Genesis Forums

As an older player returning from a very long absence I have had to remap and relearn a lot. One of the things this has reminded me of is just how many places we have that seems to have limited function. Some like Edoral are a massive area thats just the home to a few quests. And some are areas that may once have been decent hunting grounds but have fallen into disuse as new areas with better loot or experience were introduced.

While I would never be one to say we shouldn't add new areas I would love to see us go back and revitalize some of these unused or lesser used areas.

Edoral as a ruined castle and abandoned island would be a perfect place to add some new wildlife that could possible mesh well with Zhar's proposed hunting system.

Kabal use to be a decent place to hunt but now the targets are just too spread out and too lacking in experience and loot to be worth the effort. Increased coin loot or the random chance to drop some decent item could make hunting here more worth your while.

I personally like areas that are good for a specific function, X is good for making money, Y is good for getting gems, Z is good for imbues, G is for turning evil, E is good for turning good, etc, etc.

Maybe I am just plain wrong and these areas have enough function to them and I am just ignorant of it. But I would be curious to here what others think about the subject. What areas do you think are underused and what could we do to revitalize them?


edit: originally referenced Edoras when I meant Edoral.

Example: Trollshaws.
Old ground, revitalized by expanding greatly and adding a shop and some nice gear options + great exp on top.
Shut down almost completely after reducing the exp gain. Have the trolls other than at the menacing one ever been killed in the last years?!?

Example: Icewall.
Great exp area when it was released. Throttled down majorly after cows have been given infravision (?!?!!!). Currently little to no usable exp ground with only 3 mobs worth killing, out of which 2 require badassery.

Example: Ents&huorns.
I have not been killing them, but they had their high ... and now they have their low.

Who and why decided on downgrading (from the player perspective) those areas - who knows. Fact is - they have been "nerfed". Whatever reason was used, the outcome was yet another area full of mobs (like Kabal) noone ever comes to appreciate.

I really like this thread, and you both name some very good examples. I completely agree that the game has very rich content that needs to be updated and made relevant once again. I am very open to interested wizards taking on such projects. This has been my own goal in Sparkle, for example.

G.

The very inconsistent rewards for killing things is a problem.
We need a new method for calculating the reward which can be applied to all livings in the game.

Currently no other factors than target size are considered.

Cotillion I couldn't agree with you more, that has been another of things that have been running through my head.

I have been trying to imagine some point based system where the mobs get a point value assigned to them for different factors, i.e. size, specials, location, population, teamwork etc. Then that point value would be spent by the wizard creating them to allocate the reward.

So if the Jigglepuffs are hero sized mobs that assist and they have a small camp right outside of sparkle with 5 rooms and three mobs per room. They would score 10 points for size, nothing for location since its convenient to a hub, 4 points because there arnt enough for sustained killing, 4 points because they assist with three per room. So this would give 14 points to allocate towards reward, maybe 8 goes towards experience, 4 for gear loot and 2 for coins loot.

This would take a good bit of work to figure out what values make sense but it would offer a nice basic framework to build from.

Trollshaws and Edoras itself used to be grinded alot, Trollshaws was turned to shait when they gave some weird special and tewaked the stats right? So its just not worth killing there anymore, and Edoras... well people just outgrew it simple as that. Tbh the Hornburg could be developed aswell, thats a place to make alot of awesome shit in if any, quite sure it has dungeons etc, mebbe put the place under siege with orcs outside for goodies and evils could just break in and start messing up the guards? With... not sure if Theoden is in the game? But you could kill Theoden and grab his armours.

Caw wrote:i.e. size, specials, location, population, teamwork etc.

to me "etc." is the "natural armour" some mobs have and others don't as well as skills (defensive + weapons they use) and self-heal possibilities (Ashburz, Qualthas, Verminaard, Tom, Fael-thas or Thorr-kann)
another "etc." is such things as "can't target DPSers until some mob is dealt with" like Haradrims on the oliphaunts or the half-uruk in Moria

cotillion wrote:Currently no other factors than target size are considered.

Is this true?

Back in the day, when my wife was coding Middle Earth, she wwas creating some badass drow NPC's that were to inhabit the underdark, and they had to be big as hell, in order to accomodate the nasty abilities, skills and tricks they had in their arsenal, thus ensuring that the area would be for seriously big characters and/or teams.

So the XP doesn't take into account anything, but the stats of the NPC, when calculating XP?

No surprise there, I generally wonder why some troll and orc npc's have great mentals giving them high average when checking xp reward.

And where are these npc's that have high mentals?