Balance Goals

[interchange]

I think it's necessary to develop a set of achievable goals to help the direction of game balancing activities.  Here are some things I've come up with:

1. Game stats are straightforward
One of the advantages to Majormud is that it is not too complex from the player's perspective.  There are a lot of things that have been done and that can further be done to make the game more balanced, but they have a fatal flaw: they take away the straightforward nature of character building.  Most players play to create the best or most original character they can.  If you make it unintuitive for the player to determine what's best (or at least what appears to be best) for their character, then they will get bored quickly.  I think it's necessary to avoid complex formulas and caps, etc. when ever possible.  Of course, by avoiding the caps and thresholds and formulas to simplify things, you risk ending up with overpowered, boring monsters.  This is also avoidable (stay tuned to future posts, I'll explain how).  The gist of this poorly written paragraph is that balancing shouldn't compromise the user-friendliness of the game.

2. Game formulas don't break down at higher levels
Ah.  This is Majormud's big problem.  It's userbase is mostly a bunch of players that are used to very high level characters, but there's nothing fun left with those characters.  Metro can try and extend the shelf life of their players, but it won't easily work because their game formulas just aren't compatible here.  I know of a good way to address this problem too.  It should be a reasonable goal that the only thing holding back high level character development be content and the time it takes to build the char.

3. All characters with comparable eq. at same exp level remain within 25% of each other
This is a biggie.  What I mean by remaining within 25% of each other is in terms of solo scripting exp potential.  While it may make sense to strive for exact equalness, it isn't necessary or even wise.  The best way to combat this is to have diversity in characters (e.g. magical abilities, equipment avilability, etc.).  In general, the less powerful characters have useful abilities or useful party benefits not visible in their solo exp.  I think 25% with class-class diversity is a good goal.  Stay tuned, because I plan to mathematically analyze the ideal exp tables and exp earning rates to further solidify this goal.

4. 75% of the items are actually worth using for a reasonable character span
Sounds more like a content goal than a balancing goal, but the two are intertwined.  Part of balancing requires analysis of equipment available, so the balancing should feed back to the content development in order to provide just enough interesting options in eq. to strive for.  Players should be able to clearly lay out a plan for upgrading their eq. every 5-10 levels, and they shouldn't have 50 items with no practical use cluttering up their choices.

I encourage anyone to chime in with their thoughts.  Hopefully I will later as more things come to me.

[The Crazy Animal]

I'm going to wait till you go into each one to really comment. However I just happened to have a few random questions.

There are a lot of things that have been done and that can further be done to make the game more balanced, but they have a fatal flaw: they take away the straightforward nature of character building.  Most players play to create the best or most original character they can.  If you make it unintuitive for the player to determine what's best (or at least what appears to be best) for their character, then they will get bored quickly.

Did you mean straightforward as a clearly fixed linear development or a restricted but not fixed linear development?
What do you think makes something unintuitive in terms of character development? I'm just looking for a refrence point to your opinion on the matter.

And one more:

3. All characters with comparable eq. at same exp level remain within 25% of each other

When you say exp level. Which one do you mean exp or level? or was level suppost to be amount and it was just a typo?

[interchange]

Did you mean straightforward as a clearly fixed linear development or a restricted but not fixed linear development?
What do you think makes something unintuitive in terms of character development? I'm just looking for a refrence point to your opinion on the matter.

Not a fixed linear development, no, not precisely.  The biggest point of contention in the Majormud world is the crit cap or threshold or however you want to describe it.  AC, dodge, MR are also pretty big mysteries.  At least it makes sense to max out your AC, but dodge is quite limited and in unintuitive ways.  Today I'm going to compose a post on how to keep the bonuses adding in a linear fashion but still restrict the character in a non-linear way.  It will make more sense then.

When you say exp level. Which one do you mean exp or level? or was level suppost to be amount and it was just a typo?

Level meaning amount, yes.  So any character with 2bil exp should be able to earn the same exp rate as another character with 2bil exp, give or take 25%.  I want to define a very set goal for rates at each exp for which I would consider the game balanced.