This is a simply a suggestion thread of features that you think the Devs could implement into V13 that would make the game better. In your opinion of course.

I hope i can reference other games, because i'm going to.

Eve-
MARKET
Eve has the best game economy i've ever seen. EVERYTHING is player driven, there is virtually no npc "vendors", everything sold in game is sold by players, this is done by "scavenging" aka in eve "saluaging" or looting ships, mining rocks, moons, manufacturing from raw materials, etc.

The major bonus to this should be obvious, and ACTUAL MARKET, not some silly auction house system where buying and sell are completely meaningless because people are buying from a merchant and selling as a middleman. This system really allows dynamic economy and despite some peoples fear of "spreadsheets" it is really quite managable for the average player.

in other words, no NPC merchants. Everything should be player made, player sold, and player controlled as far as the economy goes. This can translate into awesome gameplay as well, because if a clan finds a resource to control, and it remains profitable to do so, there will always be competition for it, as long as the devs don't nerf the area and sell the rare item on a vendor, due to carebears crying.

another thing that i've seen requested in fallen earth, is clan vendor that public can access and buy from, clan crafters can post items for sale, and regular members can post loot and stuff to sell. the clan can adjust the tax on the store. This imo, is the way it should be, lots of stores, with clans/tribes, whatever selling and driving the economy. Clans could be established in areas that have specific mobs that drop X loot, and actual be known in game to have the best supply of X, while the same applies to other clans.

if any game needs to do away with npc merchants it's fallout, make a prospector skill to allow more sell orders, etc.

CRAFTING-
This is being discussed in another forum, so by all means, discuss it there. but i wanted to touch on things from other games that could help.

Specialization is key, you can't have every cotton-pickin crafter making every cotton-pickin item in game now can you? well you could, but then you'd have fallen earth style crafting where nothing is worth anything to anyone because everyone can make everything.

and SWG style specialization would be good, at a certain level, mid-point to cap i suppose, a choice to specialize should be made, i'd say 1-2 specializations, 1 major and 1 minor, or just 1 major. This limits the availability of high grade items, and makes crafting a viable playable class in game.

I don't have a lot to add on the actual mechanics of crafting, i didn't mind grinding mats on fallen earth, or the fact that you just fill up the que and it ticks offline, that's fine with me, plz don't make a mini-game. that would just piss everyone off, that's fine for a console, but we are going to be making literally thousands if not tens of thousands of items in this game. a mini-game will drive us nuts.

CONTRACTS-
another eve feature that would be absolutely fantastic, player creates a contract for X item, player accepts contract, gets the items, completes contract, or fails it and pays the collateral.

you can use this for anything. i like the idea of courier contracts a la the mojave express crimson caravan, players could have high cargo limit vehicles, or skills that allow them to carry more on thier vehicles, so moving stuff could always be an option. This would be a crafter type skill. Again, you set the collateral to the cost of the items, and if contractor fails, he pays the collateral. With a little bit of thought, players will start creating fake contracts and try to gank ppl in the middle of the courier contrac to get the collateral and the items back, but imo, this only makes the system more apocalyptic and interesting. perhaps some way to warn the courier if this has happened before, so that possibly they could set up a counter ambush.

LEVELING and SKILLS-

some differentiation would be nice, example: your combat/missioning or ACTIVE skills use experience from missions and killing things to level

and

Ok so maybe I'm wrong but the point is to stay original and not steal other games ideas...because they could take a legal action??...I would love to combine a lot of games in this universe...but it's wrong .. like stealing ideas form other games... so we better try to get our heads moving together and give gamesas something new and revolutionary...everybody says seen this seen that, but the question is who had the idea...similar is for Fallout, it has original STATS...you don't see other games using STATS traits and skills....

well, of course it needs to be original, but these are ideas that have worked in other games, and some that haven't, the purpose of the post is not to say, DO EXACTLY THIS, but to inspire and motivate original thought based on games that have done certain things well, and build on that.

the devs themselves have said they have are looking at WoW heavily for ways to make the game accessible. i see NO reason to try to completely reinvent the wheel here, many mmos have successful actions, and gamesas would be very remiss if they didn't try to replicate these successful things.

Fallen Earth tried to re-invent the wheel, and look where it's at now.

By that logic, nearly every MMO out there should in some way or other be sueing each other for plagiarism? :S
"WoW, you stole the combat portions and inventory styles of EverQuest!"
Or SWG and Horizons quabbling over who thought up the idea of player-estates first.
Or, if we get the option in FOOL to, somewhere along the line, "evolve" our species to another, will Horizons insist it was stolen by their mechanic to go from youngling to mature dragon?

There's a far cry between implementing good ideas and plagiarising.

(P.S. Sorry for the block of text.. couldn't help myself! )

As for the On-topic part, I heartedly agree. Also with LORD_MARINE.

That being said, yes some new thinking would be refreshing, but, do not fix what is not broken!

A playerdriven market is much more enjoyable to interact with, because you aren't just at the recieving end of the stick - and developers have the oppertunity to make truly "rare" items. Items that doesn't take effort in the form of hitting enough geckos over the head with a pointed stick untill they somehow regurtitate the desired item up and fall over, but by working together in an effort to achieve that allmighty status symbol that screams to everyone "I'VE DONE SOMETHING SPECTACULAR!" that we all so crave and long for in every MMO..
Say you want to build a fort.. fair enough - if it's a matter of "Buy this deed and it pops up", bit boring and not much of a symbol, is it?
Now if it required players with certain skills in different areas, investing time and effort into the project, you suddenly won't be troddling along going "Huh, another one..."
You'll stop and stare for minutes and admire it..It's rare! (in MMO "some minutes" is quite a while )
If they put out blueprints that players could happen upon - ones that don't respawn - you could go hunt for them, it'd be a new aspect of the game for many people.

- "Uh! a new blueprint!... oh, it's for a pointed stick with TWO ends..well, maybe SOME people want it."
[Some time passes while you try to establish an economy and search the wastes for other blueprints]
- "Uh! another one, for a plasma enveloped powerfist! If i can build this I'll never have to get caps again, and if this turns out to be very, very rare.. I'll suddenly be a known name!"

Other aspect of it is, you won't be able to get Powerarmor in a Fiend settlement, no one located in that area could use them anyway, who would put them there? So you have to get to BoS area to get one, if you are a fiend that can. But what if they don't like you there? Perhaps you're lucky and someone exploits that fact and sells it at a steep mark-up in Settlment Fiend. (granted this is a bad example, but i think you get the crux of the idea).

As for the crafting, well - i must admit EVE still has the larger end of the stick on that one.
Want to build powerfists? Would have to know a good deal about Science, Unarmed and perhaps some other unheard of skills we haven't yet seen.
Want to build rifles? Same thing, but different skillset.
The more "high-tech" the item, the more hazardous places you'd have to go to get materials.
Fancy making a set of spiked knuckles from active uranium? (don't clap your hands, kids) Have to go to highly radiated areas.
Want to make blow-guns that fires highly poisonous darts? Have to go where the biggest and baddest Radscorpions are.
In all honesty i'd rather see every player being able to build everything, instead of selecting option A and B. But! They'd have to have the appropriate amount of points in the appropriate skills to do so, and the support to get the materials needed.

Contracts: Yes. Could become an even bigger part of FOOL than EVE - simply because it's more logical.
If they make it open-PvP, you could be accepting a juicy contract, but expect and ambush - so bring friends. It's immersive and fits in well with Fallout.

All in all, most of those mechanics makes an MMO more Massive-Multiplayer-Online games than Me!-Me!-Online games, as i tend to think the acronym is most befitting to the majority of MMO games these days.

On a final note, about the player-driven market.
When i first began EVE, and TankCEO (I think it was) came rumbling along in his Battleship - i was awestruck. It had taken them months to build, and it was long before anyone else got one.
Later when they were more common, i still looked at them and thought "I want one", and thought up how best to do so with my playstyle - fight and gain ISK (the currency), join a Corporation and work together, or harvest and build? Every type of battleship i saw while in my measly frigate i viewed and observed and awed at, untill i finally sat in one myself.
Then Titans came. When the first one was destroyed, people flocked to get a glimpse of the wreck - and before that, the pilot and the people who built it became known to every-"not too casual"-player in the game.
It wasn't the goal that was fun and challenging, it was the ways of me getting there.. just to be a bit cliché.

In a game like FOOL, where the possibility of so wacky designs are there, shouldn't that be one of the driving forces that makes people stay?
Again, imagine a truly unique recipe for a weapon was found. How hard it would be to get that item, how prestigious it would be to bear. "Plasma-Powerfist, if you haven't got enough caps, forget about it."
Playerdriven economy would make them rare, because anyone with half a brain cell would up the price immensely if demand was high enough.

They become rare because we, the players, tell the game they are rare and hard to get, because we want them so badly.
Not because the game tells us that only Boss-Gurgle-Burgle drops them 0,0001% of the time.

Hehe I was wrong... I just see that everyone is suing everyone for money so ups hehe...

I would mind if every player could craft everything, IF, IF IF IF .... the crafting system was alike to eve's in almost every way, and completely dissimilar from FE's crafting system, which is very easy to max out, and learn everything.

an Eve type crafting system would do very well in FOOL. But instead of blueprints they'd prob call them schematics, i prefer the term blueprints. but whatever, don't matter. Just as long as the crafter remains God in this area.

I am also a heavy pvp'r, but if a game loses the heavy crafter base, things get boring real fast.

the reason why crafting is such a profitable business in eve is also because that you have a big chance to actually lose the items you have crafted/bought. So people always have to make new items.

That works in EVE because of the setting and the role being played. I have no problem with a largely player based economy, but NPCs definitely have a place. The way foward to me has NPCs following the same rules as PCs. Related discussion here

This is quite possible to implement, in fact many single player engines already have the work this way to a very high degree, the programmers just let the NPCs cheat and magic up items and shop inventory's because in single play it makes no difference and saves time scripting actual character routines when a facade will do.

Eve lets you role play under the assumption that your ship and mining operations have subordinates or automatic systems working away under your orders; that factories working on components/blueprints follow the same pattern. It isn't really played on such a personal level, more so as a pilot, commander and manager.

For an "eye level" rpg to have immersion, a facade of a living world has to exist. So the Fallout 3 shopkeepers wander off to bed a night and the Cape Dun slaves (Gothic 3 go saw the same log for every waking moment of all eternity. Having NPC merchants and workers takes the menial tasks out the hands of the players if they so wish whilst leaving those tasks visible in the world. In an MMO it does put a lot of strain on the developers to be manage the facade of the NPCs being real, but it is my opinion utterly worth it. As an example in a persistant world, an NPC gun merchant would only have an inventory consisting of scavenged or crafted weapons (including that done by NPCs), there is an actual (albeit perhaps simplified) of game resources between NPC/NPC factions, which player actions can have effects on.

That's not as clear as I intended it to be, however NPCs implemented this way would be nothing like the World of Warcraft implementation, which I suspect you're trying avoid.

It is also a nice step away from 90% of NPCs seemingly being employed in the armed robbery industry.


Also, as far as I'm aware carebear isn't used outside of EVE yet, so some people here might not know what you're talking about. That and I think you're wanting to impression a bit too much of EVE onto Fallout, especially regarding 'crafting'. Why do games studios have to fight and die? War, war never changes : (

CURSE YOU, BOSS GURGLE-BURGLE!

Anyway, since they are using the Earthrise Engine, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a similar crafting system in this game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise_(video_game)#Crafting

Also, I want my BOUNTY HUNTING! I put the 'Skill' in 'Kill.'
Wait, what?

i probably am a bit biased to eve, but i come from a years worth of failures from Fallen Earth. Going to Eve was a big eye-opener to me, because that game while not as successful as WoW, is still one of the longest running, most successful MMO's to date.

The system is VERY stable compared to many games, and all in all, it is very balanced. There's so much depth to the game.

This idea about NPCs is interesting, i could see something like PC's selling items or materials scavenged from mobs influencing what the NPC crafters are making, You could make a game out of moving higher end materials from more dangerous sectors to upgrade what the NPC's are selling. Also, schedules for NPC's in an mmo is pretty damn spiffy.

i still think that regardless of my bias'd-ness to eve, having high-risk areas, with rare materials for crafting is pretty much the way to go, also specialization, i can't stand omni-crafters, games with omni-crafting are doomed at end-game. Even if a clan has to control an area to maintain a flow of materials for crafters, this becomes so boring and routine. If you have specialized crafters, there is more of a diversity of what materials are needed. So instead of one Clan camping and holding high risk areas for ALL the mats for ALL their crafters that can craft EVERYTHING. You will more likely have Several Clans, with specialists, (which neatly fits into brotherhood terminology), that need specific materials. Smaller groups or gangs running around instead of large zerg resource raping clans, (while you will not avoid these completely), specializing crafting will help spread the end game out so theres not just HOT SPOTS and not smaller skirmish type conflict areas as well.

don't know if you get what i mean, but having more engagements happening in the world is better end game, like again.... in eve, you will always read of things happening in low or null sec, because there's stuff happening everywhere, it's like news, in end game, it's nice to know that there's always other options for pvp other than just joining the biggest clan and holding the most lucrative zone.

Guys, you are making the way more complex then it should be. The design philosophy of making a Fallout MMO is very simple... Take the game play from the original Fallouts. And change it juuuuust enough so it fits well as an MMO. No need to make it into a first person action game. Or like any other MMO. Don't forget, Fallout pioneered some aspects of some of the games you play today.

I think most people are just worried that when all is said and done, what will we have to show for it.

I heard a man by the name of Herve Caen runs gamesas. I think most can agree that if Fallout Online fails, gamesas is done for good.

6 Pennies a share.

I think what we have is a unique opportunity to maybe witness a magnificent comeback not just for Fallout, but for the hopes and dreams of those long forgotten.

We don't want it to just do well, we want it to have a future, that won't be easily challenged by other companies who have more financial security and are willing to roll in more dough .

We have to get the design right so we can expand on our game for a long time to come to the point of having so much revenue returned that there will be another chance at another MMO or MMO-expansion we can develop.

I think we can make a game that is in the best interest of most of our fans and upholds Fallout's true nature while still making it attractive enough that new players or players unfamiliar with the genre will have no problem getting addicted to our game.

For now the best we can hope for at the launch is fort he game media/new reporting organizations to take us seriously, to voluntary pass on hype, and for the receivers to buy into the hype and take the chance to get hooked, even if the gameplay is much different.

Thankyou.


If Fallout Online really is our last chance
and can shear quantity of

if that was your approach to making an MMO, it would surely fail. The game needs to LEARN from other mmo's because mmo players expect mmo devs to learn from other's mistakes, not make them again, players come from game to game saying "oh, that was like SWG(usually good), or this is like Champions(usually bad)" and it's things like that that can really get the hype going.

Besides, a fallout mmo is so drastically different from fallout, because mmo's are drastically different from one player games. You have to make constant adjustments and balances because players versus players will always find ways to beat the balance in any given system. It is simply not enough to make it "alike" and slap a multiplayer on it.

Crow you misunderstood his post; read it over again because its not implying any of what you are talking about. Just Enough could be almost nothing or drastic changes. He's just saying it doesn't need to have functions that go to far. Like climbing ruined buildings sides. Well I guess we're just a couple of problem solvers