World Crafting 102 - Refurbishing Existing Worlds

Oh my god this is hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. This is the longest time I've ever spent on any project, concurrently or total.

I spent the last two days kind of "flipping out on my wife" because she gave me an honest critique of my server. She said, "Don't be mad, but if I was a "real" player on our server, I'd have quit a long time ago."

Her biggest complaint was the fact that I forced all starting skills to 0.1, which is the lowest you can rate short of 0.0. What's worse, there's practically nothing you can do with that much skill. So unless there's a "free skill award" for failing to perform a skill, you'll never advance to the point where you can do anything useful. Even if there is a skill award for failure at low levels, it's a long time to spend not getting any other reward than a small skill gain.

The fact is, we're in beta. I knew before I did anything on the server at all, I'd eventually have to re-adjust the skill requirements for crafting, combat, etc. Little did I know when I started working on my server, just how many more important and fundamental systems required re-writing and tuning up.

Urilia used to be the DarkenWood scripts. DarkenWood was originally a Sanctuary clone. For those who don't know, Sanctuary has what many would call "a totally custom script set". Mithril took the POL095 distrobution scripts and completely re-wrote or wrote from scratch his own script set. What's more, he exported many core functions from the POL Core and re-wrote those functions.

What does all of this mean? First, it means I was able to get a serious jump start on creating my server. I knew for a long time that I'd have to export some core functions to do what I wanted to do. Mithril had already done what I needed.

It also meant that I have a third-hand set of scripts. Mithril was brilliant, and really knows what he's doing when it comes to programming, but the guy makes some really HORRIBLE deicisions when it comes to game design and implementation.

Everything in this script set was designed to push the Player Character's skills as high as possible, as quickly as possible. In combat, the scripts would award skill gain before it even calculated whether you had a chance to hit or not. Your character started with 50K gold and was permitted to "buy training" in any number of skills from NPC vendors. Characters were maxing out skills in under a week.

The server was cut up into classes (a DarkenWood feature, I think). All classes could perform the skills of any other class, at almost the same level of ability. Non-crafting classes were able to create their own Master Crafted items.

Players Characters could hire "henchmen". Henchmen are AI NPCs that follow the main character around and can heal the Player Character and his friends, carry extra loot for them, and fight for them using any of the weapons and armor available on the server.

Player Characters could earn gold by selling raw resources, crafted items, and adventure loot to NPC vendors. NPC monsters dropped a lot of "loot". Gold could also be earned by asking NPC vendors for a "job". A job consisted of standing still while your character auto-looped a crafting skill. None of your own material or tools were used, everything was provided by the NPC vendor. When the "job" was completed, the vendor would pay more gold. The higher a Player Character's skill, the more gold they earned for the job.

Some people might be surprised to hear this was a strictly PvP- server. PvP was only allowed under "role-played" circumstances...whatever that means. The incredible skill gain was supposed to help Players role-play their characters better. How you can role-play a powerful character without actually experiencing anything to gain your power is beyond me. At one point, I was told that the reason for the skill gain was so "Player Characters don't have to power game to get to the top". Apparently, doing things that gain skill is "bad".

The out of control influx of gold into the game created MUD-flation much as it does on other servers. Players were selling incredible spells and powerful magic weaponry on their vendors for very little gold. This made the admin mad on a regular basis, but I couldn't understand his anger when he had control of everything.

Tinker characters could make "magic jewelry". What do you expect to happen?

The henchmen made sure that adventurer players never had to mix with other players. They could not only pay for training for themselves, but they could set their henchmen to train for days straight on "training dummies" at no cost. This meant that even though you were restricted to 2 henchmen following you at a time, you could walk into almost any dungeon and wipe everything out "by yourself". As a Game Master for a short time on that server, I always saw groups of 3 fighting in dungeons; the player and his henchmen.

How do these things encourage role-play again?

That only scratches the surface, unfortunately. I've spent about 9 months killing myself to re-write major systems, create new systems, and tweak things that work but don't quite work the way they should. In the last couple of months, we decided we needed play-testers to come on and help us figure out what needed tweaking most, first. It's been good for us, players find broken stuff like no programmer can.

The negative side of things is, players also expect things that might not be reasonable, and they have no idea what doing the work is actually like. It's not their fault, and everything they complain about is my fault. That doesn't change anything. It's a thankless, brutal job. But it's still an awesome job to have. Little by little, we're creating our own little world. It's going to work the way I've always wanted a world to work. Someday.