Simulating time via ticks

[Sinzygy]

Okay, still me who is starting a new topic (somebody's got to keep the board alive B))

Again, for a PBBRPG:

We somehow have to limit the time a player spends in the game world. Or else the player that has the most time to play the game will, no doubt, win. Most PBBRPGs use some form of time; be this energy, mana, or stamina. Every action costs a certian amount of TU(time units) and when you are out of TUs , you won't be able to do anything with your character except maybe seling/buying stuff, etc.

Now, most of these games have in my eyes a big flaw: you can upgrade this energy. Why is that so bad? Simple: a new player will never be able to catch up to an older player, simply because he had more time to accumulate more TU to spend in a day. And this will grow exponetially if you continue to observe two such players.

Now I'm proposing the following: Take one day. That are 1440 Minutes. Or 144 TU (1 TU = 10 real life minutes). Now the player still has to spend TUs to do stuff in the game world, but he won't be able to improve the overall time. Now, the player has to plan his time more carefully.

I'm thinking about introducing sleep as well. Let's say a character that slept 4 hours (24 TU) has a training/battle efficency of 80%. 6 hours (36 TU) gives 100% efficency, 8 hours gives (48 TU) gives 120% efficency. What do I mean by efficency? It simply means how many turns you will have to use to do a task.
Let's say raising your strength to strength + 1 need 20 TU. With 80% efficency that means you will need (200-80)/100 * 20 = 24 TU for + 1 strength. With 120% efficency you'll only need (200-120)/100*20 = 16 TU. (this time increases as the attributes increase)

Sleep will have to be done at the current turn, before you can do anything when the turn has been reset. So you'll login, be presented with a box saying: "How long did you sleep tonight?" and only then you'll be able to play on.

Comments, Thoughts?

[Zeggy]

I like the sleep idea
Then users who take a break from the game will actually get a small bit of an advantage

[Sinzygy]

well, it's actually just measured in TU. So eventually someone will figure out the optimum and just use that from then on.

[Shapulin]

how works the ticks in games like Ogame...

I dont like the turns games very much but

[Broda]

Again, I like the way WoW handled it. When you log in it calculates how much time has passed since you logged out and gives you "rested" XP - you get double XP for kills up to 1.5 levels worth if you were out the max amount of time or more. It gives people a small advantage for logging out for an extended amount of time.

So if this is your normal XP bar:
_______________

It would look like this if you had rested xp available:
___
_______________

And once you had gotten to that point on the bar the rested bar would go away and you would then only gain the normal amount of XP per kill.

This same concept could probably be implemented pretty easily in a PBBRPG. Keep track of the amount of rested xp they have. If they use it all in a session it is just recalculated at the start of the new session. If they have some left at the end of a session, it is still available the next session plus whatever new rest they've acquired. There should always be a limit though - as I said in WoW was around 1.5 levels.

If the game is not round based, let the people with the most time play as much as they want, as the people without as much time always have a chance of catching up.

[Sinzygy]

i still don't understand the limit...
So you can double xp until your rested xp has ran out, or until you reach the next level or what?

[Zeggy]

I think what he means is that you get double the amount of exp for a maximum of 1.5 levels, so once you have gained 1.5 levels from the double exp boost, the double exp boost goes away.
And that's only if you rested enough, otherwise you probably get double exp for a shorter amount of time.

[Sinzygy]

ah, I see. thanks

Yeah, that would be one way to do it as well. But it doesn't really limit the time in the game itself, since it won't be realtime.

[Broda]

i still don't understand the limit...
So you can double xp until your rested xp has ran out, or until you reach the next level or what?

I think what he means is that you get double the amount of exp for a maximum of 1.5 levels, so once you have gained 1.5 levels from the double exp boost, the double exp boost goes away.
And that's only if you rested enough, otherwise you probably get double exp for a shorter amount of time.

Both right - You get double xp until the rested xp runs out - it may be the next level or it may just be 1 or 2 kills worth depending on how long you were logged out. The maximum you could accumulate was 1.5 levels worth of xp.

[Broda]

ah, I see. thanks

Yeah, that would be one way to do it as well. But it doesn't really limit the time in the game itself, since it won't be realtime.

It doesn't limit your time but it gives you an incentive to log out for a while. You could grind for hours or you could play a while until you got tired, log out and come back the next day and grind for half the time.

The limits would still be energy/mana or whatever you want it to be but I don't like the idea of limiting the player's time. If they want to sit on your site all day and play let em.

[Sinzygy]

sorry to ask many stupid sounding questions, but I never played WoW.

So is the experience fixed or does it inrease? I mean, do you always have to get to 10000xp or does it increase with you level? My guess is the second... so I'm wondering how they're figuring that out, when 1.5 levels are reached... oh well. I bet there's a lot of smart guys at blizzard studios for such things

[Sinzygy]

The limits would still be energy/mana or whatever you want it to be but I don't like the idea of limiting the player's time. If they want to sit on your site all day and play let em.

yeah, I might do this if my game had a different background: what I'm (still) trying to accomplish is to make a game that doesn't need you to log in every so often to be a top player.
If I wanted to let them play the game as long as they wanted to, my classmates would rule at it since we can use our laptops during class and I guess you know what that means for us and the term "paying attention"

[Broda]

It increases by level.

It's not hard to figure out what the max for a particular level would be. Plus, I don't know for a fact but it may be based on your current level, i.e. Level 5 takes 10k xp to get to level 6 so the max rest xp would be 15k. Either that or they just say 10k xp to get from 5 to 6 and 15k to get from 6 to 7 so 10k + 7.5k = 17.5k max rest xp... I don't know.

[Broda]

If you use turns you could always do what cypher did - put a limit on the number of turns you can save up. The last round of cypher the max was 5k turns. On the tick (every 10 minutes) you would get 2 turns unless you had >= 5k turns. This made it so if someone created an account at the start of a round but then didn't play until the last week of the round they wouldn't have as many turns to use as someone that played periodically throughout the round.

[Sinzygy]

Broda:

I'm giving 144 turns every 24 hours. with a max of maybe 288 turns, but I'm still thinking about that.
I want to encourage the players to log in on a daily basis, but not spend hours each visit, maybe just 10-15mins a day would be my goal. That sounds (at least for me) quite reasonable considering that most people are around computers almost all day.

And as I mentioned above: I'm thinking about introducing a sleep-feature which is basically the same as the logging-out feature from WoW. But I want to force some strategy into it. Meaning if you slept well, you will be more efficient in training and battle, but you will only be slightly better at your daily job. This way the player can decided when he want's to make a short, intense training day or just a standard working day. But as I said: this is still far far in the cloudes and not even fully thought through

[Broda]

I'm curious. Why don't you want them playing all day?

[Zeggy]

Haha, we all want players to be playing all day
I think sinzygy just wants to eliminate the factor of time in gameplay, so that players who play all day don't have an unfair advantage over other players.

[Broda]

I guess it depends on the style of game. The rest xp idea works some - if someone plays all day they won't get as much xp as someone that hadn't logged in for a day. It doesn't limit the hardcore gamers but it gives the casual gamers a way to catch up.

[Sinzygy]

yeah, zeggy pretty much nailed it

*hands e-cookie*

no, I really try to eliminate the real-time factor in my game. I find myself often cursing a game, simply because I can not achieve anything because I can't be bothered to play a game 10 times a day just to check if I can do something.

[Zeggy]

But there are also some games that become really... well, I just stop playing because I can't be bothered to wait 10 hours for my construction to complete so I can continue the game again.
I think getting the right balance is important here, to not make the game too fast or too slow.

[Sinzygy]

I guess it depends on the style of game. The rest xp idea works some - if someone plays all day they won't get as much xp as someone that hadn't logged in for a day. It doesn't limit the hardcore gamers but it gives the casual gamers a way to catch up.

damit! you're posting too fast

Well let's assume the following:
Player A has no life at all. He can play the game 6 hrs / day. One fight takes 5 minutes. that means he can complete 72 fights.
Let's assume he gets 5xp per battle.
Now Player B has to go to work, etc. He plays regurarly form 6pm to 8pm, but due to the rested bonus, he gets 10xp per battle. But he only manages to 24 battles. You see the difference here? What I could do, is introduce a level cap (lvl 100 for example, or 50, or whatever) But what happens then? The active player might reach the level cap in 14 days. Then what? Is he gonna start over? no, he probably want's to continue with his character he already spend 14 days training.

Or here's another idea that just popped up:
I could make something like playing leagues.
Every player starts in the first league. Each player can only attack players whithin his own league. After 100 wins, the player get's automatically promoted.
Theoretically it should take a lot less time to go from league 1 to l 2, as opposed to go from l.5 to l.6. Why? Because there is a bigger playerbase in l.1 than there is in l.5 (we're assuming you can only attack a player twice a day).

So every player (except maybe #10) is at some time a newbie in a league and then a "pro"-player in a league.

With this system the players at higher level cannot be allowed to have any benefits or a stretch will start to develop which will continue through all ranks. (1 player in each higher league, just waiting for a weak player to catch up).
But this could be countered by making the requirement that there need to be at least 7 people (or so) in a league for battles between players to happen.

god damit! I should be reading "the importance of being earnest" for my test tomorrow and not be on here discussing the levelgrind  -_-

[Zeggy]

Leveling leagues sound like fun
But it could get boring for the top players when they can't battle until other people catch up.

Here's another idea, inspired from the game Ragnarok Online:
Once you reach the 'maximum level', you can get reborn, so you start over from lvl 1. However, you will get a special title, for example, normal low level people would be called Novice, but you'd be called Novice High, so you get a distinction there.
Reborn characters get the benefit of bonus stats, and maybe even a few more skills. However, leveling becomes twice as hard as non-reborn characters, so getting to the maximum level again will take much longer.
Then it becomes a choice for the top player, whether to give up the top position for a better character and try to catch up again, or to keep his character without any extra bonuses.

[Shapulin]

what if a high level char gain fame points for a fair play....

but if he or she involves in fight with underlevel players...he gain a "bad fame".... negative fame points can make him infamous or even at large change permanently his alignment in the world to the ...dark side
 :O
and not just that, a infamous player cannot obtain help or trade in some places..you know...some extra difficulties for those who want to be bad   -_-

for the "restat" item..

what if the maximum level where 10....
when the player gain lvl 10...he can take an aprentice....  he must guide his aprentice but not fight for him... just save him from a certain death or something like that....

so he guide his aprentice again til level 10... and when is second character gain lvl 10....the principal gain lvl 11.... and a new free slot for an aprentice is open...

this way....a player becomes a "MASTER" and gain a few aprentices and can lead some espeical campaigns for groups..

with time can make a little army to battle with other armies...


WAR!!   --)

[Broda]

Another option:

Limit the number of times you can attack a person over a certain amount of time. Crimson Moon does this (at least on server 2, not sure about server 1). You can only attack Player A x times per hour (donators get a bonus). This same system could be used with what you're talking about. Put a cap on the number of battles you can have in an hour - something that levels the playing field a bit.

[Sinzygy]

(
...
we're assuming you can only attack a player twice a day).
...

About hourly battle limit: I think I'm gonna make so that every player respawns once every hour. But when exactly will be random to keep players from camping each other.

Also: you will only be able to attack players that are in the same location as you. So you gotta search an opponent first and only then you can attack him.