As many know I am working on a sandbox with no NPCs. This implicitly means that you cannot get quests from npcs.

I am going to give a strategic overview of the game to provide a setting for the topic.

Essentially creatures enter the world from one way planar gates. They cannot be destroyed. For every player that spawns into the world a tear either forms or grows. The goal of these creatures is to eliminate the players. All of them. It might be helpful to conceive of this as a giant RTS game designed to last many years, probably 5-10.

Players are given the task of prevailing against this endless army of monsters. The players can never win the game.

The game actually consists of an infinite set of worlds that possess different themes and magic focuses. Some worlds may contain Words of Power that are more effective at particular aspects. There may be worlds with greater mana efficiency, worlds that have more powerful spells with a specific element, worlds that have better enchantments and so forth. Further there are special alloys of metals and special potions which can only be made with the produce of multiple worlds and which are more powerful than can be created with the materials of just one world. In time with their magic focus the crafting materials of a world may offer intrinsic bonuses like resistance to elemental damage, a bonus to enchantments of a given elemental type, or some other bonus particular to that place. The risk associated with trying to create a society across worlds is that when a player travels to a new world for the first time this will create a rift there, but will not change the rift growth or formation from his spawning in the previous worlds. More powerful player resources but also more creatures to deal with. Further some worlds will possess more powerful creatures in general as well as higher quality resources.

In worlds where the monsters successfully remove all the remnants of human presence they will attempt to form gates to other human settled worlds. This will produce a small increase in the powerful monsters in a given world. The entirety of the monsters in the world will not travel to the other world unless humans begin to push back against the monster already there. Each world has a "threat" level and if that level starts to drop significantly than lost worlds will put more power through their gate.

Although the forces of the enemy grow in power over time and as more players join the fight it is theoretically possible for players to subdue the tears in the world. They could beat back the demon armies and then contain the tears. Players have the option to seal a tear in multiple ways. Players may either create a container to hold an enchantment which will prevent creatures from breaking through which has to be maintained, as with all enchantments by a supply of mana, attempt to physically contain a tear by producing defensive structures and/or maintaining a player presence to kill of anything that comes out, or they may have a player cast a life gift ritual seal the tear.

The last choice functions similarly to life gift rituals discussed in a previous thread. This will seal the gate instantly for a given amount of time. This seal cannot be broken but must run out. It cannot be extended in anyway excepting another ritual. This method has value because the seal cannot be broken, does not need a charge, and can be applied instantly. Because player proximity increases instability and allows increased output from a given tear while large groups of humans are in proximity this allows a tear to be sealed quickly to prevent these reinforcements. Other methods will require players to deal with high output when creating a seal.

Enchantment based seals take some time to formulate and deploy. Physical seals may avoid the instability if they are built far enough back, but will then require more construction.

In general there is enough give so that players would have to seriously fuck up to "lose" the game but if they played really really poorly it might result in a universe restart.

This post is a general script on how the environment will scale to take down players and how really large scale player decisions, such as gating to a new world or abandoning one are handled.

The system cannot account perfectly for poor play by the userbase however. I am still deciding whether I should use the universe restart system or have a dev capability to lower the power of the environment if players are doing poorly. There are some built in counter systems if monsters start to dominate too greatly but I don't want players to feel like they can play really badly and get away with it due to those systems.

Some of the player controlled counters exist as life gift rituals which can do things like smash large creature armies at the cost of permadeath, seal tears for a period of time without altering the "threat" level, or block off the gates from lost worlds permanently, essentially making them cease to exist. I wanted to include tools like this to prevent the need for me to interfere. Players who cast life gift rituals will lose all advancement but will spawn a new character with special bonuses and confer a lesser bonus on players who were in proximity. These vary based on the player's personal power level and the nature of the ritual.

Anyways, do you think you would be interested in games with this type of extensive PvE system? The game has no PvE to account for the various otherwise unbalanced game systems like magic and endless crafting and so forth.

Compared to the other ways that I have seen your proposed game described, I find this incredibly appealing. I like the idea of an MMO that can end (in this case, only in defeat) and I like the idea of an MMO where everyone is working together for the same cause.

This is just my opinion, but I think it would work a little better as a game that must eventually be lost, as the difficulty just continues to scale up with time. I'd rather play a game where the threat of losing everything looms large. Otherwise you run the risk of creating an atmosphere where players are just doing "daily chores" to prevent the monsters from gaining ground. It'd be more intense to know that even your victories are simply buying a little time, and defeats are setbacks that you can never afford. If you do go this route, I think the "hands off" approach would be best, and that seems to be what you're leaning towards. If the players are doing poorly, you have to let them get beaten. Patch in some difficulty adjustments during the reset but do whatever you can to avoid changing the rules mid-game.

You should carefully consider whether it's wise to allow a permadeath sacrifice to perform a ritual. I say this because inevitably you will have people claim that their permadeath was unintentional. Whether they say it was done maliciously (hackers, ex-guildie) or accidentally (you said it "can be applied instantly", right?), they're going to expect to have the character restored. This poses a huge problem because malicious and accidental deletions DO occur, and no game company gets away with refusing to restore characters that truly were maliciously or accidentally deleted. And yet you cannot possibly afford to reduce the gravity of a permadeath sacrifice by making even a single exception.

The mechanics of the game make griefing the entire world fairly easy to do. Just by existing and not doing anything, you're hurting everyone who wants to do well—even moreso if you deliberately visit as many worlds as possible. I don't know of a good solution for this other than...

Scale back the scope of the game so that it's no longer Massive. Design the game so that it's a few dozen players defending the world for a few days or weeks, rather than aiming for a Massive population defending the world for 5-10 years. This should make it profoundly easier to balance the monster onslaught vs. the players' defenses. It'll also be much easier for players to experience a game where everyone's truly on the same page and nobody's world-hopping to ruin the game for everyone. And even aside from those points, I think this kind of game would just work better as a smallish universe where players all know each other a little and each person feels like they have a real impact on the battles as well as the war.

I realize that where I ended up is pretty far from where you started, but I hope these observations have been useful.

Originally posted by Disdena

Compared to the other ways that I have seen your proposed game described, I find this incredibly appealing. I like the idea of an MMO that can end (in this case, only in defeat) and I like the idea of an MMO where everyone is working together for the same cause.

This is just my opinion, but I think it would work a little better as a game that must eventually be lost, as the difficulty just continues to scale up with time. I'd rather play a game where the threat of losing everything looms large. Otherwise you run the risk of creating an atmosphere where players are just doing "daily chores" to prevent the monsters from gaining ground. It'd be more intense to know that even your victories are simply buying a little time, and defeats are setbacks that you can never afford. If you do go this route, I think the "hands off" approach would be best, and that seems to be what you're leaning towards. If the players are doing poorly, you have to let them get beaten. Patch in some difficulty adjustments during the reset but do whatever you can to avoid changing the rules mid-game.

You should carefully consider whether it's wise to allow a permadeath sacrifice to perform a ritual. I say this because inevitably you will have people claim that their permadeath was unintentional. Whether they say it was done maliciously (hackers, ex-guildie) or accidentally (you said it "can be applied instantly", right?), they're going to expect to have the character restored. This poses a huge problem because malicious and accidental deletions DO occur, and no game company gets away with refusing to restore characters that truly were maliciously or accidentally deleted. And yet you cannot possibly afford to reduce the gravity of a permadeath sacrifice by making even a single exception.

The mechanics of the game make griefing the entire world fairly easy to do. Just by existing and not doing anything, you're hurting everyone who wants to do well—even moreso if you deliberately visit as many worlds as possible. I don't know of a good solution for this other than...

Scale back the scope of the game so that it's no longer Massive. Design the game so that it's a few dozen players defending the world for a few days or weeks, rather than aiming for a Massive population defending the world for 5-10 years. This should make it profoundly easier to balance the monster onslaught vs. the players' defenses. It'll also be much easier for players to experience a game where everyone's truly on the same page and nobody's world-hopping to ruin the game for everyone. And even aside from those points, I think this kind of game would just work better as a smallish universe where players all know each other a little and each person feels like they have a real impact on the battles as well as the war.

I realize that where I ended up is pretty far from where you started, but I hope these observations have been useful.

This isn't any different from my other descriptions of the game, its just a more large scale one. Macro as opposed to the micro aspects and features and stuff. You can't just jump worlds, players have to construct a 2-way gate. Its not the largest undertaking you are allowed but its pretty serious and requires the help of some mages at least. Similarly, even if 1% of the population managed to get to 100 worlds each it would have only the most minimal effect on the game.

I made sure to work out as many possible ways to grief as I could across all the scales of the game because even in a coop PvE only game people can be assholes. I actually used the large scale to make it impossible for small groups to wreck the game.

Regarding accidental deaths, its not that easy. You have to make several choices to do the ritual. The ritual can only be performed by an online controlling player, it can only be activated under special circumstances and not every player is even capable of using a ritual. Its "learned" in a similar fashion to other magic.

The game will be lost eventually just because the game is relentless and people have to do other things, get bored, lose internet, die w/e. Rifts never shrink ever or go away, so as many people quit the game the danger builds up.

I am glad you posted some thoughts, I was thinking that given all the time that passed I might not get even one.