This is an all around concept for Steempunk-net – or SPN as it will be shortened. I am beta tester there (beta started on the 27th) but have no other connection to the makers and do not know any details of their concept, as they know nothing about the content of this before I post it.
This concept does not include an UI.
I will try to go “from inside out” in my description, but of course everything is connected in a game.
Introduction - What is SPN?
Steempunk-net is a (the first) MMORPG based on the steem blockchain. You can (or will) fight against other users, get loot, craft items, build your house and so on.
You can find loot boxes based on your steemit activity (posting, voting).
This is done via a plugin (currently only Chrome).
You can look at their roadmap here: post on steemit
At the moment only the fighting is implemented.
Concept: Character
pic of a very impressive character, CC0
The character is the main point, the alter ego of you, the player. It must reflect all abilities you have in the game and the character’s stats should all have a defined influence.
Currently there are 6 traits:
- Experience
- Strength
- Education
- Defense
- Dexterity
- Constitution
Afaik they all play a role in the battle success - experience through upleveling, which increases the other stats. The details are not that important at the moment and will likely change with beta test results.
What I propose to the character system are two things.
First I suggest adding a “Stamina” bar. The amount of the bar should not be increased by leveling, but can be slightly modified by items and housing.
The regeneration of stamina is constantly/hourly (depending on resource use) and also not influenced by leveling, but slightly by items and housing.
Regeneration happens partly automatically over time, partly with your actions on the steem blockchain (posting, upvoting, commenting), to incentive efforts there.
Stamina should be used for most if not all actions, mainly for fighting.
Reason for this is to make the player field more level and prevent attack spamming (you can atm attack all players at the same time) and with that a sort of “power leveling”.
It also makes the player think more about what he wants to do when my second suggestion is implemented.
Second I propose to make the other traits like strength XP-able, meaning you can train them. This could open different paths in character development, housing and gear of your char, making the game more interesting through individualization and decision making. Do you go out starting a fight or do you want to train first?
A game is fun when the player has a lot of meaningful decision to made. - game legend Sid Meier (if I remember it right)
Maybe EXP should not uplevel the traits at all, or only a small amount, and the increase is mainly by training.
Housing
Housing can play a big part. According to my character concept I propose to make your house a multi-room upgrade-able base.
You start off with a downtrodden shed or even a single room and (maybe during a tutorial) you add the others rooms in the early game stages, learning how to craft.
Later you can upgrade the rooms and maybe even store certain rare items in them to give you a small boost.
Every room has a purpose and is connected to a character trait.
For example the quality of the bedroom helps regenerating your stamina. The bathroom gives bonus to your constitution, the kitchen your dexterity, the library your education, the training room your strength and living room your defense (my home is my castle, right?)
In those rooms you can train the according trait, using stamina.
Crafting and item stats
If you find loot, you can build parts of your house and different items, including weapons and armor.
Weapons have power, critical, accuracy and speed stats.
The higher the power, the more damage you do. (Modified by your chars strength.)
The higher the critical chance, the more often you do double damage. (Modified by education.)
Accuracy describes the chance to hit. (Dexterity)
The higher the speed, the more often you hit.
This means you could train your character for high accuracy, to use a fast firing but very “spready” weapon.
Armor works opposite. It has damage reduction and evasion stats and can block critical hits.
Which weapons and armor you can craft should depend on either your level or your Education. This means you may find parts for a weapon you need to train for first before you can make it.
They also have upgrades/modifications that enhance e.g. critical chance or protection against it.
Another possibility is to have the weapons get experience that increases their stats, and you need to “feed” them parts/loot to train them. The type of loot decides which stats get increased. I am currently 60/40 against this method.
Drops/Loot
Currently you get loot based on your activity in the steem blockchain. The more you author posts, write comments or vote, the more chances you have to get a loot chest displayed on your screen.
But while that helps immersion I have the feeling it is not good long term. It might look addicting, but I think it gets boring fast. You always try to catch things and it often is frustrating if nothing appears.
Also there is always a time frame between your activity and your chance to find loot. That means that if you e.g. write a big post and a comment and then log off to go to bed, you don’t get any loot. And on the next day you don’t find things at first while you browse steemit. Also you always have to keep your eyes open and on the whole page, which hinders normal usage.
Of course that could be changed by programming a longer “storage” of drop chances. I still think the current system has more bad then good points.
Additionally this system, since based on activity, incentives “noise” or downright spamming and moves the eyes away from the content.
Proposal
I therefore suggest to change the main drop system. Either abolish the chests altogether or make them only a secondary source, quite rare findings based on chance, but not on activity. In my system, as written above, the activity feeds the stamina. The more you do, the more you can do, which includes other methods of getting loot.
Those methods are mainly fighting, especially in missions or quests, as described later.
You would get the loot simply as message. Less hunting on the website, but also less stress and more possibilities for other drop methods.
If the chest system is abolished, it would also mean that people could play the game on whatever platform they want – steemit, busy, future UIs – without the game makers having to put in the URL structures and maintain them for every new system.
Shop, market place and monetary system
The UI already has in icon for the shop. It is intended that you can buy items that help you in the fight.
While there is no question that people want to get paid for their work, there is always the big problem of making the game pay-to-win. The current controversy around loot boxes shows that. (And those are downright immoral, since they use all psychological tricks to make people spend money, including those that are more or less illegal offline.)
On the other hand we have an easy transfer-system even for small amounts of money. Also the game makers want to “pay” players using the steem system.
For the SBD shop I therefore propose that 50% of all SBD income is distributed to all players, based on their steem activity and (maybe) their game activity in the last day.
If everyone profits from it, buying helper items does not look so bad.
There can be cosmetical items – items with same properties but other look – if there is interest in those. Would give the artist a job.
Other items could give a temporary boost to the traits or reload your stamina (only one item a day or so to prevent p2w).
Away from the SBD base I think an internal currency would help smooth the game. You can call it gold, credits or whatever, I will call it Smoke. And not only because I want to see smoke coming out of the locomotive on the steempunk-net website. :D
Smoke is what you get if you sell loot items you don’t need and with Smoke you can buy items you need but the god of RNG drops is unwilling to give you (for a hefty amount of course).
Smoke also is part of rewards you can get from fighting, dueling, drops and missions.
This way the RNG factor is smoothed.
Marketplace
Not to be confused with the SBD shop, this is simply the place where you can buy or sell stuff for Smoke. There is always a supply of basic items, but only a few additional random good ones (like complete guns)
It could also host daily specials.
I am not sure if people should be able to trade items with each other (like an auction house). I think it is better they can not.
Fighting and Duels
Currently the only way to start a fight is to go to the profile of a player on steemit and then initiate a fight with the overlay.
As already planned it should also be possible to start a fight with anyone you can find in your fight history, preferably without going to the profile. Maybe for a small fee in Smoke for the “surveillance system”?
Same would be for rank tables – they show the people ordered by rank, so you can find players on similar strength level, and if you click on the players, for a small fee, you can start a fight. This helps keeping the incentive on visiting the steem based platforms and engage there instead of paying.
But just fighting is not all: You can also challenge peoples to a duel.
While standard fights happen shortly after the attack and without consent of the attacked, duels are different.
A due invitation is open for at least 24 hours and the attacked needs to say yes.
All duels include a price – something both fighters agree on paying from their own stashes. The minimum can be 10 Smoke, but it could also be a weapon from the attacker and a hard to get house item from the defender. Or even real SBD (capped)!
Duels could also be used for tournament events.
Factions and Reputation
A core of my proposed concept are the factions.
I fear that only fighting is not a big enough incentive to keep playing, as it gets boring, especially if there are no rewards.
Now open the game world to factions!
Every character belongs to one faction.
Every character has a standing with every faction.
Choosing a character at game start defines the faction.
An Aristocrat can start as a member of the Court Society (names to be defined ;)). This means his “zero point” for that action is at 50+ (of possible 100+ and 100-). Another faction is the natural enemy of the chosen faction – let’s say the Anarchists. The Aristocrat has -50 towards the Anarchists.
Every day your standing with a faction moves a bit towards the zero point, which is 0 for most factions, +50 for your home faction and -50 for the enemy faction.
So even if you do something good or bad, it slowly moves back to normal, your actions are getting forgotten, for good or worse.
If your standing with a faction is -80 or lower and you move onto an article or profile of a player belonging to the faction, you automatically start a fight. That uses stamina as normal, but you get 50% more experience.
If your standing with a faction is +80 or higher you may get daily benefits (similar to the home factions benefit.
Home faction benefit?
The faction you belong to gives you a certain small daily bonus. That could be a bit of Smoke from the rich Court Society or a bit of strength experience from the Anarchists. That applies even if your standing with them is -100, because that bonus reflects your character’s history, habits and the like.
Attacking a player (and winning) makes you lose faction points. So you need a way to increase them. Welcome to quests!
Quests
Quests are given out by the factions, and they don’t care who takes them. Even at -100 you can take a faction quest and up your standing with them. Doing a quest for faction A may lower your standing for faction B though, so choose carefully.
A faction quest can be to fight 5 players of the factions enemy or bringing a certain gun or something more special.
It can also refer to steemit as in “write 3 posts” or make 5 full upvotes.
Successfully finishing a quest gives faction points and may have items or Smoke as payment. Those quests can also be used for storyline events.
Players could also set Smoke bonuses to win against certain people.
Different Characters
As already intended there will be additional characters.
As I wrote, in my concept the characters belong to factions.
That also means that those characters will have an individual background story, which the player will find out while advancing in the game.
Those background stories are intended to immerse the player more into the steempunk-net world.
I hope you like my concept!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors