Back to DDO in Time for Update 5
The thing I like best about Dungeons & Dragons' f2p model is that I have a hard time keeping up a steady playing schedule, but love to come back to the game. Sure, I've probably spent more buying adventure packs and 32-point builds and whatnot, but then again I also haven't paid a subsbscription for months with no playing happening. To me, at least, it evens out in the end.
After having made the Orien server my home during the first part of this year (as it is the home of some real-life mutual aquaintances of myself and Redeye), I am happy to report I am back in my OG hood Sarlona (which I chose as my home server back at launch). Why leave Orien? It isn't my DDO "home" and I lost the desire to play with the Orien guild as I gradually learned they had no clue how to play the game, or even display the slightest shred of intelligence or thoughtfulness.
Not to be too harsh, but within a few not-so-easy instances I realized that the core members' main strategy was ZERG, ZERG, ZERG!! Of course none of them are "vets" and have no clue how to run the instances ... which results in a wipe every few minutes. And like that cliched definition of insanity, there apparently was no learning of how not to wipe happening. Add to that high levels of frustration on the part of those causing the wipes and some rather racist commentary from the same. Partying with imbeciles just wasn't happening for me and so I took a couple months off from DDO entirely.
While I look forward to completing my Exploiter Drow Rogue/Ranger, Emmil Cioran on Sarlona, which I abandoned to move to Orien, I rerolled a copy of the character I played on Orien and absolutely fell in love with: a Halfling Monk/Cleric. It's all personal preference, but I have had the most fun I have ever had in DDO with this class combo. I got him up to level three before the server came down for Update 5, but didn't visit the trainer. His name is Trillax (trill + chillax = gangsta) on Sarlona.
Right now I am actually considering making him a pure Monk. But most likely I will be targetting a 17 Cleric /3 Monk build. He's a Weapon-Finesse/Dexterity build and I to focus on unarmed combat. I've begun with two levels of Monk and now will level him strictly as a Cleric; the third level of Monk will come later, perhaps around level 12-or-so. I'm playing with the build in the DDO Character Planner right now and will probably be posting it on my DDO blog when I get the chance.
I have to admit, I am sorely tempted to make him a pure Monk, however, and taking advantage of Update 5's Ninja Spy enhancements. Though that is more for the coolness factor - the Cleric Radiant Servant enhancements from U5 will suffice just fine. In fact, considering the Monk Ninja spy enhancements, I am willing to bet there is a really solid Rogue/Monk build ... I am sensing synergy with the Drow short sword racial enhancements. This will be something to consider down the road.
In other Update 5 news, Zen Archery is a new feat which should make the Divine Archer (Elven Cleric (or Favored Soul) / Ranger) I want to build even better as it allows you to swap your Wisdom bonus for your Dexterity bonus for damage. Now if only bow-based combat in DDO didn't suck overall - someday I'll bother to work through this build.
You'll also notice that guilds have gotten a lot of love. Most noticeably in the form of renown and guild levels, giving access to all sorts of items and bonuses and whatnot. And the most noteable of these benefits will be DDO's first stab at player housing - the guild Airship. This should be interesting, it definitely makes me want to join a regular guild.
Preferably one that doesn't have members that rush into death over and over pointlessly then scream "F***KING N**GER!!" when they can't figure out why they completely fail at the game - and obviously fail at life as well.
Player Auctions As Money Sinks
Recently, Brian "Psychochild" Green, of Meridian 59 fame, wrote two posts on the basics of an MMORPG in-game economy for the blog Game Design Aspect of the Month. I don't know if it was my green tea or my attempt to multi-task (and therefore my distracted state) whilst reading the posts that gave me a brilliant flash for a potential money sink.
During the of reading part two, I was struck by the sentence:
Except for taxes such as a fee for posting and/or selling goods, buying an item from an auction isn't a drain in terms of the game economy.
Taken at it's face value, anyone who has played World of Warcraft for more than a couple weeks understands this concept. However, I was struck with an idea for a "new" sort of money sink based on those awful bid-to-auction sites that have sprung up somewhat recently.
If you aren't already familiar, these sites (which I will neither name nor link to as they I find them morally reprehensible) entice people with promises of $20 Ipods and Xboxes. The catch is you must pay a fee for each bid you make. And each bid pushes the auction clock back X seconds. And you still gotta pay the closing price plus applicable shipping. Do you see where I am going with this?
I find the actual penny auction or pay-to-bid reprehensible because of their manipulative business plans that essentially disguise the fact they are gambling sites - if they identified themselves as such I would merely think the phenomenon foolish -- not potentially criminal. But if we were to apply this model to an MMORPG, it may produce some rather interesting results that could provide fun for the players and a large gold-sink for the game masters.
Upon quick reflection, I would structure them as special events that give the players the ability to win special items created solely for those events. Whether the items are merely cosmetic or uber phat lewtz is beside the point, excepting in their ability to generate player interest.
The players would buy bids to our special-event auction in lots, as an example say 500 gold for 49 bids. Now each bid will have a set price that cannot be deviated from; for our example we'll say 10 silver. (In our example we assume 100 silver = 1 gold.) Each time a person bids, they do not actually pay the 10 silver, but actually the 10.2 gold. To the player, they are paying "nothing," however, since they already paid for the bid previously when they bought the allotment. Keep in mind that, if strictly following the real-world penny auction model, the player will still also need to pay the final closing fee.
Continuing our example, let's say I oversee the game Planet of Pewcraft and I hold a special event auction where I auction off 50 Mounts of Worthlessness; I create the interest in the event largely by the fact these items are only available from this auction. Therefore there will only ever be 50 of them on a given server (until I start selling them for $25 in my graft item shop -- MWUHAHAHAH!!! /pinky finger), creating a high level of exclusivity. We can start the bid timer at a 72-hour countdown.
You can imagine that a good number of players will pour their hard-earned gold into buying bids. And buy bids they will, because it will then become a competition among the players to keep outbidding each other. And each bid costs 10 gold (though to the player it is 10 silver) and sets the clock back 10 minutes. This results in a self-perpetuating bidding war that could go on for weeks, driving the amount of gold sunk into bid-buying into potentially fantastic amounts. And the final bid price, should we choose to go with that aspect of the model, itself would be the icing on the gold-sink cake, even if closing at "only" several-thousand gold.
This is a rough sketch of an idea, as there are a lot of things to consider about how an auction would work both from a technical (what happens if because of the time extensions your auction never runs out?) and customer service (hopefully you don't have big gold-farmer population) standpoint. However, if carefully designed and executed in terms of knowing your players, I think an event like this could even work to "reset" a server's game economy by removing huge amounts of currency from the system.
Anyway, just a thought that allowed me to procrastinate an hour away.
Weekly Schlep
First, I have to get this off my chest:
I think the move by Turbine to make LOTRO f2p is a bad idea. Based on its core design of heavily-instanced PVE encounters, I thought f2p was great idea applied to DDO ... but I have a bad feeling it is going to prove difficult to implement in the open world of LOTRO. However, I do think it is possible to pull off, so we'll see. The main thing I am worried about is a drastic increase in the already problematic issue of inappropriate names. Somehow I don't think there were any elves running around Lindon named "Drzztforchris" or dwarves mining the Iron Mountains named "Iwillchopu." Unfortunately for me, it breaks the game. Oh well - I am sure this fall I will be logging in for at least a bit to see what it's like.
WOTAN
Now that I have dealt with that bit of unpleasantness, I will move on to what I am really here to write about, and that is my weekly report on my non-epic schlep trek called Project WOTAN, the online single-player RPG/gamebook/pbbg/pcp/nwa/insert-cliche-or-acronym-here.
I am actually a bit ahead of schedule at this point, having finished the basics of the Treasure and Power modules. August is still looking good, though I wonder if I will be able to launch The Wizard's Tower as I had planned, or rather focus more on launching the code for WOTAN as FOSS. I am still undecided, and am leaving that decision for July so I can better gauge what is left to be done.
If, by early-July, I do not feel like I can pull off at least one decently-written gamebook to start TWT, then I will likely focus more on the generic engine. I realized that a demo site for WOTAN could function just as well as a game site in its own right. And rather than attempt to launch TWT prematurely with a randomized gamebook generator, I could make a site devoted entirely to randomized adventures with less relative effort than writing something I want to actually be taken seriously. Besides, OSS or not, I need to have a site that is diverse enough to show off what WOTAN can do, right?
The basic WOTAN site would eventually come to comprise many gamebooks mostly having no relation to each other. Whereas TWT or a site like it is meant to be taken itself as a series of books, there could be several concurrent series in wildly different genres with wildly different gameplay running on the "official" WOTAN site.
This morning I took a couple screenshots of my progress. Below is the basic User Control Panel. The same page virtually ever site in the world has. You'll notice that I have included a user avatar, which is actually a Gravatar. I am also strongly considering implementing an OpenID option for logins.
The basic User Control Panel
I know, it's hella rough looking, but obviously this is still an alpha work-in-progress. Below is an example of one of the things I did this past week, the Book Admin interface for the Treasure module.
Adding Treasure types to a Book.
I purposely left a custom tag, {book_name}, open so you can see how I am populating my static pages with data. So, in the pertinent view class for the Treasure module (in this case the auxiliary class treasure_widget) I merely use preg_replace to insert data from the database onto the page. (I am a big fan of preg_replace, lol.)
I probably should have used a pre-existing template engine, like Smarty for instance, but I chose not to. While not using one has been a learning experience, I have a feeling that in the future I will probably turn to an existing system.
This week I will be finishing up the core modules and their respective admin interfaces. I am expecting to create the admin panels for the Book-Page submodule to be something of a pain. I also have to create a whole other subsystem for the basic Character object. My goal is to have all these things done within the next 11 days, Friday June 18.
After I have all the core modules and their adminstration views (panels, interfaces, whatever you want to call them) essentially finished, probably 75% of the site will be complete as it will have all its basically functionality. Then I will be moving on to creating the views for the end user, the whole point for the site existing in the first place. And so during this time I will also be doing the bulk of the graphic design and it is looking like I am going to have to brush off my far-too-dusty pencils and actually create some artwork as well.
I am planning for July to consist mainly of polishing the site and adding non-core modules to the game. The most important of these modules will consist of character tracking and statistics, and possibly also a mechanism to cache data. I have also chosen mid-July as my final deadline for deciding on whether or not to put the WOTAN svn code repository on Google or GIThub and releasing it as GNU.
Either way, we should be seeing an August release of something interesting.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- Open Bracket
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- The Core Mechanic
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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