Alternatively having the game automatically iterate turns, this would require players to input a command every X (6?) seconds or stand around doing nothing. This could work, but then you have all the complications of afk players going braindead and getting eaten, long-term actions taking hours, partially finished work, and more importantly if, how and when you warp time to make the game more playable. Spending 4 hours of my life to play 4 hours in CDDA would be pretty boring.
MMORPGs can get boring, but only if you consider zounds of kids stacking up with grinding being the only thing on their minds. This is not, by all means, an intent to complicate or disapprove of your argument but, considering more than one online hack&slash commercial product, an absolute truth.
This issue, assessed througout this message board was more-than-once explained, so I reckon it is getting rather explicit. Winding up with a bad MP example is utterly unacceptable in the RL community and that is mainly because players stand shoulder to shoulder with game devs. Therefore if I was one of those developers who decided to create, say, a RL Arena sort of project, my success would be estimated by my peers - and the same goes for any of you. This open community is widely recognized as welcoming and sincere so if you bail in front of a (staggering, I must say) challenge that revolves around a massive multiplayer project you shouldn’t feel bad; it’s something well above a single-person (or dev, if you wish) idea and task. Even when it isn’t such a heavy-duty project people [i[do[/i] set aside their roguelike dreams to pursue real-life achievements and tackle those issues full-time.
Though I think I mentioned the following once before (it’s fair if it wasn’t me however), an active roguelike player almost always fails to comprehend the fact that a Multiplayer application that revolves around the internet almost always has a Server-Side configuration / application, and client / server relationships are something roguelike devs rarely deal with. Imagine having a car dealership in your neighborhood and going inside to ask for tomatoes. Even if there are certain individuals here who have witnessed a couple of roguelike-looking games going MMO, they have perhaps forgotten the real difference between the original and the commercial product that followed. That’s right, satisfying A LOT of people’s wishes over a short period of time is more than once called - commerce.
Are you wondering why?
It’s mostly due to the fact that most of the time people giving you (relatively) small ammounts of cash actually approve of your efforts, and by giving you slightly more (or consecutively paying for service) they applaud your hard work and your vision. In this case, the latter is crucial - you’ve estimated the size of a particular fan, or player-base and acted accordingly. Even if we’re not looking into the expansion and perfection of online services, most of us could agree this might be a little costly to finish, especially in a single breath.
So, why in a single breath?
Around this time last year (and perhaps a little earlier) people have been asking me to rule an adventure in a post-apoc world inspired with Cataclysm. Believe me, it wasn’t easy - being a gamemaster to a group of enthusiasts gathered around something that could become an idea, a group that has expectations and wants to have more and more fun is exactly what you people expect, and have expected from CataDDA devs for quite some time now. I know I needed to consult both those players [i[and[/i] gamemasters I’ve befriended only to make an effort - to put it plainly enough, have a shot at it.
And what now?
Creating a multiplayer game out of an open-ended, single-player roguelike game is not a dead-end, it’s a trainwreck. You (and by you, I mean the whole community gathered around a dozen of devs) would need to abandon a heap of ongoing add-ons to the game and incosiderably forfeit all future suggestions - and only to retrain the same devs to create a completely opposite thing from their doing so far. Suuure, yeeeah, oooh-gawd it would be nice to treat the game as a co-op classic arcade spin-off for the second player eager to share a game with his/her best friend and only because it’s not so, let’s say, unusual. This would, in fact, require yet another mod to be created only to be called native, so the issue is tackled gradually with one feature introduced at a time. This is exactly what you’re asking of CataDDA devs right now - mimicking another game and adapting it to Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead for a bit of extra fun.
Even if you don’t see how I’m not dwelling on some past transgressions, you should be able to see my advice which is, spoken from my heart, purchasing a codebase from another group of coders to create an open-sourced, multiplayer project roughly based upon CataDDA and its current build. Even if you oppose this idea, even if you actually play free MMOs - please consider this - businesses who own such enterprises had purchased such things in the past, even if their franchise is currently free of charge.
Some of the above are, more or less, the reasons why the Kickstarter Web Service came to be, and made so many people happy more than once in the course of its existence.
