Large Storyline, can't think of what to call it.

[SeiferRune]

Okay this seems to be coming popular in pay-to-play MMORPG\'s but how about a storyline the game will follow, like a bandit raid, instead of NPC\'s just saying how terrible it was, why not have actual NPC bandits running into a town and a guard calls out alerting everyone, then the bandits attack and you are either killed or fight the bandits. This can be something random, like if you devs right out a storyline of events you want to happen then when the server is pretty active one of the devs might enable \'bandit event\' or set a time whatever.

If you are still lost in what I mean, look at the latest star wars online game, Star Wars Galaxies, the MMORPG follows the Star Wars story, and one day if you looked up into the sky you see the death star and a big battle going on, rebel ships flying around attacking it, then randomly it blew up in the sky.. leaving everyone amazed and feeling like they are apart of the world.

It is a great feature to a game and IMHO would bring in lots more players.

[Kiramon]

Yeah sure it could be cool with some events, instead of always running around killing monsters and mining. Just I am not sure it would be made ingame just yet as they probably should make some more important stuff - like; fixing bugs, finish all the models for the races and make some bows -.- I am still waiting for the latter.

and one day if you looked up into the sky you see the death star and a big battle going on, rebel ships flying around attacking it, then randomly it blew up in the sky..

Was that a once in a lifetime event? and randomly? - sometimes the rebels lost perhaps

[Foresteer]

Wish..... RIP ;( why must you keep mentioning its awsome yet cancelled features?!

[Madcrimson]

I like the ides of events. But I would like it more if the bandits would decide to attack an encampment on their own.

Think about this:
Create populations of monster like e.g. bandits. If this population has some basic rules that control the individual\'s behaviour, a group behaviour will emerge. The ideal case being, that the population behaves smart like avoiding to large groups of enemies or attacking an encampment when they collectivly think the target is weak enough.
That wouldn\'t even need a very powerful AI but only a few basic rules that need fine tuning to make the game still enjoyable. Because it would suck if the bandit raids allways killed the whole player population, razing the city...

But just imagine how cool it would be to build a city together with all the other players, to pool money to hire mercs to guard it at night (when the players are offline), ot defend it against enemies, monsters etc...

Oh, and there is also a bright side for the devs on this coin: You don\'t have to spent so much time on building a large, empty city. Just give the players some empty terrain and some resources. Let them build their own city. And if you also enter structure decay into the game, abandoned cities will remove themselves from the game after a while by crumbling to dust, becoming homes for monsters, ghosts and bandits...

MC.

[Zan]

Madcrimson nothing created and controlled by a computer does anything on their own. They all follow prewritten scripts, macros and do what the creators have told them to do. To create a group mentality that would attack random settlements, migrate, defend their homes, hunt down easy targets, ... would cost insane ammounts of time and server resources to create. If even possible at all.

It is much easier if at a certain time Dev A would do the next:
*override monster named \"Thug\" in area X\'s current command ... write command for Thugs to move to area Y and attack all targets encountered on the way*

Building will be an option for players but there are already tons of threads so I won\'t go into that here.