MMOBA? Would you play?

[YouAreAllWrong]

@OP There are plenty of MMOs like that. It's called Isometric view.

Diablo, Runescape, Tibia, Ragnarok, MU....

Continue??

I'll continue.
Mythos online, Battle of the Immortals, Warrior Epic, Warlords Online, Eudemons Online, Conquer Online, Erebus Online, Dofus, Ashen Empires, Great Merchant, DarkEden, Cronous.
Most of them suck though.

[Silentcry]

@OP There are plenty of MMOs like that. It's called Isometric view.

I'll continue.
Mythos online, Battle of the Immortals, Warrior Epic, Warlords Online, Eudemons Online, Conquer Online, Erebus Online, Dofus, Ashen Empires, Great Merchant, DarkEden, Cronous.
Most of them suck though.

and let's not forget Lineage: The Blood Pledge

[zaoly]

So let's just be clear, there will be a PVE portion of the game where you level up, buy items.
Then there's a PVP portion of the game with MOBA style setup where you level up, buy items?

[Deleted]

since people have mentioned ragnarok, I wanted to just say that it is free to play now, so you can give it a try. I have alot of love for this game since it was my first mmo

[PACOX]

Try Rise of the Immortals. Its a MOBA with a progression system thats slightly deeper than LoLs. Also have semi free roaming.

[molinator]

I don't think that you're hitting the right demographic here. People playing MOBA games are playing them to compete with other players. Introducing progression-style elements to the game is only for the purpose of making you pay for boosts and advantages outside of the game.

[Deleted]

Before Riot games introduced the term "MOBA games", everyone said "DotA clone", which is essentially true. Yes, DotA wasn't the first of it's kind, but it was the most popular one. It is the same with MMORPGs, the majority considered Aion, Rift, Warhammer online, AoC to be WoW-clones, yet WoW was a clone of itself.

You have genres to group similar games together. Now that "moba" games are once again very popular, people think it deserves a name of it's own, while it is actually a Real Time Strategy game in which you control a single hero unit.
In my opinion, having a leveling system (as account, not character) in a MOBA game is just annoying. It is only there to have a gating system to prevent having newer players getting matched against experienced players, and in order to keep people playing and to leech money of those who rather buy a boost and be done with it. Personally, I wouldn't mind it that much if the leveling up didn't give you access to special abilities. For example, in LoL, you cannot play most of the heroes most optimally if you don't have Flash. You cannot preform as well as other people simply because of the leveling system in place which is tied into masteries.
That's why I personally prefer DotA, I can just pick it up and play, without having restrictions put on me just because I don't play regularly or refuse to pay for an xp boost.

[Kavoo]

youre describing ragnarök online... been there a long long time ago

[Deleted]

youre describing ragnarök online... been there a long long time ago

I still miss the RO pvp. guild seiges were so fun

[Kavoo]

I still miss the RO pvp. guild seiges were so fun

Yup. Sneaking inside the castles as an assasin and breakin emperiuns was so much fun

[Deleted]

I preferred defending. No assassin would get past us sages on the other hand... my poor traps! where did they go

I suppose they deserved to be good since they had to level as dex/vit ouch

[Jaojin]

For your argument sakes, Ill just leave this here: UO was a 3/4 perspective MMO with massive pvp, and as far as being a clone of anything, I can safely say the Age of Massive Online gaming began with this game. (UO stands for Ultima Online, for you kids out there who think WoW was the first MMO )

OT: What would I think about playing an MMO similar to what you suggest? I don't think that it has enough basis to really attract a fandom. The idea has merit, but it needs depth... it needs, something mechanical that grabs a person's attention by the shirt and says "Dude! Check this out!" Something like: Fantastical Combos, only 4 or 5 moves but nearly endless unlockable abilities by combining those simple moves together; or Custom Character classes (not a new idea either, if AC wasn't such a grindfest it would still be one of the most popular MMO's around, despite being more than 10 years old): Anyway, the premise was that you have a list of skills and a set number of skill points to start, and you basically "buy" skills from the pool to be trained (and specialized for double cost) then leveled those skills. So you could be a swordsman and a healer, or an archer and a mage... or a swordsman who could run really fast (*coughcoughspecializedruncoughcough*)

[namelessone]

You pretty much described Diablo.

[Deleted]

No I dont like this. Each player should have equal chances of winning before game starts. Farming in game like this is key to failure and smells like cheap try of some company to get money for no work.

LoL is somehow similar to this. You have to farm runes and it takes ages, so some people, who are less skilled and willing to spend more time in game have advantage over skilled players who play casually.

[Deleted]

MOBA's are a sub-genre rather than a genre in their own right. You can call this phrasing splitting hairs but really, they don't fit the criteria of either an RTS or an RPG, they fall pretty much exactly between those two parent genres.

And a customisable hero MMOBA sounds interesting on paper, but don't forget the reason people play these games so obsessively is because A: they are reasonably balanced and B: people roughly know what each hero does. The latter point is important when considering the spectator and competitive sectors of the games (which are a large part of sales in games with no single player content), its not possible to really form a team around custom heroes, nor is it possible to really derive enjoyment from watching others play with them because you the spectator cannot relate.

Sure you can add a single player aspect to it but the you just have an MMO with a birds eye view and some wierd BG's rather than a true MMOBA (not sure if such a game is really possible).

[petrushka]

I'm in the early stages of designing and programming an iPad game, but the term MMOBA comes pretty close so thought I'd chime in.

Basically, the concept is sort of a cross between LoL and EVE Online. The world is 2D and non-persistant; each game will last 30-90 minutes and then be finished. Each player controls a starship (except in a few special cases). Some of the overall MOBA feel is inspired by LoL, however it also adds in a bit of the flavor from EVE Online specifically MMO (each instance will support 250 players), spaceship battles and planets (instead of heroes and towers), and a bit more focus on economy than LoL.

[Valeron]

sounds pretty good, petrushka, good luck with it

[petrushka]

sounds pretty good, petrushka, good luck with it

Thanks.

Let me throw out a design issue I've been really struggling with in case anyone has some feedback.

One (fairly unique) aspect of the game is that for every 50 players, 49 will be starship pilots but 1 of them will be the team leader called the team's Admiral. The Admiral will get a different interface that is not based on tactical combat, but more strategic level stuff such as pinging large scale attacks and simple resource / economic decisions. Nothing as complex as Starcraft 2, but more like being able to prioritize a few sectors for resource mining and things of that nature.

The problem I'm trying to solve is I suspect many people (let's estimate 1/4 of the players in the game) will want to play the Admiral. But, the number of Admiral slots available will be really small compared to the number of interested players for that position. So, what is the process to decide who gets to be the Admiral?

For reference, starship pilots have a Queue to join the game, but as long as the servers are not full, they will be assigned to a game within 5 seconds.

Here are the possibilities so far:

Option 1.
Players interested in playing the Admiral enter an entirely separate Queue to play. This queue might be minutes or even hours though! You queue up, possibly waiting hours, and you are assigned on a first come, first serve basis. You receive an estimated wait time that gets refreshed once a minute. Once you are assigned to the game, you have 30 seconds to Accept it, otherwise you leave the Queue as you are inactive.

Option 2.
There is an in-game checkbox you can set that indicates you want to play Admiral. Behind the scenes, there is a Queuing system much like Option 1. The difference is here you are required to be playing the game as a starship pilot while in Queue to be promoted to Admiral. Once there is an opening for Admiral (which could be on another game server), you have 30 seconds to accept it otherwise you cannot re-queue again for 10 minutes.

Option 3. Every time there is an opening for an Admiral, interested players can participate in an instant auction using real money (technically, game currency that is purchased through an in-app purchase). How it works is you put in an amount you are willing to pay to play as an Admiral for a single game. When there is an opening for Admiral across any of the game servers, the server determines the player who bid the highest and they are now assigned as Admiral. If multiple players bid the same exact amount for the highest bid, one of them is promoted to Admiral randomly from that group (and the others are not charged of course). The game would show the average winning price to play Admiral over the last 50 winners so you have an idea of how high to bid if you really want to play Admiral the very next opening.

Option 4. Playing the Admiral is tied into Guild membership. You can choose to Queue as a player in a game with one or more of your Guildmates. On each game instance, for each team, the Guild with the highest number of players present wins the right to play Admiral for their team. Guild Leaders can assign ranks to their Guild members, and the highest ranked Guild member present in the game gets the power to decide who on their team plays admiral. If multiple people are playing that share the highest Guild rank present, the power to decide who plays Admiral is assigned randomally to one of those people.

Eg let's say this is your team of 50 players:
Guild A - 4 players
Guild B - 2 players
non guild players - 44 players

In this case one of the players from Guild A will be given the power to decide who of the 50 players on their team plays Admiral. Ties are decided randomly (for example if 50 individual players are on a server, none in guilds, the power to decide who plays Admiral gets randomly assigned to one of them).

[Fencers]

Hm. Doesn't this sort of exist in 3rd person view of Guild Wars 2?

I wouldn't mind a top down MMO, per se. But it seems like a matter of camera angle rather than game design being proposed here.

[Rooflesstoofless]

I like MOBAs because I feel like I'm playing a strategy board game with/against other people. Having an open world and player progression to that beyond what is already in LoL/DotA just doesn't seem that appealing to me.