Here's a quick question for you guys. I'm thinking about features for MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, and the big one that I'm trying to figure out at the moment is the multiplayer component. I've always felt like MMORPG Tycoon needed a way to play with other people.. turning MMORPG Tycoon into an MMORPG just feels like the right thing to do, to me. Preferably in such a way that grinding levels in another player's MMORPG gives you some benefits in the creation of your own MMORPG.
The way I see it, there are three ways I could go:
1. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a single-player offline game, exactly like MMORPG Tycoon 1.x. Ignore networking/multiplayer/etc entirely.
2. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a locally hosted online game, where you can run your MMORPG as a server and have your friends connect, create characters, and wander around within your world, do quests, etc, with a networking model much like you have with games like Quake and Counter-Strike. Apart from this ability to have friends connect, the core MMORPG Tycoon gameplay is still a single-player offline experience, competing against computer-driven MMORPGs.
Chief annoyance of approach #2 is that of NAT traversal; on the modern Internet, most users are behind NAT devices, and connecting to a server that's behind a NAT device is tricky at best, and sometimes impossible without reconfiguring network routers.
3. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a centralised-server-driven online game, where a game server (probably running on mmorpg-tycoon.com) lets your game run like an actual MMORPG, so people can play your game even when your computer isn't turned on. In this approach, all MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 MMOs would exist in a single simulated "world" with a single simulated gamer population to compete over, and so you're not competing against computer-driven MMORPGs, but rather are competing against MMORPGs run by other human players. The number of real human players playing your game would, of course, substantially influence the behaviour of the simulated players as well. This would mean that, for example, spending the effort to craft well-written custom quests instead of just using the random cookie-cutter ones would actually help your MMORPG, where they couldn't help so much in the other approaches (since I can't code computer AI to recognise and appreciate good writing).
The big downside of #3 is that being server-driven, it would be much more expensive for me to host, and if I was to go that direction, then I would probably have to go down the path of being subscriber-funded to cover my costs. I haven't run any maths on this, but I'd be trying to charge much, much less than the big real MMORPGs charge, and wouldn't be trying to earn a profit from it. But money would probably be required for online play, just to avoid bankrupting myself on hosting+bandwidth charges.
(And incidentally, yes, I've actually written the core servers, client networking, and cryptographic and security services for a commercial MMO which is still running today. I'm not a n00b when it comes to creating massive-style online infrastructures.. though I've never dealt with the funding side, before.)
Does anybody have any thoughts on all this? Does the very concept of being for-pay-per-month turn people off from considering option #3? (Back-of-napkin maths is suggesting that I could probably just about break even on a month-to-month basis for something around $2/month)
