[crossfire] reorganizing the entire world

[Mark Wedel]

Juergen Kahnert wrote:
> I have the following idea for the new world:
> 
> After character generation, you have to chose your class. As soon as you
> have chosen your class, you won't enter "start/Nexus", but the guild of
> that class.
> 
> This guild will be a combination out of the newbieshouse and the
> beginners maps to teach new people how to play this game. And there you
> learn the abilities of your class. So you won't get a bunch of class
> specific items. Instead of this you're guided through maps where you
> learn your abilities and where you're teached how to use them.

  Sounds reasonable.  I'd also presume that players could basically skip this 
(just leave the guild and go out on their own) if they decided to do that.


> After the tour, the guild master will give you your first quest. This
> will be a chained quest. You will get better and better class items from
> your guild master for solving the quests or as a quest treasure.

  Also seems reasonable.

> 
> For more class like role playing, the guild is able to ostracize players
> by checking for example if a sorcerer uses close combat skills instead
> of magic. If the sum of the close combat skills exceed the sum of magic
> skills by a defined limit (e.g. > 10%) the sorcerer isn't allowed to
> enter the guild. This also means this sorcerer won't get additional high
> level spells because they are rewards from the guild master for solving
> quests.
> 
> It's also possible that you change the class. For example a warrior
> using a lot of magic skills will be ostracized by the warrior guild and
> may be accepted by the warlock guild.
> 
> Or a sorcerer using physical combat skills may become for example a
> wizard.

  With what you're saying there, are you equating class=guild, or is their a 
distinction?

  For example, right now, the only meaning a characters class has is what skills 
they start out with, and some stat bonuses.  So changing class isn't really 
necessary, as it doesn't mean a whole bunch after first level.  So if the guild 
says "we don't like you, maybe you should go to the wizards", in a sense that is 
very easy to do.

  However, there has been talk about making classes have more distinction.  For 
example, a fighter gets exp in the fighter skills faster, and harder to gain in 
magic skills, etc.  If you're talking about changing the characters class as it 
relates to that, it gets much trickier.

  But its unclear to me if it is really the right thing to limit all characters 
to one guild.  Right now, we have something like a dozen classes - it strikes me 
that a dozen guilds would be overkill.  You could generalize them to some degree 
- combat guild, cleric guild, mage guild, thief guild, maybe a few more.

  Some classes are basically hybrids between a couple of those - paladin being a 
fighter/cleric for example.  In that case, one would think those two guilds 
wouldn't care much, and it also simplifies the number of guilds.  A more complex 
thing is that there really shouldn't be a cleric (praying) guild - or at least 
not one, but really one for each god.  But that also adds lot of guilds.

  I also like the idea more where the quests should be more related to the 
characters skills.  For example, perhaps the fighter guild won't send you on 
some quest until your fighting skill is at least level 10 - this is good in the 
sense it won't send characters where they might get killed, but also effectively 
bars non fighters from that quest - or at least not until they have a good 
amount of experience.  If one envisions quests requiring skill level 90, that 
could effectively bar other classes from those quests

> 
> 
> The vision is, to have chained quests leading through all the maps. You
> don't need to visit every single map, because some of them could be part
> of a side quest. But you should be able see them all by just following
> the storyline.

  do you literally mean every map in the game?  If so, I don't really like that 
idea.  First, that is a huge number of maps, and thus a huge number of quests. 
For repeat players, it would seem pretty pointless (fighter guild and mage guild 
having the same maps you quest to?).  It also gets tricky adding new maps - have 
to update all those quests, and at some point, you'd probably get the case of 
too many maps for a certain level (eg, you might have 30 maps for level 5-10, 
where as it might only take 10 maps to go from 5 to 10).

  I don't have any issue with a set of maps, perhaps a fairly large set, being 
used for these guild quests.  And different guilds may send players to different 
maps.  But at some point, I think the players should be out talking to NPCs, 
finding out about dungeons that way, exploring, etc.

  I can understand the desire for some players to perhaps see every map.  But 
for those players, which I think would be a minority, I'd rather point them at a 
web page that is the map page walkthrough, listing all the maps, suggested 
level, etc, vs trying to put that in game.