Non Turn based games (looking for ideas)

[zykal]

Well I've been wanting to make a game that wasn't limited by turns or energy or what ever.

How ever there are a few problems with this.

If you fall behind your behind forever.

Also macros/bots become more of an issues with these games.


I'm looking for ways to slow the game down I guess.

or make it so that if you came in 2 weeks late you arn't completly screwed, or if you don't play for 8 hours a day its ok.


I thought about making it so you had ... different types of energy I guess

and if you only wanted to fight that was fine you would still be ok but could only do like 100 battles a day.

but after that or during or before you could go chop wood to build yourself a house so you can store more stuff/ bigger items.


things like that.


If you have any input I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Sagefire135]

I played a game before that had 2 options:  one used energy, and one didnt. using energy was just like any other game, you get it, you spend it on battles, and then you have to wait for more, but you coudl opt to have unlimited* battles instead by changing an option in your profile.

*unlimited in that you coudl battle as many times as you could, but battles were turn based and took a few minutes to actually do. If you were active ALL day then you could use the unlimited option and do better than someone using energy, but it woudl take ALOT of effort.

If the game is ongoing, and doesnt go through resets then no matter how hard you try some people will get SOO far ahead of everyone else that its no longer fun for anyone. if you do use resets, every say month then players will always be leveled out and the new players have the same chances as the older ones.

[shoespeak]

One thing that would help players who spend all day to get ahead is if there required a lot of player interaction...going on quests with other members, etc. This could probably cut down on macros too, since they would have to be really smart macros. Another thing that could help I think is a large world with plenty of things to do...bascially the game has to be open ended and ideally never ending. Giving players plenty of different stats to train means you can create a simple quest generator and have enough content to last a while. (Would need to find some good quest writers)

[zykal]

I was thinking of things, like the house, if you get one its not a big huge upgrade least not to your character but it is a time invesment, even if I have it so you can make really big ones, which would be a bigger time sink it doesn't really make your character more powerful just gives you more options on what to store and such.

So if you wanted to you could choose to build a small house or a really big one or inbetween or none at all.

[karnedge]

One idea may be what games like Eve-Online (MMORPG) and Tribal Wars (PBBG) do... You make skills/attributes or objects require a certain amount of real world time (whether they were logged in or logged out) for the player to receive the skill or object.

[jannesiera]

One idea may be what games like Eve-Online (MMORPG) and Tribal Wars (PBBG) do... You make skills/attributes or objects require a certain amount of real world time (whether they were logged in or logged out) for the player to receive the skill or object.

That's true, though they haven't really solved the problem in tribalwars. People need to be online a lot if they want to attack or counter an incoming attack. But it certainly works. I try to achieve the same with my own PBBG. But it fits a certain theme. Tribalwars is real strategy and my own game is an economy simulation (don't know about EVE online), so that works fine. But I would be carefull when trying it for an rpg.

[Scion]

there is a fundamental problem with allowing unlimited activity. if activity can be translated into advantage then those that are more active will have a bigger advantage. and generally the advantage achieved by additional activity is often exponential rather than linear or logarithmic.


the way to get around this is to allow activities that provide no direct ingame advantage. the proverbial chat, forums, messages etc....that we all know about

however you can also think outside the box.....take a look at Renaisance kingdoms......if you want you can spend hours inside one of the games taverns in what is essentially a fancied up chatroom.....but it provides little if any ingame advantage (in fact drink too much and it can be a serious dis-advantage) other than the improved social bonds with other players.

The thing to avoid though is tasks that are simply repetitive, add something like chop down 10 trees for this house or 100 for that or if your really keen 1000 for that and your setting yourself up for macro's

One example that i can think off is in a game with some sort fo character progression the character progression is controlled by turns (or real world time ala EVE if you like) but then you allow players to enter an area / environment where no character progression is possible but where they can engage in activities.

Say for example youve just built a Mech bassed PVP game where players essentially battle each other....if you limit the number of actual battels a player can engage in each day (say for instance by energy) then you have placed a cap on how much each player can improve each day.......but what about your die hard fans that love the game and want to play all day long.....why not create a holo deck like experience for them....a simulator if you will then they can continue playing fighting and whatever in the simulator ...perhapes even being able to try out alternative setups.....all without giving any specific advantage (other than improved knowledge) to their actual character...In fact id suggest if you did just this youd have just as many competing in the simulator to be king of the sim as you would in the actual game world......a game within a game if you will.

[zykal]

Scion has hit it right on the head ingame activities to do that provide little to no advantage.

exactly the types of things I need.

[Quantz]

I haven't read any of the replies but ill just give my 2 cents... What I did to solve this problem is make a battle gauge and you can only battle when the gauge is full. After each battle the gauge takes more and more time to fill up and eventually after 12 hours or 24 hours it resets to it's smallest increment again. It worked quite well for me.

[Scion]

Thats a nice idea Quantz....Still those that choose to battle as often as they can will pull ahead of others.

....Something that just occured to me now.....

If you cant solve the underlying problem (or dont want to for the effect it may have ona game ) You could attempt to limit its impact. What is the problem with some players having an advantage over others? Well its fairly clear, In any sort of competitive environment or resource  stealing situation it only makes sense to seek out a target over which you have the biggest advantage. So those who play more will seek out the weakest opponents and milk ( or farm ) them for their resources.

So one possibility is to limit players ability to attack those that are significantly weaker than you. As long as you are able to assess a players strength (bassed on in game attributes not their strategic ability) then you can ensure that a player is limited to attacking those of similar strength. Note however if you get this strength assessment wrong it can completly invalidate this approach. I know of at least one reasonably successful PVP game where exactly this happened and it more or less changed the whole game....(to the detriment of the games monitisation i might add)

In one of the game ideas/designs i have in my little black book (ok its more sort of red but meh...) I would divide players regularly into groups bassed on performace.... similar to how football leagues work... so those at the top would advance to the next level/group, those in the middle stay put, and those at the bottom get bumped down.....the intention being to keep competition healthy amoungst players so that they allways have close competitors ....with a side effect that those that are trying to multi cannot simply have one character that farms a bunch of others since after spliting the main would be segregated from the poorly performing farms.....

Of course this does assume that there is a certain player density........

[lolninja]

One of the things I was planning on doing for a game I started working on a while back which was a Civilisation clone was to have basically two layers of the game, those being the international stage and a national stage.
Within the international stage everyone would have a common currency that they use to build there armies etc, then in the national stage players would have there own currency which they use to build up their cities.

Building the cities would default to being random, based upon the needs of the people, so if they needed more food shops the game would then build the needed building in a random position. There would be some negative effects on building food shops next to say a chemical plant or something, which would limit the national growth. If the player wanted to be more active they could disable the automatic building process, and opt to build there cities by hand.

The randomly generated cities would be less effective than a well laid out city, which would have a slight negative effect on the international stage, as a happier population would lead to a minor improvement on city defence or something daft.

The idea behind this was to allow those who really enjoyed my game to play it as much as they humanly could, building there cities to be a sprawling metropolis of awesome. But in turn not gaining to much of an advantage in the international stage.
Also when users start customising there cities I feel that it would help establish a bond with the game, meaning they are more likely to return and tell there friends

[karnedge]

One of the things I was planning on doing for a game I started working on a while back which was a Civilisation clone was to have basically two layers of the game, those being the international stage and a national stage.
Within the international stage everyone would have a common currency that they use to build there armies etc, then in the national stage players would have there own currency which they use to build up their cities.

Building the cities would default to being random, based upon the needs of the people, so if they needed more food shops the game would then build the needed building in a random position. There would be some negative effects on building food shops next to say a chemical plant or something, which would limit the national growth. If the player wanted to be more active they could disable the automatic building process, and opt to build there cities by hand.

The randomly generated cities would be less effective than a well laid out city, which would have a slight negative effect on the international stage, as a happier population would lead to a minor improvement on city defence or something daft.

The idea behind this was to allow those who really enjoyed my game to play it as much as they humanly could, building there cities to be a sprawling metropolis of awesome. But in turn not gaining to much of an advantage in the international stage.
Also when users start customising there cities I feel that it would help establish a bond with the game, meaning they are more likely to return and tell there friends

Actually, this idea can be seen in action if you play Spore (at least on PC). During the second to last stage, you control multiple cities which if you take over others or find another spot for one they will automatically build what they need but you can go in build them yourself (which will make it better). I think there's also the connections thing as well where if you build a home next to a chemical plant it will make them less happy, etc.

[raines80]

Here is the deal. I play a game called Battle Dawn. It is a turn based browser MMORTS. It uses ticks which are normaly 1 hour. I have played this game for 2 years now and I usualy finish in the top 25 in most of the rounds. Rounds usually take around 4000-6000 ticks to complete. I am very active in Battle Dawn and was getting annoyed that attacks would take 3 hours. By the time my attack got to the person they could have donated and built a massive army to repel me. Eventualy BD realized that a lot the players were on enough to create a 30 min attack server. This sped up game play and gave an advantage to active players.

My point is thus, you can't make everyone happy. If you create a real time MMORPG without ticks or energy then you will have a handfull of players run away from the pack. They will become too powerful and many players will leave the game. Me, personaly, I like real time games. I like the fact that I can battle for as long as I want and train my skills (grinding) as long as I want and become better for it. To me it is like Rocky.... he doesn't win his fights becuase he is that good... he wins them cause he trains hard. The issue with this is BOTS. You are gonna have people find ways to take advantage of your gameplay system and it will ruin it for a lot of people.


Let us say you create a game with ticks/energy. This does take out most of the issues that real time games have, but you begin to alienate people on both sides of the ball here. People like me who love to play online games don't get enough out of the game. You really only get 30 min of actuall game play as day out of tick games. Energy games can be fun, but once again... when I want to play.. I want to play. You also make it difficult for the players who can't play all the time to get into it. You have people who may only have access to an internet connection once or twice a week. The tick servers are out of the question for these guys. There is no way they could gain any type of strength bein inactive for 20 ticks at a time. They also won't enjoy playing the energy either because they will jump on the computer... excited to play the game you have made and realize they can only play for 1 hour cause then their energy is gone... now they have to go play something else till next week.

My personal solution is this. Games should have two servers. One that is constent gameplay. The world doesn't stop for anyone. You will have to be suuuuppppeeerrr active on this server to even compete. The second server should be energy based. This way people who aren't as active can enjoy the game as well.

My solution to bots. Games make it way to easy to grind. You just have to walk around and use whatever skill you have that is weak so it becomes strong. I think you need to add some real player participation here. Some sort of thought processing that a comp will not be able to accomplish. Add the human element to all ascpects of the game and eventually you will rid yourself of all bots.

[Scion]

raines, very good points.

my only comment to your thoughts about bots.....just about anything that can be defined in a distinct set of steps can be automated....the problem with stopping bots is that it is a distinctly hard problem. Take Captchas for instance, these things are specifically designed to stop bots....but are not really all that effective.

Back in the old days i playyed a game that had two modes, one that allowed bots and plugins and another that prohibited them, because there was a mode that allowed for them all the bots that i ever saw were designed to work in bot mode, i dont think i ever saw or heard of anyone i knew using a bot in standard mode. A budding bot builder could build a bot for the game if they wanted and were limited only by what they could imagine and what the game would actually support.

Im a little surprised that none of the large grind style MMORPG's out there that i know of have tried this strategy....to me thinking that your player base isnt going to develope bots or thinking that youll be able to stay on top of it is akin to sticking your head in the sand...... fortunately most smaller games simply dont have the player base that this becomes a problem.

[raines80]

Scion,

You make a good point as well. I think the only way to "cut back" on the number of bots without having two dedicated servers would be to have an entire team of bot hunters. RF Online is a good example of this. They had a team that would watch each server for bots. Of course you continued to have bots, but their were fewer bots in that game then most of the ones I have played. RF Online also used the team quest idea that was mentioned in early posts. There were certain MOBs you couldn't take out unless you were in a team. This also ensure bots didn't have an advantage even if they were still ingame.

The other way is something I mentioned in my first post, but I don't think I was able to explain very well. I will attempt to explain it once again here. You need to take the bot like actions out of the game. In RF Online you have hot keys. These keys are used in battle or just to Grind your skills. Many people who didn't know how to create a bot actually made their own MCGuyver bots by taking a roll of pennies and placing them on their hot key so the character would continue to train the skill while they were AFK.  To avoid situations like this I think there has to be a way to make training a bit more random. I am by no means a great programmer and wouldn't have the slightest idea on how to do this, but here is my thought. Let's say you are trying to train your ranged skills. You equip your bow and head out into the woods to kill some stuff so your ranged skill will increase. You spot a goblin and take aim. The goblin doesn't just run at you... instead he takes cover under a tree. You take aim and clip him for some damage. Now the goblin has decided to charge.... your bow is usless now. So you have to change weapons and use your sword. The goblin dies and a screen pops up with a 6 on it.... now you must type in 7 to authenticate that you are playing at that momment.  Bots would not be able to accomplish this for two reasons. First, the bot would not know to pull the sword in order to take on the goblin. So the bot will die because it will be trying to use the bow which is useless now...second.. the quick authenticator should also slow the bots down. Some may say it is annoying, but is the pop up with the gold, exp , and items you gained from the fight annoying as well?

[Scion]

The only system that ive seen in a non turn bassed game that doesnt seem suited to botting is skill progression bassed on real world time, ala Eve.

The use bassed skilling will allways provid a good target for bots if you complicate the process then the bot just gets smarter. using a type of captcha regularly is just as likely to drive your players away as your bots, perhapes more so. Your goblin example is nice but what if im good enough to hit the goblin in the vulnerables every time......and i just want to train my accuracy? If i can hit a small winged gnat at 200 yards in the swamp of doom why cant i hit a goblin in the vulnerables in care bare forest?

If your going to have a use based skills system then to avoid skilling bots completely i think youd need to move to a limited turns system.

And then building bots for http bassed games is a whole different kettle of fish....you have options ranging from fully controlling the browser, webdrver, selenium etal... through to extending the interface using greasemonkey.... or you can leave the browser out all together and just talk directly with the server....

botting for web games is completly differnt to botting for client bassed games....although theconcerns and effect on game play can be similar.

Its my belief that everyone writing a game should have a go at putting together a bot for a game....possibly their own....just to see what can be achieved.

[tellmore]

Well I've been wanting to make a game that wasn't limited by turns or energy or what ever.

How ever there are a few problems with this.

If you fall behind your behind forever.

Also macros/bots become more of an issues with these games.


I'm looking for ways to slow the game down I guess.

or make it so that if you came in 2 weeks late you arn't completly screwed, or if you don't play for 8 hours a day its ok.


I thought about making it so you had ... different types of energy I guess

and if you only wanted to fight that was fine you would still be ok but could only do like 100 battles a day.

but after that or during or before you could go chop wood to build yourself a house so you can store more stuff/ bigger items.


things like that.


If you have any input I'd greatly appreciate it.

a dirty and easy solution is to make different "worlds".
players from lvl 1 to lvl 10(? or 20? 25? depends on you) are at world 1.
if they manage to get to lvl X, they are moved to world 2.
and so on.
so new players will find challenge at world 1, and older players who managed a higher lvl will not be annoyed by them, and allso will find new lvl of challenges.