Rethinking the MMO: How I would do CoH2

Hmmm...

Some very intriguing ideas here....

I really like where SteelClaw's ideas were going, but it raises a bunch of technical
issues that would need to be solved wrt replicating community server instances
based on the Team Leader's localized world -- you'd really need an efficient
way to track alterations to the base geography that would lend itself to rapid
transmission across the network.

Obviously, all of the "possible" alterings would be rendered into the content
itself, so that the tracking process simply sees/sends a bunch of flags denoting
which exact alterations apply.

Very intriguing.


Regards,
4

I would think if you're going to create a feeling of permanence to the world, then large changes to that world (like saving or losing the Atlas statue) should depend on events. That way everyone experiences the same thing and sees the same results of their actions. I think that would promote a community feeling.

So perhaps you start off as the protector of a neighborhood, where your actions determine what it looks like, and every once in a while you get called up to defend NYC or LA or whatever. How you do there determines what rewards you get, and you're asked to protect a larger area until you eventually become the defender of an entire city, but it's a smaller town like Manchester or Dayton and every once in a while you have to go save Chicago or London.

Not sure how that would work vis a vis Arcana's system other than making "your" town the single-player experience while the big city becomes the shared server experience. And maybe you can travel back and forth regardless of events, just to keep you tuned in to all the other players. That way you don't *have* to play with anyone else if you don't want to, but you can see and talk to other real people in between going to instances in the big city.

You heard it here first, folks. Arcana's game has Staff Fighting Skill and also Stick Fighting Skill!

Edit : On that note, I once conceived of a skill system that begins with a couple of very broad skills and branched down in order to continue progress. For instance, you could develop your Melee skill, and at some point would hit diminishing returns that made it more profitable to develop your Bladed Weapons skill, then your Long Blades skill, then your Scimitars skill, then your skill level with the particular weapon you were wielding. Of course I also wanted skill to increase by use, and also for players to be able to direct their character to train skills while the player was doing other tasks or offline... heh.

I think Arcana would say something to the effect of, "Then take away the bars." But I don't think this will work.

My feeling is that the reason for Arcanaville's suggestion is the wish to solve the problem of what's happening now, i.e., the death of CoH. If this suggestion was applied to CoH, I would gladly support it. It's a decent way to keep the game alive.

But for CoH2 I don't think I would like it this way. Sure, I've always thought that single player CoH would have been great, but part of the fun in an MMO is to see an active world with people in it, to help others you don't know, to team without expecting to, and to put touches on your character because maybe some random stranger will appreciate them.

This will go away if there are no central servers. Those who typically play solo will play offline -- they will not find new friends. Those who want to play with their friends will play with their friends -- they will not find new friends. Those who want to play with their SG will play that way -- they will not get new members. Sure, some people will try to get into closed communities, and some communities will actively try to get new people, but on the whole there will be nothing to encourage interaction, and I think that will be a big loss.

I've got two concerns about this, that I think are fatal flaws but would be happy to be proven wrong.

Security is going to be a huge issue. There will be hackers trying to get great onto their characters. And no, "you gotta earn it on each server you go to" isn't going to fly, particularly if one of the expectations is you go to several different servers. So I've got all incarnate slots unlocked with a couple T4 enhancements to pick between in each slot. I switch to a server and suddenly I need to unlock my Alpha slot again, or at least go through all the drops necessary to recreate all the enhancements?

And, well - where does the money come from the pay for the programmers/writers/designers/animators for both the original game and regular updates?

Thanks for the detailed response, Arcanaville. I think that won't work for me. I prefer to solo, and if I wasn't put in an environment with others I'm likely to never join a community. My view of a chat system is pointless noise that I'd never read.

On the other hand, seeing others in game draws me in. Getting to Atlas Park and seeing a few heroes chatting together, I might stop and check them out, listen to what they say, check their costumes, see if they have interesting bios.

I like to check out others I encounter, and I also very much enjoy things like having someone pass near me and buff me. I love zone events where I can help without having to team first. This is my experience in both City of Heroes and Everquest 2. In both games I was part of a SG/Guild because someone asked me, and I teamed mostly because I was asked to, and I enjoyed that. I don't like to socialise, but I like to help.

In a single player game I would probably end up feeling like I did in two games which were given as examples here, Neverwinter Nights and Guild Wars. I loved NWN, played it a couple of times, downloaded and played a few user created adventures. Never thought of multiplayer. In Guild Wars the only interaction with others is in the player hubs, which meant that most of the time the world felt empty and lifeless and therefore less attractive to play, and I felt no real incentive to team or even look at other players.

For me the best game would be a game where I could informally group. Where I could see people around me and help someone in need without hurting their game experience and without having to go through a UI for formal teaming.

On a slightly different note, I would wish to see a CoH2 with the same content as CoH, but with a few changes:

1. End enhancement diversification...let players push the limits and drive damage or resistance through the roof.

2. Eliminate caps on damage, defense, resistance, etc.

3. Raise inventory of recipes and salvage to 1,000.

4. Give each player a slider for the difficulty of enemies, and relate rewards to difficulty. Make this transparent, so you can see directly the precise effect on resistance, defense, hit points, etc for each enemy.

5. Give every character flight (with low endurance cost) at level 1. The game is beautiful -- let players enjoy it immediately.

6. Server transfers should be free and plentiful. Let players move anytime it makes the game more fun for them.

And then in a bigger sense, some more difficult changes:

PVP: I've played for 4 almost 4 years without ever trying PvP. It is currently too difficult to learn, and too unbalanced...there is no way for newbies to square off only against each other and learn the tricks on a level playing-field. There is no teaching/learning path for PvP. Similarly, I'd like to see a mixed PvP/PvE system in which experienced PvP masters get excellent rewards from teaching lowbies the ropes. I suspect we should also simply return to the original PvP rules...it seems we lost a lot of PvP players when the Devs changed to the current system.

PUGS: One key point of an MMO is that new players with no contacts and no friends in the game can easily find teams and make friends. This is one of the best features of the way COH is structured now, and one reason it has survived and prospered as long as it has. Changes in general should support this goal.

POWERS: I'd like a characters to be able to select a different framework -- up to 15 primary powers and no secondary powers, from the complete set of all powers in the game. Obviously, one would have to select a balance of powers from all levels, not 15 "final powers." but if you want a fire blaster with recovery aura, singularity, and radiation emission, more power to you. Powers might be less effective than their "pure" forms from the standard archetypes, but this would be enormous fun. CO and GW2 both have something like this now.

SERVERS: I play on three CoH servers, each with different character. I love the servers, but they are very limiting. What I'd like to see is a new mechanism in which many more players could be on the same server (or in the same cooperative zone, in the models mentioned earlier) at once. We need to be able to get 200 players (or more) into a zone (or a league) at once, even if it automatically shuts off all of the graphic effects (but not the powers).

SUPERGROUPS: The idea of SG's is great, but the 75-toon limit is not too helpful. 75 accounts would be a much more helpful limit, and the linkage between SGs and bases is not necessary in my view...SGs should be more social-engagement and team forming tools, and less about creating and paying for bases.

RULE CHANGES: I like the discussion in this thread that players should be able to form "shards" where they and their friends can play, isolated from the main game. Why not take that to the next level and let them change some of the rules as well? Want to play with AE enemies in Atlas Park at level 52, and a single team of 20? Knock yourself out.

After 3.5 years of playing, I've been waiting to voice these thoughts for too long. I'm glad I got the chance to put this out there now.

Very cool idea, containing the seeds of lots of other cools ideas.

One I didn't see anyone mention is Valve and Steam. Their Workshop lets people see and rate player created content, making it a lot easier for developers to add items and models to the game.

And by looking at TF2 in particular, the way that they also servers to be hosted and searched is very easy to manage and might be something else to take into account.

Okay, I was asked what I don’t like about Arcanaville's ideas, so I’ll try to explain the problems I see with them.

The simple answer is, this takes the MMO out of the MMO, and as kind of an afterthought tries to slap it back on at the end with some duct tape. That doesn’t tend to work very well though. But I’ll try to be more specific than that.
What follows may or may not be very organized, it’s going to be the things that occur to me as they occur to me while I write.

The basic idea is very much, as others have mentioned, how Neverwinter Nights worked. The problem with that is that how NWN did multiplayer was great *on paper*. But in reality it was a d@mned mess. The shard lists were endless (how shall I chose?), nearly all of them were modded to hell and back (now I have to go research every shard I consider to find out the changes, and possibly DL all of the custom content for the really enterprising ones), once I chose one (and maybe finished DLing and installing the cool mod stuff) I log into a virtual ghost-town because that near-endless list of shards has diluted the playerbase to the point that you nearly never see more than a small handful of people on any given shard.

And that was what NWN was like. I played it a Lot, and it never got any better.

Ultima Online private shards were exponentially worse. Pretty much every one was code-modded beyond recognition. To extend the UO private shards to a CoX analogy… I don’t want to log into CoX with a new character and find I have 100,000,000 Inf, five of every piece of rare invention salvage, and a full set of the best two invention sets for my ArchType.

And that was what player-run UO shards were like. Played those a Lot too.

Another problem that NWN shards had was that putting up a shard in the first place was something nearly no one wanted to do. You had to learn SO MUCH (to the casual player) before you could even start to try to set one up. How complicated will setting up your little CoX server and configuring it to communicate with the server hubs et al be? Because unless it’s nearly entirely automated, most people won’t bother.

And how does one go about becoming a ‘Trusted’ server? How much work (and waiting to be validated) is that going to entail? Because I can’t really play much with other people with the character I’ve been playing single-player until I do that, because I really don’t want to have my character get gimped out just because I wanted to play with other people. But if it’s too much work to become ‘Trusted’, many people won’t bother regardless. Not to mention the way it often works out in games that use this ‘Trusted Server’ approach is that these Trusted Servers end up becoming the special superstars of that game’s social hierarchy, and that leads to Ego problems, which leads to abuse of those who aren’t the special snowflakes. Always expect the worst, even with a better-than-average community like this one, because you’re going to get at least some of it.

As for the single-player experience, again this sounds groovy *on paper*. But then I consider how much fun it’ll be to try running a low-level Controller in a private world where there is no help, no Tank or Scrapper to pull agro for me… and suddenly I’m having visions of the old CoH Beta days and everyone starts just creating heal-tanks because they can *survive*.

This idea also loses something that is central to an MMO: Persistence. Persistence is crucial to an MMO experience, because if we aren’t all seeing the same thing, then we aren’t playing in a shared worldspace, and that’s one of the points of an MMO. But if you’ve broken the experience down into various player-centric shards then you don’t have any actual persistent world. And as much as I’m sure a lot of people will rail against this statement, the central story is NOT that of Your character. The central story is the story of the world we’re playing in. You are a character in that story. Are you the Main character in that story? You are to you, probably. But the fact remains that the Story is that of the world we play in. But this proposal has taken the world we play in and called that part of the whole unimportant.

Now you can say that the forum community is where the community actually happens, but the people who visit the forums is actually a very small number of the players and everyone knows it. If you try to make the forums the social aspect of the game, then you’ve cut out the majority of the playerbase who doesn’t come here. That means those players now have no social aspect to the game, and stop playing.

So we add chat channels, right? But those chat channels are only going to reach the server we’re playing on. That wasn’t much of a problem with the CoX we have now, just change servers, there’s only so many to chose from. But in your proposal we now have as many servers as people who want to put one up. The playerbase is scattered from hell to breakfast and unless I have some way of contacting my in-game friends outside of the game then I have no way to know where they play. So now I’ve lost the ability to play with the people I like to play with, unless we all communicate outside of the game as well.

Basically, this idea fractures the playerbase, shatters the social aspects of the game, introduces layers upon layers of unnecessary complications to just the simple act of playing the game, sets up hurtles to new players in the form of those complications of getting into the game and playing it, likely isolates existing micro-communities, and likely introduces wildly divergent gameplay experiences between players.
In short, it takes the MMO out of the MMO.

The comparison to pen and paper games shows the problems with this idea.

You play solo, rolling the dice yourself, completely random. YOU are honest, so your character isn't break the bank, you've died plenty of times and been brought back through your whatever plot armor, and had fun.

Chuck plays, and fudges dice rolls, just picks what he wants his character to have, and munchkins it out.

You play with your friends, with a GM, and you all play by the book. Fair rolls open on the table, core mechanics only, and none of you cheat.

Chuck finds a group just like him. They load up on the best gear, the campaign is Monty-Haul all the way with tweaked out munchkin characters. They use every single splat-book and downloadable content they can find, using rules that were intended to be used with one setting/book, and ignoring the disadvantages.

Both you and Chuck start going to random games, as found on the board at the local brick & mortar FLGS.

Both of you submit your characters to the GM, and the majority of the time the GM says the same thing.

"No."

Why? Because every game is different. Your character might be underpowered, or you might be using a core rule that they houseruled out/modded, and fixing it would completely rewrite your character. In Chuck's case it's because only a maniac or a masochist wants Chuck's character wrecking up their world.

You go to GenCon, look for games you can play, and ask to use your character.

Chuck does the same thing.

Both of you hit the same thing from DM's there.

"No."

Why? Because the GM knows that the world is full of Chucks. He doesn't think you're too bad, but if he says yes to you, he has to say yes to the Chucks of the world to appear impartial.

Now, with the solo games, the downloadable content suggestions, all does have its analogies to the tabletop game setting, and you end up with all those problems that are inherent with that system.

Certain things unintentionally break things, even from the IP creators. (Vow of Poverty, anyone) A single line that was supposed to be edited can destroy tons of stuff. BUT, only the people who buy that expansion have that opportunity.

In video games, if the DLC increases your power in the game, it becomes number one. Nobody wants the one that keeps you at the steady grind, although they might pick it up for a buck, but the one that allows you to get your hands on top of the line gear and stat boosts? EVERYONE wants that one.

That puts the pressure on to create DLC's that are market competitive, which means making ones that give bonuses. Thus perpetuating the true Pay 2 Win market out there.

Saying it won't happen doesn't mean it won't happen. It happens, in almost every game, unless the original designers take steps to prevent it.

Now, let's move back to single player games.

Sure, you add a chat channel, but I can do that with Fallout New Vegas and Skype. Hell, I HAVE done that with my friends. We'd go to the same places, compare loot, laugh at each other, but in the end, WE WEREN'T PLAYING THE SAME GAME!

I had a supermutant spawn on the road that I watched the ghouls tear into, then put a single .308 round into his head. He was packing a sniper rifle with a ton of ammo. At that time my friends were running around with 10mm pistols. Between Boone and I we cleaned up the wastelands of scum from 1,000 yards out with steely glares and cool berets.

My friends got crushed by rad-scorpions, deathclaws, and Legion.

Same game, different experiences.

So then I can invite my friends into the game, and we can play together. That means we are basically forming a perma-team. Something that happen in every multiplayer game we own, from Dungeon Defenders to L4D(2) to The Secret World to CoX.

There we run into the same problem. If my friend wants to run with me, we have to have separate characters to run together. Even with the Sidekick mechanics it can have an effect on the game. Three of our permateam members lost touch with the story because they missed a few weekends, and were basically relegated to permanent sidekicks.

Boo. Nobody wants to be Robin. ROBIN doesn't want to Robin. And God help Aqua-Lad.

So I want to perma-team. I look up the server list. HOLY GOD! There's tons of servers, with all kinds of mods listed, or maybe not even a mod-list until you load up the server.

We see that ALL the time with Left 4 Dead. Multicolor tanks, crawling, 12 survivors, rapidspawn/choose special infected, headshots, unlimited ammo, all of that kind of stuff. And these are just generic servers it can drop you into.

So to choose a "trusted" server I have to load in and hope for the best, or spend the time researching and downloading what mods they have.

The "Nemesis Brass Christmas Pack" is necessary? OK, that's $2.99. The "Countess Crey Fruit Pie Pack?" OK. That's $1.99. The "Supa Troll is Supa Pack"? OK. That's $0.99. "To Hell & Back with the Hellions Pack?" Damn... $4.99. What's this, it was written by the hoster of that shard. Figures. So, I'm up to $10 about just to play on this "trusted shard"?

Screw that.

So the trusted servers are all running different DLC's, or worse yet, ALL of them! Meaning I might have to drop another $200 just to play on the shards. (CHeck out how much all of the Oblivion packs might cost you)

Then you have the different gear. One might get rid of ED, another might get rid of soft/hard caps, another might get rid of inventions.

So now, I basically have one character per trusted server. Moving it back to solo? Now my game's completely out of whack. Playing with my friends? Now they're annoyed because I have to copies of "Brass Monkey Fist" in my heal-brute's attack powers and they still have core-rule vanilla IO's.

Then people would gravitate toward the "trusted servers" that support their playstyle. Since the people running the servers would have to have SOME way of recouping their bandwidth and server costs (At my job I have to deal with those costs, and they are NOT pretty) so will it be pop-up adds? Is the server owner a modder so he codes in DLC that the people playing HAVE to buy every month or so, turning the "free" service to "$30/mo in DLC" service? One of my friends is a modder and I'm a world builder (NWN, Doom, UDK, Hammer Source, Diablo 2, Fallout series) as well as a story writer and a third is a professional code cleaner and a hobbyist skinner and between the three of us we could throw out 2-3 easy mods for our server. (The great NWNMMO experiment with Novak-Dek Online that lasted about 3 years before we got bored, and that's another risk. Boredom on the part of those creating/hosting the servers)

The biggest/most successful trusted servers will be those who cater to certain player bases, meaning that those servers will be able to outlast the others by simple fiscal math.

The player base will be fractured, new players will be orphaned, and characters will vary wildly, not even on the trusted servers, but on single players games. (Check Saints Row the Third, where who has what DLC decides just what they've done and how they look) Even having it so you set up your own "server" to play the game, use a GUI to decide what rules you want to mod according to how popular the mods are, and use your client to play a single player game based on the "core rules server" or even the trusted server, everyone's character will be wildly different. Hell, just trying to get a name will be major suck, unless you turn off possessive names, in which case I expect to see 300 Fiery Ninjas and 22 Wreckerbot and 48 Big Metal Units per server online at the same time. Not to mention that some servers will allow names that others don't, like Sex Deviant or Superho on one, and only Ablebot2000 on another. Leading to further problems.

Since everyone running a trusted server gets to decide what's fun in the game, the game is no longer a community effort, but rather the design of one person. The tyranny of the minority complete with a pay to play to win design. The more popular the server, the more emulators will pop up, the more the DLC designers will support the successful servers. Then we end up with those preferring vanilla or Nemesis Brass Army storyline or Dr. Vahzilok for President Dimension completely shut out by "Supa Troll is Supa" servers.

Which means that different servers could have up to 4.5 GB downloads just to play on that server where the files don't cross-pollinate, meaning inflated directories where half the files are only applicable on certain servers. Add in costume mods (because SOMEONE will code in the costume parts that City of Heroes avoided to avoid copyright infringement, not to mention the ever popular and always appearing nude packs) to the downloads and badly skinned costume parts, and triple-cape addon and My Little Pony Rig and and and and well, you get the picture. A badly compiled/optimized costume file can bloat the game, and if enough people are running around wearing it, it bloats the bandwidth, bogs your performance, and causes crashes. (Fallout New Vegas we hit that problem, with a REALLY cool set of powered armor based on the Rifts SAMAS but we'd messed up on ONE little thing and the next time we ran into NCR troops wearing that skin it ALWAYS bogged/crashed the game. We cared enough to fix it, but what's the chance that the guy who coded it and sold 20K worth of them at $1.99 a pop is going to bother with that, or just going to move on to the Glitter Boy?) Further file bloat, further player base splitting. And that's not even getting into to the fact that in order for you to even SEE people using those costume pieces you haven't purchased those players who are using it would either have generic costume pieces, missing limbs, or the creators would somehow have to allow to you download a visual component and make it so that your certificate of ownership for that pack enables you to use it on THAT server. Which brings up other servers that will allow you to use that costume/power/archetype/mission pack without a certificate with enables larger piracy. OR, you can make it so that as long as one person has the "Countess Crey's Bordello of Purple Drops" everyone can run it, which means people could charge ingame money/whatever to run you through it so you can get the drops without dropping $2.50 on the market. Because everyone wants free stuff.

Which will cause even more splits, more code-based arguments, further community drift, not to mention infighting and bickering on what is better.

City of Heroes is enjoyable because we are ALL on the same page. We might not like the mechanics. We might bicker on whether or not the mechanics are just fine. But in the end, we are all on the same page because the GAME is on the same page across servers.

As far as just solo goes, we see that in the Secret World, where many storyline missions ARE single player, which means everyone has two builds. Their grouping build and their solo build. Where Secret World can get away with it because of their no-archetype style, we are STILL seeing the problem that plagued CoH in Beta/Alpha.

Healtanks. Roles dynamically evolving. (There are "right" builds and wrong builds, and good luck getting into a nightmare dungeon group with the wrong build and gear) Gear checks are common, and it HAS to be that way, because a poorly geared member can be WORSE than nobody at all. There's group-kicking for a single mistake, because a single mistake can wreck an entire dungeon attempt.

Then some have suggested scalable enemies, so you can be the "Scourge of King's Row" and all of that.

You can do that by turning of XP in vanilla CoX if you want. Or you can establish scalable enemies. Beyond what we already have, where zone defining bad guys often scale in the mechanic of Giant Monsters or Preatoria zone events.

Scalable enemies across the board are TERRIBLE IMHO. They wrecked Oblivion for me. They've wrecked every single game they've been tried in IMHO. Reviewers often hate them.

Ever wondered WHY tabletop games and MMO's and single player games have it so that different areas are different strength? Why there are CR3 and CR25 monsters? It's to establish a working difficulty curve. It's to give people places to be and foes to face depending on power level so you aren't fighting Orc #387 or a gimped out Aztechnology Blood Shaman without 95% of his powers.

Take Oblivion. When I first fought those bandits, they had rags and crap. A month later, those SAME DAMN BANDITS were wearing diamond armor and packing epic gear! WTF? How did they get that? Why didn't they have that the first time I come through?

That breaks immersion, and makes it so that teaming with other people means that the enemy is scaled to them, AND drops loot for the highest. Now, we can get around that by "reserved for..." like DDO does, and eliminate the ability to use it, or we can level require that gear, meaning that almost nothing drops that one person can use.

Scalable enemies work in some games, but not many. For a LOT of people it ruined Oblivion (I'm one of them), and in a few servers in NWN or other games (Ultima Online or even Wasteland 2000 Online for those of you familiar with the ASCII dialup games) where no matter how badass you were, everyone else was tougher. Some people say "Well.. challenge!" but it makes a lot of people feel just as weak as they were starting out, with no feeling of progression because those bandits back at the starting area can STILL kick your ***.

And that leads us to the other thing putted forward, which is the new loot types.

My favorite thing about City of Heroes is the fact that loot is so straight forward. I don't have to worry about that much about rare drops. I can still play effectively without rare drops. But how much competition is there for the purple drops?

If we start adding all the gear drops, complete with body gear slots, we start coming up with Champions Online and DCOU. Then we end up with gearscore again, people ******** about drop rates, people clamoring that the game is too easy because their T3 Purple geared out.

Then we're back to DLC's. Where you could throw out $5.99 to buy "Bob Barker's House of Purple!" where someone altered the drop rate, and now you can do one mission where you rescue cats from trees and get T3Purple drops. One run through it, and you're fully geared out in that gear.

Sure, that's fine for single player games, much like the Gold Pack for Sleeping Dogs, but for multi-player we're back in Pay 2 Win and server costs and trusted servers running this and you HAVE to have it for your hashkey or CRC check to match up.

And what about the way that gear looks? Shall we implement a switch to turn off all gear appearance or just some of the gear appearances, or shall we just end up like so many other games where everyone else looks the same because they have their SupaTroll is Supa Armor complete with Tier 3 Venom Hoses and Silver Surfer Skateboards?

That brings up bandwidth again. Instead of being able to just send a little data, you have to send it all, with all the switches, the gear appearances (is it dyed too?), and everything else.

If CoH2 was made, it needs to based just like CoX. Centralized server rules, no modded servers.

There's a lot wrong with this whole thing.

It isn't CIty of Heroes, for one. It's "Solo Hero who sometimes teams up in Overpowered Land", or a LAN type game me and my buddies play.

Mod drift, removing the MMO element, adding DLC drift, costume drift, and all the other problems.

To finish up with the RPG analogy: The servers will be just as divided up and wildly different as tabletop games are from each other, and importing a character will be just as difficult or impossible as it is in those.

Just look at the rules for the persistent "living worlds" in RPG's. They all have guidelines on what supplements are used, what aren't, offer a database of the articles they use, and in general have tons of reading before you can even roll up a character.

All in all, this sounds good on paper, but once you start looking at the mechanics of it, it quickly becomes NOT City of Heroes.

For me, a blend of Diablo 2 and Neverwinter Nights would set a basic ideal model.

I don't care whether an overworld exists or not. It doesn't in D2. It does in CoX1, but mainly as a hub. But in terms of development focus, I would concentrate on making the core of the game 1-8 to player instances, with the following characteristics:
- Support for dynamic lighting
- Support for recolorable tiles within maps (floor, walls etc)
- Support for "costuming" an instance (changing posters, doors, light fixtures, etc)
- Stong scripting support for mission writing, as per Neverwinter Nights (which allows script events to be tied to a trigger, a clickable, an NPC, or the map, with hooks for OnDeath, OnAwareOfPlayer, OnPulse, OnCreatureEnter, OnCreatureExit, and so on).


For handling the social element:
- "Social" maps like Pocket D and Atlas Park for collaborating, with a player limit of 300 or however many can fit. These maps have an interface that makes interaction with other players easier.
- Chat rooms from which you can launch a new instance or mission. You can recruit from here, and view other peoples characters. See Diablo 2.
- Ability to see who is playing what instances from the "chat" utility. See Diablo 2 again. Games can be made private for people who don't want to share.
- In general, little focus on the menial task of running to a mission door. Once the team is recruited in the chat utility, you can launch the mission instantly. However, the mission itself may involve an instance where you need to run through the outdoor area to get to (or locate) the warehouse or whatever if running to the door is relevant
- Message boards can be read within the game. A small thing but IMO potentially effective at reinforcing community.



Some other possible specifics and wishes:
- If possible, XML-based power and class definitions. (One parameter could be scriptResource, which points to a script to be used for handling more delicate
elements that are too complicated for the base XML.)
- Ability to summon characters you are currently not playing as allies in the place of pets, using rough rules for character cloning (and putting some limitations on abilities)