Forums: Suggestions

There should be something to use your gold on…because I have way too much of it. Like, maybe you can spend 5000 gold or something to raise a stat on a skill. Or maybe even raise a stat on a weapon or armor. Any other ideas of how to spend gold?

There are actually only a few people with great amounts of gold. Problem is: The rich are also self-sufficient, so raising prices on good items on the market isn’t really an option. There will be stuff to spend some gold on in the future. On your suggestions:
Char Stat increases: Has been suggested before, but is unlikely.
Weapon Stat increases: Maybe, who knows? Will have to be discussed.
Apart from the Athership Travel service, maybe we should wait for the crafting system to be imple… oops. Did I let that slip?
…well, it’s still a bit far off.

Ahh, I see. Yeah the char stats I didn’t think would happen…but maybe weapon stat (to a certain limit, of course). And I completely forgot about the athership travel service, that’s gonna require some cash. Heh…that would be awesome. Craft your own wea…I mean. Nevermind ;D

Another thought would be “useable” buffs. Not sure how difficult that would be programmatically? Is there a way to have Accessories pop a link in the Actions tab? Then you could have expensive one time use buff potions/elixirs/etc. that temporarily pump stats or give you “freedom of movement”, action points, etc.? Or even healing to the obligatory max of 80 :) Monsters would have these as well? It would inherently be limited during play by having only 4 characters with one Accessory slot, or optionally you could those items stack so a team could have 4 types of one time use items, but up to X of them per character (based on the item or a global stack limit).

Again, not sure what kind of challenge this would be in programming, but would allow for extra expenditure of gold – I’m approaching 2500 gold myself and I’ve only been playing for a week – nothing to spend it on anymore :(

Along the lines of stat increases – how about trainers? They would charge based on how much you were trying to raise to (the higher you want to train the more it would cost) and each trainer would have a cap limit on what they could train too – i.e. a trainer to Long Blades 70, an intermediate to 80, an advanced to 90 and a master to 100 (insanely expensive!)? You could then include a bunch of new “easy to write” missions – you’re welcome Kranodor ;) – driven off finding/liberating/saving/doing chores for/etc. the trainers. The high level ones could be on the new continent in hard to reach places - “aahhh grasshoppa, to become a Staves master you must seek Hy Din Lo in the deep reaches of Mt. Holeekrap only after you have acquired his favorite smoking tobacco ma-ri-ji-wana and the famed Weelow Staff. Perhaps then he may speak to you and teach you the famous Whack Em Smak Em Haard style of the ancients. Good luck – you’ll need it!”

Again, not sure how hard this would be programmatically – but I’m sure most of it could be mission based and only unlock when certain criteria are met (like the current initial missions).

There are some interesting ideas in this thread, but I have to say, I don’t want to address the problem of “too much gold” at this time. We’re still working on a crafting system that will likely make big changes to the player economy. If I try to fix the economy now before it’s even fully developed, I’ll just be doing extra work and taking away from other “real” game features.

You could then include a bunch of new “easy to write” missions – you’re welcome Kranodor ;) – driven off finding/liberating/saving/doing chores for/etc. the trainers.

No, thanks. Apart from the fact that I’d rather write the other five parts for the six-part mission chain I’m currently writing, this kind of mission would be the typical, nonsensical chore busywork quest that I don’t like and that, as I hope, Sheck doesn’t want me to write. I’ll rather write one real mission than ten practically identical, nonsense filler missions. You know, with decisions to make and a story to tell, instead of just writing a makeshift framework for the one or two mission encounters.

Plus, I guess that’s what ProVidence meant as well, with stat increases (trainers, that is) and something that I suggested as one of my first posts on the development servers – albeit I limited it to passive (defensive) skill training.

I also suggested that some special moves might be taught for money, but there hasn’t been an agreement on it yet and even if – something like this only comes when it is obtainable for all sorts of playstyles, as in: all leaves of the skill trees.

Hence the wink Kranador – I can tell you like to invest a lot in your quests to try to make them not the typical ones. But honestly, it’s extremely difficult not to use some sort of “formula” for writing a quest. “do something” then “get reward” is always what it boils down to… sometimes “get reward” is “get somewhere new” or “get some …” but essentially it boils down to that essential concept. Your quests are varied and interesting so that’s a definite perk.

I guess what I was trying to get at is the most games are doing something to get something or get somewhere or achieve something. Right now, to get your skills higher you can grind battles HOPING that you get the random “ding” on your really high skills. Personally, if I’m going to grind I’d rather know that there’s the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow I just worked so hard to cross. So grinding for enough gold or a certain item (etc etc) that allows me to visit a trainer that I KNOW will raise my skill to (insert appropriate value here) sure beats hoping a lot… in my opinion of course. Maybe I’m the only one that doesn’t like leaving everything to chance? Plus, think of many MMORPGs…they’re constantly raising the level caps. Why? Because when people achieve the highest ranks possible, they’re always itching for more (at least in the good games). I agree that the upper echelons of these ranks should be very difficult to achieve, but I also hate the concept that it’s mostly left to chance. If there’s less that 1% chance that my skill will raise every time I use it, I MIGHT raise it one in 100+ uses – well that’s a big might (caps = big lol) and I personally don’t like relying on luck essentially. I’d rather know that I achieved something through virtual “blood and sweat” (which translates IRL to time).

I want to stress I don’t think anyone is wrong here – I just wanted to share my view/opinion in the hopes that if you don’t see it this way maybe you’ll see that there are other views out there that might be worth looking at. No one HAS to go to a trainer if they prefer to grind it out and trust to luck right? They just don’t do the trainer “quests”. No railroading, just different tracks to run down :)

I think it’s a great game and have managed to eek my way onto 8 leaderboards in 8 days. While getting on the leaderboards isn’t my goal, I’m imagining I’ll reach the cap of possible play within a couple weeks or so…it would be nice to have something to keep me coming back and encouraging more friends to play…

Thanks for listening guys, I appreciate it – even if you don’t use any of my suggestions or can’t get to them for awhile :)

Actually, I have been content design lead for only a couple of months. Of the 11 or so missions in the game, I have only written three, actually. Some (four or five, somewhere around those numbers) of them were already in the game when the creative dev team was formed (so Sheck wrote them), and another three or four were written by other dev team members as last year went by. The process of me getting such a huge honor attached to my name came as a process in the last months – most of the other devs have either reported some important real life stuff and thus stepped back, others simply disappeared without further notice. The only person as attached to this game, and as actively involved in it as Sheck – despite real-life issues – was me.

As for grind… not a good topic with me. I’m a strict anti-grind person. I play a battle when I feel like it, to see how I’ll do. I like a new challenge every once in a while… and sure, I like being rewarded. But I would never play in some repetative manner just to get some reward, then claim it’s fun to play in and of itself, without considering the reward, and then protest if the reward is taken away, reduced, or made available by other (more common) means of playing, because suddenly – guess what? – it’s no fun anymore. (Yes, this is directed at the Guild Wars Solo Farmer community, somewhat.) [/rant]

You make a lot of great points, Aryz. I, like Kran, really hate the thought of grinding, and it’s a large part of why I don’t play MMORPGs any more. When I designed the skill system for Aethora, one of my main goals was to have it be fairly easy to get to skill level 50 or so, then start to get harder and harder. This is normal for an RPG of course, but I really wanted it to top out around 80-90. I wanted players to be able to play the game without worrying about grinding to get to that next level – whether or not it’s exp or gold-pays-for-skills grinding or rando-notch grinding.

My motivation lies in my experience with MMORPGs: I love to game – so much so that I recognize that I have an addiction. I therefore actively limit my gameplay. My friends however either do not recognize that they are also addicts, or choose not to care. The result is that anytime I start playing an MMORPG with real life friends, in a couple weeks or so they have rocketed to levels I could only hope to reach if I quit my day job.

So I really wanted to create a game that would appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers – of course, that’s the ideal game, and it’s not likely to happen. But I want Aethora to be fun even for people who can only play a couple times a week. With the open-ended skill system, I hoped that some hardcore gamers might try to increase multiple skills into the upper levels as an alternative advancement to working on getting a single skill to the maximum (at this time, no max is set, but you can only get a few levels above the NPCs you are fighting against, so I think the soft max is around 85-86). Once we get this continent finished, there will be new continents and the new continents will feature new weapons that feature all new skills.

Basically, what you end up with is PC growth that is both vertical and horizontal. Instead of tacking on another 10 levels every few expansions (like a typical MMORPG might), we hope to widen the list of skills and offer more variety rather than just higher numbers. That’s the ideal anyway. What actually happens is anyone’s guess. I’m not going to rule out the possibility of trainers 100%, but I would rather spend effort working on providing more creative outlets for players.

What about adding in something to spend money on that appeals more to the player’s vanity than to tactics? I know this is a tactics-based game, but there have been a lot of games I have played that I continued playing solely to buy things that didn’t relate to upgrading my characters. An example that comes to mind is buying a customizable house for your characters, though allowing a player to buy upgrades to their logs or player pages might work as well. I’d guess that coding this sort of thing might make it more difficult than it’s worth, but it seems like this is the sort of thing that keeps people lingering around after all the quests are completed.

Think Jay’s idea is fairly interesting…using gold for vanity reasons, not necessarily his specific ideas. Something I thought of…using gold to buy “outfits” which would essentially be different character models than the default options we have.

Vanity always was considered as an option. A Guild Wars player myself, I know how much people can be interested in stuff that’s mostly – if not completely – vanity, especially looks.

Problem: Character Models are Graphics… that require Pixelartists (at that level, anyways)… and… well… we’re a little low on pixelartists at the moment. The two (three, if we count the third graphics guy in, who was more of a painter) pixelartists we had have gone missing without warning or further notice… like a lot of other Dev Team members. Sheck does some imagery from time to time, but he can’t concentrate on it, because he has too many other things to deal with, and so on. And good pixelartists… will likely not work for free – and Sheck can’t pay them.

We do have some other stuff in store, gold-sink wise, but all that requires time to conceptualize, time to code etc. Sorry.

Edit: Oh, we did have an idea about new weapons graphics, but they’re rather bad (and incomplete, I think), so they haven’t been implemented. We were planning to give them for free.
An example? A Frostblade was supposed to look like this: