Suggestions for player deaths, free-for-all, and balance.

[debugman18]

So there's a lot of discussion regarding how multiplayer will actually play out. I figured I'd share some of my thoughts on the biggest issues with multiplayer, and potential solutions for those issues.

 

Semi-Permadeath

 

Right now, in the game, players can obtain additional 'lives' through various means. However, there is currently no way to come back to life without a resurrection point or an amulet.

 

Let's put four players in a match. The deerclops comes, and destroys the base, and only one player lives. This is a bad situation, since now it's basically single-player. What do?

 

I suggest implementing the player skulls (found in the game files) as items to be used in a machine straight out of Frankenstein. The skull could be put into the machine, and the player whose character matches the skull, will be revived. Whether this would be instantaneous or through more complicated means is not decided.

 

Infighting

 

What is there to keep a player from taking your hard-earned loot? What is there to prevent another player from killing my Chester, or hammering down my resurrection points?

 

I suggest a solution involving in-game items, as opposed to settings.

 

Settings often do not do their job. Let's assume there's four players. One of those players is going around, killing other players. The host disables player-to-player damage. Now, the player goes around taking loot from other player's chests. The host disables cross-accessible chests. Now the player goes around taking dropped loot after a kill, for example, the deerclops eye, and puts it in his chest, preventing the victim from obtaining their item again. The player could additionally hammer down resurrection points, hammer down chests; all sorts of things to prevent the other player or players from progressing.

 

It should be to be decided amongst the players how they want to deal with each other, although a setting to disable player-to-player combat might be appropriate.

 

Public games should not be too moderated, since Don't Starve seems to cater to a free-for-all multiplayer.

 

Balance

 

A few things should be addressed for this. If a group of players decides to team up, they should not be given handicaps; that is to say, resources should not be made more abundant for the sake of multiplayer.

 

However, things that are not explicitly resources should be tweaked. For instance, the player should have to craft a map before getting access to it. The map would have to be in the player's inventory to be accessed.

 

The player's inventory size could be increased. This would make it possible to avoid chests being looted too often, by letting the player carry slightly more loot.

[Fishes220]

Welcome to halo starve thats what i thought of your title sorry it sounds like halo

[debugman18]

Welcome to halo starve thats what i thought of your title sorry it sounds like halo

 

What does any of it have to do with Halo?

[AquaAtia]

I was thinking for death is once you die without anyway of resurrection you die for good. As long as there is one player living the world is deleted. In order for the player to revive his friends he must build a Meat Effingy and it will allow for the player to rejoin (You'll just need to message him via Steam that he can come back in). Either that or similar to what you say have a skull spawn somewhere in lands you already discovered. Skulls will have an icon on the map so it can be found easially and only during the Evening you must put the skull in a grave (Like unlocking Webber_ and witniss your friend be resurrected infront of you! To keep this balenced and not allow for revives every day, a skull will only be spawned 2 days after the friend's death and like I said you need to have one friend to keep the world going. 

[imsomony]

I can't get my split-quote formatting to turn out correctly, whatevs.

 

 

Semi-Permadeath

Let's put four players in a match. The deerclops comes, and destroys the base, and only one player lives. This is a bad situation, since now it's basically single-player. What do?

 

Using this scenario, my thoughts would be that it's now a single-player game. As each player dies, the host is given the option to open their spot up for that player to rejoin, open it up for any other random player out there to join, or continue on as-is with the remaining players. If the host dies, "ownership" transfers to whoever is still alive that has been there the longest. Any new players (even if they are the old players coming back) start fresh though, like they were never there before... they start at a random world spawn point, recipes need to be relearned, pre-built items are not in their inventory, the map needs to be re-explored, etc.

 

@AquaAtia has a great idea also, the skulls and respawning your friends after X amount of time using graves.

 

 

Infighting

What is there to keep a player from taking your hard-earned loot? What is there to prevent another player from killing my Chester, or hammering down my resurrection points?

 

This will be a tough one to balance I think. In MMOs, players run the risk of other players doing exactly this. If a player chooses to invite or play with random others, that's a risk they're taking. Klei did mention that they were already considering both public and private games though, so by allowing "private", it means you can play with people of your choosing who won't troll you.

 

 

Balance

If a group of players decides to team up, they should not be given handicaps; that is to say, resources should not be made more abundant for the sake of multiplayer.

However, things that are not explicitly resources should be tweaked. For instance, the player should have to craft a map before getting access to it. The map would have to be in the player's inventory to be accessed.

The player's inventory size could be increased. This would make it possible to avoid chests being looted too often, by letting the player carry slightly more loot.

 

Agreed that resources should not be made more abundant. I do think world size should be ginormous though. While resources do seem to be more abundant because of the nature of biomes on large maps, their availability is still limited because there's only so much map to go around.

 

I like the idea of crafting a map before having access to it. I REALLY REALLY LIKE IT, especially in the case of what I mentioned above about semi-permadeath and respawning.

 

Not sure how I feel about having a larger inventory.  I see your point for sure, but the downside would be that other players could be hogs and take even more of a certain non-renewable resource and keep it on themselves.

[Maximum124]

For the loot perhaps player only loot? As in when someone kills something it drops its normal amount of loot as it does in single player, but everyone gets their own instance of the loot. So no one can pick your loot up because it only exists to you. (probably should only apply to things you've killed yourself, and players that helped you, so that players that don't help dont get anything.)