Today, a long-pending project finally got turned on for general use in the game: monster lore, and a few specialized versions for particular mob types. The current specialized skills are demon lore, elemental creature lore, undead lore, animal lore, and dragon lore.
In coming up with appropriate class distributions for these, I once again ran into the shortcomings of only having the four basic classes. There's really just a few things that don't fit nicely into combinations of those four buckets.
So I've been thinking really hard about just how much effort it would be to add other classes to the game. The first most obvious one would be a ranger class, which already has a handful of skills and could probably appropriate a bunch of stuff from cleric and mage.
I wouldn't just want to add one more class; if you're going to change the infrastructure enough to allow easy addition of classes, you might as well make a handful of them and get some really solid groupings going. I'd feel better about it if I had more than just ranger to work with; I think a lot of other skill sets can simply be specializations of existing classes, and don't justify a separate class.
Good examples of these would be necromancers (cleric), elemental casters (mage), and barbarians (warrior). I don't think any of these so much need a separate class as just appropriate spell and skill trees.
There's also a question of how many classes are ideal. Keeping with the exponential leveling scheme, a level 30 character should have levels of approximately 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5, with levels in six classes. I'd actually expect there to be more people in the upper ranges similar to Boa, with something more akin to 33, 32, 31, 27, 22, 17, 12, 7, and 2, for a total of 9 classes. This indicates to me that even the most hardcore players would have difficulty bringing up to the top more than ten or so classes.
As far as code modification, there's a handful of specps and some other places where the code would definitely need work, but I'd like to think that once the fifth class is added, a sixth and more would be much, much simpler.
The final issue is: does this improve the game enough to justify the effort? It certainly adds some concept of end-game and more opportunities to advance high level characters, so perhaps the answer is yes. Then again, perhaps not. What do you think?
Thursday, June 25, 2009
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7 comments:
If it makes you happy then do it.
is high level attrition an issue? they "win" the game and then get bored and leave?
Do you put time and effort into this game because it's fun or because you want it to be profitable?
if it's because its fun then go ahead and add new classes reguardless of if attrition is an issue.
If however, your motivation is for the game to be profitable and attrition is not an issue, then new classes are a waste of your time. The only thing you should be doing is working on the newbie playerbase.
i feel like i'm starting to lose interest in the game... more classes dont make any difference to me.
Personally, I like the idea of new classes.
The only restriction right now is fame and fame levels for most people.
But, if you are gonna add ranger, why not as well add the likes of Psionic or Druid.
this would be a really big change, but I'd love to see it in action. However, we'd have to be able to see all the implications. Any way to run it as testing somewhere else?
I think we all need to pay extra attention to what Dentin points out. Most of this is most likely just a reallocation of skills/spells that alreay exist, this is more of just labeling what we already have. I think one more class would be great, maybe seperate ranged weapons as a means of damage, and this class holds that key, shrug. Ranger or not, if you can do it successfully, do it. If you make other parts of the mud obsolete, that might need attention.
I wouldn't mind opening a clone of the game on another port and seeing how it works out.
This sounds like an interesting change, but I am wondering how it is gonna work out. Removing skills from one class and transferring them to a new one should present a modest challenge to the high level people but this would also mean that a number of skills and especially spells would be defunct or weak until the appropriate levels are earned in the new class, since some spells and skills use levels to calculate their chance of success or effectiveness. I'll be interested to see how this will turn out, however.
You had a thread something like this six months ago, thinking about expanding the capabilities of other classes. You sound like you are lacking a challenge Dentin. Remodelling all of the classes would give you that, but it would alienate a lot of players (something I know you don't like doing, but will not shy away from when necessary). An obvious choice would be to split each of the four classes in two after a certain point (say level 15 or 20) and specialise from that point on, or stay generic, losing a lot of specialised skills but being able to take advantage of a limited set of both of the specialised sub-classes abilities; I realise its cliched, but it would at least keep you busy through a fe more jam sandwiches :)
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