Shadowrun Online - The MMO, What are your thoughts? Options

[Fortune]

[Crimson Jack]

[Kagetenshi]

[Adam]

Back on topic, please - without "gay" as a slur. Thanks.

[Kagetenshi]

[Moonstone Spider]

Hmm, does a MMO really need to be 100% computer driven? I can still see uses for GMs, in fact that could be the most balancing factor of all. The game could be partially controlled by several paid professionals who take on the roles of Lofwyr, Deus, Harlequin, and whatnot. That means the most important NPCs can actually speak rather than being parrots. And it means that a human player just as smart as you, but with an entire SR military at his disposal, can come after you if you tick him off. You might not hesitate to kill somebody if it gives you a minor negative tick on your character. What if you knew that, say, Adam or Ancient History was running as Damian Knight, and might well decide to personally wipe you out because that street-person turned out to be an important Johnson of yours? If you had perhaps one IE for every 400 players I imagine that would be enough for them to personally decide to kick one person's head in a day who has a bad mark on their file, and make things very scary for players who aren't careful. Actually having a half-dozen or so GMs could fix a lot of the storyline problems.

[Crimson Jack]

Another question for Grey Pawn: Will there be multiple points of entry on buildings? Would a team be able to send runners in through the sewers, up the walls, through windows... basically other methods besides the front door? Most MMO architecture features a door as the entry point and that's it. Without multiple entry points, the stress on strategy will be lessened.

When runners get into or around the buildings, how will security and stealth work?

[DrJest]

[KarmaInferno]

[Jrayjoker]

Unless you make the power players as hard to approach/find/contact as they are in the SR universe. How can you get a message to Ehran the Scribe? You can't. Not until you are a world shaker anyway.

[Kagetenshi]

Indeed. Make them elusive, and have there be no way to PM them.

~J

[Jrayjoker]

But let them instigate contact as they deem fit. Arbiters of rules, etc. should be separate from the IE/GD/Power Players IMO. IE/GD/PP should be able to instigate everything from a run to a war (or even host a party at their mansion and invite who they want).

[Moonstone Spider]

Yeah, it wouldn't be hard to keep the identities of the Immortal players secret, how many people here know how to contact Bill Gates?

And yeah, they could seriously drive the plot by having a set of instructions once a month, and this would also allow for player Johnsons more easily. For instance this month SK's trying to mess up Ares' new industrial plant. So Lofwyr, played by some human, seeks out the ten or twelve really skilled players who are playing as Johnson's and have him as a contact. He tells each of them he wouldn't be particularly sad if something bad happened to that new Ares industrial plant and there's X nuyen in it for them for a set of about 50 things Lofwyr would like to see happen (all the standard goodies like computer failure, paydata, kidnappings, and blowing stuff up). These human Johnsons set dozens and dozens of runs up for teams they know of, leading to a whole new storyline. Meanwhile the human playing Damien Knight figures out someting is up (Obviously he already knew from the meeting but pretends not to until a runner betrays his Johnson and tells him, this will happen) and tells his 12 Johnsons he'd like something bad to happen to SK, and wants to hire some muscle to protect his plant with a bonus if these 50 things don't happen. Viola, from two people who are being paid and a few hours work you've got nearly a hundred shadowruns in action, keeping probably 500 players occupied with entirely human driven plots. For the rest of the week Lofwyr and Damien hunt down that moron rigger who drove a panzer down the street, kill the guy who blew up ten buildings for fun, and hire a second set of shadowruns by putting bounties on people who were caught on camera doing bad things, but didn't do something so stupid as to merit having an Immortal hunt them down.

The human element is what's missing from so many games, and what could really make an SR game stand out.

[KarmaInferno]

Well, it also becomes a factor of practicality and cost.

Hiring a couple of folks, especially ones that know their stuff, is not a cheap thing.

This is why most MMOGs do NOT have live NPCs, really.

Not saying it wouldn't be absolutely cool, but it's not exactly a massive return of benefit for the cost and time expendature.


-karma

[Moonstone Spider]

I do see your point and it would add to the cost. But I'm not sure the return on cost wouldn't be pretty massive, it's not brain surgery, you wouldn't have to pay a six figure salary for somebody to be a Dragon (Unless somebody hires Master Shake). Given an assumption of 5000 paying customers each throwing 20 dollars a month in that's 100,000 dollars in revenue each month. While I realize a heck of a lot of cash is going to be flowing into artists, programmers, and servers, there should be room in there for a half-dozen guys getting a few hundred a month for playing the godlike NPCs, particularly if, by making the game "Absolutely cool" they attract an extra thousand paying customers and generate another 20,000 revenue. Somebody who knows more than me about the industry would have to do real math to figure out the cost benefit beyond my guesswork, though.

[Kagetenshi]

I can tell you right off that spending the time and effort to play the godlike NPCs properly will take more than "a few hundred a month".

~J

[paul_HArkonen]

Not only would it be interesting for the people who have joined the game already, it would get to be one of those "ground breaking features" that they could put on the back of the box. "Quests (runs), planned out and created by actual human beings, who react to your failures and successes." Or something like that.

I like the idea, and personally, I would think that things like that are exactly what could make something a best seller, rather than just use what's been done before, you do something new and inovative. I would think a company would be able to see the advantage of that.

[DrJest]

The Live NPC's wouldn't be on 24/7 anyway; more present for the purposes of planned events. Heck, hire four people to do monthly live-organised runs at different levels and BOOM you're light-years ahead of everyone else (possible exception of EQ1's Stormhammer server, but since they make you fork out something like five times as much moolah for crap event... well, you do the math :) )

[KarmaInferno]

[Crimson Jack]

[Kagetenshi]

A combination? Sometimes an uber-NPC is in a certain location, sometimes a string of missions leads to them, and sometimes the game writers come up with a storyline, come up with parameters (Awakened == 1 && rep >= 10 && Essence >= 3 && race != Elf && inJail == 0 && AverageHoursperMonth >= 30) and it will spit out a random player character to focus on. AverageHoursperMonth could keep vital events from focusing on people who aren't going to be there to see them through, while it could be dropped for more one-off or less important events.

~J

[Stumps]

Actually, a real easy way to create an image of random encounter can be done.

Each player character has a random generated long string key identifier made for their character upon the creation of the character.

These characters will act like "blocked group IP addresses" to the NPC's except that instead of being blocked, they will be accepted, while all other key numbers are blocked.

When any player character is in the are of an NPC that has accepted their "group IP address" then they will react to them being in their area as they are programed to do, (eg. running up to the player and talking to them).

To prevent a confused NPC trying to run up to 3 or 5 people at the same time, they will hold the "IP's" in their memory in an ordered fashsion of priority, going to one before the other, and if that "IP" in the area leaves before they get to them, then they move on to the next one available.

If none are available, they sit idel and scan for the PC's with matching "IP's" that they are to "accept".

To add to this, the long key number for the PC could be altered post-creation, as a reaction to their in-game character decisions.
This would change what group of NPC's will react to them, as different sets of NPC's would have a different blanket of number groups to react to.

This would mean that, generically, the more bad things you do, the more "bad" people NPC's would come up to you with offers, and the more "crush bad guys" officers would chase you.

[paul_HArkonen]

actually that is an interesting idea.

I'm no computer programmer, or have any real computer knowledge, so this is a question, as well as a suggestion.

Would it be possible to design it so that the NPCs would respond to the "numbers" of runners who have done specific things? Like let's say Joe runner completes an Ares run to blow up a SK building. Could you set it up so that as soon as he finishes that mission he starts getting talked to by, say Ares Johnsons, about doing another job?

Or say for example Joe runner finishes his Ares run and after that his next 3 out of 4 run offers come from Ares, because he did such a good job. Or if he failed, but survived he get's no more offers from Ares, instead they come from Novatech, (or any other AAA corp).

How feasable, and how much server space/game stoping lag would that take up?

[Kagetenshi]

It would take up that much more server power/database space, but I don't see that it's unfeasible.

~J

[paul_HArkonen]

then the question for those who tend to play MMOs is would it make you want to play the game. Would "NPCs that actually react to your actions, your successes and failures" make people buy the game?