[CF-Devel] quest exp rewards (RE: monsters, ...)

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 11:25:31AM +0200, Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      Mark W. wrote:
     
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      > Some of this could perhaps be reduced by giving end of quest exp
     
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      > rewards - managing to kill everything and get to the end gives you
     
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      > a 100,000 exp bonus - many commercial games do this.
     
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      > However, I've yet to really see how to put this in with the
     
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      > skill system
     
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      I had a trivial implementation in mind for this.
     
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      There can be an object type like "experience_donator".
     
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      When a player steps on it or otherwise activates it, he
     
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      gets X points of experience in skill Y.
     
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      The donator object works only once (per map reset),
     
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      values for X and Y can be set as attributes in the object.
     
     
Once per map reset is not good. We should make the experience donator
object by extending the marker object so that players can only get that
exp once. I.e., player steps on object, gets marked, as well as get exp
donated. This prevents problems with camping, or quest hogging. Or if that
is too harsh, set the marker to expire at a large time interval, say a few
(real) days or a week.

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      The effect of this system is that mapmakers can freely
     
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      decide what skill exp they award players with for solving their
     
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      quest: A quest for a lost scroll can reward literacy, a quest
     
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      for brewing a mystic potion can award alchemy, a quest
     
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      for killing the enemies of your god can award wisdom.
     
     
This has been discussed before, and I fully agree with it. Quests will be
so much more rewarding if they give special exp which doesn't just come
from killing monsters. Right now, if you use tricks (like hiding, stealth,
etc) to get a low-level character past high-level monsters in a high-level
quest, you get no exp for it. This is not good, since the creative
thinking on the part of the player *should* be rewarded.

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      As long as the donators aren't badly misused I believe
     
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      it will work fine. It allows players to gain experience in any
     
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      kind of skill, including the exotic and hard-to-train ones like
     
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      literacy or mountaineering.
     
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      Note that the exp players get from quests would still
     
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      be only a portion of their total gain. So if someone really
     
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      wants to boost his magic skill for example, he still needs to
     
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      go out and kill things with magic.
     
     
I agree with this.

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      The only real problem I see is that players might camp
     
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      around the donator objects waiting for map reset, but
     
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      that's the common problem for all kinds of treasure in CF.
     
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      How to avoid this is actually a totally seperate topic.
     
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      The ideal way IMO would be putting players to the StartX, StartY
     
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      coordinates after a map reset (StartX, StartY are defined
     
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      in the map header. If nothing is defined, let the player
     
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      stay where he is.). If using StartX, StartY is too uncertain,
     
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      we can define new flags for it in the map header and use those.
     
     
I think this should be done regardless of whether we add experience
donator objects. Currently, if the player saved in the middle of a room
which used to be full of monsters (either explicitly or implicitly by the
server), if the server crashes or the player loses the network connection
for a long time, when the server restarts or the player re-connects, he
finds himself stuck in the middle of a room of monsters, through no fault
of his. This can be bad, since he probably isn't expecting it, and will
likely get killed and lose lots of exp for nothing.

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      > (best I could think of right now would be it is
     
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      > based on relative portions of exp in each skill. [...]
     
     
I don't like that idea; it means that it's very difficult to train in
neglected skill areas since most of the exp goes into the area you're
already well-trained in.

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      I believe that approach would allow low level players to
     
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      advance more or less whatever skill they want.
     
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      High level players would be bound to what they have trained
     
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      before. Neither of that seems ideal to me.
     
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      Besides, there would be no difference wether you just solved
     
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      a mounteering quest, a wizard's quest or whatever.
     
     [snip]

I still think the best way is still to let the mapmaker decide which skill
area the exp should be added to.


T

-- 
And life still goes on...

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