Face of Mankind

[Lachlan]

I saw the thread about RPG vs. FPS combat and I wanted to throw out what I knew about FoM for those who haven't tried it. I didn't want to hijack the other thread, so here it is. Take it for what it is.

I know a lot of people have said they tried FoM and said it sucked, but I've actually had quite a bit of fun playing it. If you go into it expecting it to be like NC, you probably will hate it. However, if you go into it thinking it's its own game with a very different viewpoint on a lot of things, you might just like it.

Servers - Only one world, no multiple servers. One character per account. The servers are hosted by Jolt in the UK, so the ping times are pretty good even for the US.

Levelling - No levelling. No skills to raise. No Mobs to kill (well, exept the rumored aliens that will attack at some point). The only "levelling" you do is to complete missions and get promoted in your faction. The positions within the faction have increasing responsibilities and leadership over other, lower level members.

Production - Some vague resemblence to Neocron's blueprint, chemicals, and parts system but much more defined. There are essentially three types of materials: raw materials, production materials, and finished goods. Raw materials are things like water, silicon, chemicals, bauxite, etc. Production goods are produced by refining or combining raw materials at various colonies with different facilities (refinery, smelting facility, synthesis units, etc). Finished goods are produced with Production Mods combining production materials to make things like armor, weapons, implants, etc.

Every item has three different QL (quality level) and many have multiple ways to make the same item. Higher QL are more expensive. Higher QL armor protects better, higher QL guns and ammo do more damage, etc.

Economy - As far as I can tell, it's closed and totally player run. If you receive money, it comes from your faction funds. Factions get money through taxes, etc. Money does not get generated out of the blue (with maybe a few execeptions). This is good and bad. DPS had a hard time getting the economy started in open beta. They basically gave everyone starter cash and put some low level items up for sale on the market. The side effect was that some enterprising players bought the low-level items and put them back up for sale at 10x what they were originally offered at. It was hell for a while, but everything normalized after about a week as more players started flooding the market with their own manufactured goods. This is the reason we will probably get to keep our beta characters at retail so they don't have to go through the trouble of getting the economy going again.

Missions - Entirely player-run. Players create missions, players run (and lead) missions, and players review the leaders report to give it a rating. There are no in-game mechanism for determining if a mission was successful or not. For example, I participate in a mission that says "Patrol Brooklyn" where I show up at the start location and start time. The mission starts running and ends at the end time. The leader submits a report that describes what the team did and whether they met the objectives (Patrol). 10 random players review the mission and give it a success rating. Other mission members can give out reputation points for people who did their part or just slacked off. Once the mission is rated, the game assigns money and experience to the members of the mission. Experience is used to gain positions within your faction.

PvP and Law Enforcement - There is a faction called the LED that has the ability to arrest criminals and send them to a real prison. Criminals are identified by Penalty Points and the top 20 criminals get a "Most Wanted" tag over their head. When you are killed, you get an ID card for the person who killed you in your inventory. You can use the ID card at an LED terminal to report the murder. You get more PP for each kill. 500 PP for the first, 510 for the second, 650 for the third, etc.

When you go to prison, you can either wait out your time (20 minutes real-time per 50 PP), mine rocks to reduce your PP (50 PP per rock), or try to escape (possible with outside help). Your time in prison accrues only when you are logged in. Keep in mind that the LED do patrol the prison and try to keep people from escaping.

So, you can kill as much as you want, but you will do your time eventually.

Death - Permadeath. If you die and you have no clones, your character is dead for good, deleted. You have to wait 24 hours to create another one. Alternatively, you can buy clone insurange which is a in-game monthly fee but you can die as much as you want. Clones are little as 1k each or as much as 5k each depending on the quality of the clone you get. Clone insurance is twice the cost of buying one clone per in-game month. Permadeath is possible for those who get low on cash and can't afford more clones or clone insurance.

When you die, you drop everything in your inventory except your weapons. Extra ammo, armor, implants (I think), etc. This would be worse, but the storage system allows you to transfer items between cities and colonies. If I spend several hundred K mining a mineral, I don't want to lose that by dropping it in my inventory. I pay to transfer it where I want it (bauxite to a colony with a smelting facility for example).

There's a few other points I wanted to cover, but I didn't want to make this too long. After I say all of this, there are still some issues that need to be worked out.

We're coming up on the end of the period that DPS has said they will use for stress testing. Next comes the balancing. One of their first priorities is the law enforcement system which has a few problems. For example, you shouldn't get PP for defending yourself (I'm not sure that you do, some people say you do, some people say you don't), if an LED officer sees someone murdered in front of them, they cannot arrest them until the murder is reported (unless the murder has commited other crimes before), and it's too easy for people to become LED and has lead the some corruption the ranks. It really should be an invite only faction, like the secret service faction, GiS.

Each player I'm sure has their own style. My typical session in FoM involves logging in and checking all of my production and mining activities. These processes take quite a bit of time, so you can't instantly mine 2000 units of silicon. It's started and the system lets you know when it's done. So, until you get up some cash to have all of these activities going at the same time, you won't spend all of your time doing these things.

Once I check on all of my processes, I go catch a mission or two. Since I'm LED, this involves patroling the markets looking for bad guys, defending myself from factions who KoS LED, or maybe just spending time on faction chat helping out newbies.

[Lachlan]

I forgot one aspect..

Roleplaying - For a beta, I can't believe how much role-playing actually happens. I've had people run up to me and give me shit because he says the LED have saved his life so many times from evil Pkars. I also have people who spit on me and say "Go to hell, pig!".

As far as game mechanics for playing. First, no one knows your character's real name unless you tell them. They cannot DM you or add you to their friends list until you tell them. Each character is denoted by a nickname and a potential [tag] that shows up on chat and when you mouseover them.

It's the equivalant of walking to someone on the street and introducing yourself to them. Until you do, you can't interact with them except face-to-face and only on casual terms. You can't call them on the phone or send them stuff in the mail.

Currently, there's also no way of knowing what someone's faction is in the game without asking them. I'm not sure if this will change, but it's much more challenging to not know if someone is your enemy or not. The only way you can kinda tell is by what clothes they are wearing. It's pretty obvious that my character wears a blue uniform. The corporations, however, can wear almost any clothes they want.

Edit:

I started a Face of Mankind resource site, http://fomwiki.eyejabber.com. It's kinda sparse now, but I'm adding more to it all of the time.

[Chosen One]

i tryed my best to play it but it gave me a headache