Just a quick post, today; the first teams of PCs have started forming in MMORPG Tycoon 2, today. This screenshot shows a number of parties wandering around in a questing zone. (And in the following, I use the terms “teams” and “parties” interchangeably. Sorry!)

What happens right now is that when someone goes to work on a quest, they can advertise themselves as starting a party to do that quest, and other users can then join that team to do the quest. Teams are beneficial in that they slightly reduce the user’s perceived “danger” level for the quest, as well as providing some interaction-with-other-humans bonuses. On the down side, teams take time to form, and only the leader gets to decide what to do at any given time; everyone else is just a follower.

But with that said, teams aren’t working completely correctly, yet. Here are the current set of bugs around parties:

1. When someone chooses to join a party, they teleport straight to it, instead of traveling there. (To be fair, some MMOs do exactly this, but it wasn’t what I had in mind)
2. People in parties don’t animate correctly; they simply slide around.
3. Followers in parties don’t obey walls.
4. When a party is going to engage a monster, one party member drops out of the party and fights the monster alone. Everybody else in the party keeps wandering around, looking for monsters as a group.
5. Followers will never leave a party (except when fighting a monster). The only way for a party to break up entirely is for the leader to leave, which promotes another follower into a leader, who then must leave, and so on until each follower has been promoted to leader and then left.
6. Members in a party aren’t using a sensible formation at the moment. Right now, they’re clustered all around the leader in a very impractical way. They should use a better formation which will result in putting the leader in front, and the others slightly behind and to the sides.

This is the last big feature of the MS6 AI milestone build. I was hoping to finish this up over this last weekend, but contract work took up more of my time than I’d intended. This week, definitely!