Genesis Forums

Kas wrote:How many (new) wizards actually do manage to add substantional new gamecontent to the game? New domains? Brand new grinders? Several worth-todo quests, or guilds? What about analyzing and in practice modernize/revitalize the current old and possibly critically flawed gamemechanics (death, charactergrowth) that for some, is long since is out of bonds?

What separated the old eager wizards vs the current that could with ease create substantial content in a short period of time?

Well as for the first question there has been very few new wizards at all in the last years so its pretty understandable not much "substantial content" has been created by new wizards. Lavellan is probably the latest exemple of a new wizard with good programming skills and much energy who has done alot of good work. Especially in terms of fixing stuff that was flawed, bugged, or not working as it should.

As for your second question. My guess is that they were young with lots of time on their hands, and a multiplayer text game was "new and cool". The entire concept of programming in general was still fairly "new" and coding for a text game was great way to learn. Also since the game had so much more players obviously the motivation was greater, and so was the help and support from other wizards. Even if you could not code there were people here who could help you. Now a new wizard more or less has to be able to code at a fairly high level, and preferably have knowledge of LPC, or be able to learn on their own. Which probably isnt so easy even if you have a fairly good understanding of programming in general.

Our current wizards are older with much less time, and its much smaller game, with less players and wizards. It's pretty understandable the activity and energy among wizards is considerably lower now, just as our playerbase is. But it would not take much really... one or two people with good coding skills, time and motivation and they could probably pull off alot in a short amount of time if they really wanted to.

But again, the key questions still needs to be answered before anyone does anything to change our core mechanics.

What is this game about, and who is it for?

Who's this game for? Is it necessary to engage in a discussion about gamephilosophy in order to expand a grinder, add a quest and so forth? Can you afford to be picky? While wizards do efforts in maintaining the code, adding new content is just as critical. I belive we need all sorts of players in order to mIntain a dynamic and challenging game.

Without maintenance the game comes to a halt and dies.
Without expanding the game comes to a halt and dies.

Which is the most important and which is the less important?

Kas wrote:Who's this game for? Is it necessary to engage in a discussion about gamephilosophy in order to expand a grinder, add a quest and so forth? Can you afford to be picky? While wizards do efforts in maintaining the code, adding new content is just as critical. I belive we need all sorts of players in order to mIntain a dynamic and challenging game.

Game philosophy? It's a crucial question or else you wont be making the correct changes, which probably will be even worse than not making any at all. If we're talking about making changes to core game mechanisms that is, which was one part of your question.

As for adding new content, yes its important then too, maybe not as important, but still important. Or else you risk designing an area nobody will visit or a quest nobody likes, and that really a waste of a lot of time for both you and the players. I think we have quite alot of examples of game content that is hardly ever used by anyone. If you know what type of game your doing and for what type of players, then the chances are greater you'll also add the right content that people actually want. It has nothing to do with being picky, its about being smart when designing new content. Just adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff I doubt is very helpful.

I love idea-smithing. I really really do. Even so, I feel that if even just a few of the people who have all these ideas would be willing to take the time to learn how to be part of the solution, rather than simply part of the discussion, we would have what Cherek is talking about. I'll let Elvis sum up how I feel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UB-qlkJcGM

G.

The death thread turning into a wonderful ideathread.

I welcome the discussion of ideas and specially the constructive discussions.

Kas, Amberlee and Cherek summed it up very well in the end.

Who is the game for ? What kind of players do we want ? Roleplayers, loners, grinders, socializers, powerplayers, achievers and so on ..ALL of course to create a dynamic atmosphere where all the players fits in.
And how do we get that ? We need to add new content (correct one according to Cherek and I agree), we need to keep the game up to date, keep it interesting for people.
And for that we need wizards, but most of all we need new blood, more players to Genesis. If more players comes to Genesis we would probably get more wizards as well and the game would grow and prosper again.

Wonder if we shall make a poll to see what kind of content people wants added.

What happened to the Facebook introduction of Genesis ?
Converting Genesis to a MMORPG with graphics ? Well show me the money and the crew for the project and I will stear that ship.

Sadly I lack skill of coding otherwise I would have tried to wiz and contribute to the game, instead I will contribute with ideas and such.
But then what wizard would like to code the ideas another person has come up with and not getting paid for it ?

Before anything else though.
Something that has to be tossed away, and that is the archaic notion that storyline trumps gameplay.
It doesnt.. Gameplay/Gamedesign is THE most important thing for any game.
Just look at the waste of code that is Khalakhor.
You have some quests which are challenging and time consuming.. And gives close to NO qexp..
You have NO places to grind.. And.. No point in herbing there either.
No equipment worth mentioning.
So you go there to do the quests, and join Blademasters(If thats your lay choice)

But hey.. The lands have a brilliant storyline.. And nobody cares cause nobody goes there.

What Genesis lacks in my opinion is direction and the will to follow through with it.
Gorboth, you humorously posted that Elvis song(A smashing good song by the way).
But we have yet to see guild recode to completion.. Something promised years ago.
Know i dont blame anyone for burning out as wizards.. It IS in fact a thankless job.
But it is still something you CHOOSE to do.. So you can at any time CHOOSE not to do it and let someone else have a go at it

amberlee wrote: No point in herbing there either.

So you go there to do the quests, and join Blademasters(If thats your lay choice)

While I agree that Khalakhor is a bit lacking compared to other domains (I guess Cirath comes to mind here too...). I must say however that time spent questing in Khalakhor was one of the nicest experiences for me. The quests are really cool and immersive there, not your standard bread-and-butter. The reward in qexp is seriously lacking for the effort, but the experience of immersion makes up for it a bit.

And I disagree on the herbs. If you have certain skill at least at a certain level there is the best healing herb in Genesis to be found in Khalakhor. Obviously, it's pretty hard to find as you can't identify it even with superior guru herbalism...

@ Uther:

You can't really turn Genesis into a graphical MMO. Not only would that require an entire new team of people to do it, substantial financial investment etc. but also you'd be eaten alive by copyrights on oh so many things... You have 3 different D&D settings (Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms), Middle Earth, Earthsea, references to other stuff (Lovecraft, Monty Python and what not) and it's all pretty jumbled up.

Uther wrote:
Wonder if we shall make a poll to see what kind of content people wants added.

What happened to the Facebook introduction of Genesis ?
Converting Genesis to a MMORPG with graphics ? Well show me the money and the crew for the project and I will stear that ship.

Make genesis a graphics game and you will kill one of the things that makes genesis special. I play genesis since there aint no graphics, graphic games in general suck ass, playing with only the keyboard is to me the charm of genesis since it makes the game different from the piece of crap WoW copies we have out there today.

I don't know that the entire game actually has to be be solved in order to address death...

Perhaps the main thing that keeps killing this topic, is that death is actually fluff and it covers a very large swath.

We're talking about a totally different type of dynamics when we're talking about scoring character vs. character contests, than when we're discussing behavior modification and intra-player conflict resolution; both of which are totally different from the importance of balancing risk vs. reward in normal environmental activity. In our cosmology, these all should include the possibility of dying and that should have consequences, but as they are wildly differing game concepts, I think it's silly to shoehorn them all into the same dynamics.