Player-Triggered Asynchronous Hex Feature Adjustment

(Like my post in the stickied wish-list thread, this is quite long, but I think it's own thread is a good idea)

The basic idea is that any hex feature that is created, maintained, and adjusted by the SotA server can be adjusted by players as well. A second idea of skill creation and customization is discussed as well.

For example, in a given hex, there would be:

Geography
-water (ocean, river, lake, cavern, estuary)
-soil (swamp, farmland, grassland, desert, none)
-elevation (submerged, lowland, hills, highlands, mountains)
__combinations of geographical features produces biomes

Climate
-weather (rain, snow, sun, fog, wind)
-temperature (freezing, cold, warm, hot, scorching)
-latitude (polar, temperate, tropical, equatorial)
__storms, tornado, lightning, waterspout, earthquakes, forest fire, blizzard, sandstorm, floods)

Flora
-plants (flowers, grass, moss, lichen, algae, ferns)
-crops (grains, vegetables, fruits, fungus)
-forest (coniferous, deciduous, softwood, hardwood, old, young, shrubs, trees)

Fauna
-animals (domestic, wild, prey, predators, mammals, lizards, insects, vermin)
-monsters (tameable, untamable, predators, prey, hostile, aggressive)
-humanoids (humans, non humans, tiny, giant, verbal, non-verbal)

Points to keep in mind regarding these systems:
- Can be added at any time, in various ways, either in whole or in part, to an existing game
- Fits within the existing framework of player controls, UI, and existing server/network/engine technology
- Can be used to encourage or discourage a wide range of player behavior, and provides several sinks
- As described, presumes resource gathering would be constantly dynamic, as a design goal

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Implementation details.
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-It may be desirable to only have certain hex features adjustable, in certain regions or in the proper context. As an example, if the theme of a region is mountainous on the overland map, allowing the players to turn that entire hex into a desert may not fit your internal design goals. However, certain aspects of a map should have a range of variability inherently, and at the very least, those particular aspects should be adjustable. More on completely adjustable hexes, below.

-As an example, climate, flora and fauna should vary by seasons and astronomical time progresses. A particular hex, even with static geography would have different animals and plants fade in and out. Reindeer during winter and deer during summer. Animals that hibernate would not appear when they are hibernating. Monsters that have certain biome requirements would only appear when those matched. Plants would normally bloom in their season. However, whether a hex has daffodils (contains the alkaloid poison lycorine) or the common daisy (not poisonous) could be random. Both can be grown on fallow farmland, grassland, and in cold/warm/hot temperatures, in all weather except snow. Players, however, could determine which would appear, dynamically. In practice, this would simply change the appearance of the flowers in the world, and alter the values returned when harvested.

-Those familiar with RIFTs projected textures feature for RIFT incursions will understand the visual overlay technique used there. A variation of this could be used, at the minimum, for all non geographic ground adjustments such as flora, snow, fog, and even floods. Fauna is simply dynamic spawn generators. Think of SWG nests, but player triggered, and sustained/respawned over time. Currently, in RIFT, collision objects, sky changes, fog, lighting, and weather effects are all dynamic and part of player spawned triggers, in some cases. This is merely an extension of that same technology that is now 2 years+ old. That same _existing_ graphical engine technology is all that's required for everything except the geography described at the outset.

-The client can dynamically receive updates for a given hex for all parameters, and reflect those changes immediately. Certain changes would require adjustment of inherited features. Geographic changes, for example, could cause significant alteration of all dependent features. Changing from submerged to mountainous, would change the weather, temperature, water, and soil, plus flora and fauna. Not a trivial matter, but definitely possible in the proper context.

-Ideally, players would never be required to leave a hex during feature adjustments. That is, if the landscape can freely form, rise, fall, and adjust around them while they're in the world, that would be best. If the current technology doesn't permit this, there are two possible options worth considering. Mark the hex as stale to encourage the player to re-log, or force them to re-log as part of the update. Also, it might be possible to designate a "home location" or equivalent safe location for each hex, where a player would be teleported to during an update. This would NOT be required for non-geographic adjustments.

-In practice, a player performs an action, or co-ordinates the performance of many similar actions, in order to have a feature adjusted. There are several tiers of adjustment, requiring varying amounts of time or resources. The amount of time and the amount of resources are balance issues to be tested and adjusted. It seems reasonable, though, that small changes could occur more frequently, while larger changes be more costly and occur far less frequently. It is also acceptable that all feature changes EXCEPT geographical changes could be done in-place with no notification or consequence other than visual.

-It also adds more flavor if the players have the choice of impact versus duration. Using the flower field as an example, a player could obtain their widget that makes daffodils (they need the poison), but they have some choices. They can have a version that lasts a full in-game day, or a full in-game week. They can choose to have a single field be affected, or the primary plus 3 or 6 adjacent fields. Each of these has additional cost in time/resources. A quick example might be if someone had a community plot in a village, and was able to harvest daffodil seeds, then put those seeds through whatever process to have them imbued and transformed into the server side feature adjustment trigger. Perhaps the process involves other players, or other collected resources, or money, faction, NPC's, the right phase of the moon, etc. In any case, they have their magic seeds, they move out to a particular region, and they use them. They're offered a target interface of some kind, click, and voila, they now have a field of daffodils to harvest. Potentially, so does everyone else. It isn't necessary to replicate these changes to everyone, but it would provide a whole range of incentives if it did.

-Getting back to impact versus duration, in the above example, say the default duration was 1 and the size was 1. A player might be able to harvest 10 seeds, and have them all imbued, and be able to increase the size to 2, while the duration is still at 1. This would have a larger harvest area (allowing them to harvest more materials) but they would have still only a single in-game day to do the harvesting. Adding other resources to the widget creation might increase the duration to one in-game week (perhaps 1 RL day). These features are optional, but add considerably more depth and variety to the system. Each type of harvestable, regardless of the type (ore, gems, wood, flora, fauna, water, stone) would have a process to imbue and an ability to change the feature in the hex.

-Transient features such as weather and fauna would be performed in a similar fashion, basically triggering a server side event for a localized lightning storm, or spawning ibexes instead of gazelles for a period of time in a particular area. The mechanic that makes all these adjustments desirable is the requirement for certain resources to be harvested only during certain events. As an example, if fireflies only appear for 1 in-game day after a lightning storm, and firefly wings are used as a consumable for the Energy Bolt spell, players have a very good reason for causing lightning storms. It may also be a mechanic that only rare items can be harvested during adjustment alignments, while common resources can be harvested at all times, but only in the proper locations.

-Now, if a player or guild doesn't want to bother with the time sink of gathering the resources and processing them for a hex-adjustment widget, it seems reasonable to allow them to purchase these items outright from an NPC vendor for 20-50 times the cost, or have these items require another form of currency if purchased from an NPC. However, the cheapest, fastest, and best way to obtain the items should always be from other players or to involve other players, if social interaction and community building are design goals. Another option to the NPC purchasing mechanic may be that default duration & size items may be purchased from NPCs, but customized versions of the hex-adjustment widgets may only be craftable.

-Certain hex-adjust duration an size parameters could be larger than others. For example, farming crops in the wild could automatically be a size 2 (one small plot, plus 6 adjacent, if there are hexes-within-hexes) and a duration of 2. It's also possible that the use of a particular widget of the same type in the same spot could extend the duration, if adjusted by another player. Finally, you may or may not wish to restrict the use of an adjusted hex resource. It may be reasonable to permit public use of certain effects, or all effects. Or you may wish to permit guilds or alliances sole use of particular resources they have created or modified, on particular hexes designated for this purpose. This would also give an excellent reason for defense of certain hexes if hexes where guild/alliance citadels could be placed were also places that permitted guild/alliance hex adjustments of all kinds. However, to be clear, it would be a convenience, not a requirement. All players should be able to create the adjustments they need, but guilds and alliances could create larger effects and/or effects of larger duration, and/or effects of ALL types, including geographical, in certain hexes. Single players would have to travel to different hexes than those designated for guild/alliance adjustment, but single players could create every adjustment as well, with at least default sizes and durations.

-with respect to mining, it could simply be a resource that falls into the 'flora' category, that is, you can buy a mine resource widget and place it. However, given the importance of mining, it may be desirable that mines only appear when the appropriate adjacent adjustments have been made. In fact, this may be a mechanic that produces rare resources of all kinds, in addition to the more dynamic harvest methods. For example, if a single player puts in the time and effort to "groom" the landscape in a particular pattern, it may spawn a mine of mithril for a day in the center. Or they can wait for the stars/planets/moons to align and buy a sandstorm widget which allows normal bauxite ore to be harvested as mithril if done during a sandstorm. Multiple paths to obtain the same rare resources would be very popular. It could also be that only large sized adjustments satisfy the pattern for spawning rare resources, again, depending on design goals.

-optional feature: fauna creatures that produce resources of flora types (mobile plants drop flowers, rock monsters drop ore, water elementals drop water). So, if you can't find an adjustable hex nearby, you can place a creature generator/nest location that does the same, at the same location, while "on top" of the previously adjusted landscape, offering another layer of choice for the players. This does require, however, a full bestiary of creatures that provide all types of resources.

-optional feature: Overwriting other players hex-adjustments is possible, but creates chaos. In fact, each time an adjustment is made that is out of theme with the hex, chaos is created. If sufficient chaos is generated, it can manifest itself in chaotic incursions, spawns of chaos creatures, ancillary storms, and the like. However, it may be desirable to have these as a sort of "end-game" for hex adjustments, with resource gathering. Things like, you can only obtain these resources in the shadow of a chaos storm, or when a chaos storm is active during two full moons, that sort of thing. It may be a good mechanic to only permit overwriting a hex adjustment with a larger one, to encourage a time/resource sink. It may also be a good mechanic that a single/guild/alliance hex adjustments can only be overwritten by like widgets. Or not, or both, depending on your design goals and behavior encouragement. Many of these decisions will be governed by the number of adjustment locations within a land hex. If there are hundreds or thousands, many of these restrictions won't be an issue. If there are only a few, it could create serious competition.

-optional feature: adjustment breeds more adjustment. Once a hex has been adjusted in a particular location, say, a wheat farm was placed, then the adjacent areas are now open for adjustment. This could permit adjacent fields of more wheat, other grains, vegetables, or vineyards and orchards. Think of it as adjustment zone expansion by use. This "adjustment zone" or envelope could expand with use and shrink over time if not used. Also, it could be a static setting on some hexes, for guild/alliance activities, and dynamic in public hexes closer to civilization. It may also be necessary for players to adjust certain features in certain patterns. An example would be that for every 3 agricultural adjustments adjacent, the next adjustment must be a water feature to show a stream, pond, or similar feature to support the crops. This could also be required for sluice mining, or panning, or creation of a water course exiting a cavern to create a gem resource. Players could also compete to prevent the placement of these adjustments, so they can have their desired resource available. Those closer to civilization (if travel is important) could become serious hotbeds of contention for layout of certain crops, plants and forests. If a particular merchant really wants mahogany, they either have to find a free tile in the right biome on the right land hex (scouting now has value) or they can buy the proper adjustment widgets so a mahogany forest can be planted nearby.

-optional feature: hex adjustments that are in-theme last longer than those that break the theme. Placing a desert adjustment adjacent to a swamp, or glacier would last less than an in-game day, but grassland adjacent to a desert could last longer than an in-game day, with a 'default' duration for both. All adjustments could still create chaos, but potentially you could use players healing the landscape as a means to reduce chaos, that is, players using an adjustment widget to remove that offending desert might prevent a chaos storm. Other players, however, may want the chaos storm and continue to radically adjust the adjacent regions.

-optional feature: adjustments out of theme may incur a faction penalty, either global or regional. The animals, humanoids, and rulers of a given hex may not take kindly to you creating blizzards in their deserts, or flooding their cropland, even for a day. Sandstorms in a desert, though, you may be able to get away with without penalty.

-optional feature: If there are thousands of locations for adjustments per land hex, it may be a great feature to enable direct combat between the two players, two guilds, or two alliances that overwrite each others adjustments, for the duration of the overwrite. In other words, PvP flagging would be automatic (with a warning) if you wanted to overwrite someone elses/some other groups adjustment, in particular land hexes, or not.

-optional feature: If desired, on certain land hexes, the use of adjustment widgets flags one for direct pvp combat. On these same hexes, there may be inherent bonuses both to rarity, size and duration of effects. Harvesting of these same resources would also flag one for direct pvp combat. This may be a guild/alliance only feature. This feature may require the existence of a guild/alliance stronghold nearby.

-optional feature: If desired, on certain land hexes, the use of adjustment widgets spawns extremely challenging guardian creatures in vast numbers that must be overcome prior to completion. Again there may be inherent bonuses both to rarity, size and duration of effects. While this challenge is being overcome, the immediate region is locked for a period of time to prevent undue reward without risk. This may be a guild/alliance only feature. This feature may require the existence of a guild/alliance stronghold nearby.

-optional feature: Certain land hexes may require the grooming of the landscape with a certain number of adjacent adjustments of ALL features ( geography, climate, flora, fauna ) to create a location where a guild/alliance stronghold may be placed. Over time, this stronghold must be defended by continual large and long term adjustments, and incur the resulting chaotic consequences to be maintained. This has the potential to be a much more internally consistent "cost" than a simple gold sink for rent. Depending on the behavior you want to encourage, you could permit players to affect the pvp status of an entire land hex with this and other mechanics combined. This would also require guilds and alliances to actively defend their stronghold and territory, (by either pve, pvp, or both) rather than being sequestered in their own instance not interacting with the world at large. These land hexes would be "unknown areas" or perpetually in the fog of war, from the overland map perspective, to permit complete customization.

-optional feature: allowing the spawning of hostile creatures by competing organizations near guild/alliance strongholds. A simple example would be crafting all the gear and equipment necessary to outfit an army, gather the humanoids necessary to BE the army, and then spawning them via hex-adjustment to siege your enemy while you ALSO attacked them at the same time. Extraordinary strategic potential. Especially if you could spawn very powerful creatures who alone would wear down your enemies gates & walls, and you timed the attacks such that a constant defense was required, and then brought your player forces to bear to break them at the end. Rare resources could be used in this way as consumables to spawning hostile creatures, so yet another potential sink. How about NPC creatures that dig under, or fly over the walls to create chaos in the courtyard to split the defenders attention? Lots of fun to be had with that.

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Skill creation feature
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-A really powerful innovation is that player skills, that is, the skills on their hotbars they use can be created and adjusted by them if they can collect all the necessary pieces. In essence, they consume from the world to customize themselves. As each hex feature listed above can be adjusted, so through the manipulation, timing, and harvesting of these features, the player can adjust every aspect of every skill they have, including things like casting time, recast time, damage value, damage type, range, number of targets or radius, ground or mob target, debuff type, debuff magnitude, debuff duration, pulses or ticks, initial damage vs pulse/tick damage, damage modifier by race, chain requirement, chain follower, duration, and more. Those are just for combat, but could apply to all skills. Provided you have proper limits, caps, and consequences in place for skill adjustments, there's no technical reason players can't customize themselves in this fashion.

-Furthermore, a possible mechanic would be that players would create their own skills, from scratch, using this method. That is, they create each and every button they can press on their hotbars. They start out with the ability to read, write, plant, harvest and possibly have very rudimentary combat (punch, kick) but beyond that, they have to acquire, learn, or find resources and consume, arrange, or write them down in such a way as to create their own skills. The possibilities here are pretty immense. Learning about magic, for example, might require the collection of a massive range of plants and animal parts that only appear during events that are player created, after a particular area has been groomed by players to have the proper resources.

-A simple example to learn about being able to create fire with magic. I)gnite! A player may need to gather several type of ash. Volcanic, wood, and coal. So they go to places where these are, and gather them. Perhaps there is a naturally erupting volcano they can travel to. Perhaps if they have the friends and money, they can cause a dormant volcano to erupt for a day that's close by. Then they need seeds of plants that grow after fires, such as fireweed, lodgepole pine, and eucalyptus. Again, find them in the wild naturally, or cause a forest fire and harvest them afterwards. Finally, they need to gather glands from three types of lizards, from the desert. Either travel to them and kill them, or create a desert and spawn three types of lizards yourself. Once processed, they get a new skill "Fire" with basic features that can be adjusted with further tasks. If this task seems either too easy or too difficult, keep in mind there may be dozens or hundreds of skills available, each requiring customization via planting, harvesting, hex-adjustments, timing, astronomical events, seasons, and a really big potential innovation: Lore.

-It is possible that all of the details for each skill requires a knowledge of lore that is unique to each individual player. That is, their personal digital persona may require certain resources, locations, conditions or objects that are unique for them to acquire new skills. This would make each character have a unique path, flatten the requirements for certain resources, and diffuse the locations and times of all events to prevent chokepoints. This type of a system would also create personal competition for each individual, in that they need this field of daffodils, but someone else, for convenience sake, wants this field to be poppies or daisies. As such, players would be competing with each other with these mechanics. These personal requirements do not necessarily need to be internally consistent with canonical Lore. It could simply be the roll of the dice that determines what each player uniquely requires for skill creation. These "unique requirements" may be the result of the transition from Earth to New Britannia, for example. The advantage to this of course is that each persons path through the game would also be unique, to obtain the resources and perform the tasks for their skills. They will have the same basic skills, but both acquisition and customization could be a unique path. It also provides a counter to the "perform step x, move to step y, have max skill" problem of wiki's and spoiler sites. In practice, this would mean a unique player seed value fed into a procedural task/quest system. Very straightforward.

-Using the fire example above, those things may be required for one player, while the next may have an entirely different set of things they need to gather. Both would end up with the Fire skill. It's important to note, however, that the basic skill acquisition resources should be common. Customization of those skills can require only rare components, or even rare skills may require additional processes, patience, and co-operation with other players. But the basics should be within reach of everyone.

-Also, although the examples above use "earth" terminology for reagents, plants, and animals, there is no reason why New Britannia couldn't have entirely new species with entirely new features that require the acquisition of knowledge to understand their role in the overall ecology and resource generation. It seems reasonable that players learn the ecology of their new world as they explore. Wiki's and spoiler sites would have a role here.

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points to ponder
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-insect colonies. A single player could obtain a widget to spawn an insect colony for termites, bees, ants, and similar of varying sizes from tiny to gigantic, to provide a range of resources, potencies, and quantities. This simple idea may be easier for some readers to grasp, but it scales from something simple like this to more complex ideas presented above.

-many games talk sandbox. This IS the sandbox, without focusing entirely on combat. This allows players to compete indirectly, but far more frequently and without any ego involved. No direct player combat is _required_ in the above systems, although it would certainly add to some situations.

-if such a system were implemented, the ability for players to literally alter the climate, flora, and fauna (and potentially geography) of any land hex is an incredible attraction. It would gather a wide range of players and be, as far as I know, unique in the genre of persistent multiplayer games.

-such a system could be fine tuned down to the point where a single player could spawn NPCs of any kind almost anywhere, provided the frequency, limits, cost and consequences were appropriate. Want a party? Spawn a roaming band of musicians, jugglers, or acrobats. Bored? Spawn a hive of mongbats out in the wild. Have too much money? well, now you can spend it.

-this also ties in with my previous post about scripted events being triggered when you're absent against targets. Things like muggings, beatings, robberies, assassination attempts, insults and gifts. All of these things could be indirect forms of player conflict without that nasty ego being involved. No-one cares if NPCs beat them up (or insult them). If your guild had to fight off waves of drakes and ettins to keep their guild house, there's no downside.

-Finally, the ability to obtain whatever resources you want or need places the choice and path entirely in the hands of players, guilds and alliances. If they want to, for example, outfit taverns for a really good brawl, and they need a particular crop, plant, ore, gem, or tree, they can spend the money and get it or spend the time and effort and get it. The depth of knowledge of the in-game world required could be considerable.
This type of system would go a long way in providing an online entertainment experience where knowledge and patience can have value in addition to reaction time. Given the possibly dynamic nature of land hexes, having accurate and up to date information could potentially save you immense amounts of time and money, in-game. Leadership would be meaningful, as would long term strategy and planning.

 

That's a nice wall of text you got here. But what's the point?

 

Is there a particular feature of the system as described, badunius, that you feel doesn't have merit?

 

Sorry, but ya. My head just hurts trying to read. All I got out of is was "we should take something really simple and make it unnecessarily complicated". You just need to cut this whole thing way down into one simple problem and propose a solution. I can't find where you buried an actual thesis statement. It's just a lot of details that don't seem to form a coherent thought. I'm really not trying to trash you. You're certainly very passionate about something but I can't understand it.

 

It's not solving a problem, PrimeRib, it's a description of innovative new features and ideas for SotA. Sometimes ideas need long descriptions to fully explain them, not much I can do about that.

When I look back at all the persistent multiplayer online games since Meridian59, I wish (wish list!) for this type of system, something new and different.
Which part of the system as described seems too complicated to you, PrimeRib?

Online game developers have said repeatedly that ideas are a dime a dozen, while workable implementations are rare and valuable. I've done my best to think through how this would be implemented, and am looking forward to discussions about how each aspect of implementation either would or would not work well in SotA.
At the beginning and the end of this brainstorming, I asked myself "would this be fun? would I want to play this? would my guild want to play this?" and ended up with yes, yes, and yes.

 

Although I like the idea in some games to manipulate and change terrain even floods, fires, raising/lowering land, earthquakes that cause permanent damage. I think the game has to be designed for those features, where that is the major play style and feature to the game, where everything centers around that. It is actually a feature that my bro and I had been discussing putting in our MMORPG.. (we've been working on it off and on for about 14 years). and I don't feel it has any place in SoTA.
Our idea for the game would be that PVP and factions centered around controlling resources and access to regions by manipulating terrain and opposing factions would work towards changing it another way. So the game would be very pvp or atleast faction oriented.

Simply put, your idea has merit in a game, just not in SoTA from my understanding of what RG and team are trying to accomplish.

Also in the future I'd recommend making your first post a "broad strokes" version of your idea, and then the wall of text explaining it. More people will read it and might have their own ideas of how to incorporate that idea into the game.

 

Indeed, the game needs to consider such features in the design early in the development life cycle, and as per the last dev chat (earlier this week) the time is now to get those ideas in front of the eyes of the devs.
Some of these features can be 1v1 / direct pvp oriented, but none of them have to be. Everything is optional, including geographic changes, and/or geographic adjustments by land-hex. Climate, flora, and fauna resource adjustments would still be a huge attraction.

Which goal that RG and the team are trying to accomplish prohibits a system such as this from going into SotA, Mishri?

 

Great ideas, I'd love to hear what the dev's have to say about the implementation of this

 

So basically you are talking about second life with game mechanics? Lara and I thought about that same idea several years ago, and it has merit, but man froma game design perspective, it's a nightmare. Not to mention if it can constantly change, you will have a good portion of your player population frustrated and confused.

Maybe I missed it somewhere in there, but the only way I can see it being feasible is to limit it to a subset of players that want to see player adjusted content, but that does not address the overall design work that would need to happen.

Again, cool idea, but I think a bit of an over design for SotA in my opinion.

 

To address your concerns, Baene, all the adjustments are temporary, and require consumption to impose. The nature of temporary could be minutes, hours, days, or longer, depending on the resources required and the desired behavior.

Further, depending on what "doubling the world map" means, there are somewhere between 9600 and 19,200 open world land hexes this could be used with. A very small percentage could be set aside for adjustment, if necessary.

Further, the imposition of adjustments that radically shift the native biome of a hex could last for far less time, encouraging players to find the right spot that would reduce any frustration or confusion, as you say.

Finally, the technical mechanics to do this, in-game, are already used 24x7 in RIFT, and have been for well over a year, and cause neither frustration nor confusion.

 

Some good points. They would certainly help to alleviate issues with players, but anything that gives players that level of control over the environment, even if for short periods of time can be very dangerous. Yes, I know I'm a bit paranoid about it, but after having designed and built privately run games for several years, I have some experience in how things can cometely go in directions that were not intended

So rock on with thoughts and ideas, but if a system like this did to into SotA, i certainly would want a way of opting out of it. Not that I think it's an inherently bad idea, just that I don't have complete trust in any implementation of a system like this to be all encompassing enough to resolve all the potential issues well enough and not be encumbering in the extreme.

Edit: I might take a look at this RIFT that you bring up out of curiosity as I've not heard of it before

 

Took a look at RIFT and now I get what you are talking about. It's the piece Lara and I added to our idea, but figured would be unworkable within SotA. The places that players have control over are actually just their own instances. They are not part of the "real" world.

This makes much more sense, naturally, because then you don't need to have nearly the same control over things as you would if they were connected to everything's else. We had the same concept, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". Items, gold, skills, etc, were all within the instance, and non transferable to the real world. This allowed the players to have almost total control over their instances. No need to worry about balance or cheating, etc, because it only mattered within the instance.