Alter Aeon Christmas Event

Every year for Christmas (and for a bunch of other holidays), we do something special. Usually this amounts to in-game events to open new areas, or for special prizes, things of that nature. This year, in addition to the usual things, we'll also be adding something else: a bunch of new code.

For each of the five classes, we'll be adding a few new spells and/or skills. A lot of this stuff is high level, but it's also focused more strongly in some classes than others. Cleric is probably the class that benefits the most, but it's also been the class with the least amount of scaling. Necromancer doesn't get much new stuff, but it does get a few critical reworks of existing spells and skills that didn't work out as designed.

Adding new spells and skills like this is always a hassle. Coming up with new stuff is hard, because it has to be useful, interesting, and above all preserve the physics/theme of the game. There's no point in just adding a bunch of lookalike damage spells that are successively more powerful.

There's also the problem of integrating new things into the existing spell and skill trees. One of the major things about this release is that there's been a lot of reworking of the spell and skill trees for the various classes. Thief, warrior, and cleric have all seen pretty significant changes to their skill groups, primarily to make space for the new additions.

There are a few other things I'll mention, such as new achievements, but since we're keeping the actual spells and skills under wraps until Christmas morning, I'll stop here.

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.

Where do we go?

I've been doing some serious thinking about the game, the market, and the business model I'm trying to work with. I still think the business model is sound; I've been able to pay most expenses and use the remainder for (admittedly ineffective) advertising for years. This year will be different, as I'm dumping some of my personal money into it, but even so the numbers have risen and will compensate somewhat for that increased outflow.

The biggest problem I see with regard to expansion right now is, unfortunately, market based. If you go out to any gaming news site, it's not just that there's a handful of games being advertised - it's that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of games being advertised. It's reached the point where you're lucky if you can even find a WoW ad amidst the piles of other crap.

The gaming market right now is, as near as I can tell, in the middle of a huge investment bubble. Hundreds of companies have come on line with venture or public funding to be the next 'WoW killer'. These startup companies are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising for a limited number of players; several new cookie-cutter MMOs come out every week.

On the plus side, most of these will fail. As with all bubbles, this one will collapse, and most games will go under. There's simply not enough players right now, and once you've seen one cookie cutter game, you've seen them all. In some ways, being a text based game protects us, as we have a limited niche that isn't facing ridiculous competition.

So what do we do about it? In the immediate short term, scale back plans of massive growth, and wait for the bubble to pop. But we can't just rest on our laurels either; we should be doing something. What best to do?

Make the game the best game it can be, that's what. Most of the games that will fail, will fail precisely because they -are- cookie cutter games. Do you not think that the players on WoW would pay $5 more for a game that was $5 better than WoW? The reason that they don't is because there aren't any games $5 better than WoW.

I currently have two projects in various stages to this end. The first is the ongoing upgrade to the client, which is coming along slowly but steadily; I probably won't have a new release this weekend, but should have one soon. I think with that release I'll start looking for a graphic designer or other artistic input to make the interface pretty.

The other project is only in the planning stages: add more classes to the game. I get a lot of comments from newer players that the limited class selection looks strange and seems thin compared to other games. It also has issues (which some players call features), such as limited room for long term expansion, high level characters all being the same or very similar, a small number of high-end playing styles, and what I would consider bogus skill groupings.

I think I have a rough model of how to do class expansions now, but it will probably be several weeks before we have enough detail fleshed out to really start implementing it.

Skills, spells, and classes

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?

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 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.