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

[Kagetenshi]

Just as a similar disclaimer: I am also against a Shadowrun MMORPG, but that could change if someone finds ways to deal with all of the major issues I present or offers a reason why the issue doesn't matter. I don't think anyone will, but regardless of whether or not I am convinced I feel that these issues must be resolved to have a successful game.

Back to the debate: all of the proposed suggestions (1-4, not the points one) have as their fundamental problem that they punish non-PKers as well. More to the point, they don't mitigate the damage that a PKer can do. To rebut the argument that the fact that they'll be paying a not-insubstantial amount to buy the game in the first place and more to play each month will reduce their tendency to screw around like that in advance, I admit that it will cut down slightly on this problem but submit that you can have events where a player's favorite character dies, or they otherwise get annoyed at the game and decide that they don't want to play anymore for whatever reason, but they still have time left on their account and they feel like being asses. Not as many, but even a few incidents can alienate a player base when enforcing strict death.

~J

Edit: disregard, GreyPawn posted whilst I was writing this. More on his response shortly.

[FrostyNSO]

[DrJest]

I'd like to chip in a few City of Heroes inspired approaches to this:

Missions: generated by contacts, which you gain as you progress through the game. Missions, even from the get-go, tell a story, which believe me really decreases the "find the bad guy kill the bad guy" problem. You can gain experience from defeating random villains on the streets, but unless you're in a heavily devoted hunting group the real exp gains are through doing missions. Extend that to SR, and you see that - with few random bad guys on the streets* - most karma comes from completing runs.

*possible exception of the Redmond and Puyallup Barrens, which might operate more like CoH's Hazard Zones - deeply dangerous but potentially rewarding.

Death: In CoH, defeated characters are teleported to the city hospitals. In SR, I could see DocWagon fulfilling a similar purpose. I don't think there should be permanent character death; short and sweet, it would be the death knell of the game. I could see Basic DocWagon being a freebie for every character, representing the normal death penalties; then purchasing higher levels of DocWagon contract would result in (for example) less experience debt per death.

Instanced areas: both indoor and outdoor, areas specific to the mission being undertaken. Almost a necessity I would have said.

Housing: Everquest 2 has player housing, and a booming economy in items for the house. A neat twist is that better items reduce the rent of your house. I think this would be a valid inclusion for SR.

Riggers: I realise that riggers are going to be a problem. I can think of two solutions.

1) Make them essentially a "pet" class. Don't like it, but it would work and be familiar.
2) Switch characters. The rigger buys and outfits a drone, then jumps into it to actually adventure, whilst sitting safely in his house (much like I imagine a decker sitting in his house - or in anywhere the team can break him into to jack in from, see below). "Death" of the Drone causes fatal dumpshock to the rigger, so he doesn't avoid the penalties.

Deckers: As I said, I can see deckers calmly sitting at a distance while their "persona" travels with the party in the cyberspace layer. An interesting twist would be that a decker who jacks in from home and doesn't kill trace programs gets raided, with items in his home destroyed. Again, dumpshock can lead to character "death" to prevent the "remotely invulnerable" problem.

Just some ideas.

[GrinderTheTroll]

[Kagetenshi]

1) I don't like the idea of translating the Matrix to physical space one bit. It makes negligable sense, and isn't what a Decker is.

2) Likewise, you suggest a general analogue of a Rigger. That's not a Rigger. I daresay it is as close to being a Rigger as Anarchy Online is to Shadowrun.

~J

[FrostyNSO]

Higher Doc-Wagon contracts equate to faster response time anybody???

I am just very opposed to a "Get out of Death Free" card in any game.

If this is what ends up happening (as I'm sure it would), it would need to involve the chance of magic loss, or of losing a limb or attribute point.

I don't care if you have a basic doc-wagon contract or a super-platinum (that your clan-mates I'm sure bought you at character creation), there should be some potential penalty for death.

XP-loss is a horrible way to do this in my opinion. If anything, a character who dies and then gets to tell about it later has gained experience. Now don't reward them for dying, but don't make them have to train their etiquette skill back up because they failed a jump.

On a side note: There would need to be a player-driven shadow-economy, and a system that players could contract out runs and such. (effectively giving players the option to set up as fixers) This is an essential part of the universe I would think.

[GreyPawn]

The purpose of risk vs. reward is to add value where value does not exist. It is to assign value to advancement. There are no current MMO models in existence where character death is permanent. The more successful games (like World of Warcraft) actually lessen or remove entirely the penalty of character death.

There are stark differences between pen&paper games, single-player computer games and MMOs. A great many of people who play single-player games that go by the "one death" rule use a quicksave and quickload feature to make certain that their progress isn't rendered utterly futile by a lapse in judgement or inopportune moment of lag. Persistant state worlds, the environment in which an MMO exists, cannot allow for a save and load feature, as the game does not center around one single player, but rather hundreds or thousands. So this is why death has to be as painless as possible in an MMO, but still present an undesirable element.

Now, I'm not advocating that death be a complete carebear festival. It should come with some penalties. Skill-based penalties, a percentage of ¥ to repair one's body, gear/inventory loss or even durability factors in gear.

For example-

Upon death, a character's body falls to the ground after losing a fight in the Redmon Barrens, a non-consentual PvP "zone" for lack of a better word. Everything in their inventory stays on the corpse and is lootable. The player appears on a stretcher in a DogWagon clinic four blocks away, outside of the non-consentual PvP zone. All of his skills and stats are lowered by X%, where X is either a flat rate of detriment (ie- 15%) or scaled based on Karma level. A rate of 625¥ has been deducted from the runner's account for the stay in the clinic. Everything equipped by the runner remains on the runner, but his inventory is gone, dropped on his corpse. The runner comes to at 10% health. A doctor offers to return him to 100% for a nominal fee.

--GreyPawn
--Shadowrun-Online.com

[FrostyNSO]

No way.

I would say that the way attribute, limb, and magic loss should be calculated how they are in the game now.

There should be medical costs associated with how serious a wound you took and then the game should tell you. "Your left arm was mangled beyond repair and you have lost use of it. You can buy a cyber replacement now for this amount, or a clone replacement (from that sample they took when you signed up for Doc-Wagon) for this amount. If you don't have the cash, you get to play without use of your left arm for a while until you can afford it.

Maybe Corporate (extraterritorial) complexes could be exempt from the Doc-Wagon "get outta death free card", just like the game now. They don't respond there.

I don't think there should be any "I'm here in the hospital, but my corpse is in the barrens." lunacy. Doc Wagon should physically pick up the characters. The killers can loot whatever they want between the character's death and when the ambulance or chopper or whatever arrives, but nothing after that.

edit: Oh, and anything equipped is lootable as well, within reason. Perhaps it would take a few seconds to loot a character's worn body armor, but picking up the SMG he was using would be instantaneous.

[Core Dump]

About Permadeath...

Shadowrun HAS to be permadeath. Most of the arguments against PD are shallow and shortsighted. There ARE arguments against PD, not just the ones you see spouted most of the time.

Yes, if you take any MMORPG right now, add PD/Full PvP, it's going to fail. I'm not going to argue about that at all.

However, a carefull planned game with the correct mechanism can make PD so MUCH more. First it can lowers the griefers and gankers tremedously, increase the involment and fun, make success really a success, and failure really a failure. This can be an asset more than anything... if planned and handled carefully.

I'm not gonna start a thread about PD, but I remember when SWG was announced, I convinced half the boards that PD can be used effectively(we had 8-10 threads capped at 200 posts, because after 200 the old boards would crash, hehe), until devs came and told us that no, they had their hands tied and there wouldn't be PD in any way. So long for fan feedback =)

Another thing, Karma must be obtained on OBJECTIVES. Hidden or not. Not just for run finished. For example, if you realized you must kill a scientist working on a cure for aids or whatever, and spare him, you're going to gain Karma, BUT, lower your reputation with the johnson/fixer/corp. You should have done more legwork before you went on board =)

Professionals are going to earn more Karma, but it's going to be harder and harder to maintain professionalism, you'll have to be damn focused and careful about runs you chose, your rep is on the line.

[GreyPawn]

Well, I'm sure a seperate server could be maintained for those players who absolutely must experience a Shadowrun MMO with perma-death, character loss and limb destruction. I'm certain that both players will have alot of fun on it.

--GreyPawn
--Shadowrun-Online.com

[Core Dump]

The problem is that a seperate server defeats the purpose of PD. After extensive research, I'm pretty certain that, to be successful in implementing PD, everyone must be on the same playing field.

Also, designing a PD game is hard, it would be very stupid to just say: "Here, we worked a lot to make the game PD, but here, play on this non-PD server where we rebalanced everything because no one can die". you'd end up with like 5% playing on your PD part, because people won't find the need to play PD. People need to be educated to new things. That's the problem, most innovative games includes a cop-out, which totally defeats the purpose.

Same thing as PvP server having much lower population than PvE servers. Cop-out is not acceptable when you do PD. I'd much rather play a non-PD game than a PD-game with a cop-out.

[Cynic project]

[Core Dump]

What if Doc Wagon can't get to you?
What if you die in Renraku's HQ? You'll magically spawn at your street doc?

Friend will have to carry your body out, then you might have a chance. If you were wiped, well, so long.

What if you were in a elevator with 5 grenades blowing up? (chunky salsa!!) Having your bloodly pulp spawning in a medical clinic isn't really useful, heh

Your scenario can be used the same in a PD setting. It's just that, in some circumstances, you WILL permanently die. It doesn't mean that everytime you get gunned down you're hosed.

How many times characters dies in PnP? They do when they do something stupid, or very dangerous. It's not really fun to play, get in a building, then SNIPER, and you're dead. The GM won't be popular. Same thing in PD.

[Aku]

but thats the problem with pd in an online setting: dumb stuff ( not your fault) happens... you lag around a corner, dont see the Star guy coming around, boom dead.

car comes driving, splat. dead.

MMORPG's have inheirently stupid things happen.

[Core Dump]

But you won't die, you'll probably be brought to Doc Wagon and such. Lag must be a non-issue. In normal cicumstance, you'll have to work hard(clueless excluded) to permanently die. Now, if you want to infiltrate S&K HQ, that's something else. Risk vs Reward. The game must be structured in such a way that PD enhance the risk-reward, not punish the player.

Don't see PD as an addon to current game, where you'd get to 0 HP and then you'd lose your char, that would be pretty stupid. PD is another mechanism of its own.

[Morgannah]

Scalable mission difficulty.

Players can control how "hardcore" they want to play their characters. Rewards would scale to reflect these choices and people that don't necessarily want to go up against a permadeath situation all the frigging time have the option of choosing a slightly easier setting.

I'd never have thought there would be a game to take me away from CoH .. but if this can be done, I might just have to reconsider. :)

[FrostyNSO]

The scalable hardcore is good in that it would give the casual player an avenue to keep up with the bleary-eyed, twig-thin, no-life-outside my monitor, 18-hour-a-day player.

[GreyPawn]

Getting back to basics...as perma-death, player advancement and other such elementary questions have already been answered, what is the general consensus of the idea of a Shadowrun MMO?

Would you play it? Would you not play it? What would lead you to it and what would keep you there?

--GreyPawn
--Shadowrun-Online.com

[Thanos007]

1) It's a MMO. It will be different. How much? Who knows? How much will you except?

2) PD. Sure if you can guarantee no griefers. Good luck on that.

3)Why all the hate'n. Think of the cool things that could be done.

Your deep inside Novatech, waiting for your decker to open the door. (you can't see him or tell what he's doing. all you know is what he tells you and it's all in real time) He tells you he's almost got the location of the door. Just a few more minutes. Then he says "Oh, shit!...." and theres no more coms from you decker. What do you do?

Maybe you split the team up to different parts of the building. After a while you have coms trouble. Breaking up and stuff. Then no coms possible. What now?

You're in you house/vehicle running a few drones when somebody jams your signal and trys to take one!

How exciting is this gathered around a table? How exciting will this be when you are physically separated by hundreds, thousands of miles and don't have to roll play ignorance of what is happening at locations where you are not present?

Thanos

[Kagetenshi]

[FrostyNSO]

[Kagetenshi]

Frankly, I don't see that any of them have been answered, at least not satisfactorily. You've said how you're doing it, I've yet to see how you're going to make it work.

~J

[noneuklid]

You can make death permanent under certain condition if you enable account experience, whereby a certain percentage of experience gained applies to the account in addition to the character who gained it; so, for instance, when one gains 5 karma, 2 of it is also applied to all future new characters that player creates. This means that a permadead character isn't as big a setback as it might otherwise be (although I support making death somewhat forgiving, especially at first). You would lose its history, street cred, and some of the total power, but you wouldn't need to start over from scratch.

This would also make a half-decent method of balancing certain elements; say, for instance, that a player has to permanently spend some of this account karma in order to play a metavariant, or in order to buy certain Edges/Flaws at creation.

Runs would probably have to be instanced branching missions. Finishing a run for a johnson would improve your rep with his corp or organization, and you'd get access to more lucrative missions over time. Alternately, botching missions could kill your cred and maybe even get contracts put out on you/your team. -but there couldn't be any camping or 're-running' missions, because they would usually only be available to the team that got them and only once.

I would suggest that the game run on the premise of "assisted aim," whereby a player has to actually target their weapon, but the character's level of skill providing a balancing factor; so, for instance, a highly unskilled character with a ranged weapon might fire wildly despite the player directly targeting an opponent, while a player of a highly skilled character might not quite lead enough or whatnot, but the character's abilities would compensate (something like the way firing works in most of the Bond console games, where just facing in the general direction of the enemy allows semi-accurate firing but targeting improves this significantly). Actions like "Aim" would occur automatically if the character has a drawn weapon, has one target directly in their line of fire, and isn't doing anything else.

Karma could be awarded by objective, just like it is in the tabletop. Put in arbitrary things, like "+1 Karma if less than X enemies killed." or "+1 Karma if all data found and retrieved." I'd reccomend Charisma-based functions working something like they do in Arcanum, where during interaction, you are given possible responses in a box and select one in order to continue the interaction. The better your Charisma (and to some extent, Intelligence, and relevant Language or Background skills as decided by the scripter), the better your choices. Selecting a target should let you bring up a radial that operates on hotkeys with possible interactions, ranging from such favorites as "shoot in the face" to "ask for #." Intimidation would be just another possible venue of Charisma-based interaction choices, with success determined by skill and rep, much like the tabletop. I don't know that Interrogation could be supported in an MMO, sadly.

Probably one of the hardest aspects of the game to compensate for will be speed boosts. A character with Wired Reflexes 3, four or five Reaction Enhancers, Quickness 12 and Intelligence 8 is pretty damn fast- much faster than a real person could ever be. This is a problem if there is a real person at the controls.

[paul_HArkonen]

First off to answer the question would I play it? I can't give you that answer now. If done well, and in ways that address the concerns/hate that I have for all existing MMOs I would play, but that applies to any game. Just being SR doesn't mean I would play it.

However, that said, SR does have some inherent advantages to becoming an MMO.

1. The rules, as they exist now, are already designed for total character fluidity. You can be anything you want, a warrior (Sam), a support class (decker/rigger), a healer/spellcaster (Mage/Shaman), a charismatic leader (face of somesort), or a behind the scenes cordinator (PC Johnson). You can be a good person in a bad situation, taking runs to help out the week. You could be a master criminal out for the profit only, or anything in between.

2. The enviroment is designed where the sort of Shadow economy must be going on. You can get your weapons from your fixer, or from your fellow PC.

3. SR is already based on missions where just camping gets you dead. Looking for "monsters" to kill gets you dead. You have to be looking for survival and you have to be running missions to survive.


SR has one of the best opportunities for becoming the first MMO that I would be willing to play; however, there are certain things that need to be addressed.

The first is PermaDeath. In my opinion PD must be in an SR game, and should be in any MMO (but that's a different arguement for a different time). Death must be painful, and something to be avioded at all times. I think that an SR game without PD would be a failure, at least to the name of SR.

The second concern is the issue of real time and character speed vs. player speed.
My personal solution to that would be to do something unheard of in MMOs, (at least so far as I know of) Make it turn based. Tell the sam he gets three actions this turn, and the mage he gets only one. Then run the turn, the Sam takes his actions, and the mage takes his one. Then the next turn starts and you repeat. Honestly, I think that the only way to deal with the issue of Player Vs. Character speed is through turn based combat.

But, if anyone has any other solutions/suggestions to deal with either concern I'm open to them those are just my personal, and likely unpopular, opinions.

[Jrayjoker]

Well, if it goes turn based (for combat only?) then it cant be massively multiplayer...