Adding stakes to mmorpg combat, because lets face it, your not going to die

Check out my +4 six pack! Yes, that is confusing!

What I'm thinking would be good for the average 3d mmorpg, given their atleast mildly gamist leanings? I think the computer generates a line on your health bar after you finish a fight. This line is X distance to the left of your current health - so if you recover health between fights, it'll slide over to the right. But if you take damage, it stays where it is.

Okay, if you can beat a monster before your health drops below this line, you get some bonus $$.

That's it! Except that for averge gear, it'd be set so you'd lose most of the time (the line is randomly generated, so it'd be generated a bit to close to full health alot of the time).

The thing about mmorpgs is that if were honest with ourselves, play cannot involve you five times out of six running back from the local respawn point. So really, unless you pick up two monsters by accident AND you were already damaged, your not going to die. Are we pretending to ourselves there's some risk to ourselves?

Hopefully also this doesn't rub some people the wrong way, as it's a reward for doing well, no punishment for not killing the monster in time. I've heard Tesh go on about how you don't need a punishment for there to be a game and I suspect what he means is he wants something for suceeding, not losing something for failing. Of course if you fail to suceed, you miss out on the bonus - that could still be construed by some as a punishment. You are missing out, so there is a sting in that. Really I think it shows that you do need a 'punishment' if only a very mild one and people who say they don't want any punishment actually do, just that kind. To me that makes sense. Whether that matters at all.

Anyway, I imagine it as you, with average gear, missing this bonus more often as not simply to give edge and sting to gameplay. So it ceases to be a walk in the themepark just a little bit.

Anyway ON TOP of this I think you have a mechanism which is kind of like the undying trait in lord of the rings online - ie, if you get defeated over a certain time span, you miss out on a bonus. In this case just have a recurring test - have to gain X amount of experience without being defeated. If so, you gain $$$! If your defeated, you can only try again after a day has passed. OH and what would be cool is if your character occasionally limps, moves slowly for a second or two - say in this hurt state they'd limp five seconds out of every minute of movement. I think it'd be cool!

You only get out what you put in...sux!

The first castle I built sank into the swamp...

After extensive play testin g I've been making a wee adjustment to the lumbering in Driftwurld, due to go live tomorrow.

The adjustment is that when your playing the mini game to gather lumber supplies, once you get some you have a chance of winning 2 extra lumber on top. You can win this once a day - just keep gathering until you win (secret in the know knowledge - each time you have completed gathering lumber, you have a 33% chance of winning this extra 2 points of hard wood lumber).

I was basically playing and I realised how horribly linear the aquisition of this important resource is. You want more lumber? You just keep playing it over and over and over until you've gotten the amount you needed. There would be no surprise twist - it was as predictable as just grinding away at it.

The whole essence of gameplay is uncertainty. Sure, in the mini game you might choose the wrong answer, but in the larger 'game', there was no uncertainty. Just a predictable increment, as bad as the Flanders version of snakes and ladders where everyone moves one square at a time (because dice are the work of the devil!)

It's nice to have the idea the player has put in, in order to get something. But not at the expense of gameplay/uncertainty.

LOTRO 'unable to decrypt' possible solution

This pic is always going to be useful for something...

Edit: Just a second, working on this post...
I ran into this error when I went to continue patching LOTRO, saying it was unable to decrypt some of the files it downloaded.

After googling about a bit one solution one I found was where the guy went into the program files, into turbine, into the lord of the rings file then used the search function (ctrl-f) and searched for files that had been changed in the last few days where it happened.


After some experimentation (and game crashes! Yikes!) I think this is the one that was the problem. Once deleted the client downloads it again.

client_hirez_aux_1.datx

Use at thine own risk, if that didn't already occur to ye! Just putting out a possible solution because I had real trouble hunting down this answer, so just repeating it to make it easier for latter folks to find.

Screen shots in spaaaaace!

Just a cool shot from another developer who also posts at the indie resource forums!

I think it uses unity.

"I proved I will do absolutely anything if an NPC asks me to"

Man, I knew buying land here was a con...

Interesting post over at Tippa's blog - kind of two topics blurred into one, but the second topic is interesting - a quest where you bring an enemy NPC in for...torturing. And the NPC kills himself rather than divulge the information.

The problem I'd see is that this is presented in the gamist format which doesn't give a crud about your morality, it instead demands the most efficient choice from you. In a narrativist format...we'll, I'll quote what I wrote in the comments...

I think the only bad thing about the torture quest is that if you bail on it, you get no XP. I think a game that actually grasps problematic issues in a narrativist vein will give you an equal reward for either torturing him, or bailing on the whole thing. Because for narrativism, it’s about what your character would do and not about choosing an optimal path.

Frankly it sounds like you could do with more quests like that – albiet in a narrativist framework, instead of the psuedo gamist one where you did it because that was the shortest path to advancement.