My MMO idea:

[Name Lips]

Here is my MMO idea (I'm such a fucking nerd even thinking of these things... :D).

The concept is primitive magic vs. advanced science. The setting is a planet. The characters are time travelers.

The setting itself is a series of 20 different maps that represent different "eras" of the same world. The magic-wielders start at map #1 and travel between eras using spells and incantations. The science-wielders start on map #20 and travel between eras using devices.

The farther from one's "home time" you travel, the more ineffective your gear becomes, as the physical laws that make it work start breaking down. The creatures and adventures don't actually get more difficult, at least not significantly so, but your gear literally loses ability until it becomes pretty much useless. This encourages the grind for more powerful gear, which quickly makes you a god in your home era (i.e., n00b zone), but is absolutely essential for survival in the more distant eras.

The interesting thing about this concept is that the low-level content for one faction actually IS the high-end content for the other faction. The stuff in era #2 is very easy for magic-wielders to kill, but virtually impossible to fight using science.

[Varaj]

I like that idea. Pretty cool concept.

[Schizm]

wait, you actually want the opposing faction's most powerful players hanging out in the noob zones?

That sounds like a great way to have your game die off due to griefing assholes really quickly...


fun concept, though. :D

[Name Lips]

wait, you actually want the opposing faction's most powerful players hanging out in the noob zones?

That sounds like a great way to have your game die off due to griefing assholes really quickly...

But in that zone, even their uber-powerful equipment will only be equivalent to the n00bs starting gear. :D

[The Winslow]

If you can't loot the opposed faction's gear, it could work.

[FeatsofClay]

VERY interesting idea. :)

[Xavier Lang]

wait, you actually want the opposing faction's most powerful players hanging out in the noob zones?

That sounds like a great way to have your game die off due to griefing assholes really quickly...


fun concept, though. :D

I would be more worried about high level folks hanging out in there own noob area ganking the opposition members who are trying to quest, level, whatever.

[Name Lips]

If you can't loot the opposed faction's gear, it could work.

A blanket prohibition could work. But MMOs are supposed to be insideously addictive, so I thought of another trick.

Each faction would have its own unique currency. Perhaps gold for the magic faction and credits for the science faction.

Use of equipment is tied to trainable skill levels. Training skill levels requires faction currency. So for a science character to use pistols, it might require Science Ranged Weapons level 50. This would be trivial for a science character to purchase for, say, 10 credits per skill level.

Now say a magic character wanted to twink himself out with a pistol (which I'm imagining for the sake of discussion is a very low-level science weapon).

The only way for the magic character to convert his gold into credits is at a truly absurd exchange rate. This would have to be playtested to determine a good level. Maybe 1000:1, so it would literally take him a thousand times longer to grind out the training required for the item.

High level items would be virtually unattainable except for people who completely lose their lives to the game, and even then only after months upon months of constant grinding.



I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid rampant gold-selling, though, which would ruin the whole concept. If you can purchase 1000 credits or gold for the same price in real-world dollars, it would break this system in an instant.

[The Winslow]

Plus there could be the possibility of making two characters, one on each side (and why not? it's a perfectly valid wish to get the full experience of a game) and to have them trade together... If there are mechanisms to give money to another character, the exchange rate system would fall pretty fast. Blanket prohibition on the "foreign" gear would work better.

Maybe you could loot things from the other side but couldn't use it until it's converted. It could be a source of techno-magical items such as Star Wars-like lightsaber, for an example (magic sword+energy weapon), and converters (whatever the mechanism is) would be ridiculously expansive and only reachable to very high level characters. (Maybe after successfully completing a quest line of helping "research & development" to help the scholars or scientists of your side discover how to jury-rig the other side's tools. You could put the absurd constant grinding in this phase, like "gather 250 blaster pistols and bring them back to the wizard" so as to get a low-level technomagic weapon...

These hybrid things could work subtly differently depending on the place where they are. They would be weaker than their equivalent pure weapons, but keep sensibly the same power level in all realms.

I said weapons, but really, any type of equipment could do. A combo hoverboard/magic carpet, for example. EPIC MOUNT!

[Kyllikki]

If you need someone to throw acids, bases, dry ice, liquid nitrogen, and other corrosive and explosive materials at dead pigs or ballistics gel, i'm your chick. My rates are reasonable; you supply the targets and i'll show up with the weaponry ;)

[Name Lips]

I had a separate MMO idea that may or may not work well with this one. The idea was that characters were competant from the beginning, with all skills at a reasonable level (say 40 out of 100) and improve by spending points in skills. However, every point you spend in one skill reduces every other skill by a certain amount.

So say there are 50 skills. You increase one skill from 40 to 41. Every other skill reduces from 40 to 39.8. If you keep maxing out that skill, by the time it's up to 50, every other skill has reduced to 38. Now imagine you pick a second skill to add to, and you add 10 points to it. It goes from 38 to 48, your first skill reduces to 48, and every other skill reduces from 38 to 36.

I don't think that math quite works, but you get the idea. You can't train anything without reducing your abilities elsewhere - including skills you've previously trained.

The skills would include not only weapon and armor abilities, but resistences and so on. It would be virtually impossible to create a character who was both good at combat AND had no Achilles' heel.

So this would allow complete customization of your character's abilities. He could either specialize in a few twinky skills, or go for a more well-rounded and versitile character with no super abilities, but no specific vulnerabilities either.

The trick, as always, is balancing the skills so that some aren't obvious choices. Hopefully it would balance itself - as more characters took, say, kinetic resistance as a "dump stat," more people of the opposing faction would add to their kinetic attack skills because it will have become more advantageous.

The idea is also that you don't get universally more powerful as you progress through the game. Even a low-level character, if he discovers and exploits a high-level foe's weakness, can emerge victorious.

I did mention the math was a bit fuzzy above - that's because though I do want the characters' untrained skills to erode, I DO want a high level character to have a higher skill total, if they were all added together, than a low-level character. That means when he increases one skill by 1 point, the others need to be reduced by an amount that, when added together, is less than that one point. The average of a high-level characters' skills might be 60, for instance, whereas a noob would average to 40.

But is it mathmatically possible to raise the average while insuring several exploitable weaknesses? I don't know.

[Mistwell]

The OP idea you had seems like a very compelling one to me. It needs some tweaks as you mentioned, but I think you are onto something there in the basic competition theme.