The Ossiranth Chronicles

Any time new patch notes come up on MMO-Champion or WoW.com or wherever, there is always discussion in my guild circle about which features they like. And there are always discussions going on while playing discussing which features are annoying and they want to go away. These are always things like "There should be a graveyard right outside the instance portal" or "We shouldn't have to repair armor ever" or "I wish you could just teleport wherever you want". The features they like and want to be implemented are almost always the ones I hate because of one reason: They remove complexity from the game.

Dual spec means you never have to respec again. The random dungeon queue teleports you straight to the dungeon, eliminating the need to actually go find the portal. They redo half of the daily quests so you don't have to leave the area you pick them up in.

While these things can be annoyances, they also add depth to the game. They bind the world together as an actual world, and not just a random couple of cities bound to quest hubs with tons of empty space that can be safely ignored. They give you the feeling that you are playing an actual character, an actual person which inhabits the world and not just some person looking shell housing raw power that no mere mortal should possess. They give a sense of immersion. They make you feel like you are actually in another world, and not just some guy at the keyboard mashing buttons. These games are supposed to be played to let you get away from the real world. They aren't meant to be games that are to be played for 20 minutes at a time on your lunch break at work or while watching TV or cooking dinner for the kids.

I understand why the business side of the games industry has completely taken over and pushed out the creative world building types of game developers. The majority of players aren't looking for immersive gaming experiences. They are looking for something to kill 20 minutes with. They want to blow things up, stab things to death, set them on fire, or just stand around looking pretty.

This doesn't mean I have to like it though. I like my games to be complex sandbox type worlds where things are not spoon fed to me. I like to explore and find things on my own.

Yesterday, Blizzard released the Celestial Mount and Lil' XT in their store. I won't lie here. I did buy a Lil' XT. I wasn't originally planning on it, but when I saw that it blows up those god damned train sets.....I don't think my credit card has ever flown out of my wallet faster (really. Unlike the regular train wrecker, this one has no cooldown, so even those jackasses that have three or four train sets can go to hell).

What confuses me is all of the people, both on the blogosphere and the publication type websites who are just aghast at the concept of buying things with real money. There are a variety of reasons why people are up in arms, each one just as confusing as the last.

1. "I don't like that they're selling this mount because then everyone can buy it and it won't be cool since everyone has it!"

The mount is cool because of its graphics. If you don't like the way it looks, why would you buy one? Blizzard releases something for money. In order to make as much of that money as possible (as is the goal of most businesses, which Blizzard is), they must sell it to as many people as they can. This includes anyone who happens to have 25 dollars laying around that can be spared. While 25 dollars may be a bit of change for a digital item, it's not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things and a lot of people have it laying around. If you had any illusions about this somehow being a unique mount that would add 500 points to your Equivalence Potency Number, then you are simply an idiot.

2. "25 dollars is too much for a mount!"

Ok? I agree that it is too much money for a mount, but then I suppose that's why I DIDN'T BUY ONE. I know that's a difficult concept for many people to understand. "Luxury items" or in plain English "Crap you don't need to survive or achieve your goals" cost money. If you don't buy it, you will not be any worse off.

3. "This is a travesty! Allods and Champions Online and other games release items in their cash shop and the fanbase revolts! Blizzard releases items in their cash shop and players line up around the block to get one even though they are already paying subscription fees! There is such a double standard going on here!"

No, you are comparing apples to oranges. The Free to play games with their cash shops are releasing items which, if you choose to buy them, give you a competitive edge over other players. You buy a bigger bag upgrade, you can hold more stuff to carry to town to sell and make more money. You sell potions and scrolls of Experience and self resurrection, you can keep playing while other players have to wait out the rez sickness or other penalties these items get around. The players revolt against these items because they make the game almost unplayable without them. Blizzard is only releasing COSMETIC items which look cool and have absolutely no impact on the game play. I can assure you that if they were to release Epic Gear for sale in the cash shop, there would be just as big an uproar (or bigger on account of the much larger player base) as the free to play games.

4. (This one is my favorite, seen in a comment on the Massively article, and quoted): "The intresting part about this new mount is that you actually will (I assume the word "not" was omitted here based on the context of the complaint) need to buy ingame mounts at all. So... Blizzard is not only selling a mount - they are also selling ingame gold that you will save if you had to buy a "real" ingame mount."

Just.........what?

Ok, so you're saying that if people spend 25 dollars to buy this mount, then you won't have to buy any more mounts? Let's think about this. The first level mount costs 4 gold. The epic land mount costs 10. The regular flying costs 50. The epic flying costs 100. You still have to buy all of the training required to actually use these mounts, which amounts to 5304 gold (+1000 for Cold Weather flying). So while it is technically true that Blizzard saves people 164 gold on mount costs, it's not as though this is a massive amount of money. One day of dailies will get you that much, and that's an hour or so of play time. Not to mention the fact that there are mounts at all levels of riding which don't cost any money at all anyways. PvP rewards, Argent tournament mounts, Rare drops, Death Knights get theirs built in through a quest, some cost badges, achievements, or even some quest rewards offer mounts which cost absolutely nothing. Nothing is being offered here that couldn't be had already. Not to mention the fact that if I was going to spend 25 dollars on gold, I think I could get a lot more than just 164. Gold spammers regularly advertise prices which could get you between 4 and 6 thousand gold for the same price as this mount (and these prices seem to drop daily).

In summary: I'm not entirely sure what the big deal is here. It all seems like a bunch of whining over absolutely nothing.

(I had a post I was going to write about something else, but I still need to collect my thoughts on that. It'll be up soon.)

I've been thinking about tanking mechanics. As I'd want this game of mine to be more realistic, tanking would have to be vastly different than it is in most others. In WoW, the guy with highest threat has aggro. Doesn't matter that other people are doing things which logically would be much more threatening like stabbing the mob repeatedly or riddling them with arrows or worse....healing the guy they are attacking so that he NEVER DIES. As a player, if another mob is healing the guy I'm trying to kill, I immediately change targets and kill that damned healer.

Ideally, I'd want a game that feels like you are fighting opponents with real AI. If you were fighting something like a dragon or a giant serpent or bear or something without much intelligence, sure the standard tanking model works great. The tank stands there and waves their arms loudly and does all kinds of flashy things to hold the mob's attention. But when you are fighting something like the warlord of a keep (or a Lich King), then you would assume that an intelligent being would say to themselves "It's kind of futile to attack this guy while that person over there in the dress is wiggling their fingers and casting healy magic on them" and go kill the one in the dress.

So what if different actions had different threat values assigned to them based on the situation? Healers would likely have spells like illusion magic which prevents enemies from seeing them casting healing magic on different people but casting heals on the target the mob is currently focusing on would have vastly greater threat than casting it on someone else. As fights go on, the threat that damage causes would go up relative to threat of people in the raid. A rogue dealing 10K dps vs. a tank dealing 3.5 for example would quickly anger a mob. 10K dps would cause 10k threat per second, and for every second they do more DPS than the tank, the amount of threat that causes would go up by .1K. Pulling aggro would be an eventuality. Maybe the DPS would have abilities which suppresses pain in the target (such as a rogue poison or a warlock curse), meaning it won't feel the damage as much and cause less threat. Or maybe the tanks would have to have high DPS to maintain threat.

It's possible that with this model that tanks would need several abilities which cause massive amounts of damage (and therefore threat) on a cooldown. It's possible that any given fight would need several tanks to taunt off each other with these cooldowns so that they could be healed effectively (healing the mob's current target will cause the healer to be instantly targeted). It's even possible that all of the tanks will need to be DPS at the same time or DPS will need some kind of tanking survivability, even if just temporarily.

The whole idea is that for a game that makes some kind of logical sense, the "tank and spank" fight needs to go away. It's unrealistic. It's boring. To be honest, I think it breeds thinking in players that they don't have to pay attention to what's going on around them as long as their threat meter says "Hey, you're good." Raids don't really feel like a bunch of players working together, it feels like tanks and healers working together with a bunch of other guys just running around doing whatever, and I think that needs to change.

I haven't been doing much work in the design area. I've been working more on the lore side of things recently. I'm not entirely sure if lore is super important in an MMO, but I figure it's like design. If it's done correctly, then all is right with the world. If it's done poorly, then people will notice and call bullshit on it. Even the most hardcore of gamers who cares for nothing more than getting frags would agree that if the atmosphere in a world just feels dumb and tacked on instead of adding to the feel of a game, then it detracts from the game experience. It would be better to just have no story at all than to have a poorly written one that makes no sense (or worse...tries to make sense and fails miserably).

I'll likely still post on design when something strikes my fancy, but for now I'm just trying to get the story aspects done. It's fairly important to do this before doing things mechanically, since I want the story elements to affect that actual mechanics. For example, Warlocks draw their magic directly from Demon lords whom they have made pacts with. If those demon lords are killed by players, then Warlocks will lose those abilities. I'd try and provide them some way of regaining them, but it would still make the actual story of the world matter.

So I'm sitting here in MSPaint, drawing out some basic UIs which might be good for a default. I'm currently working on the character page, and I don't know what sort of slots I would need for this game.

After thinking it out, and coming up with a short list, it occurred to me that the whole paperdoll slot system should be entirely tossed out the window. I could conceivably come up with enough item types that the character equipment sheet would be fullscreen at 1600x1050 resolution. Head, Eyes, Midface, Mouth, Neck, Shoulders, Chest, Abdomen, Upper Arm (left and right), Elbow (left and right), Forearms (left and right), Wrists, Hands, Waist, Upper Legs, Knee (left and right), Shin (left and right), Feet, Back, and then the accessories such as rings for your fingers, necklaces, earrings, headbands...

You've also got weapons which must be sheathed, backpacks for inventory, what you hold in your hands, and so on.

That's not to mention the fact that I'd like to have a system where you can wear TWO shirts if you want to. In fact, I'd like the option to do like Joey in that one Friends episode where he puts on every single article of clothing Chandler owns. There would be large combat penalties to doing such a thing, but it should still be an option.

Also is the fact that I'd like to tie the player's inventory to their gear on RP servers and the like.

You can see that the paperdoll system quickly becomes incredibly cumbersome and hard to manage. So let's chuck it out the window.

I think it would be best to just have the player's equipment be a large bag like current game inventories are. Anything you put in the bag goes on your character. Each piece of equipment would have a specific tag which indicates what kind of equipment it is. A helmet, gloves, boots, etc. If you put on extra pieces of an equipment you are already wearing, you take a penalty. These penalties could vary from piece to piece, armor type to armor type, and even based on specific combinations. Plate wearers wouldn't be able to put on multiple pieces of the same type of plate armor unless one set was much larger than the layer underneath, and even then it would be like walking around with a wagonload of bricks on your shoulders. Cloth wearers would be able to stack multiple pieces on top of each other with little weight restriction, though there would be other penalties such as movement restrictions. Putting plate on top of mail might cause the mail armor to chafe the skin a bit and cause pain if the player doesn't have enough Constitution.

A system like this would also be flexible enough that if new armor slot pieces needed to be invented, say nipples for example (though I'm fairly sure I would never have a need or desire to implement that D: ), then it could easily be done in the future.

The universe is vast. Much more vast than any mortal mind could possibly comprehend. If the single most advanced mortal mind were to actually comprehend just an infinitesimal fraction of the universe's true scope, they would go completely, horribly, gibberingly and most importantly violently insane. I feel that I should add that this is the best case scenario.

Throughout this incomprehensibly vast universe is a swath of worlds, their numbers as mind boggling as the scale of the medium they dwell in. Each of these worlds has their own histories. Each of these worlds has their own cultures of mortals and beasts, or gods and demons. Each has their own rules of operation including laws of physics, magic, nature, and cohesion. Most importantly though, each of these worlds is encased in their own pocket universe, completely isolated from all the others with a few exceptions.

I am called Glyph. I am, at this time, unaware of my own origins. I suspect that most are. Over time, it has become apparent to me that I have lived many lives. I would be born into one of these worlds. I would live my life as the natives would. I have no idea how long this cosmic cycle of reincarnation has been going on, or how many others this occurs to. The past dozen or so incarnations however, I have become increasingly aware of this cycle which is normally completely imperceptible to most. I would live my life for quite some time as a mortal with none of my prior memories until one day when things start to trickle in from the edge of my perception. Visions of other places which could not possibly exist in our own world. Fantastic technology, awe inspiring feats of the arcane, monstrosities of the zoologically dubious, and so on.

Eventually, I would return to a state I like to call Blended. I am my mortal incarnation, but I am also the immortal spirit which has travelled the roads of the Astral and defeated demons and monsters alike on countless planes. I get the urge to set out and explore this new world to its fullest. I take ships across the seas or the skies. I travel the vast ocean of the galaxy. I try the foreign cuisine of those places. I seek out wrongs and right them. I make friends and enemies among the locals. I undertake vast tasks of heroism and importance.

And when I feel that my time has reached an end on that world, I simply leave it. I am then reborn into a new one and the cycle begins anew.

This time feels different however. I have left my most recent inhabitance, yet I do not feel the pressing need to find a new one. Instead I feel the urge to create. I recently met a goddess. I use the term loosely as it is so ill defined considering the things I have seen, but to most mortals it is the appropriate term. She told me that she had met me long ago in the time I cannot recall. It was then that my creator set me on my task. I was placed on this path of rebirth for one purpose: to learn. I was meant to learn all I could about as many worlds as I could find. There would then come a day when I felt the urges I feel now and I would know it was time for my work to begin.

My creator long since perished during my long apprenticeship, though he or she is not strictly necessary for me to begin. My creator was a creator of worlds, and so shall I be with my knowledge. I do not feel that I know all I need to know to perform this task competently. The Goddess has given me an offer. I will reshape one of her own dying worlds as a sort of Journeyman's trial. If I can mold into a successful plane of existence which serves its purpose well, then I shall be granted what I was created to have.

Godhood.

So I shall undertake this task. The Goddess has told me that there are many who walk the same road as I. If they should come to my world in their travels, then I shall shelter them as they gather the knowledge they seek and I shall guide those who seek my counsel on such matters. It is my calling, after all.

I am the Architect.

(( Just thought I'd create a little background character information for a character I would play in my own game. This would the the Master GM admin character for the game world with a backstory geared at an RP realm. ))

I've seen several articles cropping up on various sites recently from people bemoaning the fact that today's MMOs are lacking what Ultima Online had. I.E. You could kill other players and take their stuff.

Of course, the responses are very accurate. It's not fun to get ganked and have your things taken. As there are many more players who do not like this sort of gameplay, the developers of games cater to them and are creating games where PvP is strictly opt-in and limited in some cases to battlegrounds and other forms of competition. I remember the first character I rolled on a PvP realm in WoW. I reached level 25 or so, and couldn't go anywhere near a contested territory because there was always three or so level 60 rogues stealthed at the border, waiting to kill me all at the same time. All I wanted to do was go and see some new scenery (and later would discover that most of these horde areas had very little to see anyways). So I went and rolled on a PvE server.

It's gotten me on the thought train though. Would it be possible to create a game where free for all PvP was possible, and not a niche game by default?

Imagine: You can kill any player or NPC you can see. If the player is of an enemy faction, you gain infamy with that player's faction. You also gain a slightly lesser amount with that faction's allies, depending on how friendly those factions are. If the player is of your own faction, you gain a large amount of infamy with your own faction. The more infamy you have, the more likely you are to be attacked by NPC guards, soldiers, and police of the maligned faction. When you reach a certain amount of infamy, a large reward bounty could go up where any player who belongs to a faction different than yours (or to factions you belong to if you killed one of your own factionmates) could kill or capture you and gain a large reward.

The basic idea that I like for a game is that everything is allowed. However, actions such as ninja looting, ganking, spamming chat channels, acting out of character on an RP realm, speeding through quest text completely ignoring any and all instructions, and other actions which could be seen as undesirable (depending on the particular game and the atmosphere desired by Developers) should have in game consequences to discourage them actively. There would always be other alternatives for these players to continue playing. For example, players who are hated with officials could be able to obtain the same services as others through back door and black market sellers (at a slight premium of course). Players could also earn their way back up through the ranks to good standing if so desired, or they could go as far down as they wanted and eventually meet terrible punishments from getting caught (possibly even permanent death?).