I'll bite.
Game Theory: Leaderboards
In almost all MMORPGs from Everquest to WOW to Rift, players strive to gain the best gear in the game as most a status of power and notoriety. They enjoy showing it off and bragging about their conquests. The game quickly becomes about what is the best gear in the game and how do I get it. Once that goal is achieved, player time and commitment to logging in and participating in the community often wanes until the next content update is in place. This has almost always been the case with World of Warcraft where players often have to wait six months to a year for ways to compete again.
DraeganMMO wants to take gear acquisition away as the primary focus of the game and install Leaderboards as the primary focus of fame and glory. We want players to constantly be checking the Leaderboards to see how they measure up or see if they have cracked the top 10, 20 etc. Leaderboards are dynamically updated in real time so that the newest piece of gear or the aftermath of the latest PVP battle or skirmish is reflected in the score.
There will be two different leaderboards: TopTwenty and WarHeroes. The TopTwenty is a overall score for your character that is primarily focused on your "gear score" (similar to that of World of Warcraft), your stats, hitpoints, and your killpoint score and bonus points if you're on the WarHeroes list. Essentially it is a score for your character and it's overall power level. It is highly dependent on your gear, and losing gear always negatively reflects your status. WarHeroes is a list of the top twenty PVPers on the server. This list is much easier to calculate. Every time you kill a player you gain points.
The amount of points gained and lost in battle is determined by level difference, rank difference, and how fresh a target the player is. The higher your rank the more points you lose if you are defeated. If you kill a lower level person you gain hardly any points. The more often you kill a single player without killing any other players in between the less points you get each time. WarHero points will also deteriorate after a period of time if you are not participating in PVP.
Account inactivity will also remove you from any Leaderboards.
The full ranking list will not be available but your ranking and score will be. Only those who make the top twenty will be shown to the public, however you will be told if you are the 21st or the 100th and what your score is.
The number of twenty people per Leaderboard is subject to change.
OK. So, I dig the idea of having leaderboards. But, I would suggest that the leaderboards be based on guilds or at least emphasize the guild involved. The reason I say this is because I believe there's more benefit in giving a community street cred, rather than to individuals. Why?
1. This takes the strain off individual performance and gives the underachievers a share of the pie, if they share a guild tag with the overachievers. The individual who performs best will still be at the top of the chart, but his guild will also share in his glory and therefore the underachievers will also share in the glory.
2. If you want to focus on community, is it wise to cast all the spotlight on individuals? The system you describe sounds a lot like Call of Duty. There's not a game out there with less community, however, if you made it a hybrid that reflected a lot of the WoW raid leaderboards before Battle.net, where you could see how well each guild stacked up against each other on a server, I think it would help build more community.
The familiarity ladder would work like: Factions > Guilds > Individuals. Effectively giving people an additional outlet to show pride in, fight for, and trash talk. All the best lulz happen between guilds.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Theory: World Design, Server Size, Factions and Community Creation
Most games today focus on creating expansive worlds with thousands of players and often advertise that fact. DraeganMMO wants to take the opposite approach and create a smaller world with hundreds of players. We want to create an environment where you are forced to interact with other players. We define interaction as a PVP encounter or simply just noticing another player around you. We think this will help create a gaming environment where you see people more often and when you do see that person, you remember their name or at least recognize it. For a real world analogy, think small town vs. large city. The more personal things are, the more likely you are to play more and stick around.
So, I agree that what makes MMO's great is the sense of community, but I don't think limiting the amount of people to 100 per server is the way to do it. I mean, think about how empty the server would be on off-peak hours. You need a high population to create the feeling of a living environment. Instead of minimizing server size, I think the answer is to figure out ways to funnel the 100 people you're referencing, into content together over the course of time. Inevitably, there's always people in MMO's who play the same way we do the only problem being that it's hard to find them and even once we find them, figuring out that we would enjoy playing together.
Take WoW's dungeon finder for example, how much better would it be if the dungeon finder tried to group you with the same people over and over again. Instead of grouping with randomplayerXY746 for dungeons, what if the dungeon finder prioritized people you'd completed dungeons with before. Basing the priority a player got on the success rate of your dungeon.
Complete DungeonA with PlayerZ 1x and he immediately has priority over other players in the dungeon finder you haven't completed a dungeon with. Complete DungeonA with PlayerZ twice and he now has a higher priority over players you've only completed 1 dungeon with. Essentially, you make it easier to get groups to do dungeons by increasing the pool, while prioritizing players you're familiar with. This way you can have your cake and eat it too; create content that is more easily accessible, while also creating a sense of familiarity with the community.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: Server Size
Because we are attempting to make servers feel more small town, we have to limit the amount of players allowed to play at a single time. We will not limit character creation on a server because we want players to be able to play with friends. We would like to start off with a faction cap of 50-100 players at first. That gives up to 300 players max at any given time in the world. This number is subject to change.
With any hard-coded faction game you run into the problems with over and under population, faction dominance and other population issues. Here are some possible solutions to that.
If any faction is not represented on the TopTwenty or WarHeroes leaderboard for a period of seven days (subject to change) anyone of the same faction from another server may freely transfer at any time to that dominated server. Transfers will stay open until a certain percentage of the leaderboards have been taken over by that under represented faction. The theory is that if one faction is dominating a server then they may be richly geared and provide incentive for moving players. However to prevent players from hoping server to server searching for rich targets, there will be transfer penalties to gear, score, experience and restrictions to how often you are able to move. Server transfer for a fee might also be available.
I think people saw the problem with this type of system in GuildWars2. When you have the opportunity to abandon ship at any given opportunity, people will always take a "grass is greener" approach over building community. I think a cool solution would be to force guilds into a bid system if they want to join a new server/faction. Essentially create a server-transfer-queue for guilds that had to be approved by the top 1-3 guilds in each faction. In one way it would add a new political element to the game and it would also ensure that no faction got screwed in the transfer process.
For example, FactionX is sucking it up on ServerA, so the top guild from FactionX goes to the other two factions to discuss a potential server transfer into ServerA/FactionX by GuildDooDoo on ServerB. The other two factions discuss the transfer and demand some sort of tribute in exchange for the approval of GuildDooDoo's server transfer.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: World Design
World size is a major factor when it comes to creating a PVP environment that is both exciting and not frustrating. What we mean by this is that it should be small enough that players always have the opportunity to run into other players, but big enough so that they are not always fighting other players.
There is zero instanced content in DraeganMMO.
I like what you have to say on this topic, I would just like to add that one of the biggest fails WoW achieved on design was the recycling of old zones. I think it is a terrible idea to zone off low/middle/high end content. It creates a ghost-town effect in the lowbie areas shortly after release, when the game is actually in its prime. It also gives low/middle level players a feeling that the game world isn't alive as it actually is.
If WoW had included higher level content alongside that in Duskwood/Westfall or at least created incentive for higher levels to travel there, I think it would've made for a much better experience for lower level players. Given, that if you have higher level players around lower level players, there's going to be griefing. The solution to this is merely to create incentives for other higher level players to prevent it. I think the corpse looting is a pretty good one.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: End Game Play
DraeganMMO wants to eliminate the stale raid/gear treadmill often found in other MMORPGs. We do not want players to hit a brick wall in progression, or get to a point where all they are doing is waiting for the next PVE area to progress their character. Many games have used AA systems or something similar to allow players to continue to advance. This has led to problems where you begin to have power creep where a player must be level X with Y points giving newer players a larger slope to climb as the game ages.
The Remort system is an alternative to that, that solves a lot of the perceived problems. Lets use some arbitrary numbers to give you an example of how it works. DraeganMMO will have 100 levels. The majority of skills and spells will sit at the midpoint of the game, around levels 40-60, however some of the more advanced trees will sit at higher levels to act as a motivation for further leveling. If you are a fresh character, at level 50 you will have an option to "Remort". Remorting costs currency to do.
I like it.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: Game/Skill Mechanics
This section is mostly to describe two skills called Tracking and Tackling. Tracking is a simple ability that players can use to do what the ability says it does, track other players. If a player has been in the area, a player can track that persons name or simple track that faction and the player will see some sort of graphical overlay dictating footsteps or arrows in the direction that player went.
In greater terms of power levels, newer players will always need to feel useful this comes in the form of tackling, which surprisingly enough from the perspective of someone doing this in 1996, was used in EVE as well. All players have the ability to "tackle" someone. This brings a target to the ground where gear plays no part and only base stats are used to calculate damage. This is a great equalizer when it comes to players who have lost gear or are new to the game. You can also train skills that make you more proficient at this if you choose to use a skill slot for it. Certain stats will give you innate abilities to avoid being tackled etc. Levels also take it into account. Super high level players can be taken out if they get caught by a good tackler and a few friends if they are caught alone.
I think tracking is a cool feature, especially for gank/grief prevention of lower levels in zones further away from Home-base. I also think a cool measure of this would be to make lower level characters more difficult to track and higher level characters more easily tracked. I think of it in the same sense that while Hobbits are a weaker race/people, they've got the benefit of being sneakier. In the same way, the more powerful you become, the less you care about covering up your tracks.
Tackling is a cool feature if the lowbie gets caught regardless of the help he gets with tracking.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: Battlegrounds
Randomly throughout the day battlegrounds will be spawned. These are server wide events that all the players that sign up get ported to an instanced area. Once it begins, it's Faction vs. Faction vs. Faction. If you die, you're out. Once there is only one faction left, it turns into last man standing. The last person standing then gets awarded either currency or gear. This gear is pulled out from the world and not randomly generated. You do not lose experience, killpoints or anything with a death in the battleground.
Call me old fashioned but I don't like the idea of being able to port somewhere in a non-instanced world. Instead, a happy medium might be to have some sort of travel mechanism activate in every town that will aid in getting you to the event more quickly. This way you've still got to work your way out of your current situation, but you don't actually have to hoof it all the way to the event.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: Server Tournaments
Once a week, or month, or randomly, whatever works, the top 5 players of the TopTwenty Leaderboard from each server will be able to enter a tournament like the NCAA Bastketball tournament for additional cash prizes. These fights can be 2v2 or 1v1. Which ever works better depending on balance issues.
I like the idea, but tier the events to involve more people. Create guild, group, and individual tiers, so that the top guilds get to duke it out, the best pre-made groups get to duke it out, and the best individuals get to duke it out. This way there's something for everyone while still maintaining winners and losers. You're also increasing the opportunity for trash talk and drama.
Draegan_sl said:
Game Design: Server Styles/Types
There will be multiple server types for players to compete on. Players can choose to play on permanent servers where their characters last forever and they can build up to Remort 9000, Level 100 if they want. These players can not take part in certain Server Tournaments, or tournaments with only similar server types. Other server types will vary the lifetime of your character. Some will wipe once a month, once a year (pick a time period), or create races to certain rating levels (i.e. first person to reach a TopTwenty rating of X). Think ladder races from other games. The motivation here is to create the "fresh server race" feel periodically and at predictable times.
Sometimes having too many options is a bad thing. I think on initial release you should only have 1 type of server and force everyone to play together. Then a couple of months after release advertise the coming of a new server. Talk it up, get people excited about it, and then open it up in month three. This will be something outside of patch notes and game content that players can get excited about. Plus, if your game's sucking, players might hope it's the, "This could turn it around!", server.
If the server is a success after another 3 months, maybe offer another one like it, or if it's a failure, try out another server. I think one of the weirdest parts of MMO's is that dev's never seem to listen to the community in situations like this. They either totally ignore cries for a new server or actually release another server, but then ignore the changes requested by the players.