Mercenaries- idea for new player integration into PvP world

[sinij]

Mercenaries-  idea for new player integration into PvP world

I think there should be a way to skip character advancement/politics and just PvP when you log in.

I propose to add sub-game – Mercenaries. Ideally – mercenaries is something to do when you have only little time to play or trying to learn PvP before establishing your regular character.

Mercenaries are special type of player character that start as fully advanced, geared and fully trained but weaker than regular player characters. All Mercenaries have non-unique auto-generated names and cannot see player names, guild crests and affiliations. Ideally all mercenaries look the same to regular players and all regular players look the same to mercenaries.

Mercenaries cannot free-roam the world like players do – they can only move around freely in mercenary city and around mission area. When Mercenary accepts a mission they are teleported to the area of conflict and can only leave that area by failing mission, completing mission or desertion.

Mercenaries can be hired (spawned into game) by regular players and guilds to fight on their side but have limited freedom of action - they can't leave designated area of fight and they can't attack guild that hired them. They can only desert (despawn) and forego mission reward. Mercenaries do not respawn and cannot rejoin the same mission twice but can be resurrected by players.

As a reward for succeeding Mercenary advancement based on number of kills since last unrecovered death and currency accumulated by succeeding in missions.

Each kill brings flat small % of increase to hit points that quickly goes into diminishing returns. Lets say 5 kills you get 5% bonus, 25 kills another 5%, 125 kills another 5% and so on. After each unrecovered death it reset to 0.

After successfully completing mission Mercenary awarded some points/currency that can be spent on special abilities or boosts to your existing abilities. If Mercenary dies and not resurrected all special abilities already purchased are lost but unspent points/currency remains. All unspent currency decays over time.

All Mercenaries are rated based on what they do while on missions. Damage/healing done, number of people killed, number of deaths outcome of the fight and method left (i.e. deserted, got killed and res expired, survived until contract expired, survived until battle was won).

This way you can look up any given merc and see something like:

OneEyed Willy
1/8/2007 Mission: Defending Siege of Noobtown, 13450 damage done, 3 people killed, 2 deaths, killed and expired
3/8/2007 Mission: Assassination, 500 damage done, 0 people killed, 1 death, killed and expired
8/8/2007 Mission: Attack Siege of Sanctuary, 0 damage done, 0 people killed, 0 deaths, deserted
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Running Total (last 25): 13950 damage, 3 kills, 3 deaths, killed and expired (66%)

[Sairon]

What's resurrected? Getting resurrected by a spell from a healer type player? I hope not if you're to depend on the goodwill of other players in order to not suffer loss of abilities.

My largest doubt thought is how well used it will be if it's only designed as advancement totally unrelated to your real toon. It doesn't seem like there's enough motivators to keep the player interested and keep coming back to his mercenary character. From a developer stand point of view it sounds pretty time consuming to craft as well.

If I understand it correctly there will also be a large issue with supply/demand to solve as well. Having fun as a mercenary seems to be largely related to how many missions there's available, and since these are player created there might be a large shortage compared to how many mercenaries are available.

[koboshi]

  I had the opposite take on this than you Sairon.

  For one this kind of play would allow for healers to solo.  They just grab a handful of cheap mercs and keep resurrecting them.  That might even end up the choice gig for a merc because of its high likelihood of survival.

  As for your supply / demand question it seems to me that you answered your own question, IE. the problem of sup. vs. demand is solved by having the price-to-player/reward-to-merc be defined by a supply/demand curve.

  But I do have to agree that there should be some way for mercs to take their rewards into their characters.  I mean it's supposed to be a gateway into pvp, right? So then why would you put a barrier between mercing and the pvp game.  More so than that is the fact that you need to have some reason for a player to come back to mercing or the merc pool will totally dry up as your game ages.

[Lightstalker]

Would you propose this a better idea in an instanced environment, or an open environment?

What about NPC city guards being eligible for "Mercenaries" play?

[Kail]

It would be interesting to see this incorporated into something like Planetside's fodder program, where Merc players don't have to pay a sub fee, but "named" players would.  Give people a chance to feel out the game, give your paying customers some more targets/help, let their friends tag along for free, that kind of thing.

Though I do have two quibbles:
1- Why limit this to "nameless" characters?  It seems like a lot of work to get a system for some sort of scenario generator (in the sense that you're setting limits on where they can go, what they can do, and so on) which then can't be used by a large chunk of your playerbase.  I can think of a number of times when I wouldn't mind being able to take my main out for something like this, especially if there was some rewards for it.  Maybe make named Mercs cost more or something to balance it out.

2- Why would "Ideally all mercenaries look the same to regular players and all regular players look the same to mercenaries"?  I'm not crazy about the idea of hiding information from some players but not from others.  If this info isn't made available through the game client, people will just get it through other means (Teamspeak or Ventrillo, for example), and then they'll bitch about your client.

[tazelbain]

If you wanted to go fight with your buddy, you'd just go fight with your buddy.  This seems like a way to go fight for your enemy or strangers for cash and I assume some anti-greifing restrictions.  It would have to be anonymous or all the game political baggage would get in the way.