Gameplay Concept - Infinity MMO

Suggestions
41

I really like the ideas put foward by the OP, its sound like a plausible solution for overcoming the technical limitations a multiplayer online shooter faces.

Also players should not be penalised for loosing a combat, they should instead be rewarded for winning it!
I think a permanently destroyed ship really defeats the purpose of buying one and upgrading it.
It will only make sense if the ship and all its upgrades are fully insured at a negligible cost.

Imagine you would loose all your progress in WoW once you die, it would be a horibble horrible mess.

Combat should be fun and worry-free, otherwise it will not be a big part of the game.

And I also don’t see how hundreds-vs-hundreds of players is going to work in real life, at least not for the majority of people. It would exclude many potential players (customers…), that do not have access to top-speed internet, from enjoying the game.

42

I suppose that the rewards and penalties will and should be based on INovae vision for their game, there are already games that range from hardcore to arcade. Take War Thunder and Eve as an example, on two completely opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to rewarding and penalizing the player and they are both financially successful with a large player base.

43

Of course it is up to INovae, I just wanted to add my two cents to the discussion…

Eve is a bad example I think because it is not really a game that features a lot of combat. This actually supports my argument, because combat in EVE is awful. ^^

I also don’t think not penalising players for loosing makes it arcade gameplay. But it would prevent newbies from having a bad experience, especially when they encounter hardcore players.

44

I really think that is your opinion, if you ever lived and died in null you would have seen a lot of combat, huge and beautiful battles, by some very skilled and dedicated people, on individual, tactical and strategic levels.

45

Maybe we can agree that combat in EVE is not the center point of the game, I think EVE has other aspects that make it successful, like the economy and the teamplay. :slight_smile:

46

Two ways: 1) You spread large scale battles up over large volumes of space.

  1. You give people who aren’t interested in combat effective ways of avoiding it. That means letting them escape, or see threats in advance and work to not encounter them, rather than letting them be uncaring cannon fodder who couldn’t care less about getting caught because they’ll respawn fully intact.

There’s nothing fun about indifference.

2 Likes
47

Fair argument, but do you really want to make risk analysis before engaging in one of the core elements of the gameplay?
I think it really depends on how much the game will focus on the combat aspect. I agree with you, If the combat plays a siderole, then penalties for destroyed ships are sensible. But if the selling point is “a mmo with huge starwars-like battles in space” then I think it doesn’t make sense.
I’m confident though that they will find the right balance in this matter.

Even if your ships don’t get destroyed, you will still need to buy better ones. Its just the difference between saving up to buy the same old replacement ship or saving up to buy the next better one.

[quote=“Kichae, post:46, topic:508”]
That’s not a fair comparison. Instead, imagine you lost your armour and/or weapons upon death in WoW. There are lots of games that do that.
.[/quote]
But it wouldn’t work in WoW…

This only works if they stay far apart, If they come closer to each other (say in a territory defense scenario) it all falls apart.

48

If epic space battles are supposed to be the core gameplay element of a infinity MMO it would be strange to penalise the player for loosing a simple fight.

Ignoring all the arguments for or against it, we can simply look at a game that offers this kind of gameplay: Elite Dangerous

There is almost zero PVP in Elite Dangerous, and people don’t even do PVE battles. The game largely consists of hauling stuff from one station to the other. Elite Dangerous offers almost no replay value, and destroyable and barely upgradable ships are the main reason. There is no progression system in the game.

A successful game has to have a system that constantly rewards its players. Just take a look at the dungeons in the current WOW expansion. Nobody does dungeons anymore because there is no reward in doing it.

Elite Dangerous failed to attract a larger audience and it looks like this game is going to be a flop. I would hate to see that happen to a infinity MMO.

49

I think there can be a middle ground …

and that middle ground isn’t in between “loose everything” and “instant respawn” …

It is to allow players to relocate the risk assertion to players that like to do risk assertion … comparable to a military structure. Sure soldiers do risk assertion but space pilots do too, of course they don’t fly head on onto the big battleship.

What I try to propose is this:
Let commanders/admirals/generals whatever decide where to deploy their real losable smaller spaceships that are in turn piloted by simple pilots who just want to get into a fight.
Sure this bring the problem of ownership but who knows how that concept is preserved in a futuristic society :wink:

There are loads of games that do that to an extend. Mostly round based and on a resource like tickets or lives or number of kills required. Everyone in that fight consumes or produces those resources and together they work to win the match. Someone flying head on alone into the enemy cloud surely doesn’t help but those people exist in every game.

Now concerning a single ship. There I have to agree with Kichae, not that I disagree with his points at all, that allowing evasion or intermediate steps of loosing like a trade or damage would be a good idea.

Also I support that smaller ships should be relatively more cheaper and less tough then bigger ones. That’s one thing I think EVE got right. The scaling for ship cost.

50

This is why I like the original concept that playbenni posted. Because you still have some stakes (The space-station and the territory it controls) while avoiding serious setbacks that ruin your experience!

51

There are more interesting solutions to this problem than eliminating loss, though. Not having played Elite Dangerous, I can’t comment on how well balanced loss mechanics are, but I have played EVE, where they’re FUBAR.

Trust me, I’m not lobbying for EVE style loss. Firstly, you can lose XP in EVE, which is ridiculous. Forgetting skills via death is cringe-worthy, and is much more in line with TARS WoW example than anything we should see in Infinity (assuming the plan is still to avoid RPG skills elements). There’s no fun to be had bowling with the gutter bumpers on, though. Not past the age of 5. It makes combat meaningless outside of large scale conflicts.

Again, giving players the means to effectively avoid combat would go a lot farther. For one, it will keep players who don’t want to be involved in combat out of combat.

Another possibility is to make ships cheap. This is EVE’s big problem: Their ships are made of paper mache and cost a fortune. Things that we expect to lose shouldn’t bankrupt the player when those things are lost.

Alternatively, make ships durable. Make them durable to the point where destroying them isn’t worth an attacker’s time.

Have a meaningful insurance program. One that covers more than just a ship’s hull.

Or… a thousand other more interesting or nuanced options than just eliminating economic gameplay.

4 Likes
52

After then years they now have done away with that … except for T3 skills that are bound to the ship.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-rhea

The skill point loss incurred on clone death has been removed (exception being T3 cruiser death penalty) along with the requirement to keep your clone up to date with a relevant clone grade

53

Side note: No XP, ever, please. It’s terrible. Reputation, wealth, and player skill is enough.

1 Like
54

Hold on a sec

Because the game is new, it’s fairly challenging to play, and there’s not really anything special about PvP

This is completely untrue. Bounty hunting is a profitable venture in Elite. Hell, there’s already been capship battles. Those aren’t for the faint-hearted.

No, it consists of Combat, Trade, and Exploration. You know, the three things you get ranked on.

I don’t think so. The insurance on the ships makes ship loss fairly trivial provided you keep some money in reserve, but still punishing enough to encourage you not to be reckless.

There is, it’s just not especially well defined at the moment. You have the rankings for Combat, Trade, and Exploration. There’s also the faction ranking and relations, though again not well defined at the moment.

I don’t agree. This argument only really fits MMO games, and even then primarily RPGs. Even then, the best games set players a challenge, and reward them based on how well they complete it, or if they complete it. Being rewarded for completing trivial actions devalues the actual reward, which makes the overall experience less rewarding.

The same goes for a game like Infinity (or Elite). If you can defeat an enemy simply by throwing a infinite number of ships at it until it goes boom, it devalues the accomplishment. If that enemy ship is a player, and then simply respawns, then you’ve not really hurt your enemy. You’re now playing an arcade game where actual accomplishment is secondary to the action, which doesn’t fit the type of game Infinity or Elite want to be.
This is even more true if we’re looking for corp vs corp pitched battles in Infinity. There has to be some risk involved in taking part in war, because otherwise there’s no way you can affect your enemy. Large battles wouldn’t happen, because they’d have no impact. Corps would send most of their fleet off mining instead to easier build the biggest shinies for “trophy battles”.

Realistic PvP and corp vs corp requires risk assessment to make the outcome worthwhile.

Elite has been out less than a month. The updates have been slow because of the holidays. They’re still working on the game, and I’d expect it to be looking a lot more solid by summer. Every MMO needs some time in the wild until it settles in.

2 Likes
55

just one point topper, i agree with the rest and the overall argument about risk. I’ve lived it in countless open world pvp no safezone games, but i gotta rant about ED.

PVP doesnt happen in ED because of terrible economic/ship tier balance, the existence of solo but online play within the same save, there never being a reason to do it (if your risking cargo just play in solo-online mode) , and it being unprofitable despite pvp with npcs nearly always being profitable. It is NOT challenging to play (slap some gimbals on you don’t even need to aim! and the combat is slow paced enough for people to get into too).

ED also has an absurdly flawed overall economic design, ship prices have been ass pulled and have no real relation to their performance characteristics or anything at all. for example, an anconda will die easily to 6 sidewinders, hell 20 would instapop it… but you can purchase 4600 sidewinders with the money for a bare anaconda(last i checked. They keep inflating the price of the anaconda, or at least they did every beta update). And thats just a bare anaconda, a fully kitted sidewinder and fully kitted conda compared would likely inflate that number by a factor of 10. Like, as a whole it just doesn’t make sense for these things to exist, it’s not even remotely possible for it to be profitable to play that ship. And despite that scaling, bounties barely scale in kind. it’s not like eve either, where a battleship may cost a factor of 1000 but will vital because of fleet composition and roles and general balance. an anaconda, dare i say it, has similar maneuvering characteristics to a sidewinder, in ED. hell it’s only 40m/s slower. The anaconda is supposed to eventually be a big multi player crewed ship, or something.

56

I play Elite Dangerous and I am not the only one who thinks this game is utterly boring and offers no replay value. The threads are full of people complaining. Its a fact that Elite Dangerous is a complete flop, so there is no point in arguing about it.

You can find tons of articles on the internet about game design that tell you otherwise. Players must be constantly rewarded while avoiding punishment for failures. Loosing progress is a very hard punishment and makes a game very unattractive to a large audience.

Nobody wants battles without consequences, and I never suggested that. I outlined my ideas in the original post, my suggestion was “fights for territory” by building destroyable space stations that give you control over parts of the universe and guarantee your corporation access to valuable ressources. To avoid punishing players on a personal level I came up with an elaborate respawn system that advoids destroyed ships, while ensuing that “epic space battles” not only last two minutes.

Elite has been in the works for several years, I don’t believe that the developers can come up with significant changes that will attract more players in the near future. This game is already dead, it’s a non-starter.

57

LMFAO, if anything ED was a success even before it was released. If you really wanna get into this, please produce some solid evidence like financial statistics, statistical graphs on player numbers and some critique from an established analyst in the gaming industry. Just because there are people bitching on the forums doesn’t make what they say the truth or reality.

58

i wanted to address your post too playbenni but you replied too fast for an edit so ill just put it here.

Elite dangerous doesn’t really offer proper risk based gameplay, as explained in my previous post it’s economy is screwy to the extreme, the most cost effecient ships are also kinda great at killing everything, so pvp is counter to well, progression. for the same reason if you go to the nearest anarchy system to the starter system you see people deathmatching it out in the free sidewinders.

lets not turn this into an argument about elite dangerous, it’s not really relevant because it does risk based gameplay so poorly so isnt a great example for why risk is a bad thing in games. It is a success imo, but only because it has no competition and is the first of the big “next gen space games” in the pipe including star citizen, no mans sky and of course vapo- i mean infinity. and limit theory. and all that good stuff. shit, im doing it again.

59

I think this video sums up ED pretty good (in a humorous way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZeO-4F45WM :smile:

1 Like
60

I have to disagree with you.
Reputation is quite similar to XP … except that it can be multiplied over different factions, whereas XP is centerd on your character.


I think there are different areas to consider here, but everyone’s has mixed up everything.

There is the gameplay, and there are economics. Inside the gameplay, there is the PvP and the PvE. All do interact together but not for the same reasons.
For a given skill, you might want to nerf it for the PvP and keep it “as it is” for PvE. This is though the easiest separation.

Consider now the economics: if we have a possible infinite growth of ressources (which is unfortunately the basis of all MMO), there must be a sink somewhere. It can be the price of ship buildings, or the cost to enter the arena with a given ship, etc. One of the main question to ask itself is: do we want the economics (if there is) in or out of the PvP? If yes, can it be of its own? I’m thinking here of WoW, where usually all PvP gears are won through PvP-specific money, therefore you can separate the influence of “global game economy” on only PvE, or at least make it much smaller for PvP.


So when we talk about PvP, the risks and rewards doesn’t have to involve building again your ship (or XP !) from scratch. The risk can be as simple as dying = potential loss of station + respawn time.
Or some other ideas as @Kichae mentionned earlier :wink:

Depends on what kind of game you’re making and for who is it aimed for.
Gamers will more often accept not to have immediate rewards continously (beating hard boss / grinding / …), whereas “casual” games won’t exactly have the time / the patience for it.

Want an example? Let’s take the Diablo system: it’s basically set on the “hope” of getting a better loot than your actual at some point of the game, but you have absolutely no idea when or where… so you keep farming for that :smile: And yes, it is successful game.


The only piece of advice I’d give the devs is the following: if they plan to have some kind of economy, have a very thorough thinking of defining it and making it as balanced as possible (and by defining also what “balance” means ^^).