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Holdpoint Online - sandbox MMORPG announces release date
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Wow smh, no wonder I am, so disliked around these boards...
Nobody looks out for each other in today's Socieity.
let me guess,, you are a FFA PvP gamer huh? You play EvE?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
You do not go out to the people if you have nothing to show. Simple.
If the game is already in production it would be no problem to make one freaking screenshot of anything at all to prove point. Anything at all to make you legit. So I call scam. That or a one person garage project.
ah, you took that the wrong way, I was just joking with you about the JLP in ´my´ thread. Anyone who has been here awhile knows what to expect.
I am going to stage some screenshots in the next couple days when we run through another world. The problem is that players literally start on the beach with nothing but a couple crates of weapons. So in our base world, there is no ´player city´ to take screenshots of. What buildings get built in what order is up to where the players put their resources and time. The huge majority of the world is just open terrain, which in screenshots or videos does not look vastly different than what are in the videos on the website already. I will do it, but I don´t think taking a screenshot of the environment that is already in the videos and including creatures that are going to be just what is already on the website is going to prove anything.
But I will run a sim shortly and build out some of the early buildings and stuff like that to get some screenshots. But I am going to put a lot of warnings about it being a sim. because I really don´t want players, especially the first 2000 thinking they are going to log in and find a full player city and all that stuff ready. A big part of the fun (for us devs) is not knowing what priorities the players will have and what city projects they will focus on.
I will also get some screenshots up of the early forts and of the forts being attacked. That is fairly easy to rig although I will have to cheat and put the Followers on the ramparts to make it look good. As I mentioned earlier, we are still fighting with the pathfinding AI to get the Followers to go to the ideal spots to defend the fort. Not to throw too much ´hotdog factory´ out there. But right now the followers are pretty stupid about guarding walls on the wrong side of the fort. But we will have it fixed shortly.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
Exposed, I try to make it a point to try all sandbox games plus it's known iv been outspoken about ffa pvp and responded to some of your ridiculous threads, so your question is just a ruse. Secondly, calling every developer a scammer isn't in anyway "helping" anybody in on this site or our society.
Please keep in mind we aren't talking about buying property or vehicles here, this is a video game and 30 bucks isn't going to ruin anybody. Again, I do not support scams I just want people to use their brains. I think everyone can agree donating at this point of development is not a sound decision but did we really need to take down the link? How about not clicking the link and waiting for more tangible evidence of an actual game.
P.S I for one, don't dislike you and additionally don't need you to look out for me... but Thanks.
reading through your site and your "game" ideas, there is so much nonsense and a lot of times the information doesn't even make sense and a lot of times just goes of on tangents. Please some one read this and tell me if this has and detail that actually explains how you will actually be dealing with these supposed problems that are encountered in the typical mmorpg. The offline section doesn't even make sense its just a bunch of ideas that wouldn't work in any mmo, how is a player going to terraform his land offline? How is he going to write books with knowledge that he has none of since he is offline ? In the exploitation area you talk about how you think you're going to fix exploits, marcroing, cheating etc but you talk about it but still there is nothing in there that actually tells us how it will be fixed, you give us a paragraph of nonsensical information and an experience you have then leave with some questions that have no relevance to the actual subject matter. In fact all the information about the game is so generic, so nonsensical in other areas. If the goal is to show off the design doc of the game then this is most unprofessional way to do it, as it comes no where near what a real design of a game or mmo would be. All there is, is ideas of a game that are so vague, at time contradicting, confusing.
As someone said earlier where are the sceens of gameplay, if you're 1 year away from release there would still be a ton of concept art, designs, models, early gameplay prototypes. For example look a camelot unchained they have everything that is needed to prove that they are creating an actual game and they are still a long way from being fully released. Look at Star Citizen they have had information from the very beginning. You excuse for being on the down low is in my eyes an excuse to hid the fact there isn't anything to show, any game that is one year away from release would have a lot more than you have. I've worked in the industry and there are no excuses for not being prepared even if you're on the downlow trying to keep the hype low which i don't believe for one moment. Please prove me wrong but as it stands what you have as a website is just downright a joke and embarrassing. To put a link out for money also at this stage is just laughable even if it's an option, as you said and i'm quoting " And before someone asks if we can really develop a game for $5 per month, the answer is easily. We have been doing it for the past couple years for free and our only costs of the game once we go live scales with the number of players. We also have a couple of other revenue sources involving the game that do not directly involve players that help us to develop the game faster, which I will maybe talk about in a future dev note.." so why do you need money from players subscribing at this point when you just said that you only need money once it goes live.
please again I say prove me wrong cause there is nothing here that says or even remotely rings MMORPG.
Please read below and tell me if it makes sense, these are some of the examples of just generic, nonsensical writing that is not near anything that I've seen as design or design process.
OFFLINE ACTIVITIES - READING AND WRITING BOOKS
One thing we really wanted to bring to Holdpoint Online was a sense that your character is alive, always doing something and an important part of the community. The other part is that we wanted to give players a way to advance their character a little bit even if they couldn´t log in. At launch, there will be four things that players can perform while offline and these activities can only be performed offline. These will be set up in 12 hour blocks with a maximum of 48 hours of activities queued (4 blocks). Players can set up the same activity to run for each block, or have 4 different activity or any combination.
The first activity is fortification and can be performed either on the main city, or the player´s individual fort. This activity involves simply taking a log and applying it to the outer wall, which increases the overall wall strength. If the player is fortifying the city walls, the log will come from the cities resources, if they are strengthening their own fort, the log must be located in the player´s fort´s storehouse. In either case, the player´s skill in fortification will determine how much strength is added to the wall with each log.
The second activity is terraforming. This is process of clearing trees and rocks from an area of the map and flattening the terrain. Players will need to terraform land before they can build their fort on it. After their fort is built, they can continue to terraform the land surrounding their fort in order to increase the effectiveness of the archery skill of the hirelings within the fort (better and longer shooting lanes and preventing rocks and trees from being used as cover by creatures)
So, just to use some fake numbers. A person with 50 in mining and 10 in writing might produce a book that has a knowledge value of 4 in mining. That book can then be used by other players to raise their skill in mining by a maximum of 4 points. Books created by players can be sold to the bookstore or given to other players. Important note, books have durability, but are not destroyed after a single use. The collection available in the bookstore should increase over time, both in the number of books, and the knowledge contained in those books
The last offline activity available at launch is reading books. Another player can either give you a book, or you can purchase (and later resell) from the bookstore. Each book will have a skill, and a maximum knowledge value. The amount of skill points you receive from a book is based on the knowledge value of the book, your skill in reading, and your current level in the skill you are trying to learn. Skill gains from reading books drop off rapidly as your own skill in that ability increases. A person with 50 in mining with a writing skill of 10 would be able to teach very little to a person with a mining skill of 90, even if that player is a great reader.
NEW PLAYER AND CASUAL PLAYER CATCH-UP MECHANISMS
One problem that many MMORPGs face is how to allow new players to catch up and not be eternally behind players who play frequently or from the beginning. The truth is, there should always be a reward for dedicated and long-time players, but it shouldn´t feel punitive to new players. With that in mind, we are going to launch our game with one direct system to aid casual and new players, we are calling this the zero buff system. The system works simply enough. A portion of players with the highest total skill points will become the zero group. Let´s say we use 10 players to form our zero group and each of them have around 800 total skill points. Any players not in the zero group will receive a bonus to their skill gains depending on how far they are behind the zero group (the zero group is so named because their buff will be 0). So if the zero group is around 800 skill points, a player with 750 skill points might get a .5% increase in skill gains, while a new player would get the maximum of 10%. Of course skill gains will come quickly to that new player, so the buff will decrease over time which prevents the new player from ever using it to catch older players. We hope there will be two side benefits of the system. The first is that being a zero is seen as a small badge of honor. The other is that casual players and really anyone else who receives the buff will be happy that there are more hardcore players, because it increases their personal skill gains.
EXPLOITING
With any skill based system, one of the most important, if not THE most important aspect is to reduce exploits, macroing, or just unnatural gameplay. We define unnatural gameplay simply as performing any action, one or more times, solely for the purpose of gaining skill points. This is not allowed in Holdpoint Online. I will give you an example from a game I played a couple years ago. I started a few weeks after the game launched, I created my character and logged in. The very first thing I saw once logged in was dozens of characters either shooting fireballs into the air, or attacking trees. Almost all were unattended macroing, but a few were doing it while chatting. After a few weeks more, the devs decided that unattended macroing was not allowed, but as long as the players were there and chatting, it was ok, even if they were attacking trees for skill gains. At Holdpoint Online, we are going to do anything within our power to prevent players from feeling like it is necessary to ´train´ a skill before actually using it in a live environment. While exploiting and macroing are easy to spot and deal with, unnatural gameplay is a bit more nuanced. Here are some easy questions to ask. Are you throwing away resources, gold or time only to get skill gains with no other real benefit to the action? Are you purposefully putting the life of your character in danger for the sole purpose of skill gains?
We have spent a lot of time and resources in creating tools that will spot unnatural gameplay and zoom our GMs to that players location. Our hope is that with the lack of milestones, and with basements in place that prevent skills from feeling useless at low levels, we can reduce the desirability of players to ´train´ skills. The other part is that we are trying to create as compelling of gameplay as possible so that players are having fun just playing the game without focusing on numbers on a character screen.
Of course that is the holy grail of all games that use a skill system and we are not naive enough to think it will work for all players. For those players, we hope our detection methods and punishments are strong enough to deter that type of gameplay. And trust me, we spent a lot of time on this. We are constantly going down our list of skills trying to find methods players will use to train those skills unnaturally. In the case of macroers or exploiters, punishment generally will be zeroing of all skills and loss of all inventory (basically the character starts completely over) as a first warning. For those that are obviously playing the game unnaturally and abusing something in the game, the punishment will be zeroing the skill they are trying to train. For players who are performing borderline activities that appear to be unnatural, they will get kicked from the game and be forced to read and acknowledge our policies regarding unnatural gameplay before entering the game again.
In closing, We are well aware that many skill based games in the past have encouraged, or at least partially required unnatural gameplay to raise skills to a playable level, therefore many of our players may be coming to Holdpoint Online with those expectations. We hope we can show players it is not needed here as well as warn them of the punishments if they try, but always being mindful of the fact that for most players, this is not their first MMORPG. Trust me, I have been there. I spent many hours parrying against a bladespirit under stairs, or ´sail north´ while playing a harp, or best of all, stealing countless daggers from my own packhorse.. We do not want our game to require any of that, but we understand it will be a hurdle for us to show players that it doesn´t.
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The community (not sure that is the right word!!!) on this site sucks, sorry for that OP.
Game sounds interesting and I look forward to reading and seeing more of the game by following the CLEARLY STATED MEDIA RELEASE SCHEDULE that it seems some illiterate, rude or socially inept individuals commenting seem to have ignored in their rush to be THAT angry kid!
Good luck and hope it goes well.
The offline activities is pretty simple to understand ( especially if you have played EVE). I really am not sure what you are confused about.
1. Writing books, as explained. Before you log off, you queue up that activity. What happens is very easy. You choose a skill you want to write about, and when you log back in, you then have a book that you can sell. The strength of the book is a combination of your skill level in the skill you want to write about and your skill level in writing. So say you have 50 in mining and 5 in writing. Before you log off, you choose to produce a mining book. When you next log back in ( assuming enough time has passed), in your inventory you will have ´a book written about mining´ that has 3 skill points ( depending on your skill in mining and your ability to write). As your writing skill increases, you can apply a higher % of your skill to the actual book
2. You then give or sell the book to another player. Before that player logs off, he can chose to ´read book´ and select the mining book. When that player logs back in again, they will gain skill points in mining based on the power of the book and their own reading skill level. As your reading skill increases, you ´get´ more benefit from the books you read.
3. Terraforming - no idea why this is confusing. When you log off, you select the marker at the spot where you want to build your fort and you queue the terraforming skill. When you log back in, the land will be flatter and some rocks and trees will be removed. When the land is completely flat and without obstacles, you can then build your fort on it.
4. Fortifying - Again, very simple. You select either the city wall, or your own fort, and while you are logged off, you will use logs to increase the strength of the walls. So when you log back in, you will be down a few logs, but the walls you selected will be more powerful.
Each of these activites take real time, so they compete against each othe because you can only do one of them at a time.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
I agree. No one is forcing anyone to pre-order or throw any other type of money at this project. Besides, I say if you are dumb enough to at this stage with what little is shown you deserve what you get if indeed it were vaporware (Which I am not saying i is at this time).
I hope you have plans beyond players just cooperating to build forts/cities up, secure them, then rinse and repeat further into the landscape. That may get quite monotonous quickly. I guess unless the further in you go, the harder they become to conquer. Features like the possibility to make allies with some of the local inhabitants, maybe enslave certain creatures to assist you, etc would be nice as well. At some point.
I will definitely bookmark it and keep an eye on it's progress. It sounds very interesting. GL with this and hope to see more in the coming months.
There are 4 offline activities that will be available at launch ( although we are still debating if we should make reading and writing a city project like a library). But besides those 4 activities, there are 2 other offline activites that will be available after players complete certain city projects. Like everything in the game, we plan on adding more options for offline activies and implement them based on city projects were it make sense.
In this way, the community of players has the power to determine which things they want and in what order. We may have a really cool ( in our minds) crafting system to add to the game, and implement it through city project. Well, the players may hate the idea of that crafting system and just not devote resources to the city project, so it won´t get actually be useable in the game for months.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
Wow, some people, Op has repeatedly said he's not asking for money just showing his game and people still talk about money.
Ill link one of the vids because people seem unable to read or hear someone out
All guy wants you to do is follow the game and keep an eye on it, why is that so hard to understand lol?
The game look interesting i must say, very nice ideas. Site need a bit more appeal :P, but looks great.
I can only wish you good luck with this project: it sounds quite cool and original !
I also was surprise with the videos: ok it's only landscape but they are beautiful; I hope the interface match this quality.
The game's webpage does not have any info about the devs or organization behind the game.
Whois.com reveals that holdpoint-online.com was registered 4 days ago to Peter Cedesse in Nicaragua.
On their homepage they have several dev journals that are dated before the webpage was even registered.
I claim this project is a well made scam.
I hope you have plans beyond players just cooperating to build forts/cities up, secure them, then rinse and repeat further into the landscape. That may get quite monotonous quickly. I guess unless the further in you go, the harder they become to conquer. Features like the possibility to make allies with some of the local inhabitants, maybe enslave certain creatures to assist you, etc would be nice as well. At some point.
I will definitely bookmark it and keep an eye on it's progress. It sounds very interesting. GL with this and hope to see more in the coming months.
yeah, I wish we could get past the money. We don´t want your money yet. If we get a few hundred more people to do the alpha stuff and give feedback on the character creation system, that is great. but it is not really a priority right now. In December and January we will start pressing for your money!! haha
It is hard to predict gameplay of others, but I will tell you how I would play the game. We anticipate forts for the average player to last about 2-3 months, and there will be a constant transition you will go through. When you first get into an area, it will take most of your time to just beat back the warbands and keep the enemy forts and camps around you in check. But as a month goes by, you will gradually get the upper hand, and then is the time you start exploring for your next location. And so while will have a fort in a relatively safe place, your actually character will be clearing some camps in a different area so that it is not all crazy when you do first build your new fort there. Just by exploring a new area, you can get a general idea of how tough it will be for you to put a fort there. Is there a huge ogre fort nearby, or just a couple caves.
Very important point.. the world is random. On purpose, we decided NOT to have a gradual increase in difficulty as you get further from the player city. No joke, we actually rolled dice to determine the location and strengths of the main enemy civilizations. We did not want even the appearance of having ´zones´ where you level through and they gradually get harder. Players will have to be semi-intelligent and not put a tiny fort in an area where there is a capital city with 10,000 ogres. You landed randomly on a beach, the civilizations that are already there are not going to realign themselves in order of difficulty based on your landing spot.
We stated that there is no endgame, and that is true. There is no major shift in gameplay that happens when you reach a certain level. ´Endgame´ will be when a bunch of highly skilled players build forts surrounding an enemy capital. But the gameplay will remain the same, just a little more intense. The other thing, but this isn´t exclusive to enemy capitals, is that some city projects are actually far away from the city. Some of the most important ones will involve destroying an enemy capital, which are the requirements for finding out about some new god ( which opens up a completely different school of magic). (see the magic section of our site).
Forts are not permanent like housing would be in UO, but they are also not extremely temporary. Probably the most aggressive players will be moving their fort every month, but then a player focusing on crafting, or who wants their fort to be in a relatively safe place my have the same fort for 5 or 6 months. The aggressive player would have to have more followers and probably have to buy logs in order to keep the fort from getting destroyed, but would also earn more gold in bounties because his fort is getting attacked more often and with larger forces.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
How much have they scammed from you so far or are you just making shit up?
Jesus it is no wonder we don't get many independents any more as the playerbase is totally fucked up!
He is telling the truth http://www.whois.com/whois/holdpoint-online.com
<blockquote><i>Originally posted by Vrika</i>
<br><b><p>The game's webpage does not have any info about the devs or organization behind the game.</p><p>Whois.com reveals that holdpoint-online.com was registered 4 days ago to Peter Cedesse<strong> in Nicaragua.</strong></p><p>On their homepage they have several dev journals that are dated before the webpage was even registered.</p><p>I claim this project is a well made scam.</p></b></blockquote>
<p> </p>
yep, we only launched the domain name a few days ago. We had some issues because we were trying to get the domain name ´www.holdpoint.com´ and had some back and forth with the owners who were not using it.. in the end, we just went with www.holdpoint-online.com rather then spending months haggling with someone who was taking 2 weeks to reply to emails.
The dev team is all over the place, mostly in the USA. There are currently 8 people who have contributed work to the project ( not including the artists we contracted and then a bunch more we bought assets from).
BTW.. if you really want to spot a scam.. you should look for the guys who make their whois private.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
I would think, that since this is an MMORPG website, that the owners of this website would do a review of your game pre-release or at least do an interview. IF getting gaming news out is really their angle and not just getting paid for advertisements. Have you even spoke to them? Or the other websites that post the same sort of information?
Again, how much has he been scammed for otherwise it is all conjecture or at worst slander!
No doubt. I've seen plenty of independents that ended up being vaporware. I put ZERO cash into any of them. Why? Because I have a brain and patience and watched how they progressed...or didn't and made determinations for myself.
Screaming FAKE right away isn't helpful to the potential developer at all. Especially if it ends up legit. You pretty much kill the project right away turning people away. As I said before...if a person is dumb enough to throw money at something that sounds good right away without enough info and tangible evidence to support it's real...they deserve what they get. But no one is telling you to or forcing you to.
Wait, watch and see how it progresses. The OP even said to bookmark it and keep an eye on it. Relax already.
lol tried calling the admin phone number to the person who registered the site, the number doesn't even exist. For a site that was created 3 days ago sure seems odd the person who registered it doesn't have a proper contact number.
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Yep, this is all planned for around December when we think the game will be finished. As of right now, we really don´t want too much hype because we want to have a slow, staggered launch.
It really is strange in a way. I personally was sick to death of games that were hyping themselves 4 years in advance. just to be clear, this is our goal
For right now, until December - create this thread and a few similar ones on other games sites to get a few hundred people following the game. People who like what we have designed, but will challenge us on our ideas. There are a lot of smart players out there who can read something on a website and say ´well, won´t players just do this...´.. this is especially true of a game with skill gains where players will always try to game the system. So we want nothing other than some people loosely following the game, challenging us on our ideas. From this group, we would grab our alpha testers for January(ish).
In December or January, when we have every system in the game working the way we want it, then we start doing real PR and interviews and ´waste´ our dev time on stuff like that. For now, we really don´t want to do that type of stuff because we have a lot of work left to do in the game. So in January, we will start doing the PR stuff, and at the same time add some easy fluff stuff to the game.
To me, it just makes no sense with our release schedule to overhype the game this early. It takes a lot of time away from coding. We will save that stuff for when we are mostly done.
Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
Then wait an see? That's all the Op is asking you do. Forget about the paying for anything, just browse and bookmark the site
you need to look up what the word ´detras´ means in spanish and understand how directions are given in latin america and most of the world. You don´t give a street address, instead you start with a famous building ( like a hotel) and give directions from that point.Lead developer of Holdpoint Online a PvE-only sandbox MMORPG. www.holdpoint-online.com Launching July, 2015
Best of luck, OP. Sounds like a good sandbox. There are way too many AAA titles running the show, so I'll wish you luck rather than anything else. See you in two months.
All this talk about money is kind of stupid. Discuss the game until September. There's really no point in anything else.