Quote:Original post by trapdoor
So what about this then: Making Dungeon Mastering a very low profit profession but also easy to pick up and little cost to maintain. So should there be farmers out there, that would be the more profitable profession and keep the dungeon mastering to good DM's. I'm trying to find out what will keep people who are simply making dungeons for money at the cost of making a good dungeon while making sure the true good DM's are not hindered from making great dungeons which the community loves.

It should probably be broken off to be a completely independant activity. There will be many players who will do nothing but create dungeons and you dont want to hamper them by requiring them to play characters if they dont wish to. Likewise there will be players who would like to do nothing but play the roles of monsters in dungeons (assuming the game companies are smart enough to start doing this...)


I use the term 'dungeon', but the idea would be the same for creating lots of other content for the MMORPG. There are many players who want to create content of all kinds and it would be stupid for the game companies not to start facilitating this (it can save them huge amounts of $$$...). It will take some effort on their part (the game companies) because the required 'easy to use' tools involve are hard to create (the task is equivalent to creating the game engine so it effectiveluy doubles the initial cost of developing such a system).

Great Idea.

Quote:[Dungeon Mastering] should probably be broken off to be a completely independant activity

I totally agree. If I had the choice between playing PC and DM, I would choose to be a DM, at least most of the time. Being prevented from making a good dungeon because I dont play enough as a PC would just suck. I would rather be an average PC with good dungeon building abilites.

I would also leave it as simple as possible (because simple concepts usually work best): Every account can have two roles: Player Character or Dungeon Master. Both roles work *totally* independent.

Quote:Likewise there will be players who would like to do nothing but play the roles of monsters in dungeons (assuming the game companies are smart enough to start doing this...)

This might be a good idea for advertising. If you release a free version of the game where all the players could do is take over the role of a monser in a dungeon and verse players who have payed money to play. The free client program only allows the player to possess a single creature and offers not character advancements (no items, no leveling up, etc).

People can play these monsters (a random one is chosen each time) and act in a limited area and attack other players. This behaves as an attract mode for the main game and allows people (casual gamers or other occasional players) to play the game without having to spend money on it.

There would need to be restrictions placed on the monster players. This might be limited areas (like an invisable wall, ot the creature starts taking damage if they leave their specific area, etc), random selection, waighting in a que until a position becomes avaiable, etc.

This kind of system will give monsters a much more "intelegent" behaviour than any AI could do and increase the challenge for the normal players.