Posted by Smacky on June 7, 2000 at 12:56:51:
In Reply to: Such as.... (n/t) posted by Proud Blade(VIP) on June 7, 2000 at 12:38:50:
We've gone over the alternative power-gain thing before, you could probably run one of your famed forum searches on it..
First of all, fuzzing %s into name ranges, with no 'perfect' point, like pre-level-20 stat numbers. This would encourage people to go out and kill and roleplay and stuff and cut down on all the times pre-30 when everyone is 'sorry, practicing' 'apologies, I work at my art'. The time -> power thing is worthless as far as roleplaying is concerned. The paladins are a great step in the right direction.
One of the ideas was guildquests.. ie, you can only learn certain skills from certain places. This could be expanded by breaking skills into brackets, then you must seek out the master in whatever city before being able to pass a certain skill/spell %. This could be coupled with random item-to-mob quests (it can be done fairly stylishly with a little clever writing and code.. I've seen it on other muds) and experience rewards in addition to the % restriction being upped.
The paladins, as I said, are a good example of where to go, but the imms need to revamp it a little to ease the logistics of two individuals happening to play the same game at the same time. Mortal avatars, morality quests, and multi-imm participation would help. By the last, I mean, make an imm rung devoted to watching/critiquing/giving feedback to players. Maybe as a step in between 52 and 53, or possibly a requirement to make 54.
There's other possibilities that are done on other muds. Make improvements crappy and un-pushable at low levels, then have them naturally pop up to near-perfect/perfect as you get higher. Invokers, well... they're kind of beyond hope, maybe a bunch of quests run supposedly by the masters on elemental study, or in-game mobs in hard to reach elemental places to teach them, or make it known that the imms will reward any player who does RP research in an element and writes about it.
Anyhow.. almost any fix would be better than the current cycle we have of making push practice harder until a few people discover the new tricks, then everyone does them, and it takes longer with each cycle.
I'm sure other people have better ideas, and this strikes me as the singlemost suckiest thing about being new to CF. Not much of a problem for me, since I do one char then stick with it for a while, but it's a stupid way to make CF newbie unfriendly (muhaha, I spent 20 hours practicing, newbie! either spend 20 hours too, die, or play 400 hours to learn how to live without!). Of course, I guess in a sort of sadistic way it encourages people to not care about dying and focus on roleplaying. I mean, my first few years in CF I didn't even bother to practice, and I sure sucked PKwise and got my ass kicked, and blew as a tank and in groups, but my chars were solid with imms/quests/RP.
Got any ideas yourself, Blade?