I don't think environment-based buff/debuff would be impossible. Maybe not terribly prevalent though. I think you could certainly have mission maps where the NPC tells you stuff like "Look, it's really hard to cast spells in the dimension I'm sending you to, so your magic-origin powers will deal less damage or use more endo or have shorter range, or whatever". I'm not a programmer, but I think that sort of thing is probably doable. Again, maybe not everywhere all the time down to a really fine detail level, but doable in some ways.

Any kind of "home field advantage" is best done inside of an instanced mission and should hardly ever be done out in the world at large shared by everyone.

Even better yet if the "home field advantage" thing isn't something that has a single setting that never changes ... but rather something that has multiple settings which either rotate (in a predictable pattern) or which reset themselves *randomly* so as to force Players to react to changing situations and circumstances. This sort of "rotating home field advantage" setup is one of the few types I would ever support seeing done in a shared world context, and even then the effect would have to be QUITE localized rather than being something Global (like, say, rainy weather over the entire city). Doing it as an added element to a Capture the Flag contest at a Control Point would be acceptable, particularly if it is of the chaotic/random variety so as to keep things "interesting" in a confined area so that the event isn't always the same thing every single time.

AmbiDreamer wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Any kind of "home field advantage" is best done inside of an instanced mission and should hardly ever be done out in the world at large shared by everyone.

I like the ideas that you presented, but if the game does do instances with environmental disadvantages, I'd personally like a way to know in advanced which instanced missions have these environmental effects. It'd let you at least not choose one that goes against your own personal character concept. [color=red]The only downside - a major one- is it'd end up mostly being used to 'optimize' mission rewards.[/color]
Either way, I agree with having it in instanced missions or PVP rather than 'out in the world.'

This is the fundamental problem with anything related to having "advantages" or "disadvantages" in a MMO setting: the min/maxers among us will always find ways to mitigate the disadvantages and maximize the advantages. People will build characters that excel in specific missions and you'd have newer even faster ways to farm for gold or PL.

As Brand X mentioned above I think things like this can really only work in Pen-n-Paper settings where human GMs can keep frisky players from gaming their systems too much.

AmbiDreamer wrote:

Lothic wrote:
This is the fundamental problem with anything related to having "advantages" or "disadvantages" in a MMO setting: the min/maxers among us will always find ways to mitigate the disadvantages and maximize the advantages
Very very true. Actually I think it's true of most if not all aspects of creating a MMO but I guess that is part of developing one.

I'm not saying Min/Maxing in MMOs is bad in and of itself. I'm just suggesting that any aspect of character creation that's specifically billed as allowing you to suffer a "disadvantage/weakness" in exchange for a "advantage/bonus" is pretty much begging to be gamed to the hilt towards the bonus. Almost no one (except maybe the extremely dedicated/strict roleplayer) will willingly suffer the weakness if they can get away with it.

AmbiDreamer wrote:

Still, I will say it is a pretty fun idea in theory.

The idea is actually very fun in Pen-n-Paper gaming situations. I just think we're going to have to wait until online games can be dynamically regulated by effective AI before it'll really work as intended in MMOs.

Redlynne wrote:

Depends on how big of a swing shift we're talking about here. Things like +/- 5% which are not permanent features of the environment would be considered acceptable, so long as they aren't persistent. Stuff like changing every minute through a menu of possibilities, either randomly or in a preset sequence (I prefer random myself as a design point) would be both fast AND slow enough to make it feel like a battle has "shifting tides" in terms of who is up and who is down at any given time. Just balance it against opposites (smash vs lethal, fire vs cold, energy vs negative energy, psionic vs toxic, no buff and no debuff, for example) so that you've got "one up and one down" out of the possibilities.
I'd even argue that going so far as reaching a +/- 10% shift would be acceptable if you're stacking a pair of +/- 5% changes and you offset the timing of their changes such that they each last 1 minute but they each do their rotation 30 seconds "off" from each other ... so a double buff/debuff would only last for 30 seconds (at most) rather than for a full minute. I'd want to playtest that possibility, of course, but it would clearly fall into the opportunistic outcome if it only happened 1% of the time (or so). Definitely a "smoke 'em if you got 'em" sort of rare random occurrence, rather than something you can go into and depend on being able to take advantage of the entire time.

As long as any buffs/debuffs like these are both not permanent and not predictable then they'd be pretty hard to abuse or exploit. Having something like this that could be predictably exploitable is the only thing I'd be concerned about.

So for example having an instanced mission that subjects you to random "dimensional rifts" that change the laws of physics around you (thus providing a pretense for the random buffs/debuffs) would probably be perfectly fine and entertaining.

We're talking about stuff that basically already existed in CoX, right? I mean, suppose you do up an instance where there's a radiation leak in the main reactor causing constant Damage over time and then there's a "shield generator" that you can use periodically to get a temporary shield that protects you from it. That's exactly the kind of environment-based effect being bandied about here, and I didn't think it was broken or abusable really. It's all in the implementation, as others have said. But there could be more of it than CoX had. For instance, you could be on a map where in the one room it's really cold, so if you stay in there long enough, the accuracy and damage debuffs you're getting from your extremities going numb will eventually build to a level where you have to go out and warm up periodically. Or you could lose endo/recovery in a map where's it's reaasly hot and humid and it saps your endurance over time. Stuff like that. I'm really not in favor of environment-based buffs for the players, unless they're really hard to activate (like you have to do things that require timing and team work, etc). Even then the only reason I can see for adding such would be to make an otherwise nearly impossible mission more tenable.