Some target numbers for mmorpgs would be nifty

I was playing runes of magic the other day and I realised that in play, I'd simply be made quite alot happier if there was some sort of rating system for beating monsters - like killing them in X number of seconds. And your character would get to a new zone, and be lower level and lower kit, but you'd see your number improve and get closer to the number then finally beat it!

A bot from global agenda, simply because it looks cool!

Yeah, sure, it's still basically accumulating numbers to beat it. But it'd be more interesting than accumulating numbers and just going 'more is gud!'. Atleast it's hitting a goal here.

Also I hate bloggers labels box - I wish it showed the more commonly used ones, like wordpress does! I can't find the important ones at all easily!

Peasant Play!

What I think would be neat is to have what I call peasant play in a mmorpg.

Basically you have an alt that you can set to be a peasant. It's perhaps alot like monster play in lotro, where you have a monster and playing it gives your hero character extra destiny points.

The peasants top level would be about 10 or so! Level 10 is epic! And they would have perma death (before you moan, c'mon, it's only ten levels lost and peasants can do peasanty stuff at level one, just not as good)! Also other players, when on their hero's, would get bonus points for killing mobs around peasants, so as to rescue them (peasants can fight mobs but aren't designed to - they engage special peasant resouce nodes like animal traps and crops).

The idea is that peasant play for a few minutes every so often would be attractive in terms of resources and it would give a sense, when playing, of how big and dangerous the world is.

Also there could be events where hero's might have the chance of saving many peasants lives. Yeah, granted they may fail and your peasant dies, but again peasants would be able to do their stuff at level one to a certain extent, and level ten wouldn't be hard to achieve at all.

Peasant play!

Single player draft for a massively multiplayer game

I'm going to draft out the core combat for the browser mmo I want to make, in a single player gamemaker game. Because that way I know I can code it and see a working (single) player version, instead of trying to get one working in what I know of browser code (which isn't even the right word for it) and all the pitfalls and dead ends that'll involve.

One element I'm going to have is injecting a real sense and even possibility of instant defeat as the monster will have it's fighting approach described under it's name. You also have two attack options - regular and evasive. Normally evasive gives you a large penalty to hit. BUT on certain monster attack descriptions, the monster has a damage output potential that's going to have around a 75% chance of defeating a full health character (let alone a wounded one). If you hit evasion attack at these times, you still have the penalty to attack but you avoid the big damage attack entirely (no dice roll!)! You just have to keep watch while battling instead of clicking attack over and over and over.

Also I kept writing 'killed' instead of 'defeated' when drafting this. I'm not sure if I want perma death or not. I'll write about that gaming hot topic shortly!

Bog off, hope

I've been looking at the browser mmo tutorial over at indie-resource.com.

It nails some basics quite nicely, but then it's drifting into traditional design. ie, you have potions, you have spells...stuff weve all seen a million times before and even if I hadn't, drinking a potion or casting magic missile isn't terribly exciting in itself. I suppose I need it justaposed onto some sort of issue...I was about to link to this cheesy movie about a cyborg (and how for me it turned cool when he got betrayed, etc), but youtube pulled it (the movie was called 'Eliminators', from the 80's).

Anyway, so in terms of learning I'm at this tricky point where I don't want to learn to do the traditional design yet again - I've learnt that so many times already in other formats. But I'm still not so hot on things that I can deviate and yet still learn from the videos. Also I haven't ploted out what I want to do with a browser game AND I'm trying to gain some ground in the real world in terms of advertising (I happen to like project wonderful atleast for the moment).

I'm just really tired of running off faith 'things will work out'. You can run off that for years and I think I already have - when does 'things will work out' end? Ie the point where you accept that no, they did not work out? And the answer is that the idea that 'things will work out' can keep going until your dying day. I don't think 'things will work out' is right, to be honest. So I don't want to go there - but in terms of right here, right now returns for doing things, I'm not really seeing many options (except at the abusively low 'five cents for two hours of work' level).