06 September 2006

Random Invasions

One cool but hardly original idea in a MMO is to have monsters invade cities every once in a while.
That's good for a few reasons:
1. Adds more fun to the game (yes, you can die and lose your stuff, but FFS, it's just agame)
2. Promotes 'involuntary exchange of items' (you die, someone takes your stuff) :D
3. Brings players together to fight against those monsters.

One more or less revolutionary thing in how it will be done in EL is that there will be an NPC where the whole community will be able to donate money in order to have an advanced warning system. There will be an initial building cost, and then there will be a maintanance fee. Depending on how much the players are willing to pay for the maintanance fee, the advanced warning system will be more or less useful. For example, if they pay the minimum cost, the system will announce the invasion when the monsters are invading a main map. On the other hand, if it is well maintained, it will warn two minutes before the monsters spawn in a not so main map, which will help the fighters to go and kill them before they spawn on the main map.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Random invasions will certainly be fun, but I dont think that the idea with the advance waring will work out.

Mostly low level players benefit from that advance warning, but can't really pay the costs (500 hydro bars are a lot, and that was the lowest choice offered in your poll).
High level players (who don't frequent VoTD very often, mostly only pass through) will either survive long enough to bail out, not care about their losses much, or frankly benefit from a slaughtering near VoTD storage. I really don't know why any high level player should pay a dime for that warning mechanism. And sooner or later the word will spread through public channels anyway (rather sooner than later), which will be enough advance warning for fighters to pick up their gear.

I'd assume that every player reading your poll topic who did NOT caste a vote won't pay anything for this service.

7/9/06 10:09  
Blogger Radu said...

I disagree. Very few players (maybe 20) can deal with a strong invasions, the rest will be obliterated in just minutes, unless if they run.
I am sure that many will not pay the fee until the first invasion, then they will realize how useful it is.

8/9/06 00:16  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My initial assumption was that in these invasions only monsters that are available in that map would take part, so mostly goblins and orcs, more or less maintaining a storyline like "the monsters gathered and are now trying to regain control over their homeland". I agree that with increasing the invasion force you can make people realize the uses of a warning system, but you might also make people scare off VoTD completely; this lever needs to be handled with care.

On the other hand, there are usually quite a few heavy fighters in or near VoTD, most times already in fighting gear, due to the vicinity of KF, SKF and certain guildmaps.

Well, I guess we'll have to see how it works out; it will surely be fun in any case :-)

8/9/06 05:27  
Blogger Radu said...

If people will be afraid to go to VOTD, then so be it. It would be a good thing for us, because VOTD is the most populated map, which causes lag for everyone and increases the used bandwidth.

In reality, with a preemtive invasion warning, the players will have an ample opportunity to evacuate if they can't fight.

11/9/06 02:05  

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