TW RPG in development

[gdugwyler]

Working out the stat increases -- terrs and sharks will have cheaper upgrades, probably significantly cheaper, and have maybe a 50% bonus on flag-holding jackpots ... But this still means they'll need to earn much of their upgrades by making kills, which is not all that frequent. I know that mines do make their share of kills when placed properly, and bursts work pretty well for a terr, even if they don't come up that frequently. (Terrs will have to start with a burst, it looks like, or else their chances of making many kills from the beginning will be crippled badly.)

Question is, how much cheaper should shark and terr upgrades be, in direct relation to how often they're able to make kills compared to, for example, a WB -- which is probably a good middle ground between spider and jav in the hands of an experienced player in base. If a WB is 100% cost, would terr be about 50%, and shark 60%?... help me out here; will save a lot of time in the long run.

[DankNuggets]

if you're still planning on starting with the 4 ships (wb,jav,spid,terr) and keeping the shark as an initially locked ship--

i like the idea of giving the terrs/sharks a higher % of the flag bonus as they're often the only ships that are solely working for flag. terrs in pubs now may not fall into that consideration, but i get the feeling that there won't be much LT'ing or other options for terrs to earn points w/o staying in base in the new arena. however, (correct me if i'm wrong) flag bonuses in purepub don't give you points directly, just increase your bounty; so an idea might be to give terrs a direct point bonus from the flag where other ships just get the increased bounty from it. They'll still get plenty of kills with bursts and if they continue to receive greens from teammates, they'll be working with a higher bounty when the get kills, giving them more points per kill than most other ships.

I'm not sure how the points are going to be allocated- if points can be used to upgrade anyship, then you might be better off reducing the cost for terrs, but if they're specific to the ship you earned them in you could do something like i mentioned above. This is mainly to keep people from terring at first to earn a lot of points and then using them to upgrade another ship w/o have to work that hard at it.

with the sharks, since only a limited # of ppl could be sharks, they might be fine with just getting kills off of mines b/c there won't be an option to quickly change to shark, repel the mines, and then change back to another ship. Theoretically, the first person to be a shark might go 100-0 by mining alone since no one can repel the mines.

wow that's a lot to read at once so here's my bottom line: since the shark is unlockable i wouldn't reduce the upgrade costs, and i wouldn't reduce the terr's either unless it is unfeasiable to simply give them points for controlling flag

[bounty]

Im lookin to buy an 07 Levi fully loaded with reps, rocket, and decoys! Point me in the direction of the dealership.

[duel pasta]

Shark is my ship, baby, so pimp it up

[gdugwyler]

I'm a big fan of sharks, too, so I don't want to neglect the ship either.

Dank, you do have a point about the unlockable element and the first player who uses one being able to wreak havoc. Then again, shark is going to be sort of the "token" unlock ... it's locked but it will be unlocked by most decent, committed players pretty quickly. Also add to it that the unlocked ships will cost very little or no money to buy once they've been unlocked, and I think we'll probably see a decent number of sharks. Even if the shark wasn't an unlockable, but available from the start for a cost, the first player using it would still be able to own it up a bit anyhow. (Though all that they could seal off is one of the two FRs at a time, which a little ramming always rectifies. Note that these sharks will only have 1 rep to start as well, so they're not exactly in a great position to stay alive.)

As for the flag bonuses, jackpotting from purepub, etc., none really applies. Arena points and Distension credits will be handled differently (no ?buy menu for example). There are no prizes, and bounty does not increase when you kill someone. This is so your ship level will always be clear to friends and enemies -- and consequently how much one player or other may earn for killing you, making the bigshots much more attractive targets. The bonuses from round flagging will not come from flag ticks, though yes, probably something like the current purepub system, modified for two (north and south) flags. Maybe 1 minute holding both. Will have to play with it to see what works. Jackpots are awarded in Distension credits, and can be used for any ship. Good point in that that's probably a good reason not to have too big a bonus for being in a shark or terr, but still something to be noticed. 20%, maybe. Upgrades being cheaper will still make sense to me, though. Would prefer to only give out points for flag jackpots, rather than in regular tick intervals, and everyone will receive that jackpot, after all, even the spider who's been racking up the kills in the meantime.

Here's the preliminary idea for the point/credit system so far... maybe it will help figure this out:

Level (number of upgrades) of player you killed:
15 levels below your level - 1 point.
14 levels below to 9 levels above - points equal to level of player you killed.
10 levels above or more - points equal to your level + 10

(So killing around your level earns you the most)

Flags held (the multiplier):
0 - every kill is worth 1 point.
1 - every kill receives normal points (as usually your team will have 1 flag).
2 - every kill receives double points, and if you hold both for a certain amount of time you receive the jackpot.


So again, kills will have a lot to do with earning your credits/points. This is why I think reduced costs for terrs and sharks may be in order. Particularly because sharks start with a smaller number of reps, and terrs will not earn team greens for their bursts and warps. (They will have an ability to help them out with this later on, though.)

Also, just wanted to point out that there will most likely be a limited number of people in any ship, particularly at the start, so this isn't a big qualifier for anything. WB is the only one that's free from the beginning, which everyone starts with. Jav is a little bit pricy (though well within the range of anyone who's been playing a few weeks ... probably most dedicated players will have every ship available ... except perhaps the levi, which is going to be tricky). Spider is pretty inexpensive, as is terr -- those are probably the first ships people will change to. But of course, the real payoff in any doesn't come until you stick with it for a while...

[DankNuggets]

given the point system you've introduced, it would make sense to reduce the cost for upgrading especially if the terrs don't get greens from team and the sharks only get one rep.

how will frequencies be determined? will there be something in place to keep teams from becoming heavily one-sided (like when half a team leaves and no one re-enters the arena to balance it out) and taking both flags, leaving everyone else scoring 1 pt/kill? Will privite frequencies be disabled? Maybe a frequency balance where teams are shuffled after each jackpot is achieved?

[gdugwyler]

Hmm... good questions on the teams... one idea I'm fairly committed to that might cause problems here is static armies. Players will belong to an army and will generally (unless they defect to another) stick with it throughout their career. Two armies to start, maybe the option of private armies/freqs later. The idea behind this is to create some tension between factions, and to build camraderie, much like on a squad. You help eachother level up because you know it will help everyone on your side in the long run.

That does lead to problems with team imbalances. One solution would be to disable the jackpot system with significant gaps in teams (though have it work through to the end of the round to prevent abuse by a losing team that might quit and then just re-enter). There could also be a point bonus/penalty in direct proportion to the disparity: for example, 10v15 could make for a bonus of 25% to the small team and penalty of 25% to the greater one (half of the percentage difference between 10 and 15 players). This could encourage the team with 15 players to try and get support for the other team, just so they could get the proper amount of points coming to them.

Another small way to keep the armies even in general is the idea of an enlistment bonus, already implemented. Players joining an army with a smaller number of players receive a decent amount of credits to get them started in the game. This would still allow a player to join the other army, losing the bonus -- maybe he wants to play with his buddy or squad, that kind of thing...

[DankNuggets]

i like the idea of picking a team and sticking with it. maybe you could put a roster cap on each freq, say like 20ppl on it and when it fills up start another freq. it may get complicated if this becomes popular and you've got like 5 freqs vieing for one or two flags, but it all depends on how popular the arena becomes. sounds like you're working hard to get this done, thanks for the updates

[Remezetti]

Don't make this another "space" Runescape or Maple Story. You WILL lose 50% of the players.

[Kim]

Don't make this another "space" Runescape or Maple Story. You WILL lose 50% of the players.

I don't see how in the FUQ we can turn this into a space maple story. If we could, I think this could go commercial again!

[Remezetti]

I didn't read the posts in between, I just read the first one by gdugwyler. I'm just saying that I'm not very open to the idea that you start in one ship and buy new ships. I think it makes the game lose its uniqueness that way. SS is a 2d game, why would people who play WoW or other 3d RPG games come back to a 2d game even if it has the same concept?
Are you talking about making a new zone for this type of play or recoding the whole game so that this type of play would happen in all zones? What's the point of different zones then? This would be much more like servers in a game like WoW, MapleStory, Runescape etc.
Will there be a campaign or quests too?

Maybe I just don't get the idea completely, and you could explain it to me a little better, or recommend me go and read all of the replies before posting. Regards.

[gdugwyler]

To clarify, it's not a new zone (were it to be, it wouldn't be on TW forums), and, no, it's not recoding the client. It's just going to be a subarena, like elim, that players can choose to frequent. I'm guessing that it might support anywhere from 20 to 100 people at a time, and being that it's not compulsory, should certainly not cause everyone to quit. If anything, it might bring some population back. TW developers are trying to keep an old game from becoming stale by putting new twists on it, not rape it into the shape of something it isn't.

The first post with bringing back people from WoW was at first a joke. But there's some seriousness to it -- WoW has failings that SS does not. WoW can get extremely boring because it has no real action. The battles don't require much thought, and largely you're thinking of which mobs give the most XP, where to travel next, which skill to raise, etc. Put in your time, pay your subscription fee, and level up. No skill needed. Not my idea of a good time.

It doesn't matter that WoW is 3D vs. SS's 2D. That's a mistake that most developers are fast to make these days. They haven't yet learned how to make a 3D game as entertaining as a 2D one. For an example, think about the success of titles on the GBA, titles which, technically speaking, are nothing to boast about. Yet as far as the entertainment value goes, these are some of the better titles to come out recently. Think of how much the old Gamecube Metroid sucks (it does -- badly), and think of how the GBA ones are nearly as good as the masterpiece of the series, Super Metroid. [Any are welcome to disagree with me here.] In the end, pretty graphics do not make a good game. And anyhow ... I actually like the aesthetics of SS. Blackness, and easy to look at. The graphics are "better" than most games to come out today in my personal opinion, largely because it's very relaxing and simple.

So on the opposite end of the spectrum from WoW is a game like Subspace, which is almost straight arcade action. It requires reflexes, attention, and split-second thinking. But it has no real goal, or if it has a goal, the goal is extremely temporary -- get the flag and keep it. Win a round. Win 2 of 3 matches in the JD. Win the ladder tournament. And so on. I've still always been a big RPG fan, particularly of the hard older stuff without much story (NES Dragon Warrior, anyone?). But here, even if the story isn't much to speak of, at least you feel like from day to day you're progressing in the game... Apply these rules to a multiplayer game: now you're not just progressing, but progressing over other people -- and we humans love competition. The more you play, the more of an advantage you have over others. Neat. Even better, you can customize things uniquely. Let's try this idea with SS ... you take an RPG, dispense with the generally piss-poor story (only enough to entertain 12-15 year olds, at which they are marketted), keep the aspects that allow you to advance and customize how you do your thing, and then throw in the fun of SS action, which I think remains to this day one of the best team action games there are. Doesn't sound bad to me.

As for quests and such for this game, no, not really (except for one special thing in order to unlock the most interesting ship). The focus of this game remains almost exclusively on the gameplay that makes Trench Wars so fun. I think the RPGish SS zone Mystic Kingdom was in the end a failure because of its focus on creating your typical [read: boring] wizards and warriors world, essentially adapting SS to RPGs, rather than the other way around. But we play here because we like SS... why should we try to make it into another game?

Subspace has great advantages. I love seeing 10-20 people battling live on one screen in a way that I can actually comprehend -- where else do you see that in an action game without everything becoming entirely too confusing? We keep the advantages of SS and TW's particular flavor of SS, and add the interesting and successful elements of RPGs that give a feeling of personalization, progress, and investment in the game.

Hope that clears it up a bit.

[Remezetti]

Sounds much better thanks for clearing that up for me. =)

How are you going to get people to play in that arena though? Hosting it is way too long right?

[gdugwyler]

Advertisement of a long and annoying sort. Ideally once things are really in gear, a mention of it can be placed in the welcome message.


Been pretty excited about a new direction to take the game in. I was thinking about how each time you buy a basic upgrade (energy, recharge, top speed, thrust, rotation) under the present plan, the cost of the given upgrade will double. This means that it's smartest to upgrade all of these 5 base stats at almost the exact same rate ... leading to uniformity and a bit of a boring progression of the ship.

Instead I'm going to scrap the idea of credits altogether and operate on the more standard and also I think more enjoyable "level" style. You earn points toward a level (essentially your army giving you an advancement in rank), and each level you're given an upgrade point to allocate into your ship how you see fit (your army authorizing you for better weaponry after you've proved yourself). The base/standard upgrades will cost a point each, but the more exotic upgrades such as guns, bombs and special abilities may require several. In addition the base upgrades will always be upgradeable, no matter what your current level is -- so for example, you can max out your top speed and have an extremely fast ship very early on, sacrificing weaponry and the other attributes in the process. However, the non-standard upgrades will all have level requirements, and successive levels of the same upgrade (shrap, for example, or repels) will have different level requirements. This simplifies the whole system quite a bit, while at the same time allowing for a much wider range of customization.

One interesting side effect of this will be the advantage of point conservation. The levels/upgrade points will of course come easiest early on... so potentially a player could allocate just the bare minimum needed to scrape by until they can afford a significant upgrade that has a high level requirement and requires a lot of points. Of course getting the levels in between will be more of a pain without many upgrades ... but another nice thing about this conservation is that the number of points spent will effectively determine what level you have as far as kill/death point calculations are concerned. So you might be level 30, but have only invested 5 points. When you kill someone who's level 5 you'll still get 5 points for the kill rather than the 1 point someone at upgrade level 30 would receive from the same kill. Might be beneficial with some styles, and not with others -- your choice.

[Remezetti]

Would this be like in HZ with goalies receiving goalie points after the game? When they collect 15 they can buy a "skip" the captainship claim, and when they have 20 they can buy immunity from being picked as a goalie. Everything is done through .? commands.
?gp
?buy skip
?buy immunity

or are you thinking a bot which will record all the points, and grant new ships?