in nodrop gear, anyone who ruins their faction will be unable to obtain the gear.  In this case, the gear needs to be sufficiently powerful to make not obtaining it a considerable disadvantage.  However, the downside to this is that it essentially works with very little difference than simply prohibiting the player from killing the NPC in the first place.  If killing the NPC vendors is so disadvantageous that nobody ever wants to do it, then you may as well have simply made them invulnerable rather than implementing a complex system to make it undesirable to kill them.

In the end, the trick is the fine point of balancing the disadvantage of killing them to be sufficient to prevent approximately 80 to 90% of vendor kills, and keep it so that when people do kill vendors, it's not common or frivolous, and instead is done only when there is much to be gained.  Shipping schedules, deliveries, and that sort of thing may be used to make this possible.

Here's the dichotomy though:

Players want to have vendors in their cities. We want cities to be destructable (broad assumption, although much of the discussion has been along these lines). If NPC vendors aren't destructable, that either implies that they are only available in fully controlled NPC cities that can never be destroyed (immersion breaking--why not?), or when you destroy a city, all the vendors remain.

I just see it as a much more complex and inter-related problem than "can we kill it? yes/no. can we farm it? yes/no".
If the vendors were unkillable, they could remain and simply move on, once a city is destroyed.  This isn't particularly unbelievable, if they are considered to simply be merchants that can pack up and set up shop in the next city.  They're simply neutrals.

NPC vendors have always been silly to me for being single individuals that whip entire arsenals out of their pants on command. I like a sort of bazaar or auction house type building over individual vendors, not just for convenience and a one-stop-shop, but so that they don't clutter the street. If you want a good example, just check out Jueno in final fantasy. It's stupid.
Do you mean player vendors or NPC vendors in Jeuno?  The NPC vendors are all quite appropriately placed.  Player vendors...that does look silly.  Also given the lack of searching multiple player shops in FFXI, that's a very irritating system of trying to sell things.  People use it only because it doesn't cost an auction house fee.  In my opinion, such a method of selling things should be available, but only outside of primary cities (and probably minor cities too).  This may or may not prevent people from congregating in some outdoor place and forming 'bazaars', but if it's open pvp and you can loot stuff off of people...well, those bazaars would either be well defended, in which case they would likely evolve into interesting locations, or they would be quickly empties of people and looted.

You're freer to manipulate the rewards of killing a building than killing an NPC. When you kill a vendor, people feel that the entirety of vendor goods should be on the body. When you kill a building, you can grab 25% of the goods and say the rest were destroyed in the collapse. In a war situation, when a city (and the bazaar) falls, you could say '25% got out and redistributed to other cities (or refunded to the players), 50% was destroyed during the sack, and 25% is given as booty to the plundering players.

That's not a bad idea to tinker with as one of many alternatives. I think that if you limit players to what they can realistically hold in their personal containers and what they can put into vehicles, you kind of cut down on the whole "Im looting everything under the sun" mentality. Of course if they bring 9 friends and work as a group it just becomes farming the vendors.
That goes into a lot of questions.  Do vendors have infinite inventories while alive?  Hopefully yes for convenience's sake.  If yes, how many copies of each item should be able to be looted when they die?  If vendors carry their entire inventory on their person or in their shop, wouldn't killing them be vastly more rewarding than killing anything else in the world?  If yes, how do you make it so that it's still possible to kill and loot vendors without making it so undesirable to kill them that there's no point in ever doing so?  If no, why not?  Maybe vendors deal in goods that are of low value to the players capable of defeating them, such that even if you kill a vendor, the sum total of all their goods - even if you manage to cart it all away - isn't vastly more profitable than anything else you can do.  Maybe vendors' goods - and the vendors themselves - are somehow protected.  Being able to magically teleport away in case of trouble and take most of your goods with you would make sense in several ways - first, it explains why the vendor returns a short while later, and second, it limits the profit.  If vendors never actually die, they just use their escape mechanism, they only ever need to leave a small amount of loot behind.  That brings up an interesting concept in that, if whatever method they use to escape is limited in the size or weight of goods they can take with them, some of the loot will be left behind - but only if they have more than the limit.  Thus, when a vendor is forced to flee and returns later, if they're attacked again before they have time to accumulate more goods, there's no reward as their current quantity of goods does not exceed the cargo capacity of their escape method.  This can limit the number of times it is beneficial to kill a vendor and give vendors 'recharge time' without requiring that they be despawned during the recharge time.  Thus they can perform their functions for other players, while those who want to rob them can only come by once every few days (or whatever) when the vendor has enough goods that they can't take them all with them.

Limiting inventory space, on a tangential note, is something I believe is more of an annoyance than it's usually worth.  Making things more logical and internally consistent is good, but limiting how much you can carry - or worse, how much you can store in your bank/safety deposit box/house/whatever is an extremely annoying mechanic.  Here's something interesting that EQ did better than WoW, in my opinion at least.  Bags in EQ were common and easy to acquire - even at low levels it was a simple matter to earn sufficient money to purchase a full set of backpacks for you and your bank, multiplying your cargo space by eight.  And yet, at high levels, bags were still highly desirable - because items had weight and high level backpacks allowed you to carry more weight by being weight-reducing or weight-eliminating.  Fixed-location storage space should, in my opinion, be infinite, and inventory space on your person should be very large, limited primarily by weight, with even that limitation eventually being relaxed considerably through superior bags.  As said by Westley Weimer in his Ease-of-Use readme for his BG2 mod, "This game should not be a quest for inventory management."
« Last Edit: July 04, 2007, 08:33:06 AM by Koyasha »

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Reply #18 on: July 05, 2007, 03:52:59 AM

Wow. Everything about your post seems like you want everything waaaaaay too easy.

For the record, I played EQ from 3 months after launch until a month after EQ2 and at the time, helmets didnt turn into skulls on DarkElves...that was Iksar. They got the Cow Skull helmet, but DE's got screwed.  I could find it on Alakazaam but Im too lazy. I think it was called the Square Helm. It was a caster helm or some such.

Anyway back to your thread. Im not opposed to having auction houses, but you want instaclick and search the entire world? That's plain munchinism to me. I'd prefer having a more post-apocalyptic scavenger's world. A world where you might just roll into a vendor, strike up a deal, and get something you'd never seen before.

Once you kiddies get used to auction houses that deliver everything on a silver plate, you might as well play on an EcksBocks 360 and screw typing anything. Just ride your MMO on rails.
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Reply #19 on: July 05, 2007, 10:01:36 AM

Wow. Everything about your post seems like you want everything waaaaaay too easy.

For the record, I played EQ from 3 months after launch until a month after EQ2 and at the time, helmets didnt turn into skulls on DarkElves...that was Iksar. They got the Cow Skull helmet, but DE's got screwed.  I could find it on Alakazaam but Im too lazy. I think it was called the Square Helm. It was a caster helm or some such.

Anyway back to your thread. Im not opposed to having auction houses, but you want instaclick and search the entire world? That's plain munchinism to me. I'd prefer having a more post-apocalyptic scavenger's world. A world where you might just roll into a vendor, strike up a deal, and get something you'd never seen before.

Once you kiddies get used to auction houses that deliver everything on a silver plate, you might as well play on an EcksBocks 360 and screw typing anything. Just ride your MMO on rails.

Are you sure you're a good designer? Cause I've never heard a good designer talk like that, and I consider myself amatuer, but enough to know that you got a lot of self-righteous in you that needs to be examined.  You want people to play your game, or do you want people to play "your game"? There's a difference.  Look for it.

Actually the last time I heard someone talk about design elements like this, I think it was Vanguard, and we all know how that turned out.

Seriously, think very carefully about what barriers you are placing into your game, and ask why they are there, and if they are fun, or if they take away from your end-user's enjoyment.  Auction Houses are preferred over Player Vendors.  If I made an MMO, I wouldn't have Player Vendors.  As great as it would be to have that one person in front of a dungeon selling wares for someone who needs it, I'd rather strike the system entirely to avoid the clutter that pervades games like Lineage II. I started playing the game and actually made it to a town that was populated, and like Koyasha said, it was just a bunch of people AFK'd selling all kinds of different goods with no really easy way to find what I want.  If you're looking for furniture, you go to a furniture store, not go to a bunch of independently run flea markets.

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Reply #20 on: July 05, 2007, 11:06:49 AM

Wow. Everything about your post seems like you want everything waaaaaay too easy.

For the record, I played EQ from 3 months after launch until a month after EQ2 and at the time, helmets didnt turn into skulls on DarkElves...that was Iksar. They got the Cow Skull helmet, but DE's got screwed.  I could find it on Alakazaam but Im too lazy. I think it was called the Square Helm. It was a caster helm or some such.

Anyway back to your thread. Im not opposed to having auction houses, but you want instaclick and search the entire world? That's plain munchinism to me. I'd prefer having a more post-apocalyptic scavenger's world. A world where you might just roll into a vendor, strike up a deal, and get something you'd never seen before.

Once you kiddies get used to auction houses that deliver everything on a silver plate, you might as well play on an EcksBocks 360 and screw typing anything. Just ride your MMO on rails.

Are you sure you're a good designer? Cause I've never heard a good designer talk like that, and I consider myself amatuer, but enough to know that you got a lot of self-righteous in you that needs to be examined.  You want people to play your game, or do you want people to play "your game"? There's a difference.  Look for it.

Actually the last time I heard someone talk about design elements like this, I think it was Vanguard, and we all know how that turned out.

Seriously, think very carefully about what barriers you are placing into your game, and ask why they are there, and if they are fun, or if they take away from your end-user's enjoyment.  Auction Houses are preferred over Player Vendors.  If I made an MMO, I wouldn't have Player Vendors.  As great as it would be to have that one person in front of a dungeon selling wares for someone who needs it, I'd rather strike the system entirely to avoid the clutter that pervades games like Lineage II. I started playing the game and actually made it to a town that was populated, and like Koyasha said, it was just a bunch of people AFK'd selling all kinds of different goods with no really easy way to find what I want.  If you're looking for furniture, you go to a furniture store, not go to a bunch of independently run flea markets.

Lorekeep's post may come across as a flame (for what it's worth, I took the originating post he responded to as a flame myself, lighthearted/unintentional it may have been), but his points are extremely valid.

NetDevil didn't really think AA sucked, but the market did...or you could glance briefly at Sigil/Vanguard.
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Reply #21 on: July 05, 2007, 11:20:08 AM

...

(Deleted, misread Stephen's note)
« Last Edit: July 05, 2007, 11:28:44 AM by Lorekeep »

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Reply #22 on: July 05, 2007, 05:05:07 PM

Yes, I read as far as "I LOVED corpse runs" and stopped reading.  I don't ever need to play another game that confuses "punishment" with "challenging".
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Reply #23 on: July 06, 2007, 03:56:23 AM

Actually I said to search the city, not the world.  Assuming each major city is its own separate entity due to the nature of the world, each one should be separate in the market.  But major cities - not towns and outposts - would logically have computerized trade, the eBay of the Future.  Player cities, of course, should have anything they damn well please if they pay for it.

Also, this looks like a skull to me, and so does this.  There's only ever been one Dark Elf helm that doesn't look like a skull, the Velious Age helm that looks like a bullet or a juicer.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2007, 03:58:22 AM by Koyasha »

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Reply #24 on: July 06, 2007, 08:55:43 AM

Yes, I read as far as "I LOVED corpse runs" and stopped reading.  I don't ever need to play another game that confuses "punishment" with "challenging".

I accept that corpse runs have been hated by the vast majority of players. Hell, there's one time I fell off the invisible bridge in The Deep and another time (when Mischief was insanely hard to get to) that I lost my corpse in Mischief that were inordinately ridiculous in getting my body. But I really didnt mind the ones where it was basically travelling through zones to get it in a kind of dangerous or really dangerous place.

I know everyone's not like that of course. I just really hate the trend to make everything super easy and have no risk for mediocre reward.
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Reply #25 on: July 06, 2007, 09:05:09 AM

I just really hate the trend to make everything super easy and have no risk for mediocre reward.

When time is a valuable commodity, having it lost due to a death is more than enough.  To further compound it with time that was thought to be progress turned into waste is more of an insult to the player than an effective means of punishing them.  Players greatly appreciate either no progress or forward progress, but will hate you forever for negative progress.  Besides, if you've got a great end game, you'll want to get as many people there as possible eventually.

I'm still fond of an XP debt type system that gets you back into the game quickly, and having that debt go away when you are logged off.  But that's about as harsh as I would go.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
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Reply #26 on: July 06, 2007, 11:29:56 AM

No offense, but that's not very harsh at all. Right now, MMOs are being created not only for profitability, but for OMGZ!orOK! the best profits evar. Sure, these are businessmen shooting towards the most money possible, but when games are lauded for their gameplay and its all about making things easy, that just gets under my skin. A great game will by its very nature attract more people than a mediocre game and create a brand/reputation that will sustain a company for years to come.

BTW, I got the helmet thing wrong. If I remember correctly, it was a helmet that looked like a skull on a human. Sorry for the mix up.
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Reply #27 on: July 06, 2007, 12:43:31 PM

No offense, but that's not very harsh at all. Right now, MMOs are being created not only for profitability, but for OMGZ!orOK! the best profits evar. Sure, these are businessmen shooting towards the most money possible, but when games are lauded for their gameplay and its all about making things easy, that just gets under my skin. A great game will by its very nature attract more people than a mediocre game and create a brand/reputation that will sustain a company for years to come.


I think there remains some kind of confusion here about what constitutes hard, well done, or even fun.

I go back and play Darklands, a 15 yr. old title where members of my party can be killed permanently.
I'll never return to Everquest, where time served is the dominating measure of avatar ability and player progress through challenging content is punative.
I'd rather play hardcore D2 than Everquest, at least there is no dicking around about the death experience being "fun." 

While death penalties can be fun; the death penalties being fondly remembered in this thread are just pain for the sake of pain.  Harsh punative dealth penalties promote wussy game play, where groups of players are dangerous because one twit can ruin everyone's fun or packs of players run around ganking defenseless mobs because the modest reward is well worth the reduced risk vs. player appropriate opposition.  I remember grinding for months on Ortallius because the penalty for death made dealing mobs in the neighborhood of other players not worth the risk of death.  Look at the Undying title in LotRO for how a game mechanic (even a soft one like a title) can drive players to a decidedly non-heroic playstyle.  Avoiding harsh death penalties isn't pandering to the lowest common denominator so much as harsh dealth penalties do not meet a common definition of a fun or rewarding game play experience.

No one here is suggesting that easy == well done. 
It is likewise silly to suggest that hard == well done.

A death 'penalty' where as soon as you die the camera swings around to the point of view of the monster/player who just killed you that you 'follow' for the next 5 minutes could be fun.  It could be fun to see the monster eat your friends too, from the monster's pov.  Or to see your friends fight through and win, I guess, if you like your friends or something.

A death 'penalty' where you respawn in the underworld and have to fight your way back to the surface could be fun, so long as you can return to the point where you went under... so to speak.

'Death' in Forza2 is fun, car damage is a percentage of your winnings meaning you can't go broke by having a string of bad runs with an expensive car.  The reason they did this was because the core mechanic in Forza is "Driving a Racecar" and not "balancing the books associated with a car racing team."  What kind of game has a core mechanic supported by "forcing players to do punative work to get back to where they were before they engaged in risky behavior" whenever they happen to die in game?  I could see that in a gambling sim, where death is akin to losing big, but in a heroic journey MMO I think it is grossly out of place.  And even in the gambling sim no one is going to knock on your door at night to come break your fingers, which would be the extent of the death punishment advocated here.

WoW put several graveyards in most zones and it isn't enough to offset the annoyance of running back to your tombstone.  I don't play WoW to march back to my corpse, it sucks enough blowing 100g learning a new boss without having to march back through a long-ass instance.  I skipped Blades' Edge Mountains because the grave/respawn sites were so poorly placed.  Maybe we have different priorities in game, but unless your game is entirely about running around as a ghost being unable to interact with the world I don't think many people will see much appeal to ubiquitous corpse marching.
Stephen Zepp
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Reply #28 on: July 06, 2007, 03:07:36 PM

Outstanding post Lightstalker.

Not nearly enough game designers (from indie all the way through AAA) approach game design the way you suggest unfortunately.

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Typhon
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Reply #29 on: July 06, 2007, 05:31:39 PM

No one here is suggesting that easy == well done. 
It is likewise silly to suggest that hard == well done.

Really well said.  I'll add the following because I can't help gilding the lily.

Trivial == poorly done
Punishing == poorly done

A death 'penalty' where you respawn in the underworld and have to fight your way back to the surface could be fun, so long as you can return to the point where you went under... so to speak.

I've had a very similar idea for some time, but in the context of quasi perma death.  What I'm trying to achieve is a system where players want their characters to live/succeed, and will try like hell to keep their players alive.  But, at the same time they also understand that the day will come when their characters will die, which is somewhat ok, because when that day comes they also gain something which they otherwise would not have been able to gain without dying (but they gain more if their current character his done well).

The idea is that players create avatars, and avatars are used to spawn player characters.  Avatars have a more complex set of data, tracked at both the character level, and the avatar level as follows;

  • Experience - determines your current character's level
  • Renown - is what makes you as a player want to take chances/play heroically.  With high renown you can buy/get better stuff while alive, and you achieve an otherwise unreachable social standing upon rebirth.
  • Essence - (think Avatar experience) determines character stats upon rebirth (or it could determine character level upon rebirth, if we are doing a diku, and the early game is boring) - essentially rewards a player for playing the game and helps make character death a different sort of experience.
  • Karma - is essentially faction for your avatar.  Character has faction with mortal npcs.  Avatar has karma with non-mortal npcs.  A way for the game to track which non-mortal factions you have pissed off/pleased in previous incarnations


A bit complicated, but I hope you see where I'm going.

So, with all that said, when your character dies, he dies.  Depending on what religion/factions you help or are affiliated with, you have some options on how to return.

  • Resurrection - given to new avatars to get them acclimated with the game and given as a reward when completing some important task for a non-mortal faction.
  • Reincarnation - You spawn as a new character.  It's what you do in most cases.
  • Revenant - if player character really pisses you off when ganking you, you can respawn as a revenant and hunt them down.  When you exact your revenge, you must reincarnate.  Also, you expend essence (avatar experience) while doing so, and if you don't manage to kill your target prior to burning through all your essence, you also must reincarnate but with no essence - your are essentially a level 1 character.  I'm thinking different servers will have different rates of burn on essence.  High burn rate favors a more murderous style of play, low burn rate fosters a "carebear" server.  If you are ganked by a revenant you cannot go revenant.
  • Undeath - your typical ghoul, vampire, etc.  Essentially a way to play the bad guy for awhile.  Possibility for some servers to have this as not optional (server is a "living versus the dead" rules server).
  • Lycanthrope - your typical werewolf.  Another way to play the bad guy.  A variant, probably something to add in an expansion.
  • Spirit - A spirit is what you are before you pick any of the above.  You are an insubstantial ghost.  I'm also thinking there should be a long-shot (or maybe just expensive) option of trying to return from the from the after world.  It should be hard and/or expensive, but the player should have some way of returning to a character that was very close to reaching some goal - putting the character advancement before the avatar advancement in special situations

(Sorry for the long post)
Stephen Zepp
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Posts: 1635

InstantAction


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Reply #30 on: July 06, 2007, 05:40:14 PM

No one here is suggesting that easy == well done. 
It is likewise silly to suggest that hard == well done.

Really well said.  I'll add the following because I can't help gilding the lily.

Trivial == poorly done
Punishing == poorly done

A death 'penalty' where you respawn in the underworld and have to fight your way back to the surface could be fun, so long as you can return to the point where you went under... so to speak.

I've had a very similar idea for some time, but in the context of quasi perma death.  What I'm trying to achieve is a system where players want their characters to live/succeed, and will try like hell to keep their players alive.  But, at the same time they also understand that the day will come when their characters will die, which is somewhat ok, because when that day comes they also gain something which they otherwise would not have been able to gain without dying (but they gain more if their current character his done well).

The idea is that players create avatars, and avatars are used to spawn player characters.  Avatars have a more complex set of data, tracked at both the character level, and the avatar level as follows;

  • Experience - determines your current character's level
  • Renown - is what makes you as a player want to take chances/play heroically.  With high renown you can buy/get better stuff while alive, and you achieve an otherwise unreachable social standing upon rebirth.
  • Essence - (think Avatar experience) determines character stats upon rebirth (or it could determine character level upon rebirth, if we are doing a diku, and the early game is boring) - essentially rewards a player for playing the game and helps make character death a different sort of experience.
  • Karma - is essentially faction for your avatar.  Character has faction with mortal npcs.  Avatar has karma with non-mortal npcs.  A way for the game to track which non-mortal factions you have pissed off/pleased in previous incarnations


A bit complicated, but I hope you see where I'm going.

So, with all that said, when your character dies, he dies.  Depending on what religion/factions you help or are affiliated with, you have some options on how to return.

  • Resurrection - given to new avatars to get them acclimated with the game and given as a reward when completing some important task for a non-mortal faction.
  • Reincarnation - You spawn as a new character.  It's what you do in most cases.
  • Revenant - if player character really pisses you off when ganking you, you can respawn as a revenant and hunt them down.  When you exact your revenge, you must reincarnate.  Also, you expend essence (avatar experience) while doing so, and if you don't manage to kill your target prior to burning through all your essence, you also must reincarnate but with no essence - your are essentially a level 1 character.  I'm thinking different servers will have different rates of burn on essence.  High burn rate favors a more murderous style of play, low burn rate fosters a "carebear" server.  If you are ganked by a revenant you cannot go revenant.
  • Undeath - your typical ghoul, vampire, etc.  Essentially a way to play the bad guy for awhile.  Possibility for some servers to have this as not optional (server is a "living versus the dead" rules server).
  • Lycanthrope - your typical werewolf.  Another way to play the bad guy.  A variant, probably something to add in an expansion.
  • Spirit - A spirit is what you are before you pick any of the above.  You are an insubstantial ghost.  I'm also thinking there should be a long-shot (or maybe just expensive) option of trying to return from the from the after world.  It should be hard and/or expensive, but the player should have some way of returning to a character that was very close to reaching some goal - putting the character advancement before the avatar advancement in special situations

(Sorry for the long post)

I've played around with ideas similar to this, but never to this depth--pretty interesting stuff, and I can see it being fun to play, although with this system I'd suggest it needs to be much harder to die in "normal play".

That's hard to justify in many games, but think about your standard "raid wipe" scenario. Suddenly, your entire guild goes from high powered living characters to a bunch of spirits, to (whatever choice is made by each player). Not saying the system is faulty or won't work, but some things to consider.

First serious approach to making perma-death less idiotic (from the player's perspective) and more fun at the same time I think I've ever seen.

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LK
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Posts: 4268


Reply #31 on: July 06, 2007, 05:57:55 PM

For some reason, I'm reading this stuff and thinking the correlation between a pilot and a mech.  If your mech is blown up, your pilot statistics are kept, but your machine is lost, and you have to rebuild it.  EVE seems to use a system similar to what you have, though pilot death can mean skill loss if preventative measures aren't put into place.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
DarkSign
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Posts: 698


Reply #32 on: July 07, 2007, 06:37:10 AM

Definitely some good feedback from all sides. Unlimited inventory is just something I cant get behind and unlimited bank space Im on the fence about.

As far as how to design games, sure the audience should be taken into heavy consideration, but the heavyweight BIS guys have said on more than one occasion that they created games that they wanted to play and that had their own logical consistency - even if the mountain had to come to Mohammad.  I never said I was a great game designer, Lorekeep. I merely know what I and about 300 other people would like to play - intimately. Making games easy on players is but one consideration and game designers are already going too far in that regard. Pretty soon games will just be one big button marked "play". No one wants consequences for their actions. No one wants to explore. Well - not everyone. We're making a niche game for those who want risk and consquence. I wear asbestos undies so I really didnt take Lorekeep's post as a flame. It was more ironic than anything seeing as how the request introspection came from someone being a bit self-righteous themselves. Re-reading what he was responding to, I can see how someone might think it was a flame...so fair enough. It's easy to quote a failed MMO and attribute whatever design flaw you're discussing to that game to win an argument though.

Back to the not even original subject:
If we're talking auction-house vendors in major NPC cities, Im on board. And truth be told, we could explain away doing it in outlying towns to with a wink and a nudge though it doesnt seem believable that a hermit selling electronic parts would be hooked up to some supercomputer network where everything in the world is searchable. The reward for having vendors who dont all sell the same thing is exploration and unique communities. It's not as if I want to fuck people over and laugh. The idea is to make sure that the rich dont always get the best item and that player or npc towns that sell good stuff are rewarded.

Lightstalker's post was indeed quite good. There are multiple ways to come up with fun-to-play death mechanics. For the type of raw, PvP game we're doing, if you want to see the market - go back to SB or go to the upcoming game Darkfall. There are those who want to hunt and kill other players and loot them. Without the aid of magic or sci-fi these options get more obtuse.

Typhon
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2493


Reply #33 on: July 07, 2007, 07:11:46 AM

sorry for derail, forgot which thread I was in.   :-D
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