The 2011 Alter Aeon "Cleric Update" is now live! This update contains a lot of changes to improve traditional cleric spells, add a new mode of casting for mages, and clean up other spells and skills that have traditionally not been as awesome as they could be. Here's a list of the most major changes:
- Mages now have the ability to 'channelcast' (ccast) certain elemental spells in combat. Channelcasting takes longer than regular casting, but is interruptible and costs substantially less mana. This feature allows mages to become a true 'blaster' class without compromising healing mana.
The channel casting skills are 'fire focusing', 'ice focusing', 'lightning focusing' and 'crystal focusin'. The fire plane is easiest to reach, and hence it's the lowest level and easiest to channel. The crystal plane is much harder to reach and only high level mages will be able to channel from it.
- Added a necromancer spell 'bone dragon', which allows you to fly around over the landscape.
- Ice imprison and crystal prison have been updated.
- Ward good and ward evil are now more powerful.
- The charm spell has been updated to make it easier to land and to use control points similar to controlled necromancer minions.
- The peace spell has been improved.
- A level 19 curse, 'overconfidence', has been added.
- A level 19 spell, 'hold undead', has been added.
- A level 28 spell, 'sacred touch', has been added.
- A level 29 spell, 'solace', has been added.
As always, you can use the 'spell find' commands to find the teachers or trainers for new spells and skills.
For those of you who don't know anything about us, Alter Aeon is a multiplayer text-based game with a lot of features and settings to help make it blind-friendly. Over half our playerbase is blind or visually impaired, and we have blind builders and staff helping to expand and improve the game.
Everyone is welcome to play, so if you're new to the game feel free to stop by and check us out. For more information and soundpack downloads, see our web site at:
http://www.alteraeon.com
Happy hunting!
Showing posts with label game balance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game balance. Show all posts
Monday, September 19, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Future Plans - Thieves
Now that level 35 is installed and running in the game, I figure it's probably a good idea to let everyone know about the game's direction and where we're headed. Things aren't going to be static; there's a lot of really neat stuff planned out for this year.
The next major update is scheduled for some time around mid to end of July. The focus of this update will be the Thief class, which is currently the least played class in terms of high levels, and the class with the fewest skills.
At a minimum, the thief update will include an entire tree for shadow skills. I'm not a fan of traditional ninja skills though, so don't expect Naruto style effects. The basis for the shadow skills will be a type of channeling/synergy with the shadow plane, which has already made itself known with the Guildmaster Assassin in Jo'Kerin.
Also on the high priority list are a couple of miscellaneous skills ('untanking' in group combat, room analysis out of combat), and updates to lock picking to make it more incremental and less hit or miss.
For medium priority stuff that might get implemented, we have disguise skills, bribe improvements, and haggling (possibly for bulk purchases.) My guess is that at least some of this will get into the final build.
For low priority, we've been mulling over the idea of distraction skills, but the effects are pretty ill defined right now. We also really need to take a look at the way poison damage is done, to try to make poisons function in a reasonable way. It's pretty unlikely that either of these will be done for the update.
That concludes things for the proposed thief update. Again, we hope to have it out prior to August. I think it will address a lot of the shortcomings of the thief class, without necessarily making thief into another fighter class with differently named skills.
Coming up next - clerics get some love too.
The next major update is scheduled for some time around mid to end of July. The focus of this update will be the Thief class, which is currently the least played class in terms of high levels, and the class with the fewest skills.
At a minimum, the thief update will include an entire tree for shadow skills. I'm not a fan of traditional ninja skills though, so don't expect Naruto style effects. The basis for the shadow skills will be a type of channeling/synergy with the shadow plane, which has already made itself known with the Guildmaster Assassin in Jo'Kerin.
Also on the high priority list are a couple of miscellaneous skills ('untanking' in group combat, room analysis out of combat), and updates to lock picking to make it more incremental and less hit or miss.
For medium priority stuff that might get implemented, we have disguise skills, bribe improvements, and haggling (possibly for bulk purchases.) My guess is that at least some of this will get into the final build.
For low priority, we've been mulling over the idea of distraction skills, but the effects are pretty ill defined right now. We also really need to take a look at the way poison damage is done, to try to make poisons function in a reasonable way. It's pretty unlikely that either of these will be done for the update.
That concludes things for the proposed thief update. Again, we hope to have it out prior to August. I think it will address a lot of the shortcomings of the thief class, without necessarily making thief into another fighter class with differently named skills.
Coming up next - clerics get some love too.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Scaling
When we released the necromancer expansion back in November, I expected a pretty large spike of new players. I figured we'd get a bunch of new people from the announcement, but also a lot of high levels would want to try out the new class from scratch to see how it worked.
And new players we got; perhaps four times as many as usual, which again was about what I expected. What I didn't expect was that we would be nearly incapable of handling them in terms of areas and content. There wasn't really any fighting over equipment and quests, but from time to time it seemed newbies literally had to queue up to get their turn at a particular quest item.
This got me thinking about scaling. If we can't effectively handle four times the standard newbie load, we'll be limited to a player base less than four times the size of our current one. And it's not just newbie areas; we have to think about it everywhere, from areas to exp thwacking to the who list to the the size of Ralnoth. We might not have five hundred people logged in right now, but even if we did the game probably couldn't handle them all.
Here are some things I think could help with that:
- Instancing. Instancing allows you to create private copies of areas for players, so that they don't interfere with each other. This is great for quests, in that each player or group can be on their own private copy of the quest, and don't need to worry about someone else getting through it first and taking the quest item. Judicious use of instancing can help eliminate quest bottlenecks, and it makes the world seem a lot bigger than it really is.
- Gold and experience thwacking. Right now, gold and experience are thwacked globally, so that if a mob is run too much the returns on it drop for everyone. This is fundamentally dependent on the number of players; a better way would be to put thwacking on individual players, so that the actions of one player don't break the game for someone else.
- Item maxload. Having limited load on items is another thing that's fundamentally dependent on the number of players. Once the player load rises to a certain level, a maxloaded or rarity-based item will simply never load again. Maxload and rarity effectively need to be removed to fix this.
- The who listings, and other display systems. Having a five hundred person who list would be ridiculous. Beyond a certain point, you pretty much have to switch to a query system instead of a global listing system.
Some of this stuff is already in transit or is being worked on; in particular, instancing was booted in earlier this evening and is being tested as we speak. Maxload for the most part was phased out last week.
It's a decent start. One bottleneck at a time...
And new players we got; perhaps four times as many as usual, which again was about what I expected. What I didn't expect was that we would be nearly incapable of handling them in terms of areas and content. There wasn't really any fighting over equipment and quests, but from time to time it seemed newbies literally had to queue up to get their turn at a particular quest item.
This got me thinking about scaling. If we can't effectively handle four times the standard newbie load, we'll be limited to a player base less than four times the size of our current one. And it's not just newbie areas; we have to think about it everywhere, from areas to exp thwacking to the who list to the the size of Ralnoth. We might not have five hundred people logged in right now, but even if we did the game probably couldn't handle them all.
Here are some things I think could help with that:
- Instancing. Instancing allows you to create private copies of areas for players, so that they don't interfere with each other. This is great for quests, in that each player or group can be on their own private copy of the quest, and don't need to worry about someone else getting through it first and taking the quest item. Judicious use of instancing can help eliminate quest bottlenecks, and it makes the world seem a lot bigger than it really is.
- Gold and experience thwacking. Right now, gold and experience are thwacked globally, so that if a mob is run too much the returns on it drop for everyone. This is fundamentally dependent on the number of players; a better way would be to put thwacking on individual players, so that the actions of one player don't break the game for someone else.
- Item maxload. Having limited load on items is another thing that's fundamentally dependent on the number of players. Once the player load rises to a certain level, a maxloaded or rarity-based item will simply never load again. Maxload and rarity effectively need to be removed to fix this.
- The who listings, and other display systems. Having a five hundred person who list would be ridiculous. Beyond a certain point, you pretty much have to switch to a query system instead of a global listing system.
Some of this stuff is already in transit or is being worked on; in particular, instancing was booted in earlier this evening and is being tested as we speak. Maxload for the most part was phased out last week.
It's a decent start. One bottleneck at a time...
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Spells, skills, and class design
One of the things that takes a lot of time is tweaking the spell and skill trees to make the classes more fun to play. The various factors I have to balance are a lot more restrictive than you might expect:
1) The spells and skills within each group, for example "mage fire spells", should have proper dependencies. Greater Fireball should probably be dependent at some level on 'basic fire magics'.
2) The spells and skills within each group, for example "mage fire spells", should be separated by similar level differences, to spread the group out across a level range. If there's too much clumping, there's dead zones where you don't get a new spell for a long time, then suddenly get a bunch followed by another dead zone.
3) Spells and skills for the entire class should be evenly distributed across the entire level range, again to limit dead zones and make sure players have something to learn at every level. Necromancer is a good example of how to do this; every three levels, you get 5-6 spells and skills, from level 1 up to about level 28. Mage is a good example of how not to do this; there's 6 spells between levels 2-4, 12 spells between levels 12-14, and 4 spells between level 26-28. Mage is currently very clumpy and needs more work.
4) Low level spells and skills should be useful and interesting. Having a spell like 'ventriloquate' below level 10 makes no sense at all; newbies will think it's actually useful (it's not) and waste practices on it. It's ok to put useless stuff at higher levels, because high level players are more likely to do research before wasting scarce practices on something.
5) Really high level spells have to actually be useful, even if it's a specialized use.
The above generally result in me spending a lot of time staring at various views of the spell lists for each class. You have to keep an eye on groupings across level ranges, while making sure you haven't done anything dumb to the dependency trees for each group, and making sure you don't move useless things into the low level ranges.
And even though it may not seem that way, the above are actually really important. It seems to give you more to do, and you know that you get important, useful stuff even at low levels. I've certainly noticed a difference with my characters.
1) The spells and skills within each group, for example "mage fire spells", should have proper dependencies. Greater Fireball should probably be dependent at some level on 'basic fire magics'.
2) The spells and skills within each group, for example "mage fire spells", should be separated by similar level differences, to spread the group out across a level range. If there's too much clumping, there's dead zones where you don't get a new spell for a long time, then suddenly get a bunch followed by another dead zone.
3) Spells and skills for the entire class should be evenly distributed across the entire level range, again to limit dead zones and make sure players have something to learn at every level. Necromancer is a good example of how to do this; every three levels, you get 5-6 spells and skills, from level 1 up to about level 28. Mage is a good example of how not to do this; there's 6 spells between levels 2-4, 12 spells between levels 12-14, and 4 spells between level 26-28. Mage is currently very clumpy and needs more work.
4) Low level spells and skills should be useful and interesting. Having a spell like 'ventriloquate' below level 10 makes no sense at all; newbies will think it's actually useful (it's not) and waste practices on it. It's ok to put useless stuff at higher levels, because high level players are more likely to do research before wasting scarce practices on something.
5) Really high level spells have to actually be useful, even if it's a specialized use.
The above generally result in me spending a lot of time staring at various views of the spell lists for each class. You have to keep an eye on groupings across level ranges, while making sure you haven't done anything dumb to the dependency trees for each group, and making sure you don't move useless things into the low level ranges.
And even though it may not seem that way, the above are actually really important. It seems to give you more to do, and you know that you get important, useful stuff even at low levels. I've certainly noticed a difference with my characters.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Objects - rarity and timers - TL/DR
There are several different types of 'powerful' objects, with various limitations, that can be built on Alter Aeon:
Rarity based: Only a certain number of the item can be on the game at once. The limit is a long term (multiple week) average, so there may be none or there may be a lot of them on at any given time. If the long term average is too high, the item stops loading.
Binding: The object binds to whoever picks it up, preventing trading and selling. There are usually a low number of these per zone, between 0 and 3. The building code warns if there are too many of this in any given zone.
Artifact: One artifact is allowed per zone. Artifacts can be much more powerful than normal equipment.
Rare: Two rare items are allowed per zone. Rare items can be a bit more powerful than normal equipment.
Timered: The item has a timer and will at some point self destruct.
Each of these four classes can be more powerful than normal equipment, and as names like 'artifact' suggest, sometimes they can be very much more powerful. Some of these different classes interact with each other, making the calculations and code messy; for example, Rarity and Binding contribute to make Artifacts more powerful, but only to an extent.
This complexity in itself is problematic, but there are two other major issues to consider as well:
Rarity based: For any 'good' and useful piece of rarity equipment, it is obtained repeatedly until it is well past its loading limit. If the item is also Binding, it can't be traded and eventually it begins loading again as players stop playing the game. If it's not Binding, players trade occasionally (one or two trades per year) for the few pieces that exist, and it never loads again.
Timered: Noone will ever use the item. If it's not permanent, people aren't interested.
Rarity doesn't make any sense if all it does is give a small number of players a monopoly on an item; for them it's not rare, it's just a part of their set that noone else can ever get. For everyone else, it's so rare as to be impossible to obtain.
Timers on the other hand are the opposite end of the spectrum. Regardless of how good it is, people won't use it if it's timered. There seems to be some small exception for this with timered enchanted equipment, but I suspect this is because the timers are really long and the equipment doesn't self destruct when the enchant wears off.
Timers are of course, the obvious natural mechanic for controlling rarity based equipment. If something is limited load, simply make its duration in-game finite. This would guarantee turnover and make the item available to more people.
One final thing to consider is the way that timers currently work: they're not based on real time, but rather some amount of game time. You get an item, and you know it'll time out after you've used it for a while, but you never quite know when without checking it each time. If you log off for a week, you're likely to forget about it and suddenly find an important item vanishing unexpectedly in the middle of a battle.
This leads to one possible improvement: RL timered equipment. You have something, but you know exactly how long you have it for. Having something say "This will expire at Mon Apr 19 11:33:15 2010" is very different than having it say "This item will last for two RL days of game time, which could be two months from now if you don't play very often". It also has a built-in sense of rarity attached to it.
I like it.
Rarity based: Only a certain number of the item can be on the game at once. The limit is a long term (multiple week) average, so there may be none or there may be a lot of them on at any given time. If the long term average is too high, the item stops loading.
Binding: The object binds to whoever picks it up, preventing trading and selling. There are usually a low number of these per zone, between 0 and 3. The building code warns if there are too many of this in any given zone.
Artifact: One artifact is allowed per zone. Artifacts can be much more powerful than normal equipment.
Rare: Two rare items are allowed per zone. Rare items can be a bit more powerful than normal equipment.
Timered: The item has a timer and will at some point self destruct.
Each of these four classes can be more powerful than normal equipment, and as names like 'artifact' suggest, sometimes they can be very much more powerful. Some of these different classes interact with each other, making the calculations and code messy; for example, Rarity and Binding contribute to make Artifacts more powerful, but only to an extent.
This complexity in itself is problematic, but there are two other major issues to consider as well:
Rarity based: For any 'good' and useful piece of rarity equipment, it is obtained repeatedly until it is well past its loading limit. If the item is also Binding, it can't be traded and eventually it begins loading again as players stop playing the game. If it's not Binding, players trade occasionally (one or two trades per year) for the few pieces that exist, and it never loads again.
Timered: Noone will ever use the item. If it's not permanent, people aren't interested.
Rarity doesn't make any sense if all it does is give a small number of players a monopoly on an item; for them it's not rare, it's just a part of their set that noone else can ever get. For everyone else, it's so rare as to be impossible to obtain.
Timers on the other hand are the opposite end of the spectrum. Regardless of how good it is, people won't use it if it's timered. There seems to be some small exception for this with timered enchanted equipment, but I suspect this is because the timers are really long and the equipment doesn't self destruct when the enchant wears off.
Timers are of course, the obvious natural mechanic for controlling rarity based equipment. If something is limited load, simply make its duration in-game finite. This would guarantee turnover and make the item available to more people.
One final thing to consider is the way that timers currently work: they're not based on real time, but rather some amount of game time. You get an item, and you know it'll time out after you've used it for a while, but you never quite know when without checking it each time. If you log off for a week, you're likely to forget about it and suddenly find an important item vanishing unexpectedly in the middle of a battle.
This leads to one possible improvement: RL timered equipment. You have something, but you know exactly how long you have it for. Having something say "This will expire at Mon Apr 19 11:33:15 2010" is very different than having it say "This item will last for two RL days of game time, which could be two months from now if you don't play very often". It also has a built-in sense of rarity attached to it.
I like it.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
PK, PPK, PK, PPK...
Player killing on Alter Aeon has always been limited to registration, and while we have various arenas and temporary PK, we also have permanent registration - known as PPK.
PK has never bothered me much, but it's never really interested me either. PPK on the other hand I've tried a couple of times. I could never get into it, and it also seemed like I could never get away from various instakill issues.
Instakill reared its ugly head again a few days ago, and after fixing the specific instakill bug, it occurred to me to simply cut all PK damage in half. That clearly reduces the instakill problem, yes? However, there are some problems.
The biggest of these is that the existing PPK population doesn't like it. There's a few of them that do, but largely the response has been negative. A number of them say that PPK has gone from a threatening, risky affair to an irritation they can easily and always run from and survive. Others note that the power to heal has been effectively doubled, giving casters with a lot of mana huge advantages. Both of these criticisms are good, and sufficient to convince me to revert the change.
However, the instakill problem still lives. The current consensus is that judicious limiting of various instakill mechanisms is the best way to go forward. Barring any major objections, we'll probably go that route.
PK has never bothered me much, but it's never really interested me either. PPK on the other hand I've tried a couple of times. I could never get into it, and it also seemed like I could never get away from various instakill issues.
Instakill reared its ugly head again a few days ago, and after fixing the specific instakill bug, it occurred to me to simply cut all PK damage in half. That clearly reduces the instakill problem, yes? However, there are some problems.
The biggest of these is that the existing PPK population doesn't like it. There's a few of them that do, but largely the response has been negative. A number of them say that PPK has gone from a threatening, risky affair to an irritation they can easily and always run from and survive. Others note that the power to heal has been effectively doubled, giving casters with a lot of mana huge advantages. Both of these criticisms are good, and sufficient to convince me to revert the change.
However, the instakill problem still lives. The current consensus is that judicious limiting of various instakill mechanisms is the best way to go forward. Barring any major objections, we'll probably go that route.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Class updates
As part of the groundwork for getting additional classes into the game, Locane and I have been digging through the code and trying to condense common routines and eliminate dependencies. He's been working largely on uncontroversial skill changes, to merge together the skill handling routines and make it easier to add skills in the future. I've been working on player regen and healing. This is a bit more controversial.
Quite a bit more controversial, as it turns out.
The fundamental problem with regen and healing is that the algorithm was put together over a decade ago, and hasn't been fundamentally altered since. In its simplest form, caster levels are pitted against fighter levels, and regen is heavily tilted in favor of the winner; higher casting level means greater mana regen and less hitpoint regen, while higher fighter level is the reverse.
This balancing act was a zero-sum game. Gaining a single level in a class could force you to trade hitpoints for mana; and at higher levels, a caster for example has no choice but to gain levels in fighter classes. The only thing that made this balancing act of a system usable is cast level equipment, which allowed players to push around the balance point.
Unfortunately, adding new classes isn't really compatible with this. We have also received a number of complaints over the years about unusual side effects and problems with the system. I finally made the decision to try something radical, rather than continuing to tweak the existing code.
The last couple of days, while hectic, appear to be quite an improvement. The level/balance dependency is gone, and I've even managed to keep cast level somewhat usable. Most players have increased net regen, which is probably bad in the long term, but in the short term allows work to progress.
Something unusual is that the value of mana regen varies wildly based on the player and their playing style. I have a couple of fighter primaries totally geared out like casters; these players complained loudly about being dented. This type of player would gladly trade hitpoint regen into mana at a 4:1 ratio, double the standard 2:1 typically found with heal spells. Most other players are happy with 2:1, as they burn through mana and hitpoints almost equally as they play.
The plus side is that this work has eliminated yet another choke point for pushing through additional classes. Unfortunately, there remain quite a few equally controversial areas that will need to be updated.
Quite a bit more controversial, as it turns out.
The fundamental problem with regen and healing is that the algorithm was put together over a decade ago, and hasn't been fundamentally altered since. In its simplest form, caster levels are pitted against fighter levels, and regen is heavily tilted in favor of the winner; higher casting level means greater mana regen and less hitpoint regen, while higher fighter level is the reverse.
This balancing act was a zero-sum game. Gaining a single level in a class could force you to trade hitpoints for mana; and at higher levels, a caster for example has no choice but to gain levels in fighter classes. The only thing that made this balancing act of a system usable is cast level equipment, which allowed players to push around the balance point.
Unfortunately, adding new classes isn't really compatible with this. We have also received a number of complaints over the years about unusual side effects and problems with the system. I finally made the decision to try something radical, rather than continuing to tweak the existing code.
The last couple of days, while hectic, appear to be quite an improvement. The level/balance dependency is gone, and I've even managed to keep cast level somewhat usable. Most players have increased net regen, which is probably bad in the long term, but in the short term allows work to progress.
Something unusual is that the value of mana regen varies wildly based on the player and their playing style. I have a couple of fighter primaries totally geared out like casters; these players complained loudly about being dented. This type of player would gladly trade hitpoint regen into mana at a 4:1 ratio, double the standard 2:1 typically found with heal spells. Most other players are happy with 2:1, as they burn through mana and hitpoints almost equally as they play.
The plus side is that this work has eliminated yet another choke point for pushing through additional classes. Unfortunately, there remain quite a few equally controversial areas that will need to be updated.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Gold balancing in MMOs
[Update 2009/07/04 - I've posted an updated version of this post as an article on the Alter Aeon web site.]
All too often, articles talking about gold balance do little more than state simply that 'most MMOs have problems with gold balance'. Rather than waste your time, I'll describe a successful example of a gold economy, and what it took to get there.
Alter Aeon handles its gold economy fairly well, after many years of tweaking. The foundation for this stability is accurate gold tracking:
- All gold sources and sinks are tracked and understood
- Real-time gold stats are available
- Unexpected or 'dangerous' gold changes are logged
- Large gold changes, even valid transactions, trigger notifies just in case
- There's a single global value representing all gold in circulation
Just tracking the flow of gold through the system was useful, but completely ineffective in actually managing the economy. Usually when a game manages to get numbers, they have active immortals adjust things on a continuous basis to keep the economy under control. We decided that this would be a complete waste of time for an immortal; we have computers to do boring tasks like this.
Therefore, we don't bring immortals or builders into the picture at all. Nearly all gold drops are calculated from statistics and game parameters. Adding this helped tremendously, but was still not enough to stabilize the economy on its own. In the long run, we ended up with several layers that each contribute to the whole system:
- Mobs drop gold based on their death or theft rates; object gold is similarly modified with every looting of a treasure object. The purpose of this dynamic feedback is to prevent one source from dominating or becoming the 'easy gold'.
- Large quantities of gold are taxed. Characters holding more than a million gold are taxed on the amount above a million gold, to the tune of about 2% per week. The purpose of the tax is to prevent packrats from accumulating unlimited hoards.
- Clan and guild bank accounts can only hold a limited amount. Since the very existence of the clan indicates that gold is being paid in dues, this limited amount is fairly high (on the order of 50 million gold.)
- Player shops can hold an unlimited amount, but generally shops have high rent rates, so gold turnover has so far not been a problem there.
- Dynamic pricing of items alters the price of items for sale in shops based on how often they are shoplifted. If a particular item is stolen too often, the price is lowered and the theft difficulty is raised to make the price more cost-competitive.
But by far the most critical part of the system is the global offset controller. This control system monitors the total quantity of gold in existence, and subtly tweaks the gold sources based on that value. The short-delay term of the control system looks at local deviations from the long term expectation, and fairly aggressively modifies the global gold sources. This short-delay term can change total gold influx on the order of 50% in a one week period if necessary.
As the total quantity of gold in existence changes, the long-delay term of the control system slowly adjusts the set point for the short-delay calculations. If a large amount of gold is in circulation, the short-delay set point will be lowered, globally lowering the input of gold into the system.
The net result of all this is that we have a system that allows for fairly substantial deviations in the short term, but always returns to long term stability. Total gold in circulation has varied by approximately 10% (peak of 528 million to trough of 482 million) over the last two years, and I no longer hear the once-common complaint that gold is worthless.
All too often, articles talking about gold balance do little more than state simply that 'most MMOs have problems with gold balance'. Rather than waste your time, I'll describe a successful example of a gold economy, and what it took to get there.
Alter Aeon handles its gold economy fairly well, after many years of tweaking. The foundation for this stability is accurate gold tracking:
- All gold sources and sinks are tracked and understood
- Real-time gold stats are available
- Unexpected or 'dangerous' gold changes are logged
- Large gold changes, even valid transactions, trigger notifies just in case
- There's a single global value representing all gold in circulation
Just tracking the flow of gold through the system was useful, but completely ineffective in actually managing the economy. Usually when a game manages to get numbers, they have active immortals adjust things on a continuous basis to keep the economy under control. We decided that this would be a complete waste of time for an immortal; we have computers to do boring tasks like this.
Therefore, we don't bring immortals or builders into the picture at all. Nearly all gold drops are calculated from statistics and game parameters. Adding this helped tremendously, but was still not enough to stabilize the economy on its own. In the long run, we ended up with several layers that each contribute to the whole system:
- Mobs drop gold based on their death or theft rates; object gold is similarly modified with every looting of a treasure object. The purpose of this dynamic feedback is to prevent one source from dominating or becoming the 'easy gold'.
- Large quantities of gold are taxed. Characters holding more than a million gold are taxed on the amount above a million gold, to the tune of about 2% per week. The purpose of the tax is to prevent packrats from accumulating unlimited hoards.
- Clan and guild bank accounts can only hold a limited amount. Since the very existence of the clan indicates that gold is being paid in dues, this limited amount is fairly high (on the order of 50 million gold.)
- Player shops can hold an unlimited amount, but generally shops have high rent rates, so gold turnover has so far not been a problem there.
- Dynamic pricing of items alters the price of items for sale in shops based on how often they are shoplifted. If a particular item is stolen too often, the price is lowered and the theft difficulty is raised to make the price more cost-competitive.
But by far the most critical part of the system is the global offset controller. This control system monitors the total quantity of gold in existence, and subtly tweaks the gold sources based on that value. The short-delay term of the control system looks at local deviations from the long term expectation, and fairly aggressively modifies the global gold sources. This short-delay term can change total gold influx on the order of 50% in a one week period if necessary.
As the total quantity of gold in existence changes, the long-delay term of the control system slowly adjusts the set point for the short-delay calculations. If a large amount of gold is in circulation, the short-delay set point will be lowered, globally lowering the input of gold into the system.
The net result of all this is that we have a system that allows for fairly substantial deviations in the short term, but always returns to long term stability. Total gold in circulation has varied by approximately 10% (peak of 528 million to trough of 482 million) over the last two years, and I no longer hear the once-common complaint that gold is worthless.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Trading
I've been out for almost a week, so when I came back it was time to pull forward code from Locane and get some other minor things out of the way. As it turns out, he's been working on secure trading between players, and while I was away I read some articles on that same subject.
There seems to be quite a hubbub going on in the MMO world regarding trading, in particular gold farming. The general consensus seems to be that gold farming is something that should be utterly squashed wherever it crops up; further, anyone caught selling gold (or other in-game currencies) for real life cash, outside of the game environment, should be penalized as harshly as possible. Most games delete not only the accounts of the farmers, but the accounts of the purchasers as well, and occasionally the accounts of anyone they trade with.
This seems ridiculously harsh to me.
When I first started the game, I didn't really have an opinion on this topic. I originally didn't think trade would be big enough for it to really be a problem. Over the years, players began to donate to the game simply because they liked it; we (I and the other admin at the time) decided to give minor perks to those contributors as a way to say thanks. Many years later, we now offer a wide host of things for purchase from the game store.
While we were setting all this up, I got a lot of very good advice from some very bright people. The overwhelming majority of them were very clear on one point: thou shalt not sell things that unbalance the game. This includes characters, equipment, gold and a number of other nasties I have seen for sale on (less than successful) games in the past.
Players don't like the idea that someone without skill can buy their way to the top. If you take a look at our list of purchasables, you'll notice that everything on that list is either convenience, customization, or a minor boon. This policy has worked rather well for us over the years.
But back to the issue at hand, which is trading. I don't see any reasonable way that it can be completely prevented, and from my standpoint anything that's traded had to be obtained by someone somewhere. If they're going to be doing it anyway, I'd much rather put in some sort of secure mechanism for it, so people can't be ripped off.
Locane's code starts this off by handling in-game currency only. Once that's stable and working well, I'm going to add the ability for people to trade dollars, but only ones that have already been donated. Once dollars are donated to the game, you can buy donation things with them or trade them to other people. Eventually, I'll probably set up business accounts that let people withdraw those dollars from the game.
It will be interesting to see if this model works for any other MMOs. So far, I'm not aware of any that have tried it.
One major concern I have is regarding duping and generation bugs. If someone finds a way to exploit gold or certain items into existence, it may quickly become very difficult to clean up.
There seems to be quite a hubbub going on in the MMO world regarding trading, in particular gold farming. The general consensus seems to be that gold farming is something that should be utterly squashed wherever it crops up; further, anyone caught selling gold (or other in-game currencies) for real life cash, outside of the game environment, should be penalized as harshly as possible. Most games delete not only the accounts of the farmers, but the accounts of the purchasers as well, and occasionally the accounts of anyone they trade with.
This seems ridiculously harsh to me.
When I first started the game, I didn't really have an opinion on this topic. I originally didn't think trade would be big enough for it to really be a problem. Over the years, players began to donate to the game simply because they liked it; we (I and the other admin at the time) decided to give minor perks to those contributors as a way to say thanks. Many years later, we now offer a wide host of things for purchase from the game store.
While we were setting all this up, I got a lot of very good advice from some very bright people. The overwhelming majority of them were very clear on one point: thou shalt not sell things that unbalance the game. This includes characters, equipment, gold and a number of other nasties I have seen for sale on (less than successful) games in the past.
Players don't like the idea that someone without skill can buy their way to the top. If you take a look at our list of purchasables, you'll notice that everything on that list is either convenience, customization, or a minor boon. This policy has worked rather well for us over the years.
But back to the issue at hand, which is trading. I don't see any reasonable way that it can be completely prevented, and from my standpoint anything that's traded had to be obtained by someone somewhere. If they're going to be doing it anyway, I'd much rather put in some sort of secure mechanism for it, so people can't be ripped off.
Locane's code starts this off by handling in-game currency only. Once that's stable and working well, I'm going to add the ability for people to trade dollars, but only ones that have already been donated. Once dollars are donated to the game, you can buy donation things with them or trade them to other people. Eventually, I'll probably set up business accounts that let people withdraw those dollars from the game.
It will be interesting to see if this model works for any other MMOs. So far, I'm not aware of any that have tried it.
One major concern I have is regarding duping and generation bugs. If someone finds a way to exploit gold or certain items into existence, it may quickly become very difficult to clean up.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
High levels
As a result of the recent high level observations, I've been making minor changes and cleanup to the player experience. One of the things I looked at was int/wis requirements on spells.
The reason for looking at int/wis was mostly newbie based; new players have limited practices available, and have to decide where to spend them on which stats. If you train stats based on the minimum-cost method, you'll find that stats are naturally separated by two, for example int 18 and wis 16, or int 18 and wis 14.
Under the old int/wis system, the values were hand picked and mostly but not completely followed an algorithm for this that left the int/wis requirements separated by 3. This left new players with a subtle but weird choice to make: should my secondary casting stat be my second highest stat, or third? 3 is between 2 and 4, so keeping the costs even was inefficient.
With the new system, the separation is always 4, so that's never an issue. Also, all the values are calculated, with (currently) no exceptions, and all the spells are consistent. Plus, I got to delete a lot of lines of code.
Unfortunately, there are some complaints, and this seems to be where it always breaks down. No matter how small a change you make, someone gets upset, or pissed off, or threatens to leave. Most of the new players will never even know that there was a change, or the ones that do will adjust their characters within a few days at most. The real complaints come from the highbies.
One such player confronted me while I was in the middle of writing this post. In this particular instance, the change has moved the 'sanctuary' spell from 17/20 int/wis to 18/22, which honestly is a bigger change than I expected (the high mana cost of the spell is bumping up the requirements from what would otherwise be 17/21.) This player is a high level thief/warrior, and doesn't have the natural int/wis to cast sanc now, though they barely had it to begin with. After months of arduous effort, the total 105+ in question finally managed to get a 20 natural wisdom, just as the spell requirement changed from 20 to 22.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Part of me wants to say 'WTF, a total 105+ with a 20 wisdom?', and other parts of me think other things. But an additional point was raised that brings up yet another design related question:
Why bother to have thief and warrior classes if it's effectively mandatory to have caster classes to do anything interesting?
I'm not sure how I feel about this one either. The game has always been multiclass. I expect people to make full use of whatever skills and spells are available in each class, and to use those spells and skills to compensate for weaknesses in other classes. To have a level 20 cleric incapable of casting sanctuary or other cleric spells simply isn't something I would have expected; after all, sanc is an EXTREMELY powerful spell used by virtually everyone virtually all the time. The game is practically built around it.
In short, I don't know that it's legitimate to have a warrior-only character and expect it to be able to stand on its own and compete with multiclass characters of similar level (or total levels.) The game just isn't designed that way. That type of operation is generally reserved for single class games.
Still, the player is pissed and will likely continue to be so. I have a shitty set of choices to decide from. Compromise a subtle change that I know in the long run is what should be done? Make an exception for particular spells? Make an exception for bitching players? Ignore it?
I'll let you, the readers decide. And then probably ignore the result.
The reason for looking at int/wis was mostly newbie based; new players have limited practices available, and have to decide where to spend them on which stats. If you train stats based on the minimum-cost method, you'll find that stats are naturally separated by two, for example int 18 and wis 16, or int 18 and wis 14.
Under the old int/wis system, the values were hand picked and mostly but not completely followed an algorithm for this that left the int/wis requirements separated by 3. This left new players with a subtle but weird choice to make: should my secondary casting stat be my second highest stat, or third? 3 is between 2 and 4, so keeping the costs even was inefficient.
With the new system, the separation is always 4, so that's never an issue. Also, all the values are calculated, with (currently) no exceptions, and all the spells are consistent. Plus, I got to delete a lot of lines of code.
Unfortunately, there are some complaints, and this seems to be where it always breaks down. No matter how small a change you make, someone gets upset, or pissed off, or threatens to leave. Most of the new players will never even know that there was a change, or the ones that do will adjust their characters within a few days at most. The real complaints come from the highbies.
One such player confronted me while I was in the middle of writing this post. In this particular instance, the change has moved the 'sanctuary' spell from 17/20 int/wis to 18/22, which honestly is a bigger change than I expected (the high mana cost of the spell is bumping up the requirements from what would otherwise be 17/21.) This player is a high level thief/warrior, and doesn't have the natural int/wis to cast sanc now, though they barely had it to begin with. After months of arduous effort, the total 105+ in question finally managed to get a 20 natural wisdom, just as the spell requirement changed from 20 to 22.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Part of me wants to say 'WTF, a total 105+ with a 20 wisdom?', and other parts of me think other things. But an additional point was raised that brings up yet another design related question:
Why bother to have thief and warrior classes if it's effectively mandatory to have caster classes to do anything interesting?
I'm not sure how I feel about this one either. The game has always been multiclass. I expect people to make full use of whatever skills and spells are available in each class, and to use those spells and skills to compensate for weaknesses in other classes. To have a level 20 cleric incapable of casting sanctuary or other cleric spells simply isn't something I would have expected; after all, sanc is an EXTREMELY powerful spell used by virtually everyone virtually all the time. The game is practically built around it.
In short, I don't know that it's legitimate to have a warrior-only character and expect it to be able to stand on its own and compete with multiclass characters of similar level (or total levels.) The game just isn't designed that way. That type of operation is generally reserved for single class games.
Still, the player is pissed and will likely continue to be so. I have a shitty set of choices to decide from. Compromise a subtle change that I know in the long run is what should be done? Make an exception for particular spells? Make an exception for bitching players? Ignore it?
I'll let you, the readers decide. And then probably ignore the result.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The death (dearth?) of high levels
It has finally been made sufficiently clear to me that there is a problem with boredom at high levels. As near as I can tell, it's not that people actually run out of stuff to do; it's that they run out of -fun- stuff to do.
Consider the plight of a total 118 or higher. When it costs you a billion experience per level, you pretty much have three options:
1) Run experience for weeks straight to get one measly level, ignoring anything dangerous like EQ or quest runs
2) Do EQ and quest runs and forget about getting a level
3) End up halfway in the middle without incentive to get more exp and not wanting to do anything else because you'd lose the exp you already have
Of these, option 3 is the worst case, and unfortunately probably the most likely. Fortunately, all of the above have an easy solution: microlevels, also known as level staging.
In short, it's a way to bank off experience or whatever the level requirement is in the short term, and give people the ability to work on the level at their own pace. It's even better if you can display that somehow, so that others can see them making progress. Everyone likes feedback about how they're making progress.
This brings me to a whole slew of ideas:
- display of the microlevel on the who list somehow?
- more use of fame for microlevels?
- use of quests for microlevels?
- abandoning exp completely for microlevels?
- going to levels 33-40
- limit rate of acquiring microlevels and levels?
All of these things are something to think about, but either way we're looking at opening up level 33 this year. Whatever I set up, I'd like to do it such that we only open at most one level per year - it's far too easy to get massive inflation otherwise.
For the display thing, the current display model is something like:
[30 32 23 32] Jerk doesn't exist
Suppose Jerk has 16 microlevels on his way to level 33 warrior:
[30 32 23 32] 16 Jerk doesn't exist
I like the way this looks; perhaps other formats would be prettier. Microlevels for each class, with only the highest being displayed sounds like a reasonable way to handle it.
I also really want to do more with requirements other than experience. We did some of this with fame, in requiring fame to gain levels, but right now a quad 32 only has to use 700 fame to get there. The current level requirements for fame right now are:
30 - 25 fame
31 - 50 fame
32 - 100 fame
33 - 200 fame
Note that the level 33 setting has never been used, but 200 fame sounds like a good value for it. For a dual-32 having used 350 fame, another 200 to get to level 33 seems fair. Pro-rating this per microlevel would help people to know where exactly they stand.
Other possibilities for level requirements could be as simple as explorer tokens, or some periodic event. I'm definitely open to more ideas in this area.
For implementation of this, if I had my way I'd make microleveling required for any level higher than 30. This still might be doable, so long as the level and other costs associated with it don't go out of bounds. Microlevels seem kinda stupid and redundant if you can get 15 of them in an hour. 50 million exp spread across 30 microlevels to get to level 31 leaves only 1.6 mil per microlevel; perhaps the real cost for it should be more along the lines of 300 million, or 10 million per microlevel.
This would be a huge increase in the cost of level 31, but with the idea of giving some bonus for each microlevel it might be well tolerated. Consider a temporary bonus for each microlevel, perhaps hp for each of the 32 microlevels on the way to warrior 33. When the final level is actually attained, the microlevel bonus goes away and is replaced by whatever the real level gives you. Players can then start accumulating another set of microlevel bonuses.
Ok, enough ideas for today. Feel free to post back.
Consider the plight of a total 118 or higher. When it costs you a billion experience per level, you pretty much have three options:
1) Run experience for weeks straight to get one measly level, ignoring anything dangerous like EQ or quest runs
2) Do EQ and quest runs and forget about getting a level
3) End up halfway in the middle without incentive to get more exp and not wanting to do anything else because you'd lose the exp you already have
Of these, option 3 is the worst case, and unfortunately probably the most likely. Fortunately, all of the above have an easy solution: microlevels, also known as level staging.
In short, it's a way to bank off experience or whatever the level requirement is in the short term, and give people the ability to work on the level at their own pace. It's even better if you can display that somehow, so that others can see them making progress. Everyone likes feedback about how they're making progress.
This brings me to a whole slew of ideas:
- display of the microlevel on the who list somehow?
- more use of fame for microlevels?
- use of quests for microlevels?
- abandoning exp completely for microlevels?
- going to levels 33-40
- limit rate of acquiring microlevels and levels?
All of these things are something to think about, but either way we're looking at opening up level 33 this year. Whatever I set up, I'd like to do it such that we only open at most one level per year - it's far too easy to get massive inflation otherwise.
For the display thing, the current display model is something like:
[30 32 23 32] Jerk doesn't exist
Suppose Jerk has 16 microlevels on his way to level 33 warrior:
[30 32 23 32] 16 Jerk doesn't exist
I like the way this looks; perhaps other formats would be prettier. Microlevels for each class, with only the highest being displayed sounds like a reasonable way to handle it.
I also really want to do more with requirements other than experience. We did some of this with fame, in requiring fame to gain levels, but right now a quad 32 only has to use 700 fame to get there. The current level requirements for fame right now are:
30 - 25 fame
31 - 50 fame
32 - 100 fame
33 - 200 fame
Note that the level 33 setting has never been used, but 200 fame sounds like a good value for it. For a dual-32 having used 350 fame, another 200 to get to level 33 seems fair. Pro-rating this per microlevel would help people to know where exactly they stand.
Other possibilities for level requirements could be as simple as explorer tokens, or some periodic event. I'm definitely open to more ideas in this area.
For implementation of this, if I had my way I'd make microleveling required for any level higher than 30. This still might be doable, so long as the level and other costs associated with it don't go out of bounds. Microlevels seem kinda stupid and redundant if you can get 15 of them in an hour. 50 million exp spread across 30 microlevels to get to level 31 leaves only 1.6 mil per microlevel; perhaps the real cost for it should be more along the lines of 300 million, or 10 million per microlevel.
This would be a huge increase in the cost of level 31, but with the idea of giving some bonus for each microlevel it might be well tolerated. Consider a temporary bonus for each microlevel, perhaps hp for each of the 32 microlevels on the way to warrior 33. When the final level is actually attained, the microlevel bonus goes away and is replaced by whatever the real level gives you. Players can then start accumulating another set of microlevel bonuses.
Ok, enough ideas for today. Feel free to post back.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Melee fighting
While talking to various people over the last few months, a couple of fundamental combat related ideas have come up. Today I'm going to talk about thieves.
In a lot of fantasy/D&D style games, thieves are really just another fighter class, with different fighter skills and less armor. Alter Aeon has traditionally not been much different, and I find that less than ideal. Consider:
Mages - damage casters, inflicting damage from afar using spells.
Clerics - healers and miscellaneous support for fighters.
Warriors - tanks and heavy hitters.
Thieves - light hitters and occasional backstabbing.
It seems to me that thieves really get the short end of the stick here. Not that they can't fight, but pretty much the only thing that sets them apart in combat is the use of backstab as an opening attack.
This seems contrary to the whole premise of thieves - that they use cunning, agility, and other weirdness to accomplish tasks in unusual ways. Yet Alter Aeon is in large part constructed to have only a single track for accomplishing tasks: kill the mob. The option to just steal or 'liberate' a particular goal isn't even available in most scenarios.
This isn't to say that AA is alone in this area. Most games fall into this trap, because it is the easiest way to do things, and because coming up with general ways to handle specific scenarios is difficult or very time consuming.
I don't intend to address all of this inequality in this post, but I believe that I can address one aspect of it: how thieves handle combat. Mages blast, fighters fight, clerics heal. All these tasks are pretty straight forward. But what should a thief do to be different from 'just another fighter'? One answer I've come up with is this: thieves spoil the fight.
A good example of this would be the 'trip' skill. Tripping something small is no big deal, but suppose you and your group are fighting a twenty foot giant. Casters are doing their thing, fighters are doing their thing, but all of this is really setup for the thieves to get in place: suddenly the giant goes down face first, making things much easier for the fighters and casters.
Trip is the most obvious 'spoiler' skill, but plenty of others could be found. There may also be special defensive skills for thieves to allow them to temporarily be in danger - perhaps an enhanced dodge that can give a thief a very good chance of getting alive out of a sticky situation - but only effective for a handful of hits or a very short period of time.
With this in mind, I may be adjusting the various thief and warrior skills to push things slightly in this direction in the future. Ideas?
In a lot of fantasy/D&D style games, thieves are really just another fighter class, with different fighter skills and less armor. Alter Aeon has traditionally not been much different, and I find that less than ideal. Consider:
Mages - damage casters, inflicting damage from afar using spells.
Clerics - healers and miscellaneous support for fighters.
Warriors - tanks and heavy hitters.
Thieves - light hitters and occasional backstabbing.
It seems to me that thieves really get the short end of the stick here. Not that they can't fight, but pretty much the only thing that sets them apart in combat is the use of backstab as an opening attack.
This seems contrary to the whole premise of thieves - that they use cunning, agility, and other weirdness to accomplish tasks in unusual ways. Yet Alter Aeon is in large part constructed to have only a single track for accomplishing tasks: kill the mob. The option to just steal or 'liberate' a particular goal isn't even available in most scenarios.
This isn't to say that AA is alone in this area. Most games fall into this trap, because it is the easiest way to do things, and because coming up with general ways to handle specific scenarios is difficult or very time consuming.
I don't intend to address all of this inequality in this post, but I believe that I can address one aspect of it: how thieves handle combat. Mages blast, fighters fight, clerics heal. All these tasks are pretty straight forward. But what should a thief do to be different from 'just another fighter'? One answer I've come up with is this: thieves spoil the fight.
A good example of this would be the 'trip' skill. Tripping something small is no big deal, but suppose you and your group are fighting a twenty foot giant. Casters are doing their thing, fighters are doing their thing, but all of this is really setup for the thieves to get in place: suddenly the giant goes down face first, making things much easier for the fighters and casters.
Trip is the most obvious 'spoiler' skill, but plenty of others could be found. There may also be special defensive skills for thieves to allow them to temporarily be in danger - perhaps an enhanced dodge that can give a thief a very good chance of getting alive out of a sticky situation - but only effective for a handful of hits or a very short period of time.
With this in mind, I may be adjusting the various thief and warrior skills to push things slightly in this direction in the future. Ideas?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Miscellaneous Update
I have been a bad developer, and have not posted recently. Part of this is due to things going on in my life, but more of it is due to lack of incentive on my part. I seem to have cyclical swings, and if I follow the historical pattern I should come out of it here in a week or so. But enough about my problems, let's talk about the game!
Of the major events recently, I'd say the biggest two are quicker movement regen, and the str/dex changes. The movement regen change is really only a net improvement of about 25%, but the important part is that it regens on every prompt instead of every tick. For new players, this is absolutely critical; nothing sucks more than being one step away from a safe room and unable to walk there for the 30 seconds it takes for another tick to hit. It changes the newbie game from a 'move a few squares then rest for 30 seconds' kind of game to a 'move more slowly through a few squares and look at stuff' kind of game. It's definitely more pleasant for me when I'm playing, and I've gotten similar remarks from pretty much everyone else.
Strength and dex are another matter. Several very vocal people have already complained, though since I was expecting it, it bothers me less than it initially did. It also helps that nearly everyone who is complaining has already figured out how to change equipment with the least amount of damage. There are also a handful of people who dislike the change because they feel it hurts their characters, but at the same time see the logic behind it and support it. In their view, it affects everyone equally, so it's fair if nothing else.
I only put in the first stage of str/dex in this last update. This limits the spells to +6 and widens the range of boosting to +8, flat across the board. (It used to be +5 or higher depending on how low your natural stat was.) In February, I plan to lower the limit to +5, and in may to +4. I don't think I'll raise the boost range, as it seems to me that +8 is probably sufficient. I'll have to collect more information on this going forward.
One minor change which is actually pretty major is a sort of 'freak' multiplier for randoms. It's just a single line in the changelog, but it's actually a pretty big deal from an equipment standpoint - it's like getting a really kick-ass unique in games like Diablo II. There's four different levels with about a 1 in 8 chance for each successive level. Each level adds 30 composite points to the total, so if you get all four (about one in 4000 odds), you can add nearly 4 hit/dam to the total of the object. Of course, odds are good you'll end up with most of the points going elsewhere, but it basically allows for 'super' random objects to appear from time to time. I don't think this will break the game, as it will be much harder to accumulate sets, and it's much more likely to happen on bound equipment.
Of the major events recently, I'd say the biggest two are quicker movement regen, and the str/dex changes. The movement regen change is really only a net improvement of about 25%, but the important part is that it regens on every prompt instead of every tick. For new players, this is absolutely critical; nothing sucks more than being one step away from a safe room and unable to walk there for the 30 seconds it takes for another tick to hit. It changes the newbie game from a 'move a few squares then rest for 30 seconds' kind of game to a 'move more slowly through a few squares and look at stuff' kind of game. It's definitely more pleasant for me when I'm playing, and I've gotten similar remarks from pretty much everyone else.
Strength and dex are another matter. Several very vocal people have already complained, though since I was expecting it, it bothers me less than it initially did. It also helps that nearly everyone who is complaining has already figured out how to change equipment with the least amount of damage. There are also a handful of people who dislike the change because they feel it hurts their characters, but at the same time see the logic behind it and support it. In their view, it affects everyone equally, so it's fair if nothing else.
I only put in the first stage of str/dex in this last update. This limits the spells to +6 and widens the range of boosting to +8, flat across the board. (It used to be +5 or higher depending on how low your natural stat was.) In February, I plan to lower the limit to +5, and in may to +4. I don't think I'll raise the boost range, as it seems to me that +8 is probably sufficient. I'll have to collect more information on this going forward.
One minor change which is actually pretty major is a sort of 'freak' multiplier for randoms. It's just a single line in the changelog, but it's actually a pretty big deal from an equipment standpoint - it's like getting a really kick-ass unique in games like Diablo II. There's four different levels with about a 1 in 8 chance for each successive level. Each level adds 30 composite points to the total, so if you get all four (about one in 4000 odds), you can add nearly 4 hit/dam to the total of the object. Of course, odds are good you'll end up with most of the points going elsewhere, but it basically allows for 'super' random objects to appear from time to time. I don't think this will break the game, as it will be much harder to accumulate sets, and it's much more likely to happen on bound equipment.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Miscellaneous Update
I've been lax over the last few days with regard to getting much of anything done. On the plus side, Morpheus ran a system event for Halloween which the players seemed to enjoy. It was hard on him though, as there were some hitches (including a minor problem with teleport not working on the magic pumpkins), but everything worked out in the end. I should have the event log and notices up in the next few days.
In other news, I'm going to start making changes to the strength and dexterity spells. I haven't decided some of the more important implementation details, but hopefully I can come up with something that doesn't generate a lot of fallout. There was a lot of resistance from a handful of the higher level players.
Personally, this kind of resistance makes the game a lot less fun for me. I feel the urge to walk on eggshells all the time, and I further feel like the only changes I can make are those that make players more powerful - anything that involves a minor nerfing of player power, spells, or equipment immediately generates craploads of hatemail. Such is the life of an implementor - balance the needs of the game against the fun of the players, and hopefully manage both.
It's all the worse in that sometimes I find (or more often finally get around to) fixing something that is broken, only to find out that two thirds of the players use it religiously and are willing to raise hell if it's removed (or fixed.) It can really cramp your ability to get anything done if you actually care about the player base.
In other news, I'm going to start making changes to the strength and dexterity spells. I haven't decided some of the more important implementation details, but hopefully I can come up with something that doesn't generate a lot of fallout. There was a lot of resistance from a handful of the higher level players.
Personally, this kind of resistance makes the game a lot less fun for me. I feel the urge to walk on eggshells all the time, and I further feel like the only changes I can make are those that make players more powerful - anything that involves a minor nerfing of player power, spells, or equipment immediately generates craploads of hatemail. Such is the life of an implementor - balance the needs of the game against the fun of the players, and hopefully manage both.
It's all the worse in that sometimes I find (or more often finally get around to) fixing something that is broken, only to find out that two thirds of the players use it religiously and are willing to raise hell if it's removed (or fixed.) It can really cramp your ability to get anything done if you actually care about the player base.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Fighters and stats
I was looking at some warrior characters and the issues that they have to deal with this morning, and I have come up with an indecent proposal on how to change strength and dexterity so as to make them 'more interesting' and more useful. This came about due to recent changes to the strength and dexterity spells, which screw warriors and thieves harder than I had expected.
Part of the reason strength and dexterity have come out so low on the equipment totem pole is that there are spells to compensate for it. Why should a builder bother to build equipment with strength and dex on it, when those valuable composite points could instead be used on stats like int and wis? After all, you can just use the int and wis to cast and maintain strength and dex spells.
With this in mind, consider the following two changes:
1) Limit strength and dexterity spells to a maximum of +4 boost.
2) Raise the boosting limit for strength and dexterity on equipment to +10. If you want 30 strength, you only need a natural 20 to do it, if you wear strength boosting equipment. Spells alone can only bring to to 24.
As an example, you could have 20 natural strength, add 6 through equipment, and 4 through spells to get 30 strength to wield a special sword.
Again, the reason for this is primarily to change the way that builders build equipment. The strength and dexterity stats on equipment are ill-favored, because they're so easy to replace with spells. Allowing stats to be able to do something that the spells cannot should tip this balance.
The only down side of this is that it will take some time for this to percolate through the equipment lists, and it will take time for equipment to be updated. In the short term to help bridge that gap, I would propose that the spells be limited to +5 instead of +4, with a temporarily lower casting cost. After 3-6 months the limit would be lowered to +4, and the casting cost slowly raised back up after that.
Any feedback on how you think this might be broken would be appreciated.
Part of the reason strength and dexterity have come out so low on the equipment totem pole is that there are spells to compensate for it. Why should a builder bother to build equipment with strength and dex on it, when those valuable composite points could instead be used on stats like int and wis? After all, you can just use the int and wis to cast and maintain strength and dex spells.
With this in mind, consider the following two changes:
1) Limit strength and dexterity spells to a maximum of +4 boost.
2) Raise the boosting limit for strength and dexterity on equipment to +10. If you want 30 strength, you only need a natural 20 to do it, if you wear strength boosting equipment. Spells alone can only bring to to 24.
As an example, you could have 20 natural strength, add 6 through equipment, and 4 through spells to get 30 strength to wield a special sword.
Again, the reason for this is primarily to change the way that builders build equipment. The strength and dexterity stats on equipment are ill-favored, because they're so easy to replace with spells. Allowing stats to be able to do something that the spells cannot should tip this balance.
The only down side of this is that it will take some time for this to percolate through the equipment lists, and it will take time for equipment to be updated. In the short term to help bridge that gap, I would propose that the spells be limited to +5 instead of +4, with a temporarily lower casting cost. After 3-6 months the limit would be lowered to +4, and the casting cost slowly raised back up after that.
Any feedback on how you think this might be broken would be appreciated.
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