"Map/monster of the week" yay or nay?

Started by Achelexus, Sep 03, 2018, 12:55 AM

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Achelexus

I see features/mechanics like this on many servers, a random monster/map/dungeon(sometimes all of them) gets chosen and everything there has bonus loot/exp for a determinate amount of time, after said time is over, other map/etc gets chosen and so on.

Is this a good game mechanic? Seems like it just kills one of RO's biggest purposes, the freedom to come and go, and grind whatever you want to level, by essentially forcing a "meta" where you just go kill whatever is in the spotlight as it's the most efficient.

What do you think of this?

yennar

Ragnarok has a big problem: You got many many maps with many many monsters out there but most of them are not efficient for leveling or farming.
The map/monster of the day/week is just an option to make other maps/monsters a bit more interesting than before.

Blinzer

#2
the whole fantasy of an open world is a scam. the reason why the original zelda and older games functioned as true open worlds is because you could go anywhere at any point in time and get your a*s handed to you, but you could also succeed if you were good enough at it. there's no such thing in the modern day rpg, there's gear or level or skill requirements littered everywhere. you can't walk into a lategame dungeon and clear it no matter how good you are, but that's something you can do in an open world game

the deeper you dive into precise scenarios, the more streamlined your game is going to become. even if you balance the exp out there will still inherently be an order in which you have to do things, and a "best place to get exp or zeny or items". you can get around this by making places with monsters of almost identical strength and giving them item drops of almost identical strength, but that's just a cheap magic trick to cover up the reality. there's way to make it more tricky by giving value to hunting different places not just by experience but through exp-equipment-consumables and whatever else affects character stats, but it's really just the same s*** covered with different flowers

i think at the end of the day the trick is to make people not care about the fact they're being taken on an adventure. you do that with good gameplay, interesting mechanics and by putting something that people can take away from your game even once they're done playing it



Insomnia2000

I think it can be a good mechanic/feature if it's done properly. Most of the time it's implemented as some sort of completely random selection. Then you end up with monsters like Seals or High Orcs getting an EXP boost when they don't really need it. Even if you narrow it down to some monsters that you think are lacking, you can't just put a blanket x2 EXP on -this- monster for the day. Some monsters might need x3 EXP to be decent and others might need x1.5 to get players to go there. You'd need to manually create a list of monsters and how much EXP that certain monster should be increased by.

Overall, I'd say that the "Monster of the Day" is just an easy way to add another feature bullet point to the list. It usually doesn't do much to solve the issue which is, some monsters are pointless in both loot and EXP.

I think the best approach for a vanilla server to take is to "highlight" that area for a few weeks. Temporarily, manually adjust EXP and/or loot for the area, add in some local quests for hats or EXP, temporarily create incentive for those monsters through both EXP and items, and you'll end up with players wanting to go to an otherwise undesirable area. (*cough* Umbala).

In the end, it's always just a temporary solution for the "this area sucks" situation. The monster/area goes right back to being useless after you're done. The safest, long-term approach for a vanilla server to take in making an area more usable would be through the creation of hat quests or other quests that require items from that area. Example: Make Elastic Band required as part of a cute hat quest and people might actually go hunt Wootan Shooters.

Achelexus

Quote from: Blinzer on Sep 03, 2018, 07:15 AM
the whole fantasy of an open world is a scam. the reason why the original zelda and older games functioned as true open worlds is because you could go anywhere at any point in time and get your a*s handed to you, but you could also succeed if you were good enough at it. there's no such thing in the modern day rpg, there's gear or level or skill requirements littered everywhere. you can't walk into a lategame dungeon and clear it no matter how good you are, but that's something you can do in an open world game

the deeper you dive into precise scenarios, the more streamlined your game is going to become. even if you balance the exp out there will still inherently be an order in which you have to do things, and a "best place to get exp or zeny or items". you can get around this by making places with monsters of almost identical strength and giving them item drops of almost identical strength, but that's just a cheap magic trick to cover up the reality. there's way to make it more tricky by giving value to hunting different places not just by experience but through exp-equipment-consumables and whatever else affects character stats, but it's really just the same s*** covered with different flowers

i think at the end of the day the trick is to make people not care about the fact they're being taken on an adventure. you do that with good gameplay, interesting mechanics and by putting something that people can take away from your game even once they're done playing it

I'm not saying that you can beat Thor's Dungeon fresh off the tutorial island with your knife and cotton shirt, but compared to other MMOs, RO does have a lot more freedom in the sense that the game doesn't guide you or force you to follow a linear area treadmill to level your character (other than Renewal exp scaling mechanics). If you know how to use your class well, you can go farm areas far beyond what your level might suggest.

Playtester

For pre-renewal I think it's great, but I prefer the variation that it's manually decided by a competent staff and done via database edits rather than a fixed increase.

For example, once per week the staff chooses a low-level, a mid-level and a high-level area that is usually unpopular, then increase the rewards in such a way that the area is at least as good as the popular areas, but also not better than those.

So basically rather than creating one area that's better than the rest, you simply add more areas to the list of "worth it" maps.


On a sidenote, it's not necessarily bad if all players go to the same map. It might not be good from the "open world" philosophy, but for private servers with less than 100 players in an MMORPG with a world big enough for 50000 players, it's actually nice to see other players for a change.

Wolfie

Quote
All men are not created equal. Some are born swifter afoot, some with greater beauty. Some are born into poverty; and others are born sick and feeble. Both in birth and in upbringing, in sheer scope of ability, every human is inherently different! Yes, that is why people discriminate against one another, which is why there is struggle, competition, and the unfaltering march of progress! Inequality is not wrong, equality is!

I like the speech of Charles zi Britannia from Code Geass. Basically, some things are meant to be better than others. We enjoy the fact some facets of a game are better than others. Discovery of optimization is one of the best things about playing games. People want to find the easiest way to do something, you get chemical reactions and stuff from it.

So basically, I prefer letting people find the best way to do a certain thing and reward them for it, rather than funneling players.

duckbenok

Quote from: Wolfie on Sep 06, 2018, 11:51 AM
So basically, I prefer letting people find the best way to do a certain thing and reward them for it, rather than funneling players.

Sometimes its hard to find the best way without hints like how to get colored HH /heh