You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.

[Extras]

- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)

- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)

- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans)

The world is much different - but it has A LOT of the game play you're asking for.

Additionally, I found it to be one of the most enjoyable games I've played in... maybe ever?

Divinity Original Sin 2 - an entire RPG playable in split-screen co-op, with hard strategic turn based combat

- Narrative games. Think anything from Quantic Dreams (Heavy Rain, Detroit), lots of Nancy Drew games, Tell tale Games (Walking Dead). Note that none of these are co-op, but they're fun to pass and play. - Simple platforming games (we're currently playing Kirby and the forbidden land on Switch, will probably play Mario Odyssey after. I let her play the main character but take over if it ever gets tough) - Puzzle type games (Portal)

She isn't great at games, but she's getting better, and she enjoys playing them.

And by fun I mean CHAOS

TINY MOUSE-SIZED HUMAN:

"Alas! The whole world is growing smaller every day. [Close on the tiny person, panning out ever-so-slowly to reveal, bit by bit, the cavernous enormity of the room.] At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

[Corner trap now visible, the camera holds steady and dwells for a moment on this sad, bleak fate. Suddenly, there is another voice from behind -- this is not a monologue after all.]

CAT, SLINKING INTO VIEW:

"You only need to change your direction." [CAT pounces, and promptly gobbles him up.]

It would be like a cross between The Last of Us, Hitman, and The Secret World of Arrietty.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105957/

I don't like the difficulty levels of Hitman III though -- I wish there were a hell of a lot more victims to go after.

But the levels are AMAZING and fun and beautiful.

But anything that can capture the Hitman gameplay would be great.

The thief series was also amazing, but its so dated it doesnt run well on my super high-end gaming machine...

But one thing that was super cool in Thief were the arrow types: Moss, Rope, Water... Moss arrows hit the ground and spawn a soft bed of moss to allow for silent walking.

I wish Hitman had some of these elements...

Do you have the NewDark patch?

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146448&highligh...

Though I would start with a compilation patch: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149669

EDIT: Hitman and Thief are lit the only game-play-styles I prefer....

Whats weird Is that I dont know the difference bewteen I before SEE between Theif and Wierd.

---

Anyway.. if you actually evaluate (ovulate - Lets go deep on etymology!) the mental dopamine construct,

Gaming is a super interesting thing.

SOURCE I WAS THE LEAD OF THE DRG AT INTEL IN THE EARLY 90s...

I saw the first 'unreal engine' and worked on the first AGP platforms and blah blah...

None of that matters any longer.

That said; im not a person who is ignorant..

---

loved that map. one of fave. and its variants. wish it was party of the current CS:GO distro

latest from that game developer: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23141182/ni-no-kuni-cro...

movie trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMe7PavaRQ

- Live in the "walls" (barracks) - Sneak out during curfew to do tasks and build things to open up more areas, and also for food - You nurture a relationship with the other prisoners and new ones arrive often

Check it out!

Katamari is a casual game (I prefer this genre) but now I wonder if there would be some way to make a more "simulationist" game that uses this scaling effect somehow.

I believe the Terry Pratchett one is currently being made into an animated film or series.

I really like the idea; i'm thinking much in the same art style as something like Arrietty just slightly more western cartoonish vibes, but only subtle changes.

There is a TTRPG exactly matching what you're after. Small folk setting for fate core. http://www.warehouse23.com/products/the-small-folk

Which has a brilliant play through in this podcast https://tabletoptales.roleplayingpublicradio.com/tag/top-of-...

In that game you (a Sasquatch) has to steal food from campers, resolve some mysteries, play mini games, build your place, and go to work disguised as human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_a_Tale

https://imdb.com/title/tt1568921/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Giants

Household, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2lm/household

I loved reading the Borrowers books as a kid and would play tf out of this game haha

E.g. you are the newly elected president of Afghanistan/North Korea/Iraq/Other etc - now go rebuild infrastructure etc, set policies, see how the country develops as a result. E.g. do you invest in universal healthcare, or transport infrastructure? Is transport infra required while your country is still largely subsistence farming?. What about education - save money there and spend on natural resource extraction? How will that play out over decades and centuries?

It would be nice to have direct control over city-level layout etc - demolish this neighborhood for flood defences, put in railways, major roads etc linking different parts of your country (not sim city levels of simulation, more just at the major civil engineering level of that makes sense - happy for actual city population to grow organically as a result of major works).

Civ gets close, but it's too high-level and more focused on conquest. I want to zoom in and have more control over where major irrigation canals get built, where to best build a nuclear plant, where that bridge should go or which mountains to tunnel through for a railway etc. So instead of the grid being the entire planet, the grid would just be one country.

Edit: I am specifically interested in the "building" aspect (so think civ-style grid with units moving around doing things), and less so on simple a-vs-b decision game model you see in Democracy et al.

Here's a tech demo of what I've been working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI

I created a path finding algorithm that can simultaneously path 300,000 units to random destinations at a comfortable frame rate. Units can choose from any of the shortest paths between two points (there are many in a grid), and from those paths, can also choose the path that matches any preferences they have.

Very early stages of development still!

I'll be using old.reddit.com/r/Archapolis if you want to know when the first release is out.

https://www.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgip?plogplay

(I don't have an opinion either way, just curious.)

At a country scale some simulation techniques need to change. For example, tilemaps become ridiculously inefficient (a byte per 10m^2 becomes tens of GBs), so they either need some form of compression, or the simulation has to use vector-based maps instead (more like Cities Skylines).

Another quirk is that at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter, and that starts looking just like a normal distribution of the simulation data you put in.

This is very untrue, which is why this problem is infeasible.

It's sort of like simulating every atom of an object vs using Newtonian physics. There is a difference in accuracy, but it may not even become apparent or matter for gameplay.

Nominally it's an experiment to see which government and organizational structures are the strongest, though being a multiplayer game it can devolve into who's fighting skills or automated bots are the best.

My chief complaint with Civilization games is that they've become a history-themed board game. A fun board game, but less and less it doesn't feel like a history simulator.

The problem with "country" simulator is that countries are a more modern concept, the vast majority of human civilization doesn't feature strong nation concept. How do you model a country that goes from Villanovans to Romans all the way to Italians?

How do you model a civilization which can boom and collapse? How can you set the systems up to support things like the mayan collapse or the bronze age collapse? The fall of the roman empire? Technological regression? How technology truly transforms culture, engineering, politics, etc? Adding +1 to a score is nice and dandy but how you simulate your nation having dynamic classes enjoying luxuries based on location, industry and technology?

I want to see that the urban elite are using silver utensils while the farmers are stuck on wood. I want to see that the civilization used wood too fast and used it all up, causing a collapse.

I actually envision the map as a grid with each grid holding information about the people there. Population, class, technology, industry, culture etc. A rural tile would have low population and be influenced by other tiles. An urban tile might be generating let's say `copper age 3` and in a radius around it for some distance, their tools would be upgrading towards that level. But invading and pillaging this urban tile might lead to those levels dropping, setting a region back in many ways.

The hardest part I have is that I just want a pure simulation with no user input. Gamifying it ruins the purity of my simulation and leads to civilization the game!

Overall, RFC essentially builds a new game on top of Civ4. The best part is that there's a number of RFC-derived modmods with varying locales and mechanics. Here's a few that I would highly recommend:

* RFC Dawn of Civilization[0] - An actively developed fork of the original mod that keeps the "vanilla" feel and the global map.

* The Sword of Islam[1] - A Middle East themed variant that although is long-abandoned is one of the most polished modmods

* RFC Europe[2] - Self explanatory. Focused on Europe starting from the rise of the Franks ending with the Industrial Revolution.

[0] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-ci...

[1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rf...

[2] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-eur...

[1]https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/

I'm sure mods will make the game somewhat more fun and I'm probably going to buy the game for that reason, but after playing the beta I have absolutely no faith in Paradox's ability to live up to Victoria 2 despite it being a heavily flawed game that ended up being mostly a commercial failure. The worst part about all of this is how much effort they're spending on completely inconsequential things, like replacing the icons for POPs with horrendously ugly, anachronistic 3D characters. Something tells me that it was just an attempt to recoup losses from CK3's development. But don't worry, I'm sure Paradox's newfound console audience will enjoy Import-Export Trade Deal Manager 2022 and keep the company afloat.

It lets you control a small country and build basically everything from scratch, factories, railways, housing.

Honestly it hits most of the points you describe above.

It's a bit more abstract and counter-insurgency focused than your description, but sounds pretty similar.

https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc

It's also strongly influenced by Turkish politics, specifically the rise of Erdogan, which was a very complicated time for Turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game

I recommend:

Conflict: middle East political simulator Shadow President

There's also an interesting one reflecting Stalin's challenges after world war 1 - he has to choose between guns and butter to prepare for the coming conflict with Hitler. Don't remember the name...

If you really want to shape a country in your direction, autocracy, or dictatorship is the only way. Otherwise, you become just another populist leader that always wins elections but nothing changes.

Just like in real life ;)

So... it's pretty realistic then?

Then was killed by a nun who disagreed with my no-state-religion policy. :D

If you were to 'take over Iraq' the first thing will happen is that one of your political challengers will use all of their means to usurp you.

The issues are power, control, corruption, clan loyalty, incompetence, dysfunction, bureaucracy, radicalism, laziness, embezzlement, short nearsightedness, lack of key resources, petty infighting, political inconsistency and duplicity from supporting nations, bureaucracy etc..

What happens when the entire system is corrupt? The Judiciary, Police, the Army, the politicians? Everyone is trying to embezzle, selling votes, stuffing ballot boxes, using multiple ledgers, giving their family members jobs, handing out MD's to the rich kids?

Some Billionaire owns the TV Station and is lying about you daily, destroying your ratings. There are protesters outside your door while you're trying to 'plan the buildings'.

The guy who funded your campaign to ascension wants special state-guaranteed contracts.

The rebels in that 'ugly border area' have killed some civilians and the locals want blood.

... and consider that many of the same kinds of constraints exist even in modern countries.

'Building Bridges vs. Schools' is completely pedantic exercise.

They should make the game called 'Saddam' and see how a regular person might fare at that 'job'.

If you get 10 million through corruption you are basically set for life in a positive interest/rent seeking environment because interest acts like a force multiplier on your original act of corruption that gets stronger over time. So your personal goal is to earn as much money as possible, as early as possible and through any foul means. I.e. the reward function strongly favours corruption.

With a negative interest rate, corruption no longer guarantees a high social status and automatic wealth accumulation which means you will have to do honest work until you retire if you want to keep your money. Automatic wealth accumulation is the primary metric that makes money laundering profitable or not. If you can only make 25% of the stolen money clean you can still grow it exponentially over time after it is clean.

If the land value tax is paid out as a dividend then everyone, even the destitute, would benefit from classic USA style homeowner corruption (artificially distorting the allocation of land by restricting it's use).

Another form of corruption would be to spend your student loan on Bitcoin when it was still under one thousand and then skipping college because you "made it". You earned money without producing anything, you are a net negative to society if you don't work for even a little bit.

Marble Age is notable too and has some mechanics unique to the game. Story is mostly the same, but there's three city states with slightly different tech trees. E.g. you'd need to fight the Persians at some point. Athens would be the classic path of farming, making alliances, building a wall and armies. Spartans need to raid for slaves for growth, but hold off on killing neighbors before facing Persians. Corinth would be more trade based and consider buying mercenaries and buying out the other city states.

I've bought all of them because they're an excellent ratio of time for fun as far as games go.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27773...

https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-o...

I lived there for more than a year and a half. The things happening there now are terrible. But you don't know about it, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it right now. It's a massive tragedy.

- World in Flames

- Churchill

- Fort Sumter

- Food Chain Magnate

- A Distant Plain

You are the government leader of a nation and a new pandemic is starting.

The science is not clear yet. How do you manage as the leader? What policies do you set up? What research do you pursue? Along with variables of budgets, economy, population morale, upcoming elections, travel, etc.

If there was a good model of how the policies affect economy especially, it would reveal to the players how hard lock-downs are on the economy.

If the dynamic between the federal state and city governments are modeled, it would show us how actual policy implementation happens. Just even how hard it is to test and track the spread of a pandemic.

This could indicate to people how hard it is to lead in such a situation. At the same time help the player evaluate how things were handled recently.

I probably spent more time playing it (and Alpha Centauri) than Civ.

Build up a civ on 1 planet, scale to multiple planets, survive space whales...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/

Back in the day when the genre was new, people were fascinated by the potential of virtual worlds and virtual societies. Social scientists did online studies on player behavior and the interactions people had online, on spontaneous self-governance coming into existence, on how communities formed and developed, and many other similar topics. That potential was never fulfilled.

Today - some twenty years later - the MMORPG has become a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you. Apart from PvP and maybe some forced grouping, most games would play absolutely identical mechanically, if you were playing all alone on your own private server. You'd do the same quests, fight the same enemies, get the same loot. All the other players you get to meet online - they don't actually influence the game mechanics at all.

You play next to each other. Not actually with each other.

I'd like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts. Some glimpses of this sort of thing can be seen in games like EvE. Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day. This kind of stuff has evolved very, very little since then.

I would assume that with today's technology we should be able to get a lot closer to fulfilling that potential.

Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.

Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.

If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.

For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.

You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.

It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)

In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.

So I wasnt convinced it would stick.

I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed

The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.

I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.

a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .

It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).

Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.

Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back

An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.

Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.

Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.

And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.

Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.

Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;

You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.

That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).

Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.

Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.

In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.

There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.

addendum: also infinite dendrogram

Doubt.

I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.

Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.

I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.

I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?

Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.

There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.

I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.

Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.

At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.

Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.

Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.

But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".

You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.

Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.

But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.

Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.

They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.

BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.

[1] https://tera.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance#Exarch

Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.

The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.

I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D

I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.

>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.

I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.

Tip of the hat to you, good sir!

Still, Minecraft is pretty limited mechanically. The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention. The games' mechanics - all the technological progression and stuff - work perfectly fine in single-player. Also the number of players per server isn't quite on MMO levels...

But yes, some elements of Minecraft would be great ingredients of the game I'm proposing.

To be fair, neither does real life. Real life shops, jails, etc, are just collections of atoms with certain emergent properties resulting from how players have set them up.

With mods, it does.

Tell me, what town did you mainly reside in? I was over in Chiapas with the crazy leftists, one of whom erected a wool statue of himself. We were largely untouched by the HCF invasion, except for when their skirmishes with the World Police got close to our borders.

I offer you this classic, and hope you recognize it: https://youtu.be/BAzsolKHJfc

Dirty Ancaps everywhere. </s>

I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between late 1.0 and early 2.0, but I ended up in Carson City for a bit when it was coming online. Where they made a hole in the ocean, and turned into a city. A fun place to hang out and talk shit.

Do you have any 2d world maps of that era?

From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:

  games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried. [...] hopping online to go do your second job [...] implies work [...] no one wants to do that work

The fact that the spaceship game was intertwined with the team-based FPS was really cool. FPS players (on planets) could be in the same clan/guild/corp as the spaceship pilots, and could call in airstrikes. In the spaceship game, your corpmates could maneuver into position and rain down lasers. This interaction had an effect on the local economy, which was an incentive for the spaceships to show up for airstrikes.

One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?

SWG for example had all items being player-made in addition to slowly loosing durability and breaking eventually. That means, instead of finding loot you can then use indefinitely, you were dependent on economy supply chains. SWG also made you dependent on player services - like doctors, entertainers and such.

I think there could easily be many casual friendly playstyles, like farming, harvesting, herding, entertaining, being mayor in a player city, etc. - in addition to more combat oriented play. Players should be able to choose one style or the other, or mix and match to their liking. And every such playstyle should both need and provide "stuff" from/to other playstyles on a regular basis.

It is a very strange "game" though, so I understand why it's not for everyone.

Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.

Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.

Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/

1. Raise prices enough to employ enough humans. I imagine there's quite a few people out there who'd be happy to spend a pint's price on a quality gaming experience.

2. Give the GM better tools. Higher level half-scripted events + better sentiment monitoring. I imagine a single competent GM can run in parallel a bunch of events keeping quite a few players engaged.

3. Recruit experienced players to do this job for you. I imagine there's quite a few people who'd do this job for in-game goods, as long as an hour of GM-ing gives a couple hours worth of grind of goods.