My Services (Competitive Balance)

[interchange]

Hi all,

I've finally decide to offer my services to the greatermud community.

Specifically, I'm interested in the often overlooked but extremely critical area of balance to the gameplay.  We all know that Majormud has horrible balance relative to classes and races, and no matter how many times they've :quote:fixed:quote: it, it hasn't gotten any better.  This is a tricky problem, but I think it can be solved through some mathematical techniques and experimentation with game formulas.

Truth be told, though, Majormud's balance is actually the key to its longevity.  Most of its classes/races are playable and fun for a long period of time before it breaks down.  The exponential experience curve and equipment and monster difficulty/exp is good enough to keep the game from breaking down.  Ever play on an edited board?  Most of them get boring real quick.  My goal is to take Majormud's inherent pluses in this area and refine them in a way that's mathematically sound.  Hopefully this will keep the game from going stale, and more importantly, extend the game's useful character length well beyond level 65 (where Majormud's character development ceases in nearly all cases).  This won't require new ways to spend CP, etc., etc. that have been proposed to extend the life of experienced characters.

This goes far beyond tweaking formulas, though.  I hope to come across a way to determine exactly how much exp monsters are worth, the right amount of weapons and the right balance of weapons and equipment, etc.  Basically, Majormud suffers from several dead spots in a character's life due to a lack of equipment or a slight overpowering leading to boredom.  If you have the right balance of equipment and scripting/exploring areas, then the game won't lose it's excitement.

To accomplish this, it would be nice to have a separate server construct to rapidly change game formulas as well as generate new monsters, etc.  I could spit out stats for proposed equipment and monsters that the development guys could simply tweak, name, and place in new areas of the world.  It could vastly speed up development.

I'd also want to play with some minor ideas of mine (such as weapons that grow with character level, unique weapon abilities such as crit chain spells - e.g. 3 consecutive crits makes a room lightning spell, enhanced magic resistance rules to balance this area and make witchies have a worthwhile ability, etc.).  However, these would all be beyond the initial balancing activities.

[The Crazy Animal]

Grin I know this is going to make me sound like a smart ass but I can?t really help it. Truly I mean no offence by it. You have 6 posts over the year(ish) that you?ve had an account here show us that you have some staying power by posting more and taking part in the forum and we can see what develops from there. Not that I?m the final word on this but I?m just saying this because we?ve seen so many people come in excited about working or collaborating on the project and then they vanish soon after they get something to do.

Really I sat down with the intent to go into the other bits of what you posted maybe 3 or 4 times tonight. And every time I found it just turning into pages and pages that lose its topical cohesion. Simply because it touches on so many topics within the same spectrum of game design so really I?m just going to leave it at there?s an entire forum section for the topic: ?Balance Analysis: Discussion of balance issues in majormud.? I remember that you?ve posted in there before. Everything that goes in that section in regards to balance issues in mmud will be looked at and used in the development of greatermud. It?s what that section was designed to do. So if that?s the portion of the game that interests you the most then start plugging away in that section.

Right now the developments content wise are slower because we currently do not have a remotely accessible native multi-user editor in which to make our data changes. This really makes it so that only one person can do the data entry and keep the database in good workable order. Not to forget to mention the additional tedious and repetitive nature of the creating the massive amounts of descriptions that need to be made for everything in the game. I can?t tell you how many times I?ve already burnt myself out making up descriptions for items but seriously we all should feel sympathy for DC cause he?s done even more then I have, not to mention he?s doing all the data entry solo too. I won?t go into code development however because I?m involved less with that other then in the realm of how should this work or how could this work better type of thing. Things get done with the code though and people really don?t notice a lot of the time.

As for your other minor ideas post them in the idea forum I?ll read them. Believe it or not I read everything that gets posted there and suggest everything I see with a hint of possibility to it.

[interchange]

Grin I know this is going to make me sound like a smart ass but I can?t really help it. Truly I mean no offence by it. You have 6 posts over the year(ish) that you?ve had an account here show us that you have some staying power by posting more and taking part in the forum and we can see what develops from there. Not that I?m the final word on this but I?m just saying this because we?ve seen so many people come in excited about working or collaborating on the project and then they vanish soon after they get something to do.

Fair enough.  However, part of me choosing this activity to post about is that it's something that can be done independently of other development without slowing it down.  You have nothing to lose by giving me a sandbox to play in.

Really I sat down with the intent to go into the other bits of what you posted maybe 3 or 4 times tonight. And every time I found it just turning into pages and pages that lose its topical cohesion. Simply because it touches on so many topics within the same spectrum of game design so really I?m just going to leave it at there?s an entire forum section for the topic: ?Balance Analysis: Discussion of balance issues in majormud.? I remember that you?ve posted in there before. Everything that goes in that section in regards to balance issues in mmud will be looked at and used in the development of greatermud. It?s what that section was designed to do. So if that?s the portion of the game that interests you the most then start plugging away in that section.

I have 6 very on topic posts, none of them in that thread.  I don't know what you're talking about here.

Right now the developments content wise are slower because we currently do not have a remotely accessible native multi-user editor in which to make our data changes. This really makes it so that only one person can do the data entry and keep the database in good workable order. Not to forget to mention the additional tedious and repetitive nature of the creating the massive amounts of descriptions that need to be made for everything in the game. I can?t tell you how many times I?ve already burnt myself out making up descriptions for items but seriously we all should feel sympathy for DC cause he?s done even more then I have, not to mention he?s doing all the data entry solo too. I won?t go into code development however because I?m involved less with that other then in the realm of how should this work or how could this work better type of thing. Things get done with the code though and people really don?t notice a lot of the time.

I didn't mean to insult content development at all.  Sorry if it read that way.  I was only saying that I could derive equipment stats and monster stats/experience levels in a mathematical way that would maintain the game balance.  The good thing about this is that it can avoid the plethora of equipment that never gets used, avoid the grossly overpowered items, help make it easier to provide exp areas that are worth exploring, and provide some inspiration.

As for your other minor ideas post them in the idea forum I?ll read them. Believe it or not I read everything that gets posted there and suggest everything I see with a hint of possibility to it.

Nope.  I believe it.  I have a lot of ideas that are cool (to me), but I don't think any of them are worth implementing before the basics are all 100% in place and working smoothly.  Part of development hell is having too many ideas to actually implement without doing the groundwork first.  That leads to constant reworking of the basics.  I believe you have to start with a winning "formula" first.

If you want any clarification of anything I've written, just ask.

[The Crazy Animal]

Fair enough.  However, part of me choosing this activity to post about is that it's something that can be done independently of other development without slowing it down.  You have nothing to lose by giving me a sandbox to play in.

The forum right now is the sandbox. As for getting things like game data and formulas to work with I'll leave that up to Vitoc and DC to decide as they've yet to chime in on this.

I have 6 very on topic posts, none of them in that thread.  I don't know what you're talking about here.

LOL its ok I was talking about me trying to reply to some of the points you made within this thread. I would have responded to more of them but I kept getting carried away. (I do that often) So I was suggesting that you post some of the topics from this thead that have yet to be covered in that forum section, in there. So that each of those balance issues could be looked at as single topics.

I didn't mean to insult content development at all.  Sorry if it read that way.  I was only saying that I could derive equipment stats and monster stats/experience levels in a mathematical way that would maintain the game balance.  The good thing about this is that it can avoid the plethora of equipment that never gets used, avoid the grossly overpowered items, help make it easier to provide exp areas that are worth exploring, and provide some inspiration.

No insult taken... I was just letting you know that the bottleneck in development is else where then generating stats. So no matter how good the data is it still doesn't get into the database any quicker and and as a result wouldn't really speed up development. I do agree though that things can be mathematicly balanced prior to it getting its attributed descriptive content. If I remember correctly DC was graphing these out however I haven't bothered to look at his stats beyond whats in the database already.

Nope.  I believe it.  I have a lot of ideas that are cool (to me), but I don't think any of them are worth implementing before the basics are all 100% in place and working smoothly.  Part of development hell is having too many ideas to actually implement without doing the groundwork first.  That leads to constant reworking of the basics.  I believe you have to start with a winning "formula" first.

I agree to some extent, however its good to be able to plan ahead by hashing out ideas ahead of time. It just makes it easier to build a road map to where we want to be.

[interchange]

OK.  I can use that forum as a sounding board for some ideas of mine.  Obviously, though, the best way to actually make progress is put your ideas to a real, in-game test.  That requires some sort of construct with rules that aren't tied to the main realm that can easily (enough) be changed for experimentation.  That may be something I am willing to work to provide, regardless of who ends up doing the actual balancing.

I may post some other game ideas as well in other forums.

[Krusty]

and I would be one of those CA is alluding to.  Doh!

[The Crazy Animal]

lol

[DeathCow]

woot.