Shattered Kingdoms

Gnimral...

*fistshake*

Uh. IMMs != coders. Only Dulrik can do any of this. Its apparent that there are way more ideas than he will have time to finish that could be put forth. I think the best goal is to focus upon a few ideas more than widespread overhaul. I'm all for making sure things are balanced, but I'm almost positive I'd rather not worry about "balancing" and rather have things that are completely new and adding in fun instead of rehashing old items. The game gets plenty of balancing. I want new stuff to do.

That's unfortunately why this mud is in its current state. Dulrik needs to relinquish his obsessive control of the code and allow a few select others to work on it if he wants this game to be better.

Granted, if he just wants to be selfish and keep it to himself as it is his game, he's fully within his rights to do that and none of us can say jack to him about it because he's providing this free of charge.

To help narrow the list, I'll only quote any changes that are worthwhile. I'm also using bold/italics instead of quotes because quotes make things unbearable to read in long circumstances like this.

1) Dual trib/cabal
Take the wonderful trib code and cut it into notepad for another day. We don't have the playerbase to support any sort of extreme system based on Tribunals. No war system, no big diplomacy system. If you are balls deep in making these, merge them into cabals until a later date. Just make being in a tribunal an extra flag (like being in a religion) that allows you to kill people in a country's land.
2) Revamp of weapons (yes, it needs ANOTHER fine tweak)
I still would go with either uncapping stat maxes for builders on weapons or removing subtypes.
4) Balances changes with art/saves (art needs to be more effective)
Go back to when you could fully resist a spell's damage with MP, decrease the effectiveness of each enchantment by 25%, and these are your balance changes that should be in place.
5) An actual economy/trade system!
This is one of the only things that'd take extensive coding, and I think should be the next project. Screw some trade system, but building an extensive economy (lol stock exchange anyone?) would be worth coding time. Nothing else really is.
7) Removal of bounty hunters.
20) Remove shovels. Seriously.
Simple and necessary.


13) Remove hp/me/move limitations from being trained.
14) Reduce the amount of adamantite/mithril/energy in the game
These two are resounding nos. Very few people ever toppled the currently implemented HP caps, and a lot of the better chars in history never did. As far as great loot, this needs to leave everyone's mind now. There should be very little limitation to good loot, only increase the challenge in getting it (and by challenge, that does not mean give scouts a 75% chance to fail in skinning better NPCs...)


OTHER NON GAME RELATED CHANGES:
1) Advertise. A lot. Draw players away from other muds in groups.
Ingrained MUD players are not going to abandon ship from one MUD to another short of some great dramatic travesty, and those are the players we don't want here. The best advertising this game could get is the idea already in play: post in your local dice&card shops.
2) Remove the SK official forums for all things but bug reports, newbie help, announcements, and afterlife. The game is more fun when everyone isn't oocly worried on cabal/religion/leader/HF/general discuss/gameplay discussions. Also I think this crap discourages newbies.
*No.
3) Bring on 2-3 more angels to just RP with folks. ...
*No. IMM-sponsored RP events have very, very rarely ever been a booming, well-received success. The best RPs are created by players, with help by IMMs controlling NPCs or offering supportive pecho/rechos. IMMs need to lessen their interaction to mundane things like this, in fact, and allow players to create their own dramas. Which is another thing a lot of code changes, actually, have gimped, per taking away a lot of solo PK capability.

A lot of these things are small tweaks that can be made over time. Save trade for last. Dulrik makes a smarter move than apparently some can respect by keeping the code on lock down. A lot of these changes talked about for the game's gut code are unnecessary, and those above can be implemented over time.

Oh, and one I'd like to add.

Change recalls back to town centers.

I do not agree here. SK is pretty much the only MUD I have ever played, and if I suddenly heard of another one that lacks the aggravating anti-player problems this game has but with an environment just as alluring, I would be tempted to try it along with. Surely there are other people similarly minded elsewhere. A lot of newbies I have helped in the past told me they came from another MUD to try this one.

Go play some other muds and then come back. The most beneficial advertising we can do for that crowd is your basic TMS and reviews, and that's a world of good. You'd be surprised that reviews and such get a lot of attention when searching for a new MUD when one's bored with another. The only way advertising like this would work would be for a group of people to actually play other MUDs for a while, figure out the problems, and then subvert them by saying the grass is greener over here. One, that's disrespectful, and two, just not the players we generally want.

Amen brother.

You make it sound a lot more sinister than I imagined. I figured other MUD forums usually have some kind of off-topic section and sometimes a section to discuss other MUDs. I have not looked into it a whole lot though. I would agree that the covert operations to sway the masses would be pretty lousy, if anyone was actually endorsing such a thing.

You'd sooner see an imm waltz around in a cartoon costume IRL than see a forum to discuss other MUDs on SK's forums - and very soon any thread talking about them would be trashed: all other muds are the same way. The only way to do this advertising would be like I described, I imagine.

<3 karma, <3.

If that is true, I consider myself schooled then.