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The thing that killed Warhammer Online was faction population imbalances. You got bonus rewards for winning while outnumbered, but at least on my server Destruction outnumbered Order to such a degree that if Order ever won anything it was because Destruction hadn't noticed yet or was waiting for Order to capture one thing in the entire world so they could get the reward for taking it back.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:06
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daoc - lets have 3 factions that way if one is underpopulated, it can still fight warhammer - 3 factions is too hard, going with 2 daoc - lets have battle grounds until late game so it doesn't split the population warhammer - battle grounds at all times that way always have a fight and have less reason to go to unbalanced rvr doac - lets have pve in the battlegrounds so you have things to do when no one is there warhammer - lets have instanced battlegrounds with no pve and doesn't load everyone in at the same time so fights are still unbalanced
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Aug 15, 2022 16:14
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My favorite thing about Warhammer battlegrounds was that the xp rewarded was based entirely on damage done, which was then split even among the group. Except you could leave that group, and get none of it, but you'd also keep all the xp from damage you dealt entirely for yourself. So if you then played a broken AF class that did outrageously more damage than anything else, such as a Bright Wizard, you could be getting triple the rewards of anyone else on your proverbial team. Half your team spending the entire matching just whining in chat how you were "stealing xp" was the icing on the cake. Love some endgame capitalism in my midgame stupid fantasy game pvp.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:52
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Third World Reagan posted:daoc - lets have 3 factions that way if one is underpopulated, it can still fight As much as I enjoyed Warhammer for the brief time I played my biggest takeaway was how was this made by the people that did Dark Age of Camelot.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:56
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Groovelord Neato posted:As much as I enjoyed Warhammer for the brief time I played my biggest takeaway was how was this made by the people that did Dark Age of Camelot. More of a flanderized DAOC
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Aug 15, 2022 17:17
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Groovelord Neato posted:As much as I enjoyed Warhammer for the brief time I played my biggest takeaway was how was this made by the people that did Dark Age of Camelot. Probably top-down demands to make it "the next WoW" and the thing being a development disaster behind the scenes. IIRC, they had to largely scrap and redo the whole project midway through development, and the open beta test they ran mere months before launch was absurdly glitchy.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:20
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Vermain posted:Probably top-down demands to make it "the next WoW" and the thing being a development disaster behind the scenes. IIRC, they had to largely scrap and redo the whole project midway through development, and the open beta test they ran mere months before launch was absurdly glitchy. Mythic's had a helluva time - remember Imperator Online their sci-fi mmo set in a futuristic Roman Empire that never fell that never came out?
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Aug 15, 2022 17:28
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Lifroc posted:gently caress, I've loved this discussion guys, now I just want to quit my day job and go design a loving MMO. Time to open a kickstarter, see ya in a decade. You may laugh, but I'm with you. I grew up with the Ultima's and EverQuest's and other with real designers with real power to have a vision for a game. Those big names are all pushed out at this point out of fear from corporate overlords of the name getting to big. What's happened since then is that its gotten stupidly more costly to make MMO type games. At the same time none of the back end for MMOs has really been released. Like you cant license WoW's engine. Amazon almost made New World's engine something that could be licensed, but that dumpster fire of a game failed to get any attention. IF Epic or Unreal released an updated engine with a real net stack, Proper Client / server architecture and management, Zones or location rendering, a LUA UI or other scripting for the UI and a LOT of removal of optimization that exists for single player games that just breaks MMO style games then we would see a MMO renaissance. What I am trying to say is that there are people inspired by Richard Garrett and Brad McQuaid, we're semi sidelined by cost and we're sidelined by just how toxic the games industry is right now. We're quite smart, well educated, and ready and hungry to make games based on old D&D campaigns or homebrew worlds or simply visions of mashing up 5 different game styles so that we can play an MMO-RTS-Kingdom sim with Mega dungeons under our base with 4 independent waring factions.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:45
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As usual I'm inclined to go slam some rust together and think about how much I can get away with super variable tick rates and non-persistent zone contents and whatnot, but what I kinda wanna do right now is a writeup on Progression versus Acquisition systems and why mixing them is probably okay for PvE but bad for PvP. Short version: Acquiring, as in gear, is not the same as Progressing, as in level up mechanics. Attempting to mix these in a PvP context is where major friction happens. Note how battle royale games are strictly about acquisition while PvE MMOs don't really mix them as much as require progression before acquisition. PvP tends to be the same progression+acquisition target as whatever top-tier raid of a PvE game demands, while Gear/Level Sync systems to make open world PvP more fair is mostly just undercutting the value of both, or maybe in some cases PvP has its own progression and acquisition that feels like a whole extra load of work that might as well be a separate game entirely. This line can get really blurry with like steadily-accumulating-currency-to-gear systems but I think there's a nice basis to knock out a few pages of speculation and case study. Mostly obvious concepts but it's always fun to sit down and organize thoughts.
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Aug 15, 2022 18:12
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Remember when warhammer launched, they had a city invasion system that involved having different wards based on equipped gear and told no one about. I remember the first city major fort / wall part where people died in droves because of not having the first ward and were like WTF
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Aug 15, 2022 19:09
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Kind of late to add to the Rust discussion, but it does have progression in the form of item crafting being gated behind research and having the appropriate workbench tier. You have to either grind scrap to learn things via the tech tree, or get the item itself and research it with the requisite amount of scrap. Scrap is obtained by hitting barrels on the road, salvaging items, and opening chests that are locked behind doors that require keycards and fuses in various monuments. There is a lot of progression in Rust these days, although a lot of it can be skipped depending on if you're playing solo or in a large group. The type of server you play on plays a factor, as well, since blueprints haven't been force-wiped by the developers in a long while, whereas maps have been force-wiped every month consistently.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:15
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Ranzear posted:As usual I'm inclined to go slam some rust together and think about how much I can get away with super variable tick rates and non-persistent zone contents and whatnot Do you mean Rust the programming language? I'm a software engineer as well, and I've been thinking about how the multi-server system is so antiquated and how would I design it. I would really love a single unified open world, where in-game areas are represented by different geographically distributed servers. This huge chunk of the world is in Europe, we get great ping but I can also travel to that far away land that's physically hosted in Singapore with a ton of Asian players. It's extremely challenging to design a system like this, but absolutely possible with current technology.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:21
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Lifroc posted:Do you mean Rust the programming language? I'm a software engineer as well, and I've been thinking about how the multi-server system is so antiquated and how would I design it. I'm imagining the real world version of this and it's giving me the giggles. "Yeah, my wife and I are going to Taiwan this year, it's great to see people but the flight sucks and the ping makes it hard to eat with chopsticks"
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Aug 15, 2022 19:26
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I mean WAR had some major technical flaws, like how there was no real line of sight mechanic. So if you aimed your camera correctly you could fling fire aoes at people on the other side of a city wall. It just got pushed out the door way too early by EA and then people realized that all the promises that drunk guy on streams made weren't actually in the game
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Aug 15, 2022 19:27
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WAR's T1 pvp scene was (is?) still the best pvp of any hotbar mmo in existence. It's also not particularly great, but it's absolutely the best. Second place is FF14's crystalline conflict
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Aug 15, 2022 19:31
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Lifroc posted:Do you mean Rust the programming language? I'm a software engineer as well, and I've been thinking about how the multi-server system is so antiquated and how would I design it. So the business world just had to solve this actully. Every dang country is now saying "Our data must be in our Country" so you now have software written for distributed database's. The real difficulty in all of this is time. Google solved this with some kind of ultra accurate universal clock, not sure if this tech is publicly available though. As for one giant map, or zones, or some combo of both, totally doable as well. Running 3 servers that are kept in sync is no big deal, You only real issues is the amount of data and the fact that your server clusters are going to be in the realm of an Airline or something, not a normal games company server.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:37
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PyRosflam posted:So the business world just had to solve this actully. Every dang country is now saying "Our data must be in our Country" so you now have software written for distributed database's. The real difficulty in all of this is time. Google solved this with some kind of ultra accurate universal clock, not sure if this tech is publicly available though. Sure, but you can start with a single server a-la-Albion and slowly split into multiple over time. Network-wise it isn't even that complicated, all your servers are in a big world-wide WAN, but latency, packet loss and handling network splits requires some top talent, not an outsourced team of junior engineers, that's for sure. I'd love to sit down and design something like this. When we'll finally say gently caress it and start the Goon MMO, message me and I'll be your tech guy.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:44
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Ranzear posted:Progression versus Acquisition systems and why mixing them is probably okay for PvE but bad for PvP. With only a few notable exceptions PVP systems need an element of "Fairness". Fair can be defined in a LOT of ways. - Time Played - Equal Footing (Gear Normalization) - Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock (Hard Counters) - Skill Ranking - Territory or People Management Progression systems are all about gating content with time. At some point everyone reaches the top, thus everyone is equal at the end of progression, these are great in the early days as players see improvements, downside is that PVP becomes totally unfair with progression systems. Acquisition systems are still time gating, but they generally take the cap off the amount of time that can be invested. The only real cap now is the diminishing returns that come from having far more then you need. PVP with an Acquisition system, especially one with full loot, results in a snowball effect that may never unwind till the server goes pop or the group winning fractures from the inside. This system also puts new players at a disadvantage from the moment the server opens unless the time from new player to fully ready to and effective in combat is set to a short amount of time. For an MMO an Acquisition system first gating skills to keep battles grounded, along with strong catchup mechanisms like say skill points are based on how long the server's been open for specialization could result in a workable system for everyone involved, as your keeping fairness in mind, and advanced skills that show up later ensure new players can get on equal footing with those who played from the start. The only way I see an MMO Progression and Acquisition system working is something like Guild wars, or WoW without levels. With skills unlocking over time played, or time the servers been active. All the above leads to one of the other issues with PVP vs MMO. Seasonality. I can bake a lot of the above ideas into the game, Gate abilities and hard counters behind Time or something, but PVP calls for seasonality in most cases. MMOs call for long living worlds and gear inflation. This is really something thats at odds with itself. The more groups and players can dominate the game end game, the more you need seasonality to reset things and start over. You can make things easier by making the world bigger, or expand it as player count grows, or have areas that mutually block owning both at once (say the cops are in the center so you cant really own the right and left half of the map at the same time). The above all still leads to the problem of new players, Any system above the noob will get crushed shortly after joining. Seasons help a TON here for noobs to join at the start.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:22
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Imo the best way to do PVP in an MMO would be something like, of all thing, Call of Duty multiplayer. No gun is fundamentally better than others in CoD, but everyone has their own preference. The starting rifle you get is usually the best one in terms of reliability, since it's usually a very stable weapon that can get kills pretty reliably. But you're also presented with two methods of progression as a player. You have the attachments that you can put on your weapons on one path, which increases your ability to effectively use the weapon, and you have the general ability track that allows you to unlock entirely new weapons. One key thing is that you can effectively build weapons into other weapons. An M4 can have +damage -fire rate add-ons attached to turn it functionally into an AK-47. Sniper rifles can have their scopes removed, and marksman rifles can have scopes added. You have the choice of either pursuing a new gun that does what you want, OR you can master a single gun and gain the ability to do whatever you want with it (within reason). And the guns never lose their ability to shoot shoot bang bang the other guy. You could really do the same thing with rpg mechanics, allowing someone to master their poo poo stick starting sword and allow them to customize (but not necessarily straight upgrade for the most part) their weapons, or try and get new weapons entirely. The issue becomes that you end up with situations where everyone knows that the Axe is the best weapon, because MMO pvp fights are usually *long* and everything then comes down to numbers. Situational bonuses and side grades don't matter for much when you're taking forever to kill each other. That's something that New World got right, PVP was usually fast so long as someone wasn't just heal tanking. And while it sucks to get ganked, the reality of it is that if someone in WoW gets the drop on you and blows their cooldowns knocking your health down then you're already dead because they were prepared and you weren't. It is just a matter if it takes 20 seconds to die or five.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:52
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This is GW2's sPVP and its fantastic. Fun on day one, fun today.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:58
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CuddleCryptid posted:Imo the best way to do PVP in an MMO would be something like, of all thing, Call of Duty multiplayer. Dude, whatever kind of PVP in an MMOFPS works for me. I'm so loving sick of elves and gnomes and staves and mages, I want pew-pew in space, and no, I don't mean Star Wars.
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Aug 15, 2022 21:45
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Lifroc posted:Dude, whatever kind of PVP in an MMOFPS works for me. I'm so loving sick of elves and gnomes and staves and mages, I want pew-pew in space, and no, I don't mean Star Wars. May I interest you in Richard Garriott's Tabula Ras- ok you know what I can't even finish the joke.
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Aug 15, 2022 21:50
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Lifroc posted:Dude, whatever kind of PVP in an MMOFPS works for me. I'm so loving sick of elves and gnomes and staves and mages, I want pew-pew in space, and no, I don't mean Star Wars. Does Planetside 2 work for this for you?
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Aug 15, 2022 22:07
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My main memory of playing WAR was playing a Blackguard and spec'ing the anti-magic specialty.... and still getting deleted by Bright Wizards. To add insult to injury, most Ironbreakers, the Blackguard's mirror class on Order, could roll me pretty easily too. Warhammer Online kinda sucked rear end
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Aug 15, 2022 22:25
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FrostyPox posted:My main memory of playing WAR was playing a Blackguard and spec'ing the anti-magic specialty.... and still getting deleted by Bright Wizards. To add insult to injury, most Ironbreakers, the Blackguard's mirror class on Order, could roll me pretty easily too. Return to Reckoning has done so much balancing I forgot how unbalanced release was.
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Aug 15, 2022 22:43
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Cutedge posted:I mean WAR had some major technical flaws, like how there was no real line of sight mechanic. So if you aimed your camera correctly you could fling fire aoes at people on the other side of a city wall. It just got pushed out the door way too early by EA and then people realized that all the promises that drunk guy on streams made weren't actually in the game The aoe pull didn't have any los checks at all so you never had to do funny camera stuff. Almost certain pbaoes had the same problem at different times. jokes posted:WAR's T1 pvp scene was (is?) still the best pvp of any hotbar mmo in existence. It's also not particularly great, but it's absolutely the best. It is funny because they tried to make a 3 way pvp game late into wars life based off of T1 pvp but still didn't understand map design or what made T1 pvp good.
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Aug 15, 2022 22:49
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PyRosflam posted:So the business world just had to solve this actully. Every dang country is now saying "Our data must be in our Country" so you now have software written for distributed database's. The real difficulty in all of this is time. Google solved this with some kind of ultra accurate universal clock, not sure if this tech is publicly available though. Do you mean UTC time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)? It's a publicly available atomic clock and provides the standard that most time is translated to/from in software.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:01
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FrostyPox posted:My main memory of playing WAR was playing a Blackguard and spec'ing the anti-magic specialty.... and still getting deleted by Bright Wizards. To add insult to injury, most Ironbreakers, the Blackguard's mirror class on Order, could roll me pretty easily too. Groovelord Neato posted:Return to Reckoning has done so much balancing I forgot how unbalanced release was. Yeah they really have. It has even changed since 2020; I feel like the balance is in a pretty decent/good place at the moment. They overtuned Witch Elves recently and it felt like for awhile AoE magic damage was gimped too much but seems to be pretty well balanced again.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:17
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Me looking at a unix time stamp ultra accurate clock
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Aug 15, 2022 23:26
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RoR is a good game when I played it a year ago, but I figured it would die. Glad to see it's still doing thangs-- is it actually active?
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Aug 15, 2022 23:27
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jokes posted:RoR is a good game when I played it a year ago, but I figured it would die. Glad to see it's still doing thangs-- is it actually active? Population maxes at like ~850 players during primetime (EU night is primetime) sort of back to like it was pre-covid & LazyPeon video March 2020. It can get kind of dead US night, sometimes below 300. I've been trying to force myself to play lately even though guild way dead, joining pre-made warbands can be a lot of fun. I want to get best-in-slot gear on my Runepriest and something on Destro (DoK/Choppa/Sorc), I've played long enough at this point 😤.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OPEo9yjkPA
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Aug 15, 2022 23:35
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I wasn't even aware of that game but RoR devs mentioned it in some talk they had with old Mythic devs I think? Looks fun.
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Aug 15, 2022 23:36
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knox posted:I wasn't even aware of that game but RoR devs mentioned it in some talk they had with old Mythic devs I think? Looks fun. It was not fun and died very quickly they misunderstood rvr from the start, saw people loved scenarios, saw people wanted a 3 team game, then made that
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Aug 15, 2022 23:44
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Hell it even had a wiki wowie https://wrathofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Wrath_of_Heroes_Wiki
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Aug 15, 2022 23:47
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LLSix posted:Do you mean UTC time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)? It's a publicly available atomic clock and provides the standard that most time is translated to/from in software. No, this is a far more technical issue: quote:Cloud Spanner provides clients with the strictest concurrency-control guarantees for transactions, which is called external consistency2. Under external consistency, the system behaves as if all transactions were executed sequentially, even though Cloud Spanner actually runs them across multiple servers (and possibly in multiple datacenters) https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-consistency Concurrency is a huge deal, if you can post a transaction to data center A, then post the same transaction to data center B before A updates B then you may as well not make a game because trust me, assholes will race condition that stuff.
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Aug 16, 2022 00:12
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PyRosflam posted:No, this is a far more technical issue: Interesting. Thank you for the link, having the name allowed me to track down the technical nitty gritty. http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf. An average 4ms error bar is certainly much smaller than some ping times I've seen.
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Aug 16, 2022 00:41
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Lifroc posted:This is exactly one thing that's sorely missing in most games and I wouldn't even know how to call it. "In-game and in-lore boundaries"? Don't tell me I can't flag in this noob spot, make it so my player character is nuked from outer orbit as soon as I unsheathe my sword. Coincidentally, emergent gameplay in the context of mmos is almost entirely defined by unplanned pvp, which while memorable, doesn't sit well with a lot of players.
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Aug 16, 2022 05:05
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Freakazoid_ posted:Coincidentally, emergent gameplay in the context of mmos is almost entirely defined by unplanned pvp, which while memorable, doesn't sit well with a lot of players. Let me channel my inner J. Allen Brack: "they think they don't want (PVP), but they do." Emergent behaviour in gaming is what turns a game into a memorable experience, being such a rare and magical occurrence. I already mentioned the Falador Massacre in Runescape. Yes it was a glitch, but still unplanned pvp. People hated getting PK'd because of a bug and losing their hard earned loot, but people loved the memory and talking about it for years later. It's now such a legend that a person like me that has first played Runescape literally a couple years ago knows about and would love to have experienced. Speaking of which, there's a great documentary of that tragic day that's just released: https://youtu.be/_prl1Ohn-Ew Lifroc fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 09:20
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Lifroc posted:This is exactly one thing that's sorely missing in most games and I wouldn't even know how to call it. "In-game and in-lore boundaries"? Don't tell me I can't flag in this noob spot, make it so my player character is nuked from outer orbit as soon as I unsheathe my sword. "Diegetic" gameplay elements are ones that exist for both the player and the player's character, such as space cops. The classic example is an ammo counter for a gun actually existing on the gun model as a digital display instead of a number in the bottom of the player screen.
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