Galen Shannow, on 29 November 2011 - 07:04 AM, said:
For a flash in the pan it seems pretty damn successful.
Look , as someone put it, WoT is nothing more than counter-tank-strike with some mmorpg elements (including grind) thrown in. But you know what? Counter Strike was, is!, a damn popular game. I've spent many a night playing it over the last decade. My wish as is one of the major themes of this thread was that there was a point to it all. (sidenote: Why one of these FPS games hasn't introduced a strategic overlay to their game is beyond me).
However if you want a persistent world where you can make real strategic decisions and there are real winners and losers you are going to come up against a big problem.......people. Sounds funny right? But trying to balance winning/losing vs playing a game on the internet is damn difficult. I can tell you from experience in playing ww2ol that people don't like playing 'fair' when they can 'win'. How are you going to balance numbers for instance?
Huntsman, prepare to be really disappointed. A large persistent world will be too difficult on many levels. One, technology. You want a large persistent world that can hold 1000+ players, all with ability to receive FPS like frame rates and lag? Not going to happen. ww2ol does it and the graphics suck for it. Maybe a larger company with better funding could pull it off but why would they bother? Secondly comes the balance issues, how do you even the sides, how do you make sure one side doesn't just zerg rush an empty part of the map? How do you balance timezones?
A large persistent map is a great idea, just too difficult to implement.
I think a strategic overlay, with instanced battles will be just fine. But make the battles different. Different number of participants (some 4 vs 4, some 10 vs 10 and maybe some big 32 vs 32)...different types of battles , different levels of mecha (so it doesn't devolve to assault vs assault)....
Now the 100 million dollar question...who then makes the strategic decisions?
Google "Planetside" and Sony online entertainment, aka, soe.
As for the strategic decisions it falls upon the player base. All of what you threw out in your post was covered way back in 2004 at the latest. That is when players were playing the game, so actual planning and development, at least a few years before that. Its all been done before, its just that no one has stepped up to take on making a response to it. The big problem that SOE ran into with Planetside was getting fps players that were used to paying $60 for a game, then playing for free from that point on, to actually cough up $15 a month. Was it worth it? Oh yeah, back in the day when there were a load of players it was far better then anything out there. The game made soe money, it just didn't make them world of warcraft money and they got obsessed with trying to get everquest2 to beat wow, which never happened.
With free to play games, which world of tanks and league of legends has proven to be rather successful, an epic scale game would do very well. Planetside 2 is coming out next year and if they were to just tweak the old game a bit and make it free to play, they will reap the rewards for making an amazing game. The first was amazing and what made it really amazing was that the player base determined so much of what the game was doing as far as where the battles were.
In the post of mine that got eaten, I had mentioned that planetside allowed players that could make the connections, get the reputation, has the plan, and respects the players to create movements of large numbers of players. There were outfits/corps/guilds that could have hundreds of players, and those that had 30, and each had a different capability to bring to the table. Some focused on the main fight and just blobbed it, others looked for targets of opportunity, others sought to harrass the other side behind their own lines. The player base determined where the fight was going to take place, and part of that decision making was done by players that were CR5s, short for Command Rank 5, which meant more years ago. Basically it meant a player had led squads of players for a multitude of hours in order to get the ability to speak "globally" in order to help steer the player base to the best target.
As for who among that group got to direct the player base ended up being kind of a shouting match at times, other times it was a democracy, some just had a great plan that everyone else agreed upon and backed. Sometimes small groups of players started a fight and by talking to their friends in their outfit/guild, and those in other outfits/guilds led larger groups to join in when they heard how much fun a fight was. It was not the best system out there as there were some complete jerks that directed players to do what they wanted for personal gain, causing the team/empire to lose ground to get into a last stand type of fight for the person's amusement. Players would learn over time who was out for themselves, or their guild, and who was looking out for the entire side.
I also disagree that players do not want to have a fair game. Of course there are some problems that one player on one team might think is fair, but the other players on another team see as being an unfair advantage. Thats what the devs are for, they can test out the different units, weapons, and so on to determine if there really is an unfair advantage, or if something is to weak. Planetside had lasher 2.0, lasher 3.0, increases of damage to vehicles while using man portable anti-vehicle weapons, they increased and decreased land mine damage. The list went on and on. People stuck with the game because what was unbalanced today might be balanced down the road.
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