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Monday, July 28, 2008
WoWGuild Manager Live
People sometimes ask me how I come up with all these ideas for blog posts. Most of the time I don't know myself. But this one I literally dreamt up. Woke up in the middle of the night with a vivid memory of having dreamt about this non-existing game: WoWGuild Manager Live (WML). I played WoW and Football Manager Live the day before, and my brain mixed the two up in my dreams.
In WML you play the manager of a World of Warcraft guild. You start by hiring players of different classes and stats. Unlike the real WoW, you need to pay the players a daily wage, out of a daily income based on your fame, so you can't directly hire large numbers or the best players. Every player has his regular WoW stats and talents, but also mental abilities like patience, punctuality, or lootwhoring. You put together a team, 10 players at first, define a series of tactics, and send them on a raid. Their success in the raid depends on their stats, and how adapted your tactics were to the particular challenge and the player's particular strengths and weaknesses. You can watch the raid, but it is only displayed with colored dots on a 2D map, and in fast forward. But you can press a time-out button and adjust tactics or bring in substitutes if there is a problem. Sometimes there are emergency time-outs, for example if a player left in the middle of the raid, or there is a guild drama random event.
By succeeding in raids your guild gains in fame and daily income. Your player's stats increase due to experience and the epic loot they got (not shown in detail). You can auction players off to other managers, and in regular intervals there are wage auctions where other managers can try to steal your players away by offering them higher wages in a sealed bid system. You might also be forced to sell or let go players because of some players not getting along with another one, or retiring. But if you manage your team well, you'll be able to raid harder dungeons, and ultimately the even harder 25-man dungeons.
I don't think anybody will make this game, I really just dreamt it. It plays just like Football Manager Live, only with WoW guilds and raids instead of football teams and matches. Maybe I'm missing the kind of computer RPGs where you controlled more than just one character, and gave strategic commands to a whole adventuring party. Apart from pets and the henchmen in Guild Wars, that aspect is sadly missing from modern MMORPGs. I'll just keep dreaming.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:15 AM Permanent Link
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I could definitely see that working as a game, maybe just shareware or something, but you've got football management, cricket management, I remember a fun little text-only Formula 1 game years back, why not Guild Manager...
Course, in a way, guild leaders already do that "management", especially in something like EVE, maybe some of the tools of sports management games could actually be quite useful... though auctioning and selling players off might not go down too well...
Course, in a way, guild leaders already do that "management", especially in something like EVE, maybe some of the tools of sports management games could actually be quite useful... though auctioning and selling players off might not go down too well...
# posted by 
: 28/7/08 08:53
: 28/7/08 08:53
Squaresoft beat you to it. My Life as a King is a game where you manage dungeon-crawling adventuring parties and the city that they use as a base.
Funny one, we can only hope for someone to make this wacky dream into a game. Anyways, Tobold, you should play more rpgs where you control a team. I'm currently pushing through Etrian Odyssey 2 and Rondo of Sword 2 on the DS, and I'd recommend both for play. Have their flaws, yet they are enjoyable games.
A good reason to break out the old Baldur's Gate - that's what I did when I got the itch to play a AD&D-based group adventure. I still don't think it's been done better before or since.
# posted by : 28/7/08 16:17
: 28/7/08 16:17
The fact that you can even design this game shows the extreme nature of raiding.
What if individual baseball players had to look for teammates, coach them, deal with intra-team problems, and the whole mess of other concerns that managers also get?
There would be a very small number of baseball players who are hardcore enough to also manage.
Just like there are a very small number of WoW players who are hardcore enough to also manage.
Raiding has always bothered me because the majority of the work in raiding is an externality that is simply the addition of 24 (or 39) other egos. It has very little to do with the game itself and a lot more to do with people.
That's bad design.
What if individual baseball players had to look for teammates, coach them, deal with intra-team problems, and the whole mess of other concerns that managers also get?
There would be a very small number of baseball players who are hardcore enough to also manage.
Just like there are a very small number of WoW players who are hardcore enough to also manage.
Raiding has always bothered me because the majority of the work in raiding is an externality that is simply the addition of 24 (or 39) other egos. It has very little to do with the game itself and a lot more to do with people.
That's bad design.
# posted by : 28/7/08 16:37
: 28/7/08 16:37
That's a pretty good idea Tobold. Wouldn't it be interesting if WoW had a solid enough meta culture to sustain a supply of well-known wow players to populate the game with--players of noteriety to make it quaint enough to be fun, like the inevidable Leroy Jenkins character that every manager kills for though he only functions to wipe your raid. I suppose you could find the more recongnized players of each class to make the echilons and then fill in the rest with generic "Steve Mountain-Dew Johnson" or "Josh High-school-student Filman" players.
Another fun idea you had was having personality skills with yoru guild players. Which made me think, What if these meta-gaming skills were actually incorporated into WoW? The ones you mentioned were patience, lootwhoring, etc. What if there were some defining formulas based on the way you played your character, or maybe some character creation sequence, that would determine his "personality" as he developed into a grown up lvl 70? And then you would have a second breed of classes. You could do a D&D morality spectrum and then correlate it with grouping bonuses: evil stacks for +dmg. You could center the system on character flaws which each character would have. For instance lack of patience would cause an increasing character de-buff after dying so many times in a raid. Stubborness trait would gradually apply long lasting +tomiss debuffs on spells the character infrequently uses. Rage trait would cause the game to sporatically control your character and cause him to charge foward while in battle.
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Another fun idea you had was having personality skills with yoru guild players. Which made me think, What if these meta-gaming skills were actually incorporated into WoW? The ones you mentioned were patience, lootwhoring, etc. What if there were some defining formulas based on the way you played your character, or maybe some character creation sequence, that would determine his "personality" as he developed into a grown up lvl 70? And then you would have a second breed of classes. You could do a D&D morality spectrum and then correlate it with grouping bonuses: evil stacks for +dmg. You could center the system on character flaws which each character would have. For instance lack of patience would cause an increasing character de-buff after dying so many times in a raid. Stubborness trait would gradually apply long lasting +tomiss debuffs on spells the character infrequently uses. Rage trait would cause the game to sporatically control your character and cause him to charge foward while in battle.
# posted by : 29/7/08 01:59
: 29/7/08 01:59<< Home
