As the two or three people (including myself) who visit my webpage know, I'm reworking Dreamoor, basically from the ground up. Gaining skills in my original system involved performing quests for the skill teacher. First, there were preset ones for each skill. I later abandoned that in favor of dynamically generated quests (at least randomly chosen), figuring that would eliminate having "solved quests" where everyone knows the solution (even worse would be things like some MUDs have that autocomplete quests).
Nonetheless, I'm bothered by the possibility of veteran players basically doing the quests for newbies, and just letting the newbie player follow along. Does anyone else think this would be a common occurance? Or should I just not worry about it? If it would happen a lot, what could I do to prevent it?
-AbyssDragon
ID:154019
 Aug 6 2002, 4:56 am
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AbyssDragon wrote:
As the two or three people (including myself) who visit my webpage know, I'm reworking Dreamoor, basically from the ground up. Gaining skills in my original system involved performing quests for the skill teacher. First, there were preset ones for each skill. I later abandoned that in favor of dynamically generated quests (at least randomly chosen), figuring that would eliminate having "solved quests" where everyone knows the solution (even worse would be things like some MUDs have that autocomplete quests). I had that problem in my game. I did different things to try to prevent it. I made it so at some of the important bosses only one at a time could enter, and bosses who dropped items necessary to the quest, only the killer could get them. Even still people are trying to find ways to get around doing the quests to get to the end. Wall04 | |
Killing things and getting equipment are normally what I see veteran players do. Quests, however, are work. Passing by and doing something small might be easy enough, but I rarely see people who want to spend their time finishing a long ritual. I wouldn't worry about it much. It may happen, but spending time on a few annoying people might be a waste.
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In Super Hero Bash! There are two types of missions...
Inspections and Umm...Action Missions. In inspections, you would talk to the inspector, and he would tell you that there was a break in at the parking lot or something. So you would go to the parking lot and get that item (if it was yours). Then, you would turn in all the "clues" to the inspector and he would tell you who did the crime and all. Then you could go after him and take him down. Or something like that... I barely got the inspections working.... so...yeah.... this was useless. LOL. | |
AbyssDragon wrote:
Nonetheless, I'm bothered by the possibility of veteran players basically doing the quests for newbies, and just letting the newbie player follow along. Does anyone else think this would be a common occurance? I think it would start out uncommon, then become epidemic. If you limit the quest's "value" to party leaders, you've still got a problem of advanced characters hooking up with lower-level ones. Of course one way to deal with the item sharing issue (which is actually a separate issue) is to prevent low-level players from using high-level equipment, or at least using it effectively. (Also, players with tough equipment like diamond mail who have too low a level to have earned it should be monster magnets, drawing in beasties who will try to steal their stuff.) Another way to handle the quest problem besides limiting quest credits to the leader is to divvy up the reward (of points, money, etc.) among the players in the party. The highest portion of experience should go to the most experienced character. If you assume NPCs all have experience levels too, this means that if you attempt a quest in a party of 4 (let's say the quest is calibrated so the leader of a reasonable party will get full credit), but one of those NPCs under you is about 10 levels up, the fact that they have 50x more experience means the NPC will get 50 shares of the reward, and the others won't be credited with a full quest. (This should count anyone who was part of the quest for any time, provided you were able to prevent freeloaders from joining up.) If "completed a quest" is a binary decision, then use this formula: didquest = (my_exp * party_size) > (combined_exp * 0.8) That is, if your exp (which determines your "payoff") is at least 80% of what an equally divided payoff would be, you get a quest credit. So you can have players and characters in your party of a higher level, provided they're not too much higher. (It also means in theory a gigantic party of grunts could have a high-level "leader" with them and get credits, which to my mind is still valid.) Best of all, if you count exp from the end of the quest (and players' contributions toward the total from end-of-quest or when they left the party), you still allow some of the level gap to be smoothed out following battles, depending on how exp is distributed after a kill. Longer quests would therefore tend to allow for a greater range of character levels in the party. Lummox JR | |
There will always be powerlevel players who will try and rig new characters. One idea might be to do what a lot of larger MMORPGs do to prevent kill stealing, and things like this: Provide monsters with a damage list, containing the name of each player who deals damage to it, and how much they have done. If the monster is defeated, whichever party/person did the most damage gets looting rights.
This is of course assuming that quests will involve slaying monsters, finding objects, and whatnot. The bottem line is that nomatter what, you will always have these kinds of players. The best you can do is to make sure it can't be severely abused. Put a cap on certain aspects, make sure there are certain limitations on groups, even remove the persons ability to group while on a quest if its not flagged as a group quest.
Im not really sure what kind of quests you mean, so I can't do more than guess.
Alathon\\