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Shards Online adds permadeath ruleset
Shards Online's Kickstarter campaign is on fire, having blown past its $50K fundraising goal and now plowing through stretch goals. With eight days to go on the campaign, who knows how far it'll get, but there's one thing for certain: Thanks to passing the $80,000 mark, the fantasy sandbox will incorporate permadeath into some of its server rulesets. For the stretch goal, the developers wrote, "We will add an extra official ruleset to Alpha One with increased skill gains and permanent death! Not only will we have this ruleset running on some of our official servers, but players will be able to run these rules on their own community servers."
H1Z1 floats possible server rulesets
A short Reddit post from SOE revealed a few possible server rulesets that the team has been discussing for H1Z1. While these aren't set in stone, it is an interesting peek into the possibilities of both official and player-run servers. The possible server rulesets include: Hardcore ruleset (wipes all ownership and recipes upon death) PvP vs. PvE Military weapons toggle Guns toggle (melee/bows only server) Roleplay (VOIP attracts zombies and other tidbits) World chat vs. area chat Hardcore ruleset #2: Starvation! (food and water consumption are much higher) Hardcore ruleset #3: Zombies and wolves are deadlier, faster, and hardier Base destructibility (easy, hard, not at all) SOE also indicated that it would be possible to create rulesets that mix-and-matched between these ideas.
Shards Online launches its Kickstarter
If you had a dollar for every Kickstarter MMO that advertised itself as a fantasy sandbox, you'd have... well, a fair bit of money. We've lost count. Shards Online, though, is a bit of a different beast, as it's not reserving its sandbox nature to mechanics. Players will be able to influence and take control of server rules, creating individual shards where things are arranged just right for particular playstyles. The prospect of unlimited custom rulesets for servers is pretty different, isn't it? The game's Kickstarter campaign has just launched, aiming for $320,000 by 6/12/14. It includes most of the things that you'd expect in an MMO Kickstarter -- beta access, digital copies, and so forth. If you've got $10,000 to throw at the game, you can even get a custom-designed house and have the developers show up as gods to run a one-time live event. If you're interested in the concepts, check out the Kickstarter and consider throwing a few dollars toward it.
Stay on target: SWTOR's guilds begin to align with phase 2
Star Wars: The Old Republic's release may feel like it's always going to be in a "galaxy far, far away," but at least BioWare is giving guilds something substantial to do in preparation for launch. Following up the first phase of guild formation, today the studio announced that guilds can now progress into the second phase: alignment. During this phase, guild leaders can establish up to three guilds as their Allies or Adversaries (depending on the target guild's faction). Not only will this help to cement friendships and rivalries, but BioWare says that these connections "will have the highest chance of being placed in the game together, allowing these guilds to coexist on the same server." This won't happen if the guilds have chosen different server rulesets, however. Another new feature that's come with this phase is the ability for leaders and officers to begin inviting people to the guild by email. The SWTOR website has a helpful FAQ for all three phases of guild preparations. The third phase, deployment, is scheduled to occur shortly before launch and will begin placing guilds on servers if these guilds have met certain criteria.
The Perfect Ten: Non-vanilla server rulesets
I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your default PvE, your same-as-PvE-except-we-have-a-naming-policy PvE-RP, and the two player vs. player variants: PvP and PvP-RP. Those are all well and good, but... y'know... couldn't rulesets be used to create fascinating variations on these games? It turns out that yes, yes they can. While the vanilla rulesets are the vast majority, there does exist a group of fringe rulesets that dared to walk the different patch, er, path and made versions of MMOs that are a bold and refreshing flavor. Like blue! Sometimes these new rulesets were whipped up to inject new life into an aging title, giving players a valid reason to come back and see the game from a different perspective. In this week's Perfect Ten, we're going to check out just how wild 'n' wacky server rulesets can get!
The Daily Grind: Create-a-Server
In this day and age, it seems as though servers have checked their creativity at the doors. PvE, PvP, RP, RP-PvP come as standard as red, green, blue and yellow in a Crayon four-pack. Hey, if it ain't broke, right? These four server rulesets do their job admirably, and for most people, that's good enough. It's almost easy to forget that devs have the ability to create rulesets that strike out in different directions, such as permadeath servers (oh yes, I went there) and progression servers (where a server resets to the core game, with expansions added at a steady pace). Of course, on rare occasion you do see a game experiment with unusual rulesets, such as EverQuest's 51/50 server. More recently, Realtime Worlds announced that they're contemplating a slew of unique rulesets for APB, including newbie, Chaos and pure skill. So the potential is there for servers to branch out -- it's just that, for various reasons, the risk is seen as not worth the potential reward. But this is The Daily Grind, a place to unleash your imagination and engage the "What if?" in its full glory. So if you could create a unique ruleset server for your game, what would it entail?
