I like the challenge idea mentioned in Cliff’s blog positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=253 but feel that sending your challenge to a specific person or persons is limiting. As I mentioned in my comment to the blog I would prefer the challenge to be submitted for all to see on the game’s hompage.
So to expand on my comment:
My whole idea isn’t new and is based on Armadillo Run’s method.
You would create a challenge maybe specifiying the types of units the opponent can use.
You would be REQUIRED by the game to ensure that the challenge was actually doable.
You could then submit the challenge to all other players to download via the website.
There would be a running highscore of the player who won the challenge in the fastest time and/or cheapest way.
Without seeing exactly how the game works it’s difficult to know how plausible all this is. For example there would have to be a cost per ship/unit and/or a way of tracking mission time.
Dragon
EDIT!:
Having re-read your post I notice your comment about “open” challenges. DOH! That will teach me to read things properly!
The other thing, is that if anyone could post an open challenge on the database, there could be a rating system for the challenges, perhaps out of 5 or 10, like on video sites. People could rate them as challenging vs fair vs fun too.
Depending on how the final game plays, there’s a lot of space to create a share and play community. You could also have online key registration for the full game to join in on challenges, and have seperate demo challenges. Having online registration would cut off a lot of the game from the pirates.
The multiplayer setup, because it’s almost a fire and forget game, would probably best be an upload/download/share/compare database style. You might even be able to use simple web interfaces to push/get the data to/from the server.
From my experience with MP from other games (partitularly SE4), this model seems to work more efficiently than direct challenges to a certain player. Besides, direct challenges can just be part of the community communications. “Hey, buddy. I just posted up a scenario {insert linkage here}. No way can you beat that one!” Having an open challenge system results in more opportunities to play against others. After all, if no one challenges you, you’ll never get to play against someone elses fleet! Also from my past experience with MP, it would be nice if these scenarios were sorted by the mods that created them (along with a download link to the relevant mod).
I think that it would also be important, from the standpoint of bragging rights, to keep track of who has beaten any given scenario. I’m imagining this complex ranking system, similar to chess. Everyone gets one vote on any given scenario’s difficulty ranking, as mentioned above by Parthon. The game generates some tiny file generated when the player beats the scenario; this basically contains the player’s final score. The player sends that back into the multiplayer server, where it is used along with the scenario’s difficulty rating to generate points. These points are added to the player’s ranking. Note that doing poorly on an easy scenario would generate negative points, causing your rank to go DOWN. This could also be done, following the chess ranking system almost exactly, in the direct player challenge system of MP.
Ok, obviously I’m putting way too much thought into this.
Anyway, since I’m new here, I haven’t said this yet. THIS GAME LOOKS AWESOME!
