My best idea so far for addressing this is to give all players exactly three characters, which they can switch between at any point. The goal would be for most of your "boring" productive output to be determined more by (character) resource allocation rather than participating in the grind yourself all the time.

For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.

You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.

It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)

I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.

In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.

So I wasnt convinced it would stick.

I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed

If you can passively make more money with more characters what stops someone from having a ton of accounts and just funneling resources?

I'd like to pretend the cost of a license would mitigate this, but yes, it would probably be disastrous in practice.

The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.

I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.

> A virtual economy implies work.

a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .

It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

>> It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).

The difference between stupidity and genius: stupidity has no limits. — someone

Well it's fun until logistics goes on strike and demands changes: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/foxhole-players-launch-...

Savage also mixed in RTS so you could have one player play StarCraft while the others were units

I would argue that this is the exact problem of current modern games. The parent is suggesting something alternative, fun with other people.

Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.

Love Ironman mode in RuneScape for this reason. Taking the economy out entirely improves the modern game experience.

Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back

I haven’t been into MMOs in a long time, but years ago, I remember desperately trying to find a good one, but I found that not only do a lot of them have some grindy linear progression, but even worse was it was always so limited. I got sick of games that looked amazing but had basically no content.

Puzzle Pirates was the best game ever for a number of years.

An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.

Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.

Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.

And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.

Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.

Wow, thank you for this blast from the past. I remember getting rich enough to own one of the bigger ships and losing it in in a fierce PVP battle. Good times!

This is subjective. I played FFXI for over a decade and despite it being more or less a second job, I truly loved coming home and hopping on and see what we were fighting for that evening.

Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;

You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.

Is FFXI what the poster was describing though? I got the impression that it was a world where the economy was mostly controlled and defined by the community via trading, crafting and agreements.

That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).

Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.

Most MMOs are overly focused on player engagement. MMOs should have built in botting mechanics, so you can just let your player do the tedious stuff while you are asleep/working/living real life.

Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.

One of the Final Fantasies (I forget which one, 10 was the last one I personally played, so I only ever saw my sister play it) had a concept of actions you could program into your off-hand characters. You had only a basic number of slots to define command to begin with, but as you progressed in level, more slots opened up and you could program more complex behaviors.

I believe you are talking about ff xii with its gambit system. It's sort of a simplified programming tool to program your AI companions behavior without having to directly micromanage them. For example, a companion can be programmed to heal ally if their HP is less than 50% hp, cast specific spell if there 3 enemies or more, attack nearest enemy in that priority order. I wish more games have this system.

The gambit system was pretty polarizing. Programmer types liked it, but a lot of people perceived it as "the game playing itself" and didn't.

The key is to have your characters work while you work. Kind of like EVE Online.

In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.

Try limiting players to 60 minutes per day. In the BBS days this worked because you got two TURNS per day. 24/7 access is what kills this sort of thing, IMHO.

This could be interesting. I feel like the problem with MMOs that give you too much freedom is how players with more time will just completely dominate everyone else within days of any new content launching. Also, in my experience bad/unfun behavior in general gets worse the more populated an MMO is (FFXIV being a nice exception), and this solution could help keep traffic down. The only problem is that no dev trying to make money would ever time-limit their players.

Perhaps time limited but only per realm/server/world? That way someone trying to get their fix can play across multiple isolated economies but still allow players to play more if they really want to (lets be real people would multiaccount anyway)

This was usually done by having separate instances with different time limits. That way all the lifers with 12 hours a day to spare could play together and let everyone else enjoy themselves.

I was thinking of something similar recently as I am a big fanatic of PvP games of different kinds. Problem is as I get older I have less time to play to keep up with my enemies and would love to have "adult" servers which are only on at certain times of the day (maybe even with some auto grinding on the off hours). To allow people to be on more even footing. I bet there would be a decent chunk of people who would enjoy this.

Turn based games can work well.

There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.

I beg to differ, World of Warcraft is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. It was destroyed when they changed the game to have multi-server raids etc. that ended the social aspect of "your server is your world." No longer did you have to make friends and have a life on your server that was as addicting as real life. You just had to queue up and let the computer match you up with people. And then the magic was gone.

Have you played any sandbox games more seriously and joined some guilds etc? I would say WoW was more of a "world" in the start (but not on a comparable level to others) and turned less and less so over time. The one thing blizzard always managed really well however is a crazy level of polish. I am sure they could make any kind of game really shine.

The one way I can see for true MMORPGs, as outlined by the GP, to work, as I can see, is basically having an AGI director to handle arbitrary actions, along with a BCI to actually take those actions.

I've also been thinking about using small containers in the cloud to basically run NPC lives inside a MMORPG. I thought this would be what New World would bring to the table honestly.

That’s actually a fascinating idea.

And basically stolen from a certain type of manwa. (Overgeared in this case)

addendum: also infinite dendrogram

> The problem is, games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried.

Doubt.

I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.

Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.

I don't think it's a problem of fun, but of profit. I too want an mmo that is closer to a social experiment than a slot machine, but one of those is easier to make and has a more reliable business model to justify the expenses to make it.

Second Life was once this grand experiment. I recall you ended up with weird things happening virtual real estate tycoon Anshe Chung being chased by a horde of scripted dildos chasing her avatar around. All the money in the virtual world still can’t save you from trolling.

I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.

The line between work and play is not are clear cut as people think. Look at farming simulator games, be it the Harvest Moon style ones or the proper farming simulators. Look at trucking simulator games. Some programming games have problems harder than what I face at work. Many jobs can be turned into play by removing certain parts. It won't appeal to everyone, but the idea with an MMORPG would be to have many such possibilities and a player can have fun even if only a few matches with their preferences.

Along these lines, I remember Skyrim once being described as "at heart, the world's greatest hiking sim." Maybe Minecraft shares some of that.

Isn't there a pretty broad swath of what people find fun? I mean isn't Eve Online called a "spreadsheet simulator" (Long before the recent Microsoft Excel Integration)

Not true, EVE, Albion are like that (and probably a good number of others). Some survival type games with PvP features parts of that as well although they are regularly wiped. While the demand is smaller than mainstream MMOs the following is way more hardcore, there is a reason some of these games are going strong after 15-20 years.

Isn't the OG Sim City something like "work"?

I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?

I played Tera about 10 years ago, when it was good.

Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.

There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.

I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.

Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.

At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.

Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.

Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.

But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".

You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.

Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.

But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.

Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.

Not even MMO. I play Apex Legends, a character based BR. There is a ranked mode where each rank have an entry cost and you get points by placement and kills. While it’s a team game, the entry cost was so low that you could play aggressively - killing a few people and dying soon after - or survive by hiding - ratting - and get to a high rank easily. It quickly became a solo game, where people abandon their team to push fights they can’t win, hoping for a few kill, or leaving their teammates in fight they could have win otherwise.

They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.

Your experience with TERA is akin to mine. Not only the game was innovative, skill based and overall fun to play, the interaction with other players was like none I had ever experienced.

BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.

[1] https://tera.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance#Exarch

Ha, I tried, but no dice. Too much competition (and people cheating with multiple accounts). Best I got was Assault Commander, but I kinda liked to stay Defense Commander, the buffs could make a good party unkillable :D.

Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.

The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.

I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D

>The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.

>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.

I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.

I think you underestimate the number of people who live their lives on these games.