Thanks for the feedback so far.
About contour colors, I never had them in any version of FOnline, I do not know what it depends on, whenever I press A, everything had red contour. For example I press A in a town and the militia is colored RED, where it should be GREEN, but so it shall be in random encounters, where you meet Junktown scouts fighting pig rats. Maybe I was missing something, I play mostly on Reloaded, and there I do not see it working for me.
About jack of all trades and classes, I do think classes work better for every game. I did play games where you could have 100 skills or more, barely able to have hotkey for them, but the simpler version, where you could only have a selected few from those, was much-much better. For an MMO to work, you may not able everything to a single character, I mean you may, but they may not be able to be as efficient as someone specializing in that. Hence the roles/classes. If this is neglected, game play devolves into one or two metas, and everyone plays the same. Less diversity, less fun. One hitting someone should not be possible, not even with an Eye-crit or 1 hex burst. Lower TTK is needed, to allow people to react, and different crippling/healing and melee combat mechanics. This is why a moba mini-game would bring a lot to the table, as players would be able to sort balance out in a fast way and give feedback. There is/was a lot of dead time during/before server wipes/developments, where people would have nothing else to do, but test combat balance while enjoying it in mini games.
That chat window looks epic, but it clutters the view and I want the chat windows to be available all the time if the player chooses to. Basically every GUI component should be movable/resizeable, or customizable in other ways necessary. it should be up to the player to set it up as they like, and without editing CFG files.
NPC factions and player factions would be different. You would never join an NPC faction, but what would happen is that you would be friendly, neutral or enemy to them. Friendly means access to a lot of stuff, neutral is a stage to get friendly with them, and enemy is obviously the state where if you enter enemy faction territory you would get random encounter attacks from them, and guards on map shoot you on sight. The main purpose of this would be to have players stop the mindless killing of people friendly (aligned) with the same faction/faction alliance. It's a bit more complex than this, but solveable and imo needed in the MMO world. Think of WoW, Horde vs Alliance, except you could loose your affiliation to one, and join the other or be hated to any and use only Neutral towns like Gadgetzan, Dalaran, etc. The faction balance can be solved via higher timer on repeatable quests the more active (faction points gained total, and not number of characters/alts, etc) members a faction has compared to other factions, and other dynamic measurement. Mini-games on faction vs faction would have a capacity, so a fight of 100 vs 5 never happens and the people with most recently achieved points toward that faction would have priority joining them. This would naturally push some people to join the lesser populated factions, to be able to have fun. (+ other balance/exploit fixes that come up, it's to early to say, but helpful to contemplate on it)
The sand needs to be filtered by a lot of layers before players can play with it. Again, this is very complex, but doable and needed. Else player interaction will reduce to kill on sight in 90% of cases, a very bad design for an MMO, specially for one with full loot.
Idea of how Quests should balance on
level performance / player+character skill.
- First and foremost, Quest shall be able to FAIL. PVE needs to be engaging, and there shall be a risk to it as well, for starters let's say, repeatable quests shall be able to fail.
- If you fail your PVE quest (= you entered your private area and died to mobs, not on the way or on the way to rewards, as there players might kill you as well) the level of that repeatable quest is lowered, let's say instead of 10 dogs generated, there will be only 5 or their quality is reduced, you get 5 dogs and 5 weak/injured dogs.
- If you complete that repeatable quest, the level of the quest rises for next time, so instead of 10 dogs, you either get 15 dogs to clean up, or the quality of the dogs upgrades, either in health/dmg or type, like rats < pig rats < molerats < tought pig rats and so on. Dogs would become wolfs, maybe having a pack leader and so on.
- I would add perma death for character if it fails its main quest line and dies at quest location, but that might be too harsh, idk, has to be tested. Have a warning before you accept. Have some shivers in PVE.
Creating new engine is too costly imo. The thing is, that you do it, but then again, all that I listed above, needs to be done, and you are barely ahead. Current engine might have limitations, but to think that creating a better one in reasonable time and that that would solve the FOnline problem (listed above), is foolish. I think at the moment it's better to go what we have here, and slowly replace the problematic parts, like hard coded stuff. When the whole thing is in my grasp, I might go for a shot on creating an open source version of this, but that way far ahead. I was also thinking first of replacing the animations by doing their 3D models and introduce new animations, but it seems I do not have much talent for it, however exploring this area would be good to influence people who have the time and knack for it, but lack the coding skills to add it, etc. (I would need too much time to get it done and we aren't even talking about quality.)
Agree about 'pro' players wanting to have every advantage and replace art by wall blockers, I think it hurts the game, but it is used on a scale where (1) it's common place already, (2) you cannot ban for this, as you cannot catch users, except if they post video and report themselves, but doing so would result in less footages shared. Reloaded tried to solve this by having in-game option for it, but it still looks ugly. The transparent roof/walls are available at Reloaded, I do not know if this is part of the newer engine they use or coded from script, but I think this is one of the last issues this game has, as you and others have already solved it, maybe someone will share.
About joining a team to develop there, I am sorry, but I feel like that is least useful for the community as a whole. Whatever I do, I will share it here, as I do not have any desires or plans to manage a live server, other for testing maybe. Since rotators SDK is shared, (so is Reloaded, but that is a live server and people might not feel right to use that to their own server, I never checked out TLA, but don't plan on doing so, don't have that much time) it takes most sense to add new features/remove dead code from there, everyone can add the new stuff to their server if they have at least 1 person being able to script. Also, I do believe that running a server should be mainly about that job/hobby?, as that is more than enough. Developing should be a separate hobby, even though at the moment most server owners are needed to be proficient coding/mapping/debugging their server. Hence post above, to reduce the load from server owners/scripters, at least at this level. (Generic tools supplied, but modifications needed to fit into server.)
