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I was reading through the forums and came across this interesting forum. I have my own philosophy on the matter just like everyone does and has an asshole ect. I understand completely where both sides are coming from here in these arguments. I hope it's not too late to post some suggestions or fixes I have on the matter. First, I am qualified to relate on these topics because I was the strongest player on another online rpg where there were thousands of accounts and generally 50-200 people on at any given time. I made suggestions to help shape the way the game developed dispite the fact that my own suggestions would hurt my way of play. I quit that game to go to college where I took up classes in psych. but enough about me here are my fixes on this matter...
1. Problem: how do you draw new players when new players won't feel like they have a chance against elite players who have played for way longer?
A. Players join games for different reasons. The main reason players and people choose to join events, games, clubs, ect. is a similiar interest to socialize with like minded people. Ultimatly people do not care about the mechanics of the game (in most cases) they only care that they can come socialize and make new friends or compete against other people with their friends. The solution here is to give players more options of what to do with their time on the game. This will draw more people who will become interested in what they like. Make options for people who are highly competitive so that they can compete against one another (more pvp options. that have unique rewards for participating player such as unique armors, weapons, ect.). Make an option for people that strive to be number 1 and/or are OCD or just highly self-motivated! (grinding). Make an option for someone that wants to spend their time tryng to buy their way into power (an auction house maybe). Make an option for people that want to be the best craftsman and they need to make unique equipment of their own or enhancement bonuses that no one can get without them. Create areas that are just absolutly impossible to handle without the help of multiple party members and make the rewards for these areas much greater than for a normal area. The idea here is to apply to everyone's sense of accomplishment and what motivates them while at the same time bringing together those people so that they can socialize. Socialists are the most important part of any rpg. It makes up probably 95% or better of the player base.
2. Problem: I don't want my game to be about grinding. I want it to be as if people of better skill can do better than people that have grinded with no skills.
A. There is always some degree of grinding in any rpg unless it's just completely roleplay then there is still arguably some grinding. I guess you have to ask yourself where you draw the line in terms of what is comfortable for you to be concidered grinding too much... there are 2 paths here for you to take as far as I can see. Both are going to require alot of work to get done correctly.
Senario 1: You will have to force players to select from a limited selection of multiple races, classes, jobs, professions, magic types, ect. then cap them at about 2-3 months worth of work for steady grinders. Say level 100 since that was a comfortable number mentioned. Say someone picked: Elf, ranger, fleching & bowcrafting, and since they can't learn other types of magic they had to go with a limited use of life magic or something ... being rangers and all. This person gets unique bonuses from their race like the +dex, int, bows or something... as a ranger they get 100 bows, 30 life magic, 100 longsword, 50 shields can wear leather or chain armor or something, can craft bows and make multiple types of arrows all the way up to difficulty of lvl 100. ect. You will have to create such a diversity so that players won't feel forced into being "sandboxed" as someone put it. The replay on this system is great so that each player will want to recreate as something else and try something new. The downfall to this system is balancing. There will be alot of bitching about which certain classes being better than their class. Again, the balancing comes with the paper,rock,scissors style where whats good against one class isn't nessesarily good against another. IE: rogues do lots of damage real quickly to mages who have little armor but armor wearers can stand against a rogue's blades and the mage dominates he plate wearer as his plate does not nessesarily protect him against the mage's spells.. again this may not hold true if the player has chosen to equip themselves to fight against certain player types.
Solution 2: Create a completely open system. While fighting, you level up as normal. When you level you get to choose what skills to increase the cap on. This does not give you the skills, only increases the cap on them. So if you're fighting and you level up, you get say 5 points to distribute among your skills say... magery, healing, parrying, dodging, blocking, 2 handed swords, 2 handed maces.... foils, daggers, long sword, bows, tactics, accuracy, magic defense, magic penetration (for canceling magic defense), magic accuracy, magic dodge, ect . *one important note here is that there needs to be a counter for every skill. for instance accuracy and dodging. tactics and blocking (for lesser damage) or parrying ect. whatever skills you have in this combat system, you need an equal counterpart that does the opposite so that there isn't an imbalance for offensive or defensive skills. Don't cap this system, just create alot of skills to develope so that it is impossible for any one person to develope themself perfectly as someone that comes along developed differently will be an answer to their strengths or weak depending on how they leveled themself up also. Again, it only increases the cap, they would have to fight from that point to gain the actual skills from fighting using what they increases... for instance increasing magery's cap they still have to use magery to get it to it's cap. races will have to be revamped so that they provide bonuses to skills rather than stats as stats wont exist anymore. Finally, for the issue of players become too strong, they will have their counterpart monsters which are particuliarly good at killing them. Develop the skills on those monsters as if they are players of corresponding level with different builds. Ultimatly, you will have to create a "random dungeon" for those hardcore grinding gamers matching the highest level person in the party and having a corresponding amount of monsters to party members. The monsters generated will have random skills matching their level of course and give correct experience for something that level. Each floor will have an exit for returning to town and another set of stairs going down. Players cannot use recall scrolls to get back to town. Going further into the dungeon yields better equipment while resetting the dungeon begins them all over again. Randomly generate the tile setup so that each floor is unique as well as the chests, monster setup and skills of course. Party members that exit the dungeon are disbanded from the party (they must exit through the town exit) For crafting.. you will have to still limit it to 1 professional trade per person because it's not sensible to have everyone good at every craft. that will kill trading. Not to say that you can't continuously and infinitatly get better at your craft! The limiting factor here is materials. Create several materials which are needed to craft certain things. The higher your skills, the more rare materials you will need. Skillup as if you don't have a cap here. Can create (or buff or socket w/e) whatever you want in your school of craft as long as you have the correct materials and you don't fail and destroy the materials
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/tongue.gif)
the higher an item is above your skill level, the higher the probability of failure and destruction.
3. Problem: I can never beat this player. He has +9 axe and all +9 golden armor of defense!
A: Randomize your item drops more so than they are. there are very limited amounts of things that can be dropped but one thing that holds true is that there is a determined mind set of what items are better. It's black and white and it needs to be greyed so to speak. Give your item drops multiple attributes all catering to a different type of build so that if the platewearer wants to sacrifice something like defense or ability to hit for extra magic resistance, he can do that if he is lucky enough to get some peices to drop (this encourages trading also). Just like diablo style you can give an item a random prefix, a random suffix, any amount of random slots for gems, runes or whatever, throw on some random stats and/or random skill % ups, range the defense, attack, hit%, dodge % values, ect. you get the idea. bigger bonuses and higher range values on group quests/ raids or whatever ^^
This concludes my wall of text. If you haven't fallen asleep please give me some feedback. If you have any questions about this wall of text or don't understand any part of it. I will be happy to explain.
-Xero