Posts made by Roccandil

Yeah, I'd like a way to show off my guild, too.

@tsoo

Really good point! I wanna know, too.

@kniknack

I like Candlebrook.

And ya, Hearthsfort is good, too.

World of Tanks had voice chat when I played, and it was badly done, despite WoT being a massive moneymaker, and most of the game being well-polished. We wound up just using Discord/TS anyhow.

I figure it would be too expensive for Fractured to spend resources to do something dedicated apps already do well, and it's easy enough to chat in text and then invite to Discord/TS.

Granted, optional voice chat when near someone -could- be a lot of fun.

@kniknack

Will AI caravans not have basic AI guards? Seems like if AI caravans were a thing players could hire, they could also hire AI guards.

@jetah said in System controlled caravans.:

this isn't a theme park game where everyone is a hero. this is a sandbox where everyone is a nobody just trying to survive in the world(s). if you want to pay someone to transport your profession goods to another town then you should need a human to do that not an AI.

"Sandbox" and "should" don't go together for me.

Granted, I'm currently playing an MMO with low pop, so there simply aren't the people to do all the menial tasks humans "should" be doing (and AI transport was recently introduced on the PvE side).

@jetah said in System controlled caravans.:

@muker
it's bad when you take a sandbox game and have AI controlled caravans when players should be doing it.

"Sandbox" and "players should be doing it" conflict, in my view. I don't mind NPCs doing repetitive tasks to free up players to do more interesting tasks (especially if the players can do those repetitive tasks if they want to).

Fundamentally, I get the impression players like to be the "heroes" in games, but if everyone's the hero, then no-one is, so a population of NPCs can help with that.

@Jetah

Why work on -any- voluntary feature, such as so many different skills? Not everyone is going to use them all.

@jetah said in Guild Types:

@roccandil
that's not something the game should enforce. the game should allow any guild/alliance to break at any point.

the whole point of a sandbox game is there are no hardcoded boundaries. now the karma, gods, planets are there as part of the rules but those should be the only ones.

Except that these would be voluntary boundaries. Guilds wouldn't have to use them; they would just be tools available to those who wanted them.

@jetah said in Guild Types:

then why have the label at all?

For one thing, for hard-coded enforcement/warnings. Say Guild X wants to make an exclusive trade treaty to only buy resource A from Guild Y.

A hard-coded alliance "package/module" would make it obvious to members of Guild X that buying that resource from a guild other than Guild Y is forbidden. The game could either make it impossible, allow it but increase some kind of "infamy/smuggler" rating, or simply provide an in-game warning/reminder.

Otherwise, the smuggling action wouldn't be reflected/understood in any way by the game at all; it would only exist in the minds of the players. Tracking it in-game, however, allows other potentially interesting mechanics to be developed.

If the ability to make world notations had to be earned (so no spam), were abstracted/curated in some way (you can't write/draw whatever you want, but must select from a predefined set), and decayed over time, I could see it working.

As ergonomic a build as I can!

Although, since it looks like we can have multiple characters per account, I imagine I'll have various specialists in critical capabilities (crafting, enchanting, etc.).

Wurm Online has a magic mail system through which most items can be sent, bypassing travel through worldspace, and while very convenient (travel times can be measured in hours), it degrades immersion and makes for a "flat" economy across all servers, which destroys local economies.

No reason to buy from the local blacksmith, if you can buy from the best/cheapest a world away!

So, I'd be reluctant to see a mail system, especially one that bypassed worldspace travel times and danger.

Granted, I suppose a lore case could be made for magical teleportation of objects, and that could work if sufficiently expensive in some way.

@jetah
The way I see it, if a "trade alliance" option is available for guilds to enter, it's still just an option: nothing is preventing guilds from working up their own trade alliances without it.

@Jetah
I hear you, but at the same time, I wonder if more alliance "packages" for players to choose from would be good. Players wouldn't have to use them, but they could also make things more interesting for those who do.

I think among my favorite fantasy game sound effects was Baldur's Gate II: nothing like hearing mages casting spells while berserkers whaled away at each other.

(BGII was -creepy-, btw, I don't think I'll ever forget assaulting the dungeons defended by Beholders.)

@ekadzati said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

Anyway, I am about to be on the road a bit, so likely will be sparse on replies unless insomnia visits again. Thanks for the discussion.... very interesting and enjoyable!

Ya, thanks!

@ekadzati said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

A given collective of players should be able to encode their cultural rules upon the land(s) they manage, and be able to do so in such in a way that assures technology handle the heavy lifting.

Providing the options of different models is the only requisite. How they are used will be the emergent aspect.

Maybe players prefer to follow real world examples, maybe they don't... but it's a lot easier to do any of it if the game itself provides a means of formalizing such things.

I like Fractured's take on planetary cultures; I'm saying with the right systems in place, you wouldn't need separate planets.

So, you'd like to see, say (just for example), a guild alliance structure available to demons on Tartaros? Something that would penalize breaking the alliance or attacking allies (or maybe prevent attacks on allies entirely).

(From a lore perspective, could be a blood oath/magic thing that not even demons ignore lightly.)

@dragomok said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

...but then again, even rudimentary modelling ecology leads to mob in-fighting, and OOOHH YES, mob in-fighting can be fun. Firefall beta didn't have a full-blown ecology, but it had mob factions. I liked to herd swarms of Hissers onto Brontodons, and my favourite memory is of a (brief) five-sided players-Raiders-Chosen-Brontodons-wildlife battle that I accidentally started.

That sounds cool. I'd love to see more ecological systems implemented!

@ekadzati said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

@roccandil said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

@ekadzati said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

Sorry, this is incorrect. Each of us as human beings live in a world where there are outside models imposing and enforcing contracts.
If you don't think so, try refusing to pay your taxes or any other "illegal" activity that any number of collective, emergent systems of human civilization put in place (varying wildly by any number of variables, around the world).

Hmm. You appear to have misunderstood what I meant by "outside". From my perspective, the collective, emergent systems of human civilization are not "outside" models imposing and enforcing contracts; they are, well, emergent.

Think "extra-dimensional" as what I was trying to say by "outside", and that might be closer.

Specifically, the world-rules of an MMO are controlled on an extra-dimensional level (from the player's perspective) by the code: players (theoretically) can't access that from within the world.

Within the context of the world rules, however, players -do- have the opportunity to impose and enforce their own social rules.

It is not impossible to replicate real world systems in video games.

It is not impossible to codify concepts like "rules of engagement" or perhaps the Geneva Accords in a game.

Indeed, any cultural or societal system of consequence can be modeled using simple rules. The emergent behavior comes from people behaving in unexpected ways given the set of rules they are given.

MMO games have never really had that many codified rules and frankly, that's the problem.

But I suspect not for much longer. We'll see.

Sounds like you want to turn models of real-world emergent social behavior into rigid, hard-coded structures.

At least in the case of Fractured, it sounds like it already has rules of engagement based on alignment, and those seem inviolable.

On the other hand, looking at the demon-on-demon free-for-all on Tartaros, I imagine that the players will come up with "rules" (guidelines!) to govern the planet.

Trying to impose hard-coded rules of engagement there would seem counter-productive.

@ekadzati said in Pinatas, catatonia, and Montgomery Scott (or what matters the most to me in MMOs):

Sorry, this is incorrect. Each of us as human beings live in a world where there are outside models imposing and enforcing contracts.
If you don't think so, try refusing to pay your taxes or any other "illegal" activity that any number of collective, emergent systems of human civilization put in place (varying wildly by any number of variables, around the world).

Hmm. You appear to have misunderstood what I meant by "outside". From my perspective, the collective, emergent systems of human civilization are not "outside" models imposing and enforcing contracts; they are, well, emergent.

Think "extra-dimensional" as what I was trying to say by "outside", and that might be closer.

Specifically, the world-rules of an MMO are controlled on an extra-dimensional level (from the player's perspective) by the code: players (theoretically) can't access that from within the world.

Within the context of the world rules, however, players -do- have the opportunity to impose and enforce their own social rules.