[crossfire] races, classes, and play style

[Brendan Lally]

On Mon, 03 May 2010 21:28:56 -0700
Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:

> On 05/ 3/10 12:53 PM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> >
> > Related to gameplay, I'd like to propose a shift on the "aim of the
> > game".
> >
> >
> > Currently, the "aim" is to level up or find the best equipment,
> > grinding again and again maps (Raffle for instance).
> >
> >
> > I would like to have a quest-driven game, in which you happen to
> > level when doing quests, as a "natural" side-effect. But the aim
> > would be to explore the world.
> 
>   I'd like to see that also - it certainly provides some better aim
> than just wander around and kill things (and lets be honest, even
> some of the very simple games like nethack, wizardry I, ultima I, etc
> at least had some goal).
> 
>   I think that leveling up may be seen as what you do in crossfire,
> when you lack any other goals.
> 
>   That said, a question is still what happens when you finish all the
> quests. Do you just call it quits?  I haven't played many MMORPG's,
> but most seem to try and keep some interest.

I've not really played MMORPGs either, but from what I can
determine, there seem to be different approaches here:

1) Have more quests than any sane person could complete: 
This is what WoW does -
http://www.goblinworkshop.com/quest-search.html?words=&QuestCategory=0&OrderBy=0&OrderBy2=6&find=Search+for+Quests
- has over 4000 quests. Despite this someone did 'finish' World of
  warcraft recently
-http://www.destructoid.com/man-beats-world-of-warcraft-156593.phtml
this however probably doesn't meet the 'sane' requirement however.

2) Have something other than just quests to mark progress:
Runescape doesn't have that many quests, 'only' 160-odd,
http://runescape.salmoneus.net/quests/#freeplay but it does have a lot
of scoreboards which run off the main game
http://services.runescape.com/m=hiscore/overall.ws?table=5&category_type=1
which give a separate goal to just questing.

Clearly the WoW approach isn't entirely feasible for crossfire - there
would need to be a full-time development team of 6-7 people just making
quests in order to create enough that players couldn't finish them all
- That's not to say there shouldn't be as many as possible, but the
final number is likely to be in the hundreds rather than thousands.

Now, my view is that the runescape-style scoreboards are a little lame,
they reportedly cause lots of players to spend hours clicking on trees
for no other reason than to rise up a scoreboard. 
While I like the idea of multiple scoreboards, to keep count of 'trees
clicked on' seems like accounting rather than gameplay.

So, I have (a couple of weeks ago) started on creating an alternative
approach, to have minor scoreboards which can be tied to specific
events.
http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:cavesomething:arenapoints <-
this is the design I've been working to so far, I started out with
the arena in mind, but I have deliberately sought to enable it to be
extend to other types of contests as well, so that (for example) chess
and draughts can have leaderboards in the same way.

Hopefully, if there are enough leaderboards, then there there are more
things to 'compete' for rather than just exp, and by having the scores
decay over time, and points be exchanged between players, there isn't
really a single 'win' state, and there shouldn't be lots of 'abandoned
characters' at the top of the leaderboards for years on end.

I don't pretend this is the entire answer, but I hope it may form part
of it.

Brendan.