Topic: Chronicles of Herenvale /
Suggestions After 10 Days
Mojo, YalinOman,
I like both of these replies, obviously YalinOman’s suggestion is much more practical than mine as it does not mean rewriting the game. Mojo’s is also one I like, the point of playing an RPG is the character design, fiddling with the stats and skills to get a small advantage or to do fun things. It is this that I feel is a little bit light in this game, the stats have relatively little effect (at level 15 I have 45 stat points but carry two weapons that give +17 each plus 6 other items of equipment)
I will try to explain what I think about the effect of players with unusually large quantities of leisure time.
A few players will always take any game to extremes and, although these players typically pay the most they stop other players from paying and eventually from playing at all.
In any game where time spent is an advantage a few players will be way ahead of the rest by starting early and playing a lot. This means that unless fixes are used casual players will stop playing after a short time when they realise there is no point and in the end the paying players have nobody left to lord over. It is important here to discern between paying for advantages and paying play time for advantages, but both can cause problems. The knock on effect is that only a core few players will pay, because only the combination of paying and playing a lot is worthwhile.
My badly explained point is that in games such as Herenvale the people with extreme amounts of leisure time are a double edged sword. The developer wants them because they pay, but they discourage anyone else from paying by being so far ahead there is no reason to even try to catch them.
In other games, such as travian, a server reset enables the owner to keep collecting money and everyone to start at the same level again. In an adventure such as this a reset is more difficult to imagine. In old style paper role playing games the issue was patched by having XP for the next level doubling each time, which means that no player was ever more than one level behind. A similar mechanism was used in mybrute, with less effect in an online game because some players can spend much more time than others. My impression is that mybrute was eventually killed by players scripting to automatically play, which is something the developer here might want to keep an eye on as similarly there are few clicks required to do the neccessary stuff and no disadvantages for the computer getting it wrong.
|
