Character size inflation

[Cherek]

Finally could we have a link on the Useful Links & Resources page of the main Genesis website to the online Quest orbs ?

Hm, we have no such page?

[Strider]

What's the best approach depends on what we wish to accomplish.

Okay, here's some of what I'd like to see:

- Make changes with many smaller corrections. Do not throw the frog into the already boiling pot.
- Don't take any work away from any player. Change it's relative worth, by all means, but no demotions without offense.
- Finish the guild balance. It's almost impossible to discuss relative merit until that is complete.
- Bend the top end of the curve, such that Supreme stats are closer in effective power to Epic than Immortal is to any named stats.
- Change CXp distributions such that there is no drop in growth rate from adding another teammate.
- Lower the top end of character power relative to the game.
- Reconsider stat modifiers, both magical and racial, such that they are less pronounced for the insanely huge and make sense at the top, middle and bottom of the size distribution.
- Implement these types of changes prior to getting bogged down in building a big new system for stats, skills or the like.

[Bertram]

Whatever you decide to do, having the small resources of coding power, I think it would be more efficient to do it orderly way, making a plan and sticking to it.
Coming up with too many new ideas at time will be disturbing the people involved in creation, actually the most of those ideas have been proposed already in some way.
We could make a list of ideas and then make a poll to see which are considered the most important at the moment.

[Bendis]

What about putting a Newbie's guide to questing on the Quests orbs site ?

Finally could we have a link on the Useful Links & Resources page of the main Genesis website to the online Quest orbs ?

Ragni

By all means yes!

On the other hand, my suggestion attempted to avoid another RTFM situation and provide a concentrated and actionable reference/metainformation to keep the players engaged. All the games offer this in a way or another. E.g. wow has a minimap and question marks above the quest masters. Our environment is different and it would be cumbersome to provide it in the same way. A (meta)list would be closer to our text-based approach.

Oh... And someone mentioned stories... . For some reason youngsters would happily read stories but would be bored with "manuals".

I'd say if someone feels compelled to write a manual/guide, just do it. A Links and Resources page could be easily added. A sticky post on the boards would do it too.

Great job with the quest orbs online! I would even add a link to it on the splash page on Genesis

/Bendis

[Rhaegar]

Here is a simple idea that would require no coding .

Let's make a list of quests, in the order they should be done, so the player doesn't lose exp points for doing the quest too early (i think i lost half of the points of the zodiac quest 10+ years ago )

We would need to capture this information:

Domain, Quest name, Who gives it, Level it should be performed


I believe this metainformation published on the Genesis website and combined with Ragni's monumental work on the quest orbs online would bring lots of players back and smooth the way for many newbies. (points at self )

Based on this list, an unemployed wizard like me could put together a quest log in the style of WOW that would mark the available quests for one's current level.

We could dream even more and filter the report on the quests the player has yet to do and the quests the player has done etc...

What do you think ?

/Bendis

My usual quest route with new chars:
Tutorial
Sparkle/Greenoaks
Calia/Argos/Tarshir (getting those annoying tours out of the way)
Pelargir
Palanthas
Terel (obelisk, gypsy camp)
Ribos
Middlearth (MT)
Kabal

There is no specific order to them. Usually I just try to do the tours around the world, as I hate them and they give shitty xp so I want them out of my way, then I proceed to small quests that don't require anything special from you (Bodulas is a great example here). And to balance everything out I usually get to brutal on cexp, which also nets me money, and then quest until I'm back in the touchy zone, then back to brutal and so it goes. Obviously, you'll reach the point where you're brutal and there are no more quests for you to do, or all there is are some quests that give you next to no experience and can be a pain in the ass (Isengard). That's where "The Great Grind" starts.

[gorboth]

One thing I really do have on my short list of big things to fix is quest exp. Tapakah has put together a rubric for what a quest might involve, and how much exp a quest should be awarded. Something along these lines is really needed, such that we could make the rewards equal to the challenge across the board using a single rubric. What is required for this to go into place is a wizard (or team) to recode every quest in the game to make the rubric apply. The code, here, is not the issue so much as sitting down and applying the rubric to each quest, which requires a great deal of knowledge about the quests themselves.

The other issue would then be shifting quest experience to by dynamically awarded each login based on those quests that a given character has been flagged as completing. It would probably make unhappy those players who did old quests that don't exist anymore. However, it would really make the game fair and give everyone equal footing in terms of the modern game. Another nice feature would be that we could then dynamically assign the qxp cap for brute simply based on how much qxp is available based on all the flags being set.

Its a really important project that I hope we can someday mount. It would be nice if simultaneously we could rework many of the syntax and terrible logic issues with many of the notoriously bad quests. And ... yup, it comes down to needing lots more wizards!

G.

[Rhaegar]

Would be nice if the amount of time and effort spent on quests in Khalakhor would earn something more than minimal progress after you've done them all...

EDIT: Also, before I completely forget:
How hard would it be to implement some extra features into already existing game? I'm talking here about minor changes to some rooms:
- adding locked doors/chests with no keys for them and traps so that thief skills other than sneak and hide could be useful (those could be great to hide some of the best equipment but a feature that would randomly spawn such closed containers with some loot in them in certain areas would be nice too)
- giving some tougher fights some poisons and other special effects, which could be countered by healing
- making some mobs immune to weapons (even magical ones) and having to nuke them down with spells

The idea here is to bring Genesis more in line with classic view on heroic fantasy, where people would pick teams of various classes to tackle the dangers ahead, even if some of them aren't particularly fit for straight out combat.

I guess that a big part of some MMOs popularity is the fact that you don't need just any team to take on end-game content but you have to devise a wombo combo that's going to be up to the task and then fine-tune it for best efficiency. Genesis is all about straight-up combat, and this should change in my opinion.