Market forces for game balance – Many folks complain that power X is overpowered or power Y is underpowered. Balance of powers has got to be the most difficult aspect of designing any game, whether it be a card, board, or computer game where multiple players compete. One easy solution to this is to provide a marketplace model to powers. MMO’s have auction houses for equipment, why not allow everyone to start with a blank slate and every power is obtained through an item that can be traded/sold away? Players level by getting a lower-quality item and trading up, say by auctioning off multiple lower-value items for one higher-value item. Give everyone a tiny amount of $ per hour played; newbie players can use it to buy the lowest-rung goodies.
Limited level range for quests – I played Runes of Magic (finally stopped when they wanted to do 3 patches in a row…Um, nah!) and the lower-level quests are supposed to be solved by teams…But higher-level players would come by and offer help (for free, or for pay) and make the quests uninteresting and extremely short. Warhammer Online got this right, to some extent, by having tiers and higher-tier players can’t fight lower-tier players, but they can help with lower-tier quests.
Or have quest difficulty be a function of who’s playing the quest – D&D Online does this, sorta…Running solo? The quest is scaled down. Want to play harder, scaled up. But you select how hard you’d like to play and the rewards are scaled as well. Not too bad…
Streaming clients – Warhammer Online just started this…So now you only need download 1GB. 1GB? Sheesh. Should be able to get that down to 100MB, if you ask me.
Chris, I will nag Josh and see what he can do for s/w, since I LOVE online stuff like this. Why don’t you come play wow with us?? lol
Comment by Anonymous — 2009/12/18 @ 17:05