Developers Corner

A big theme in my design is balance.  I feel balance is needed to make a game more fun, especially in PvP.

By balance I mean, automatically losing an encounter whether in PvP or PvE due to your stats, gear, level or skill level would hardly be considered fun by anyone.  Like wise winning such encounters due to some defacto superiority is empty and not enjoyable, except by a few people.  Power difference makes players less important and the character too much a factor, in fact in most games anyone could play your character and do just as well as you, if your character is powerful.

This is why I eliminate statistical advancement, your stats never increase, they can be rebalanced but never increased, gear and its crafting too are about trade offs and balance with no statistically superior gear, beyond preferance.  This is to make the player more important for success in game, and end a rather lazy way or making "challenge" in current MMOs, so when you win you know it is because of you and not your character.

The problem becomes, how do I give people a sense of accomplishment in the game if they do not see their numbers grow over time.

One way I am doing this is by adding many things to unlock.

Of course you have new, but not more powerful, abilities to gain throughout the game, as it is the main source of advancement in the game.

And Player housing adds reason to find items and spend time decorating.

Rare gear, weapons, armor and items, can be earned through PvP and PvE, they are not more powerful but they are more unique in that crafters, which make most the gear in the game, cannot craft these designs.

More character customization options, you can unlock unique tatoos, hair styles and such than were availiable at the beggining.

New animation sets, intially all characters use the same animations, but you can unlock new ones to give your character more personality.

UI sets, initially all player's UIs are the same but players can unlock new UI motifs to customize the look of the game.

Emotes, you start the game with some basic emotes, but can gain new ones from various tasks to let you do things like heroic poses.

Titles, players can earn titles to display with their name for different actions in game the have done.

Achievements, these keep track of various actions in game and keep track of what you have done and seen.  They also give you some XP, which goes to buy new abilities, this isn't a level based game though.

Now I  personally could spend a ton of time chasing down all the different unlockables, but I am still concerned about longengevity for your average MMO player, even with many things to unlock to add layers upon layers of customization to the game, it still lacks that quality of uberness that many players seem to want.

Do players like chasing down gear for the fun of getting new items or because they just want a more powerful character?

Originally posted by CactusmanX

Do players like chasing down gear for the fun of getting new items or because they just want a more powerful character?

Both I would say. In Age of Conan, you could get new items all the time, but many people felt like, "What is the point?" So much of the gear was so similar in stats (and looks) that people just didnt really care. This of course changed later, but many people would just wear what they found in the starting zones all the way into their 30s, and no one was happy about it.

Vanity gear is always nice, but once again, not everyone is about vanity. I remember in EQ1, there was pretty much a direct ratio of Vanity to Stats. The better it looked, the more terrible it was, and vice versa. My wife would do anything to look wonderful, even if it meant not having ANY stats on the item. I, however, would wear ripped pieces of toilet paper if it had amazing stats.

So, if you cater to lower variation of stats, but lots of different looks, you will only get one crowd. And, to be honest, it seems that only the RP people, and women seem to care about nice looks. Of course, it is a bonus to look cool, but not everyone actually cares that much.

The solution that I have, which I am still torn on, is making gear differences similar to WoW, but have the gear destructable. Make all the gear fairly easy to obtain, so that even beginning people could realisticly kit themselves, but they would need to actively maintain it. If this was a crafting based game, it would give crafters plenty of customers, while keeping a nice, easy stream  of great gear. But, why would anyone wear the crap stuff then? Because it is destroyed slower, that is why. So, you go out and dump a nice chunk of cash on good stuff that will last you a week, or dump the same amount on mediocer stuff that will last you a month.

But I have to wonder if people not focusing so much on looks of gear has to do with the fact that in many games gear stats play such a large part in the game that players can't afford to try and make a nice looking suit of armor.

But I know what you mean about lack of statistical variety, which I would want to add but still maintain the balance.  And I already have plans for the visual variety.

As of now armor has many possible stats like armor rating, weight, various resistances, social modifiers like intimidation or charm, camoflague etc. so when you make or find armor, it can have stats in any of those catergories but not nessacerily all, to try and add more variety to the armor but avoid uber gear, which limites gear choice and throws PvP off balance.

Then there is durability and accessory slots (max of 4), which unlike the other stats, which must be balanced, can improve hierarchically, so that is some more incentive to chase down and make gear.

Player created gear can actually be created with more flexibility towards apprearence and stats, so if you like the look of a chest piece but do not like the stats, a crafter could make you another chest piece with the same look but differenct stats.  Of course if the piece looks like heavy armor then it always will be.

And of course gear can be destroyed for good, it isn't that likely to happen and with care can be prevented but it is still a possiblity, and more importantly it gives crafters reason to keep crafting replacement parts for gear to fix it and keep it from permanately breaking.

My goal with gear is to give players ample choice in how they look but also retain some common sense about gear, ie heavy armor looking gear behaves like heavy armor, and retain a reason to craft and gear to discover.

I was in the middle of writing something similar when the power went out last night.

Iron realm games have a few interesting forms of alternate advancement.  The games are fun to mess around in though I wouldn't recomend them since they value just being able to survive in PvP at around $200 to over $400(That's just the cost for survival so you can remove all the status effects, and they're still text games mind you).

Groves:  Some forestal/druid classes can take a room and turn it into their grove.   As you your groves skill you unlock abilities dealing with it ranging from combat, personal defense, grove defense, and grove maintainence.   Your grove could be along the lines of an almost pet but it does advance.   The benefits of the grove are:  while inside your grove you're extremely difficult to take out, some extra crafting stuff mold a weapon out of the trees, make a simple golem, and a couple handful of abilities that you can use outside of it.   The grove also gathers energy during the games day time hours.

Tarrot:  make tarrot cards and decks.  When in combat you can either draw the top card(you can stack the decks to be in any order) off a deck or search through one at a time penalty.  You'd have to make the cards yourself set up your decks ect...

Lusternia's Cities/communes:  Each one would have a power nexus that that city/commune would need to maintain.  city officials could draw energy from the nexus for doing various things and players could draw from it for power that they could use in stronger feats(think ace up the sleeve type deal).  Power mangement was also pivotal in city defense.

blessing/Curse systems:  As you did actions in lusternia you'd build up karma(it's not good/bad it's just plain karma)  you could use it to cast blessings on yourself so you'd level a bit faster, have a higher chance to crit, occasionally cure a status effect for nothing, and ect.   On the other hand there were curses which where the opposite but used up the same karma stat if you wanted to use them, you could only cast them on people who were on your suscpect list(they got there by you witnessing them do bad stuff or them killing/stealing from you when they shouldn't have) basically the system made it so that 'random' PvP didn't have to just end on a gank field.

_________well outside of lusternia stuff now_______________

If you went class/archtype based I'd love to see something along the lines of spirit walks (think along the lines of oblivion gates in TES: Oblivion in content generation though a bit more random).  For instance a shaman would find a few componets needed for entering their trance and could go on a spirit walk whenever after mixing up the potion.   A seer would have a vision every once in a while.  a mage would find a perfect ley-line-intersection and want to wrassle a bit of engery out of it.  A palidin would go on a few hell walks.  Priest would occasionally actually preach.   A scout would map something out then have to sell the map.  Thief would find a target to easy to pass up.   I'd imagine this as a personal instance though but it makes sense being one, there also wouldn't be a limited number since unlocking your next spirt walk would be triggered by something.

The end effect after taking this nice little detour would be you'd get a very long lasting buff ( +mana regean, +healing).   The more often you choose the same buff the stronger that buff is when you choose it the next time.

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If you're going to have telepathy/hacking in your game you might as well take a queue from the groves skill and make that your mind/computer.   Make it a personal persistant instance that people could join if they tried hard enough or were invited.   Have a bit of fun with someone by working around all their defenses to switch a buff out for a debuff(tiny stuff like 10/50/100 health depending on how your stats are balanced).  Some of the defensed could be along the lines of traps that would make it easier for you to enter their mind/computer.  

You'd have a form of advancement that stayed on basically forever, a housing system that matters even it it's not a 'real one', and a form of PvP that wasn't just about the killing fields.

It's a tough question, but looks like you have a pretty good list already.  Personally, I'd love to see an MMO like this, that uses alternate forms of advancement.  I can think of two things to add, both have been mentioned before:

1) Skills.  Your stats never increase, but you can earn/find new skills to polish off your character and make them more diverse.  Maybe you can also earn the ability to customize your skills.

2) Status.  This is the one I always think of, but I'm not sure exactly how you'd pull it off.  Whether it's political power or faction rank or in game perks, basically anything that doesn't increase the characters statistical power.

Oh yeah, I wasn't going to mention this here but I had a system of tweaking your abilities, You can spend XP to alter certain aspects for your abilities, like range, DoT length, etc.  It adds a little bit of statistical advancement but not more than say talent points in WoW do.

One clever thing I came up with was when you respec an ability or even when you unlearn an ability you are only refunded for 1/2 the XP cost, so there is a continued need for XP even after you have maxed out all of your ability slots, which I have yet to set the number of.

As for status type achievement, there are multiple in game organizations that you can join and befriend.  The main way you do that is through the ethics system.  It isn't a simplistic good or bad measurement, your ethics are split between multiple categories and opposing values, like authority and anarchy.  There isn't some inherent moral code of the land that all people recognize either, morallity is relative so based on your actions in game you can appear good or evil to different people.

Anywho, once in an organization you can contribute to the open objectives that the organization sets to increase rank in it and gain access to the perks they give you, some examples like workshops and tools, henchmen, special buildings.  As well as access to special looking gear no one outside of the organization can get.

Using the Grooves idea though my idea does not have magic,  that is kind of similar to the ability of player characters with crafting skills to have shops.  In shops players can save up money to buy machines to craft on and it serves as a place for that player to go to craft.  Players can also employ NPC helpers to increase production at extra cost and hire NPCs to sell the goods the player makes.

Guildhalls are like this too, guilds can get access to equipement storage and means of training.

There are forms of collective achievement too, resource nodes are like this, your realm captures a resource node and players and NPCs move in to set up factories and processing plants and to protect the reasource node. Though reasources do respawn, the nodes are large and require a team effort to extract the materials and even then it takes a long time to deplete the node, the respawn time is also long giving players much incentive to both attack and protect nodes.

Then you have government, it isn't player created because frankly noone wants to be under beg and call of other players and the time required to run a government is massive but it is player driven.  The government basically does not exist, each realm is a partisipatory democracy,  players have the ability to directly vote for objectives like where to move the NPC troops that the players also help conscript, train and equip via open objectives, Public quests in other words.

Bases required to control territory are also a team effort to build, and players can organize attacks against them and progress through a series of stages in a battle, basically a competitive public quest, where one side can get the upper hand and new objectives pop up for the other side to counteract them.  when in a battle there are collective choices to be made to change the direction of the battle, you could capture point A, B or C and each one spawns a different objective once complete.

I figure a big world tracker telling you of all the goings on around the world would help organize people and funnel them to current objectives easier.

Then you have mini games, like poker or darts that you can play and use to make money, or mess around with while you wait for your team.