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Turbine Says, “Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!”
By Cameron Sorden | July 6, 2007
Interesting stuff. Turbine has announced that their new class armor sets (a la WoW) will now be dropping both within the Helegrod raid and also outside of it. The percentage will be much lower outside, but still, interesting.
All set pieces will soon drop in Helegrod! No more boots and gloves only! We listened, we heard, we agreed, and we tweaked pretty heavily. Now that is not to say that you only have to go to Helegrod to get the epic set pieces. Also… All set pieces will soon drop outside of Helegrod! We know that there are a lot of players who feel that raiding is not for them so on a much lower percentage, we have high level monsters possibly dropping set pieces. Enjoy! This will be coming in a patch or update very soon.
I’m curious to see how they do this… will they be randomly dropped off of high level mobs similar to world drop purples in WoW, or will there be specific elites sprinkled throughout the world that require a small group to take down and drop only certain items? More importantly (assuming static mobs with static drops), will the mobs be rare spawns and will the loot be BoE or BoP? I can see a whole can of worms and whining aplenty around the corner depending on how this plays out.
However, I no longer have an especially vested interest in the outcome– just morbid curiosity. The reason for this is that I’ve stepped down as the Site Manager for Ten Ton Hammer’s LoTRO Source. It was fun to work on and I enjoyed the community interaction, especially helping people and answering questions, but ultimately I just wasn’t having fun with the game. I thought about it for a while and decided that it would be best if I didn’t try to write about a game I had a little passion for… the writing would have suffered, and then no one wins. It’s too bad. As I said, I really tried to like it. Maybe I’ll come back in 6 months or so and see how it’s doing. Instead, I’ve been reassigned to a new position: News Editor on the Ten Ton Hammer Main Page. It’s a whole new ball game for me there and I’m pretty excited about it. Since I’ll be getting all my work done in the mornings now, that gives me more time to read, reflect, and write throughout the day. That means more blog posting! Woo!
Another post I wanted to point towards today was Tobold’s take on player-created content. I don’t think he’s familiar with the Ryzom Ring, which basically does exactly what he’s describing, but I agree that I’d really like to see more player-made content. Especially for a company like Blizzard who has a history of releasing construction kit tools with their games (well, their RTS games), I’m surprised we haven’t at least seen this idea discussed by them. The big issue is of course loot and xp. Do you have it or not in player made missions, and if you do, how do you prevent it throwing off your balance? A lot of people have pointed out how much fun the Ryzom Ring can be, and I haven’t tried it myself, but I just can’t see spending a lot of time doing something with my MMO character that doesn’t advance him somehow. There are a few ways I can see to deal with this:
- Hire someone to review the player made content and deny it if it’s too broken or farmable. The issue here is that with the size of the community, this would require at least a few full time employees and they would still miss stuff. It would be a time-consuming process to review anything and they’d be wading through a LOT of crappy scenarios. Plus something like this is highly subjective.
- Offer fixed placeable bosses with fixed loot and trash mobs that drop only vendor trash and the occasional uncommon item. Sure, people will make farms or instances where you just fight straight to the boss and get his loot. So what? This lets players who want to have a fun adventure get it, and those who just want quick gear still have to fight for it. There’s still the illusion of getting something and you DO get something if your character doesn’t have better items yet.
- Don’t allow xp or money to drop in player content, but DO allow drops of graphical-only player-designed items. This is my favorite idea of the bunch. Taking a page from Second Life and SWG, why not allow players to make vanity items and offer them as rewards for completing their instance. These items would do absolutely nothing but look cool and let other players know that you completed So and So’s instance. They would double as a badge of honor… someone else might copy a design and offer it in an easy instance, but their cool-looking item wouldn’t be inscribed with “Obtained in Lord_Darkness’s Gauntlet of Doom Instance.” Imagine if there was a badass prop sword or an impressive cape you could strut around Orgrimmar with that let everyone know that you defeated what was commonly known as the hardest player-created dungeon in the game. You could have endless challenges with nothing but prestige and recognition as rewards. You want to talk about Killer/Achievers? This system is made for them.
Finally, in closing, I wanted to point to Matt’s post about RMT and the taxation of virtual goods. As always, he has interesting stuff to say about conducting virtual trade. That’s all for today!
Topics: LoTRO, TenTonHammer, armchair design |
July 6th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Good luck on your new position, man.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
I don’t think it has to involve much work or risk on the developer side. I just posted my walkthrough in a new blog. Feel free to respond here, instead of on my site, if you want (best to consolidate the discussion).
July 7th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Since you’re okay with discussing it here, Aaron, I’m responding to your post on this topic.
It’s not that I think using alternate characters in the quest is a bad idea… but I’m not sure I see the point. Why make characters create a new avatar that they’ll have no attachment to (compared to the one they’ve spent tons of time on) if you’re not going to let them keep gear or xp anyway? Why not just let them use their main character and don’t give them loot or xp?
Or instead, let them have loot, but let them only use it within the confines of the player-made world. You could have gear progression and save points within a player made instance. For example, give the players a challenging encounter with an underboss that gives sword rewards that work on the main boss, but don’t come back with you to the main game?
As for inappropriate modules, there’s a BIG can of worms there waiting to spring free. Bioware didn’t have problems with them because any inappropriate mods were hosted for external download on fansite servers and weren’t integrated with the main game.
Can you imagine the uproar if someone’s kid logged into a player-made WoW world designed with cybering in mind? What if the game was Age of Conan, though? We start getting into issues of censorship now… does the player playing the game that promises player-made content have the right to experience what they want without worrying that it will get banned because kids might see it, or do parents with kids playing these games have the right to make MMO companies protect their kids from such content regardless of the rating on the game?
Can you imagine the phone calls and customer service costs? I suspect there are a whole host of reasons why this isn’t embraced by mainstream games at the moment.
But I’m with you. I’m dying to see it. We’ll get them figured out soon enough, I’m sure.
July 7th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I agree that not being able to use your official server characters is a big drawback of the system I was talking about. But I think a lack of traditional reward systems would be resisted more fiercely by players.
…unless the action and story is its own reward, like in many single-player games. That certainly something to aim for, but I don’t expect that sort of gameplay from MMOs anytime soon.
If the player-created was similar to the module system of NWN, like I proposed, then the inappropriate content probably wouldn’t be such a terrible problem. But I agree that it would be a big problem if the content was tied to official servers before screening.
July 8th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I absolutely hear you on the LOTRO issue, I’ve tried very hard to really get into and love this game. There are few things I don’t like about it, but still I just can’t get excited about the game.
As far as player made content in MMOs goes, it is a whole bag of worms that I honestly don’t think will be seriously touched outside of “fashion items” for years down the road. Developers, I believe, will be very reluctant to introduce meaningful PGC into their game, it loosens their control and introduces a lot of complexity to a genre that is dominated by it. Though Blizzard has surprised me before with allowing such open access to WoW data to addon developers, so of course anything is possible.
–
Cheston
July 9th, 2007 at 11:26 am
I’m wondering how much weight the “gameplay may change during online play” (don’t remember the exact phrase) clause the ESRB packages with online games could cover for, as you said, places designed with cybering in mind?
Further, what about a place where player-created content is voted on? It doesn’t seem like it would be so hard to create a system where players make content, other players play the content with cloned characters (peeled from their real servers and made to play these beta instances), vote on said content, and then once the instance receives a certain number of votes or consistent traffic, that instance is plowed with a fine-toothed comb and made ready for mass deployment by the developers?
That approach seems to solve most of the problems brought up in this discussion.
July 9th, 2007 at 11:44 am
[…] of Cameron’s suggestions, from his article: Hire someone to review the player made content and deny it if it’s too broken or farmable. The […]
July 9th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Sounds sort of like what A Tale in the Desert does, Ryan– bringing in voting, player politics, community decision making, and user generated content. I think it’s a really good idea. It still has a similar problem, though. To let players vote on the content, they have to be able to try it. It’s really hard to put age restrictions on content, and it’s difficult to police it in an open arena.
Cloned characters or not, someone is going to get access to these areas that shouldn’t. The public at large isn’t even aware of many things that most gamers blow off as part and parcel of the games we love (asshats, beggars, jerks, and naked elves cybering in the tram). Just wait till Jimmy Harper ‘07 stumbles into a simulated den of drugs and sex and CNN breaks the story of how it ruined his life. If you think violence in games is a big issue, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Not compared to the terrible puritanical wrath that will descend upon the “lurid sex-filled worlds of depravity which steal our children’s souls away.”
We’re at the tip of the iceberg, friends. User generated content is coming, it’s going to be awesome, and it’s going to cause one hell of a stir once people really start “getting” what exactly these new-fangled Worlds of War Crafting and Second Lives are.
July 9th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Grats on your new position Cam…kick some ass.
That is very interesting regarding Turbine’s approach to epic drops. Will have to keep an eye on this one.
July 9th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
It’s interesting you should mention that — I was wandering around in Second Life about a week ago when I came across one of the “lurid sex-filled worlds of depravity” you mentioned. It was an adult shop, right in the middle of the city (there were a ton of warnings everywhere, but morbid curiosity got the best of me).
It didn’t offend me, but, like you said, I was surprised that it hadn’t ended up in a plaque on some CNN reporter’s desk. So, good point on the player-generated stuff.
July 11th, 2007 at 9:33 am
I’m there with you on LotRO, Cam. Interest is waning. A lack of soloable material and having played it since August are helping me get bored.
I’m still volunteering at the Vault, but might not be for much longer for LoTRO if something new draws me in… please God let something new draw me in.