Zone Exp vs Exp Zones

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Iaiken Toransier
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Zone Exp vs Exp Zones

Postby Iaiken Toransier » Sat Jan 08, 2005 12:19 am

This post is in reference to an idea that I know has been posted before in the past, but the thought was revisited in this post with regards to achieving level 50: http://www.torilmud.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=15027

Crude Elegance:

Sometimes I wonder at the elegance of the mud, but that thought is always dispelled by the crudeness of "The Grind". Anyone unfamiliar with grinding either hasn't played this mud, are incredibly patient, or play at such a pace that it's taken them the last to years to hit level 30. It is simply unreal that a highly skilled player is easily outprogressed by a player who just grinds for twice as long and learns nothing for having done so. The thing about elegance is that it exists at so many levels with so many different kinds of elegance. I'm going to concentrate on elegance of planning and elegance of execution... When you think about it, elegance is not too difficult to achieve when you are thoughtful.

To borrow from Mark Rosewater of Wizards of the Coast:

One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Down:

Camp A – Values Elegance in Concept Over Elegance in Execution

This is the group that falls in love with ideas. These are the people that get great satisfaction over the beauty of a concept. As such, they are willing to trudge through inelegant execution to get to an elegant concept because they value the concept so highly. This group appreciated the ironic juxtaposition because it’s conceptually very cool. To these people, the mud is, and likely always will be, a success, they made it to level 50, probably with more than one character.

Camp B – Values Elegance in Execution Over Elegance in Concept
This is the more practical group. This group wants the experience to be as enjoyable as possible. If the execution is inelegant, they never get to the point where they admire the concept. The execution gets in the way. Much of this group probably never made it to level 50. They gave up, it wasn't too hard, it was just too boring. The endgame couldn’t possibly be worth the pain of grinding towards it. To this group the mud was an utter failure and they left.

Camp C – Values Elegance in Concept Equally With Elegance of Execution
This group has a balance between the two. They are driven to admire the concept, but will not dismiss the execution to do so. This group appreciated the concept of the game, but was still put off by all the grinding. They liked parts of it but not the whole. To this group, the mud was a noble, but failed attempt at a wonderful game. Many of these people, left with those in Camp C, or resigned to just doing whatever suited them and forgot about level 50 or achieved it over the long haul.

As with any grouping, be aware that some people fall between the above groups.

Witness an execution:

Whenever a designer sits down to design a zone, his ultimate goal should be a zone that is elegant in both concept and execution. And sometimes, he pulls both off. Sometimes he pulls off just one. And sometimes, he pulls off neither. Let’s examine:

Group #1 – Zones Elegant in Concept and Execution
This is the category that every designer wants their zone to end up in. A classic example of this category is Trolbark Forest. The concept is amazingly strong. A forest that is full of slathering, angry, fearless trolls, it has many powerful items that only skilled or lucky characters aquire. The execution is very straight-forward, find some cracked peices of armor, put them together and off you go. You exp there sometimes in the 30's, you revisit it for the challenging quests in the 40's and 50's. These are the kinds of zones that make designers happy.

Group #2 – Zones Elegant in Concept But Not In Execution
These are the zones that are very cool, but are a bit clunky in some way – be it the time that it takes to do the zone, the lack of reasonable reward, or just the difficulty concerning how the zone functions. This is the Muspelhiem category. At its core, Muspelhiem is a neat concept. It’s an zone chalked full of dragons and giants and many nasty things. But the zone is so muddled in execution (mostly due to excessive questing and unnecessary quest complication and ordering), that many players give up long before they understand how to complete it it. Be aware that Muspelhiem is the extreme of this category. Camp A loves these zones, *pat Dartan*.

Group #3 – Cards Elegant in Execution But Not Concept
These are the zones created to fill a function. There’s nothing too exciting about them, but they get the job done. A fine example of this category would be Brass. The zone is very efficient and elegant at doing its job, but when you start examining the core of its design, it’s a bit ho hum. Why is it a good eq zone with little difficulty? Who knows. But heck, who cares? You need to get some ok gear within the hour and no casualties? Brass is your zone.

Group #4 – Cards Lacking Elegance in Both Concept and Execution
I won’t lie to you. These zones are many, mostly grids. They exist more because they have to than because we set out to create them. These zones normally come into being through demand, Druid Sanctuary or any other safe exp grid fall into this category. They are less than ho hum, they are just boring.

The top link makes referance to one of the things that bother me the most, utter lack of risk vs reward:

Why is it that one of the safest zones to exp in is also one that gives the most exp? Is it a coincedence that it is crowded? Would it be just as crowded if the mobs were agro trackers? Probably not, only skilled players would go because it is dangerous. Only the MOST skilled players would delve deep into the zone, knowing that it could potentially repop on them in the middle or end of a fight or while resting, or that a monster may just wander in on them unanounced by double moving or any other disaster such as the stoner fleeing out into another agro and tracking it back to the group...

Grinding grinding grinding, get those noobies grinding:

Why is it that dangerous zones like BC give almost negligable experience when you take into account the time spent there? Zones like CC, SG, Brass, Jot, and the Invasions likewise notch my mid forty characters four percent if I am lucky and do a lot of damage? I don't understand how players can be rewarded more experience for doing the ever so uneventful druid sanctuary, than by beeing adventurous and raiding the ever dangerous Myth Drannor and smiting it's demonic denizens? Shouldn't the people who make 50 be the ones who have braved the most zones?

MAKE TROPHY MEAN SOMETHING!!!

If trophy knocked your exp down by 1/8th, 1/4, 3/8ths and so forth, or did so by a reasonable order of magnitude per kill and didn't go away, then grinding would be extremely difficult and players would be forced to explore, forced to find NEW experiences... In turn, players would experience more and likely become better players, I mean really, you prolly learned all there was to learn about killing buffalos after the first 50. By the time you hit level 40 and have exhausted most of your easy exp holes, only the most daring and skilled players will venture forth into dangerouse exp zones, and EQ zones, likewise they will be the first; and likely the only, people to hit 50.

These two things would likely make an enormous difference on how the game is played, but will likely not increase the number of players. Muds will likely never go away, but they will never again be as popular as they once were.
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Postby kiryan » Sun Jan 09, 2005 12:14 am

um so what your saying is that if you have a good concept and a good execution you have a good xyz?

Some people will put up with more bs to get what they want than others?

duh?
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Postby Iaiken Toransier » Sun Jan 09, 2005 7:23 pm

My appologies as my message got somewhat muddled (I was ill with a cold now that I re-read my post I got started well, but never finished my points.)

Good Concept + Good Execution = Good Game.

Why? Because it caters to ALL three "Camps" (outlined in my original post) and all of the people in between. This is not exactly a new concept; much of what I wrote is derrived from numerous articles I have read on game design, from video games, to card games and even board games and my own personal experience. To be successful, you need to fulfill both of those two requirements.

Toril/Sojourn/Torilmud has an incredibly beautiful and elegant concept. While I quit playing 4+ hours a day back in 2001, I still log in to bomb around and have fun, exp when "non-grind-groups" can be found, to just explore and further my maps and notes, quest just about anything and everything I can find. With respect to those aspects of the mud, to me and many others, torilmud is an incredible success.

Strike one. Interface:

Every mud on the planet falls victem to this one. The text only interface simply does not cater to the newer generations, as such, it should not be aiming at this crowd. The players that the mud needs to attract are still in the same generation that grew up at the same time the internet was growing up. We were all highschool and university stundents and there were no alternatives; Muds were the ONLY MMORPG's and as such people were forced to accept the text-only interface. Here, every mud has failed.

Strike two. Generations:

The younger, impatient, gui-spoiled generations simply don't want to learn how to mud. Non-computer saavy users find it extremely difficult to learn how to mud. Why should either of them invest thier time learning how to play when they can just jump into a GUI based MMORPG and start playing from day one? People WILL pay for convenience... It is just easier to click to kill, click to walk, you can see whrere you are going without getting easily lost. It's just easier to play than a mud, these games attract more players because of thier elegant execution and succeed where muds failed.

Strike three. Time:

The playerbase is shrinking because the veterans are leaving, it is extremely rare to see a familiar face from Sojourn, and more rare to see players from the original toril. Why is that? Because we are all growing up, when I was in highschool 10 years ago, they were in college. Now they are all grown up; some with families, others with time-consuming jobs and some of my old friends are too busy just trying to make ends meet to play. Even myself, 2001 saw me being unable to commit 2-4 hours of my day to the mud because of school and working to pay for it. I still play, but only 2-4 hours per week, tops.

As time goes by, more veterans will leave because of time constrains, the number of new players with the time to play simply cannot make up for this loss. At my current rate of play, it will probably take me another 6 months just to go from level 30 to 40. Such time demands on a player are not rediculous, but to make any exp headway I have to spend my precious gaming time grinding away unpleasantly at my next level, this is extremely inelegant, few players have this kind of time anymore.

Strike four. Balanced EXP:

However, the part that made me leave regular play (2-4hours a day) was the exp grind. Exp has always marred gameplay on MMORPG's, it is incredibly diffucult to balance so that it cannot be taken advantage of. This is where I feel torilmud missed it's mark and due to this inelegant execution they have driven away all but the most die-hard, hardcore mudders who are willing to trudge through countless weeks of mindless experience to hit level 50.

Worse yet, is that it takes no skill whatsoever to do so, how many people are still noobies at level 50? With all of the veterans gone, I still get level 50's asking how to get from DK to gloomhaven, or how to get from waterdeep to baldurs gate, or worse yet, how do I get to Druid Sanctuary?

Fun, it is not fun to grind exp. I have had the most entertaining groups of people and as entertaining as we were to each other, we just got tired and bored after a few hours of grinding away exp. How about some quest experience and a meaningful trophy? Surely these are not impossible to code... Imagine if quests gave a reasonable, percentage-based, one time only experience bonus? If you do a quest that spans over the face of the world you're gonna learn a lot about htat world, conversly, this is not reflected in your character. You get SFA, maybe a item. The one time only part keeps people from taking advantage of it multiple times, doing it percent-based means that if you do it at level 4 or level 40 you're still only gonna get 6 to 8% for it. Sorry lowbies, not instalevels here.

Strike five. Endgame:

The myth of the endgame being the be-all and end-all of MMORPG's... Does life begin at level 46? HELL NO!!! There is an absolute lack of mid and low level zones and WAY too many safe experience grids. This means that to actually do anything meaningful, players have to grind for weeks and months just to attain high enough levels to be concidered zone groups. Once again, an inelegant execution that costs the mud players. The mud should be playable and enjoyable with a steady experience progress and zones (even ones that can be done solo) throughout the levels. This would not be impossible to do if area designers spent more time on this kind of zone than on meaningless and boring exp grids. Don't worry though, just about every MMORPG I have ever played falls into this trap and I can't give any recommendations beyond what I have already given.

As for some people being willing to put up with more BS than others... look around the mud, they are the only ones left!
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Postby Disoputlip » Mon Jan 10, 2005 10:09 am

Sure there are players that make it to 50 and can't run anywhere. There are even old-timers that don't give much for exploring.

Some will learn it, some won't. Removing DS xp won't make better players, just players with lower levels.

If you want to achieve what you talk about then all !aggro mobs should give 0 xp. Not just DS

Don't forget the newbies. What you call grinding is actually quite fun for many, especially players where it is their 1st char.
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Postby Crumar » Mon Jan 10, 2005 6:19 pm

Exp can be fun for first time players when they go to different zones to do it. I remember having to actually run down to Havenport or then run up to Tower or the Shadow grove to do exp. Spiderhaunt, even CP palace look at the extremes from one end of the mud to the other. That is how I learned this mud that is how people become leaders by knowing where things are and how to get there. It made me want to explore the mud. Now we got DS, ship and maybe Randars hideout, maybe 20-50 rooms walking distance from waterdeep at most (just a rough guess). From Waterdeep to Havenport it was over 100 for sure same with ZK to waterdeep or CP. We had variety, we could explore other places while walking there and take a look and have fun as new players. That doesn't happen now. I remember a level 50 chanter asking me where HP was a month ago because he never left the WD general area. There IS something wrong with this system. Keep ignoring it all you want but its time to beef up zone exp or equal out all the exp given in every zone. Please make exp closer to waterdeep for the higher-level mobs like DS less as compared to mobs that you would find in spiderhaunt or SG, HP etc. I did ask nicely at least :)
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Postby Yarash » Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:59 am

Crumar makes a good point. I remember years ago doing SH with crumar for exp, and the sand giants off of urlandar's (sp) trail. I also remember about a couple years ago doing HP. These areas aren't done anymore though. I am often asked where good places to exp are, and I mention HP. About nine out of ten times the person says it's too far.

I'm not sure what the solution to this would be. Perhaps one idea that could help would be to make lowbie quests that require players to go to those areas.

Of course another way to help woud be to tell new players about the areas. This is something we'd have to make an effort to do. I know that when I'm asked, I generally think of the last places I exped at, which are of course ds, smoke, spirit raven, or for lower levels, ssc, monestary, cemetary.

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Postby Demuladon » Tue Jan 11, 2005 5:12 am

HP is a favored xp area for midbie evils.. it's not a bad thing that goodies don't xp there ;)
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Postby kiryan » Tue Jan 11, 2005 6:14 am

First it was elites, then tower, ms wizzies, next it was ship, then mielich mages, now its ds (and for some its randars)

can you really say the relative distance or difference changed? ALl these exp zones are less than 50 rooms from wd except ms wizzies.

and since were stuck on exp, very few of us have as much time as in the past... but i dont get your point, when did exp get harder? As far as i can tell it keeps getting easier, in amount per kill, in ease of kill (spells + relative char power) , hell 1-45 was made 10% easier TEN PERCENT EASIER... Best I can tell things have continued to become more friendly to the part time gamer.... need i bring up the free admin CRs and 16 hours corpse rots?

=====

im not sure I don't somewhat agree with what your saying, but i think your examples are bad.

#1 and #2, No matter what we do we really arent gonna change 1 and 2. At best we could offer a packaged zmud installer. Is it a factor, probably, for me its one major reason i still play, i can script the crap out of it and work at the same time. If I was in college id probably be playing WoW and shrug nothing gonna change that. however, to say the markets are decreasing is not true, more people than ever get online access everyday... We just aren't marketing or appealing to them for whatever reason.

#3 time, i think the game has molded over the years. Is it a good thing or a bad thing. Hard to say. I do however find the lack of things to do if you only have 15 minutes a serious deficiency. This is why i am promoting tradeskills or trade code. However, same was true on everquest for a long time, 30 minutes to find a group, 30 minutes to find a druid to take you to the zone, 30 minutes to run to the group.... EQ was wildly successful. Time hurts the most on leaders, many times ive thought about leading a zone, but I dont want to tie myself down to the game for 2 or 3 hours... If my friends call up, im going out. If I get hungry, im gonna go eat. When Im tired, Im gonna go to sleep... Are you gonna make zones shorter or just exp?

#4, balanced exp, I'm not sure what your expectations are, most games are designed to be winnable in 50-60 hours? at 3-4 hours a week a normal off the shelf game is still gonna take you a third of the year... Is your concept that you should be able to be 50 by 60 hours? quite frankly, you don't have enough time to play games if you can only play 3-4 hour sa week. Read a book, play a board game, flame people at bigboobs.com or whatever entertains you, you dont have enough time to play a RPG (maybe table top).

I spent about 250 hours of great exp leveling my cleric on EQ to 50 and about 120 hours doing great exp leveling my cleric from 55 to 65 on everquest and you could spend literally thousands of hours doing AA exp (leveling up special abilities). 50-60 hours on everquest you could be level 30 of 70 if you knew the game and bought some eq with real cash... Nothing you could "zone" for would be remotely close to what $5 bucks would cost you or what people would just give you because it was filling up their inventory.... sound familiar?

On toril, With eq you can probably do a char to 50 in 120 hours although a newbie takes around 20 play days because they usually dick around and stop at low 40s. People are also much more likely to hook you up with nice eq at low levels. On toril you can write triggers and afk while you exp or at least not be intently focused.

You have to be far more engaged in a traditional graphical MMORPG than on toril, but by your claim more time investment is partially to blame for our decline?

If there is any problem with exp, i would say that it is that two of the most vital classes to the mud, cleric and enchanter, get the shittiest exp splits in groups. How can you foster a group oriented atmosphere when you exp better solo or 2-3 man....

I've seen it suggested a few times and I agree more and more, eliminate non kill exp and normalize the leveling speeds... its stupid that warriors have to argue amongst themselves to determine who gets to 2hand (not their job, but beter exp) and who has to tank (their job, but worse exp). Its stupid that enchanters would rather solo or 2man for 14% an hour than get 4% an hour in a 7 man group.

Its dumb that low level casters run around in hit/dam gear because they'll level 10x faster than using their skills. With the exception of invoker and perhaps necro/ele none of the casters really do anything job related < 20. totems at 20 (gheal at 41), enc stone at 21, cleric heal at 21, bard song of healing at 30?

I think the model we have been using for many years is that you have to grow your char into his or her specialty or power. I'm not sure thats a good model. If it is a good model, I think some other implementations I've seen are much better.

For instance on homelands i think your a "mage" until level 20 then you have to do a quest to become an invoker or an enchanter ect. Other implementations have done things like give you stone 1 at level 1 as an enchanter, stone 2 at level 11, stone 3 at 21, ect... Stone 1 would be as effective as regular stone against mob levels 1-6, stone 2 1-16, and an additional catch you could throw in would be you couldn't cast stone 2 on a level 1 char. Also, it would take away a lot of the upward mobility of some classes... Why on earth should a level 49 want a level 21 enchanter? The power distribution is out of whack if a level 21's skills are formiddable against level 50 mobs.

#5, ok you just got done saying that the game progresses too slow... if you spend less time in mid level, how are you supposed to do more midlevel zoning? Kinda contradictory...

anyways, aren't their still mid levle zones? If exp was too boring for you, you could go do a zone.... if you could find people who wanted to do it.... or are you now telling people who dont want to mid level zone that they have to so that you can mid level zone? Do you follow me? If exp zones were 2x as good exp, id still do traditional exp as long as I can find people because it'll be more consistent over time.... you can get into a groove and do 12 hours of exp... if your gonna make that possible for "zone" exp, arent you just creating exp zones?

but lets say you revolutionized exp and you could only exp from mid level zoning and everybody was happy... what do you do when you cant get a group? really really really shitty exp? Sit on your thumb and shout for groups?

And unless you eliminate all !zone exp, the problem with mid level zoning will always be.... its an inefficient use of time when your objective is equipment and high level. Its much more efficient to spend 5 hours at 50 zoning for eq than 5 hours at 25.... any eq you dont wear at 50 has no value period in our present economy.
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Postby Sarell » Tue Jan 18, 2005 10:00 pm

I think a problem that arises that damages the game is highlighted in crumar's post. The thing where you get these lvl 50 characters, specially an important group member like the chanter, who really has only ever done DS. You go to a zone and about half an hour in realise that you just arn't going to make it 'cos your key classes have no idea what is needed of them. The DS factor. It then means you have to reshuffle your group, which is mean and disheartening if the group is at 15, or just makes the zone incredibly slow and boring... If people who were level 50 you could have a fair idea that they could 'do' a variety of situations and keep track of the game around them to a fair degree it would make zoning more fun - rather than just exping more fun / less repetitive.

Anyhow, I'm sure what everyone is trying to say is ... 'upgrade trophy downgrade exp tables' (mebbe remove all exp except kill exp aswell while at at)... blah blah blah
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Postby Jegzed » Wed Jan 19, 2005 7:52 am

Simple solution.

Remove the following zones from the game, or rewrite so the mobs are MAXIMUM level 40-45

DS, Ship, Tower.

Make it so that if you are over level 41, you won't get ANY exp from a non-aggro mob.

end result.. people would do stuff like Jot, SG, Demi etc for exp. And we'd get MUCH better players.
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Postby Demuladon » Wed Jan 19, 2005 9:39 am

smoke gonna be crowded :)
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Postby Ambar » Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:32 am

Demuladon wrote:smoke gonna be crowded :)


smoke xp for non casters? no ...
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Postby Demuladon » Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:50 am

it's 37C here today and the beers going down like water.. why would non-casters be on smoke? :P
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Postby rockers » Wed Jan 19, 2005 11:14 am

non-caster like warrior could practice rescue up there... ;)
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Postby Jegzed » Wed Jan 19, 2005 2:27 pm

Demuladon wrote:smoke gonna be crowded :)


Why?

I said..
"Make it so that if you are over level 41, you won't get ANY exp from a non-aggro mob. "

Which mobs on smoke would then give exp?


My suggestion to change those others are to make them valid as good exp zones for slightly lower levels (30-40)
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Re: Zone Exp vs Exp Zones

Postby Ashiwi » Wed Jan 19, 2005 3:19 pm

Iaiken Toransier wrote:Group #2 – Zones Elegant in Concept But Not In Execution
These are the zones that are very cool, but are a bit clunky in some way – be it the time that it takes to do the zone, the lack of reasonable reward, or just the difficulty concerning how the zone functions. This is the Muspelhiem category. At its core, Muspelhiem is a neat concept. It’s an zone chalked full of dragons and giants and many nasty things. But the zone is so muddled in execution (mostly due to excessive questing and unnecessary quest complication and ordering), that many players give up long before they understand how to complete it it. Be aware that Muspelhiem is the extreme of this category. Camp A loves these zones, *pat Dartan*.


I'll take exception to your reasoning on this point. You're assuming that all players enjoy the same aspects of the game, but that their enjoyment of those aspects is slanted by how they view the concept or execution of that aspect. I think Muspelheim is a great zone, and one reason is because of all the quests and their degree of difficulty. I happen to like that challenge. Dugmaren did an excellent job of keeping these quests not only challenging, but also sensible. He made sure that the majority of the items his quests asked for seemed to fit some need within the story (even if some of them were stretches, but considering the vast number of quests available, that's still quite commendable), yet insured that the challenge of retrieving those items was still somewhat comparable to the reward within the game system.

I don't think you can separate "Camp A" and "Camp B" on on whether or not they enjoy quests over fighting. I enjoy a well-written quest. I don't enjoy hack-written quests, no matter how juicy the reward is. Unless you've done a great many of the huge number of quests available in this game, I don't think you're qualified to judge the Concept vs. the Execution of them.

Let's take Hulberg, for example. I loved questing Hulberg, because it was hard as hell, before everybody in the game started cheating like total pusses because Cherzra had to spoil it for the players who appreciated the zone, instead of spoiling it for the staff (sorry Cherz, I like ya, but that move wasn't all that well thought out). Hulberg is a good example of Concept winning out over Execution. Very well written, so amazingly detailed, yet a good portion of the challenge arose from so much confusion surrounding the items, themselves, due to extremely vague clues which indicated multiple items, or clues that didn't seem to fit the items very well at all.

Muspelheim took a little work, but it was nothing like that, at all. If you couldn't figure out Musp, then you just need to increase your overall game knowledge, and it all starts falling into place.
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Postby Burmadapig » Fri Feb 11, 2005 3:51 pm

Something that I found that most players on DAOC liked when I played there might be applicable here. Once you obtained level 50 with one character, any additional characters you rolled would be granted 20 free levels from his/her guild master.

The biggest problem I see with it working here is that there is currently no way other than IP address to determine a link between characters. DAOC, like every other MMORPG out there, has user accounts that characters are linked too. You could only have one character per account in the game at any one time. You could only use the plevel feature on characters on that account.

Maybe one of the brilliant coders could write something that would link all of a persons characters together. That way you could not use your 50 to plevel a character to 20 with the free levels and then give it away.

This code would also log every time two linked characters were in the game and not in the same room. A list of accepted room numbers (inns) would also be applied. This would eliminate the need to watch ip addresses for multi.
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Postby Vena » Fri Feb 11, 2005 6:53 pm

Ambar wrote:
Demuladon wrote:smoke gonna be crowded :)


smoke xp for non casters? no ...


I leveled caz on smoke when ship was too crowded.
kiryan
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Postby kiryan » Fri Feb 11, 2005 6:56 pm

Vena wrote:
Ambar wrote:
Demuladon wrote:smoke gonna be crowded :)


smoke xp for non casters? no ...


I leveled caz on smoke when ship was too crowded.


this is kiryan
and tonights winner in the Toril EQ lottery is demi belt and skull earring!
kiryan
Sojourner
Posts: 7275
Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2001 5:01 am
Location: Los Angeles, CA and Flagstaff, AZ
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Postby kiryan » Fri Feb 11, 2005 6:58 pm

Burmadapig wrote:Something that I found that most players on DAOC liked when I played there might be applicable here. Once you obtained level 50 with one character, any additional characters you rolled would be granted 20 free levels from his/her guild master.

The biggest problem I see with it working here is that there is currently no way other than IP address to determine a link between characters. DAOC, like every other MMORPG out there, has user accounts that characters are linked too. You could only have one character per account in the game at any one time. You could only use the plevel feature on characters on that account.

Maybe one of the brilliant coders could write something that would link all of a persons characters together. That way you could not use your 50 to plevel a character to 20 with the free levels and then give it away.

This code would also log every time two linked characters were in the game and not in the same room. A list of accepted room numbers (inns) would also be applied. This would eliminate the need to watch ip addresses for multi.


well it seems kinda dumb to make new players go through levels 1-20 since they are pretty pointless from a learning your class perspective.... We could just start all players off at 21! by the way, i think this is a really dumb idea.
and tonights winner in the Toril EQ lottery is demi belt and skull earring!

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