I've had almost 12 years experience with MMORPG games. And just as long as I've been playing them, I've been playing Bestheda's finest. Now with my experience it's key for me to point out sustainable methods to keep this game alive beyond the precipice of typical mmorpgs. Just know I'm horrible at explaining my ideas, it's mainly because I'm dyslexic and a scatter brain.

The greatest question right now is the service model! How should Bestheda handle it? Well I see several methods. Perhaps using both is fine too! The greatest problem with MMOs are that the charge you to own the game initially. You need to drop 60$ or something just as absurb and then pay a subscription. Fundamentally that already alienates a quantity of players. My suggestion if this was the course of action is to only charge for the subscription. This would make the playerbase ten fold larger on the initial launch. Perhaps causing stress, but when you have quantity of people you don't have to worry if your subscription/player base will have sustainability.

This is my favorite model! I actually think that it should be like buying Skyrim. You buy it once and you can play it anytime you want. However you just give a limited amount of character slots. Due to them being maintained on the MEGA SERVER, I think that's what it was called. You can buy more additional slots. However the game should have DLC that doesn't effect the initial experience. Just sell little DLC packages. Kinda like Borderlands.

Reason why the second is my favorite is because Bestheda can actually do more flexible things with it. A good example is giving the game Steam Workshop of Bestheda approved mods submitted by users. Like the ability to download player homes. And the game saves will remember what you've done so it'll download them while loading your save. If you don't like the player content you can always delete it and access a chest in the city to retrieve anything left in player made content. Modding has always been a powerful foundation for Bestheda's games, it'd be foolish to not support it.

Next suggestion is that there will be a significant amount of overhead while managing a MEGA SERVER, again I think that's what it's called. I love that idea! Anyway if the game was partially made Peer 2 Peer with a MEGA SERVER as a central hub it'd prevent the world from being too crowded. I even thought it'd be cool to even introdruce regional ip connections. Like if you're at home roaming around and someone from the same area as you is roaming too, you could walk into them. If you say traveled on vacation got into the game you could run into others from that area. Of course less populated areas reach further out on the Peer.

Thinking more on the regional stuff! It'd be kind of lame to be able to yell acrossed the world! So everyone knows what you're looking for or buying. It takes away the whole living in a world of your own aspect. I was thinking that it'd be cool to introduce radial voice chat with filters and noise reducers. This way when players talked there wouldn't be fan noise! And if players were male or female they could sound like their counterparts in the game with the filters. Even a mouth movement feature. But you have to kill global chat. That just makes the game less sandbox. Just make a central hub where people can request aid on bulletin boards. Doing so would take you into their Peer routed from the MEGA SERVER! Auction houses are a must!

Names... yes player names. Naming yourself in a game shouldn't be hard. Technically we shouldn't be restricted because someone else has the same name. Just give them a digit code accessible in their friends list. They share that to add people. Adding those people also brings them into your peer with the option to toggle.

Suggestion for account technical support! Say something happens and your character gets jammed up. I think with a MEGA SERVER. It'd be easier to fix players issues by allowing the player to file for technical support inside the character selection menu so the character save can be locked out till resolved. This technically can help prevent further corruption on the save. Also allow tech support to work on it in real time. Speeding up fixes! Either by rolling a player back or doing a basic error scan with patch. This way also a player can keep playing on something else too!

Anyway that's about it! I hope you like my suggestions!

Bienvenue!
Welcome to the forums!

I did like most of your suggestions, but I would have to disagree on you subscription fees, I feel that with profits from the game itself will be enough to fund developers patching and a full support staff to manage the servers. Plus don't forget about the possibility to add some extra content like quests and or purchasing Xp bonuses.

I also did not like your idea on the names, names are unique and if someone beat you to it then oh well. Fair is fair and the early bird indeed gets the worm.

All in all I enjoyed reading most of your suggestions.

Thanks! I couldn't find this forum. I had been posting my ideas on a user created forum. Now I've found this here so now I'm dropping my suggestions! I'd love to see this game become amazing! I want it to be sandboxy like the original games! Thank you Members!

Well I gave two options, one was subscription fee only or a community supported system kinda like TF2. I personally detest subscriptions, but I'm more likely to pick it up and play that way if I wasn't responsible for also buying the game.

Well the reason is that if there will be one mega server managing names could be conflicting. I think that it could spawn a whole new level of indentity theft and playing this game RPG style it'd be amazing. Go all bourne surpremecy on the individual, pk him or something.

I do love me a good ol' buy to play method, with the cash shop having exclusively cosmetic items so it doesn't become pay to win.

Also, I remember a topic a while back about the emperors of Cyrodiil being recorded in history books for future single-player ES games, and it poked fun at emperor names such as xX_stonekillah_420_Xx. But it turns out that their http://acolytesguild.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/elder-scrolls-online-preview/ include a first and last name, begins and ends with a letter, no two of the same letter in a row, and only one hyphen or apostrophe at most. Now with a naming system like this, I feel as though it wouldn't so out of the ordinary for people to have the same name. If you want to add someone on your friendlist or send them a courier message, you could use their log-in username.

Agree with the initial $60 purchase upfront OR monthly subscriptions. Whats the purpose of both? Money, obviously.

I highly doubt modding would EVER be considered in an MMO such as this, and disagree with it entirely.

Disagree with names as well. You get what you get. There's already a first/last name system in play, so I doubt it'll be hard to get what you want.

I saw someone mention that the mega server would almost be like an iCloud of sorts. Of course, it's just speculation, but I see mad potential with it.

All in all good read +1, sir.

I know where you come from with your opinion and I applaud your explanation. I'm sure with a little ingenuity it could be introduced appropriately.

There is two bottom line rules everyone needs to remember in games,

1) you cannot please everyone

2) the more you try to please everyone, the bigger risk you have to loosing most of your players to generization

now the next question is divided to two parts,

1) Will you make the game for everyone
or
2) Will you intentionally limit the game for a certain group and make it a bit fluffy so even the masses will try it out


now, when talking about limiting the game for a certain group, it means (examples)

1) selecting any aspect of the game above all else, ie PvP / PvE / Story

As many game developers have limited resources, they will have to make sacrifices to maintain enuff resources to produce a game that is leaning against one type of a game, ie PvP oriented game.


When talking about TESO, we know they have the money, we know they have the skill to select the right stuff, SO, we can estimate the following,

1) they will select 3 main points to focus into, PvP / PvE and Story
2) they will focus 99% off all resources to these 3 aspects and balance it out as well as they can with the skills/experience they have
3) they will have to make decisions to maintain balance with PvP/PvE and Story, for this purpose only they have to build the world in a way that every aspect of the 3 is supported evenly in PvP areas, in PvE areas and by the Story/Lore ESO has. (and they have done this by introducing Cyrodiil with PvP,PvE and story inside and even more PvE and story in the faction areas).


Looking realistically about all of this, i can 100% tell you all, that they have made the correct decisions about Cyrodiil and how the boundaries work, remember you cant have it all, you cant please them all, thus we have some small limitations as players ALWAYS, its not just TESO its all of the games out there.

Look at the mirror, and be real, we can expect a very good game from TESO and we all cant wait for its release.

( this post could prolly be posted in 10 threads out there due to its varied txt, but i will only post it here. )