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[MUD-Dev] defeating twinking through game mechanics



This is a tangent topic to a thread started by raph and going on with the EQ designers on mud-dev.
 
One of the design failures IMO in everquest is that it follows the old 'weaponcode' model of weapon damage.  I.e. one hits for the 'max damage' of the weapon rather than any sort of measure of player skill.  This means the weapon is tantamount.  Nothing matters except for the weapon stats, in the end.  With armor the same way, you have created a game where heavy twinking is inevitable. 
 
I'll throw out an alternative system here, and let you guys kick it around.  We did something like this on EOTL, but I think it could have been better.  The best system I have seen was on the shattered worlds mudlib, all praise Dredd!
 
The basic idea is to have weapon archetypes, and then bonuses.  The bonuses reflect magical power, fine weapons, artifacts.  The limitation to twinking here is that a poor player won't be able to exploit the benefits of more powerful weapons such that each weapon would have several factors (speed, damage, weight, accuracy) and modifiers. 
 
Your basic rusty newbie weapon might be (-speed,--damage,-accuracy), and that newbie would benefit from a weapon with no minuses.  however a (+speed, +damage) weapon would not benefit them since at their _skill_ level they cannot exploit the bonuses.
 
The other bonus of such a system is you have a single clear metric for balancing reward.  The total bonus of a weapon should be exponentially linked to the rarity.   With such a clear metric, there's no doubt in the designer's mind when they give an 'orc' a weapon with a total bonus of (3).
 
Likewise armor needs to be balanced vs. player skills.  If you put the finest platemail on a totally inexperienced fighter, giving them the same protection as a trained warrior devalues the effort of training that warrior. 
 
So, in sum, I see this issue as one of affordances.  We create the system that enables twinking.  It wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't reward it.
 


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