I played more wow then I care to admit, but I put it down a while ago. Much of the reason for not having a dynamic environment in wow is due to technological limitations. Before I left they had begun to implement a technology that they called phasing which allowed the environment to change based on what part of the narrative the player was in...Another issue related to the no consequence is that if you do not complete the quest to "kill 10 Gnolls" as they are rushing in to sentinel hill, then they just keep rushing in forever and get locked into eternal battles with npc's who tank them until you can finish them off. Lastly, you can only see other players that are on the same "phase" as you. All in all, it's a step in the right direction, but trying to create a fully immersive environment that has true consequence is a difficult task that requires more technological innovation.
Agreed that phasing was a step in the right direction. I had not learned of this outside of the game, but rather experienced it within the game. It was a really cool "wow, I actually changed the world!" moment that I've always WANTED from an MMO, but they've never really provided. It does have the downfalls that you mentioned. I think GW2 is another step beyond this. There are consequences for failure and there's no "phasing." Everyone is always participating in the same world. If the Pirate ship is left unopposed, and loots the main town in the region, it's looted and pillaged to everyone on the server, not just you. Everyone has an incentive to pitch in and help complete these dynamic events so that the consequences don't happen.
It's still not perfect, because you can still catch the same section of a dynamic event more than once if you play through an area twice, or, for intance, log off after completing section 1, fork A, and when you log in the next day they are on section 1, fork A again. I think, though, that this is a really great system within the limits of the technology we have now.
I think the main reason the MMOs have a hard time with any persistent world changes is that their business focuses on the individual player. They want each person to subscribe and stay subscribed...
I like your idea of focusing on the world instead of the "hero player." It's almost like what a Burning Wheel MMO would be. Characters in BW usually are not superheros which can lay low an army of orcs with a single punch. Most of the time they are average joe schmo the blacksmith/farmer/swindler/etc.
However, I have been thinking a lot about what incentives are on a developer when you receive a lot of your revenue on a monthly subscription basis. It basically puts pressure on the publisher/developer to stretch out the content as long as possible. So if you have MMO X and the developers gather around and say "ok, our classes are finished, they each have 30 skills and 20 talent points all balanced out." The next question is going to be "how often should they get those skills/talent points?"
Any game designer focusing on good game design would answer "they should get the next mechanic/skill once they have mastered the ones they have." That's good pacing for a game. Portal was amazing on many levels, but I think one of the ones it absolutely nailed was how it slowly taught the player many different concepts and then asked them to put these into practice to solve the puzzles. It doled out new challenges exactly when you were ready for them. Not before, and not after.
If you give out new mechanics/abilities too early, the player is overwhelmed and confused about how to use all of this stuff successfully. It breaks them out of the "playing" of the game and instead forces them to study everything they have available to figure out how it all fits together. They have to memorize everything in their arsenal, and if you give them too much at once, that becomes work instead of experiementation.
If, instead, you give out new mechanics/abilities too late, the player is going to spend a portion of the game feeling like they are ready for a new challenge, but it isn't given to them. It is going to feel stale and boring once they've already mastered the mechanics they have. This is what Grinding is in MMOs. You don't measure grinding by how long it takes to level, you measure it by "is the player ready for the next challenge but not given one?"
So that brings us back to the question: "how often should you give out 'rewards' like new skills/talent points/abilities." The answer, as we've just discussed, should be "whenever the player is ready for the next one." However, due to the "pay per month" system, publishers and developers have an incentive to pick the wrong answer, and instead stretch those rewards out. Because if you can get 10,000,000 players to play your game for an extra month before they reach max level, that's an extra 150 million dollars in revenue. And they do sneak it in there don't they? Early on, the progression feels pretty good, if not a little fast for people unfamilier with MMOs. But after about level 20-30 in WoW, it really starts to feel like you are spending more and more time grinding away with a build you've already mastered. "Yup, do skill 1, then 3, then 4 if he runs, then back to 1, and use 2 to finish him."
So while "No monthly fees" in Guild Wars 2 is great for my wallet, I'm a shit-ton more excited about the fact that as a result Arenanet has no vested interest in fucking up progression to make more money. They've already proven this to be true. The leveling curve in Guild Wars 2 is flat after about level 10. This means that it will take you about the same time to get from 11 to 12 as it will take you to get from 64 to 65.
I'm also looking forward to PlanetSide 2, but I haven't heard any info on it recently except a screenshot or two.
but to bind the "WoW" experience to a truly changeable world would require some pretty crazy man-powe
No, you drop the "WoW" experience and do something completely different. WoW is a single-player game with a chat room, instanced co-op, and instanced pvp attached. Not saying it's bad, but it's by and large a single-player game with a few "social" features for most of its playerbase.
but to bind the "WoW" experience to a truly changeable world would require some pretty crazy man-powe
No, you drop the "WoW" experience and do something completely different. WoW is a single-player game with a chat room, instanced co-op, and instanced pvp attached. Not saying it's bad, but it's by and large a single-player game with a few "social" features for most of its playerbase.
I think that while that is technically correct in some aspects, it does sell the game a little short. The vast majority of WoW land area is not instanced (within it's own server of course). I'd say probably 80% is open world non-instanced where you can and do run into other people and group up to quest with them. I've done it, even if it is rare to find someone willing to cooperate with you rather than play by themselves. But I'd chalk that up to the game design (remember: The game makes the community :P).
In GW2 they looked at other MMOs and asked "why is it some players get pissed off when they meet other people in the world? Why would they rather play by themselves instead of playing with others?" Well in WoW the reason was simple: Many quests required you to loot X things from mob Y. If another player showed up, he's not competing for that finite number of mob Y, of which, only a certain fraction of those mobs actually dropping item X. And if you are not in a group, you can't share experience for kills, and grouping up with a random stranger isn't the kind of thing most wow players are good at (social engagement with new people) or even want.
So as a result, in GW2 you acquire a dynamic event task by walking into the area where it's taking place, and then when you leave the task is gone. In this way, everyone near you is always on the same dynamic event quests as you (or at least can be). These events also scale in difficulty based on the number of players actively participating in the dynamic event. I believe that as this scales the loot gets better as well. If you and a friend chase off a small scouting party of centaurs, maybe you get some small loot. But if there's a dozen players participating, there will be a whole warband of centaurs attacking and success will mean better loot for everybody. In addition, nobody is going to "steal" your kills in dynamic events. As long as you didn't jump in at the last minute to help complete the quest, you'll get the same kinds of items as everyone else.
I'd love to design a game that is like a mixture of Minecraft, WoW, RTS, Dwarf Fortress, that mouse platform game, and Sleep Is Death.
Someone said that it would take too much time and energy by the game company to oversee all the crazy stuff needed to make everything work like it should in a game where changes stay persistent. Why not make that management part of a game for other people?
I'd love to design part of a map in Minecraft, and know that once I submit it, someone else will populate it with NPC's, and then a clan would try to fight their way through it. If they take over, great! They can then set Dwarfs to look after the place, and those Dwarfs can be managed by someone who likes to play Dwarf Fortress. The WoW clan can go take over another part of the map, if someone has made something interesting.
Some players will be "god" characters, and some could be "human" characters, and others could be "nation" or "species" characters. If you were a god player, like you made the maps, you could only get resources to build more if human level people played through the map. If you were a human player, you could only move on to another map if you play the map until the end. And, instead of grinding to get levels, you play the Dwarf Fortress part to build up resources.
The mouse game (I can't remember the name, and I'm offline so can't google), is a good guide to giving players power in a single level. If you reach a goal, you get points. At the start of a round, if you have the most points, you are the commander, and have a god role rather than a mouse role. In a MMOG like this, if you enter the level with the highest points, you get to play commander, like an RTS. Like NS, even. If you do well, you get a few points. If you do badly, you get no points. No matter what, you're down at the bottom of the queue again. The only way to be commander again is to play a lot, or play better than everyone else in that part of the map.
I'm just rambling, but maybe you get the idea. Make every level part of the same game.
Luke, your suggestion reminds me more than a little of what CCP games is doing in making Eve and Dust play with each other. Basically the guys playing Dust are just playing a territory control FPS, and can organize into guilds and such in order to secure a territory/mission/etc. (They haven't shown much yet for it) Then the Eve players can recruit or put up bounties for certain tasks that a guild or PUG can then do, and if the guild succeeds so does the task the Eve player wanted done on said planet. Not the best explanation of what exactly their doing, but I think the idea there is close to what you're talking about
Well, this seems as a good enough time for me to pimp MLP Online, the 2D MLP-FIM MMO . Im the art director for the overall team, and we;ll have a demo on the engine and basic systems at Bronycon. At this point however, here is the overall direction the MMO will be like.
This is a Social MMO, we have no plans for level up systems besides potentcy of spells and certain skills. Even then combat will not be a main focus
When i say social MMO, i mean it will be mostly passive, focusing mainly on player interaction and exploration, like a huge chat room. Player economy is present, and world events and quests are available, although we've decided to use a more dynamic NPC system. NPCs will have basic patterns in day to day life, and unless you hold down a permanent job, most NPC quests and missions are subject to limited availability or require certain requirements to be met. For eg, you dont go knocking on Twilight's door asking for a quest at 2am in the morning, she'll blast you away. Also because NPCs will be walking around and are not static, you as a player will not have daily routine. You wont be going about with a checklist saying do this and then do that unless you memorise NPC routines, and even then, it will be randomized. Certain events and quests may even happen and end withought you knowing of it, or are inherently secretive in nature.
We have plans for dynamic dialogue, having the way you as the player talk to NPCs affect how the NPCs respond and what type of situations you may get into. Choosing certain dialogue choices and making use of certain items and gits, affects NPCs in certain ways, much like that bribe system in the Elder Scrolls Series that gives access to info or quests a player may not obtain normally.
As it is, the best analogy i can come up with to describe the game is a combination of social play styles like Habbo and Neopets, with certain roleplay elements and economy. There are still tons and tons to discuss and iron out so none of what i said are actually concrete yet. At this point of time, the whole team is concerned with getting the GUIs and engine up and running, and moving on to server load tests.
SO! Fun part, as this is a volunteer project, we have some freedom to actually try and do what we want, and being an avid geeknights listener ive been keeping tabs on the MMO discussions and try to break the mould in this game. If any of you have any ideas of what you feel would be great mechanical wise, do tell me! Any programmers who feel they can help the programming team out into making some awesome ideas a reality would be better!
Oh, our site is mlponline.net, we just got it up and the art team will continue working on it. Deadline for bronycon is soon though, so thats our focus now
Well, this seems as a good enough time for me to pimp MLP Online, the 2D MLP-FIM MMO . Im the art director for the overall team, and we;ll have a demo on the engine and basic systems at Bronycon. At this point however, here is the overall direction the MMO will be like.
This is going to fail. I can tell you exactly why it is going to fail. The reason is that what you are making is basically a MUSH. However, it is clear that you have no idea what a MUSH is. Because of your lack of knowledge, you are going to make all the same mistakes that MUSHes have made throughout their history.
If you actually want to make something that doesn't suck, as opposed to something crappy that people play only because it has ponies, then I suggest you immerse yourself in the world of MUSHes and learn everything about them that you can. That includes studying the history of MUSHes. Find one that still exists, and play it extensively. Study the source code of ones that are available. Setup some old crappy ones and get friends to play it together seriously to uncover its flaws. Learn and steal from the forgotten masters.
I still want to see a fully persistent MMO where you pay per life. Maybe 50 cents per spawn. All death is permanent and the world is extremely hazardous. Of course, your meager inventory would be on your corpse for anyone to take. There would be no levels, just equipment.
the guy behind Metal Gear has talked about wanting to do a zombie MMO where death is permanent and you could in theory come across your old character as a zombie.
If you actually want to make something that doesn't suck, as opposed to something crappy that people play only because it has ponies, then I suggest you immerse yourself in the world of MUSHes and learn everything about them that you can. That includes studying the history of MUSHes. Find one that still exists, and play it extensively. Study the source code of ones that are available. Setup some old crappy ones and get friends to play it together seriously to uncover its flaws. Learn and steal from the forgotten masters.
Thank you for your honest opinion scott, and its true, as with such fandom volunteer projects, its a challenge to even stay current and up to date with work progress, and of the team im the only one with any expereince in making games and even then its mostly in the art side and small discussions. The team is not a team of professional game developers, simply just a collection of fans with differing skill sets.
Ill take your advice to heart and have a look at some of the MUSHes, the core game engines and maps/art are being finalized still, and theres tons of room for things to change mechanically and gameplay wise. Perhaps ill start a seprate thread on this in time.
Luke, your suggestion reminds me more than a little of what CCP games is doing in making Eve and Dust play with each other. Basically the guys playing Dust are just playing a territory control FPS, and can organize into guilds and such in order to secure a territory/mission/etc. (They haven't shown much yet for it) Then the Eve players can recruit or put up bounties for certain tasks that a guild or PUG can then do, and if the guild succeeds so does the task the Eve player wanted done on said planet. Not the best explanation of what exactly their doing, but I think the idea there is close to what you're talking about
Sure, that is a step in one direction. But who creates the new content for the commanders and guilds are playing?
Let me elaborate a bit further. Imagine a plot of land on a map, hexagonal, maybe 500m across. This seed territory is created randomly, as in Minecraft. Each person who joins the server is given a chance to create, minecraft-like, another plot of land. Just one. In the original plot of land, you gather together a band of at least 20 players, and head north. Once you reach the north edge of the hex, a player's map is selected at random, and the group enters it. The two hexes are now linked, and will always be together like that at on that server forever. The player who built the level doesn't control what happens on the map. Instead the player with the most "points" becomes the GM, and controls, like in an RTS, the bad guys, even though they only know what the map will be at the same time as the players who enter it.
If the god player wins, and keeps control of the plot of land, it belongs to them, and they can chose to keep hold of it, and manage their remaining troops Dwarf Fortress style. They will probably fail to keep hold of it in the long run though, as they won't only have to deal with random shit from the computer, but also human controlled players.
If the band of human players wins, whoever scored the most points has the chance to Dwarf Fortress that hex of land, as well as becoming the RTS god player for the next hex map the human players enter. Of course, the more land you take, the more difficult it is to keep control. And you never know what kind of hex map you're going to have to defend. Maybe it is something awesome, maybe something not so cool, but it won't be something you have made. However, if you are in the group of players entering a new hex map, the chances are it is something you yourself built. If you've put time into it, you're going to want to capture the land/building/dungeon you have created! And if it is a cool castle, or something, you might even convince real human players to stay with you in the castle to defend it. You'll still have the Dwarf Fortress level power, but real humans can use your castle to "sleep" in while they're not playing, and even defend it if you aren't around.
The world would then grow, hex by hex. At any time there would be the same number of possible hexes to add as the number of people in the world on that server. You'd need a minimum number of people to band together, to cross the edge of the map, to grow the land in any direction. Some people might control a few hexes in different parts of the map, but there would be a increasing difficulty penalties the more land you control. Some people might want to play more at the Dwarf Fortress level, creating new dungeons, and some might stick with human characters, just exploring, or sneaking into castles, that kind of thing.
Make a Minecraft server mod, here is how it would work. First, you register your server with a centralized server list. Players then register with your server and mark it as their home server.
Next you get all your peeps and start building stuff. Then there is one new structure, the war portal. When you build a war portal, the central server picks another server. It then connects to that other server and builds the reverse war portal on the other side. Now anyone who goes into a war portal gets disconnected from one server and reconnected to the other. They will also be spawned at the location of the opposite portal.
That's it. Otherwise it's just Minecraft. If someone turns their server off, the portal will go dark. If a portal is dark for too long, it will get destroyed.
The mod will also make sure that only people who have your server set as their home can connect directly. Everyone else will only be able to get in via portal.
These almost never come to completion. Most that do are then sued by the property owner.
Just a friendly warning. Most of the people collaborating with you will disappear before anything substantive is done.
Our team has been through much since we started 6 months back, but the main reason why we're still kicking is i think mainly because the core members, me, the head programmer, and head spriter have not given up and we've personally been constanly advertising and networking to replace people that drop out. Its taken awhile to weed out unproductive members and find good people who WANT to stay on and not just for the sake of ponies.
There were one or two times the whole project teetered on collapsing, but we've managed to pull through. Im almost 100 percent sure that a skeleton build will be finished, the thing is how it goes from there, and how much we expand the game, which the core members have all agreed to stop after cloudsdale and canterlot. Maybe sooner, we have no plans to support this game indefinetly.
Comments
It's still not perfect, because you can still catch the same section of a dynamic event more than once if you play through an area twice, or, for intance, log off after completing section 1, fork A, and when you log in the next day they are on section 1, fork A again. I think, though, that this is a really great system within the limits of the technology we have now. I like your idea of focusing on the world instead of the "hero player." It's almost like what a Burning Wheel MMO would be. Characters in BW usually are not superheros which can lay low an army of orcs with a single punch. Most of the time they are average joe schmo the blacksmith/farmer/swindler/etc.
However, I have been thinking a lot about what incentives are on a developer when you receive a lot of your revenue on a monthly subscription basis. It basically puts pressure on the publisher/developer to stretch out the content as long as possible. So if you have MMO X and the developers gather around and say "ok, our classes are finished, they each have 30 skills and 20 talent points all balanced out." The next question is going to be "how often should they get those skills/talent points?"
Any game designer focusing on good game design would answer "they should get the next mechanic/skill once they have mastered the ones they have." That's good pacing for a game. Portal was amazing on many levels, but I think one of the ones it absolutely nailed was how it slowly taught the player many different concepts and then asked them to put these into practice to solve the puzzles. It doled out new challenges exactly when you were ready for them. Not before, and not after.
If you give out new mechanics/abilities too early, the player is overwhelmed and confused about how to use all of this stuff successfully. It breaks them out of the "playing" of the game and instead forces them to study everything they have available to figure out how it all fits together. They have to memorize everything in their arsenal, and if you give them too much at once, that becomes work instead of experiementation.
If, instead, you give out new mechanics/abilities too late, the player is going to spend a portion of the game feeling like they are ready for a new challenge, but it isn't given to them. It is going to feel stale and boring once they've already mastered the mechanics they have. This is what Grinding is in MMOs. You don't measure grinding by how long it takes to level, you measure it by "is the player ready for the next challenge but not given one?"
So that brings us back to the question: "how often should you give out 'rewards' like new skills/talent points/abilities." The answer, as we've just discussed, should be "whenever the player is ready for the next one." However, due to the "pay per month" system, publishers and developers have an incentive to pick the wrong answer, and instead stretch those rewards out. Because if you can get 10,000,000 players to play your game for an extra month before they reach max level, that's an extra 150 million dollars in revenue. And they do sneak it in there don't they? Early on, the progression feels pretty good, if not a little fast for people unfamilier with MMOs. But after about level 20-30 in WoW, it really starts to feel like you are spending more and more time grinding away with a build you've already mastered. "Yup, do skill 1, then 3, then 4 if he runs, then back to 1, and use 2 to finish him."
So while "No monthly fees" in Guild Wars 2 is great for my wallet, I'm a shit-ton more excited about the fact that as a result Arenanet has no vested interest in fucking up progression to make more money. They've already proven this to be true. The leveling curve in Guild Wars 2 is flat after about level 10. This means that it will take you about the same time to get from 11 to 12 as it will take you to get from 64 to 65.
I'm also looking forward to PlanetSide 2, but I haven't heard any info on it recently except a screenshot or two.
In GW2 they looked at other MMOs and asked "why is it some players get pissed off when they meet other people in the world? Why would they rather play by themselves instead of playing with others?" Well in WoW the reason was simple: Many quests required you to loot X things from mob Y. If another player showed up, he's not competing for that finite number of mob Y, of which, only a certain fraction of those mobs actually dropping item X. And if you are not in a group, you can't share experience for kills, and grouping up with a random stranger isn't the kind of thing most wow players are good at (social engagement with new people) or even want.
So as a result, in GW2 you acquire a dynamic event task by walking into the area where it's taking place, and then when you leave the task is gone. In this way, everyone near you is always on the same dynamic event quests as you (or at least can be). These events also scale in difficulty based on the number of players actively participating in the dynamic event. I believe that as this scales the loot gets better as well. If you and a friend chase off a small scouting party of centaurs, maybe you get some small loot. But if there's a dozen players participating, there will be a whole warband of centaurs attacking and success will mean better loot for everybody. In addition, nobody is going to "steal" your kills in dynamic events. As long as you didn't jump in at the last minute to help complete the quest, you'll get the same kinds of items as everyone else.
I'm way too obsessed with this game >_
Someone said that it would take too much time and energy by the game company to oversee all the crazy stuff needed to make everything work like it should in a game where changes stay persistent. Why not make that management part of a game for other people?
I'd love to design part of a map in Minecraft, and know that once I submit it, someone else will populate it with NPC's, and then a clan would try to fight their way through it. If they take over, great! They can then set Dwarfs to look after the place, and those Dwarfs can be managed by someone who likes to play Dwarf Fortress. The WoW clan can go take over another part of the map, if someone has made something interesting.
Some players will be "god" characters, and some could be "human" characters, and others could be "nation" or "species" characters. If you were a god player, like you made the maps, you could only get resources to build more if human level people played through the map. If you were a human player, you could only move on to another map if you play the map until the end. And, instead of grinding to get levels, you play the Dwarf Fortress part to build up resources.
The mouse game (I can't remember the name, and I'm offline so can't google), is a good guide to giving players power in a single level. If you reach a goal, you get points. At the start of a round, if you have the most points, you are the commander, and have a god role rather than a mouse role. In a MMOG like this, if you enter the level with the highest points, you get to play commander, like an RTS. Like NS, even. If you do well, you get a few points. If you do badly, you get no points. No matter what, you're down at the bottom of the queue again. The only way to be commander again is to play a lot, or play better than everyone else in that part of the map.
I'm just rambling, but maybe you get the idea. Make every level part of the same game.
This is a Social MMO, we have no plans for level up systems besides potentcy of spells and certain skills. Even then combat will not be a main focus
When i say social MMO, i mean it will be mostly passive, focusing mainly on player interaction and exploration, like a huge chat room. Player economy is present, and world events and quests are available, although we've decided to use a more dynamic NPC system. NPCs will have basic patterns in day to day life, and unless you hold down a permanent job, most NPC quests and missions are subject to limited availability or require certain requirements to be met. For eg, you dont go knocking on Twilight's door asking for a quest at 2am in the morning, she'll blast you away. Also because NPCs will be walking around and are not static, you as a player will not have daily routine. You wont be going about with a checklist saying do this and then do that unless you memorise NPC routines, and even then, it will be randomized. Certain events and quests may even happen and end withought you knowing of it, or are inherently secretive in nature.
We have plans for dynamic dialogue, having the way you as the player talk to NPCs affect how the NPCs respond and what type of situations you may get into. Choosing certain dialogue choices and making use of certain items and gits, affects NPCs in certain ways, much like that bribe system in the Elder Scrolls Series that gives access to info or quests a player may not obtain normally.
As it is, the best analogy i can come up with to describe the game is a combination of social play styles like Habbo and Neopets, with certain roleplay elements and economy. There are still tons and tons to discuss and iron out so none of what i said are actually concrete yet. At this point of time, the whole team is concerned with getting the GUIs and engine up and running, and moving on to server load tests.
SO! Fun part, as this is a volunteer project, we have some freedom to actually try and do what we want, and being an avid geeknights listener ive been keeping tabs on the MMO discussions and try to break the mould in this game. If any of you have any ideas of what you feel would be great mechanical wise, do tell me! Any programmers who feel they can help the programming team out into making some awesome ideas a reality would be better!
Oh, our site is mlponline.net, we just got it up and the art team will continue working on it. Deadline for bronycon is soon though, so thats our focus now
If you actually want to make something that doesn't suck, as opposed to something crappy that people play only because it has ponies, then I suggest you immerse yourself in the world of MUSHes and learn everything about them that you can. That includes studying the history of MUSHes. Find one that still exists, and play it extensively. Study the source code of ones that are available. Setup some old crappy ones and get friends to play it together seriously to uncover its flaws. Learn and steal from the forgotten masters.
Ill take your advice to heart and have a look at some of the MUSHes, the core game engines and maps/art are being finalized still, and theres tons of room for things to change mechanically and gameplay wise. Perhaps ill start a seprate thread on this in time.
Just a friendly warning. Most of the people collaborating with you will disappear before anything substantive is done.
Let me elaborate a bit further. Imagine a plot of land on a map, hexagonal, maybe 500m across. This seed territory is created randomly, as in Minecraft. Each person who joins the server is given a chance to create, minecraft-like, another plot of land. Just one. In the original plot of land, you gather together a band of at least 20 players, and head north. Once you reach the north edge of the hex, a player's map is selected at random, and the group enters it. The two hexes are now linked, and will always be together like that at on that server forever. The player who built the level doesn't control what happens on the map. Instead the player with the most "points" becomes the GM, and controls, like in an RTS, the bad guys, even though they only know what the map will be at the same time as the players who enter it.
If the god player wins, and keeps control of the plot of land, it belongs to them, and they can chose to keep hold of it, and manage their remaining troops Dwarf Fortress style. They will probably fail to keep hold of it in the long run though, as they won't only have to deal with random shit from the computer, but also human controlled players.
If the band of human players wins, whoever scored the most points has the chance to Dwarf Fortress that hex of land, as well as becoming the RTS god player for the next hex map the human players enter. Of course, the more land you take, the more difficult it is to keep control. And you never know what kind of hex map you're going to have to defend. Maybe it is something awesome, maybe something not so cool, but it won't be something you have made. However, if you are in the group of players entering a new hex map, the chances are it is something you yourself built. If you've put time into it, you're going to want to capture the land/building/dungeon you have created! And if it is a cool castle, or something, you might even convince real human players to stay with you in the castle to defend it. You'll still have the Dwarf Fortress level power, but real humans can use your castle to "sleep" in while they're not playing, and even defend it if you aren't around.
The world would then grow, hex by hex. At any time there would be the same number of possible hexes to add as the number of people in the world on that server. You'd need a minimum number of people to band together, to cross the edge of the map, to grow the land in any direction. Some people might control a few hexes in different parts of the map, but there would be a increasing difficulty penalties the more land you control. Some people might want to play more at the Dwarf Fortress level, creating new dungeons, and some might stick with human characters, just exploring, or sneaking into castles, that kind of thing.
Anyway, I'd play that game. For a month or two.
Minecraft world.
Make a Minecraft server mod, here is how it would work. First, you register your server with a centralized server list. Players then register with your server and mark it as their home server.
Next you get all your peeps and start building stuff. Then there is one new structure, the war portal. When you build a war portal, the central server picks another server. It then connects to that other server and builds the reverse war portal on the other side. Now anyone who goes into a war portal gets disconnected from one server and reconnected to the other. They will also be spawned at the location of the opposite portal.
That's it. Otherwise it's just Minecraft. If someone turns their server off, the portal will go dark. If a portal is dark for too long, it will get destroyed.
The mod will also make sure that only people who have your server set as their home can connect directly. Everyone else will only be able to get in via portal.
Art and sprite wise, the body of work done has already been substantial. Feel free to have a look http://mlpfimonline.deviantart.com/
There were one or two times the whole project teetered on collapsing, but we've managed to pull through. Im almost 100 percent sure that a skeleton build will be finished, the thing is how it goes from there, and how much we expand the game, which the core members have all agreed to stop after cloudsdale and canterlot. Maybe sooner, we have no plans to support this game indefinetly.