User:Bladestorm

From LSWiki

Incarnates as:

• Lysator - Developer
• Castam - Test Character

Contents 1 Regions 2 Areas 3 Guilds 4 Associations 5 Misc 6 Updates

Regions

• Losthaven's Pet Shoppe
• Northlands 3d mapping
• Avalon - the little island east of Almeria
• Gardagh - a barbaric island to the north of Avalon

Areas

Guilds

Associations

Misc

• Losthaven's Pet Shoppe

Updates

• Temple of Gaia - Moved it from the series of twelve rooms that was called "The forest of Devonshire" into the actual forested region of Avalon, and updated the code slightly in the process.

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My primary function within the mud at this point is development. I had characters at one point (obviously), but I just was not that good at power levelling, twinking, exploiting bugs, or any of the other things necessary to really make it in the world of Lost Souls, so I decided to do something about it. Since I was too stubborn and stupid to learn how to play in the world effectively, I decided to change the world. In September '07, I was promoted to developer, and have been trying to fix all of the things that I saw as broken.

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Here's a list of my general complaints about the mud.

• Issue - Liathyr is too complex, too confusing with its z-axis, and there is a bunch of useless crap in there, like discordian plays and stupid platinum bars.
  • Breakdown - Like most players, I had gotten too used to a 2d realm that essentially funneled me through an area to the most essential parts. I was also oriented towards the 'must kill for xp to gain levels' mentality, and had no interest in anything not specifically designed with that in mind.
  • Solution - Make more of the world 3d, so that the z-axis becomes standard. With the additional freedom of movement, I can add in a lot of realistic functionality, like more importance of flight and usefulness of intangibility. Re-orient the rest of the mud so that Liathyr is the norm rather than the exception. Also, I can take a look at the 'useless crap' and find an actual use for it.

• Issue - the world just stops for no reason
  • Breakdown - The entirety of the world was just the Almerian continent. No explanations were given as to the edge of the map. If something was sitting on the main map, you could scour the entire thing in about 3 minutes. I used to have a macro set up to go scouting for the ancient bonsai.
  • Solution - Make the rest of the world, and piece it all together as seamlessly as possible. Avalon was one of the first steps towards this, as well as Gardagh. As more and more of my regions get added in, the world will become a much bigger place, up to the point where I can start connecting my lastest piece of the puzzle to the first piece.

• Issue - I'd be fighting something a little out of my league, wimpied to rest up in order to come back and finish it off for some decent amount of xp, and some high level would waltz right past me, steal my kill, and proceed to kill everything else in the area.
  • Breakdown - With such a small world, there is only so much that you can kill. Add in that there is even less to kill that has any value in the xp/minute scale. Anything worth xp to a level 20 is worth the same xp to a level 120, who can kill it faster. Once a player finds a good path on the xp farms, they will stick to it no matter what their incarnations
  • Solution - add in more places so that there are more things to kill. Even better, add in more ways of gaining xp than just by killing. The downside to this, like with the cleric healing, is that some idiot will try to tick that ability to be uber-powerful for no effort. By adding in an immersive world that rewards active play other than combat, and by setting up stepping stones as far as difficulty levels go, this should provide ample places for the low-mid range players that aren't farmed by the upper levels.

• Issue - There are a ton of obscure pop-culture references that I just don't get. I don't like Monty Python's style of humour, and have never been interested in any of those movies. The Quest for the Holy Grail was almost uncompletable without this outside information.
  • Breakdown - The mud was originally set up to just be fun, almost like an inside joke. Everyone who was designing it or playing it at the time was around the same age level, and most likely, all of them could quote Monty Python verbatim. Though some people consider that movie an all-time classic, there are a lot of other movies that the younger generations would rather see.
  • Solution - Chaos already wiped out the Holy Grail references. Other pop-culture references will have to be weeded out as well. The Spears of Brittany, magickal spears that talk smack in combat and make references like 'hit me, baby', 'one more time', and 'oops, I did it again', may seem rather tongue-in-cheek today, but 20 years from now, provided LS is still around, most of the newer players will have no idea what that is about without doing extensive wiki searches (provided wiki even exists at that point). Any information that is vital to the completion of a quest has to be attainable within the game itself, and without any outside references.

• Issue - look at troll "This is a troll", help troll "No further help available"
  • Breakdown - some of the descriptions just suck,and other assume that you know intrinsically what that monster type looks like. Trolls come in many different forms. Is this the muscular, hulking monstrosity that pummels you with its massive fists (from Tolkein's world), is it the large-nosed, clawed creature that can only be killed by burning its remains (like from D&D), or is it short, have a gemstone in its belly button, and brightly coloured hair that stands up on top of its oversized head?
  • Solution - I have begun working on fleshing out a lot of the assumed races across the mud, and actually developing them as separate entities and cultures that can interact with one another. I didn't really know what a gnolls was, and most people explained to me that they were 'low-level evil creatures' or 'hyena-people'. Not really descriptive there. So, I did some research and updated the race help file, as well as the racial definitions. I had to figure out what they were, why they existed, how they interact with each other and other races, why (if they truly suck so badly) have they continued to exist, how the race came into existence, do they share any similarities with garou or sekh, etc.

• Issue - 'Ancient' cities would spring up overnight.
  • Breakdown - the mud was not set up to have any sort of dynamic content, or to allow for seamless expansion of the game at all.
  • Solution - As has been noted, in my new areas, there are towers, forts, cities, and villages that cannot be explored yet. Once those places become explorable, it won't be like a city has just shown up overnight. There may be a few series of sudden changes in the future, but once things get standardized some more, the world shouldn't just suddenly change. It should feel more like exploring a previously unexplored aspect of the world rather than random materialization. The Chinese culture didn't suddenly appear overnight when explorers first found their trade path to the east, the planet didn't suddenly swell in sized when sailors decided to travel west in order to reach the far east, and Australia didn't just magickally show up when Europe needed some place to send their criminals.

• Issue - Flight is mandatory
  • Breakdown - The only way to keep up when xp'ing in a group is to fly. Anything that doesn't fly is too slow, and therefore useless. No one uses wingless mounts because they are so slow.
  • Solution - Players are just used to moving at a certain speed, and the rest of the mud doesn't function at that speed. There are also other mechanical factors that have to be looked at, such as encumbrance, endurance, etc. If in reality, an average human could carry 14 tons worth of gear and still run faster and farther than a horse without getting tired, the horse would probably have never been domesticated.

• Issue - Killing the gods is a necessary part of the xp circuit.
  • Breakdown - 1. the gods are way too accessible. 2. the players have power that rivals the gods. 3. there are no repercussions to slaying the gods.
  • Solution - Make the gods less easily accessible, and while I am at it, make more gods. Crank the power of the gods so that they are...I dunno... god-like? Not so much as make them raw killing machines, but make them so that they are hard to damage, regen incredibly fast, and have a ton of tricks up their sleeves. 45 minutes of pounding on them, going through a vast multitude of endurance potions, and you finally manage to get the god down to 'somewhat hurt'. Then randomize them some so that the players can't learn 'the trick' to slaying them repeatedly. There should be many more stepping stones along the way than major human npc to dragons to gods. Then, add in consequences to slaying the gods. If someone slays Cthulhu, an ELF shouldn't be able to invoke Cthulhu at anywhere near his full capacity until after he has had a chance to reform.

• Issue - "What's the best armour in the game?" "What's the best sword in the game?"
  • Breakdown - This is essentially just bad training from other muds. There should be no 'best' of anything. Another aspect of this is that really powerful items tend to be rare, maybe only 20 in existence....but when we only have 20 players, that means each one can have this powerful item.
  • Solution - More items of varied abilities may be a viable solution. For a while, the 'best' armour was a geos, but once strata armour came out, players started flocking to get that in a full set.

• Issue - "There aren't any decent spears"
  • Breakdown - Very similar to the above scenario in that we only have a few players, so exquisite gear is the norm. Plus, there are a ton more swords than any other type of weapon out there.
  • Solution - More areas with more types of weapons. I can't change the outlook of the players that demands that they have the best gear possible on each of their characters, but I can provide a wider variety of things to choose from. Gardagh has the Gungnir, who are named after the spear of Odin. They will have a wide selection of spears once I develop them further, and Devonshire will have a wider selection of spears.

• Issue - "Why doesn't the samdworm eat the spearmaidens and the hobgoblin fort?"
  • Breakdown - With only one desert, anything that had source reference to the desert got thrown in there. the multiple cultures from several different worlds were thrown together and crammed into one small section of the world.
  • Solution - By expanding out the rest of the world, we should be able to find better matches for where to put our constituent material, as well as have logical places to put new material. If anyone wants to code up a city based loosely around London, Avalon would make a suitable home for it now. If I get around to coding up an area that has a middle-eastern flair and bits of Indian culture to it, a temple of Kali, Shiva, or Krishna would fit in well there.

• Issue - 326k gold on the floor at Citrina's.
  • Breakdown - We have a faucet economy, in which the shopkeepers have an unlimited supply of coins that they can drop onto a player. Gold essentially has no value anymore after you get your initial guild skills trained and get past about level 20.
  • Solution - An actual economics system is far beyond my capabilities for right now. Trying to code something that complex would require me to know every aspect of it in order to code it correctly. Considering there are people out there whose sole function in life is to try to understand economy, and I am not one of those people, actual economy may not happen for a while. I have a few things in store for some of the traders and shopkeepers out there.