"Verbal Sparring"

So I have been thinking... (Dangerous pasttime, I know.)

CoH went into maintenance as I was fiendishly plotting my new dominator for the board SG they're trying to start up. So I went into RoD to while away some time, hoping to find some old faces. Gonnil sent a tell and we got to talking. I was my usual ray of sunshine self (translation: jaded cynic) when it comes to RoD, while he sounded like he'd been taking optimism lessons from Ceir. :)

And some of the stuff we discussed got me to thinking...

I mentioned that RoD gameplay was lacking in strategies. Hit mob with as damaging an attack as possible + quaff heals until your face turns blue. That classes aren't in 'equal demand' per se.

Now he mentioned that RoD is a multi-character game. Granted. That's a defence I always used to use too. And he admitted the classes weren't balanced combat-wise, but were, out of combat. Now, I don't think every class needs perfect balance, it'll be an impossible goal, but after CoH, it'll be nice if the classes could have their own special niche. A role that they are intended to play.

I used the example of who would bring a cleric into battle? Granted, they can brew heals, so maybe that's their special niche. A little humbling to think of oneself as a brewbot, but hey, emp defs are heal/buffbots, so perhaps that's the life all healer types have to face. Exactly what special, crucial things do druids, auggies, fathomers do again? That other classes don't do better?

The refreshing thing about CoX is that it's not totally built on the "holy trinity" of warrior-tank, priest-healer, mage-damage dealer. But let's not limit it to just CoX. GW tries to complicate matters by allowing you to pick two professions, each with their own shticks and subshticks - trapper, regenner, pet or minion master, buffs, enchantments, what have you, I dunno, I lost track long ago. Some other games (AA, DDO) throw in a 'special ops'/stealth agent function in the rogue/stalker/assassin archetype.

I don't see RoD sitting down and deciding exactly how their combat system is going to work and revamping stuff from there. Perhaps I'm being too negative, but there you go. :/

Now Gonnil's convinced that a lot of the gameplay strategies can be replicated in RoD, and he says the new areas can show this. I haven't seen the new areas, so I have to give people the benefit of the doubt, but...Really? My first reaction is, you must be kidding.

A game reflects the environment you play it in. You can do things in a textual MUD you can't do in 3D. You can do other things in a web browser that's difficult to do elsewhere (forms, clickable buttons, low lag, etc.) And you can do things in 3D that you can't do in MUDs.

How do I explain the importance of 3 dimensions to someone who hasn't played something like CoX or even an FPS game? You /move/ in 3D. To get away from mobs that are closing in on you. You kite. How do you kite in a MUD? Have the mob chase you from room to room maybe? It's doable, you could use that on special mobs to trap them someplace, but it doesn't have the commonplace to it. You can kite any mob in 3D and it's something special when they don't kite, be it because they can't cross a zone (EQ was like this apparently) or they are programmed not to, or they have realistic AI (like in an FPS).

CoX flying. An old old game, Descent with the 360 degree turning which is even looser than CoX flying. Auto-Assault with their spinning vehicles. They've all got a different physics engine to them. Exactly how do you replicate this in a MUD?

And of course, the twenty four thousand dollar question. Would you want to?

RoD suffers from add-it-on syndrome. Anything that sounds cool is something to be tacked on, IF there is a coder around willing to do it. If not, well, you're SOL.

Perhaps CoE really needs to sit down and make some important design decisions about RoD and its future. Like what? Like what you want RoD to be for the players.

I'll tell you what's special about RoD. Limitless multiple characters. And then you nerfed it by limiting it to 8 online only. Fine, you needed to put a reasonable balance on it for whatever reason.

Endgame consisting of running mobs for equipment to dress those said multiple characters. You know how you fucked it up? You made it more difficult to run the SAME mobs for the SAME or gimpier equipment. Nerf! You made it time-consuming, involving many people online, who don't even get a reward, but a chance at the reward - either a lottery or an long, extended involved points system.

Idiots. Do you need Everquest and World of Warcraft to run through the same model and see why it BLEEDS players after the first year or so of addictiveness? Sooner or later, people are going to wake up from their greed-infested dream and realize, waitaminute, I am spending 20 hours of my life 7 days a week in some stupid's dragon cave hoping to be the lucky one to get the dragon helmet so I can progress to the next zone to slay the super mama dragon.

Translation: Ultimately pointless.

Here's a hint. If you're determined to stay with the "slay a mob, collect an item" gameplay. Make the lottery EASY. Just make more of them. When it is easy to attain, your players will continue to climb the ladder of progression and not question how much time they are wasting. Your progress points, the rungs of the ladder, are well within reach of even newbie players. For hardcore players, make tougher challenges and send them around to experience the same content again, but slightly harder this time. Eventually, players will reach a point when they may have had enough of climbing the ladder personally, but you'll be surprise how much you can sneak up on 'em when you don't make it insanely hard.

Does this sound familiar? Does it sound like Kingdom of Loathing? I don't ever want to reach the point where I will donate $$$ to get a Mr Accessory. So I know I will stop at that point should I ever bump up against it. But I still played it because I can complete mini-goals, unlock new areas, and cheesy of all cheesy things, craft stuff - ie. cook pizza and burritos, that in turn help me gain stats and unlock new areas. All within the span of one day's adventures. If I had to take one month to reach a goal, I would have said, fuck it, and quit long ago.

For the hardcore, there is ascension (aka remort) and all kinds of strange "paths" that make it harder. Cannot accept gifts from people, cannot eat, drink, blah blah blah.

And this week, for the first time, I am sitting on my adventures so I can wait for a Mysticality Day and see what all the special fuss is about. This is something that apparently all 'real' KoL players do, wait for stat days. Yea, whatever. You can thank your game designers for being smart enough to make even noobs feel like they are progressing, even without the benefit of knowing about all these special secret stuff about moons and funky pieces of equipment and this and that. Eventually, a serious player will learn about all this game jargon and then become one of the "in-crowd" of your particular game.

And I'm still embarassed for RoD because after the Shattering, it has become uber newbie-unfriendly. There's a lot of repair works to be done before new players are guided as well as the old days - a small in-story in-game tutorial area where they could find the secret float token - a nice academy - Tagetarle's stone which ported you to self-contained lowbie areas you could explore and then get back to DH base camp safely. Alas, the benefit of hindsight. :(

Anyhow, if you want players to keep killing stuff for better equipment, then you better start thinking about your combat system and your precious DR cap. Trying to cap DR was what started the decline in the first place, imo. You cannot say that 200 dr is out of the question, and then make sure no future equipment reaches that kind of reward. Or that seth is the penultimate reward. Then what the heck are the new mobs for?!

I don't have an ultimate solution to this dilemma. It involves giving a close hard look at your combat system, what rewards you think are significant to players in this combat system, and making them choose between equally enticing choices. Maybe something like more hp, less dr. Or the opposite. Then you'd at least produce two combat roles, tank + damage dealer. You can't have holy trinity with your current combat system because, dammit, you bottled the priest. :P

I know, it's a really refreshing idea. Haven't seen anywhere do it like RoD. But...maybe there's a reason they didn't. Perhaps you should explore more of it. People would probably cry foul if you added some limitation to how much they could quaff or eat at any one time, they are so used to endless 'healing' from the stuff they carry. Maybe different brewed heals could have different effects for different classes? Maybe you could add a crafting element so that clerics can start hem, 'cooking' like pastamancers and saucerors? I dunno, brainstorming here.

You gotta put some think into what decisions you're making. Like I don't see the point of upping 'divinity' to 300 hp heal. Sure it makes clerics feel warm and fuzzy and they have something new and fun to play with for a while. But have you seen how LONG it takes to heal with divinity with the symbols of faith? I forget, was this the one you had to have two clerics chanting in unison too, which makes it even longer? Have you timed how fast it is to just fucking quaff three heals?

Can a cleric with their 1500 mana store heal more with divinity than a thief just carrying 220 heal potions? Let's look at numbers here, eh? Fun little numbers. I don't remember how much divinity costs in mana. Let's presume impossibly that it costs the same amount as 'pzar' which I believe was 50. Means you can do 30 divinities x 300 = 9000 hp. 200 heal potions x 100 = 20000 hp.

Big esteenking DEAL. And quaffing is FASTER. You can quaff at least 3-4 heals in the same tick as a single spell cast. Was it really worth the effort to just change one number in the code?

Think, people. Sheesh.

Adding millions of flagged eq, anti-priest, anti-druid, anti-bear, anti-shark, anti-hamster, anti-dust fluff evil alignment only yadda yadda, is NOT exactly enticing reward, ok?

To add more significant choice, you'd really have to revamp the combat system. What makes you dodge better? (Like KoL Moxie). Perhaps you'd want typed damage (like CoH, AA, even KoL's hot/cold/stench/spooky, etc.) Then you could add armor that protects against certain types but not all. Different outfits become important at different times, then. = More demand for a whole set of clothing.

And when I start thinking like that, it's when I start to feel all depressed for RoD again because the base combat system is clunky. I know a CoE imm admitted as much. I forget who it was though. Could be Edmond, or Kali or Blodkai, in order of most likely to least. They wanted to revamp and rewrite it again.

That's practically ripping RoD out from its guts and doing Shattering (of the Soul) x 2 on it though. Do you think RoD can survive that kind of trauma? I'm not sure it can, personally. It would be an entirely different game. A healthier game, perhaps, but it doesn't have too strong a clientele to begin with - all it has sticking on to it are the diehards who react least well to change. The change and novelty hounds left long ago for fresher cleaner waters. :(

And if you DON'T revamp RoD like this, you're building on shaky foundations and you still run into the endgame/rewards + damage cap problem, and you turn into an insular community of diehards who make it super-difficult for newbies to get into the game, and that results in eventual attrition and atrophy. :/

I'm still looking for side number three, or option three. Is there another possibility I'm not seeing? Besides RoD: the Game officially becomes RoD: The Chatroom?

I suppose you can try creating a "Legends" system like CoX is. If you can flip the diehard level 50s' view of what the endgame is supposed to be, and magically create some kind of FUN self-sustaining endgame, you can slowly but steadily tweak the focus away from MUST HAVE UBER-LEET LEWT. Then you work on the newbie system and make sure newbies are encouraging with progress points and make it easier and fun and less tedious to level. Then the marketing comes in and you can get people to play the game.

And all this is done free of charge out of the goodness of imms' hearts. Heh.

Right.

I will stop this and cease to cynicism myself into absolute jadedness.

I'll just play CoX until it gets tiring and then try the next new game on the market.

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Oh, let me just ooze about why CoX suits me a little. Made my dominator, finally came up with a nice character concept and name for him. Better than the orange-red costumed punk with a big omega symbol that I deleted. I realized I hadn't made a pirate. I was thinking ghost pirate at first, but white, pale green and blue wasn't ghostly glowy enough for me, made him look like he was in a dressing gown or something. Luckily, black worked and made him look sinister.

As usual, I got stuck on names, but found a random pirate name generator table and came up with Black Jeremiah, which I think is cool. I wanted to use Isaiah, which is a name I've liked since La Chute, but Black Isaiah doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Armed with a sweet concept, I enter Mercy Isle and start kicking ass. Reason number one why I like CoX: Action begins almost immediately. You can go street hunt or mission as and when you want, and you don't even have to run for 30 minutes to get to it. Unless you forgot a travel power or something. :/

Reason number two why I like CoX: Multiple mob fighting. I can handle three mobs at once. This is NORMAL for CoX. Hold one, severely fry one with incinerate flares brawl, hold third, work on number one, etc.

And tanking. *insane giggle* Lookit all those mobs in the spawns. And the day RoD implements the reactor trial, the Eden trial, the crystal caverns in the ice mistral TF, etc. is the day I'll -maybe- think about going back to RoD. I think the number of mobs required would probably lag RoD to death first though.

I could go on about the fun of teaming in CoX and the uniqueness in gameplay of each AT, but I'd be either preaching to the choir or wasting my breath, so I won't.