[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[Byron Ellacott]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 07:28, Steven King wrote:
> bje wrote:

> This is the problem facing most MMOs right now, and the problem
> that Ultima X and World of Warcraft are trying to skirt around by
> offering a better quest system.  They will still be hard-pressed
> to find a way to allow players to advance their characters without
> offering some kind of leveling system (be it AD&D-style levels, or
> SWG-style skills).  If the quest system, itself, is the mechanism
> for advancement, they will be faced with the caveat you brought
> up:

I don't know any details of Ultima X, so I cannot comment on it at
all. World of Warcraft's quest system does appear to more or less be
the mechanism for advancement: you gain most, if not all, of your
experience either through the combat you engage in while completing
the quest, or as the quest's reward.

>> I can only see one solution: create engaging content for all
>> levels of ability.  Of course, the caveat is the high cost of
>> creating engaging content for many levels, which suggests that
>> the concept of the level of ability as a means of tracking
>> progression is not suited to MMOs.

> Enter the writers and storytellers who lay out the paths for the
> players to follow.  One downside to this is that gameplay could
> become more of a single-player, episodic experience rather than a
> free-form multiplayer game.

In World of Warcraft's case, I understand there's a balance between
quests you can complete alone in an episodic way, and quests you're
going to hold off on until you've got a group to help you.  The
higher levels of the game also hadn't been revealed last time I
investigated it, so it's possible that the quest driven advancement
is merely leading up to the free-form multiplayer experience.

Creating all those quests is one solution to providing content for
all levels of ability.  I've yet to see if the quests could be
called engaging, or if they tend towards repetitiveness.  Given the
volume of quests required, I would expect the latter case.

> The problems with that idea are that the live teams would need to
> be large, the "live encounter" events would need to constantly
> evolve, and you run the risk of players thinking that the live
> teams are picking on them when something bad happens to their
> character.

Live teams are very expensive for the amount of content they can
effectively create.  Live events tend to be geographically isolated,
because us humans can only pay attention to so much at once, so they
must cater to small groups of players.  They also tend to be bound
to normal working hours, which leaves us internationals out in the
cold.

Evolving events is another tough nut to crack.  To be considered
evolution, the outcome of previous events would need to affect
future events.  This means each shard will need to evolve
separately, which means you generally can't share content between
them.

Assuming you have an economical way to provide regular live events,
you still haven't solved the original problem: providing content for
all levels of avatar ability.  Since there's an upper limit on
levels, after a certain time the bulk of your players will have
reached that level, and so fresh content is more economical to
target at your top end players.

An approach such as World of Warcraft's may be the answer: provide a
reasonably good single player experience as the player journeys from
novice to expert, gradually shifting them from solo quests to the
group based freeform MMO systems that are the current end games.

Of course, that still leaves the problem of how to deal with Candice
joining your game two months after her good friends Alice and Bob:
can Candice meaningfully play with Alice and Bob?

--
bje
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