I started my own MMO Game Barons of the Galaxy after distaste with other games

DrDread74

I've played a lot of MMO games like you all here but I've been kind of disgusted with the way MMO games have been designed so I started making my own a couple years ago. Since this is a huge MMO community I value your opinions on what kind of things you like to see in a MMO Game and what are the things that  immediately turn you off?

One of the big things that I revolved my game around was the "Multiplayer" part of MMO. Too often I play MMO games but it feels like I'm playing a single player game with some random internet people here and there. They aren't part of my game, just people to socialize and group with. My game is a sci fi themed game about trading and loosely cooperative events where the other players you are sharing space with in a city can all vote on outcomes and scenarios of how events unfold. Kind of a space opera.

I would love to hear all your opinions on this kind of social interaction

My game can be found at:

http://baronsofthegalaxy.com/

Quizzical

Is this a game that you can just play whenever and reasonably expect to do fine?  Or would you expect to get attacked and have your stuff wiped out while you're sleeping or at work?

Axehilt

Barons of the galaxy?  With skillful play could we become princes of the universe?

Beatnik59

Do you envision that the best players would have to "do it all" in terms of manufacturing, defense, raw materials acquisition, exploration, etc...or do you see specializations form, like one player becoming very efficient at pure military stuff, while another specializes in manufacturing?

FomaldehydeJim

With an appropriately camp outfit, and if I had the power, could I become a Master of the Universe?

Sephiroso

FomaldehydeJim said:

With an appropriately camp outfit, and if I had the power, could I become a Master of the Universe?

No sorry, that title is already taken.

Wizardry

Well you got the rigth idea in multiplayer so in that sense player>player combos no solo combos or maybe one solo combo.

Pet Peeves:Yellow markers over npc heads and any kind of free cheesy xp.

Sephiroso

Wizardry said:

Well you got the rigth idea in multiplayer so in that sense player>player combos no solo combos or maybe one solo combo.

Pet Peeves:Yellow markers over npc heads and any kind of free cheesy xp.

Some kind of marker above npcs heads who has a task for you is better than none at all. Maybe you like clicking/talking to every single npc you come across, but doesn't mean everyone else does or even a sizable amount of people do.

Sovrath

Sephiroso said:

Wizardry said:

Well you got the rigth idea in multiplayer so in that sense player>player combos no solo combos or maybe one solo combo.

Pet Peeves:Yellow markers over npc heads and any kind of free cheesy xp.

Some kind of marker above npcs heads who has a task for you is better than none at all. Maybe you like clicking/talking to every single npc you come across, but doesn't mean everyone else does or even a sizable amount of people do.

I think I disagree.  Though it would be more interesting if npc's had something to say as opposed to short sound bites about nothing but I'm all for not having any markers above heads.

My thought is that the players who want a game that doesn't use such devices are going to have no problems playing such a game. 

Players who don't like it will probably not play such a game. Especially since the game probably has other more "old school" game play. 

I say find a demographic and cater to that demographic.

DrDread74

Quizzical said:

Is this a game that you can just play whenever and reasonably expect to do fine?  Or would you expect to get attacked and have your stuff wiped out while you're sleeping or at work?

I DO NOT like the idea of getting wiped out by some random attacker, it's one of the things that bothers me about Astro Empires, OGame and Eve Online.

For one, it costs a lot of money to attack someone. All your units in the game have an upkeep its what limits you from having an endless armada. You can actually bankrupt yourself if you hold on to too many units or overproduce in your industry. Importantly, the military units upkeep for the few turns they are attacking will go up 10x-100x times for those few turns. It's not worth attacking someone for no reason. Like everything else it needs to be profitable.

Also, if they DO destroy your structures or units, those units automatically will savage for about half what they are worth so you can rebuild them.

I also want to incorporate a "raid" option in the combat system so you can attack freighters or areas where other players have products at a reduced combat value but in exchange your units can pick up a chunk of whatever products you re after during combat. This would allow you to hit a freighter convoy for what they are carrying and leave without destroying everything. This is a big problem in other games where you can only gain by annihilating everything.

The best defense though, are the other players. You can place your Corporate HQ and structures in a city that is already controlled by another player. That players job is to protect the business inside his city because the better his city does the more tax credits he will get. Its only if you operate farther and farther into the frontier do you risk getting pummeled by player pirates. But having your entire game destroyed is a rarity.

DrDread74

Beatnik59 said:

Do you envision that the best players would have to "do it all" in terms of manufacturing, defense, raw materials acquisition, exploration, etc...or do you see specializations form, like one player becoming very efficient at pure military stuff, while another specializes in manufacturing?

You can choose to go either way. You can specialize into one specific industry (via your tech points) and be the "Sugar Baron of Centauri" or spread yourself around. Specializing in one area has obvious advantages but is more volatile. Your industry can get hit with disaster or windfall which can dramatically, although usually temporarily, affect your entire game. You will also have significant voting power and attention if certain events that affect your industry come up.

If you want to go more military then perhaps governing a city is more your thing in the long term. The elected players who run cities, planets and even star systems typically will need to have a large force which is maintained by the money they get from the citys taxes. Combat oriented players will be more involved in the combat oriented events that happen (Monster attacks, pirate invasions).

Most of the things to do are going to be event driven and I plan to balance the military with all the industries when it comes to events.

DrDread74

FomaldehydeJim said:

With an appropriately camp outfit, and if I had the power, could I become a Master of the Universe?

You can become the #1 ranked player of a certain industry or military in your solar system by your own hand "Contraband Kingpin of Centauri", or "Sky Marshall of Sol". There is a title system that gives titles to the top 3-5 players of every industry by city , planet and star system. But Rulers of cities, planets and star system are ELECTED by the other players within them, their voting power corresponds to their industry/military might but anyone, even a noob player, can be elected to be "Star Lord of Rigil". That Star Lord might ask you, the Contraband Kingpin of Centauri for help in a planetary wide event involving Contraband. Go politics

iridescence

Is this a browser game or an actual MMO with a client?

rojoArcueid

since you are not pleased with the direction mmos are taking and decided to fix that by making your own mmo, i assume you have the necessary funding to make a higher quality game than what is out there and good enough to guarantee good business and keep the servers alive?

Otherwise, why would i take the risk with a one-man project instead of getting the quality of a development team with the right funding?

Best of luck to you and your project, but if i were on your shoes i would make a single player game (with coop gameplay through LAN) i can sell and dont have to worry about shutting the game down if its not profitable enough.

EDIT: that is just a personal concern i always have about software development

DrDread74

iridescence said:

Is this a browser game or an actual MMO with a client?

Its a browser game. It's not real time or even 3D, although the graphics and artists I got are pretty good. More of a game you play offline but check in on and make adjustments in response to things that happen.

DrDread74

rojoArcueid said:

since you are not pleased with the direction mmos are taking and decided to fix that by making your own mmo, i assume you have the necessary funding to make a higher quality game than what is out there and good enough to guarantee good business and keep the servers alive?

Otherwise, why would i take the risk with a one-man project instead of getting the quality of a development team with the right funding?

Best of luck to you and your project, but if i were on your shoes i would make a single player game (with coop gameplay through LAN) i can sell and dont have to worry about shutting the game down if its not profitable enough.

EDIT: that is just a personal concern i always have about software development

Your concerns are legitimate. It would be too ambitious to try to make a full fledged PC MMO game by myself. I am a realist!. My real life profession is that of a .Net Web applications and Database developer. So the game I'm making is essentially a website with a database back end, something I've been doing for 15+ years. I've also done a Hall of Fame winning persistent world in Neverwinter Nights back in the 2000s called "World of Torr" by myself. That went well and was a lot of fun.

The game I'm making now is mostly working already and I'm confident I can make the rest come together but I'm keeping the scope small. I'm also doing it while I hold a steady career. If it works out in the small scale then perhaps it will grow and become a real business. I hear Riot and League of Legends started out small too. In the end though, its a labor of love and the money is a close second

Copperfield

your website dont work m8

DrDread74

Copperfield said:

your website dont work m8

I have a couple of people who tell me that, and its usually a problem with there ISP or their computer. I've had my ISP look into it. Are you in the UK by chance?

Quizzical

DrDread74 said:

Quizzical said:

Is this a game that you can just play whenever and reasonably expect to do fine?  Or would you expect to get attacked and have your stuff wiped out while you're sleeping or at work?

I DO NOT like the idea of getting wiped out by some random attacker, it's one of the things that bothers me about Astro Empires, OGame and Eve Online.

For one, it costs a lot of money to attack someone. All your units in the game have an upkeep its what limits you from having an endless armada. You can actually bankrupt yourself if you hold on to too many units or overproduce in your industry. Importantly, the military units upkeep for the few turns they are attacking will go up 10x-100x times for those few turns. It's not worth attacking someone for no reason. Like everything else it needs to be profitable.

Also, if they DO destroy your structures or units, those units automatically will savage for about half what they are worth so you can rebuild them.

I also want to incorporate a "raid" option in the combat system so you can attack freighters or areas where other players have products at a reduced combat value but in exchange your units can pick up a chunk of whatever products you re after during combat. This would allow you to hit a freighter convoy for what they are carrying and leave without destroying everything. This is a big problem in other games where you can only gain by annihilating everything.

The best defense though, are the other players. You can place your Corporate HQ and structures in a city that is already controlled by another player. That players job is to protect the business inside his city because the better his city does the more tax credits he will get. Its only if you operate farther and farther into the frontier do you risk getting pummeled by player pirates. But having your entire game destroyed is a rarity.

You actually didn't touch my question, though you do raise another one.  My more direct question was, is this the sort of game that gives you an advantage to be on at all hours of the day, so as to be able to do something when attacked, as opposed to finding out the next day?

Next, if players can attack each other as you describe, what stops powerful players from wiping out newer, weaker players with nothing that the latter can do about it?  You only lose half of everything rather than all of everything isn't much comfort unless it's pretty quick to rebuild.

The attacker hurts himself to some degree isn't much comfort, either.  What happens when you get griefers who see destroying random newbies as the goal of the game, and see the purpose of building up an empire as being so they can go slaughter weaker players?

-----

Your game reminds me of a browser-based game that I played about 15 years ago.  I think it was called Merchant Empires, though I might be wrong on the name.  You pretty much had to join a guild to avoid being a sitting duck.  (I don't think the game called them "guilds", but that was the general concept, regardless of the name.)

So I joined a guild, and then the guild increased the tax rate to 50%, meaning, they got half of whatever I earned--but any combat losses were on me.  Presumably they had a low tax rate for recruiting purposes, and then hiked the tax rate once they were done recruiting.  So I left, and they came to my base and wiped it out out of spite that I had left their guild.  So I quit the game and haven't touched another game along those lines since then.

Had I only lost half of my stuff rather than everything, I'd still have quit.  With more powerful players who wanted to kill me to spite me for leaving their guild, had I rebuilt with that half, they'd have just come to kill me again.

Making it costly to them to come kill me doesn't fix the problem, either.  It was costly for them to come kill me in that game, too.  You had limited numbers of turns to do stuff--including simply moving around--and they spent a bunch to come kill me.

Had I stayed in their guild in the first place, the bulk of what I did would have constituted raising money so that higher level people in the guild can do stuff without me.  That works fine for the guild leaders, but I wanted to build up my own stuff, too.

If you don't want that sort of player behavior to chase people away from your game, you'll need some pretty strong systems in place to stop it.  I'm not saying that it can't be done, but it doesn't sound like you're particularly trying to do it.  Just putting some mild, first-order incentives against attacking isn't going to shut down blackmail and guild politics.

Then again, you might not want players to really be safe.  If you make a game where attacking is self-destructive, then the game ends up basically not having combat and is just about expanding what you build forever.  It doesn't sound like that's the game you want to build, either.

DrDread74

Quizzical 

There's no easy way to completely remove the advantage of being on at all hours of the day when it comes to attacking other players. I don't think the answer to the problem is to make new players immune or making No PvP zones. You actually want players to cause some problems like this, it's a game, you just don't want it to easily WRECK another players game. Ideally it would be a source of reward.  The way to mitigate other players from rampaging is to make it in the best interest of OTHER players to defend you as PART OF THE GAME and make it easy to do.

In my game your base of operations, your corporate HQ, has to be inside a city although you can still build elsewhere most of your game is going to be close to your HQ. Every City, planet and Star system in the game outside of Sol System is run by an elected player and that player collects tax money from the city he is governing. The more population his city has, the more he makes. The population of the cities increase when the other players (You) are selling to it and doing business. Those rulers will almost always be set to defend the entire location from any attacks. YOU are their profit, you are essentially their industry as they will usually be more military oriented. Not just the city ruler will be defending you, but the planet ruler and star lord as well. You can also vote that ruler out and another one in. Players based in a city can vote in its election.

You should be very safe deep inside a populated planet, or at least there will be a dozen other players defending with you. But that protection becomes less and less present as you build or relocate deeper into the expanding frontier. There are fewer and fewer cities with less and less players which makes the profit potential larger but also makes the chance of getting raided higher. Also realize that the event system causes a lot of combat to happen on a regular basis vs NPC mobs and scenarios that should affect you but rarely wreck your game.

You can choose to play safer and operate from a populated area or diversify and have some operations near the frontier.

A few other things that mitigate the problem:

Combat is instantaneous between turns, but the fights rarely take one turn to resolve. You will usually have at least one or two turns (10-20 mins) to respond to an attack on your own units before serious damage is done and attacks against structures usually take a lot longer than that to destroy them completely.

Units can be set to respond to "Distress" calls of other units and possibly be set to "Run home" when attacked or a certain hit point threshold is reached

You can relocate your HQ and your structures to another area of the galaxy at a small cost. IF things are going crappy in that part of the game, you can relocate elsewhere.

We were considering have 3 servers and each one would be offline for a different 8 hour block of the day.

nariusseldon

I like to play MMOs as single player games. I guess your game is not going to support that? So i should pass?

DrDread74

nariusseldon said:

I like to play MMOs as single player games. I guess your game is not going to support that? So i should pass?

There's nothing stopping you from playing "solo" . The game is described as "loosely" cooperative. You don't need to deal with anyone else or be a part of any group. You don't have to vote in any election or event. You can mine resources and make products to sell to cities without talking to anyone else.

You can be the mysterious Space Pirate of Hermes III who has taken over the entire planet and always has his forces set to attack anyone.....

nariusseldon

DrDread74 said:

nariusseldon said:

I like to play MMOs as single player games. I guess your game is not going to support that? So i should pass?

There's nothing stopping you from playing "solo" . The game is described as "loosely" cooperative. You don't need to deal with anyone else or be a part of any group. You don't have to vote in any election or event. You can mine resources and make products to sell to cities without talking to anyone else.

You can be the mysterious Space Pirate of Hermes III who has taken over the entire planet and always has his forces set to attack anyone.....

Thank you for the clarification ... may be i will give it a swirl and judge it, solely, based on its gameplay.

Kazuhiro

Your website's registration is broken sadly. It rejects all email addresses, yahoo, gmail, and even personal network emails as invalid formats.

UPDATE: After another 10-15 attempts I figured out whats broken with your email registration form. Your form does not allow for capital letters in it. You definitely need to fix that, your likely losing a LOT of potential players because of it.

DrDread74

Kazuhiro said:

Your website's registration is broken sadly. It rejects all email addresses, yahoo, gmail, and even personal network emails as invalid formats.

UPDATE: After another 10-15 attempts I figured out whats broken with your email registration form. Your form does not allow for capital letters in it. You definitely need to fix that, your likely losing a LOT of potential players because of it.

wow. you're right. Validation is refusing capital letters. What a silly oversight. I'll need to fix that tonight

Thanks Kazuhiro you're my #1 beta tester now. I'm not sure what benefits that entails yet but congratulations

Kazuhiro

DrDread74 said:

Kazuhiro said:

Your website's registration is broken sadly. It rejects all email addresses, yahoo, gmail, and even personal network emails as invalid formats.

UPDATE: After another 10-15 attempts I figured out whats broken with your email registration form. Your form does not allow for capital letters in it. You definitely need to fix that, your likely losing a LOT of potential players because of it.

wow. you're right. Validation is refusing capital letters. What a silly oversight. I'll need to fix that tonight

Thanks Kazuhiro you're my #1 beta tester now. I'm not sure what benefits that entails yet but congratulations

Happy to help.