Blockland Forums > General Discussion
Mr. Wallet's Rise of Blockland
Mr. Wallet:
Rise of Blockland always ran for 6-8 weeks, and was always intended to do so from the very very very beginning, because there's simply no way to long-term reconcile the gameplay elements of, "most of the fun is managing limited resources" and "players can earn resources faster and faster". It also gives people who didn't join at the start of a game a chance to feel like they have a better shot at being one of the big players when the next game starts. I expect this aspect of the design to remain, but I would be interested in identifying "winners" who accomplished "bests" and "mosts" and somehow giving them persistent rewards that wouldn't really give them a money-making advantage; that way people might complain a little less when their wildly successful business empire gets deleted.
That said I always strove to find money sinks that would give people an excuse to blow money on things "for funsies". You really did not need to spend much at all on your home in order to get your businesses more efficient, and many players chose to spend more than they needed to to have a spiffy house. Additionally, Gas was never strictly required for anything (not even maximizing profits, since it's always easy to outpace business production at walking speeds), but people bought it anyway because it was convenient and fun. I sometimes even put in hidden rooms you needed jets to get into. Later on I added the feature where you could buy roads between plots you owned, and were allowed to build on the sides and over them, so you could make bridges and things; this served no practice purpose whatsoever but a lot of people did it anyway.
I may finally have some free time in about a week so I'll see about poking at BL and see how much of what I remember still works, what with badspot changing all the rules all the time.
mod-man:
--- Quote from: Mr. Wallet on December 05, 2013, 12:37:11 PM ---I'll see about poking at BL and see how much of what I remember still works, what with badspot changing all the rules all the time.
--- End quote ---
this is such an exciting thing to read. rob was my favorite game to play on bl
Wesley Williams:
I think it would be pretty cool to run the game for longer, and make it easier for people to go out of business so that companies come and go like in the real world. Only those who adapt to changing demands survive. Of course, this would be hard to pull off and the current run time is fine.
Besides that, people working together to form a large company would be really neat.
Tokthree:
Maybe add things like income tax and property tax in order to cause the game to go on longer. You could have different bands of income tax based on how much the user is capable of earning and also have the income tax change based on the average amount of people in each band and how much money the average person in each band earns per day. The property tax could be based on how large the property is at the baseplate and how many floors it has by counting how many baseplates are on the property. This could have the side effect of preventing people from building those ugly-ass rainbow towers to advertise their business.
Probably extremely complicated to implement but it might make the in-game economy more interesting. I suppose it's the kind of thing that only tests can show.
You could also just add a casino or something, I dunno.
Mr. Wallet:
I never understood why people keep suggesting taxes.
Taxes exist so that government can pay for things. Government is synonymous with almighty God in this game, and doesn't need help from anyone to pay for anything.
If I want non-optional (re: forced, like taxes) community assets/services, it can just spring into existence with proportion of community wealth without actually taking any. If I want people to earn less if they hit certain income/property milestones, I can build that into the system without giving it to them and then taking it back away again.
Taxes don't actually make sense in the context of the game. As with all games that are not deliberately intended to be hyper-realistic simulations, any similarity between RoB and real life is only intended to give players a faster understanding of what is going on and what their goal is, so they can go straight into having fun.
Same goes for crime, which is also sometimes suggested: This isn't an RP server where "crime" is just a name for a game mechanic, and it's not actually crime but just a type of PvP gameplay. That mechanic doesn't fit naturally with the rest of the game, and it's only the assumptions that (RoB is supposed to be a simulation of a modern city) and (more simulation = more fun) that would make anyone think it would be a good idea in RoB; both of these assumptions are wrong. RoB is supposed to be a game that AFTER THE DESIGN IS MOSTLY FORMED happens to fit the "modern city" theme well, and more simulation does not always mean more fun.
In RoB, crime is breaking the rules. If someone breaks the rules I'm going to use admin powers to punish/ban them, and/or write a script to stop it from ever happening again.