Evizaer wrote:1.) If vertical character advancement lasts no longer than the time it takes the newb to get familiar, I'd say that's an appropriate length
"Appropriate" length is different for everyone. What takes one player a week to learn might take another three months. Most western MMOs probably take the average new player anything from one to three months to progress to a point where they are competitive. In a really complex MMO you probably never stop learning. I hope Perpetuum will be like that, but to get to a competitive level will take a newb about 2 months ito EP, which is pretty fair.
Evizaer wrote:If we're going to endorse "main" characters, I don't think you should even be ALLOWED to have multiple characters
You're taking what I said too far. All I meant by that point was that a mass zerg of newly created alts should not be effective in combat, because it gives corps an easy win button. Encouraging zergs via a game mechanic is a bad thing. I wasn't endorsing "main" characters per se, and I think the restrictions you suggest are completely unecessary. The way it is now works fine.
Evizaer wrote:How does vertical character advancement provide a clearer goal than the mere acquisition of wealth and power?
Because character advancement are methods of achieving greater wealth and power. And because a sandbox game is supposed to be a virtual society as much as a game, and should model the way things work in real life where we need to learn skills in order to perform roles.
Evizaer wrote:Why should I have to do activities that aren't fun in order to get to fun activities?
Again, because a sandbox game is supposed to be a virtual society, and should model the way things work in real life. You have to work to get rewards, and when you've done that the reward is all the sweeter. Secondly, why do you assume all the activities I've named aren't fun? None of them are exciting, but they can all be fun in their own way. I actually enjoy putting up buy and sell trades on the market and trying to make a profit out of it. Out of all the things I named, I like killing mobs best so in order to get NIC that's what I do.
If I don't like the grinding options provided in a game, I won't play it. I don't like quests, so I'm not playing WoW. I don't enjoy killing wisents for gold, so that's one of the reasons I'm not playing Mortal Online. I do enjoy killing mobs in Perpetuum, and that's one of the reasons that prompted me to pre-order.
Evizaer wrote:Why should there EVER be grind, though? Why can't the game be designed to be fun end-to-end (or as close as you can come) instead of requiring you to do repetitive, boring tasks.
Look at single player games. Years of work by large teams go into a game that could last anything from 10 to 80 hours. People play MMOs for thousands of hours...it's unrealistic to expect similar content to be generated for all that time. Having said that, did you check out SWTOR? What do you make of that?
I do think more could be done to make content in MMOs interesting. For instance, PvE dungeons are almost always 1) See goup of stationary mobs 2) Tank pulls group 3) DPS dpses group 3) healer heals 4) Mobs die 5) Go round the corner and repeat with next group of mobs until you get to the boss. I think they should add more puzzles. Some MMOs do this, but after a while even that gets repetitive (e.g. DDO).
But to get back to my original point, in a virtual society not everything can be fun. The whole point of the game is to work for rewards, and you know you are playing the right game when you enjoy the work as well as the reward. That's what I mean about dressing up the grind to make it fun.
Evizaer wrote:I'm saying that people vote with their feet. They would prefer not to be bothered with the ganking and histrionics.
Um. No. Ganking and histrionics make the game interesting and exciting, it's the reason many of us play. Moreover, Perpetuum allows you to avoid this - you don't have to go out of the safe zones if you don't want to, any more than you do in EVE. You don't have to post in the corporation dialogue forums if you don't find that kind of thing interesting.
Evizaer wrote:But this genre has been around for over ten years now and no one has made a game that has truly succeeded on a large scale without turning it into at least a partial themepark/safe zone?
Why does a game need to succeed on a large scale? Why is that an aim? Most sandbox devs very sensibly aim small because they know their genre is a niche one. Prior to WoW, MMOs measured success in terms of hundreds of thousands of subs. Small developers can easily survive and make a profit on these subscriber numbers, so why on earth would they count it a failure just because they can't get millions of subs?
Evizaer wrote:I don't understand your aversion to calling Darkfall a sandbox. It's clearly a sandbox when compared against industry standard games like WoW. It may not be AS sandboxy as Wurm Online or EVE, but that doesn't mean it isn't a sandbox--I guess you could say DFO just has less sand.
I'm trying to make the point that you can't call the sandbox genre broken because DF is broken. It's the other way around. DF is broken because it doesn't do the sandbox properly.
Evizaer wrote:Here I disagree. Stone age tribal societies are nice in the beginning, but for how long is brutal coercion by force as the default a fun way to live in a virtual world?
A stone age society does not imply brutal coercion by force. The simplest tribal societies have egalitarian structures with small group sizes, and if there is one person in charge he tends to lead by consensus and does not posses greater personal wealth than the rest. Many small guilds follow this structure. At the other end of the scale are larger guilds with more stratified hierarchies, where the leadership control and allocate most of the guild's resources. Guilds are microcosms of real world polities and it's funny to see how different nationalities consistently produce the same kinds of structures...like French guilds are so often organised along democratic lines, etc. The main differences between real life and virtual polities is that (a) individual members have a choice as to which guild they join and (b) they are smaller in size. This means that some things that work irl don't work in games and vice versa.
Sorry that was a bit of a digression there. But the point I'm trying to make is that all these little polities need to decide whether to co-operate or conflict with each other, it's like a giant game of prisoner's dilemma, and it involves trade, non-aggression pacts, treaties, alliances, hostilities and war. That's what I thought you meant by "stone age societies" and this is one of the main reasons people are drawn to a game like Perpetuum.
Evizaer wrote:I think we should have better tools for building and maintaining societies in-game
Like what...? I can think of some ways that in game organisations could model rl ones more accurately, but what's there works perfectly adequately for our purposes.
Evizaer wrote:so we can get past hitting one another with rocks as the main way to solve problems.
But "hitting each other with rocks" is one of the main reasons we are here. The more the hitting better.
Evizaer wrote:Of course combat should still remain important, but it should be relegated to specific purposes like outright war, sparring, and fighting criminals/bandits/pirates/rogue AI.
Um...it already is? There are already corps fighting each other out there in the beta islands. Those that don't want to just stay in alpha territory and peaceably build up wealth and mutual love or whatever it is they do with each other.
Evizaer wrote:I don't see how global banking makes a game less of a sandbox.
As mentioned above, a sandbox is a game that sets up a virtual society within a box. A society needs to be defined by the rules and restrictions that govern it. DF is a fantasy world, it should have bankers, traders, trade caravans, bandits and an economy. By choosing to make banking global, Adventurine wiped out any chance of any of these things happening.
Evizaer wrote:"Sandbox" is merely a descriptive term for games that, relative to the industry standard, let you go your own way and forge your own fate. "Sandbox" means notably less directed than average, not "realistic". (At least in common parlance it's used that way.)
There is no agreed definition of sandbox. Despite this I think your definition is wrong. More freedom does not equal sandbox. A sandbox has to have a set of rules that govern it, which either reflect or twist real life rules. A theme park restricts you in a very artificial way by giving you a specific path to follow e.g. you become an assassin by rolling a class with that name that uses daggers, not by joining a secret society and getting contracts to murder other characters.
A sandbox provides many different options which are limited by the rules and the mechanics of the game, in the same way that we are limited in a real life society. Local banking is one of those kinds of limits that enhances game play and creates reasons for players to interact with each other, thus making their gameplay experience more challenging, but also more meaningful.