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Post by succat on Dec 5, 2012 4:48:14 GMT -5
Really interesting comments so far from everyone! Thanks to all of you for taking the time to chime in and make your points, and hopefully there will be more to come...
From my perspective, pretty much everything is wide open for a Grid 3.0. Even the Grid itself, the way it functions now, and the way it looks. Actually, the whole way it evolved was by chance... by chance I remember playing with 10 squares across, and it didn't look right... I ended up with 6 across. Then, wanting to start the Grid off with a starting number of squares, I added several rows down, it happened to be 7 rows... of course, 6X7 = 42 squares, but it didn't really cross my mind then. Happy Hour was originally 15 minutes - too long. Figured I'd cut it in half, either 8 minutes or 7 - picked 7 minutes and that kind of stuck. Next thing I know the players were all referring to 42 squares and 420 minutes... so I just went along with it... but, what I'm saying is that in a Grid 3.0, pretty much a lot of even the 'core' stuff about The Grid is open to change. Maybe the Grid should be able to expand infinitely either horizontally or vertically - maybe it doesn't need to be a perfect rectangle. Maybe each square would open up into a sort of sub-grid, and the rules in that sub-grid would be determined by the player whose square it is... who knows, there are a lot of ways we could go.
In regards to some of the things I'm hearing so far, most of it I like, and would want to utilize those ideas in some way.
Mobile - Like Psykosis said, this needs to happen. The current Grid was not made for mobile so things like the scrolling in the chat and command box don't really work, and overall things are just to difficult to do on a mobile device right now.
Happy Hour - This also either needs to go away or be changed. Right now, it's buggy, and it's this crazy loop that does all of this database processing every 7 minutes, which seems inefficient and wonky. There's probably no good reason to do nearly 90% of the game's transactions, not spaced out, but all shoved into several seconds every 7 minutes, other than that at the time, it seemed like a good idea, and it was the only idea.
Rounds - I am definitely not in favor of an economic wipe or a wipe based on a time limit, so I probably lean more towards Popopop's opinion in this regard. I like the system now where after someone wipes, The Grid resets, although I resisted that idea for a while because originally the Grid didn't reset after a wipe. Still, one day a player will come along that will dominate, and maybe they won't wipe, but rather just lord it over everyone else, enjoying maximum power for as long as possible - that would be interesting to see if it ever happens, but maybe it's not likely because they'd want that 'wipe' point - I don't know.
Stagnation / Giants - I think there's always going to be some stagnation... people can't always be fighting every minute because they also have to be building resources too. Obviously, I'm pro-conflict and there are plenty of features for that to happen, but the player base right now is pretty unique in that almost everyone seems very thoughtful and helpful, which does make things like war and chaos happen less frequently, but I think expanding the player base would also bring in other types - those who just want to battle. Really, it's kind of back to the same thing: the game needs more players, but it also needs an overhaul to grab the attention of other players. Things like better guides to starting out, maybe new incentive for new players, more start up cash, whatever.
Farms - Farms seem like they need an adjustment. Maybe someone could post IO's example because I don't remember it. But, also, they shouldn't become so worthless that players no longer start battles for them. As far as farm cheesing goes, I haven't seen it happen in a long time, and with more percent of the total farms that a player owns, the more they get taxed on those returns, so lately the farm system doesn't seem too bad, except that the price does increase by 100 for each farm owned, which seems like a lot, but at the time, it was the quickest solution. Not terrible, but maybe there's a better system than the current one...
AutoBanking This needs to happen. I don't know what the percent would be yet. I haven't messed with that functionality because currently that would mess up other players trying to extract and steal money. Something will have to be figured out eventually, I hate to have players feeling like they need to be online just to deposit. Although, maybe it shouldn't auto-deposit 100%, but I really haven't thought this one out enough to say what the percentage should be exactly.
Switch, Pilgrimages, Carvings. Mission System - I like the idea of these things expanding into more stuff. I like the 'Wall' idea so that some squares can't be switched. I'm mixed about 'Switch' because on the one hand square position should be important, but on the other hand I like the idea of mobile squares that are not stuck in one spot. Need to find a better middle ground maybe.
Missiles / Cannons Missiles could be brought back and / or Cannons added. Missiles were more important on the old Grid when squares couldn't switch. They are not as important now, but with some retuning they might provide another avenue of conflict, which I am in favor of.
Chat / Message System I agree, these things could be improved a lot in a future Grid.
Spawning - This one always seems to be a tricky one. Lately, spawners get more units than before - to hopefully encourage them to attack with. But, sometimes they land on a square that is not idea for them or maybe for the previous owner...
Great ideas so far... hope to see moar!
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Post by killatankz on Dec 7, 2012 2:23:16 GMT -5
Here's an idea... For auto-banking at a certain point it deposits 65-85% of your on hand gold... I dont know how this would conflict with something like after a certain amount of gold is surpassed yada yada, just thought I would throw that out there for auto-banking.
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Post by krossfire on Dec 7, 2012 15:45:12 GMT -5
I just want to point out that there have been a lot of "how do we fix the gird" conversations in the past and a lot of them are stored in the old threads. you might want to take a look and scroll through ancient history for a bit.
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Philoten
Ronin Warlock
I am un-biased in certain matters.
Posts: 34
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Post by Philoten on Jan 29, 2013 23:55:10 GMT -5
My Turn for input xD Will edit as more ideas come though. - I believe Switching needs to be turned off. I wasn't here pre-switch but to me it seems to destroy the tactical battle portion of the game. You can just go to your enemy in war and just ask them to trade places with you lol
- While switch is off i believe the wildcard should be allowed to switch but its range needs to be limited greatly. I would suggest a 3-4 square area.
- Along with the wildcard being allowed to switch i believe headbands need to be thrown out though with the wildcard, (In spirit of it really being a wildcard) it should have a chance 1:10 (can be modified) to give you a boost in units. Say 10% of the squares current units but it should be capped off at 100,000 units.
- Along with my no switch suggestion I believe the deploying of units should be altered slightly. When you deploy the units I think you should only be able to deploy to and from squares that are touching. That way with a little more strats you can cut off your opponents supply. The connection to deploy can be as if you attack (head-on connection or diagonal) Deploying would have an instant effect.
- Now to stop people from being able to just bypass the deploy limitations. If you purchase units it takes time to get them. Purchased units will appear in the beginning of the next happy hour. This will require betting timing and increase thinking in the users.
- I believe ghosts need more powers. (ghost ie. player with no squares) I think possessions should only be possible by ghosts and the rate of success should be somewhere around 25% This would put fear in the unknown and add an extra element to the game. The possessed player would receive a message as you have been possessed by a ghost. Notice I didn't say or use a name lol. Ghost should be remain anonymous. Though this power is powerful so it can only be used once every two happy hours. I think ghosts should have more powers though that is more open to discussion.
I have plenty of more ideas that need more construction before i place them on here though. Will updated later p.s. I know I'm not an older player but i am a player nonetheless and wish to see the Grid change for the better.
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Post by prostrategos on Jan 30, 2013 9:46:21 GMT -5
Well, I haven't been playing The Grid much lately, so I won't talk much about the actual commands and stuff, which are completely out of my league.. Anyway, Pop and Cyber mentioned a 'new influx of players causing a dissolution of veterans'. However, I for one, would strongly encourage a more noob-friendly environment. More players would just increase the complexity and excitement in the game... and clans could potentially get implemented to encourage larger scale wars and shift the focus slightly to teamwork and actual fighting, instead of a slow, monotonous build-up. Also, a quick shout in support of missiles - loved them back in the Old Grid, and still do! Of course they need to be toned down, but general speaking, I agree with the idea that as Psy puts it, turnovers need to be increased.
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Post by succat on Feb 1, 2013 0:34:51 GMT -5
Here's an idea... For auto-banking at a certain point it deposits 65-85% of your on hand gold... I dont know how this would conflict with something like after a certain amount of gold is surpassed yada yada, just thought I would throw that out there for auto-banking. Maybe the auto-banking XX% of your income should be something that can be voted on? I just want to point out that there have been a lot of "how do we fix the gird" conversations in the past and a lot of them are stored in the old threads. you might want to take a look and scroll through ancient history for a bit. Your right... and it's your quest to go dig them up, j/k (Come on, man there's like 50 pages to dig through!) @philo - Yeah, I'm mixed about 'switch' because it does seem to change the strategy of the game to be something I hadn't intended from the start. Originally, the strategy was supposed to be similar to the board game 'Risk', but things have wondered off track... I think the other items you mentioned could probably be things that get 'voted' on. Psykosis mentioned a kind of 'wishlist' feature on the 'Voting' page where you could basically propose a new law from scratch and see who all is in favor of it, or something to that effect. Doable, but then someone has to write the code for it... so that means either me... or Psykosis, at this point in the game. Also, the whole Voting thing was kind of fun because I wanted to throw some crazy laws out there just to see what would happen - like changing Discovery to 1% energy, or the Bless rate, or whatever - I learned that it was a bad idea @prostra - Yeah, I have tried to make the game more noob friendly. First thing was to just let people outside the Grid have the ability to just view inside The Grid through the 'GriddleNoob' account to even see what they are getting into before they possibly waste their time creating a new account... if they were expecting The Grid to be something that it is not - mainstream. Beyond that, newcomers are given 3X the average number of units per square as their starting base number of units - to encourage them to attack if they look around them and notice their new square has just as many units or probably more than the squares around it. After all, it's a combat game. But, really I haven't seen much of an influx of new players... it's always been kinda like this - a few will wander in at a time... the goal really is to do a complete overhaul of the game - hence a Grid 3.0 that is mobile friendly, simpleton interface that anyone can master, flashier looking squares, better thought out economic, battle, diplomacy, everything systems... get the game back to more like 'Risk' with as much strategy as possible with as little random as possible... but yet still fun and sort of fast-paced with good action where anyone could easily start playing, understand the goal, and 'immediately' have an effect on The Grid by their own unique playing style... - that's kind of my goal, anyway. And yeah, there has been enough talk about missiles that they need to come back in some form... whether as 'canon' or whatever, they'll have to make a return. @psy - got Redis working like a charm, PHP is making calls to it, getting and setting data. I would like to try using it for Grid 3.0 unless there's a better method that's quick and easy... speaking of Grid 3.0, I need to not work this weekend so that we can get the ball rolling on this...
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Philoten
Ronin Warlock
I am un-biased in certain matters.
Posts: 34
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Post by Philoten on Feb 1, 2013 0:55:57 GMT -5
But as well I don't believe things should be able to be voted on and off. That takes quite a bit of fun out of the game. I kinda miss ioi gatekeeping every chance he got lol it brought interest to the game. And the fact it annoyed people so they just turned in off and lets all be honest there is no way its ever going to get enough votes to be turned back on. I think the voting system should just be thrown out. I know ill get hate mail for this lol but it is how i feel. Or maybe after every reset the rules are Random. So the game is never the same. Instead of the voting page you have just what is in effect this round. It could randomly change as well during each round but put like a 42 hour minimum time that has to pass before it can consider changing the rules. Keep people on their toes I say
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Philoten
Ronin Warlock
I am un-biased in certain matters.
Posts: 34
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Post by Philoten on Feb 1, 2013 1:01:09 GMT -5
@philo - Yeah, I'm mixed about 'switch' because it does seem to change the strategy of the game to be something I hadn't intended from the start. Originally, the strategy was supposed to be similar to the board game 'Risk', but things have wondered off track... I think the other items you mentioned could probably be things that get 'voted' on. Psykosis mentioned a kind of 'wishlist' feature on the 'Voting' page where you could basically propose a new law from scratch and see who all is in favor of it, or something to that effect. Doable, but then someone has to write the code for it... so that means either me... or Psykosis, at this point in the game. re's a better method that's quick and easy... speaking of Grid 3.0, I need to not work this weekend so that we can get the ball rolling on this... I know it would make monking impossible but then a monk could just be a carving that is possible but we would have tone the defensive odds down alot lol. Mass at 42 monks i think should stay because its hard enough getting 42 squares and maintaing them as it is. Or maybe the wild card has a chance of randomly turing into a monk or cannon and such? Or maybe the polymuf could. That really is useless so maybe i different use for it would be good. Noone likes or uses the polymuf square.
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Post by succat on Feb 2, 2013 1:19:23 GMT -5
The purpose of Voting was to let the majority decide how things should work on The Grid. I can't let 'everything' be voted on (we saw what happened when I tried that) - but 'most' things I would like to be decided by the players. So, for example, you don't think gatekeeping should be voted off - then vote to have it turned back on. If most of the other players agree that it's better to have it turned on, then it will get turned back on. If you're in the minority, all you can do is take as many squares as possible, all the seers that you can grab, and hope you can tip the vote in your favor. The Voting System has actually been interesting, because before when I decided that every feature should be turned 'on', and I set the rates % for the various features... people didn't always agree with my choices (as I would expect - everyone has a different opinion). So, it seemed to me to let the majority decide what they wanted, and let them live with their choices. That's why the passed laws do not reset after a wipe - because the majority, or at least those with the most power - decided how something should be. So the only way to go back to an old law is for the majority once again to collectively make that decision, or at least fire up someone enough to take the key squares to tip the vote in their favor, if it's close. Because... I don't want to be involved in all the details and mechanisms of every feature - let the players decide that
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Post by popopop on Feb 14, 2013 13:30:48 GMT -5
... and clans could potentially get implemented to encourage larger scale wars and shift the focus slightly to teamwork and actual fighting, instead of a slow, monotonous build-up. If clans were implemented, and all the veterans joined the "veterans clan" and helped each other out, the noobs will forever be noobs. And it'll come to a point where you'll have to fight among the clan since there are no noobs left to fight. Not sure how to make the game more noob-friendly, but it was mentioned in the yak to give noobs a protection period. And I stand with philo on voting. Not a huge fan of voting, especially when players vote out strategically-sound commands just because it's detrimental to them. It's biased towards stronger players, and they'll just vote out those commands which discourage offensive moves.
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Post by succat on Feb 15, 2013 0:24:40 GMT -5
@pop: Yeah, I think Psy and I feel similarly about Clans at this point. Really, Clans hasn't been thought out too much yet, so we'd have to think about how to make it as fair as possible.
And... I've heard the "give noobs a grace period of protection when they first join" argument, but I'm not really in favor of it. It's been done in other games... and I think it's kind of lame that a weaker player can't be taken out due to some invisible forcefield that's protecting them for a little while. And in this game especially, too many noobs join, spawn, and don't do anything - I'm not going to say they should be protected. I would like, however, to create some kind of a "backing" system so that when a noob joins the grid, another player who's been playing for a while can 'back' them, meaning they can invest some of their strength into that noob to keep them on their feet. Haven't really thought it all out yet, but the idea is that bigger players would come to the aid of newly spawned players and invest in them... and at some point receive some kind of a return on that investment, whether it's allegiance or money or whatever. So essentially, if another gridder attacks the noob, that gridder in essence is declaring war against the noob's 'backer' veteran player. Almost could think of it like a prison movie... so the grid is a prison... and a new prisoner spawns in... new prisoner is about to get beaten up by some of the other prisoners... until one of the big leaders of the fiercest prison gang comes to the rescue of the new prisoner and protects him from the other prisoners... for a price, of course. Similar idea... the veteran player comes to the rescue of the noob in return for some favor down the line.
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Post by cybercitizen on Feb 17, 2013 0:13:30 GMT -5
Perhaps there could be some bonus to having a "new" player in your clan - Like, a money bonus every day after having the person in the clan for a week or so. A person could be described as "new" if that is the first time they have been on the grid, but are only considered "new" for 1-3 months or until a reset? Just a few ideas.
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Post by prostrategos on Feb 18, 2013 8:05:24 GMT -5
... and clans could potentially get implemented to encourage larger scale wars and shift the focus slightly to teamwork and actual fighting, instead of a slow, monotonous build-up. If clans were implemented, and all the veterans joined the "veterans clan" and helped each other out, the noobs will forever be noobs. And it'll come to a point where you'll have to fight among the clan since there are no noobs left to fight. Not sure how to make the game more noob-friendly, but it was mentioned in the yak to give noobs a protection period. Firstly, about 'veteran clans', I'm sure most players would be bored outta their minds just developing peacefully with the same bunch of players in the same team, over and over again xD Anyway, there could always be a simple rule: players in the top 5 rankings can't be in the same clan. This would encourage diplomacy, and open up a whole new level of communication and strategy to The Grid. As for noob-friendly tweaks, I'm with Succat and Cyber on this. There's no need to give a new player addition protections considering he'll get a substantial pile of units in the start (with not many farms/cities to give power players the incentive of wiping him/her). Incentives for Clans to include noobs and some small perk would be adequate for the moment, in my opinion.
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Philoten
Ronin Warlock
I am un-biased in certain matters.
Posts: 34
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Post by Philoten on Mar 19, 2013 7:58:25 GMT -5
Succat has told me about his idea of having grids inside of grids and I'd like to make my response on it.
Succat's Original Idea: We have the original grid then within each square there is another grid and within each square there is another grid. So there are 3 levels of the grid. That means we would have 7,290,000,000 squares.
To me thats a bit of an overkill. I like the idea but it should be modified.
Succat's Idea after I played around with it: The original grid will have only 42 squares. And in each of those squares is 42 squares. and within each of those squares is 42 squares. Now with this it drops the total from a whopping 7.29 million to only 30,560. Much more manageable but even then I do not believe we will reach the end of the squares. With this idea The discovery rate has to be amped up.(I wouldnt be happy with that) I am not to happy about crazy discoveries as they are now. ( I believe it needs to be harder to discover in the sense of more energy needed instead of worse odds) we have not reached our 900 square limit yet even, So I suggest we only have one extra level of 42 square in each of the original 42 squares. This would give us 1,764 squares total which is more then enough. That way whatever laws effect the original 42 squares that is like the grid wide votes, while the squares within the original 42, would be domains. I.e. square 1 would also be domain 1 square 2 domain 2 and etc. down to 42.
Now how attacking would work i would be unsure of. It is understandable squares from the original 42 would be able to attack each other and squares that are domain specific would be able to attack each other. But how would one attack from the original 42 into the domain. Would the domain master square(original square) be able to attack any of the squares inside the domain and vice versa or only certain squares? Im not sure how this would work quite yet. Also how would square inside domain 1 go about attacking squares from domain 2 and such other ones? would they have to take control of master square first or can they attack from where they are?
The idea still needs alot of work and any input is welcome. Thank you for your time my friends.
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Philoten
Ronin Warlock
I am un-biased in certain matters.
Posts: 34
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Post by Philoten on Mar 19, 2013 13:25:29 GMT -5
Idea, Scaling unit costs with grid networth or even personal networth would create a money sinkhole. Cities would become more valuable also.. number of units able to be placed on the square should depend on the amount of cities. example: 1 city allows 100 units on the square or even 1 city equals 1000 units on the square. would create another reason for cities which would make another sinkhole for money. Would keep inflation down and would allow new players to keep up with older players and 'giants' much easier. it gives them a fight chance instead of none at all
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