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.

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[mod-man]

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.

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.

[Conan]

For the server cycling, have a sort of hall of fame to have people compete to get up on there

you could have global and non-global ones
ex: all-time biggest businesses, all-time tallest structures; vs cycle 1 biggest businesses, cycle 1 tallest structures

and for more funsies you could name each cycle and have some kind of unique perk or ability per cycle. ex: zero gravity, cheap bricks, lot sizes, dm's, zdm's, creeper gamemode, etc.

[Munkey]

This was my favorite gamemode of all time, very glad to see it coming back! :)

[DrenDran]

And from what this sounds like, this is just as good, if not better, than the farming simulator DrenDran set up a while ago. That was very competitive and fun.

hey wait that's me!

I still don't get what you guys got against collecting resources yourself?
I mean, I liked RoB for what it was, but in the end it's a lot of waiting around. Perhaps theres a chance you're fortunate enough to build while you wait, but still, it's waiting.
The challange for Mr. Wallet should be to make something where you get resources yourself, e.g. making your success based on effort, but not making it feel like just another grind.

and for more funsies you could name each cycle and have some kind of unique perk or ability per cycle. ex: zero gravity, cheap bricks, lot sizes, dm's, zdm's, creeper gamemode, etc.

It would be fun to shoot zombies and such on the build we all made together...

[Monkeyboy]

taxes would make it possible to have losses, so players would have to actively bring money in. stalemated companies would slowly go out of business. not something I necessarily want, but I think that's the reason people want them.

I think that the 6-8 week range is a good idea, instead of Wesley's suggestion. some people are going to dominate the market, that's a given. a few players are going to play the game a lot and be undeniable giants... if Mr Wallet just put them out of business so that new ones could flourish, what's the point of being top dog if you could just go out business?

I still think that a DM arena would be easy to set up; just make a /dm command that gives players a weapon and new spawn point. maybe a (very) low reward for killing other players

if you're going to make a reward for killing players, please take into account that some people are going to try to farm money by letting each other kill get free kills, free money. this is where the betting idea could be used, I think it would be really fun



what if, if you do make a DM aspect, players could buy better guns? this would give money another use, and would make betting on fights more interesting

[Sleven]

Are you able to transfer money or w/e between players? Because one income source I really would like to try out would be to sell my building skills, aka building stuff for people for payment.

[Mr. Wallet]

No, transactions were strictly controlled to be "he gets this right now and you get that right now and they're quantifiable things that can be transferred." This was mostly because 1. with arbitrary transactions and gifting, the rate of scamming would go up enormously, especially since the playerbase has a lot of naive kids, and 2. the moment you open the doors to "do whatever you want with this system" it becomes atrociously difficult to ensure that there are no loopholes that break the gameplay. The fact that it's a big coding investment per fun generated is a big factor too.

[Machinima]

I hope this comes back I have fond memories of salezk, mr cookie , slevens tech/fud/mat shops.  As well as my own fud shop on two ocasiones.

Really lots of good fun i had in your server.

[masslead]

Wait who on blockland?

[MrCookie]

Are you able to transfer money or w/e between players? Because one income source I really would like to try out would be to sell my building skills, aka building stuff for people for payment.

it'd be like dota lol where ppl funnel all their money to one guy who'll get a huge headstart and destroy the others

[Mr. Wallet]

People need some seed stuff to get started or the game isn't fun enough for anyone to come back after their businesses produce something, so the number one problem would be

A: How do I play?
B: I'll teach you.
*A gives all money and resources to B*

or A could even do it deliberately to help out a friend with no intention of playing himself, giving B an unfair advantage. At least in RoB boosting was at best selling your product max-expensively, but prices were capped anyway, so you could only receive so much money from an accomplice at once because you only had so much to sell. It wasn't perfect (and nothing ever will be) but it was better than a free-for-all.