Heroes

[Hoofhurr]

Here's a thought. What if the hero was an npc like Loki in AV. Player's could build a pool of influence (like mana or morale) with NPCs and that influence would allow the player to guide if not outright control the NPC for a period of time. He with the most influence controls the hero.

[Slamz]

I don't like things that put you into direct competition with your teammates. e.g., we both want to control Loki, I have 998 influence, you have 999, so when those night elves jump you, I'll go hide behind a tree and giggle so that I end up being top dog for influence.

With the original idea, it would be more like:

10 morale: Summon Crippled Child
100 morale: Summon War Dog
1000 morale: Summon 10 Wolf Riders
10000 morale: Summon Loki

Any solo person can scrape together 10 morale.
Due to morale decay, though, you would probably need to team up with someone to reach the War Dog. You'd need a solid group to reach 1000 morale for the Wolf Riders and you'd need to be the platoon leader of a raid to ever have enough morale to summon Loki.

If you can't get enough people to group together and pick a leader then they just don't get to summon Loki.

[Hoofhurr]

I thought the premise behind the thread was re-configuring the player's relationship to the hero-grunt bifurcation. I was also trying to get away from a scripted loki event and free it up for some more interesting options. The means of gaining influence/morale is sort of irrelevant to me. Whether you gain it by being selected raid leader or by performing individual tasks I don't care. You aren't going to avoid direct competition between players because rarely does it work out that only one person wants to be raid leader so there ought to be some way for players to vote for the leader they prefer. If there are 40 players in the area and one hero NPC and 20 of those players are your friends and 20 are the other guys friends but your 20 have more influence then your group ought to be able to have first shot at influencing the event. Maybe you can right click on the person you want to nominate as leader and donate whatever influence/morale you have personally gained.

What I want to avoid is the situation where some dumbass comes along and pre-fires the event/hero that you and your friend worked so hard to time for maximum effect.

[Dustie]

I thought the premise behind the thread was re-configuring the player's relationship to the hero-grunt bifurcation. I was also trying to get away from a scripted loki event and free it up for some more interesting options. The means of gaining influence/morale is sort of irrelevant to me. Whether you gain it by being selected raid leader or by performing individual tasks I don't care. You aren't going to avoid direct competition between players because rarely does it work out that only one person wants to be raid leader so there ought to be some way for players to vote for the leader they prefer. If there are 40 players in the area and one hero NPC and 20 of those players are your friends and 20 are the other guys friends but your 20 have more influence then your group ought to be able to have first shot at influencing the event. Maybe you can right click on the person you want to nominate as leader and donate whatever influence/morale you have personally gained.

What I want to avoid is the situation where some dumbass comes along and pre-fires the event/hero that you and your friend worked so hard to time for maximum effect.

I think the key is that heroes are players that are "elected" by the fact that they have people who will follow them. If you allow heroship based on completing individual tasks, that kind of breaks the idea.

[Hoofhurr]

Oh I agree but as a former raid leader in pug environments having to reestablish credibility every time you want to organize something is very taxing. We go through this every time we play a new game. I guess I'm trying to create a transparent leadership metric. Maybe there is a way for the game to keep track of how much influence/morale people have invested in a player historically. That act of being selected a raid leader doesn't a couple times doesn't convey any history to pugs.

[Slamz]

Oh I agree but as a former raid leader in pug environments having to reestablish credibility every time you want to organize something is very taxing. We go through this every time we play a new game. I guess I'm trying to create a transparent leadership metric. Maybe there is a way for the game to keep track of how much influence/morale people have invested in a player historically.

That's basically what Planetside did with its Command Rank system and I thought it was one of the worst features of the game. Basically Command Rank was meant to be a leadership system, but since it didn't decay, you ended up with a every moron veteran in the game having high command rank and thus access to "leadership" features even when they weren't really leading anyone right at that moment.

From the perspective of a pugger, I don't want you showing up and activating command skills when I have no idea who you are; I didn't vote for you or want to follow you, but you have access to these command skills because of some previous battles you had been in where I wasn't present.

So the idea here is that if you want to activate command abilities in this battle, you must be actually getting people to follow you in this battle.



It is a pain to have to keep re-establishing leadership but that's where things like guilds or community comes into play.

I also think this could be very nicely facilitated via an easy interface.

e.g., imagine you open a window where you can see everyone involved in the battle. You can, without having to "join group" or anything else, simply change who you "report to" on the interface. The person you report to gets your morale points to spend on abilities. So any General Patton can wander over and start shouting and if people like what he's saying, they can quietly shift to him.

We could even throw in some RTS elements, like you get to share radar with everyone that's reporting to you, and you can use a map interface to send them orders ("go here", "kill these people", "wait here", etc). If they don't like the way you give orders, they quietly shift their reporting to someone else or turn it off.


Conceptually the "hero" could become simply an RTS commander who is collecting resources from people to spend on battlefield structures and improvements for his team to use. If you're solo, your own trickle of resources isn't going to do much. If you join a group, you contribute to them and use what their commander selects. If you get people to follow you, you get their resources and can pool it together to buy better stuff.

Kind of imagining the HL2 mod Empires or a Natural Selection type of thing, except you get to decide who your commander is and you can switch it on the fly.

[Hoofhurr]

I also think this could be very nicely facilitated via an easy interface.

e.g., imagine you open a window where you can see everyone involved in the battle. You can, without having to "join group" or anything else, simply change who you "report to" on the interface. The person you report to gets your morale points to spend on abilities. So any General Patton can wander over and start shouting and if people like what he's saying, they can quietly shift to him.

Conceptually the "hero" could become simply an RTS commander who is collecting resources from people to spend on battlefield structures and improvements for his team to use. If you're solo, your own trickle of resources isn't going to do much. If you join a group, you contribute to them and use what their commander selects. If you get people to follow you, you get their resources and can pool it together to buy better stuff.

We're on exactly the same page here. This would be a wonderful mechanic. At least conceptually.

Maybe you can right click on the person you want to nominate as leader and donate whatever influence/morale you have personally gained.