Shattered Kingdoms

I think it would be very encouraging to have a few hints as to what's coming - sort of like the teasers at the end of a show for next week's episode. Enjoy what's here now, but just wait for what's coming...even without a weak timeline, it's nice to have something to look forward to.

Perhaps to help make GMs more rare, not make them solely dependent on enlightenments, but give other requirements that would qualify them as actual "grand masters" of their fields. Figure mentoring points into this, or skill levels, or "years in the field," or perhaps certain quests that would lead to it - tests of mastery, if you will. Goals that mean a heck of a lot more than days of grinding at the ToM.

But along with making the last 10 levels more challenging, be sure to make the first ones a lot less tedious. There is so much static time in SK to be anywhere near on an even playing ground - not just grinding, but brewing, scribing, enchanting - that even if you're RPing while you do them, they're so darn tedious for so little reward. (My own little QQ.)

I think these are the main code-able things that would help make SK more enjoyable. Other things lie on the shoulders of players: stop mindlessly slaughtering, but make your killing part of a story line. Make conflicts more than "I'm right you're dead" scenes. Don't just wait for RP to come to you, but do what you can to bring RP to others. Take the risk now and then of letting your prey get away when you're hunting, for the chance of a more colorful encounter for both you and your target. And most of all, don't let this wonderful game become a chore - that way lies boredom and burnout.

this post is so damn full of win.

Make stun effects from a PC last a couple ticks or more so a party can stun the other party strip what trinkets they want and allow them to live?

I read this thread and all I read is... qq, qq, qq, qq...

There are a couple of points that I do agree with, though.

I do like the idea of previews regarding changes that are to take place, although from time to time D does indeed let us know that something will be fixed/implemented in the next update.

Regarding leveling, I am certainly NOT a power-player, and I am not newbie of course. So at least from my perspective it's easy like crap to get to early Master. It's from there on that things get harder, requiring that you travel to distant and dangerous areas like ToM or so, which is more than fine in my book. If you want to reach GM easily you need to go through peril, else be patient. In the end, try to take more advantage of the area-bonus out there and don't be lazy. You would be AMAZED if you realized how much extra exp that means!

He lies, don't listen to him.

Speaking of game play, I vote we have GL become the official bit..greeter of SK.

Give him moderation of the newbie forums and let him organize/sticky/clean things up. He's got the time on his hands, enough care about his ooc image to be responsible with it, and he's not an idiot.


I'm serious, too.

About grinding: I don't like it and the changes I've made have been to promote not doing it. I've said this before. However, I'm also not a fan of letting everyone level up to 40 as easy as pie. I think part of this is just a difference in the evolution of games over the last 10 years.

Back when I started mudding in the early 90's, it was just expected that you would spend hundreds of hours levelling your character. And for at least the first 5 years of SK, this attitude persisted and nobody really complained about slow levelling. Consider that it was at least 6 months after we opened the game before anyone even hit level 40. The griffon that did so was pretty famous for the next year. Even years later, when we added heroes that were based on classes, half the slots went unfilled because no one had attained GM in that class.

By this standard, the levelling today can still be insanely fast. Granted that for a newbie, it can take 200-300 hours to hit GM, which I do not think is unreasonable. But people in the know can probably still go to GM in under 50 hours. That's fast, but I'm NOT going to make that harder because smart people are always going to find out the fastest way.

The number one thing that hurts the current levelling scheme is the now almost universal expectation that you have to be Master before you can even "start playing the game". People just did not think like this in the early days, and I'm still trying to think of ways to change it.

Some games don't have to deal with this problem because they have PK level ranges. Low level people can be powerful within their level range and be useful at taking out other people in their level range that the high level people can't touch. But that's a system that is completely against the philosophy with which SK was designed, so you won't see it.

I think the best way to solve the problem is to make more things in the game that can only be done when you are lower level. And make these unique actions be important and helpful to your higher level allies. That way lower level players wouldn't have to race to the top in order to be a useful part of the game. I welcome any ideas along this line.

Quoted For Truth.

I think there are several ways to approach this. One is to make, and support areas and organizations, and quests(!) expressly for low-mid level characters. An example would be the largely unused "Adventurer's Guild". This is something that can really be fleshed out. But along those lines, a guild/tradeskill based system could be geared towards the lower levelled characters (by this I'm talking 30 and below).

Another way to approach this, and will likely not happen, is some sort of ascension, or some way to multiclass.

Something I'd been mulling around in my head along the lines of open-ended quests, are the ability to have certain quests flag off others, and change the way other NPCs/people/scripts react to you. This however, is lengthy, exhausting, and very troublesome - but this could generate more differentiating characteristics between classes, characters, and skillsets.

I know that "at internet speed" a month can seem like an eternity, so what I'm about to say is probably considered ancient history. However, when it comes to previews for the game, I did this at the beginning of the year. In fact, I actively let players vote on what would be worked on this year. Specialty spells for each religion were not really on my radar, but due to high demand, that's what has been slowly being worked on.

Maybe this didn't turn out to be the best task to work on, because the introduction of new IC knowledge-only abilities certainly doesn't win us much in positive public awareness, but it has been happening and they will all be done before 2008.

I know that doesn't sound like much, but there are always other things going on in the background, including a ton of work related to migrating our servers due to the imminent loss of our free hosting and attempting to generate revenue from the website to support a game which is going to be costing me more than pocket change to support in the future.

To answer D's question about leveling, there are reasons nobody complained back then compared to now.

1. Spellspamming. You used to be able to GM just from pressing enter a whole bunch. It took longer than when you were out killing things, but it meant you didn't have to put up with having to go out to various places and jump through hoops. You removed that option.

2. NPCs didn't used to cast debilitating spells. These days (or at least, when I last played), you can be charmed, blinded, slept, cursed, deafened, confused, all by NPCs. Great, I just killed one NPC, now I have to sit around twiddling my thumbs for a few minutes. I understand you removed some of these problems, but they're still there and will be there as long as NPCs commonly used for leveling have debilitating, boredom-creating spells and effects at their command.

3. Interaction. People used to interact while they were leveling. There were only a few areas you could level, and there were set "leveling paths" for people to take. You'd do taslamar newbie school, amphitheatre, morea, n'kashya, ToM if you were a lightie for example. It took a while, and the same people were there for the same amount of time. You'd chat, shoot the [REDACTED], have a good time. These days there are umpteen million places to go, but you have to be taken to half of them. This forced interaction makes interaction in general quite boring. When someone says hello, you know they're going to be "wanna group" -- I don't want to group with you!

4. Area familiarity. God do I regret suggesting this. You may say you don't like grinding, but you must love it, or you wouldn't have reduced below normal the amount of exp you can get from a single area. It's punishing and boring unless you know where to go.

5. Skills and spells. You have made it increasingly painful to use these things, whether it's skills costing ME, charge needing a 'recharge' time, whatever. You've just made it annoying to play the game.

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All of these changes together have made the leveling grind pretty god damn boring and pretty god damn grindalicious compared to how it was years ago when the mud was popular. Leveling might take less time now, but it's painful. I literally sit there and feel like I'm being punished for trying to play the game. It's for that reason that I haven't leveled a character beyond veteran (or stuck with a character after veteran) for a couple of years.