Writing your own MMO

[Monochrome]

Having some fun atm. Since the demise of CoH was announced, a team at the Titan network has been trying to write a replacement MMO with new IP while keeping the spirit of CoH.

A couple of weeks ago, Golden Girl decided she couldn't live with some of the design decisions being taken and split to make her own game, so now there are two. Basically GG's game "Heroes and Villains" will be pretty close to CoH in the way it functions, the other "The Phoenix project" will be closer to what CoH2 might have been.

H&V is using the hero engine, TPP is using the Cry(sis) engine.

I'm doing a bit of design work for TPP in 3 areas (while making the odd hopefully helpful comment on the H&V forums).

Currently working on

1. Making the market functional and less easy to exploit than the CoH one
2. Factions and alignment
3. The character selection screen (when you have a max of 4K toons on a single server, how do you find the one you want ?)

If anybody else is interested in getting involved, the Titan network http://www.cohtitan.com/ is a good place to start, from there, there's a redirect to the H&V site http://www.heroes-and-villains.com/phpb/index.php . TPP is currently migrating off the Titan forums onto their own Missing Worlds Media boards http://missingworldsmedia.com/phpbb/ (GG caught them slightly on the hop by quitting and producing a website the day she quit that she'd been working on for a couple of weeks), but you should find their stuff split between the two boards atm.

[Naaman]

1) More enticing Money Sinks. City of X had too many people with too much cash when they introduced the market, as people threw cash at it to purchase stuff other people made their own little nest egg and repeated the process.
Perhaps make everything purchasable from vendors in-game but allow rare drops to offset some of the purchase price.
Make the crafting system simpler so that it's possible to make things from scratch yourself or with assistance from Alts, not reliant on drops or players selling those drops.

2) Factions - maybe, allow differing factions different (small) buffs, or costume pieces\sets, ranks or shiny money sink items. Alignment? Not so much - have yet to see alignment system worked well; you're either a pious arse or bastard dick, you're penalised if you don't play all the way up one side or the other, generally (no matter what the box says) the 'evil' side gets the shaft  regarding alignment bonuses or they just limit the way you can play too much.

3) Filters? Archetypes, power sets, favourite pet. Set them up in subsets of your supergroup "Oh, that's the Alaskan branch of "The Super Amazing League of Heroes"

Have a chat with Swifty, he went and got hisself an edumakatin in Game Design, also watch these guys > http://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz?feature=watch they break a lot of stuff down
Mebbe not have so many alts - even you'd be hard pushed to play 4k toons

[Monochrome]

The sort of problem with factions is this.

You me and Swifty have all been playing our toons. I'm in with the Skulls, you're in with the Hellions and Swifty is pretty neutral. We wander down the street and a hellion attacks me with a baseball bat, what happens next (apart from me handing him his sorry backside) ?

The only mission I have is "Steal the artifacts from the Hellions", what can we do if we want to team and you don't want to trash your rep ?

[Naaman]

I was thinking more of "You me and Swifty have all been playing our toons. I'm in with the Skulls, you're in with the Hellions and Swifty is pretty neutral...

If Swifty want's to pull his finger out and pick which side he's on we can go rob a jewelry store and beat up on the trainee heroes in the park, or just beat up Swifty.... his choice 

Trying to have multiple factions that can oppose or ally with each other and have them interact as players is going to be a hiding into nothing keeping things straight.

Probably better with two, maybe three sides (Heroes, villians & neutral) that have factions within those sides that offer the minor shinies detailed above.
Have separate factions for players and NPCs, the players can beat on the "We're not nazis, honest" gang to either take them off the street to make the city safer or to get rid of the competition because your turf needs a fried chicken joint
Perhaps have ways that allow the factions to mix for certain missions\zones\instances "for the good of us all", "Doctor Eight Tentacles is getting too powerful, he must be taken down!!", "You need my grubby morals to get us past the gate and into the factory proper", "Just because I'm a jewel thief doesn't mean I like crack dealers outside schools"