Greetings all, my first post here after reading for quite some time. I figured I'd solicit some feedback on a few ideas I had kicking around. I won't go into story so much as I've been working with someone for a year and have a pretty hefty library of lore to convey to players the idea, but I would like your thoughts and opinions of the mechanics and their complexity in coding. So without further ado...
Levels will be hidden from the player with a hard level cap of 40. Levels will be gained via a combination of experience from quests/killing monsters and individual skill levels.
Skill levels will be hidden from the players with a hard level cap of 40, but displayed to players by a range, such as "Novice, Adept, Expert, Artisan, Master". 1-9 Novice, 10-18 Adept, 19-27 Expert 28-36 Artisan, 37-40 Master. Skills would only be learned once, and then advanced through usage with each higher level taking exponentially more uses.
There would be no class system, instead the skills would be tier based. In order to learn a tier 2 skill, a player would have to learn a certain number of tier 1 skills. There would be a finite number of "learns" available to a player, so not all skills would be able to be learned, and choices would have to be made within each skill realm as well. This way to unlock the truly powerful skill in a skill realm, dedication is required. I hope this would make each character unique, and realize it will require very finite balancing to prevent "cookie-cutter" builds.
World economy would be based on a multitude of things. There will be a crafting and gathering system, and the game would log transactions (privately, players won't know about it) and eventually "learn" the cost of everything. It will also keep track of all currency in the game, and be able to measure economic flow. I intend to write in scripts that would trigger if the economy stagnates, such as the loan of money from game banks to players to form their own stores or build their own homes. Money sinks would include interest on these loans, buying "land" to build homes on, home taxes, as well as offering key components from game stores that can't be found elsewhere. I also intend to create some sort of web interface that would allow players to order/create truly unique items that would cost them in game currency. Each one of these items would require immortal approval if the statistics on it fell out of bounds.
Currently I'm more pro PVP than against it. Anyone could kill anyone, but I intend to implement a comprehensive justice system so that a murderer would at first not be allowed in a city escalating to the point where smart scripted mobs might continuously hunt them. This would at first be mostly autonomous eventually growing into being player run.
To determine the outcome of every action besides the very basic, I intend to generate two random numbers using a standard distribution, the actor's and the receiver's. The mean would be a combination of their level and skill level plus any specific modifiers from effects already on the player, and the standard deviation would exponentially decay based on the individual skill level of the action in question. I feel this is extremely fair but allows for random things to happen.
Well, I have a ton of other ideas but I think I've blabbered on long enough. Another challenge in all of this is deciding which language to write it in. I've studied Java and am teaching myself C++ as well as Objective C, and am leaning towards C++ as the language of choice for speed of execution, especially if the economic model lifts off the ground. I do like the Java aspect of the web services as I'm unfamiliar what C++ or Objective C offers. Lastly, I intend to either run Python or Lua as my scripting language, or possibly make my own that would be easier for people with no programming knowledge to use, though I don't see any reason to re-invent the wheel on that one.
I appreciate any feedback.
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