The Ossiranth Chronicles

So I am seeing that Blizzard is planning to make Achievements account wide in Mists. No longer will players have to actually play their characters to earn achievements. If they have it on another character, all they have to do is level it to the appropriate level to earn them.

These kind of features always baffle me. World of Warcraft is a subscription based game. Blizzard earns money by players playing the game for many months at a time. Players are burned out and continue to demand features which allow them to not have to play the game, and Blizzard continues to implement them despite they are counterproductive to their goal of making money. Let's look at how many times they have done this:

Dungeon Finder: Players no longer have to spend hours looking for pug members for heroic groups. They can also simply teleport to the instance instead of having to travel there. While this appears more convenient, it means players burn out much faster as the time spent forming the groups and traveling paced people and prevented them from completing content too often and getting bored of it.  Content that once took many months to get bored of now takes two or three weeks tops. (This isn't to mention the other problems this thing causes).

Raid Finder: Same as Dungeon Finder. Seriously sick of looking Deathleg's stupid face. Plus you have to deal with 5 times as many cross realm idiots which makes the number of times you want to do it even fewer.

Strangely, the random BG finder doesn't have this much effect as you can have whatever kind of fun you want in a BG with little risk of getting kicked out.

Heirlooms: How long does it take to get a fresh alt to 85 now with heirlooms? Three, four days of constant playing? Maybe a week or two of casual playing? Not only does it kind of get rid of a lot of the playing time for alts, but it also removes much of the need for the gear roller coaster ride as many slots never need to be replaced until you get to 85 (this lack of gear swapping also has a whole host of other negative effects I won't get into). As another side effect of the current expansion, there is less end game content for players to do when they get to 85 because a great deal of Cataclysm's content was the redo of all the old world quests (much of which is also skipped because of the increased XP).

Flying mounts allow faster travel. However they also completely destroyed world PvP, as players can completely avoid any enemy players. I still think there are ways for Blizzard to fix this one so that players can keep flying mounts and gain back all the previous benefits.

There are other things such as talent tree streamlining meaning players spend less time choosing talents, but players just copied crap from EJ anyways so that stuff doesn't count.

The fact of the matter is that players are getting burned out severely on the game, and for some reason Blizzard has decided that features that let them not play the game are the best way to go when it's clear that the correct answer is with not just more content, but more varied and fresh kinds of content. Content like the Pet battle system and Challenge modes could breathe some fresh life into the game, but all of the different content needs a large amount to keep it interesting, and with each new "time saving" convenience feature, the amount of each kind of content needed to hold interest gets larger.

I've also heard that they are going to make pets and mounts account wide too which not only kills all the need to collect them on alts for the new pet battle system they are introducing, but also removing a very large gold sink as well in the form of mounts for alts. It also destroys that particular segment of the market for gold makers, though I don't think Blizzard really gives a shit about what auctioneers want.

Overall, it just seems to me that Blizzard isn't even trying to keep their game alive. Every move they make to try and keep things fresh is completely counteracted by another which removes reasons to play the game in the first place!

No wonder everyone calls these guys the B team.

Been quite some time, but I want to just dive into a topic that is near and dear to my heart:

Fictional Temporal Theory. Otherwise known as the overall structure of time.

First of all. It is assumed that events flow logically from one to the next in a perfectly linear fashion if there is no time travel mechanism at all. How Time is structured in a fictional universe determines how the universe deals with time travel and its effects. It determines what kind of paradoxes can or cannot exist, what effects they have on the overall series of events, and several other things.

The main topic I wanted to talk about is the new official Zelda timeline that Nintendo released (and also this article). Since Ocarina of Time, the Zelda fandom has been discussing the split timeline theory. Now, instead of having two timelines, there are three. The author of the article I linked has a question (and some speculation and worries which follow from it) about "What happens if other Links failed?" The hero from Wind Waker died when they flung that barrel over the wall of the fortress and into a room full of bombs that exploded. The hero from Minish Cap gets accidentally stepped on by some guy in town. Etc. Etc.

In my studies of Fictional Temporal Theory, there is a unified set of rules I have been operating under as the true rules of the Structure of Time. These rules explain 99% of all time travel stories, and the ones it doesn't are badly written anyways. These rules have one or two which apply to this situation:

1. There is an alpha timeline. This is an immutable series of events which always happens in the same way no matter what. This series of events happens after all time travel that ever happens has already taken place. It is basically the "Final Draft" of a timeline and is unalterable (as all the alterations have already happened).

2. Every decision, no matter how small or insignificant, branches off into its own timeline.

3. Every timeline that has no bearing on the alpha timeline (I ate corn flakes for breakfast today, as opposed to cheerios) will unravel almost immediately into nothing. In this case, after eating the corn flakes, and then thinking for a second "Man, my mouth tastes like corn", everything else would be the same as before, the timeline unravels into non existence.

4. Timelines that do have a bearing on the Alpha timeline will continue on until all relevant things have time travelled, at which point it will unravel into nonexistence.

Sure. There can be timelines where the Hero of Winds failed. There can also be timelines where Link decides to take a nap and misses the important plot event. Unless Nintendo decides to make a game where this has happened, or a game where this matters in some way, then I think it's safe to completely disregard it as irrelevant.

According to my own time theories, the Ocarina of Time Adult timeline would have naturally just fizzled away into nothing, as Link had time travelled and changed it. However, since Nintendo decided to elaborate on what happened to it, then it didn't unravel immediately. In fact it continued on for three more games, possibly more in the future. This means that somewhere down the road, this timeline will have some importance.

This kind of excites me. This could form the basis of one of the best and most wibbly wobbly timey wimiest games ever. Maybe there could be three separate worlds of Hyrule, each vastly different from eons of civilizations, mining, weather, events and heavenly interventions, and what have you. Each world is the result of each of these three timelines. In one of the timelines (Say this new third one with FaiLink), far near the end of it, an ancient evil arises. In order to destroy it, the Master Sword is needed again. It hasn't been used in so long that it has lost its power and must be recharged. However, the artifacts needed to do this were lost long long ago. Maybe they fell in a volcano. Maybe they were shot into SPAAAAAAACE. Whatever the case may be, they're gone, and it appears that everyone is boned. But then a sage remembers a legend about an ancient artifact of the Godesses which was hidden away somewhere, to be used only in the most dire of emergencies. Link finds it (maybe like....a second magic mirror. The Magicaler Mirror. Or something) and it allows him to travel off and visit these other two timelines and the other two worlds. It is there that he can find the pieces needed. There could be other evils in these other worlds which must be defeated.

And in the end, the Master Sword is recharged and the enemy is defeated. However, it was just a servant of the true evil: the most powerful of all Evils. It has been growing in power since the dawn of time and is now nigh invincible. The only hope is to go back in time to the very dawn of time to defeat it when it was still young. There are many artifacts in existence which allow time travel, however their powers are limited and cannot travel back in time that far. Link must then go and seek out all of these artifacts, as well as several others (such as large amounts of that Timestone stuff in Skyward Sword) to create a powerful enough time travel spell.

It could wind up being the single most epic Zelda game ever created. They could have it span every location ever visited before. Possibly even every time period visited before.

I don't know about that guy from IGN, but I'd be willing to have a canon Hundred Dead Links if it meant I got to play that game. It is an acceptable price to pay.

Inscription has the ability to make the Darkmoon cards, which can then be made into decks and traded for trinkets.

Why can't the whole idea be expanded upon to be more than just a gear treadmill?

It's been done in single player RPGs before, FFVIII coming to mind most readily. Collectible card games. It would add yet another PvP aspect, or even PvE aspect to the game. Collectors can earn prizes for completing sets and collections, there can be tournaments with prizes for winning, and it could even play into questing with needing to challenge some people to card games to complete objectives or advance a personal storyline.

This also allows more to do for crafters.

There's also the aspect of external card games and potential interchangeability between them, but that's an entirely different post unrelated to in game mechanics.

I think the idea has potential if it's done right, and so far I can't recall any MMOs that have done it at all, let alone correctly.

Been a while since I posted. Sorry, just been in a fog.

I wanted to weigh in on the optimization issue that so many others are talking about.

Optimization, shmoptimization.

If there is an optimal path, then the game is doing it wrong.

Games are supposed to be about meaningful choices. Should I take talent A over talent B? Should I go left or right? These choices are not inherently meaningful of one if them is wrong! In an ideal game, choice A and choice B should be equally valid choices that only affect the actual play style of the game. If choice A makes the game more fun, take it. If choice B makes the game more fun as opposed to A, then take that. Both of the paths that these choices lead to have an equal chance of allowing you to succeed, but how that is done is different. If you choose to dual wield over single wield, then combat is faster and lighter feeling. If you choose to single wield, combat is slower but harder hitting.

This is probably incredibly hard to do for an MMO, and would require self adjusting talents which change as you take other talents, but I think it's doable. The question is why hasn't it been done yet?

I like the concept of Soulbinding items. It introduces a system of decay into a game which otherwise would have none. You find an upgrade to your equipment, the old one must be discarded or otherwise salvaged (disenchanted, sold for vendor coin, etc.). This keeps crafters in business crafting new items and it keeps farmers in business farming materials for the crafters.

However, it also seems like a massive waste. It also raises the question of what vendors do with all this vendored gear they buy that they most certainly can't sell or even wear themselves. Are they all enchanters? What do they do with those enchanting mats anyways, since they never have any for sale?

I had an idea for recycling old stuff. When gear is created, it is created as a white quality item every single time, regardless of the design. Enchanters can then enchant the gear to make it more powerful, up to a certain point. Until it is enchanted, it doesn't bind. The enchanter's magic, as a natural consequence of the magic itself, will automatically bind the item to the soul of the next person who wears or wields it in combat. If a player no longer has use of an item, they have some options. First, they can have an enchanter strip the enchantments off an item for a fee and sell the item enchantless (at which point they could use the materials, which would of course be reduced, to enchant something else). Second, they could have a Salvager deconstruct the item into its base components (minus some "waste") and sell the materials or make something else. Third, they could have the Enchanter unbind the item from their soul. This would cause the item to lose some of the potency of its enchants and become a second hand item and then sold.

I haven't decided if multiple characters per account would be a good idea, but if it were used, a second (or possibly third or fourth)hand item could be taken and have a special enchantment placed on it to turn it into an heirloom. The enchants would be set at a certain level and maybe given an heirloom only perk or two and be allowed to be left to another character on the account, or possibly given to guild members or something.

It's good to have a system which encourages trade and gathering, but second hand items could also have their own market in their own right and I think it may be worth exploring.

My next post will be about professions. I think I have a good preliminary system started that I'm working on.

I've been thinking about something I posted about a while ago. I like the idea of characters being able to ascend to Godhood.

The lore of the world I am building is as follows: There is a cosmic war going on between the races that the Gods belong to and the demons they are fighting. The worlds belonging to the gods serve a number of purposes for this end. Some are breeding grounds for soldiers. Some are training grounds for those soldiers. Some are schools for tacticians. Some are staging grounds for troop movements and assaults. Some are headquarters for the brass.

The world this game is set on is a recharge world for the goddess who has created it. For each world created, the one who creates it must expend a portion of their own essence for use as the raw material to construct it. They can also lose bits of themselves fighting and creating new troops for the war. This necessitates recharging ones self so as to not fade away to nothing. The mortal races of the world live, they die, and then their souls fuse with their creator, invigorating them with new strength.

The players of course belong to a separate group, the Chosen. They are exempt from being required to fuse with their world's god as they have shown potential for being able to have a much more positive impact on the cosmic situation as free beings. Their efforts can keep the world going, or possibly more. So when they die, they are allowed to be returned to life and continue on with their struggles.

As players play, try, and occasionally fail and resurrect, they become stronger. As they become stronger, they get closer and closer to Godhood as they learn new abilities and come to a greater understanding of the true underlying nature of existence.

So when they get powerful enough, I like the idea of letting players become gods, at which point they can leave the original world and go off to explore other worlds. Or if they wish, they can create their own worlds to rule over, creating their own races of mortals or immortals (or both). They could choose which side of the conflict they wish to be a part of or if they wish, they can choose their own side as new factions in the war with their own agendas.

It starts out as Everquest and slowly evolves into a sort of Spore/Civilization/Minecraft style game.

I think it could be beautiful if executed properly.

Getting reeeeal tired of posting comments on peoples' blogs, The Goog tells me the comment is too long, and then the post just evaporates into nothing.

Yep. That's gettin' super old.

I mentioned about Knowledges in an earlier post, but I thought I would go into detail about something I've cooked up for it.

Each Knowledge represents what a character knows about a particular academic or practical subject. How much a character knows will affect how successful they are in various tradeskills and can improve their various combat and other abilities as well. Metallurgy would improve a character's blacksmithing, engineering, and mechanic professions and might give the character a chance to identify weaknesses in a target's metal armor (in PvP, if the armor isn't fully repaired), allowing extra armor pen or crit or something.

Players can increase their Knowledges with practical experience. Anytime a player does something relating to a Knowledge, there is a chance they will learn something. A player can also read books in game to temporarily learn a piece of knowledge, which will greatly increase the chance of learning that piece of knowledge through practical experience (a player's intellect will determine how long, in game time, a piece of knowledge will stay remembered if they do not go and acquire it with practical experience).

In the game, players would have a Knowledge Compendium, representing the sum total of their character's knowledge. In it, each subject would have each of its topics denoted with each piece of information (such as "A Dragon has a weak point just under it's jaw where the scales are as soft as they are on the belly" in Anatomy). As more information is gathered, the connected bits will arrange themselves into a narrative almost like a wikipedia entry on the subject. Each bit will also list the particular bonus the piece of information gives the player.

The game would also have a Knowledge Helper. While playing, if your character knows something relevant about an enemy or something in the world, an icon would pop up next to it to alert the player. In the mentioned example when fighting a dragon, if the dragon were to lunge at you to try and bite you, an icon would come up indicating a weak point and glowing when you should strike.

I'm considering having a maximum level of knowledge which could be linked to a wisdom stat. Knowledge which is gained beyond that stat will be learned, but older piece of information will become depreciated, losing some of their bonus, and then eventually being forgotten. Perhaps any time the player uses that piece of knowledge to their advantage, that bit would gain a point of XP or two, and then after so many, the knowledge becomes ingrained and doesn't count against the maximum.

I think this would make the game much more enjoyable for players who enjoy learning everything they can about their favorite games while not being annoying to anyone who doesn't, and it would provide another method of character advancement beyond just class levels.

I find myself constantly redesigning the class structure of my game. Originally, I had the classes able to multiclass into anything they wanted, granting a massive number of choices of secondary and tertiary classes.

To trim that down, I decided to change the design to one where each class could advance to their secondary form, or multiclass into one of two other for one of two other specializations. This resulted in 33 classes with a good deal of redundancy (3 flavors of paladins, 2 flavors of monks), it left out many classes I wanted to include, and forced me to introduce several I felt were craptastic just so each class would have enough that wanted to take it as a multiclass option.

I think my new design will be based on abilities. If you want to be an Assassin, you have to have a certain amount of skill in stealth, melee combat, and various forms of information gathering abilities. If you are skilled enough, you may even be able to pass these tests without much skill or even without learning any of the abilities at all (though the tests are specifically designed for these abilities and only the most crafty players will be able to do so).

This would provide a good balance between the two. Players would never feel limited by their character build because their class couldn't move into many specializations. It also gives me the freedom to include some of the redundancy if the feel of the classes is different enough.

If you want to be a Paladin, you only need knowledge of some Priest skills and melee medium or large size weapons. There can be several specializations of the class which would depend on what else you took, but you can do any of them if you wish.

This system also allows me to go with my other idea in which a player's tradeskills can be used to unlock additional classes. A Mage who is an enchanter can become a Sorcerer. A Specialist who is a mechanic can become a Machinist. And so on.

Ok, I feel like I'm rambling now. I'm going to go work on a talent system that makes sense in a classless context.

(I also feel like I've made this post before. >_> I need a better filing system.)

For the last 6 years, Azeroth has been basically the same. Same NPCs, same quests, same rewards, same instances, same progression towards endgame. Even the expansion areas follow this same pattern. Even though in lore, players have fought off the Burning Legion and defeated Kil'jaeden's plans at the Sunwell, when you go to Outland all of the storylines about helping defend Honor Hold and killing massive amounts of creatures for Nessingwary and assisting the nether dragons in defeating the Dragonmaw clan are still there. All of these stories have played out as far as the game is concerned, yet there they still are.

Now they are wiping the old world slate clean and starting it over with a fresh 1-60 batch of everything. This is only a temporary solution though. In two more years, all of the new questing experience is going to be old too, and the same inconsistencies are going to pop up.

They have all these neat phasing technologies which they use to great effect in the new race starting zones (and the new old race starting zones). Why didn't they do that with all of the other races' starting zones? Hell, why don't they do that with ALL of the zones?

Imagine it this way: each zone has six states. The first state is the default state for players at or below the appropriate level. I'm going to use Westfall as an example. In Westfall, the default state is that of first walking in at level 8-10. There's Old Blanchy and Farmer Mr. and Mrs Whatstheirfaces. There are Defias problems everywhere. The crops are in a perpetual state of total crap famine. Players can play through these quests all the way through to the end of the massive quest chains helping destroy broken Harvest Reapers, save peoples' farms, and foil the Defias plots. Players will stay in this game state until either they finish the quest chains or they level to a point that those quest chains no longer grant experience.

This puts the game into state 2 in which all of the major problems are solved. The local inhabitants are happy and getting back to their lives. There are repeatable or daily quests from almost all of them which don't give XP as a reward (to encourage players to GTFO and go level somewhere else), but do give money and possibly other items, such as mats needed to level crafting professions. Once a player has reached a certain level, say a bracket above the Stage 2 trigger point (this point would be level 30, and the next bracket would start at level 40), then the game advances to state 3.

State 3 is basically State 1, only with an entirely new set of problems that are updated for the new level range. Maybe after the Defias were driven out, Murlocs could swarm the shores. Players could then complete these quest chains to solve the new problems, or get to the next point (level 60 in this case) to take the game to State 4, which is State 2 for the higher level range.

State 5 begins at 85, and would probably be patched into the game zone by zone according to different tiers. Some would be available right at Cataclysm launch, others such as our Westfall example would become available at a later time (the release of Heroic Deadmines in this case, if that's not happening at launch) such as after a player completes a certain raid tier.

This updates those Zones to be relevant to the Deathwing destroying the world storyline. While the Cataclysm happens to the entire world for all players, player interaction with Deathwing starts out very low and ramps up as they advance through the zones culminating in these stage 5 zones where he is literally doing fly bys at 5 feet over your head trying to barbecue and/or eat you. Completing all of the quests in the stage 5 zones unlocks a large number of dailies similar to how Icecrown has tons of dailies all over after playing through the storylines.

There are a lot of other things which could play in here too, like reputation gear for lower level characters based on stages, but those are a different story. The main idea here is that as you go through the world, the story of the world actually changes around you as your character has his or her adventure. Things that happened are in the past where they belong. Players also get a much wider choice of where they can go for each level range to level in. Instead of having 3 or 4 level 40 appropriate zones, there become 8.

I guess I'm just kind of disappointed that they didn't take a golden opportunity to put some realism and immersion back into the game that doesn't affect game play ability.

(and before anyone says it, they haven't announced any CoT plans yet, so if players want to go back and do quests from old states they might have missed or get quest rewards they missed out on, perhaps our Bronze dragonpals could allow us to do that.)

After playing for years now, it seems like players don't like to have adventures. Sure some do. I'm sure at least a few who read this post do. Most, from what I read on forums and blogs don't though. They skip quest text, go straight to the quest objectives, complete them and turn in, moving on to the next quest. You aren't an epic hero on a quest to save a little girl kidnapped by a gang of thieves (who are holding her for ransom from her rich parents). You are a guy with a sword in search of XP. Is the little girl NPC unharmed? Is she being treated well by her captors? How is she coping with the experience after you rescue her?

Who cares? As long as you get your XP, she can be missing an arm or scarred mentally for the rest of her life and it makes no difference. Although this is a legitimate way to play a character (my own main would likely take this particular view, though it may secretly tug at his heartstrings just a tiny bit), it's not really in character for all characters. A friend of mine plays the selfless and noble paladin who would be generally concerned about the girl and her eventual fate. However, the game rewards those who disregard all that wishy washy RP crap and go straight for the good stuff.

This is a bit off topic from what I want to talk about, but it is loosely related. I wanted to talk about experience and the way it is earned.

I really want to make a game where the story is the important part. When a player plays their character, they should want to actually play the role of that character. These are called Role Playing Games after all. Most game mechanics seem to incentivize the player to disregard any hint of story elements and just burn through as much questing and mobs as their sword can slice through. The story becomes irrelevant as it is just a tl;dr version of the objectives from which the real goal can be extracted from a quick skim.

What if the game mechanics for things like XP punish those who try to grind through everything and rewards those who play in the story mode? Alternative methods of achieving objectives could award more XP than the standard "Kill everything you see method". This especially applies to stealth classes who would get a bonus for not being seen or for having a minimum casualty rate.

However, this doesn't seem to apply to just regular killing mobs. Players grinding 4 million boars in Elwynn forest certainly doesn't seem heroic. I had an idea to discourage that with XP gains being on a diminishing returns cooldown timer. You kill one mob, you get full XP. You kill a second mob, you get full XP. You kill X number of X additional mobs (the number of which should be tuned to a proper amount) and get full XP. After this point, a very short cooldown hidden from the player starts. Maybe 10 or 15 seconds. Killing a mob once this cooldown is up will award full XP. Killing a mob before this timer is up will award reduced XP and restart the cooldown timer with a slightly increased time amount. This continues until about 4 or 5 mobs killed this way (before the timer ends) when no XP is gained at all. Each of these additional timers you wait out will return to the previous XP level.

The main idea is to slow down the grinding player to it is more efficient to actually complete quests. Mobs which are involved in the quests you must complete would of course be exempt from these timers. Killing rats as a grinding exercise is on the timer. Getting a quest to kill rats will not trigger the timer until the quest objectives are met (at which point they kick in).

This could also be incorporated into the profession system for professions that require killing mobs like skinning or butchering. Killing additional mobs grants the reduced XP, but if you perform the profession actions like skinning the corpse then a large portion of the lost XP is returned in the form of XP towards that profession.

I've also been considering the inn mechanic from WoW. Logging out at an inn wouldn't give you a bonus on its own. You'd need to actually rent a room, at which point you would automatically log out and your character would be sleeping. The longer you are logged out, the more bonus experience you get for a certain amount of time (up to a maximum). The idea here being that players who play all the time can play normally, and players who have limited play time can still keep up so that they can participate in group content as well. The bonuses would be balanced so that if a player plays for 15 hours straight (something I don't recommend) and another plays for two, goes to work for 8, spends three hours with his family upon coming home and eating, and then plays two more hours, the player who only played four hours would gain XP from his play time enough to equal him to the 15 hours straight player and they can continue to play on equal level group content together. I think this is a much better way to do what Square was trying to do at keeping players on the same level of play as it doesn't punish the player who wants to play for 15 hours straight with no XP walls.

To sum up, the XP system I have in mind would:

1. Discourage grinding and incentivize playing in a natural story based way
2. Not punish players who are trying to use or level their mob killing related professions
3. Allow players with less play time to stay on a competitive level of play with those who have time in abundance.

This is all subject to balancing of course so that players who play in a natural way would never be affected by any of the downsides.

Thoughts? Does this system seem like it would annoy players if it's balanced correctly? Is there a better way to accomplish these goals?

In WoW, there are sets which provide bonuses depending on how many pieces of the set you are wearing. Sometimes, these sets are strong enough that gear outside the set isn't worth using. Sometimes they are weak enough that you don't want any of the set, or just a smaller part of the set. Then when you get new gear, which would otherwise be an upgrade, you don't want to use it as it would break those set bonuses which defeats the purpose of gear upgrades. As a rogue main, I used T8 until I had 2 piece T10, as T9 completely sucked (this also meant I was finished with T9 badge gear long before anyone else in my guild).

What if, instead of the bonuses for sets being on the gear itself, they were on an upgrade item like a gem or rune? Blacksmiths or the like could add special sockets or some kind of slot to certain pieces of gear ( a limit of one per piece of course to prevent stacking) which these items would be able to be placed. New gear which would otherwise be an upgrade could then be taken and used while keeping the set bonuses. I think this could solve the gear leaping problem where a majority of designed gear is skipped in favor of set pieces.

Just a thought: Why does the initial game world have to be all there is? What I mean by that is the MMO so far has the player growing in power until they hit a cap, and there they are. Why not let it scale infinitely?

As players play through MMOs, they gradually get more powerful and defeat stronger and stronger foes. Eventually there has to come a point where they run out of enemies they aren't strong enough for (this begs the question of how those enemies got so powerful themselves with nothing to fight against. Did they grind 4 million boars?). This is already starting to be a problem in WoW. We've already defeated a good majority of the most powerful characters in lore, and will have most of them licked by the end of Cataclysm. An elemental Lord, two direct children of Deathwing, Illidan, a Dragon Aspect (soon to be two), the Lich King, Archimonde (even though it was a travel back in time deal), TWO Old Gods, and then.....not much else on the "still on Azeroth" scale. The other two old gods (or possibly three, depending on if they retcon The Master's Glaive to be a dead lieutenant or something) and possibly a second Algalon type entity arriving, and there is literally nothing else on the planet more powerful. You would have to step up to Actual Kil'Jaeden, then maybe find Sargeras out in the Nether, then maybe a few of the other Titans, and then you're done.

The entire time, the heroes remain as ordinary mortals. Mortals that can slay gods and Titans. Why does that have to be? Why can't the players eventually become gods, or at least half gods, along the way? You defeat all the evils of your world and the gods say "Grats. As a reward, you can be a god too." And you can then continue on to other worlds and fight greater evils, and maybe even make your own worlds.

I dunno. I just think it would be cool to take a character who was once a lowly farmhand (who lost his home when the farm was burned down by bandits) and turn them into an all powerful god of the cosmos.

I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online since my WoW account expired and it's now free to play. They use a trait system instead of talents for customizing your character. These traits are earned by doing things in game as opposed to as you level. You get empathy for completing quests. you get justice for killing brigands. Etc.

What if these traits were more than just stat bonuses? What if they also affected how you speak to NPCs? There are already things like text options and dialogue wheels that let you choose (in a limited way) what you say to NPCs. Why not have these traits affect what options are available, allowing the dialogue to go in directions that others wouldn't see? This could open up entirely new quest paths, allow players to negotiate better quest rewards, or even open up new skills to be learned from trainers. There could also be "negative" traits as well, allowing a wider range of bonuses and even changing the way the game is played. Ruthless would grant pets and hirelings higher damage (because you push them harder), but causes them to be more willing to abandon you after taking enough damage. Evil would grant a bonus to shadow damage spells and abilities and give you greater control over undead minions. And so on.

The main thing here is that I'm trying to come up with ideas that bring an RP play style into the main part of the game. Playing on RP servers basically since I've started playing MMOs, it seems that most players regard RP as something that is done in town. When you are out questing or doing instances, RP becomes impractical. I want to bring about a game where a character's actions have impact on what happens to them and where players have to consider their actions' consequences before leaping into the fray. A paladin who is an upholder of all that is good and just running into the forest to slaughter squirrels and bears en mass doesn't really seem like it would be in character.

I know a lot of my ideas would make for a game that is extremely niche and not very widespread, but I think it would make for a game that is highly immersive and rich.

I've just had an idea for healers.

When someone takes enough damage, they die. I had the thought that if the attack did enough damage, maybe the player's head would get lopped off.

I already decided that in order to resurrect someone, their wounds would need to be healed before their soul could be reunited with their body. What if, in healing someone whose head was severed, their head is placed slightly off by mistake, which affects the healed player's controls slightly? Maybe just a temporary one that the player's character then adjusts to, or could be healed away. Would this be an interesting mechanic, or just annoying to everyone?

Eh, it'd probably be annoying to everyone, but I think it would be funny to include just to watch people stumble around randomly for a moment as if their keys had been remapped.

I'm kind of boggled by Blizzard's decision to convert all badges/shards/whatever alternative currency into cash moneys, and the current content badges into the new points system. What exactly is the point of this? The currency is just kind of sitting there on the currency page, not doing anything and not bothering anyone. It doesn't take up bag space anymore, so it's not as though there is any issue to really be solved here.

In all previous expansions, they just reset the gear with new badges. The badges you earned previously would get you exactly squat in the next expansion. In Wrath, they even did this between tiers so all the badges you earned in tier 7 would be useless for tier 8. Why have they decided that players stockpiling points before the expansion so they can immediately buy all of their badge gear and start raiding is a good thing? Are there not many heroics and they need to compensate for that? Is the badge gear going to be absolutely necessary to clear just the trash in the first raid? Are all of the new recipes for professions going to be bought with points and players will need them just to level to 535 or whatever number they're raising that cap to?

This just seems like useless busy work for the Blizzard staff to me. Or maybe they are dangling shiny keys in front of the people who have expressed concern over how their class will be performing.

Not only this, but wiping out the other currencies like spirit shards and stone keeper's shards sort of defeats the point of the whole mechanic. You want the WG rewards, you go win WG. This allows you to get the shards to buy them. Now you can just buy them with honor without having to win? While these are going to be old hat come Cataclysm, what about Tol Barad? Are they going to introduce a new currency for that, or just allow people to farm BGs to get the rewards, or just not have rewards at all?

There are so many implications for changing these mechanics that I wonder what they are thinking.

I am also upset that they are not taking all of the old badges and converting them to a third currency called "Old Crap Points". They could have "Old BC Crap Points" and "Old Wrath Crap Points". Or maybe they could be called "Useless Bullshit Points". They need to make this happen.

Elements have been a part of many games for a good long time, and are established well enough that many gamers don't even have to think about it. The systems are just intuitive.

That being said, coming up with a system that makes sense is proving to be difficult. I can make cases for one type of magic dealing extra damage to another in so many ways that it would have made more sense to just remove the element system all together. If you were playing as someone who had a fire elemental pet? Hoo boy. That pet is screwed. Water extinguishes fires. Wind extinguishes fires. Earth in the form of sand extinguishes fires. When Fire melts Ice, it becomes Water which extinguishes fires. Lightning was the only one that didn't really deal damage to Fire, and could start fires. There were also cases for Wind being able to spread Fire and for Fire being able to burn so hot that it vaporizes Water.

I expanded the system a few times with different aspects of the elements separated until it had officially reached the status of Pokemon Rigmarole. Then I said screw it and went back to the basic wheel system. If there are exceptions, then they can be baked into abilities themselves.

I think it requires a light touch to be done right. Something like FFXI's system where different hours of the day will influence the strength of your elemental attacks would likely be too much (which after looking into, looks practically identical to the flowchart I came up with for strengths and weaknesses). However, something like WoW's system where elemental properties only matter for if the boss is doing them, and if you have enough resistance (a stat which has proven to be largely useless in the last few years) would likely be not enough.

The real question is "Is an elemental strengths and weaknesses system really necessary, or is it just a relic of older games that doesn't have much relevance anymore?" I'm not entirely sure where the line is between "Strategically important" and "completely irritating" and "completely ignorable".

I know a lot of people have been posting on the subject lately, most of it negative. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring regardless. My opinion of the game, though there are a lot of bad things, a lot of them are simply "new to the game" feelings which have diminished thus far. Let's start with the good.

First off, the graphics are beautiful. Even on my not so high end machine, the textures and details are incredible. I started my first character out in Gridania, which is the woodland area. It actually feels like a massive forest and not just a bunch of trees stuck together.

The quests are done differently than other games. There are the traditional quests, which take the form of storylines. These story lines are not entirely based around combat. The kill ten rats quests are not present here, and they instead display some kind of creativity to them. Currently, I've only done the opening storyline quest and I haven't found any more of this kind though I've heard they have removed all of these quests until release. Likely because they don't want beta testers blowing through them and putting up walkthrough sites before the game is released. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, though I hope they have internal people testing out the "yet to be released" material so it's not buggy when it comes out.

The other quests take the form of levequests. Basically, the way they explain it is that instead of having a bunch of people standing around with exclamation points over their heads, any of the NPC citizens that have jobs for people to do like hunting deer or killing pests goes to the Adventurer's Guild. They probably pay them a hefty fee, and the guild says "We'll get someone to take care of it for you." Then you come along and the guild pays you a bounty to do these jobs. This makes much more sense from a logical standpoint to me than having people just standing around because it makes the world feel more vibrant with the cities having citizens actually going about their business. It also avoids any potential legal entanglements with quest givers handing out dangerous "Go kill Billy the Guy who Got My Daughter Pregnant" like quests.

They also have seem to mixed things up and are now allowing people to be in multiple linkshells (the FF version of guilds) at once. I don't remember the exact number, but this is a great idea as it allows you to have several pools of people to play with, and maybe even a way to distribute message easily (as there doesn't seem to be any mail system that I could find).

Now let's talk about the bad.

This game is very clearly a console MMO with a keyboard/mouse interface tacked on hastily. The keyboard controls are a bit awkward, and though you can remap a few of the keys, most of the functions such as opening the menu and not remappable. The game comes with a utility that you must use to map all of the functions if you want to use a gamepad. And I highly recommend using a controller. Be prepared to remap these keys several times as you figure out what the functions do and get everything in comfortable positions. The control scheme becomes much more natural once you do and the game becomes more playable.

There are large floaty crystals called Aetherite scattered throughout the game. They act as hearthstone bind points (which need no physical hearthstone item), graveyards for the corpse run, and starting points for levequests. They allegedly also act as waypoints for fast travel, though having discovered two of them already I have yet to get it to perform this function and am starting to doubt it exists. (EDIT: Found this function. Unlike everything they tell you about this, the crystals are the endpoints. The command is in the command menu, apparently.)

Most of your storyline quests are done instanced. Other players who are on that part of the quests will share your instance, so this isn't the isolation effect. However, if you fail one of these quests and get teleported out, you end up back at the floating crystal you last used. This is a massive pain when the area you restart the quest in is another five minute walk on foot. On top of this, there are escort quests in this game. If you get more than 10 or 15 feet away from the NPC you are escorting, you automatically fail and get sent back to the crystal. Sometimes this occurs without warning. Is it really too much to ask that when you fail a story quest that it sends you back to a point near where you entered the instance so you can try again without having to run back for five minutes?

There are no tutorials anywhere. Well, there is one tutorial quest, but it's for using emotes and it doesn't even show you how to do it exactly. This seems to be the general design. Don't tell players "This is what these numbers and bars mean". Let them figure it out themselves. There is a small display in my upper left corner (it starts somewhere else). It has many numbers and fractions and a few icons on it. I have absolutely no idea what any of these are, and they seem to change at random. Two of them I though might be coordinates, but after running in a straight line north and seeing them change in all directions, I have determined that this is probably not the case. Some moves (and by that, I mean the only one I have) are available sometimes, and sometimes they aren't.

There are a few minor points which can mostly be ignored: The fact that there are spelling errors in a lot of the text is probably going to be ignored by most players. There are also several bits of quest text where some words haven't been translated from their original Japanese yet.

A lot of people have been talking about the surplus exp, but I just haven't seen it kick in yet. Or if it has, I haven't noticed it. Looking at how these skills work, it is probably beneficial to switch classes and level them anyways, as it looks like there are good and useful skills spread across all of the class trees. (I find it ironic that most of the resources can list all the skills, but can't tell me what those damn numbers in that little box do. >_>)

I don't think this is a bad game. I think it just needs a bit of work. Keep in mind that I say this after only having played it for a matter of maybe 10 hours total. It seems to be getting a little better now that the initial "I don't know what the hell is going on" feeling is starting to wear off. Hopefully when the game goes to release, they will add in that extra quest content they were talking about (which hopefully is not a lie) and add in some tutorials, or at least some freaking tooltips that explain things when you hover over them. Maybe add in a glossary or some diagrams to help console players that don't have a mouse.

I won't pretend that I'm a very big fan of the HP system. I never liked the idea of a character being distilled down to simply a number. You get punched for 12 damage 10 times, and your 120 hp character dies. Punched to death, what a way to go. Sure, if you get hit hard enough that can happen in reality, but it's not exceptionally likely.

So instead of a health number and a magic number, I opted for 2 of each.

I'm still tweaking this system (and in MSpaint, I'm trying to conceptualize how it would look to keep it simple), so bear with me here.

There are 4 different meters, instead of the standard two.

Blood, Pain, Soul Power and Fatigue.

Blood is simply the amount of blood your character has, and starts at 100%. As you are hit, some attacks could cause the character to get cut, or stabbed, or impaled, or some other form of laceration. Characters of course bleed when these things happen. As you bleed, your blood meter goes down. Wounds will naturally clot themselves up to stop the bleeding, depending on the severity, the speed of which depending on the size of the wound. Once you have lost enough blood, your character will become disoriented from blood loss. This will cause them to miss more often, move more clumsily, and probably a few other specific things I haven't thought of yet. When it drops to a lower point than that, your character passes out and becomes unconscious (something to note about unconscious characters is that they are not dead, but are entirely vulnerable and unable to defend themselves from atack). If they continue bleeding after that, it will hit 0 and they will die. The amount of blood a character has doesn't change, but stats can make a character less likely to take wounds that bleed, make the wounds heal faster, or let a character continue on longer before becoming disoriented.

Pain is the amount of punishment your character can take and starts at 0%. Physical attacks and most kinds of magical attacks, instead of dealing damage, will deal pain. The pain meter goes up as you take it, and once it reaches a certain point, your character will be in extreme pain. This level of pain makes physical actions cost more than they normally do and may even cause more pain themselves. When pain reaches 100%, the character passes out and becomes Unconscious. The amount of pain a character can take can be increased by stats, the amount they take from attacks can be reduced, and the Extreme Pain threshold can be lowered or even ignored for some classes.

Soul Power is the amount of magical energy a character has. It is your basic MP that has been standard in games for a long time, with one exception. Once players spend enough Soul Power on spells to reach a certain point, it becomes harder to cast spells and cast time, as well as spell cost go up, and spell effectiveness goes down.

Fatigue is the amount of energy a character can expend. As characters use physical actions (some of which are combat actions like throwing a punch, some are defensive such as blocking, and some are non combat such as running through a field), they gain Fatigue. Fatigue fades when you don't take any actions. As a fight goes on, Fatigue builds up, and as it does, characters become less effective. When this effectiveness decline starts depends on the stats of the character, but each successive stage will reduce the speed, power, and defensive capabilities of a character by certain degrees until they reach 100% Fatigue. At this point, the character becomes Exhausted and only able to take a few actions (actions such as falling over, maybe rolling over once or twice, etc. Just small actions that may help them not die). The Fatigue will fade slowly and the character will stay Exhausted until enough of it fades and they can get up. If they take any of those minor actions, it will stop the fading for a moment but otherwise they are just slightly less helpless than Unconscious in the Exhausted state.

Like I said, this is still a work in progress, but I think a combat system in which you have to not only try to whittle down your opponent but also pay attention to yourself and make strategic decisions in combat is a good thing.

There are also several other things I'm planning on working in such as players getting hit enough times could start bleeding internally, or possibly what to do if you get your head sliced off or bitten off by a dragon. But those will come later. I think 4 separate numbers is more than enough to worry about right now.

In most games, a player's class for combat purposes and their profession for crafting purposes are completely separate and have no bearing on each other.

What if they did?

Most professions are suited to one class or another because of the inherent bonuses they provide or sometimes merely because they provide the ability to craft things that are more useful to them. In WoW, blacksmithing is more useful to Warriors and Paladins because it crafts plate armor they can use (and gives a health bonus useful to tanks when paired with Mining). Tailoring is more useful to Mages, Warlocks, and Priests because it crafts cloth armor, and Enchanting is better suited because of the synergies with Tailoring's cheap disenchantables (as well as being more suited flavorwise, being a magical art).

What if these professions not only gave players the ability to craft and modify items, but also gave bonuses and extra abilities to specific classes? What if players who leveled a tradeskill up enough could gain access to unique classes?

This is just an idea I've been considering. Enchanting is a magical school, and thus would be useful to Mages. Or at the very least being a Mage would allow enchanting to be leveled more easily. At higher levels the Mage could become an Enchanter, allowing them to cast helpful and harmful status spells on friends and enemies.

These wouldn't be straight bonuses in the traditional sense in that they must be taken for min/maxing purposes, but they would be bonuses which change the dynamics of the class that takes them. And Enchanter would be just as powerful as a Mage, they just have a slightly different toolset and a different amount of utility.