New efforts!

[Lock-On]

Rattling around in my head is an idea for an evolution of the MMO that goes all-in on that concept.  Elements of that idea kind of exist.  City of Heroes and City of Villains were once two distinct games that we could somehow move between.  Perfect World has a kind-of sort-of single login to a portal that can connect you to lots of different games via Arc.  Champions Online had the idea to make different game zones into completely different genres.  I wonder what it would look like to make something called HyperMMO where you log into ... something.  And from there you can socialize and whatever, and then "portal" yourself into different games.  The games would be connected in a way that would somehow make it make sense for "you" or your character to be able to go from place to place, playing different games with potentially different rules but with some unifying principle.  And when a "genre" becomes stale, unused, or unprofitable, the company could phase it out without shutting down the entire "game."  The incentive to keep the global thing running is that it is in effect your entire customer base.  Your character could live on forever even if its ability to enter "superhero world" might one day get curtailed.  You could still enter SecretAgentWorld or DinosaurJoustingWorld.  There would still be a sense of continuity.  And if enough people ask for SuperHeroWorld, you could always bring it back.  Or you could make SuperHeroWorld2.0.  And really as long as people were playing SuperHeroWorld1.0, there would be no incentive to shut it down anyway.  Even if only five people were still going there, put it in maintenance mode and let them be.  You have to keep the servers running anyway, because they are also running WorldWar2World and HopscotchAndPoniesWorld.

Disney Infinity comes, correction came, very very close to realizing this goal without knowing they were doing that.  While the toy connection at first buoyed the game, it would appear that eventually it also brought it down due to distribution and other problems with the figurines.  Given what they were working on at the time of their shut down (allowing characters from different worlds to play in the game worlds of others, and more), it's another very sad tale of a game that had huge potential cut off before it could realize it.

But remove the toy element from Disney Infinity (and the licensing rules) and you end up with a game that had super heroes, space fantasy, anthropomorphic mice, pirates, princesses, racing, and....Tron.  If that's not an eclectic mix of genres and styles I don't know what is.

[Felderburg]

But was the gameplay different? I never played Disney infinity, so I don't know. Could you race with tron light cycles, or would you just have standard gameplay in a tron skin?

[TimtheEnchanter]

But remove the toy element from Disney Infinity (and the licensing rules) and you end up with a game that had super heroes, space fantasy, anthropomorphic mice, pirates, princesses, racing, and....Tron.  If that's not an eclectic mix of genres and styles I don't know what is.

Someone needs to take this concept but do it in reverse. Now that we've got 3D printing this shouldn't be too much of an issue. Build your toon in the character builder, buy it, you get a physical model of your character that you can use for those RFID pedestals, or whatever the heck they are. I don't see any practical reason why accessories an ONLINE game should require going into a toy store. Comeon, Disney. We're in the digital transaction age and it's an online game. What were you thinking?

I must say I was VERY interested in playing DI. But it had the same problem I have with the Marvel and DC games. You can only play a variant of THEIR characters. If I'm going to invest time in a game, I had better be able to create my OWN character. I don't mind being Bat Man or the Hulk for a single-player experience, but I need something more personalized than "Iron Man wearing sunglasses and a grass skirt" if I'm going to play it in an online environment for years.

And at this point, if Disney really wants my money, they just need to make a sandbox MMO in the Kingdom Hearts universe. I'd play the living **** out of that game.

Just as an addendum - I would suggest that Free Realms and Superhero Squad are both pretty much just what you described for HyperWorld. You login to the overarching "social" world and then branch off to the other "worlds" as you wish either on your own or with your friends. It's probably not too encouraging that both of those games are (or were, in the case of Free Realms) kid's games. It seems like the concept of a "world" built of many different and separate activities is treated by the game dev community as some kind of acknowledgement of developing for short attention spans rather than a way to offer a kind of variety to an adult customer.

Woow... okay I don't know where I'm remembering this from. It may have been some random 5AM-over-coffee discussion with friends a long time ago. But I remember talk of some kind of an open-source game that would work like this, enabling individuals or entire teams to craft their own dimensions and then link it to the main. Servers for different realms were accessible just like picking a server in a classic multiplayer game, but instead of a server list, what you had was an ingame region sort of like Portal Corp, where you could browse through the alternate dimensions like going to a travel planner, or possibly use other abilities like an Ouro portal to get to specific locations.

I feel like something like that may have been done with Minecraft at some point.

[slickriptide]

I feel like something like that may have been done with Minecraft at some point.

Landmark had hopes of being "Minecraft the MMORPG". It was going to offer the world-building of Minecraft, the combat of Free Realms, the questing and gameplay of Everquest Next and the goal-driven "smart" NPC programming of Storybricks.

For all that it was a kid's game that was supposed to be a gateway drug leading into Everquest, Free Realms had some interesting new ideas. It had classes/archetypes, but every character could level up every job independently, and freely switch between them outside of a combat game. While clothes had generic stat boosts, "powers" were attached to weapons not to a character. A lot of the combat didn't make sense if you thought about it hard - a level 20 Doctor leading the charge against the Troll King with his giant healing bone saw, LOL, that looked like something a Chainsaw Warrior would be swinging. Still, the idea that you had an assortment of powers that you could change from encounter to encounter based on what job you chose and what weapon to use was an interesting one.

Landmark seemed to be going down that road. I don't really know where they're headed now that EQ Next has been cancelled. Storybricks never panned out at all. As far as I know, the dream of a world where NPC's had drives and needs that dictated their desires and actions never came close to being realized. The world building aspect of the game is pretty cool if world building is your thing - even as a stripped down version of Voxel Farm, Landmark has some amazing potential there. I've seen the Codewalker/Arcana/Leandro's of Landmark do some awesome designs and push the voxel engine to places that I'm sure the SOE and Voxel Farm people never intended or anticipated.

The problem is that it's still not a real game. If you're into Minecraft then the voxel-art look of it is part of its charm. World-building was supposed to be just one aspect of what Landmark could potentially be. At this point, it looks like that's all it will ever be. Maybe SOE/Daybreak will find a way to re-purpose whatever work they did for EQ Next and turn it into something more.

In a lot of ways we're back at square one for MMORPG's. The market began as something rarified where online RPG's were novel and bizarre to the mainstream consumer. Now we've reached the place where they're old-hat and too time-consuming for the mainstream consumer. WoW is down to five million active subs, while Hearthstone crossed the 50-million account line recently (though I highly doubt that's the number of active monthly users). The age of the game where you sign up for a lifetime is passing.

Given that, it's hard to see where Hyperworld is going to come from. One reason I've loved the idea of TORG as a MMORPG setting is that you would have a built-in path for moving characters from one game to another and a way of measuring how one game affects the worlds in the sister games. But then we're back to the same problem - Spy World and Cybertech World and Pulp Adventure World and Prehistoric World all have to not just be compatible, they have to be able to stand alone just as well as they stand together with the rest of their kin.

Look at how many failures NCSoft and SOE have had, despite their many successes. Blizzard invested almost eight years(!) in Titans before scrapping it and retooling the scraps as Overwatch. Meanwhile, a game like Hearthstone that was supposed to be somebody's little fun side project has blossomed into the biggest money-maker since WoW. It's a weird time to be an online game developer.

[Arcana]

Disney Infinity

Yes, now that you mention it I think very specifically the idea of Infinity playsets comes the closest to the idea I was thinking about.  The critical element being the idea of playset expansion with independent gameplay concepts.  It isn't all there, but it is very much in keeping with the concept.  Just not executed in the way I was thinking, exactly.

[Fireheart]

Hmm, The Seed, from Sword Art Online/Alfheim Online?

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Arcana]

In a lot of ways we're back at square one for MMORPG's. The market began as something rarified where online RPG's were novel and bizarre to the mainstream consumer. Now we've reached the place where they're old-hat and too time-consuming for the mainstream consumer. WoW is down to five million active subs, while Hearthstone crossed the 50-million account line recently (though I highly doubt that's the number of active monthly users). The age of the game where you sign up for a lifetime is passing.

Given that, it's hard to see where Hyperworld is going to come from. One reason I've loved the idea of TORG as a MMORPG setting is that you would have a built-in path for moving characters from one game to another and a way of measuring how one game affects the worlds in the sister games. But then we're back to the same problem - Spy World and Cybertech World and Pulp Adventure World and Prehistoric World all have to not just be compatible, they have to be able to stand alone just as well as they stand together with the rest of their kin.

Let me suggest that the answer to the question "where could this possibly come from" and "how do you make the different worlds both stand alone and yet be compatible with each other" might have the same, overarching answer, by mentioning the idea I had for City of Villains.  Its an idea I've mentioned before, but when NCSoft announced City of Villains my immediate thought at the time was "don't just reskin City of Heroes with goatees."  I know a lot of players had been wanting to "play as villains" and CoV was intended to address that desire, but I thought that was wrong for a couple of reasons.  One: I honestly didn't think it would be easy to make good content from the villain perspective, and I think I was right on that one.  I also thought there was a good chance of splitting the playerbase between two games, an error no different logically than overpartitioning a single game.

But I also thought there was a lost opportunity to go what I would today refer to as "asymmetric integrated gameplay."  Back then, the rough game play example I used to use was the paper board game Ogre from the 80s.  Ogre was an interesting game I've thought about more than any other game of any kind period.  It was one of those games played with cardboard playing pieces and a paper hexagon "board."  The idea is that one player would have an army of a couple dozen tanks, hovercraft, and infantry units.  One would have just one: the Ogre.  If the army killed the Ogre, they won.  If the Ogre killed the army, the Ogre won.  Fairly straight forward.  But what's interesting to me is that the game play was "fair" in that there wasn't an explicit advantage in being the army or being the Ogre.  The Ogre wasn't just the token bad guy necessary to allow the player with the army something to kill.  In one sense, each player was kind of playing a different game with different rules, and yet still playing on the same board.

I thought similarly City of Villains should a) not split up the playerbase and b) introduce a new form of gameplay and c) still work together with City of Heroes.  And I thought the answer to those requirements was obvious: Dungeon Keeper.  City of Villains should have been the Dungeon Keeper of the City of Heroes franchise.

For those not familiar, Dungeon Keeper was a game that came out in the 90s where the player essentially took on the role of the bad guy in a generic dungeon crawl game.  Instead of being the hero exploring the dungeon, killing the bad guys, and taking the treasure, you were the bad guy building the dungeon, collecting treasure, raising monsters, and being raided by computer controlled hero parties trying to loot you.  In some ways, I consider it the much more complex personal computer version great grandfather of things like tower defense games and things like Clash of Clans.

So in my version of City of Villains players would be building criminal or supervillain empires.  They would start off as low level something or other, and rise to become the top rank of whatever their villain class was.  Villain classes wouldn't be things like "Brute" and "Corruptor" they would be things like "criminal mastermind" and "world dominator."  And you'd be constantly trying to build up this empire while under assault from computer controlled hero NPCs and NPC super teams.  Beyond the new gameplay there would be a new kind of asymmetric PvP: City of Heroes teams could try to take on City of Villains villain organizations.  So some of the heroes confronting CoV players could be human controlled.  But this could happen whether players were logged in or not: players might face off against each other directly, or they could face off against computer proxies playing the other side.

So what's the answer to the question "how do different worlds remain compatible with each other?"  Well, in this case they don't need to be compatible in the sense of "my character works in the same way in both worlds" because the two worlds are completely incongruent.  What you do in CoH is totally different from what you do in CoV.  And yet, the two worlds are compatible in a more important way: they are integrated.  They interact with each other in specific well-defined ways.  They even contribute to each other: players playing CoH can contribute something to players playing CoV and vice versa.  In this way, even though you have players "split" between worlds, they don't get isolated from each other.  They can still be a part of the same community, and gameplay in one world enhances the gameplay in the other world.  One doesn't tend to starve the other.  You also get some economy of scale: some development for CoH is only useful there and also for CoV, but there are lots of opportunities for devs to contribute to both simultaneously.

You can still have SpyWorld and Cybertech world, but those would be genre wrappers around City of Heroes, like genre zones in Champions Online.  But the really interesting areas of development would be the VillainKeeperWorlds and other expansions that don't just add wrappers around a generic game GURPS-style, but expand the gameplay in ways designed to maintain a integrated overarching world but still creating interestingly different gameplay experiences.

Where does this come from?  From the mobile world.  An MMO world designed like this would have lots of opportunities to add expansions that were mobile-specific.  In fact, the mobile specific parts of the world could actually be, in the business sense, the *core* world, and the parts that look more like conventional MMOs to us would actually be the expansions.  Imagine a Clash of Clans MMO where you get to level archers and giants in that kind of world, and where the places you encounter were based on actual players Clan maps.  Its the MMORPG that could be the spinoff of the mobile game.

[slickriptide]

I like the way you think!

Especially given that I can draw on some direct experience. SOE was a publisher, back in its facebook game days, of a game called Dungeon Overlord that was a very rudimentary kind of "Dungeon Keeper the MMO". The game was similar but you weren't building a death trap for marauding heroes, you were building a lair and raiding the lairs of all of the surrounding would-be evil demonic overlords.

It would have been so much more fun if it had been a game where the marauders were MMORPG players and you were actively attempting to slaughter them before they stole your treasure/bait.

When SOE pulled back from Facebook, Dungeon Overlord went indie and then was acquired by Kabam games. Judging by the Kabam website, Dungeon Overlord is now kaput. More dust in the wind.

I see the Infinity toy box as Mission Architect on steroids. If Codewalker ever takes his plans for private instances with GM privileges to the logical extreme, Paragon Chat could become something like Infinity toy box.

[TimtheEnchanter]

When SOE pulled back from Facebook, Dungeon Overlord went indie and then was acquired by Kabam games. Judging by the Kabam website, Dungeon Overlord is now kaput. More dust in the wind.

I see the Infinity toy box as Mission Architect on steroids. If Codewalker ever takes his plans for private instances with GM privileges to the logical extreme, Paragon Chat could become something like Infinity toy box.

At launch, CoV sort of had that in the form of base raids, but sadly it didn't last long before they got rid of the whole system. The turrets and traps you could lay around a player base were actually spawn points. The turrets, the power components that could be damaged, shield generators and all that, all of those were technically mobs, and they were placed by players to create a gauntlet of sorts. It's not hard to imagine expanding on that a little and adding spawnpoints for mob groups.

I doubt we'll ever be seeing mob combat in Paragon Chat though. It's just interesting though that CoX had all of the technical capabilities to allow players to create mission maps or "dungeons" from scratch, like ten years ago. Pretty sure all it would've taken is some additions to databases to expand on what could be dropped in a base, and a loading system to allow players to enter a base as an instanced mission.

The ideal though would have been to merge Mission Architect and base building into one unified editing system.

[Dr. Bad Guy]

Rattling around in my head is an idea for an evolution of the MMO that goes all-in on that concept.  Elements of that idea kind of exist.  City of Heroes and City of Villains were once two distinct games that we could somehow move between.  Perfect World has a kind-of sort-of single login to a portal that can connect you to lots of different games via Arc.  Champions Online had the idea to make different game zones into completely different genres.  I wonder what it would look like to make something called HyperMMO where you log into ... something.  And from there you can socialize and whatever, and then "portal" yourself into different games.  The games would be connected in a way that would somehow make it make sense for "you" or your character to be able to go from place to place, playing different games with potentially different rules but with some unifying principle.  And when a "genre" becomes stale, unused, or unprofitable, the company could phase it out without shutting down the entire "game."  The incentive to keep the global thing running is that it is in effect your entire customer base.  Your character could live on forever even if its ability to enter "superhero world" might one day get curtailed.  You could still enter SecretAgentWorld or DinosaurJoustingWorld.  There would still be a sense of continuity.  And if enough people ask for SuperHeroWorld, you could always bring it back.  Or you could make SuperHeroWorld2.0.  And really as long as people were playing SuperHeroWorld1.0, there would be no incentive to shut it down anyway.  Even if only five people were still going there, put it in maintenance mode and let them be.  You have to keep the servers running anyway, because they are also running WorldWar2World and HopscotchAndPoniesWorld.

I don't know if this is a really good idea or a really stupid one.  Right now its just an intellectual exercise, like thinking about how light sabers work.  But if you like thinking about game design theory, HyperWorld begs some interesting questions.  Like what game balance rules are actually necessary, and which only look like they are necessary because no one has ever challenged them?

Palladium Games has done similar with RPG's.  All of their games are based on the same basic game system.  Some of the housekeeping stuff changes (such as money), but the core game is the same throughout. You can easily take your character out of a Rifts setting and move them into a zombie setting or swords and magic. It really would be the lore and maps changing.  Sounds like a good idea.  You could even get the basic game play done and sell/ lease it out to those who just want to do the pretty stuff.

[Harpospoke]

Stubbornness implies persistence, but I think persistence is not enough.  That persistence has to be directed towards useful effort, and not all effort is useful.  Probably most important is that persistence has to be coupled with some kind of iterative self-reflection and assessment.  Some people are better than other people at self-assessing what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.  Teachers can't be around all the time, and people who are able to self-assess and have the persistence to apply themselves have a significant advantage over people who can't or do not.

Learning can also have cumulative effects that magnify small advantages.  Sometimes getting better makes it easier to get better, particularly when it improves the ability for someone to self-assess and feedback that into better learning.  When you have positive feedback cycles happening like that, where learning something improves your ability to self-assess and teach yourself, which improves your ability to learn something even absent teachers, a small advantage at age ten can magnify exponentially into a huge advantage by age twenty.  So much so it can be hard to see what the initial advantage even was by comparison.

Agree with the idea that getting better makes it easier to get better.   Maybe some start out better at self-assessment and that is a kind of "gift", but one can also learn it.   I know I'm way better at that than when I started.   Learning how to practice is a pretty big deal.

As for different musicians learn at different rates that is true beyond question.  But with a lot of hard work you can certainly close the gap.  I don't believe I was born with any natural talent.  The musician I work with the most often was born with a great ear and natural inclination towards melodies.

So there is hard work and there is natural gifts.   Maybe the Mozart's of the world are born with an inclination for both?   Combine a natural ability to learn with a natural desire to learn and that's a lethal combination, eh?

Its funny about the "slower" student though.  As this has been a topic of many, many great musicians and just creative types in general.  Some people claim that if you stick to a creative routine it will help you get the most out of your time.  Other's say set clear goals for each practice session.  But the main thing people discuss is getting more out of your practice is just a skill a musician needs to learn, its just as important as learning an instrument.  There are a million different ways to get more out of your practice time and for each person its different.  A piano teacher I studied under and respected very much as he was not only a really good person but he was just a fantastic musician, one of the best I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and I have met hundreds of different musicians.  He once told me

"Its not the people who practice more then me and are better then me that annoy me.  Its the people that seemingly practice less.  But then again, maybe they can just get more out of an hour then me"

I think there is something to that.   I recently ran across this guy who claimed that spending 5 minutes on a particular technique and then moving on to other techniques over an hour's time was more productive than working on a single technique the entire hour.   I've been trying it and I think it has some merit.   Something to do with brain training.

And little things like something I picked up from Steve Morse...find the specific things you need to work on.   Like..instead of practicing an entire scale, find the one problem area you are having difficulty fingering and work on that.

The thing about music though its not always about being "the best".  Was Mozart the best?  Not a chance.  He was one of the best.

I stopped believing in "best" in art a few years ago.   I don't actually think it exists.   Watching the various methods people use to rank movies proves that to me.   No matter the method used, people don't agree...and the various methods usually come up with a different "best" each time anyway!   Kinda funny.

[srmalloy]

Not sure if serious.

Are there really that many programmers who aren't touch typists? I can't imagine working in a profession that has you typing that much and not picking it up that ability involuntarily, even if you weren't trying to learn it.

Looking back at 35+ years as a programmer, I have to say that it's not 'touch typing' as you get it taught to you in a regular typing class format; while for general typing it looks much the same from the outside, I find that I use whatever finger happens to be more convenient to the key I want to hit, rather than the dedicated 'this finger for this column of keys' that formal touch typing will teach you. Reflexes acquired in use, rather than reflexes acquired through repetetive drill.

[Biz]

Looking back at 35+ years as a programmer, I have to say that it's not 'touch typing' as you get it taught to you in a regular typing class format; while for general typing it looks much the same from the outside, I find that I use whatever finger happens to be more convenient to the key I want to hit, rather than the dedicated 'this finger for this column of keys' that formal touch typing will teach you. Reflexes acquired in use, rather than reflexes acquired through repetetive drill.

I suppose that kind of ties back into the talent vs hard work topic. In that when hard work doesn't always make you better, if you don't work hard "productively", meaning you have to work hard at the correct aspect of your trade and do so in the correct way. Practice doesn't make perfect, practice only makes permanent.

[Codewalker]

So what's the answer to the question "how do different worlds remain compatible with each other?"

Indeed, that's something I've given quite a lot of thought to, but more in the context of creating a distributed game architecture with seemingly conflicting goals.

For example, say you are developing a hypothetical game that is normally straight client-server, but you want to find a way to not depend on a single server holding all the eggs, because they are community run and could come and go without warning. So you have to balance all of these factors:

• Character portability between servers that may be running different content. Some might be "no content" chat/rp only. Some might be classic content. Some might be wacky experimental content. Or something entirely different that happens to share a common universe. Just how much of the character can effectively move between these environments?
  
  
• Ability for people to experiment locally and create interesting things that go off the beaten path.
  
  
• Given a classic game mode that is progression focused, how to maintain that in contexts where it makes sense? This seems to be in direct contradiction with the previous two. If characters are ultimately portable even when servers are offline (which implies some form of local character storage), how can you prevent duping/jerk hacking? Is it a big enough problem to even worry about? Research with other games seems to lean towards 'yes', rampant cheating does ruin the experience for many players even in PvE games.
  
  
• How to separate the open sandbox environments, which are a great petri dish for breeding community additions, from the 'no cheats' progression zone? What level of character portability is desired or possible between the two? With chat/rp only it's easy enough to allow your progression character to act as an avatar without needing to alter its state, but it's the cases in the middle with nonstandard content that are a lot fuzzier.

It's not an easy problem to solve. For sandbox it's less of an issue, but for progression it's probably impossible to solve 100%, as without a single authority (which is also a single point of failure), there is no way to prevent someone really dedicated from gaming the system. Still, there are ways to raise the bar high enough to keep it from running rampant. Public key crypto has possibilities to create a form of mutually trusted authority that is not required to be online all the time to verify.

[Linuial]

For example, say you are developing a hypothetical game that is normally straight client-server, but you want to find a way to not depend on a single server holding all the eggs, because they are community run and could come and go without warning. 

If you want a server setup which is not dependent on any one physical node, you could do worse than to look at the originator of the process: the Tandem "Non-Stop" computer.  It was sold as a single physical box that contained four independent processors.  The operating system was optimized to run every single instruction four times, once on each processor, and then compare the results.  If at any time one processor produced a different result from the other three, the operating system simply dropped that processor, issued a warning, and continued with the next instruction on three processors.  It could conceivably continue to run on three with the same reliability (if one processor disagrees with the other two, again drop the dissenting processor), giving the operators time to correct the error.  I have *never* understood why Tandem Non-Stops were not used for air traffic control....I guess the people in charge were too cheap (they are *not* inexpensive machines!). 

If you want a reliable network of individual user-run volunteer nodes, I can see creating an umbrella software capable of making sure that you always have at least four nodes up-and-running (or more, for greater reliability), and if one drops, immediately designate a replacement and copy any necessary software and data to the new node.  Easy to code?  No.  But pretty much bulletproof, if that's what you want.  :-) 

[Linuial]

Looking back at 35+ years as a programmer, I have to say that it's not 'touch typing' as you get it taught to you in a regular typing class format; while for general typing it looks much the same from the outside, I find that I use whatever finger happens to be more convenient to the key I want to hit, rather than the dedicated 'this finger for this column of keys' that formal touch typing will teach you. Reflexes acquired in use, rather than reflexes acquired through repetetive drill.

I'm with Codewalker on this one...not so much "programmer", but I started in keypunch.  ;-)  (giving away my age, here).  I was a horrific typist...had typing class in high school, and my hand-eye coordination is so poor that I only passed the class because of turning in extra work (35 wpm, when 50 wpm was required to pass).   When I had to make my living keypunching...I learned.  No, it wasn't easy, but I still type the "old-fashioned" way, the way I was taught in class, because I *had* to to make a living.  Like riding a bicycle, once you *do* learn it, you don't lose it.  And it does become so natural that I no longer even notice I'm doing it.  I really have no interest in products like Teamspeak, because I'm so used to "thinking with my fingers".  :-D 

[Linuial]

So there is hard work and there is natural gifts.   Maybe the Mozart's of the world are born with an inclination for both?   Combine a natural ability to learn with a natural desire to learn and that's a lethal combination, eh?
I think there is something to that.   I recently ran across this guy who claimed that spending 5 minutes on a particular technique and then moving on to other techniques over an hour's time was more productive than working on a single technique the entire hour.   I've been trying it and I think it has some merit.   Something to do with brain training.

This is a very interesting topic to me.  Something I've spent a lot of years thinking about, as well as researching.  The "final word" I've seen is not intuitively obvious, but very compelling.  If you'd like the details, you can look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but the elevator pitch goes like this: 1. people compute their assessment of "competence", both in themselves and in others, with the same part of the brain the computes the actual skill.  Therefore: 2. incompetent people are completely incapable of understanding their own lack of competence.  3. Competent people tend to believe, through "false consensus", that everyone else is just as competent as they are.  The old saying "the more I know, the more I know I don't know" is actually a truism, along with "the less someone knows, the less they know how little they know." 

Can "competence" be learned?  In some cases, yes, in some cases, no.  A person who is "tone deaf" cannot learn to sing on key.  All the practice in the world will not "cure" tone deafness, just as some forms of blindness can be cured, and some can't.  Hard work alone isn't enough...there also has to be a potential there. 

So...a new "technique" may work for you...and it may not.  The only way to find out is to try.  It all depends on whether or not you have the potential for that technique to work. 

All men are *not* created equal.  ;-) 

[Codewalker]

If you want a reliable network of individual user-run volunteer nodes, I can see creating an umbrella software capable of making sure that you always have at least four nodes up-and-running (or more, for greater reliability), and if one drops, immediately designate a replacement and copy any necessary software and data to the new node.  Easy to code?  No.  But pretty much bulletproof, if that's what you want.  :-)

That was one of the early ideas that I considered, but quickly dismissed.

Using full server redundancy for validation is impractical. Those types of setups -- VMWare HA is a software-only implementation that is similar -- require that the redundant nodes run in lock-step with each other and synchronize everything. Every instruction, every memory access, every bit of state is exactly the same across the instances. That more or less requires they be in physical proximity to meet the immense bandwidth and latency requirements.

Even breaking that down and doing it at a higher level would mean synchronizing all game state across multiple servers at once, dramatically increasing bandwidth requirements while severely impacting scalability. It makes the system that much more fragile and easy to shut down, since it requires multiple servers to be online and in sync at once - the exact opposite of the goal of making it bulletproof and resilient to tampering. You can pretty much kiss local mode goodbye as well.

[Thunder Glove]

Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here going "Ogre was a board game?", since I only played it on the Commodore 64 and had no idea where was a physical version (though I can totally see it now, since the C64 game was just a screen full of hexes and pieces that moved along them).

Actually, that's not all I'm thinking of.  I was reading this article, and wishing that NCSoft had cared enough to do the same thing with CoH.

[Shadowsmith]

Ogre is an awesome board game. I still wish I had been able to afford the deluxe edition when it Steve Jackson Games did the kickstarter for it. I still play the Microgame version of Ogre several times a year.

Back in the 80's, my friends and I worked up rough rules to use an Ogre in Car Wars. And then Autoduel Champions brought us superheroes vs. Ogres.

Being able to do stuff like that in an online computer game environment would be incredible. It would also be a massive time suck, but a fun one!