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I also want Nihimon to be able to name his character Nihimon Vhane'Sylvan.

From what I understand, gathering resources wont be like other MMOs where you find a little node, push a button and watch a bar fill up for 2-3 seconds. In PFO when you find a resource you'll then need to bring in workers and build a work camp to gather the resource, and you'll be pecking away at the same spot for hours or days. All the while having to defend it from hostile NPCs and other players.
For all this, I think the exploration required to find a resource is very important, and having an icon showing you where it is out of place, at least without some sort of rare divination spell.

I also do not think we should have a minimap at all, it just doesn't fit the game I think. We should still have a map that we can bring up though, one that fills in automatically as we explore as well as letting us add our own notes and markers. Just not a mini-map in the corner of the screen. Being able to buy pre-filled hex maps from settlements would be good too.
It might be interesting if dungeon maps had to be drawn manually too, but I can see that being frustrating and a huge turn off to many players. Could maybe make it an option though...

Alternatively, much like with EvE, players may be given the option to 'be' Goblins for a few days as part of an event, with their class choices and roughly equal gear to the normal toons generated using a Goblin model, and then are given the mission of attacking a settlement within a week.

While this seems not only plausible but actually likely (and I think partially confirmed); I'm just not a fan of the idea of being given a character only to have it taken away. I tend to get attached to my characters.

Would be rather interesting to see a hundred or so 'leveled' Goblins with more NPC Goblins following them charging the Settlements in character.

I would definitely love to be able to lead an army of NPCs. I would like to see ways of doing that that don't require special events.

1) Monster 'races' should be very expensive to purchase, with the more 'powerful' monster races costing extreme amounts of real-life money...

I also am not a fan of the idea of buying races from the store, that's like punishing people for being poor. I'm especially against being able to buy more powerful races. As soon as players can buy power a game is just stupid broken. Pay to win is not fun.

3) Before any transactions take place, the request for a Monster race is sent to the Game Masters/Moderators, with the option for the transaction to vetoed by Goblinworks...

I'm against adding powerful races that would require this level of policing to begin with. If a race need this much regulation just to play then it does not belong in the hands of players. I thought we were talking about playing uncommon and rare pathfinder races, not dragons and such (though I am totally for playing dragons in temporary event things like what you described above).

4) Most 'Monster' races will be unwelcome in NPC domain, and might cause penalities to the Development Indexes of settlements of opposing alignments to their normal alignment, but a suitably dedicated 'Monster' PC might be able to mitigate that.

I'm partially for this. I think though that most settlements being player-run combined with common xenophobia and racism will result in a lot of settlements banning monsters races naturally. I don't think specific game mechanics to enforce this will be necessary.(I do not support racism, I'm simply accounting for it's existence.)

5) Certain Monsters would be just too hard to code in. Vampires go poof in the sunlight, cannot cross water and cannot enter a private dwelling or building without permission, for one thing, and Natural Werewolves can potentially infect everyone they meet with a bite, but a Infected Werewolf can't control themselves on the night of a full moon, which could cause the player to rampage around a settlement and kill off vital NPCs/PCs.

...yep, I think that you've latched too much onto the word "monster" though. While I'd love to play a werewolf, I also do not see a way to implement them cleanly.

6) Nothing too outlandish. Half-Dragons, Minotaurs, Ogres and other CR 6-8 monsters only, no Half-Fiends or Half-Celestials or anything that might lock players out of...

CR 6 to 8!? Ye gads man, try CR 1/4 to CR 1...

I'd also like to mention the game production side of including extra races, especially less human ones. It's not simply a matter of using a model that already exists for NPC.

First of all, there is the customization options, if there are any, new assets will have to be created to grant the race all the customization on par with the existing races. But that's pretty minor really, untill you get into the next part...

...clothing and armor. Every single article you can equip to your character has to be stretched, scaled, and remodeled to fit the new race. Hundreds, or likely thousands of assets will need to be remade, the more inhuman the race the more work will be needed.

Then you need to animate everything. Every single move and animation in the game will have to be recreated, probably from scratch, for each new race, and, depending on the game engine's set up, for many of the new armor and clothes too.

All this represents hundreds or thousands of man hours of work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost. What's more, if there are any anatomical differences between sexes of the race (and there generally are) then it all has to be done twice! Yet it still doesn't end there.

There is the programming to add the new playable race to the game, but that's pretty minor if the engine is built well. (Unless they need to implement all new racial abilities or the like.) Visual effects might also need to be adjusted or created for the new race.

Finally, once all the new content is made and implemented in the game, the testing begins. Hundreds of hours spent testing every little facet of the new race, and how it might affect the existing content. Not only to find bugs but then to spend even more hours pouring over spreadsheets and crunching numbers and tweaking gameplay to make sure the game stays properly balanced.

One year of solid work, 300 employees, contractors, freelancers, and volunteers, and several million dollars later, the new races is finally finished and in the game. Then they better hope the race is popular, or it could have all been for naught.

And that's only the production side. There's also the pre-production, where they design and plan all the new content needed for the race. There's the supervisors who have to organize all this and fit it into a practical schedule. The executives who need to convince the producers and investors that this is all worth paying for. And the marketing department which needs to create all the promotional material and convince everyone that this new race is a good thing.

@Being and @Trikk, Sebastian and myself are all for treating women with respect right and dignity. That's not the problem here.
The problem we have is that you are saying that every male who has played a female character is a misogynist sexual deviant. This is directly insulting to us and anyone else who has ever played a female character.

Like Sebastian, I have DM'd many a game, which constantly involves playing the roles of various female characters. I've also played female characters as a PC, both in table top and in video games. As I have explained before, I just have an easier time creating a female character because all my male characters end up the same. I have never treated them as my own personal sex toys.

I will grant that there are plenty of guys out there that do just as you say and only use female character to fulfill their sexual fantasies.
Just don't lump us in with them. Or we will continue to take offense.

I would also like to point out that this isn't a male-only thing. There are plenty of women out there that play as men as well. Some for good reasons, some for bad reasons.

~~~

Now, I propose that this thread come to a close. The topic has been covered pretty thoroughly and the discussion is largely degrading into a battle of sexism and stereotypes.

I try to think "How do we do 'x' in Pathfinder?" and then apply that to Pathfinder Online.

How's this for a notification, you walk up to an NPC and they wave and say, "Huh, have I seen you before?" or, "Oh! It's KitNix! How's it going?" or, "Holy @#$%! It's KitNix! Run for your lives!" and various other reactions.

Hmm, here's an idea.

You're already going to have a reputation score, but currently it only represents if you have a good reputation or a bad reputation. What they could do is add another aspect of it, representing how well known you are, we'll call it renown.
Most players will start off with zero renown, but every time they perform an action that affects their reputation, like fulfilling contracts or killing players, or perform an amazing deed, like slaying a dragon, or founding a city, their renown goes up.
Every time you see a PC you will perform a passive gather information or knowledge local check, the DC of which will be determined by their renown, the higher the renown the lower the DC. If you pass the check then you recognize the PC and know their name, once you know it you know it forever. You could perform the check again maybe once per in-game hour, so the longer you hang around with someone the more likely you are recognize them. Friending someone or partying with them will also give you their name.
Disguise checks can override this though, even if you've ID'd the person previously. When encountering someone in disguise, you first have to beat their disguise check with a passive or active perception check to recognize that it is a disguise and then succeed on a passive gather info or knowledge local check, DC determined by their renown but also modified by their disguise, to figure out who they are specifically.

I've never liked the vanity pets that have become popular in MMOs. They are an annoying distraction, and worse they take away from the value of classes that get companions as a unique class feature, even though that have zero use in combat. Every animal in pathfinder online should have abilities and a mechanical purpose. If they really must include vanity pets in PFO then they should be restricted as decorations for a player's personal home and never leave the house (if we have personal homes, I'm not quite clear on that).

@Richter, Yes, one man armies are actually a thing you can do in table top pathfinder, most DMs and players won't like you if you do that though, as you hog all the combat rounds and have a thousand stats to track.

Of course, in Pathfinder, there is a large distinction between an animal companion, a familiar, and a pet. Summoned Creatures would probably fit in this mix too. There are also animal allies.

For animal companions and familiars, you can only have one each. They are a result of a special mystical bond. They're loyal and grow in power along side your character. When one dies, you can get another, after performing a lengthy ritual. Similarly, you can dismiss them for another, but it isn't supposed to be a simple thing, these creatures are supposed to be life long friends with which you have a deep connection.

Then there are pets, pets are tamed animals, either reared from birth by a player or bought from a store that sells pets. These can be mundane dogs and pack animals, but they can even be some unintelligent magical beasts. They can be trained to follow commands and often serve loyally, however, they can be easily killed or even scared off, and if that happens they're pretty much gone for good. In theory, you can have as many of these pets as you can afford to feed and take care of.

Animal allies are similar, but are generally wild animals that a druid or the like as befriended with Animal Empathy. These animals are generally just creatures that have decided they like you, and so they help you out a bit. You have no direct control over them, though if you have the means to communicate you can request their help with specific tasks. However, if things get rough they'll probably have no qualms with abandoning you to look after themselves. In theory, the number of animal allies you can have is limitless.

Summoned monsters are creatures conjured from other planes of reality to aid you in battle. They'll defend you to the death, but will act independently unless you have a means to communicate with them. Dying is of little consequence to them as it simply causes them to be sent back where they came from. I think generally you can only have one active summoning spell at a time, but I could be wrong. Higher level summing spells such as Gate can bring forth some incredibly powerful creatures, even gods. However, you often don't have any control over their actions and they may very well decide to destroy you, or the whole world...

These are the main different types of 'pets' available in pathfinder, with some minor variations (like a paladin's mount, or a witches familar). What Goblinworks will actually manage to include in the game I can only imagine, but I remain hopeful that each type will be represented in-game (I expect that animal allies will be hardest to implement, while tamed pets will probably have a cap on how many you can have).

Kusuriurite wrote:

The problem is how to get clothing and armor to fit body deformities? We may have to settle with facial deformities unless GW can spare the time to design armor models for such diversity.

I'd be happy with a basic polygon model and the clothing/armor option just be a mesh that maps to the base model the way that CoH did it. Yes you could have problems with clipping in CoH, but the system gave you a plethora of options.

Ugh, I hate clothing and armor that's all skin tight, just textured onto the body mesh. That's last gen stuff, and it looks terrible. Silhouettes need to be broken up, an unbroken silhouette gets pretty boring to look at. Having different silhouettes is also more important for making characters look different and stand out then different textures and colors is. Texture and color is just the icing on the cake of a good model.

Check out dragon's dogma for armor done right.

Really, if you plan on having deformities and the like from the beginning, warping armor and clothing models to fit is not all that hard. A little time consuming, but not unreasonable I think. It might even be possible to make it procedural. The ones who would have more trouble are the animators, they'd probably have to create whole new versions of every animation to account for major deformities...though some procedural animation could also be a solution to that.

To me though, this is all part of making a current gen game, and current gen to the developer is next gen to the consumer. When this game comes out in some 2-3 years there will probably be whole new game consoles and technology available. To compete in the future market you have to move beyond what was the standard of the past. Developers need to constantly work harder to make better games, and do it faster, to make their appeal stronger (see what I did there?). Of course, Goblinsworks is a new developer, but they should at least be trying to push the bar of their predecessors.

...man it weirds me out out much I babble on in these forums.

I for one hate PVP in themepark games as well. I've also had some terrible experiences with it in sandbox games (Mortal Online, that piece of @#$%!). Yet, I do like everything I've heard about it in the Goblinworks blogs. The idea of proper full PVP definitely sounds great and alluring, on paper. In practice though it's a very difficult balancing act. One little flaw in the system, or one dedicated maniacal maverick, and it can all fall apart.

Mortal Online's PVP system sounded amazing on paper, it seemed flawless, but the end result is that PKing and griefers were rampant, they literally lined up around starting areas to kill noobs, and each other. You couldn't even go into a town without getting ganked and looted.

In the end, the only way we'll know if PFO's PVP is good and works is by playing it. At the very least I fully expect there will be a lot of problems during early enrollmeny. I also hope they'll be able to iron things out before open enrollment.