Priorities

[Molly]

Like I already said in a previous thread, I think we need a place to list the best of all the ideas that have popped up during the last year and also earlier. Not all ideas are feasible for various reasons, and some may need a too big coding or building effort for someone to handle all that work.
But if we can agree about where we'd ideally want the mud to be going on the long term, it should also be possible to discuss more modest changer and additions that would improve the gameplay without affecting the end goal negatively. Some of the smaller changes  could even be stepping stones to an end goal, making the big changes that we'd admittedly need a bit easier.

Many of the ideas hang more or less intimately together, so I've divided them in 7 different groups.

Below is a list of ideas that I personally like and would support. Others may have different priorities, so feel free to add to and comment on my list. I'm going to comment on the different parts myself in a later post, mostly to explain why I think they would be good.

1. MORE NEWBIE FRIENDLY GAME
* Fixes to Mud School and Quest Academy (partly done)      
* Fixes to the Newbie zones (hopefully Kvetch will deal with this)
* KaVir's client app   (finish, put download package on website and advertise)        
* Fix the buggy maps  (The code seems to be fixed now, so I'll continue work on the zones)        
* More Newbie equip quests  (another assignment for Kvetch)?  
* Quest journal and personal notepad   (a prototype is ready for testing)
* Exp points for exploring          

2. CLASSES AND A MORE INTERESTING FIGHT SYSTEM
* Balance the current classes, (reshuffle existing skills, remove GM?)  
* New skills/spells system  (skilltrees)    
* Elemental weaknesses and strengths  (could make fighting a lot more interesting)
* Add stamina/action points (Once is apparently working on this)              

3. VEHICLES, PIRACY AND SPACE BATTLES
* New vehicle system  (Horus has something almost ready)
* Long-range and/or room damage weapons for vehicles (promotes spacebattles and piracy)
* Coordinate based navigation system in space  (enables hyperspace jumps)      
* Make some vehicles crashproof   (promotes piracy and spacebattles)

4. RACES
* Remove current attributes? (not sure if I like this though)
* Cybernetics (a chance to customise your character)                

5. ARTIFACT SYSTEM
* counter removed or reworked  (is being worked on)            
* Artifact detector (almost done, under testing, pricing needs to be decided)         
* Fix existing artifacts  (relocate some, possibly change stats)    
* New artifacts (sitting in buildport)            

6. PETS, MOUNTS AND GOLEMS
* Trainable pets (an old dream of mine)
* Golems work only partly (script driven, might be better coded?)
* Herd animals (would be a cool feature for Oldwest)

7. IMPROVED AND EXPANDED CRAFT SYSTEM
* new pricing on lumberjack  (remove decreasing reward)  
* Farming and gardening (once per zone reset, new pricing)
* add cooking/catering  (makes farming and gardening more useful)      
* add advanced brewing (base on existing herbs, encourages exploring)
* full system (gives farming, lumberjacking, mining etc. a purpose)

8. DEVELOP THE CLAN SYSTEM
Clans are important, both to PK and to social interaction.
Eventually Clan HQs should be open to raiding by other Clans, to improve the challenges.
There are a lot of measures to be taken before this end goal can safely be achieved though.
The details are discussed in another thread, I forgot which one, so need input on that.
However we should not forget the ultimate goal for the clans.

[Virisin]

POINT 1: I think someone somewhere was talking about a better transition from mud school and newbie zones into the real world. The suggestion that seemed to gain a lot of support was some kind of quest or mission to do this, so I'll try flesh an idea out a bit:

Once someone has graduated mud school it would be nice for them to somehow be given a 'major' quest that essentially gives them some kind of direction in an otherwise enormous world. Most big open-world games you play on consoles have the main series of quests, and minor quests are completed as you go - I think this could be applied to 4d in a way.

If graduates have some kind of specific aim straight out of mud school it might help them feel less dwarfed in the world, ideally this aim would take them through all four dimensions but not be too difficult. Basically just finding specific people in specific places: e.g. first to the Old Yorke, then maybe to Odessin or Green Fenn, then to the Golf Course, then into New Goznemia or Necromunda, then to Dry Gulch and on to Legend or Hole in the Wall, and then into the Greek Archipelago.

The details are not all that important as long as it is interesting and gives them reason to visit and learn the way to some of the good levelling spots for new players, ideally completing stages of this quest would give significant enough experience boosts that it would be worth doing for a newbie and help speed their way through the first remort. Each person in each specific zone might even have a mini quest before they send you on: get to a certain level, kill a certain number of things in the area.

Thinking about some kind of direction I would suggest:

Olde Yorke -> Convent -> Odessin -> Golf Course -> Pleasure Planet -> New Goznemia -> Dirt Farm -> Legend/Hole in the Wall (?) -> Greek Archipelago.

[Prometheus]

Molly you forgot potential p-wipe and cleaning up of the code in general (possibly a new code base which would be easier to code in and not with tons of files all over the place) I think most of the changes should be pushed into the next version of 4d since there are many new things we could do with starting over. I know it will be a b**** for builders if we use a new code base but with what we have it might be a better idea to start from scratch.

There is a crafting patch but it is for a different code base. This might be something Once or someone better at coding than I look into. But it does stomp on some of the skills we have in the game (brew is one that comes to mind)

But that is my 2 cents worth.

Prometheus

[Molly]

Molly you forgot potential p-wipe and cleaning up of the code in general (possibly a new code base which would be easier to code in and not with tons of files all over the place)

I didn't mention a totally new code, since I don't think it's ever going to happen. It would be an enormous assignment, and I don't really see anyone having the time, ability and interest to carry it through.

And to tell the truth, I'm relieved. Massive code changes always affect the zones in a lot of ways that the coders never seem to be able to anticipate. I've been through one total code change, and it brought so much work with fixing the zones that it took me over a year to get them in shape again. And that was back when the world was a lot smaller too.

As much as our crappy code could need a cleaning up, I think we are stuck with it. We should work with what we have, and do whatever improvements that are possible without a total upheaval.

And I actually believe that a lot of development can be done with a simple step-by step approach. Elephants are best swallowed in smaller chunks.

The way I see it we have two main priorities:
1. To make the game more appealing to newbies, so that they stay long enough to really get into it.
2. To make the game more interesting to oldbies, so that they not only stay longer, but also stay active longer.