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*poke poke* I disagree (hopefully in a constructive way) about your comment on the "depth" of things to do in the server. I personally find it about as narrow as it is shallow.
Here's a few of my ideas. You can argue them amongst yourselves if you want but I'm not going to hang around arguing them.
1: Smaller HH's. Currently, they're unrealistically huge, sprawling, and basically just a run around one-hitting everything for the more advanced players. To balance this out, add more, higher level HH's.
1a: An alternative. Have different level "areas" in each HH. Moreso then what we have now. Have areas geared towards MUCH higher players, with extremely tough monsters, and more low level areas for the beginners to play around with.
1b: Doors and traps. Have doors and traps automatically adjust to the level of the person opening it. That way, the traps will always be difficult to spot/disarm, and will always be dangerous. Making one think carefully about opening that door. (Also adjusting door HP to the first person who tries to beat/blast it open.)
2: Mega sprawl dungeons. Do we really need those overly complex labryinths that no one really goes through anyway except to look for some obscure chests or a few important paths to rex spots and kingdom warps? Size them down, save server space to load up more useful levels elsewhere. Smaller dungeons, and more of them.
2a: Scatter the potion chests across the lands. Such as a cave at the top of the big mountain in NW main. You must fight through several tough monsters in order to reach the chest.
3: Better develop kingdom islands themselves. Some DO need some sort of standard monsters running around. Not nearly as much on main, but pockets here and there. Mining of resources is really a chore as is. It may pose a challenge to beginners, but for the more advanced players it really is a huge chore. Add more convenience mines to the kingdom islands, and trade that convenience off with harder time consuming challenges of different types elsewhere.
3a: Easier house/plot customization. The method of using houses is very unique and somewhat enjoyable. The only other game I've seen do a good job is a Runescape. But it has a single portal which each player can use to go to their own seperate house. Which they can actually build up pretty big. That method wouldn't be necessary and would probably take away the "charm" of the islands, but being able to have a plot "assigned" around your house (the size should be variable and at the discretion of the person with the H right).
3b: Stuff to actually do with those plots. Like grow permanent flowers/vegetables/trees. Save the more indepth stuff for down the road.
3c: "Addon" flags, costing significantly more each time. Buy an addon flag for a HUGE sum of plat and have it automatically "sticky" to the side or back of a house when placed. Once approved, one must spend the resources to build a second houses, which has two indoor levels connected by a door. At maximum.
4: Economy. The economy runs on diamonds, various scrolls, gold keys and event coins, various gems, and event items. It's more of a high-value barter system. The plat has been virtually phased out because there's so little to DO with it other then buy out stores to get rare spawns. As more and more content gets added to the game, store items and services need to become significantly more expensive to make it crippling to a player who -doesn't- have a lot of plat.
4a: The excessive random spawns in shops are a bit heavy in some places. Some shops do need more static spawns. Trade off.... make'm tons more expensive.
4b: Smaller shops, more of them. I love the atmosphere of the smaller potion shop underneath the big shop in Bogenera. There's nothing wrong with a super-market, but we need a few more quaint ally shops.
4c: I would almost recommend special places with which to "buy" high end items. Places like travelling shady merchants who only get new items now and again regardless of how fast they get bought. These higher level elitist shops should be the ones where the rare and powerful items occasionally show up in.
5: More resource/production items. Give something for the packrats to dig up. Make some manual labor/gathering jobs for beginners to do. Add resources that can be difficult to get (and in new locations such as mines with tough monsters in them.) but sell for a nice chunk of cash. Also, a wider resource base means more potential later on.
5a: Create MANY more craftable items, and I don't mean more swords. We got plenty of those. Other things, shields, armors, boots, gloves, capes, etc. With a wider range of resources with a range of difficulties obtaining them craftable items with good stats can become quite difficult to obtain. This would also put emphasis back onto making items for the low to mid levels. (As well as take emphasis off of lording for some resources to make a rather mediocre item.) Also, some craftable items should match or even surpass some of the event items. In payoff, they need to be hard to craft (and I don't mean Event Coin hard). Make ET items more for show, or the very rare, really powerful item. [Should also help solve the current issue with there being so darned many ET items right now. Once they get diluted in value, they can still be handed out like candy, but since they'll have lost their overall use and value it won't be nearly as bad.]
6: Monsters. We need more, a lot more, and higher end content. We also need a few specials hanging around that could make King John cry. Recolors may be the spawn of satan, but these are desperate times. Make a recolor, add a few changes (like an extra pair of horns or twenty) and run for it. It's called a placeholder for a reason. Add something unique and innovative down the road AFTER the game content has had a major bump.
6a: Maps. Yes, maps keep getting harder and harder. They have a nice, linear pattern of development. But once there is a significantly larger monster database of all difficulties we can get a few more different kinds of maps for each difficulty level.
6b: Kingdom maps. Maps that only work on a kingdom. Unique monsters, kingdom specific if you really wanted to be fancy. Same difficulties, just more footwork.
6c: "God maps". This is just some idea I had while toying around. These maps drop, and when you go into one, cult monsters (yes you'd have to add some of these and get that spell working) of your god's opposing god will spawn and fill the map. Once you clear the map, you don't get plat as much as a nice prayer exp bump determined by the level of the map.
7: Quest improvements. Once there's a lot more content (and believe it or not, more land), maybe some story/adventure type quests can be added like other online games. For right now, I don't think that's as important. I'd recommend more quests similar to the "Kill x monster" or "Gather y item" quests. Repeatable, vary a lot, different types of rewards. Make these more or less difficult depending on the current content of the game, and you'll have a loose quest system that adjusts to suit gameplay.
There's probably a dozen other things that can be done, even Googi's pet system. (Although I don't like the pet battling idea. I think its something we don't need yet. Just make it easier, make it so you can't accidentaly hit your pet. Make it so they come back with full food after a server restart (unless that's been fixed already), and possibly allow some really awesome recolors through breeding. That should be good enough for now. These suggestions are basically the things that I think should be done FIRST in order to bulk up the foundation of the game. Once its more like one of those fancier games out there, then we can continue to grow and adapt it into something very unique. But until then people barely play, people get burned out with insane grinds and trying to catch up with other players, and I for one like to enjoy a game by packratting a HUGE library of items and taking part in diversified activities and environments.
[[I'm not even gonna talk about addressing balancing issues, or making things fairer. Seriously... don't even start. How do we even know the current issues will even BE an issue once a bunch of serious development is started? And if its really that much of a problem, drop kingdoms down to a classic world, start the diversified game as a new kingdoms, and allow for a "partial" one-time crossover from old to new.]] |
11-25-2007, 01:25 AM
Linear Mode
