Xeriar's page

GW are still finalising the Kickstarter details. End of March is the date we should receive an email is my understanding.

Yeah, thanks. I apparently misread someone's post, I guess it referred to the upgrade option available in the first Kickstarter.

I participated in both Kickstarters, got the first one. Have had no similar notice regarding the second one despite seeing people talk about it - I am somewhat annoyed especially considering the amount.

The reason "Retina display" is brilliant is that it removes technobabble from a technology product and replaces it with a human-centric value.

It's a "Retina display" because your eye can't see any more pixels even if you keep upping the pixel density. More pixels are pointless. Doesn't matter what that number is. What matters is "You can't see any more pixels".

Anyone to whom that is explained intuitively gets it. They don't have to worry any more about dpi, screen x/y values, etc. It turns nonsense into common sense.

At a differing number of inches from the screen depending on the device, for someone with 20/20 vision, and only for gentle curves on solid shapes. For someone who holds the device closer, has better than normal reading vision (I'm 20/10, myself), or is viewing something with a lot of sharp angles (like say... text), the claim breaks down. As a simple test just load up a simple image with horizontal black and white lines and see how far away you are able to tell the result from a medium gray image.

It's just another marketing gimmick. I'll be amused if we see a 'Retina II' name. "This time we mean it, really!"

@Xeriar - it will be interesting to see how people engage in social organization in those early months, that 's for sure.

A community is pretty strongly defined by its 100 most committed members.

Who do you want those people to be?

I do not mean their names, but rather their deeds, goals, etc.

I suspect this is another feature of authenticators that Ryan likes.

No way to get into someone's account without them being physically present means that this sort of verification won't be possible.

It will be largely feature complete code, and there will be alpha and beta tests that proceed the start of the live game, so I think only the stubborn and the malicious will call it either.

Key being that it's launching sans one of your most tauted features (player settlements).

Ideally, it's a scale up phase, and you could call it that. Though I'm not sure why you'd want beta phases with less than 10k or so people. What do you actually gain by doing this rather than adding seven months to your beta phase, and charging for beta access? Certainly not new, and GW2 seriously suffers from a lack of a large-scale, extended public beta.

You get the potential (but not guarantee) for slightly more revenue at the end of those seven months, as opposed to getting most of that money right away. You risk a more disastrous reaction if something bad happens because of higher levels of concurrency, and you are confusing people to the point where even you aren't sure what to call this phase.

Beta testing is supposed to be done on largely feature-complete code.

This will get called an alpha test, whether you pick some gimmick term for it or not.

A proper verification method would run a ghost of the character executing commands at the claimed times. Mismatches should be investigated.

Speaking of, I noticed gender identity is also missing.

I think it's very likely that what you're seeing in GW2 right now is anti-desynch choices, not developer ignorance.

If you can affect speed or location (speedhack or teleporthack) that tells me that the client & server can get desynched a lot, and rather than have players see a lot of rubber-banding effects or hard resets (i.e. forced logouts), the developers opted to let the client be authoritative.

I thought about this, but players are also putting up ridiculous buffs.

It'd be one thing if there's a certain degree of grace for commands. What the hell are they letting people throw up perma-invulnerability for?

It would be interesting to know if this is the case both in the PvE areas of the world as well as the PvP areas. PvP is where it really matters - otherwise it's just envy, not game breaking. Since GW2 doesn't have open world PvP it should be possible to enforce stricter rules in PvP areas. Those players are also a lot more resiliant to being told "sorry, your ping time sucks, your packets are hopping through 100 routers, and your crappy DSL modem + terrible NetGear WiFi router + awful kitbash of a homebrew computer with all sorts of crazy drivers, malware and beta software can't keep up" than PvE players are.

Basically, someone in wvw flew over the castle walls, invulnerable, and stole the orb for their server.

More typically, we see small-level speedhacks, force-logging, and the occasional micro-teleport, or fake-downed invulnerable buff (though this can happen innocently, had it happen to me once, and given my kill ratio it might be why). There aren't a lot of cheaters, and it seems like most know better than to make themselves obvious, but it's quite annoying to both have to deal with it and not have a feasible means of reporting them.

This is one of those MMO problem areas that there is no good solution as yet. As long as the heartbeat of the MMO has to be set slower than near-realtime to allow the server to process all the inputs, change the game state, and get the state change out to the clients, the developers have to choose between authoritative clients or desynch player experience degradation.

This isn't a fully either-or problem, and if you go this route, you can also log checkpoints.

Or log everything sent by the client, and do reviews.

Since GW2 is all about "prove we're worth switching your whole life to away from WoW", I can see why they went with "player experience" vs. "player's can cheat".

RyanD

In a game billed as Guild Wars, no less.

That's the biggest mistake you saw in GW2? The "races" section on their site is like an rpg mistake museum.

...I hope you're joking.

Judging by ryan's comments on stealth and other similar topics, it sounds like GW is already erring on the side of overcaution when it comes to the clients. (I'll dig it up later but basically they more or less aknowledged that all information sent to the client is to be assumed to be known by the player, which by extension I'm pretty sure they already have the school of thought that all information from the client better be verified).

An alternate view is to have the client's commands simply be sent to the server, rather than declaring the toon's current state, though that's being somewhat pedantic. GW2 has basically locked itself into 'must verify' at this point.

I'd love the idea of darkness/visibility but certain players could easily circumvent it, apparently. :(

Set gamma to maximum. Done. Most game clients themselves support this, and it's an easy way to 'cheat' in the darkness jumping puzzles in GW2 and in places like Rainbow in the Dark in DDO.

Trusting the client.

This is freaking 2012. It's annoying enough seeing bots in PvE teleport around the map. Absolutely infuriating to see low-level speedhacks and teleporation hacks in WvW, much less the 'superman' incidents.

I don't know what else to say, really. We learned this like, a decade and a half ago. "Though shalt not trust the client." Almost like "2+2=4", except apparently it needs to be explicitly demanded, for some reason which I cannot fathom.

So count me in as demanding it.

I can't think of any reason we'd have a filter. We don't intend to be ESRB/PEGI certified, and that is the only reason I could see bothering to implement one.

It's useful as a stopgap spam filtering measure. GW2 is certainly lacking for its absence.

I have moderated forums, admined muds, run guilds, etc. ranging from G rated stuff for the kids to adult only, and I have never had set people up or be vague to do my job.

You would obviously not like to talk about this subject so I guess I will be waiting to hear from others word of mouth how you handle your community.

Google "selective enforcement" and more than one game has gone bankrupt due to it, governments have been toppled, and is generally considered a sign of tyranny. If you want the speed limit to be 40 you set it at 40 and deal with the inevitable rule breakers. If you must be absolutely sure, because of extenuating circumstances you set it at 25 like a school zone and you ticket everyone going over 25. If the rules are going to be vague, arbitrary, and antagonistic (land mines really?!) I'll just take a pass to play a more grown up game. One that is willing to communicate it's expectations so I can help maintain that standard.

You don't want clear rules but you don't want to play games?! Seriously? You don't see any irony there? Your insistence that people only want rules to lawyer them is also a bit insulting. I guess I'll just go back to lurking.

And I run the world's largest ERP forum. Google 'role playing forum' and you'll see. E is also 45% female, and I'm proud of how much it gets gushed over as feeling safe. We still work to improve it.

If you've used nothing but clear, hard rules, I can't imagine that you've managed a community of any significant combined size and average member involvement. Where more than about three-four hundred commit more than two hours a day each to said community. There's a sort of 'glass ceiling' many communities have, and breaking it is difficult without some external impetus.

E tried the 'clear rules' route.

The people who memorized them were the worst.

Sociopaths and their ilk would obey them to the letter, and use them as a relentless beat stick against anyone they didn't like who crossed the line on 'their' forum. "You've violated rule x." "That's against rule y."

And the rules list just became more and more intimidating. One member in particular became an expert in the rules we wrote, and basically devoted their life to managing the social aspect of my forum. De facto forum royalty. Even was telling people they did not like to leave. The 'monkey sphere' effect was extremely pronounced - they choked my forum to almost exactly 150 active members. I let this go on for two years. I'm still ashamed of that.

Even with the ridiculously long list of specific rules, members felt harassed, and that there was selective enforcement anyway. Vagueness in the rules has nothing whatsoever to how you're going to get treated as a large community leader, there's always going to be a communications breakdown somewhere.

Simply put, you're dealing with thousands of people, and a much more finite mod staff. And then there are the [insert expletive of choice here] time vampires who decide to latch on to a particular staff member or two and do everything in their virtual Internet power to suck all of that poor person's free time away. And then complain about not getting enough attention.

Eventually, as often happens when you're a de facto member of a rather exclusive club, I met a few other large community owners and we traded knowledge. Fewer rules - with some specifics, but also a few vague ones - has led to a much closer, larger, more vibrant and friendlier community.

There are going to be differences in enforcement, no matter which path is chosen. GW is going to be attacked for it either way, and this may or may not be legitimate, either way. There's no magic button that says "Clear rules means no mod abuse."

Hell, you can see what for us is the second most important rule as the most important rule here, below every post submission form. "Don't be a jerk." And, despite its vagueness, you still made a post.

Hopefully, GW will keep it to the level of "It's because we're human." and not "Abuse." The blade of vagueness swings both ways - and we're going to have to judge that as the game progresses. If there are a lot of lopsided bans, word will get out, the community will go toxic no matter what they try, and PFO will go the way of many other MMOs whose resultant community did it no favors.

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I don't think Ryan will achieve his stated goals via the stated methods, but a limited degree of vagueness is not in and of itself the problem. It's acknowledging nature.

And your telling me thousands of game copies of 60$ or more plus the eventual expansions plus add on content further then that won't cover all that, the cost of making the game, and paying the people that make it?

What, exactly, do you think maintaining a MMO with a staff of sixty costs?

8 developers are working on the tech demo. This group doesn't include Ryan as far as I understand it - he's on the fundraising/promotion/etc team. Their goal was to have the tech demo finished come mid-September, at which point they'll make most of the additional hires to work on the main program.

Sounds painful. Maybe they should watch where they're going.

The web systems manager seems kind of an oddball position. Rather than hire a full-time web developer, you just want someone with connections?

To a degree. I don't want to have multiple characters and have to pay a continuous monthly upkeep or lose them, for example. If I spend $10 or whatever it is for an additional alt on an account, and for whatever reason I decide/have to stop playing for a year, if I couldn't just hop back in... I wouldn't.

The same goes for a lot of convenience upgrades, IMO.

Ignore the player division for a moment. $25-$35 for a server.

*looks at his server bill*

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I've been toying with the idea of running an MMORPG where people could pay for their own instanced servers themselves. While I'd obviously be providing on something of a far smaller scale than Pathfinder Online (at least in terms of big-ticket items like bandwidth consumption, disk usage, power usage, and support), I always feel that this sort of perspective is what ultimately makes it impractical.

I pay $400 a month for my two servers. I'm only paying that because I dropped $3k up front and administrate them personally.

I think a more straightforward solution would be to require merit badges to either activate certain magical effects, use multiple magic items at once, or both.

I think a character with one powerful magic item should be able to expect similar versatility to a gadgeteer (as most D&D characters are these days), as a separate sort of development path.

I'm not really commenting on Pathfinder Online in specific, but I can tell you by far the overwhelming momentum in the MMO space is for games to allow players to spend money to be mechanically better than those who do not.

You don't have to like it, but you should get used to it. It will be the new normal.

I'm fine with this insofar as 'people who contribute to the game' should have such proportional rewards in general.

I've found that honestly, people care less about balance than they do about socializing and having fun. Games like DDO shoot themselves in the foot over forgetting why people play MMOs in the first place.

What quote or blogpost are you responding to? I've yet to see anything at all even slightly implying that both sides have to consent to a siege or war. There is certainly debate as to whether an alignment shift may take place for a nation that paves over the majority of it's neighbors, but I haven't seen a single comment by the devs to even imply what you are protesting here. Maybe I missed something though if you can link the quote or whatever you are talking about here.

I recall seeing in a post or blog post somewhere that in order to avoid alignment shifting, hostilities had to be mutually declared.

However, there were no implied limits on being able to attack people I think.

In one of the blogs Ryan said that war had to be a mutual event.

I'm hoping that areas without settlements might have laxer rules regarding that, though.

To others, you mean?

One of my personal pet peeves about D&D and its derivatives in general is just how much equipment defines you.

If PFO replaced that nonsense with merit badges, I would not shed a tear.

As Xeriar has pointed out his first priority is getting rid of griefers.

Well, insofar as I'd be happy to join alliances that took care of nations/settlements/settlements that failed to revoke the charter of griefers.

I'd probably have some clear lines as to what qualifies, though.

While we all like to think griefers are all evil little kids or adult mouth-breathers in mom's basement, I have witnessed just as much griefing activity from the white-knight community as well.

White knights very often are after a prize. Rather than doing good for the sake of good, they're out to try and impress someone with their antics, on the one in a million chance they'll get some(thing) in return.

But yeah, it's bad enough to see Chaotic Neutral types going 'I was just playing my alignment!', we're going to see 'But I'm Lawful Good! Even my conduct says so!'

Because people will be able to stay within the bounds of conduct while managing to be epic jerks.

If this nation forms, though, individuals will probably get left for individual chartered companies to handle, individually.

I can really only go from my experience in Age of Conan when looking at FFA gaming. I played DFO but joined the game too late and didn't last long with their latency. Even though AoC was a themepark game it was amazing when looking into the fishbowl to see the player made factions, griefers, gankers, roleplayers, solo-pvers and white-knights mixed together. Some of the most skilled PvPers in that game were roleplayers and probably more ruthless when it came to retribution griefing.

I think anyone who actually has their eyes set on running a nation with a chance at achieving that goal is going to be a bit ruthless. Not necessarily evil, but I don't think any of the LN organizations are going to spare someone's watchtower in territory they otherwise dominate just because 'someone else put it up first'.

Which is actually what I'm afraid the initial bout of griefing will be - people putting up watchtowers and forts freaking everywhere, crying foul/victim, enjoying the shift of their targets to evil alignment, or both.

Screw that, I'll take the alignment hit. And do it for others, too, for a price. If our George is having problems with similar people, well, happy to help.

GW might have an initial grace period here, or something (i.e. declare that making/owning/defending a building on a hex you don't have a settlement on is not an innocent act), but they can still play victim, and addressing that annoyance in game might be plenty fun.

Yeah, there is stuff you can do like that assuming the person is playing on thier own hardware. Once you get to certain parts of the world (e.g. Asia) it's more common for people to be renting time on someone elses hardware to play. You even occasionaly see that in the U.S. with some Game/Comic stores in some cities, though it's not nearly as common.

Of course, in that case you're relying on information gathered by the client to base your decison on. That suffers from the same sort of issues that alot of other security issues do... once the client gets compromised, you can't trust any info it's providing you.

Given the mention of being able to make 24-hour skill training purchases, and Ryan's statement about how early skill training will be vastly more effective than what comes later on, I'm thinking that they'll only need to handle individual IP blocks insofar as they vet them for serious abuse.

1) It's quite possible that the ability to do anything related to griefing - building buildings, attacking or stealing from a person - might require some small amount of skill training.

2) Combined with the above, it'd be easy to see if resources from one account were continually flowing to another. The game could keep tallies and judge the fairness of exchanges, especially those coming from low-resource accounts, or going to high-resource ones.

I think the priority list for most major groups is going to be

1) Get rid of the griefers
2) Maintain balance of power
3) Reinforce own power

'Having fun' will probably vary between first, fourth, and 'one of these three IS my fun!'.

I wouldn't be surprised if an effective game-wide alliance forms for the first. But what constitutes griefing is going to be in the eye of the beholder. Not all organizations are going to agree.

Still, may put some hard thought into the concept of 'legitimate' cassus belli. Would be neat if the game had mechanisms for such.

Sometimes those are done through a public facing vulnerability of some sort (e.g. most famously recently, memcached instances of popular major websites were nor fire walled and thus accessible from anywhere.)

More often though, some employee or such gets tricked or actively sabotages the company from the inside. You hear about this a lot less.

I would not want to be known as the first mmorpg that pushed a compromised client through the update pipe, personally.

E-mail addresses have value. So does the code base itself (see Ragnorok Online and the leak of AEGIS).

While hacks are easily over hyped, 'encryption' alone is not sufficient for security. If I have control of your login server, I don't need the 'file'. SRP and MDAC were developed for such purposes, but if you tie a user's account to web services, defeating MDAC is just a matter of some slight JavaScript adjustments.

Well the product's business model is going to include F2P, is almost an imperative for various reasons. All I'm doing is trying to wonder how this could have a negative impact on the game?

First question: One possible way is the account management and barrier to entry, which I'm assuming is lower with a F2P model, does that make life easier for hackers and other agents interested in 'screwing' the game for whatever motivation?

Only for those attack surfaces that having an account in and of itself exposes, and then only for 'noisy' attacks.

Pathfinder Online's attack surface, like any service running on the Internet, will be larger than what you see inside an account. Most typically, it's an employee that gets compromised these days, so the actual attack goes through someone's fan site or some other highly targeted medium e.g. spear phishing.

Security is a process, not a checklist. You have a certain set of services to provide, and you work out how to minimize the impact of a compromised interior system, while still allowing work to be done in a reasonable timeframe. Security that people break to make things work isn't, after all.

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As for your question about the impact of f2p on culture, I imagine the first few 4500 or whatever size batches they pick are going to have a major impact, and they are probably well aware of this. I wouldn't do it any other way for just that reason, though numbers might be different.

Security is a separate concept from a product's profit model.

I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.

Gregg Reece wrote:

Necrocracy - Lich and undead based government.

Actually that is still a normal kingdom I believe, in that the lich himself holds all of the votes. Well unless the other undead are sentient and then the lich wants to organize some other form of government where others get their say. A new word doesn't need to be invented simply because the inhabitants do not happen to have a pulse. That's racist!

Is a town of only elves called called an elfocracy?

Is several settlements under the rule of a halfling called "a halflingdom"

Actually I believe in the real world Christopher Hitchens used the term Necrocacy to refer to a country that continues to follow to the letter the rule of it's first dictator, long after his death.

Undeath is a state of being. The issue of undead rights transcends the boundaries of race, gender, species and gender identity.

Anem Vora will be a proud supporter of necromantic rites.

*shrug*

This thread is for the purpose for sketching out a method. I don't know what shape it would take. Perhaps it is not doable. Perhaps an organization such as this would have to pay for 'mercenaries'. Perhaps we could recruit some of our own PvPers. I don't want any free favors, anymore than I really feel like cowering behind someone else's defenses.

I would like to think that other players would respect the wishes of those who didn't want to engage in PvP, but I realize that is foolish. As long as PvP is an option, there will be the 'ne'erdowells' as Nihimon mentioned above. And, as he intimated, should I ever reveal my game persona, I would likely be an autotarget from then on.

Believe me, these are all the things that make me not want to play PFO. Only my devotion to Pathfinder is even keeping me interested at this point. Hopefully there are enough people out there who might be willing to join a group dedicated to non-PvP persuits.

My main concern would be, after the map has settled, what happens when someone who has joined you tries to use you as a shield?

'Let's offer this group amnesty' needs to have some sort of internal policing, and a response for that sort of situation.

I'm getting this image of a guy standing around in the settlement shouting at every newbie or suspected newbie he can see. "HAY GOOD PEOPLE! WE HAVE SPIES TOO! AND SMUGGLING! AND OTHER SERVICES, COME CHECK US OUT! THESE PEOPLE ARE -EVIL-!"

We could call him George.

And we could ask him "But do you have a George?"

Will you have a George?

Who says you have to be evil to like spies and smugglers??? If you expect everyone fighting for good to play by the rules then you are in for a nasty surprise.

Why would we bar any law-abiding citizen from our services? That would be rude. : (

Anyway welcome to PFO. I won't wish you well in your endeavors but I look forward to crossing swords.

Game won't be out for at least a year and already we have threats of violence.

Such oppression we suffer. : (

And Samantha's PastrIES?

Or Sasha's Magnificent UnderGround Games and LINGerie?

Yes, these upstanding businesses need a place they can all call home.

Xeriar wrote:

I'll be your bad guy. You seem to want something you can hate.

Are you volunteering as content?

Everyone is. Some even plan to pay for the privilege.

I'm sure the Goons and groups like Ryan describes will show up, but this is meant to be a more 'open' order.

The sort of thing that new players can get involved with, partaking in dastardly deeds without feeling like they are just ruining people's fun. Sometimes we'll even provide a helping hand.

Straight from the heart.

Xeriar wrote:

You seem to be equating emergence with difficulty...

No. I'm not. I'm equating "add[ing] the basic physics to make formations an emergent feature" with difficulty.

Honestly, though, seeing your recent post on the type of Player Nation you're wanting to build, I'm not at all surprised that we clash so. It's funny how that keeps happening that way...

You're really hung up on the word 'physics'.

Fine. Call it a buff.

If you have complaints about the player nation, you should take it to that thread. I was originally planning on another "lawful neutral" order but people were complaining about there being no proposed serious villains.

So fine. I'll be your bad guy. You seem to want something you can hate.

@Xeriar; I'm not sure I fully follow your response... My comments on the topic have indicated a firm understanding of the technical challenges, middleware or no. As I stated already, I know its highly unlikely GW will be able to implement the environmental changes as described, but that it would be a fun "pie in the sky" idea. As to data models and regional equations... you flat lost me.

It's a way to implement said 'pie in the sky' idea on large scales (those of PFO's proposed on up) without requiring ridiculous computational capacity in order to have a full dynamic range of possible 'environmental' effects.

Edit: and the resolution could be as graphically detailed as your end-user's computers can put up with. It wouldn't be blockland.

Are you familiar with how games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress generate their terrain? Like that, except that you wouldn't be able to arbitrarily make changes. The server instead simply knows that such and such a region is dominated by such and such equations, and only needs to care when there are active players in said region. The players would influence the world by (effectively) altering the local equations. So a small region gets intensely fought over, the various global parameters have their weights reduced in a region, and the local parameters become those representing devastated terrain.

Are you down?

Worried that when the armies of 'righteousness' gather, that there will be none to spit into their smug pretend face, matching them soldier for soldier?

Sure, we have a few organizations that are 'lawful neutral', but so far only a perfectly LEGitamate BREAdmaKING business is willing to do what is necessary to truly make the world a better place.

It's a big place, the world, full of simple people who think that it is all black and white.

They think such a thing as 'innocence' can exist.

They think that, when it comes to making the hard decisions necessary for rulership, that they are prepared.

They never expect to have to choose between what is best for those they claim to love, and what is best for their nation.

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I have a name picked out - Anem Vora - but I am just gauging interest for now.

If you are familiar with the Scorpion Clan in Legend of the Five Rings, and how they are supposed to behave - then you have a pretty good idea of what I am looking for.

For those not familiar, the Scorpion prize loyalty above all else, and have no shame in doing what it takes to fulfill their goals. The Clan of Secrets and of Lies, they are also the most honest. They wear their masks publicly, for all to see, and if you have a problem, they are very happy to help.

They of course expect returns on such favors. They make valuable friends.

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As for who I am, I run two of the most active play-by-post forums in the world. The biggest one is often just called 'E' and though I can't link it here, if you put 'roleplaying forum' into Google it shows in second place.

No, this won't be an 'adult' organization. But any members I bring to the table will be adults, experienced roleplayers and good writers. Regardless, I'm not in this alone, and I am very familiar with running large virtual communities.

This would be more than just a chartered company - it would be an actual attempt at creating a player nation. Wherein we play the villains. The Evil Empire complete with spies, assassins, and dreams of world conquest. All for the best interest of its future subjects, of course.

If there is interest, I will start fleshing out the structure more.

That is why I think your proposal would be unimaginably expensive, and probably never come to fruition.

If I'm wrong, then you could make a fortune coding a game engine that had such a through implementation of basic physics, and I wish you the best of luck making that a reality.

You seem to be equating emergence with difficulty, for some reason. Emergence is GoblinWork's primary goal, here - they want to see virtual societies establish themselves, grow, evolve. Emergence is why they can hope to get away with a ~5M budget instead of a ~50M one.

Emergence from my idea comes from basic actions, and the modifiers they apply, to you as an individual. You can take these actions on your own. Mechanically, to the server, they are nothing but buffs. You are essentially arguing that buffs are too difficult for either GW or the server to handle.

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Right now, my current major project is a web development platform, and I have the wonderful support of my community members to enable my independent development. My dev time is, for now, theirs.

If no one takes my fractal terrain idea in a few years I might run with that. Potential for much awesome.

Ideas are easy, however. 'Can you implement it?' is the billion dollar question.

Xeriar wrote:

It's like you are taking personal offense to my every post or something. : /

To be honest, I was somewhat offended that you would basically call Ryan stupid for doing it the way he said he wants to rather than doing it the way you think he should.

However, the statement you quoted there was actually me trying to point out something relevant. Again, if I'm being honest I probably took some offense that you once again said it in a way that made it sound like you thought Ryan was being stupid for not doing it the way you thought he should.

Where did I call Ryan stupid? I called the chosen implementation lame, but having posted on various electronic media around him for what is probably fifteen years or so now, I don't think I've ever called him stupid. I don't recall any interaction outside of Paizo here, but there might be something.

I called an idea as presented lame. Equating people with ideas is not a good practice.

As for this thread, this is just a concern - like I'd be playing on a glorified Go board of some sort. Ryan says they'll control the density, and we'll see how that goes and looks, but it's one of those things - you can't just start taking away forts when it starts looking silly.

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As for my idea in response to Gruffling, GoblinWorks hasn't revealed their middleware yet, and there are no plans for us to be able to directly influence the world. They very well could try to implement such a system. However, it would be an untested concept to implement in an MMO (as far as I know anyway), and require a considerable deal of development time for it in and of itself rather than actually building on a known code base.

On top of the core flaw with my idea as I presented it - you don't have control over the small details without actually dropping the influence of those equations over the appropriate region and reverting to 'standard' data representation (after a fashion).

You do realize they're not putting all of Golarian, or even all of the River Kingdoms in that map, right? And that they've never said they intend to do either of those things?

You do realize that my post had nothing to do with GW's immediate intentions, right?

It was me trying to figure out how you could efficiently represent a dynamic world, at scale, into the million+ square mile range.

It's like you are taking personal offense to my every post or something. : /

One idea I was thinking of when considering PFO's proposed size - how could you hope to represent a full-scale world?

Tracking each individual tree and vertex would be maddening.

You could, however, store the world as a set of seeds which would have varying degrees of strength in an area. So rather than storing a tree, the server stores the regional and local seeds, and their respective strengths. The latter's nature, and the farmer's dominance, could vary based on buildup, war, active planting - whatever.

Unfortunately my current project is going to dominate my life for the next few years, so I don't have the time to crack open Electro server or some solution and try this.

The main flaw is that direct involvement with the world would have to be limited. You can't actually pick a single tree to cut down, for example.

If a tree falls in the forest, no one is ever around.

@Xeriar,

Your ideas definately have some merit but I expect they are simply going to be too resource intensive for whatever game engine GW decided to use to impliment on a mass scale. It could probably handle the facing bonus thing fairly well...but anything more complex then that, I doubt.

For example in the Tetsudo formation example you used. In your model, the game would have to approximate pretty much a full physics engine as it would have to track the angle the shield was placed at and the exact trajectory of an incoming missle to determine if it struck the shield or not.

You are either holding your shield above your head, in front, or to a side. The game would have to have the same understanding of the concept of an attack from above in both implementations. Difference being, a lone character could still run around with a shield over her head on her own and still get some benefit if there is some nasty weather, so to speak.

Under the system Ryan described, it would simply have to determine that the player was occupying a slot in the formation (i.e. position relative to other players, something the engine has to track anyway to do rendering) and that the player had pressed the "Tetsudo Formation" button.

No, in order to differentiate tetsudo from shield wall, the game also needs to have the concept of an elevated attack angle. Similarly, many siege formations will have shields overhead, but these might also drop protection from certain angles for various reasons.

What Ryan described already sounds pretty darn ambitious in terms of resources and programming but clearly GW feels they can pull it off and I applaud them for attempting something truely innovative that takes MMO combat "to the next level". What you are proposing, while I would actualy prefer it as a player, I think is just asking them to go a bridge too far in terms of actualy building into the game. I could be wrong about that, but that's what my intuition is telling me.

Essentially, Ryan's proposal has to me what is commonly called a 'code smell' in programming circles. Rather than add the basic physics to make formations an emergent feature, the proposal is to do each one, individually.

They then waste time designing and balancing each one, cluttering up the UI, rather than adding more genuine features.

Overgeneralization is its own code smell, of course, but in a general sense, when building a complex system, lists need to be justified.

Example: What is the justification for the archetype list?

The answer: It's called Pathfinder Online, the class divisions are part of its essential flavor.

A set list of formations has no such pedigree.

@Xeriar: how would your system slow down a line's movement speed, or allow a turtle formation to even exist? I can imagine a magical or extraordinary shield formation breaking catapult, ballista, or even cannonball fire. Modern artillery, somewhat less so, but modern artillery rewrote all the rules of battle when it was introduced.

In normal movement, it'd happen naturally, especially if line cohesion was automated - each individual soldier has to account for differences in terrain, etc. In fast movement the software would have to check the width of the unit trying to move as a cohesive group.

Tetsudo would be a function of being able to put your shield over your head and elevating facing (forward would be 0-60 degrees, looking up 60-120, etc). Holding a shield in formation and heavier shields might also reduce movement speed on their own.

It would primarily be for dealing with levitating attackers and those who fired in volleys. I don't have an issue with them being effective against canons and magical attacks in some situations. Shields not necessarily a prerequisite, 7th Sea's Iron Meg story was pretty cool (though that's probably into the Legendary spectrum that this game won't be covering).

A hex is half a square mile. A historical county would be a few hundred hexes. On the small end. York and historic Toulouse would tip scales around ten thousand. The Roman and Han empires dwarf these constructs.

Player nations are not the prime or even secondary or tertiary focus. If they were, we'd see some scale for land to mitigate the raw size of actual player empires.

Truly gathering something that could form an empire would not be a merit badge just anyone could earn. Some concept restricting the number of actual legendary (11-20) characters would need to exist in order to make them suitably special, and it would be a very contentious issue, though probably not an impossible one.

Well, all requiring control of all surrounding hexes for a settlement does is reduce the maximum number of settlements in the initial allotment to about 30-35.

I'm not entirely sure that would be a bad thing - fewer settlements means more forced interaction. 300 people to a digital community is a pretty good ballpark where such groups become self-sustaining, though unless they break that glass ceiling mismanagement can still wreck them. So, as a ballpark, GW could try for one 256-hex block per ~12k active members, ensuring that each settlement has a pretty active community - or gets taken over.

The 'flyover country' is that much bigger for people who want a hiding spot. There also would be inevitable 'holes' of lesser control where hideouts and such could persist, despite efforts to deal with them, for a long time in major nations, even though they would nominally be part of said nation's 'territory'.