First post so be kind,
(warning post will be long at the very end I will put in a TL:DR too-long-didn't-read version for those that just want the bare bones of this)

One thing I've really wanted to see in MMO's that almost is NEVER touched upon correctly is faction growth. NCR, Brotherhood of Steel, the pink fuzzy bunnies of cuteness, the emo knights of darkest night of night.... you get the idea. Every MMO even those in their 7th years have almost no growth of their factions.

Let me give an example.(names changed to protect the innocent)

Empire A fights Empires B and C, both B and C fight the other two so no one can truly go 'all out' on the other. Each has 1 city, 3 towns and maybe 4 or 5 camps/outposts that start when the servers come up. Each is jockeying for position to gain an advantage over the other. So as a new player you see this when the server starts and you are excited, you want to know more and you exclaim "Wow, the developers REALLY put a ton into the back history this is awesome I really thank them for the efforts *virtual clapping inserted here*

Then it's 4 or 5 years later.

Your level 100, you walk around in power armor, so does your best NPC friend that you've carefully leveled, protected, and shared an extra small tent with on a cold night.... heck even your dog 'scruffles' has Brotherhood augmentations to his body to make him more resistant to damage. You have anything and everything you really want, besides Mark IIV power mod 47, augmentation 6 (the left hand pinky finger ring mod that gives a 0.00002% chance for the enemy attacking you to be blinded by the light cast off of the ring thus deflecting his shot.)

So you are there, you come back to one of the starting zones since many players still try the game out and you like to sell items there to them to make some more caps. And low and behold!!!!!

Not a single thing has changed....

The 3 empires still exist, the towns still exist, the camps still exist, heck, even the same GUARDS still exist in the same areas they were standing in, the very day you started. You think "wow, even my 100 person town in real life has had more change then this place!" Suddenly you find yourself saying "This svcks, the game is static, nothing changes and the game is getting boring!"

What just happened! you LOVED this game, you thought it was awesome, you told all your friends, and even a few of them joined you here!

This is how to avoid that happening AND hopefully not only get the players involved BUT to get the players to enjoy it and have some fun.


First off each player should start off in a faction, NCR, brotherhood, fuzzy bunny empire, whatever. If you want to keep faction starting populace in balance give a 'bonus' to starting players in the lowest number faction on a day to day basis. Say +5% to item drops and +5% to exp earned your first 2 weeks IF you take the lowest population faction to start with.

Now here's where it can get interesting, and I'm going to cut this down in length a tad so it doesn't become an EPIC txt wall.

Each and every faction town, city, camp, can be upgraded, a large number of times. However each upgrade costs an amount of quests, items, and time. For instance a town with say 10 buildings, and maybe 40 NPCs could be upgraded to a higher town with 2 more buildings and maybe 50 NPC's. The new buildings bringing in more services while the new NPC's offer new missions, faction specific items (weapons, ammo, blueprints) trainers, and so on. The new NPC's can give better and farther reaching missions that can tie together with other towns that also would have to be upgraded in order to make the missions work. So until the other town is upgraded the mission giver could say something like "I would have you deliver some supplies and recon the other faction around town 2, but town 2 doesn't have an armory yet...."

Costs for upgrading however would scale upwards, drastically. A camp with maybe a 6 tents to go to 10 tents would be maybe 500 hours of player work (cumulative) so 500 players doing 1 hour of missions would finish that requirement over time. With costs of maybe quadruple that, so 2000 hours work of items (all lower level stuff) would be given over, donated or what naught to upgrade the camp. (again just examples). If players are simply in the area doing quests it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have them donating gear and items towards the site to upgrade it instead of just 'vendoring' all those trash items that every game seems to be packed to the gills with.

This all can be tracked with faction boards for each town, just a list of the top 25 players and/or tribes/clans that donated as a whole that will be a monument to their work that will stand for all time.

And please if you decide to use this in the game remember to include an ability for the site to take pretty much any item, even at semi decent trade rates (say 110% worth of garbage items towards the thousands caps to upgrade a site). So I go out to the wastes, kill a few raiders and come back with say a few 'trash' items I don't want, a baseball bat, a knife and a bottle of whiskey. Total value for the items to a vendor would be 22 caps. But to the 'site authority' it would be worth 25 caps worth of donation which would raise your characters standing with that faction (which at various levels would allow access to specialty gear, rights to purchase items at the cost of cash AND losing some standings after all gotta stop players from getting the best items and suddenly buying 10,000 per day to sell on the market)

This can open the doors to all kinds of ways to keep the factions involved, yet still making the player 'nations' that will arise feel important and even one day equal to or better then some of the factions. For instance, maybe a player nation of 1,000 players wants to strike out on it's own, the game however having some controls in place dictates that players need a specialty item to be able to put down even a basic area. In this case a town center, so the G.E.C.K. is required but has only started to be produced by the various factions and their not giving them away without some major work and cash.

So player nation XYZ decides 'lets get this done' and starts to help upgrade the various faction towns, campsites and even the city under it's factions control. After a few mishaps, wars and (most likely) patches, the G.E.C.K's are available to various nations under faction control and some buy one or two and get ready to start their own sub faction.

However it doesn't stop there, now that the player nation has it's G.E.C.K. it needs a place to put it that the various factions won't just swoop down and take over. This would open up into 'zones', that have to be upgraded (aka cleared and/or fought over) to open up. The more difficult it is, the better the zone is for that player nation. Lets say the fuzzy bunny nation wants access to a pretty decent zone, with access to some resources, maybe even some chances to get into rare resources and/or creature spawns and decide to go for it full tilt. This zone would require say maybe millions of caps/credits, and 10,000 hours worth of time as a player nation(guild, corp, whatever) to earn access too. Lets say that a good example would be a large valley with many unscalable cliffs ringing it, but the pass to it has been blown with hundreds of tons of rock and debris. Yet the faction the player nation is closest too is willing to clear the pass, which will take the 10,000 man hours. before you say OMG that's not possible!!! Read on dear vault dweller! The nation will provide say 12 or so workers (Mr. Handy or whatever) bots that will work on the pass per week so 20 weeks later without a single player interaction the pass will open up. And the player nation will be allowed to deploy their G.E.C.K. as they see fit.

But who the heck wants to wait 20 weeks? We want it yesterday!!! So we decide to 'help' the team out, but since we can't manually pick up the multi ton rocks with our characters (this also stops players from saying HEY, I want to grab a pick axe and help out!) our characters need to do other things to assist.

The things they can do are legion to assist in this case:
1. Clearing out enemies - They could run 'patrols' into the surrounding area that would clear out other faction NPCs that have been harassing or keeping tabs on the site.
2. Parts assistance - The Mister Handy bots are great, but their old and a few (say as many as 50% of the work force is down at one time) are out of commision, if the right parts can be found, (mission? crafted? bought?) the bots that are sitting idle can be brought back up to speed and help cut down the clearing time for that week. But since clearing is hard on the robots the next week would require another batch of parts or the same slow down occurs.
3. Super charger! - Prototype robots are around, so are others that have been built by other factions. A few of them working with your parent factions robots would speed up the work even more... But the foreman from your faction would have to run them, and he'd probably want to keep them... Time vrs Rewards. Give him a few extra bots (not cheap) but get access to your zone quicker!
4. Hired Workers vrs Slaves Depending upon your faction you can pay to have additional workers sent, but you can't just hire a few thousand and have it cleared in a day, after all the pass can only hold so many workers before they'd get in each others way. Or you can buy slaves and damn the human price! (direct loss of faction with some factions for slaves) (loss of money for hired workers)
5. Burning the midnight oil! You can bribe the site foreman to bring in an additional set of crews (big bucks for this but 1/3rd the time) but they need a tremendous amount of supplies and protection. Not to mention fuel for lighting, ammo for the guards, food and parts for the various workers, etc etc. (can cut the 20 weeks to as little as 2 weeks if they want to run a crazy amount of missions and pay a great deal of cash)

The rewards however would be massive, their own way to collect resources though it would be limited (can be upgraded obviously just like a faction town) their own NPC's would begin to spawn with quests only they or allies of their nation would be able to run. etc etc.

It would have to be balanced where players would have a way to recoup the massive costs of getting the zone and the G.E.C.K. But with upgrading and holding the zone would come the desire to get another, or another. Or even someone elses.... and thus PVP can be introduced.

However it doesn't have to be that crazy, it could be as small as a 100 players getting together, clearing out a semi okay zone that would only take 4 weeks or 2,000 hours and maybe 20% of the cost of the 'mega zone' but it would still be 'their' zone. It could be upgraded, but it wouldn't be as good as the pricey area. Where the pricey zone might have gold (for example only) and a small chance to get Uranium (for making various batteries or uranium tipped slugs). The 'lesser zone' would only have maybe a buried junkyard so only rusty iron would be collectible with a small chance at getting maybe some copper (from wires that were buried in the cars). The nice thing about the lesser zone would be, not everyone would want it, the higher zone however large player nations would want for the sheer income it could produce. So great wars would be fought over the things while the lesser zone would be ignored.


TL:DR upgrade factions to open up access to player controlled territory and resources, which can lead to PVP which can lead to politics and such. Years and years of game play I would imagine and everyone would be needed to make it work, not just 20 people working like crazy and getting access to the best parts of the game by playing 20 hours a day. It would require tons of other players,....aka Multiplayers, a massive amount


I know this is rough, and maybe said somewhere else (though I haven't read it anywhere) but I hope I can make a Dev take a look and say "hey, that's not such a bad idea, we should do something like that!" compared to the same old, same old of static NPC nations that are utterly useless after a few months in game that are only used for 'events' which companies stop running after a few years in production.

It's also something I'd love to play and hope some others would like to as well, so I hope something like that will be put in so I can bring some friends into it someday for some fun.

More posts to come, good day!

-Banlish

You deserve many, MANY, cookies.

Meesa thinks I like.

Must ask: Does the various nations wage wars against each other? and if so, can they take over towns and further are the main capital cities "protected" (cannot be taken over).

AND even further, if 1 nation is very undermanned will they get NPC help in battles.

Also will the battles be decided by NPC (like public quest, we will attack town X at monday, 13:30, be ready). So if it turns out that a nation is getting a little too big they will slow down and let other nations catch up with them, never funny if 1 nation gets too op :/

anyway, im just throwing some ideas

I'm not saying I disagree with it being a good idea, or wish I could see it, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I like it. Seems like a novel way to introduce new areas and content in.

this sounds similar to the territorial conquest idea i had a while back, with more details, sounds good to me

Eventually yes, player nations (refereed to here after as PN's) would be able to fight each other, but some time would have to pass to allow a period of build up (think colonization before people starting bringing the big guns to play) maybe say that to truly take over another PN's zone/territory it would have to take and defend some G.E.C.K. control interfaces. I'm not an expert on time zone fighting, so I'd leave that to people much more knowledgeable then me to figure out.

As for NPC help in battles, I'd say that's what diplomacy is for. You might be able to get some Mercenary guards for various installations or sites, but it'd be limited and it wouldn't be cheap. Also Mercs can defend a site, even a small campsite, but to guard an entire zone? No, that'd be up to the players to figure out and bring politics and infighting to the game. Though multi thousand player nations taking over everything just because they have the most bodies seems kind of counter productive to how the game should be. I'd say keep "player nations" out of the game for a good while till tribes/clans get some territory and upgrade it before people start flinging 20,000 people vrs 20,000 people in time zone wars.

I like the idea, but how will it be degraded\destroyed? One idea is that you have a monthly goal for the entire population of the faction. Let's say that a camp needs 10000 rounds of 5.56, 5000 of 10mm, along with some building materials (bricks, wood, etc.) in a month to stay on that "level". If the population doesn't get this much, it will downgrade. And you have higher numbers required to upgrade. If a place is downgraded all the way (so that it's destroyed), the opposing faction AND your faction can have battles (let's do this in an "arena" (like WoWs battleground?) to simplify it) as well as gathering materials to rebuild the place.

Only thing I don't see as a doable thing, is the evolution being done in realtime. It would probably require a update to the map, probably a long with a patch.. But hey, I don't see a proper problem with this (unless it's a lot back and forth).

But yeah, most MMOs lacks ingame development, it would be nice to see what an NPC actually does with all the crap you gather for them...

Maintenance fees such as more ammo, more materials, etc etc are not a good idea for an NPC faction to be paid for by players. As soon as you do, players are going to feel like it's a chore instead of a goal and the entire system breaks down.

Once upgraded it's assumed the NPC faction is greedy enough and powerful enough to maintain what they built up. Some other games have maintenance costs directly associated with character controlled territory or what naught and I can honestly say I have NEVER, ever, EVER, seen players want such a system removed as those of constant maintenance and up keeps.


TL:DR version:
NPC factions only should have costs to upgrade and then are done, the next level upgrade should cost progressively more so it's basically like 'stocking the fort' for months by upgrading.
Player Nations however would have to pay an upkeep of sorts, mostly in the form of repairs and/or activity in their controlled zones but with only some costs. (Maybe the running of a Mister Handy or 5 that go around making sure things are in some basic state of repair)

Sooo... Territories can only grow, not shrink?
I'm sorry, but that sounds like a stupid idea. Like anything, things can become too big for itself. Take a city in a modern world for example, it's power consumption can become too big to provide enough power for everyone, resulting in it buying power from other citys\countyies\countries. Or old time, a little village expands too quickly, but doesn't have enough food to feed everyone, it WILL shrink due to that.

It would also add a very dynamic MMO. Maybe you didn't have to donate things, but rather doing questslines (recon missions, killing off nearby hostiles etc., you get the idea) for the "camp chief".

(I do like that you have very extensive ideas, which aren't over the top or just simply dumb, I do respect your opinion but I do have mine as well, like this for example)

I'll explain it a tad better, since people get very much up in arms over what they think is wrong or exploitable.

The idea of 'growing' a territory is not a small thing. It is a MASSIVE undertaking, and I do mean massive. It should take hundreds if not thousands of players 1,000's of man hours to get it accomplished. Not just (turn in 50 lumber, 100 rounds and 2 sweaty socks for upgrade level 2!) I know your probably not suggesting that, but it's also not meant to be a chore either. I can see a basic maintenance fee of items or a set number of missions/quests to be run, but paying the cost over and over and then trying to go upwards would also be bad.

Unless the dev's decide to go all on the single server with thousands of people. I doubt that will happen, but if it does, no problem make it cost something.

To put it in perspective, even if 1,000 players go together and EACH put in 20 hours of 'work' upgrading the city in question it would still take a good amount of time since not all the resources could be gathered at the same time with other factions trying to upgrade their territories as well. After all, until many many zones are opened via G.E.C.K. kits resources will be somewhat limited, and players should be fighting over them.

If a territory is ignored it probably should degrade, but if that's happening it's most likely the server/game is dying instead of people moving on to bigger and better things.

I am not trying to bash down your opinion, but I also won't insult you by saying 'that's a stupid idea', please try to do the same in your future replies. So lets keep that on an even keel if possible.

Please remember even though 'upkeep' might sound like a great idea (it is) players get lazy, and more then a few great players have been burnt out on 'epic' mmo's that have tons of upkeep, chores and the like.

If players are willing to put in 20,000 hours worth of work, I would think that would be enough to let the NPC's take over at that point so things don't enter the 'chore' zone that a few MMO's have become (and honestly burnt out too many good players).

And before you think a city would become too big for itself, the highest levels should litterally take 20% of the server a few months to gather accomplish. And at the highest levels it might not even be worth it for faction players to upgrade that city to level 6 when tons of small towns and campsites are at level 1, 2 and 3.

This is good though, I like discussion in a respectful manner between people. After all I'm only trying to encourage ideas that might make the game better for us all. It could all be almost nothing where the game is going to go, but hopefully the game will be what everyone can enjoy.

Very nice....check out the NPC respawns and behavior and let me know what you think...both could fit together very well to keep things dynamic when it comes to lesser elements (NPCs and critters) and static in the things you should be growing with.

How would you feel about player run factions? (guilds, kinships, alliances in other games) Almost every game lets you build your own faction I put the 'Skill' in 'Kill.'
Wait, what?

Read the OP, that's what "Player Nations" refer too. They wouldn't equate to the same as the NCR or Brotherhood of Steel (which have been around for 100+ years) but they would only be limited by the amount of players in the player nation and the amount of time and effort they put in.

Lovely work there, but some minor details will be needed; I got your point, love it, pretty decent requirements, but I think you can add a few things in there.
Fox example: we have a water supply, but not that tasty; player will need to get craft some filters using resources from zone A.
Now, every PN is limited to a single zone for some time; after more players get involved, the limits should be modified accordingly to the progress. "Problem" will be that all zones will have vital materials (either from creatures or ground < >>) and will need go get what they need if the zone is not yet occupied, to trade with other PNs, try to organize a stealth raid (to steal).
Now, with stealth raid should be available later on; after all, filters needs to be changed and technology advances. Think the order I wrote them is the chronological one.

Regards and keep up the good work.

Epic Idea is Awesome. I agree with the fact that there is no Dynamic PN System..and that the NPC Factions/Nations do stagnate after a while. This idea should do definetly be noted and hopefully be introduced in as a new feature that no other MMO (I think?) has. Keep dishing out the Ideas

I like this A LOT... really good idea. I didnt read the whole thing but i read the TLDR version along with the first couple paragraphs and Im probably gunna come back and read that later kinda bust atm but I would like to see this implemented... I could imagine a basic town like Megaton minus some things like armory and what not and then as the empire grows a public armory comes into play and stuff and depending on how much you did for the town you get better weapons or items everyday. Stuff like that. maybe some Banks to store precious items you dont want to lose when out in the wastes and small huts for players to call "homes" also protected with locks that you can use depending on lockpick level so the raiding nation couldn't break in along with traps and stuff to also keep the nation raiding away. The Bank would protect the items forever though but have limited space. Sometimes whole villages could be knocked out and forced to relocate and start over maybe with some help from the main capital city for the nation said village was a part of.
Sorry if its not to clear im tired right now... Hopefully you get the idea and if any ideas from all the ideas on this site get chosen to actually be put into the game I REALLY want this one and this is BY FAR my vote. My idea would only be an extension of the awesome the main idea is.

I say us beta testers start a faction of our own.

Betania. You are being served by Nymus powered by black boyshorts with black lace, a pink bow, and pink ribbon and a hot pink and black lace, totally frilly.

Then I will follow the normal rule of faction starting, I will start a counter-faction and call it... Betonia and I will say I was the first one to come up with the name idea (just because every faction vs faction must have a quarrel between them self).

Nearly impossible to achieve. Actually, impossible, unless you are playing a game universe where are a lot of space, stars, ships and gates in between.

I imagine myself starting a game after four years it's been there and I bring my small guild there and we want a place for ourselves, then comes zerg and rushes us away 'cuz day can'. I've been there before. Fallout? What Fallout? (Live in Russia Dem.jpg