[crossfire] RFC: Wild idea to make experience more interesting

[Sebastian Andersson]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 02:46:53PM +0800, Lalo Martins wrote:
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      There is a general feeling in the mailing list that we want to encourage
     
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      two other kinds of gaming experience; the inter-player interaction and
     
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      teaming (think mmorpg - to my knowledge crossfire is one of the first
     
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      mmorpg! and never claimed to it...), and the role-playing.
     
     
Richard Bartle's Players Who Suit MUDs might be a good starting point
for analysing the players and crossfire. In the paper he identified
four kind of players: explorers, socialisers, archivers and killers
how they relate to each other, what makes them tick and he comes to
the conclution that all four are needed.

For socialisers and killers, crossfire in general isn't very well
suited. Its "regularity" (most things work in the same way) also makes
it less suited for explorers, but I except more python scripts to
change that somewhat.

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      What I thought is, by mass-slaughter, you can, as reported in that
     
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      thread, get to level 90 quite fast.  This makes it more or less
     
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      mechanical for the level-seekers - and a mechanical game gets boring
     
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      quick.  It also makes it uninteresting for the game-explorer-types, who
     
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      will try each of those dungeons once then leave in disgust, back to
     
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      their alchemy labs.
     
     
The whole point for an "explorer" is to explore something new and
unique, not explore the same map over and over, so of course they will
only try each dungeon once (except to gain higher levels so they can
explore other things that those higher levels grant them access to).
Making the game harder for archivers will not make it easier/better
for explorers. More unique things will make explorers more happy.
It doesn't have to be powerful things for an explorer, even silly and
almost useless things can make them happy if they manage to find some
new use for it.

I'm an explorer & archiver when it comes to crossfire. I try to gain
the highest level so it is easy to explore everything without worrying
too much about getting killed. I also want to gain high levels in all
skills to be able to explore all that I can do with those skills.
When killing stuff, there is an excitement (one can die!) so it is
not as boring to repeat the same stuff over and over again as it is
with non-fighting skills, like lockpicking where at most a triggered
trap will be annoying. It takes forever to reach a new level in most
non-fighting skills which makes it boring for the archiver part of me
("I want a reward now!") and when I finally gain a higher level in some
skill, it often just reduces the chance of failure, it gives me no new
abilities which makes it boring for the explorer part of me.

To make it a requirement to gain multiple skills to get a higher
level would make it more boring for an archiver and not do anything
to the other three kinds of players.

Instead of making it harder to level a "focused" character, make
it easier to increase other skills and people will do it.

Regards,
/Sebastian
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