What if a MMORPG offcially allowed purchase of powerful characters and equipment? To further clarify, imagine a well off professional who enjoys MMORPG but does not have much time. How would you feel if a game offcially allowed that player to use real world money to create a more powerful character at the start or to upgrade to a higher level character or item? I mean officially as I've read that people do, do this unofficially on ebay. How do you feel? Would this work? I discussed this with a friend and was heatedly told that this should never happend. To me it seems to make a lot of sense. --- ||Please try alpha002.zip(663k) [edited by - BinhNguyen on January 18, 2004 8:23:34 PM]

It would work but it would depend on the game. A lot of the characters being sold on ebay had to be leveled by someone, they weren''t just payed for. I personally like leveling my characters. That is part of the fun of the game for me. On the flip side, it wouldn''t bother me if that was an option. I wouldn''t use it, but I am sure there are those exactly like you describe not to mention the ones that just want a powerful character and don''t want to waste time doing the work to get it.

"If you are not willing to try, you will never succeed!"

Grellin

I think that makes people suspicious of all high level characters. There would be arguments and bickering when you can't tell who fought their way to high level vs those who bought it.

Another problem is that RPGs tend to have adventures that match various levels. What good would it be to go high level and all the world is boring?

Players with no life can advance in a few days, then get bored and leave. So the design has to make leveling slow and steady to keep their interest/addiction going longer. But there's not enough new stuff to do so they repeat the same hunts over and over until ready to go to the next level's adventures. This seems to work fine for that class of player.

Now imagine someone only has an hour or two to play the game every few days... that slowed-down rate relegates them to low level and gets boring compared with single-player games that have a faster rate of return. This turns off that class of player from your MMORPG, losing business.

How about balancing the experience gain based on quotas. For example:
- Each day, whether they play or not, players gain 1 hour high rate, 1 hour medium rate, and 2 hours slow rate. Unused hours roll over to the next day.
- if a player has any high rate hours left, set experience gains to 4x.
- if a players runs out of high and they have medium, then set gains to 2x.
- if no high or medium rate, set gains to 1x.
- If no hours are left, experience is frozen at 0x.

Players who can only play occasionally will accrue unused high rate hours, so they will be able to gain faster during the times they are available, requiring less repetition of adventures zones. Since they aren't available to play as much, it will still take longer but at least they aren't stuck on low levels forever.

Players with no life who put in several hours a day can enjoy the game but the experience gains drop down so that they don't finish everything too fast and completely lose interest in the game. However, they will still be able to gain treasure and items.


[edited by - 5010 on January 17, 2004 10:33:14 AM]

Nice idea 5010, except that I would definitely reccomend against a 0 multiplier. The lowest should be 1.0 so normal players dont decide it is only woth playing X hours a day and then over time stop playing. You want them to start playing and never stop playing (ideally =-)
I would also change it around a little bit more: _X min of high-exp time, and _Y min of medium-exp time. Instead of just using as ''you get extra exp for this amount of time'', I''d make it work like charges that each last 1 minute. In other words, when you aren''t earning XP, you don''t use up time. When you earn XP, it uses up one charge, and the multiplier applies for a minute. If you don''t XP again for 30 minutes, then those 30 minutes don''t use up your XP multiplier time.
That way, just a few minutes of multiplier time can be more usefull, and doesn''t really favor those that go into combat immediately over those that choose to talk with friends, find out what has been going on in-game, etc when they log on.

quote:Original post by Extrarius
That way, just a few minutes of multiplier time can be more usefull, and doesn''t really favor those that go into combat immediately over those that choose to talk with friends, find out what has been going on in-game, etc when they log on.

I agree, and that would prevent players from going berzerk each time they get new quota!

One problem is passive skill gains. For example: standing near some NPCs speaking a foreign language increasing your skill in that language. You probably want to only use the normal 1x skill rate, not tapping into the quota. So only certain types of actions would pull from the bonus rate.

Also if you do it your way, then you could receive a minute of medium and high every few minutes and spread it out instead of once per day. So offline, you accumulate it. Online, it comes in a regulated stream.

A lot of you are making the argument that it would ruin the game. I would submit that it is already going on. You can already buy a high level character, items, and even gold on Ebay for most popular MMORPG''s out there today. His suggestion is only cutting out the middle man (ebay) and allowing the people who are going to do it anyway a chance to pay him instead of someone else.

Honestly, who cares HOW someone got their character to the level they are. If your enjoyment of the game is reliant on what everyone else is doing you should probably not play MMORPG''s becuase there will always be someone that will get around the system. But this is a great topic!

"If you are not willing to try, you will never succeed!"

Grellin