A bit from Lord British in IRC - May 29, 2013 5:16CST

For those of you thinking about "scenarios" think about something like this...
Scenario maps are up to about 2km x 2km. Most cites, towns and villages, are technically a "scenario" as they too can be "overrun" and must be freed, as a "scenario".
Also...
...
A normal plot advancing scenario, could "read" something like this (this is the example I have the team working on now (mostly Bill).
To get in, you first may search "this side" of the river....
You may discover in the woods an old wishing well, toss in a coin, find a gold key...
Imagine a tower overrun by a liche, your job is to free the tower, and find a clue to the broader story....
(Er eh moat)
You begin outside the stronghold, now occupied by the liche, and his forces are inside, and the tower is surrounded by a fortress as well as a moat with drawbridge.
To cross the moat, you may see that the crank is visible! (Remember in Stephen's sketch!)
He gives a clue, that IF you get across the moat, there is a secret door in the outer fortress wall!
BUT, now the hoards inside come out (battle #1)
Also, a timer is started, if you don;t raise the bridge soon, reinforcements will arrive for the Liche from outside in the woods.
Also in the outer woods, you may find a dying guard who stood against the Liche when he overran the fortress...
Shoot the crank, destroy it, and the bridge comes down!...
Now on the inside, fix the crank and raise the bridge, else have battle #2 with reenforcements.
Now go to doors of keep. Use either the key (if found) or seeek the secret door, if you got that clue...
inside the keep, fight the liche's guards, then finally the Liche, and release the tower from dark forces..
I skipped a bit, but the point was, each adventure should have something on the order of: 4 significant battles (moat, reinforcements, guards, liche), 4 puzzles (well, guard clue, 2 more), 4 story advanceing NPC's (which I did not describe) and even 4 "easter eggs" which may require knowlede from another part of the game to find, or even two players to do something together, etc. I think that will make them fun, not too "l
Bill has added an infested city in front of the tower I described and a few more puzzles and such, but we will have screen shots soon!

Then y'all can go to town, if you like to write some scenarios and such for us to build out!



Additional Side questions:


vjek - Lord_British: within that 2km hex, can there be diverse geography, biomes, weather, etc, or does it all have to be desert, or forest, or mountain? can you transition from mountain to plain within that 2km hex?
Lord_British - (vjek - it can transition)


lordrex - Lord_British: one thing i always wanted to do was to be able to play the monsters in a quest... it would make it more realistic for the questers and there might be some kind of reward for it for the badguys... even if there was no reward at all it would be fun. do you see sota doing this for quests ever?
Lord_British - lordrex, yes.
lordrex - Lord_British: how do you see that being implemented? do we just queue up and auto-polymorph into liches or somehting?
Lord_British - lordrex, what do you mean?
lordrex - Lord_British: i mean for me to play the liche in said quest how would the mechanic work? would i queue up to volunteer playing the NPC and polymorph/teleport to a quest instance?
(never saw an answer on this one)
Possibly LB was thinking you'd be the "NPC" in a pvp environment, hard to say.



Bubonic - is there any plan at this point to implement any sort of stealth mechanic?
Lord_British - Bubonic, yes, stealth is planned.


vjek - ok, so , some scenario guidelines for community writers
Lord_British - vjek, keep them short 5-60 minutes. don't forget to target about 4 each of: encounters, NPC story bits, puzzles, easter eggs.
Lord_British - It will be MUCH easier once we have published the next gen map and some backstory.

Redrik - It'd be very helpful once we get actual maps and lore to work off of.
Lord_British - Redrik, coming SOON!

 

Ugh, no edit.

I forgot to preface that with the first section being from Lord British in chat today. I suppose the topic explains that.

 

I would like there to be an "out of character" game mechanic as follows:

1- go to some place in the game where you get a prompt to play an npc
2- queue up with some other players randomly selected
3- you and your "team mates" are polymorphed into liches or death knights or something
4- you are teleported into an instance for a quest where normal players are questing
5- your goal is to play the monsters in that quest. if players win, they win quest. if monsters win, they can loot the players.

this of course is for high level quests where the players are taking higher risk with higher reward.

perhaps quests with human assisted NPCs can have a higher payout in some way. for example the chances for dropping more valuable loot is higher or something to that effect.

advantages:
1- i think this will be a platform for player killers to interact with the pve-only/CB crowd in a way that is constructive.
2- the CB/pve-only crowd will engage pks only when they opt to.
3- pks will always be able to play monsters instead of roaming when there are less players etc.
4- a lot of griefing happens as a response to sore loosers. a lot of players who become sore loosers do so because overpopulation of pks (die too often)... so some times they start complaining and nagging and acting in ways that the pks don't appreciate. the point is that pks dont enjoy over population either, and personally i would switch to playing npc's in a scenario like that.

i dunno buncha random thoughts...

EDIT: of course this would only work with full loot drop.

 

Being able to play the monster side of a scenario might be a good way for guild-versus-guild pvp to take place. That is, one guild play the monsters while the other play the heroes. Or you could make it so you had to be at declared war with the other guild before even being given that option.

Personally, I see little value in the monsters being able to loot the players, given that fun is it's own reward. It would be nice if the monster players got some kind of reward, but there would be the concern of "farming" Heroes. If, from the perspective of the monster-player, the hero player had a generic NPC loot table, that would be fine. I would have concerns about transferring items via monster-play. Strictly gold may be a simpler option.

Having players control or puppet monsters has issues. Through collusion, players can use this mechanism to leapfrog content, so it's important to have gatekeepers, patrollers, lieutenants and any monster with scripting dependencies not be a puppet.

It may also be necessary to enforce attack frequencies, proximity limits, visibility limits, and of course, the only way they could speak is if they had the ability and had a "verbal taunt" skill that the monster-player could trigger. Otherwise, without such limits enforced, there would be serious concerns regarding difficulty and immersion. Having your Liche minion shout "noob, lol, pen.is pen.is" over and over isn't exactly thematically appropriate for the intellectual property.

Another possibility is that guilds can only engage in guild-verses-guild scenarios if they have both completed the scenarios "normally" beforehand. Depends on the behavior you want to encourage. If you want warring guilds to be able to prevent one another from completing a scenario for the purpose of progression blocking, you could. I just don't think it's a particularly good idea.

 

@vjek: i think all your concerns are valid but very very easily addressable (you gave some examples yourself). also dont think that in that scenario the monsters should be able to talk to players at all. only other monster players should be able to hear them.

i also think that monsters looting questers is not a problem at all. im actually very interested to see why you think its a problem.

 

I'm not against them looting hero's, provided hero's are treated the same as monsters, from the monster players perspective.

To be clear, I think it is reasonable and fair that:

If a hero loots a monster, player controlled or not, they get loot from them that is NPC appropriate.
If a monster loots a player, they get loot from them that is NPC appropriate.

It's quite clear from your posts, lordrex, that you want full loot at some point. Unfortunately, my personal opinion is, players are too much reward for not enough risk, when it comes to loot, in every possible situation. The amount of loot a typical player carries is so extraordinarily high in value compared to what an NPC loot table generates that to maintain an appropriate level of risk would be catastrophically un-fun.

So, a compromise to keep the mechanic in place, but reasonable, is, treat the dead hero like any other dead NPC, for loot. This keeps the fun focused on the scenario goals, rather than a negative play experience for the other team.

And just so there's no confusion, I would hold this same opinion even if the monsters had their "real" inventory from their normal character, and hero's had the option to loot it. Even with that as an option, it's still a bad idea, the same principles apply.

 

@vjek: when you say looting players is too much reward and no risk... thats true. i suppose the way i imagined it is that it would be harder to play the monster so it would be rare for the monsters to win, or that the player who plays the monster would have to be really good. reward for difficulty is the theme here, if not risk. most pvp reward systems are reward for difficulty, not reward for risk. i think thats fine.

i wouldnt play monsters if there wasnt full loot drop. also wouldnt play monsters if it werent supremely challenging.

i imagine players would bring all kinds of cool gear to make sure they dont loose, which would make a monster victory that much cooler. monsters wouldnt be able to bring anything and would get the standard stats of a monster of course.

what do you think in light of what i said?

 

Do you think we have time and resources to add that aspect at game release? or would you be ok with it coming out later ?(Expansion, update or in the 2nd module).

I wouldn't want it done half ass just to get it in the game. I like the idea, just want it done right.

 

as a guy who understands the development i don't think it would be hard to implement at all. disclaimer: i don't know their process and haven't seen their code so that's a guess. and of course i am with you in that i am willing to wait for it to be done right and fair.

its basically a good way to have high risk high reward for the questers, and high difficulty high reward for the monsters. everybody wins.

 

It should be easier to play the monsters with your big human brain driving them instead of a typical 3 line "AI" script.

The overarching issue with monster play is that the ONLY advantage they can have is your brain. The most basic reason for this design is that at any time, your brain can be disconnected from them, and they have to return to their normal NPC script. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of online play. Be it accidental or deliberate, that transition has to be seamless.

There are compensating mechanisms you can put in place to make the disconnection possibility less risky, but they all break immersion to one degree or another. A simple example is spawning extra NPCs on both sides. Ok, that's fine, what happens when one side disconnects? Where does the now overbalanced NPC go? Poof into the air? Kind of lame. Definitely immersion breaking.

Keep in mind, there's nothing preventing designers from giving you really good _generated_ loot from the players corpses. It doesn't have to be their personal inventory to be very rewarding, from an in-game resource and monetary perspective.

 

@vjek: i disagree. if it is not the players loot it will mess up the economy. i think players should loose a lot of stuff very often in the game. if not it will be an item based grind game that will get boring.

the game should generate as little as possible in terms of items. resources are ok, but if i die i want to have to fight for my stuff back or have my friends protect it or something.

also if i kill you and take your stuff i want you to suffer that loss and protect the economy. i also want you to use that as an incentive to continue to fight harder and play better so you can challenge me more.

all of this is opt-in for both sides of course... and it doesnt change the economy much

 

While your bias is clear, it's illogical to claim that getting NPC-equivalent loot will mess up the economy.

That's what would normally happen if the scenario were completely PvE, with Heroes only. The default design isn't going to be flawed, and using the default design instead of an exception also wouldn't be flawed.

The whole problem with:

"...if i kill you and take your stuff i want you to suffer that loss ..."

is that the moment a player is a personal victim, they are less likely to be a customer. If you insulate the loss, or make it indirect via NPCs, players don't feel victimized. But the moment one player directly affects another, negatively, consensual or not, one side of that interaction is a victim.

Players won't play to be victims, indefinitely. Not even for free. Not even as monsters. They will leave the game.

Also, generated loot from player corpses, in the above scenario, doesn't have to be finished items. It could be resources.

 

vjek: i think i misread what you said... i thought you meant it basically dupes the loot so the player doesnt loose anything. my bad.

I think that people would participate a lot less if there were not full loot drop. it basically becomes consensual pvp, which we already have... but there is more role playing ability. i suppose i would do it some times but it would be a lot less fun. also it wouldnt pay off the way player killing would, so id spend a lot less time doing it.

i probably wont participate in any of the parts of the game that dont involve full loot drop on a regular basis.

also remember this would all be optional. i imagine people who like what im proposing would probably quest with player monsters all the way through the game so they could get more reward. remember, sota will not be one of those warcraft type games where items mean a lot.

 

"i probably wont participate in any of the parts of the game that dont involve full loot drop on a regular basis."

I guess you wont be playing much of the game.. should be easy to pick you off with no skill ups

quest with player monsters for more reward? I'm not sure what you mean.

 

@vjek I played the victim until Trammel came about.
Yea I played smarter as I went along and had macros for recall and joined guilds that would help fight off PK's.

What got me to leave was no sense of danger anymore.
No reason to look to others for help like I did before.
No reason to find ways to play smarter.

As far as players playing creatures in the game.
I think that would be great.
But yea they would have to be given the same types of attacks or moves the creature normally uses.

And that might be a good way for some games story line, to have the evil characters in the game turn into a monster. lol