Changes to lure people (like me) back into MUD

[warrax]

1. Fix the retarded rent, figure out another system to control valuable items. (Ie very low drop chances and remove the maxes) make the items scale in power, so killing the same mob over and over may yield an even better item.
2. Wipe characters if they havent been been logged in for 60 days.
3. Random chest spawns, random loot on monsters.
4. Quests and quests items, possibly set items.
5. Extra playability beyond level 50 (ie paragon levels in d3).
6. More to come

[maxum]

Rent: Well I don't like the current rent system either. It pushes people to both ends of the scale. Low rent casual type players, high rent hardcore players who never have holidays. I would prefer a more graded system, where every single item has rent, but at a lesser amount. Foods 1-10 coins each, potions 10-100 depending on affect and difficulty. Items grading from 1 upward.
Currently players have 35ish rent or 200Kish, I would like to see that move more towards 5kish to 50k.

Characters get wiped now except immorts.

Other stuff:
I have been toying with the idea of treasure goblins and random loot but nothing really fits Shadowdale like that. Random loot ideas.. Quest points, components (for brew and scribe).
Thinking about a complete race rebalance, bonuses per level for demi-humans, dual class type options for human. That would mean levelling to 50 as a human, then choosing a second class, and starting over as 1/1 and levelling again.

Bear in mind this sort of talk is well outside the scope of what I am currently looking at, but I do have these sort of thoughs as well.

[unicus]

Dec 4, 2012 19:27:04 GMT -5 maxum said:

I have been toying with the idea of treasure goblins and random loot but nothing really fits Shadowdale like that. Random loot ideas.. Quest points, components (for brew and scribe).

As a systems admin (instead of a mud programmer) I had some ideas about adding more randoms to the mud. It uses the muds system of temp files. The mud is compiled with all of its active zones. And then minor fixes to objects, mobs, rooms, zones create a text file of just that item with that change. When the mud boots up it reads in the compiled information, and then all of the temporary change files.

NOW WHAT IF.... a zone builder created a chest with everything in it to be compiled in. But then a different one and saved it. And another and saved it. And another. An program outside of the game (cron job shell script for those that know linux) could randomly swap out the file in the temp directory. So whenever the mud booted up you wouldnt know what chest is there.

Maybe that room will hold a mother red dragon with eggs, and another time with hatchlings, and another time a small brood of dragons, another one really big red dragon, and yet another with a "sleeping" dragon which turns out to be dead and full of nasty things that break out when you hit it.

What if NPCs and Shop Keepers could change moods and therefore change prices.

What if the Astral Pools could really be as random as they were meant to be?

From my viewpoint there are a lot of fun things that could be done with this quite easily. Unfortunately, like many interesting ideas for changes it was never walked thru the approval system when a pantheon of gods was here so it cant be put in right now. Maybe a Havok mud could take the idea and run with it.

[maxum]

Half these things are already setup, just commented out of the code.
World events of both Famine and Miners strike are there, one adds to the price of food items in shops, the other items flagged as armour or weapons/metal. Varying prices based on race are already partially operating. The real trick is how to make these things not affect real newbies harder than newbie adepts.

There is (or was I haven't looked at it in ages) code in place to allow outside text files to be run as scripts for NPC's, feeding directly to the command interpreter.

The issue with changing text files for rooms and objects is that if they are altered when the mud is running, they cause a crash to occur. They would need to be altered prior to boot, and thats not really very malleable.
Zones that are only altered on reboot tend to lead people to hunt crash bugs.
It must be possible to fix this, saving items from within the game causes no issues, but that is beyond my skill at C. It might be possible to combine things though, running an external script on an internal lvl 60 mob.
I am not sure the current playerbase would survive a havok style split, or that a havok style break could find the resources to build the zones required from scratch. I never actually played or looked at havok....
What would be better would be as the old gods went myth, they moved aside to allow new gods to rise.

[Fury]

Dec 4, 2012 19:27:04 GMT -5 maxum said:

Rent: Well I don't like the current rent system either. It pushes people to both ends of the scale. Low rent casual type players, high rent hardcore players who never have holidays. I would prefer a more graded system, where every single item has rent, but at a lesser amount. Foods 1-10 coins each, potions 10-100 depending on affect and difficulty. Items grading from 1 upward.
Currently players have 35ish rent or 200Kish, I would like to see that move more towards 5kish to 50k.

I'm afraid that I'm with warrax on this one for the most part. While variable stats on item spawn could be interesting, it would in no way be a deal breaker for me. Rent, however, became the one thing that I simply could eventually no longer justify dealing with when I sadly left SD.

The removal of rent with a system change of item load rarity instead of item limits would be the one thing that brought me back to my beloved MUD home, for rent is the one thing that ha me lose interest and drift off every time I have attempted to return home.

I tend to agree with warrax a combination of the rest of his #1 and #3, where an improvement would be easily part of the item spawn rarity whereby you could have scaling rarity rather than simply scaling power and each rarity would be a different version of the same item type but with stats based on said rarity. Think of it somewhat like Diablo 2 (because let's face it, Diablo 3 may have made a hand full of nice changes but is mostly a completely and far inferior game based in the same universe that happens to have the graphics update we all wanted), where you could get different rarities of an item from the same mob resulting in - for our purposes - magic, rare, and say legendary versions of the same item that can drop from specific mobs in zones.

[lestat]

Hello - late to join the conversation, but glad I discovered these boards. People may remember me as Auda / Sulla from the 90s. Warrax I played with you quite a bit!

I think the most dynamic thing that could be done would be remove item maxes and make things load very rarely. This would make every zone exciting, with the potential to drop the key items.

However, to balance the influx of possibly to many items, could you institute a nodrop/soulbonding kind of system? Certain key items are flagged as soulbound, and then can't be traded or given to any other characters. If you want to reroll, you have to regear as well. It would ideally only be applied to the high end, currently maxxed gear.

It would be great to gear up a tri, step away for a couple months, and be able to come back to the game (eliminate rent stress). It would be great if every zone were 'live', with a chance of items dropping.

[lestat]

Another thought - SD hasn't had a new zone in how many years? Part of the problem with maxxed items is the static nature of new items - there are no new items as there are no new zones. Perhaps if there was a build site and new content and an influx of new, limited items it wouldn't see so acute.

[marla]

The issue is that right now, no one is willing to let a god create new items, or new zones, or do anything NEW.
Nothing new can be created, nothing can be destroyed.
As per unicus, the mud is to be left unchanged, the way it was left years and years ago.
It is meant to exist as a monument to what people achieved.. or that is what I have grasped through hours and hours of discussion with him.

One thing though.
If we did have a god high enough to do restrings, arenas, and quest tokens, we would be able to utilize the quest shoppe for items that are not in circulation.
Also, with restrings, we could create new items with quest points we get.
Some quest rewards were +1 dam to a weapon. -10 armor to a piece of armor.
You could restring, and recreate an item that is pretty nice, and turn it into something that is unique.
This would not add or subtract anything from the mud, but we would need a HIGH god to do these things.
The last few high gods we had put in "charge" ravaged the mud or ended up being caught for abusing the gold abuse/bug from Air Plane.

[unicus]

Any god can do quests and arenas. All they have to do is ask.
A high god only turns on that function for the god that wants to do it. And we even had mortals running quests in the past.

Evidence the quest we recently had? That wasnt a high god.