Goblin Squad Member
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One think I think is seriously lacking in MMOs are in-game social tools. MMOs are suppose to facilitate interactions between players, but the in-game tools for institutionalizing these interactions is seriously lacking.
I would like to see a tool system that allows free association to player built groups. I would like a system that allowed any arbitrary group of players greater than one to "officially" create a social group. This group could be called a guild, a religion, a spy ring, an alliance, whatever. This social group will have internal tools which the creator of the group can distribute access to. Among the tools, I would like to see the ability to create chat channels, internal titles, and internal groups (which in turn can be assigned privledges/rights/duties as a whole).
I would also like to see the ability to invite not only new members to a social group, but also entire groups as a whole. To illustrate, Player x starts a social group called Southern Alliance, he/she then invites 3 other social groups by either clicking on a member of that group and selecting "invite group" (as opposed to "invite person") or by entering the groups' names. The leader of each social group then accepts the invitation via popup and all 3 social groups are then three separate groups within the larger group. Each of these 3 sub-groups retains full rights to their own sub-organization, while still allowing for a unified alliance chat channel and even setting it up so notification is received concerning news (such as log ins and log outs) from the other member groups.
This system should allow unlimited customization of organization as well as encapsulation of responsibility.
Using this a framework, what features would others like to see?
How is this different than the Alliances in EVE?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah, I would make it so you can choose other groups with whom other players cannot be associated (the group leadership would receive a notification and option to boot the player, or an auto-boot can be set up).
To illustrate, Southern Alliance is created and invites its 3 member guilds. At this point Southern Alliance is composed solely of those 3 guilds and is set up with "Northern Alliance" on their exclusion (warning) list, and "Eastern Alliance" on their exclusion (auto-boot) list.
A random character who is a member of Northern Alliance tries to join one of Southern Alliance's member guilds. The inviter would receive a warning upon sending the invitation that this random character is a member of Northern Alliance and confirm they still want to invite. On the other hand, another random person from Eastern Alliance tries to join and the inviter would get a warning and be unable to invite (due to being on the auto-boot exception list).
Likewise, there would need to be an option to periodically and/or manually purge using the exception list.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How is this different than the Alliances in EVE?No idea, never been part of an alliance in EVE. Do they let you nest groups within groups? If this is the way it is done in EVE then I am guessing PFO will do similar but better...this makes me very happy.
Your suggestion reminds me a lot of one I started shortly after the game was anounced
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Goblin Squad Member
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OH cool, I vaguely remember that thread. Good stuff. I agree, I would just prefer it is all generic so any custom social structure can be created (as opposed to premade templates of religions, kingdoms, clans, alliances, etc).
I hope each character can be a member of any amount of non-exclusive/non-contradictory social organizations.
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Goblin Squad Member
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OH cool, I vaguely remember that thread. Good stuff. I agree, I would just prefer it is all generic so any custom social structure can be created (as opposed to premade templates of religions, kingdoms, clans, alliances, etc).
I hope each character can be a member of any amount of non-exclusive/non-contradictory social organizations.
I do fully agree, I wouldn't mind if any structure could have any number of subgroups etc...
The main 2 things I think would be would be
1. Guilds/alliences etc... being narrowed down. Basically granting the ability to simultaniously be part of a huge guild/allience/whatever, while having a smaller closer knit group to chat with. Most games when the guild size gets over 200ish, there's very little personal friendships IC or OOC, but if you can drill down to closer subsets of friends with their own chat, you get to keep the huge epic 500v500 battles, and the close knit group of 20-50 friends.
2. Organizations that can be joined, in addition to your guild. These could range from an economic group trying to influence the global market, a spy network (with secretive membership obviously), etc...
I do like the ideas of such tremendously.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think KitNyx is seeing it more as totally arbitrary groupings, rather than specific tiers.
I actually agree with KitNyx about almost everything, but I would change one little thing: Instead of "any arbitrary group of players greater than one", I would say "anyone". I think it's also important to let the Social Club Leader (or authorized rank) to send invitations to characters that are not currently online. And there should be some reason to be wearing a particular Social Club's tabard or whatever prominently as your "primary" or "current" Social Club.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think KitNyx is seeing it more as totally arbitrary groupings, rather than specific tiers.
I actually agree with KitNyx about almost everything, but I would change one little thing: Instead of "any arbitrary group of players greater than one", I would say "anyone". I think it's also important to let the Social Club Leader (or authorized rank) to send invitations to characters that are not currently online. And there should be some reason to be wearing a particular Social Club's tabard or whatever prominently as your "primary" or "current" Social Club.
Your verbiage is better. I had not considered it, but I suppose I could be a guild of one. I also agree that requests should be queue-able, so even offline characters could get requests they could check as soon as they come on-line.
I don't think there should be magical tabards that change emblems at whim, I do think you should be able to craft guild tabards, flags, and banners (of varying fineness) with a chosen emblem on it (I am for custom art too, as long as it it vetted by the community first and finally okayed by a CSR/Dev. At the least give us art we can combine and alter like in EVE to make a "individualized logo").
Finally, I also think that if GoblinWorks decides to go the traditional route with nameplates, you should be able to choose the association(s) (if any) that you want to show on your own plate, within reason depending upon the size of the plate. In all other ways, as far as mechanics are concerned, all associations are equal.
EDIT: Upon thinking about it further, I am iffy about the social group of one...it sort of defeats the purpose of being a social group. On the other hand, every group needs to start with someONE.
No Guildhalls or apts...buy a building or part of a building and do with it what you will. Once again contradicting myself, I could see a place for players to build huge structures and "rent" out apartments for players and larger ones for guilds. Slumlord archetype for the win?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Oh, being able to toggle chats would be absolutely necessary when you could belong to multiple organizations, each of which might have multiple channels going (IC, OOC, etc). I think you should be able to view a list of all of the chats you are eligible for and be able to toggle them on and off as desired.
And of course, you should be able to arrange/tab them as desired.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@KitNyx, the reason I mentioned single-player guilds is because there will almost certainly be some kind of perk for being in a guild, such as access to a shared guild bank, and I don't think it's right to punish the player who prefers to be able to easily share gear between his own alts. Hopefully, there will be a way to do this without having to create a Guild for it, and hopefully, there will be other Guild perks too.
As for the Guild Tabards, etc., as I said, I fully expect there to be some kind of perk for being in a Guild, and a very strong likelihood that we'll be able to contribute in some way to the advancement of a guild in some way or another. I expect they won't want us to have to automatically split all of our contribution up evenly amongst all of the guilds we belong to, and I can't imagine they'll want to create an interface that lets us specify what percent of our contribution would go to each guild, so I suggested the "active" guild. If they want to provide the interface to let us break it up specifically, then that would be preferable.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Let people write UI add-ons that handle chat and voice chat. I'll find someone who can program and tell them the interface I want. It will probably be more complicated, especially if I need to fall back on a different server for one or more voice channels. I bet the design that works best for me will work poorly for people not used to the style that I work with.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Speaking of Voice Chat...
I think there really needs to be a way to heirarchically organize groups into ever-larger groups.
Personally, I'd like to see a setup where groups can be organized like this:
Adam
-> Beth
-> -> Chuck
-> -> Diane
-> Edward
-> -> Fran
-> -> George
Where Adam's "group" really only consists of Beth and Edward, but each of them are the leader of another group. Normal group chat would allow Beth to communicate with Adam and Edward, but there would be down-group chat that would allow her to talk to Chuck and Diane instead. Extra-Special down-group chat should be available to Adam to communicate with everyone down the chain.
It shouldn't stop at two levels of nesting, it should basically be unlimited, but possibly limited by one or more Skills that determine things like: number of direct sub-groups allowed, total number of sub-groups allowed, etc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Speaking of Voice Chat...
I think there really needs to be a way to heirarchically organize groups into ever-larger groups.
Personally, I'd like to see a setup where groups can be organized like this:
Adam
-> Beth
-> -> Chuck
-> -> Diane
-> Edward
-> -> Fran
-> -> GeorgeWhere Adam's "group" really only consists of Beth and Edward, but each of them are the leader of another group. Normal group chat would allow Beth to communicate with Adam and Edward, but there would be down-group chat that would allow her to talk to Chuck and Diane instead. Extra-Special down-group chat should be available to Adam to communicate with everyone down the chain.
It shouldn't stop at two levels of nesting, it should basically be unlimited, but possibly limited by one or more Skills that determine things like: number of direct sub-groups allowed, total number of sub-groups allowed, etc.
Would the ability to invite people to an arbitrary chat group satisfy this? To illustrate, you could just invite x people individually to a chat group, similar group messaging. Then, have a voice chat system that allows you to choose among a list of active chats you wish to speak to...perhaps even giving the option of speaking to more than one group.
To me this seems easier than trying to construct an organizational hierarchy and properties privileges.
And I still really like the idea of a "local" voice chat.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Would the ability to invite people to an arbitrary chat group satisfy this?
They are two entirely separate things. I wasn't thinking about your use when I gave my example. My example is purely for large-scale raid-type grouping.
Ultimately, yes, I'd love to see a system where you could easily select exactly which chat group you wanted to speak to. I don't see how you could make a workable interface to support that without making it a very common mistake to speak in the wrong channel. Even with only two ways to speak, I think there will be plenty of human error.
When we're talking about typed chat instead of voice chat, it's probably a lot simpler and people are already used to using /4, etc.
With voice-chat, I'm not even sure it would be remotely feasible to be active in multiple channels at once anyway.
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Goblin Squad Member
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More tools:
An in group rating system. Administrators of a group can create a private rating system which allows members to rate each other. What is rated is entirely up to the admin and decided when they create the scheme.
To illustrate, I as a guild admin make a rating system for "Helpfulness" with a brief description to give helpful members a +1 for deeds of note. I could also create another one for "Courage", or even "Stupidity". I can then decide to make the ratings public or only visible to a subgroup within thew guild. I could even make the ratings only award-able by a subgroup. Another option would be to make the ratings normalize, meaning the scores are relative to that of the other guild members, or make them absolute, just a sum of +1s.
I am not advocating a use for this system, only its existence for social groups to use as they wish.
EDIT: Although this sounds complicated, that is only because I am trying to keep it as generic as possible, so players can develop novel uses.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I want an interface where I can put buttons indicating who my voice and typed chat (separately) goes to; text channels would include local, guild, guild officer, alliance, alliance officer, group, and tactical channels; I would also select where each of those channels was displayed, if at all. Normally I would want text directed at me (/tells), local, group, guild and alliance general (and officer, if I am one) chat on the main feed, with everything else directed to one minimized window for me to review at will. Talking in a channel would be done by clicking on the desired channel and typing.
During operations, I would monitor /tell and my operational channel on the main chat, with group chat in another window and officer chat (again, if applicable) in a third. Again, everything else gets thrown into a window for review if I choose to.
Voice chat would be a different selection, where I choose configurable groups (including local) and/or individuals to include in the chat and then PTT to go to all of them. I might have a group that is 'members of my current group', one for 'everyone downchain of me' and a number of tactical groups for various purposes. Talking would be accomplished by clicking on the people/groups destined to, then hitting the PTT.
I also want the ability to choose between blacklisting or whitelisting people from each chat, including voice.
If I end up having to excessively reduce screen real estate in order to remain a communication nexus, I'm willing to invest in the hardware to run in a 3240*1920 resolution. I doubt that the system I want is the best for everyone.
I really like the idea of "local" voice chat too, where I can speak into my microphone, and everyone nearby can hear me. Hard to implement a Profanity Filter on that, though...
Sorry to blow this one out of the water but no. Mainly for immersion problems.
You're walking through the forest and come across a small inn sheltered in a forest clearing. You've just been hunting deer and hope the keeper here will pay a fine price for them. Outside, you pass a fair elf maiden and decide to stop to chat. With the crackling voice of a fifty year old chain smoker in some barely recognisable accent, you are told, "#@~& off."
Feel free to substitute the elf maiden with a on aged old wizard and the voice of the fifty year old chain smoker for a prepubescent squeak. Either way - bye bye immersion.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...well, people do not have to use the voice chat. And your example illustrates to me why it is a good idea. Of course, the ERPers will still find a way to make that 50 year old chain smoker male's voice into the young elf maiden's. Which in itself would be kinda interesting to see/hear.
I can definitely see the use of voice modulators and/or voice clips pre-recorded from a viable source. Or it may just give people the encouragement to play a creature/sex that would make sense having their voice. This is what it would do to me.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really like the idea of "local" voice chat too, where I can speak into my microphone, and everyone nearby can hear me. Hard to implement a Profanity Filter on that, though...Sorry to blow this one out of the water but no. Mainly for immersion problems.
You're walking through the forest and come across a small inn sheltered in a forest clearing. You've just been hunting deer and hope the keeper here will pay a fine price for them. Outside, you pass a fair elf maiden and decide to stop to chat. With the crackling voice of a fifty year old chain smoker in some barely recognisable accent, you are told, "#@~& off."
Feel free to substitute the elf maiden with a on aged old wizard and the voice of the fifty year old chain smoker for a prepubescent squeak. Either way - bye bye immersion.
How is this significantly different from text-chat? Granted, it's insignificantly different in that you hear the voice and accent. Is that really significant? When a text-chat can just as easily say "Dude, you're like totally ghey, neo-maxi-zen-dweebie, get lost, Spongebob."
I remain unconvinced that either is fundamentally more or less conducive to immersion than the other.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...well, people do not have to use the voice chat. And your example illustrates to me why it is a good idea. Of course, the ERPers will still find a way to make that 50 year old chain smoker male's voice into the young elf maiden's. Which in itself would be kinda interesting to see/hear.
I can definitely see the use of voice modulators and/or voice clips pre-recorded from a viable source.
I'm somewhat torn, on one hand I love voice chat built in game, DDO IMO had one of the best systems for that very reason. Something was just plain awesome about being able to find a random PUG, and still be able to voice chat. (as opposed to skype/vent/others where more or less you likely can only be on the same server as other guild mates etc...). On the other hand I'm not sure how/if goblin works will have the resources to do voice chat. The implications/difficulty of voice chat in a massive world. Harassment reporting etc... get far more complicated with voice chat, as you can't take a screenshot of someone cussing you out in voice, and the server keeping recordings of thousands of conversations, is even less likely.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ultimately, the ability of the community itself to rate other members is what's going to make something like this work. If I make you have to earn respectability in the RP community before I see what you type or hear what you speak, then that's a whole different ballgame.
@KitNyx, re: profanity filter, I'm not arguing for one. I just believe that no business is going to serve up chat without one in this age of political correctness. It's always fun to me when I see the chat that reminds me I haven't turned off my profanity filter yet...
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Onishi, just as they're doing with the game engine, I would imagine the cost effective way to incorporate voice chat would be to go 3rd party. I would highly recommend Mumble, since their software does an incredibly good job of balancing out everything from a Whisper to a Scream.
...well, people do not have to use the voice chat.
By this do you men they can disable listening? But that gives many RPers a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. They're missing out on an aspect of RP if they disable it, and they're listening to immersion breakers if they don't.
I can definitely see the use of voice modulators and/or voice clips pre-recorded from a viable source.
Modulators... If it was done well sure why not - but it won't be, accent will still play a massive part, and it's a lot of unnecessary computer resources on something that might have next to no volume because they're just barely close enough to hear at all.
Pre-recorded voice clips. Isn't this the bane of RP in MMOs? RPers complain about how these games are too limiting in what you can do. Giving anything more than a small selection of generic sayings (and considering the race/class/age combinations - it will be small) like this will just aggravate players more at the lack of variety. It's better to create your own immersion from text from the getgo than to have a lacking attempt at essentially theme park-esque clips.
If people want voice communication, keep it out of the in-game RP scenarios is all I'm saying. It's a useful external, tactical or conversational tool otherwise.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ultimately, the ability of the community itself to rate other members is what's going to make something like this work. If I make you have to earn respectability in the RP community before I see what you type or hear what you speak, then that's a whole different ballgame.
@KitNyx, re: profanity filter, I'm not arguing for one. I just believe that no business is going to serve up chat without one in this age of political correctness. It's always fun to me when I see the chat that reminds me I haven't turned off my profanity filter yet...
Indeed plus half the fun of a game is seeing what random mundane words are going to be ****ed out because they start with or contain something that can be an offensive word.
Of course my greatest amusement was back in the game ragnarok online. Where it actually would not allow you to say the sentance
"I hate gravity" (all 3 words are perfectly fine on their own, the sentence will not send, and for those who don't know, the company that handled the US release of RO, is gravity).
I really like the idea of "local" voice chat too, where I can speak into my microphone, and everyone nearby can hear me. Hard to implement a Profanity Filter on that, though...Sorry to blow this one out of the water but no. Mainly for immersion problems.
You're walking through the forest and come across a small inn sheltered in a forest clearing. You've just been hunting deer and hope the keeper here will pay a fine price for them. Outside, you pass a fair elf maiden and decide to stop to chat. With the crackling voice of a fifty year old chain smoker in some barely recognisable accent, you are told, "#@~& off."
Feel free to substitute the elf maiden with a on aged old wizard and the voice of the fifty year old chain smoker for a prepubescent squeak. Either way - bye bye immersion.
How is this significantly different from text-chat? Granted, it's insignificantly different in that you hear the voice and accent. Is that really significant? When a text-chat can just as easily say "Dude, you're like totally ghey, neo-maxi-zen-dweebie, get lost, Spongebob."
I remain unconvinced that either is fundamentally more or less conducive to immersion than the other.
You don't have to hear text for a start. This is advantageous in so many ways to people who need the volume down, who like to listen to music, or are on voice chat elsewhere.
If someone is saying all that in text, you can tell at a glance not to read it. You aren't forced to read it, and you can skip it and pay attention to the RP around it. If they spam, you can easily ignore them.
If someone is doing it in voice chat however you might not know they're talking bull immediately. They may be talking over other people, and multiple people will be talking at once as it is. Even between a group of people intending to RP talking over each other will be a problem due to latency. Seeing as it's voice chat you can't go back and re-read what was said if you didn't catch it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I see what you are saying Zidash, but I don't see as much difference between the immersion break of 1337 speak and someone not RPing their voice in local chat as you seem to...which is fine as both are only opinions. While I see a lot of interest for PFO by RPers, I do not expect the majority of the community to be RPers. Due to this, I expect most of my RP will be done when me and my RP pals go do our own thing...I think the RP benefits in these cases will be exciting and extreme (don't move to far away from the group or you could loose them in darkness (oh right, no darkness *grin*), etc. Anyways, if we wanted such a thing it cannot be done third party unless PFO allows for random source queries to the game server about spatial positioning (which admittedly could have other cool uses for third party software).
Also, you must ask yourself which is more immersion breaking, having a discussion with people miles away, or talking to a female elf with a husky smokers voice (that kinda sounds like a guy) in front of you?
But, after Zidash's points, I do think small voice chat on/off, RP/nonRP icons would be in order...maybe something as easy as red for off, green for on and non-RP, blue for on and RP. TO avoid clutter in the UI, this icon could just be present on a tab visible when you inspect someone.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
...well, people do not have to use the voice chat.By this do you men they can disable listening? But that gives many RPers a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. They're missing out on an aspect of RP if they disable it, and they're listening to immersion breakers if they don't.
I can definitely see the use of voice modulators and/or voice clips pre-recorded from a viable source.Modulators... If it was done well sure why not - but it won't be, accent will still play a massive part, and it's a lot of unnecessary computer resources on something that might have next to no volume because they're just barely close enough to hear at all.
Pre-recorded voice clips. Isn't this the bane of RP in MMOs? RPers complain about how these games are too limiting in what you can do. Giving anything more than a small selection of generic sayings (and considering the race/class/age combinations - it will be small) like this will just aggravate players more at the lack of variety. It's better to create your own immersion from text from the getgo than to have a lacking attempt at essentially theme park-esque clips.
If people want voice communication, keep it out of the in-game RP scenarios is all I'm saying. It's a useful external, tactical or conversational tool otherwise.
Set the voice chat either to whitelist (I only get the audio from those I select) or blacklist (I get audio from everyone except those I select). If you blacklist, you hear them once, then silence them. With whitelist, you only hear those you want.
If I'm maneuvering and engaging in combat, and also need to communicate with the group, hitting Mouse5 and talking is superior to disabling the keyboard controls for the time it takes to typo out my message and send it. I would find an in-game interface for voice chat supremely useful for that reason alone.
If I really need to communicate a lot, I can type with one hand the least urgent stuff, or the stuff that needs to be precise and referenced later, while I use the other hand to control voice chat. In that case, I really need to not be in combat, because holding two different conversations in different media takes slightly more than all of my concentration.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There's certainly room for having purpose-specific voice chat channels, like OOC, Trade, General, RP, etc.
And the only time the voice chat is really going to matter is tactically, when you've been told by your group leader that you better have it on and be able to hear. At all other times, it's not going to matter anymore than the chat floating by in /1 that most RPers don't watch anyway, at least in my case the very first thing I do in any game is move the public channels off to a separate tab that I only go to on very special occasions.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There's certainly room for having purpose-specific voice chat channels, like OOC, Trade, General, RP, etc.
And the only time the voice chat is really going to matter is tactically, when you've been told by your group leader that you better have it on and be able to hear. At all other times, it's not going to matter anymore than the chat floating by in /1 that most RPers don't watch anyway, at least in my case the very first thing I do in any game is move the public channels off to a separate tab that I only go to on very special occasions.
Exactly. If I am using a channel called 'tactical one', I'm not going to avoid using roleplay breaking phrases like "try spamming trip" or "We're losing, scram for now and wait for the respawns". If my character is chatting, there's no need for me to have the switchboard up, and I can talk about how hard it has been lately to find quality timber, and how spoiled these new brats are with the new fast travel points. Why, in the old days we had to walk 4 kilometers/2 miles to get to the watermill, and it was uphill, both ways ;)