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| Participatory Power |
| Participatory Developers actively play the game and have tools within game, either special commands or game units on a higher level to facilitate the game rules being enforced. This is the most risky and innovative method, and requires a lot more thought. The risks would include unforseen events leading to the developers losing control - not everything can be tested in BETA. Other risks could be overt involvement in game play - to the detriment of development, power creep - as devs intervene just this once etc. |
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The way Earth is run in FG I think is something fairly unique to our game. It is a developer controlled world, meaning that us devs will be playing alongside players. With that said, however, Earth will be incredibly advanced technologically, so don't think that any of you can just invade and conquer us. It will be possible though to defeat Earth ships, it will just take a lot of firepower and will result in most likely considerable losses.
Earth is where we will experiment with new models, technologies, weapon systems, etc. For this reason, Earth will probably boast ships that are nothing like anything else in the game, although later on down the road these technologies and ship classes will probably be introduced for general usage. Sol is essentially going to be our testing ground.
Matt, Fragmented Galaxy Developer
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| The crew at Fragmented Galaxy aim to participate as an advanced Sol faction/system with full on use of custom admin units and skills to enforce game/system rules. Promising to be fully involved and capable of being invaded (?sounds good though)this is possibly the wildest of the methods seen so far. |
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One final thing I'd like to mention is how players will be kicked/banned (only if needed — breaking the rules), because this also relates back to Earth. In RPGs, its easy to ban a player because their avatar is erased and never appears again, but in MMORTSs there is a problem with this. Since each player controls an empire, we can't just simply make that empire disappear and turning it into rebel territory is kind of boring.
So, this is where Earth comes in. If a player needs to banned, a fleet of warships will be sent from Earth and promptly destroy all remnants of that player's empire. If we just want to punish a player, and not completely ban them, limited or total destruction save for a few colony ships may be called for. This system will give entertainment to players, will not impose any unrealistic rules on player's existence in the game, and will serve as a great way for clearing out sections of space that are unused or used in a rule-breaking manner for immediate colonization by other, more responsible, players.
Matt, Fragmented Galaxy Developer
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Defacto War: Commander in Chief, for example, sells parcels of a virtual USA for players who can build up a community or army, depending on their bent. Here the developers essentially begin the game running the Federal Government and, again, can be overthrown and replaced by players. Not too many details released atm but we hope to bring you more as soon as Guevara Studios release them to us. |
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| The previous two MMORTS games are innovative examples of such developer and player interactions and are possibly just the beginning. I imagine that flawed concepts will quickly fall and we will enter 2009 with some certainty over a smaller number of manifestations. |
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Developer Manisfestations 
