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I am not so sure whether those rules, roles, options will do anything else but create a situation where an individual character is, again, pigeonholed. I also suspect it would lead to the formation of a couple of "ideal" tactics that will be used ad nauseam.

This is like saying nothing.

Every game out there is vulnerable to "exploit" patterns. In every type of game, every genre. Even in a soccer game you could find a pattern (and there are cases in the past about this) where you can always "score".

This has nothing to do with my own ideas, it's just a possibility in every game and a design problem. We can take Civilization, or other strategic games. If I can use the same couple of strategies and always win it means that the game is vulnerable and not so well designed.

This is why we have beta tests. If a couple of ideal tactics are effective and predominant in every situation the result is that design needs works. Just that. It's a situation that would need to be analyzed, understood and then addressed.

As it happens for "balance" problems.

1) NPC's allow the scale of the battle to be increased upwards: not a few dozen (at most a few hundred) players, but thousands or tens of thousands of NPC's led by / intermixed with player heroes, commanders and specialists.

The point is to isolate the purpose of this. So what's the functional purpose? Why the need to scale the battle upwards? To have more lag?

In my idea (the dream mmorpg) NPCs exist. The players can conquer regions and "spawn" NPCs. Then give them tasks and schedules. Ideally you can set up a NPC caravan and transport goods from a region to another, assign guards to that caravan, patrol enemy zones and so on.

But these NPCs exist with a specific purpose: "automate" the boring tasks. Like hauling stuff from a place to another. Think to Eve-Online. The game has a similar structure, with the difference that you can use NPCs to automate the boring tasks. The crafting for example and the maintenance costs you have to pay to keep a zone under your control can all be automated through NPCs.

Think to a RTS. You "spawn" peons and send them to gather resources from a mine, or collect wood, build farms, find food, Etc...

So these NPCs have a functional purpose. They automate boring tasks and they defend the regions while the players are "away".

But I would be careful to use them in PvP situations because, you know, Player Vs PLAYER. That's the point. The NPCs are superfluous.

The sheer organisational difficulty of gathering, training and leading a force of players will always create a rather low "upper limit" for an organised force.

I know it's hard to portray and imagine a game that doesn't exist but this already happens in DAoC. Every day. There are leaders and there is coordination. The tactics are rather superficial, but that's because the RvR structure is rather superficial and rudimental. There are only so many elements available to toy with. It definitely doesn't have the complexity of a wargame, so the tactics remain on the superficial level.

What my idea addresses is about giving a definite purpose to those leaders. In DAoC "a leader" is just a normal player that has a different color in the chat channel. In WoW you have your class, but a raid is just a bunch of groups linked together. There isn't an emergent level of rules that go to apply to large armies. As I said: just scaled-up group mechanics.

What I want to do, instead, is about giving the leaders (as for all the other roles, there are many stratifications) SPECIAL SKILLS. Something concrete that affects directly the gameplay.

You still have your basic class and skills, but when you join a larger army you acquire brand new skills and spells that define your role and objective in the battlefield. *Concrete* skills and spells, not just "fluff" that I expect the players to swallow just because I want to.

What I planned is a whole new ruleset that goes "on top" of the basic group mechanics and that I expect to give a "structure" to those mindless zerg battles we have today.

My belief is that we have mindless zerg fights, because those fights are unregulated, unstructured. They are, functionally, just the same group mechanics. So that's the point that needs to be "advanced" to the next level.

And when you give those players CONCRETE powers, you can be sure that they WILL organize so that they can have access to them. This is not "roleplay" fluff. This is a significant, concrete advantage.

The optimal pattern you will choose if you want to prevail.

Or I'll ate my hat ;p