on finding a great summary of quests

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Found this http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/UnSub/022009/3303_Kill-10-Fedex-Princesses-The-10-Basic-Types-of-MMO-Quests
from yahoo keyword, ‘quest structure mmo’.
So to recap with a few of my own thoughts.
number one, kill x of y, This being the most common maybe should be regulated to achievements and titles a la Everquest 2. As an actual quest with text and followup then reward, too common. Twists are had when combining with other quest types. What would be the point of this quest unless it really did thin out the population of a monster type? A secret chamber may be needed where the dead and soulless pile up. For those monsters with souls another place to pile up and perhaps serve as a necromantic source for souls and bodies.
number two, kill named x monster, these really ought to have souls, they have gained enough power to be distinctive. What does make for a cool name? Is it referencing some piece of literature? perhaps. is it referencing some in-game lore? better. is it referencing a name a player made up? ehh?
Words of war and destruction come to mind for a lot of the enemies players face. Words of peace and light twisted and straightforward also play a role. Might do some lists of words for each. Those lists would become a stepping point for named npcs and monsters. words of war and destruction
synonyms and antonyms are the tools for naming the usually boss monster or npc.
number three, delivery of packages, This one needs twists and turns and meaning for the package within the current lore. Getting packages through dangerous areas is the way to add spice to this one. Why else would a quest giver need the package in the hands of an adventurer?
number four, collect x of y, unless the point is to make something or find something out there is no point. And I feel the made thing or knowledge contributed is actually useful for something in game. An example would be collecting rat noses gives some clues to rat ecology such as breeding rates, death rates, birth rates. as a player collects and turns in quest items the collective knowledge about the creature can be used to complete some other knowledge based quest. Introducing ways for players to influence that knowledge, say one decides and collects resources to have rats with custom colors or textures or different but controlled body modifications. Leading up to a player controlling some parts of how an elder rat god looks and plays.
number five, escort. again with random people and npcs needing escort all the encounters could be worth it when faced with dangers, traps, and monsters. A way for player to player escorts and player to npc escorts more easily notable. An extra click or two and this becomes an achievement level quest. Noted but unnecessary for full developed quest.
The next five have some interesting sidenotes to delve into in another post.

quests and quest creation

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Structure of an eq2 quest.  First iteration, then after a good sample of eq2 quest do wow quests, then entropia missions and see where I end up.

Need 20 quest samples.  Here are some preliminary thoughts.

Quests go from item quests,  find item for a lore reason, return item to quest giver, more lore revealed, directions to next quest.  Find task to be completed, return to quest giver, task completed, directions for next quest/mission.

memory lane of older games may provide some insight.

 such as Contra II.  the quest is pretty much find items to more quickly deuce a bad guy.  The game play was different in that the quests were completed in minutes with no text.  Find an item, use it immediately.  MMO’s are different in that it takes a little longer say 5 minutes to do a quest.  Quests in action RPG’s such as Diablo 3 have a quick turnaround also like Contra II.  What is a new direction or wrinkle quests could take?  Somewhere between action and mmo?  Or maybe a ridiculously lengthed quest like story arcs in mmo’s? 

In a story arc there are many subquests to go on in an mmo.  The full story emerges from the many quests took and completed to get to the penultimate goal. 

Perhaps a place to chronicle the saga is needed so a player would be able to go back and read what the story arc was and not have to quote it from memory of playing the game.  A simple list would do to start off with.  Then an explanation of each part and how they tie together.  The times I’ve come closest to doing this are in trying to complete a tough quest in a reasonable amount of time.  I went looking up questlines for WOW and found them on a wiki.  Now the wiki’s are great but depersonalize the player’s experience into the essential points of questing.  With EQ Next and Landmark there may be an opportunity to auto-chronicle a player’s experience.

With an auto-chronicle a list of battles fought, won, and lost listed is a start.  Then lore-based activities listed.  Custom lore using emergent AI could be done up with text perhaps.  Real histories emerge with players having played the parts.  Then recorded for all posterity and licensed book rights.  These ideas give me a wild idea for generating stories and books based off the mmo.  A book for each player.  A step beyond Achievements lists. 

armor customization

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I am in favor of little armor customization of items after the item has been created. A creator should have the item remain the same after releasing it to the public. Maybe changing colors should be permissible. But general shape and size should remain the same. By keeping the shape and size the same the game perception of power and style is kept easily recognizable. Changing colors is a relatively easy fix though it could create items from silly to serious.
I like identifiability and choosing armor looks if they are earned. The consistent look and feel contributes to lore and lore based immersion. The earning part is needed to scale an MMO’s progression curve unlike Second Life where everything is attainable from the get-go.
How far the customization and stats of a new item can go is another question I would have? If there are no stats to a created item it’s no fun as it can have no core impact on the world.
But when there are stats perhaps a ranged random roll would be desirable. By semi-random I mean an item gives for example, +4-8 STR or INT. The final item would read +8 STR/+5 INT. And each though would be slightly different. The item hunt aspect is better with random rolls. Given the item to each new player or the same player multiple times goes with the idea that a given item looks the way the player desires within bounds of the item’s creator. And armor customization would allow for semi-random items that are unique but still used and desired as intended but identifiable still. This post inspired by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq4l3CiIM2g

diablo 3 shutting down auction houses

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Diablo 3 has shut down the auction houses.  A huge mistake for shareholders and players alike.  I played Diablo 3 for 800+ hours all because my core reward loop was the time was not wasted getting loot.  Now it is.  No real dollars equals waste of time.  After killing the umpteenth demon and I can’t cash my time legally, morally, or ethically?

For shareholders it means a huge revenue stream shut down.  My preliminary population and revenue estimates 6 months ago had the revenue at $4 million per day.  If they had kept it, the game would go on 20+ years.  And the real revenue figure is likely $10 million+ per day.  A huge cash goose.  Maybe they didn’t want that.  The shortsighted view of selling an xpac may have motivated the decision.  Hit and run and done.  Seems to work well for Grand Theft Auto’s modus operandi.

For the puritans among d3 players they place little value on people’s time or effort.  You cannot succeed at gold farming without play time.  And the rewards go to those who play the most.  Which I thought was something puritans are after?  Or are they looking for a handout and the difficulty mode permanently set to MP zero?  I noticed the scale of difficulties from release till sept 2013 as decreasing on all points of the game.  The game was much harder by 10’s of degrees early on.  (take whatever is being measured for difficulty, say, DPS, and divide it by 10 every month or so since release).  (compare it to what was available at the time)  The victory over the game during that time actually meant something.  The icing on the cake was cashing in on that play time.  I ended up getting uber items from drops just because I spent time actually playing the game and working the numbers.

Is it better to kill 40 monsters on mp10 or 800 monsters on mp6?  It’s the 800 monsters on mp6 due to more chances that the random item roll would pop out something good.  The chance of each individual item dropping is still the same but with more chances I am more likely to get a great item.  And to play one or the other (mp10 or mp6) took the same amount of time.  I did get great items and now alas, I have few incentives to do it anymore.

Blinding ourselves to some ephemeral spirit of the game leaves reality and virtual reality wanting for a company to do right by those who would see games become something more than a stereotypical game.

the resource limitations of EQ Next for playability

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In eq next some people are worried about player-planet desolation. Within Everquest Next Landmark the voxels are very much manipulable similar to minecraft. I think the resource limits to do things to modify the environment with are the main limits on players. Want to knock that wall down, costs X amount of resource that took 30 seconds to a minute to get. taking out a castle? hmm, chalk up another hour of resources.
still would be unbalanced I think from the builder’s side as hours could go into it and in minutes or seconds be gone. However with sufficient rewards for both sides an ecology could emerge that balances.

dwarven beards in EQNext?

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Surfing websites for a couple of hours on topics of interest. Should female dwarves in Everquest Next have beards?
O No, The world is going to end! Female dwarves are going to have beards. Talk about your weird fetishes.
Making it optional for those that want beards makes it a more both/and world, less of an either/or misery.
How are beards made in a 3d graphical environment? Apparently can be done in Adobe Photoshop, for photos of people.
Kywrd: . Have Photoshop up and running with person’s photo.
Brush fuzzy where beard goes, filter for noise, select around face, fill out with radial blur is one way.
Ashu Sarraf does the YouTube video in under 3 minutes. To do beards with voxels of EQNext is a possibility maybe depending on how fine grained details are added and refined. Using voxels for buildings and landscapes I perceive as intuitive. Character modeling may go differently but still possible with voxels. I have no idea how it really goes.
I want a voxels tool. Does such a thing exist and available outside Sony’s-verse?

some explorations of game development from on search engine result

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here’s the link i clicked:  Channel9.msdn.com – good intro to various game dev issues.  Remains to be seen if someone can slog through it in a timely manner.  Overcoming the IDE integrated development environment issues may be summed up as IDE is a place to slap your code in.  Type it, copy/paste it, and generally find winning recipes to get something done immediately.  Something to show for the coding.  Even small victories like int x=1+1, to store as int lifePoints; are big victories.  Getting from square one to half-way playable game is a long way.  It is too easy to get lost in the minutiae on the way to a playable game.  Pareto principle is in effect.

Taking on a less ambitious task, like programming an EA, Expert Advisor, for forex, (and knowing the right LIBRARY code to use) that simplified programming, broke my, ‘heh this is really useful and fun!’ , learn to program hurdle.

With LIBRARIES of code to copy/paste with and a customizable full working EA, I was able to ‘crack the code’ and program a moderately useful program.  A lot of programming is knowing which function in a program library goes where.  Line by line writing of code is a dinosaur.  Though occasionally useful to code line by line, it is usually more important to link into a function library.  Good luck in linking, loading, and copy/pasting lines of library code.  I think it is more important for some people to half-code and have something performing than to know the detailed syntax and linking structures.  Syntax is minor, easily fixed and learned, still time consuming, and unnecessary to understand overall structure of a program that gets me producing fast.

I feel the approach to programming put forward on this website is a great way to get an idea of at least one working recipe to get a game from idea to code, to playable.

Buckminster fuller and mmo’s

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What can be said about social gaming? My experiences with Farmville.  Post-mortem.  I played to about level 20 as a farmer.  I had fun picking crops at predetermined times. Timing my life around Farmville production cycles proved more than I could keep up with.  Others in the family and friends circles played more.  A lot more.  To the point only an Mmo gamer would understand or end up spending hour after hour, day after day, 3-8 hours at a time, playing the game.

That Farmville is an mmo is a bit of a stretch.  Maybe it’s not hardcore.  It’s social.  Still rolling that discussion over as I think about my Diablo 3 avatar and how long it took to get to level 60(72) paragon witch doctor.

Checkmarks for an mmo:

people interacting,

in fact they have to interact to succeed in the game.  Within actually playing the game

Within auction house systems

a virtual currency

used for buying/selling, and trading in-game items

persistent worlds to play in

so if a player logs out the world is still there, still moving, still creating interactions

Avatars persist.  Accomplishments and play’s rewards persist even when player is logged out.

There is no finish to the game.  It is perpetual.  Endless play is possible.

To go into other games such as City Ville and some jungle resource collecting game I did play through the first few levels.  As a hardcore gamer I found it tough for the facebook/zynga games to hold my attention.  With more complex interactions and the ability for a player to cash in on their game play would have definitely held my attention more.  Funny thing about cashing in on play is there are a few games out there that permit it. Staying on the good side of the Terms of Use has been a guiding principle for me.  But making millions selling virtual loot has evaded me.  I still try and set other goals with a higher chance of the goals happening.  Such as, pays my bills kind of pay.  The pays my bills play is done in the goal of infinite wealth as put forward by Buckminster Fuller.

Also Fuller goes on about what do people do when all the necessities are performed by 1 out of 50 people.  The other 49 I suggest can play MMO’s.  So I play.

As for creation of these games from a newb’s to beginner point of view I see artists, programmers, and business functions people coming together to create a game and get people to play it.  Making money is  a bonus but to me, making the game to end user playing the game is the best.

Appears that the place for articles is on a blog, not facebook.