Something To Do

I was surprised (and pleased) to hear this recent, spontaneous sunstone exchange:

Foster Finn thinks, "anyone around town? Just hanging around with nothing to do."
Eirian Caldwell thinks, "go on the newspaper quest"
Natas thinks, "newspaper quest!"
Xenos thinks, "try delivering a paper"

The Exclamation Point

The past several days have been a lot of fun for me.

Last Friday evening I was working in my GM office, compiling a punch list for my V756 deliverables, when another GM stopped by.  We started chatting about a project on which we were working together.  The chat slowly morphed into a teleconference: a collaborative assembly of the project components which lasted a little over four hours.

This was a new — and very positive — experience for me, as I typically assemble my update materials alone.  It was great to have a collaborator ask and answer questions: do we have these files ready?  Did we include this NPC?  Do we have all of the artwork that we need?

Collaborating with this GM has added an exclamation point to an already fun project.

Unpredictability

Fiona wins my favorite Quote of the Week:



I don't know what it is about her comment that made me laugh.

Toad Eats Puppies

I made a brief stop by the fairgrounds this evening while waiting for the update.  Silliness ensued.







Thanks to everyone who stopped by. I enjoyed your company!

Spending Time

I spent the evening away from the computer, so I did not do any development for Clan Lord this evening.  Instead I spent the evening playing table top games with friends.  It was a great way to spend the evening.

Fairgrounds Visit

I stopped by the fairgrounds for a couple of hours.  As with most of my visits, I made no formal announcements, nor did I have a formal agenda.



I enjoy not having an agenda, as it allows for a variety of topics.  Through the course of my visit, we discussed the following:

• Fellblades and the Champion subclass still need some tweaking
• Experience for high level characters
• Mystics need a boost (sorry, I couldn't resist the pun)
• Monster AIs and fun hunting areas
• Untrainus and respec quests
• The upcoming Capture the Flag event (plus some TF2 quotes which do not translate well to text)
• The changes made to Mazika's Mushroom Hut, and its subsequent impact
• I still get tricked by Hoggle

Thanks to everyone who kept me company during my visit.

It's Not A Distraction If Town Is Endangered

I met up with another GM this evening, and our conversation went something like this:

Me: I have to finish testing a script this evening.
OtherGM: I think I'm going to invade town.
Me: !
[OtherGM throws some Darshak in town.]

And that was it for me.  I just can't ignore a good invasion, and as a result I got zero testing accomplished this evening.  While I may not have gotten any work done, I instead managed to have a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, and I hope that the Defenders of Puddleby had as much fun as I did.

Welcome to V663

I stopped by the fairground for a little while and chatted about nothing in particular for several hours prior to the update.  CrumblingGM stopped by for a visit and, coincidently, the body count started increasing from a prior count of zero.



Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and enjoy exploring V663.

Hot Pink and Hot Fire

I am quickly approaching the first milestone of my current project.  I feel happy with the content that has been provided to me and I think I am just about ready to move onto the next phase.

I took a break from project design to work on some bugs.  Has anyone noticed if pink paint turns blue after the paint wears off?  I have been unable to replicate this problem, and I look like a fool wearing pink paint.

I then took a break from taking a break, and I ran a small invasion.



I am learning quite a bit about what challenges players are capable of handling.

You Dirty Ratticus.

I spent a good portion of today continuing with development of new content.  The work is rather a bit of a grind; lots of repetition and not a lot of variety.  I took a break from this numbing work to see what was happening online and was appalled to see that nothing was happening.

Town center needed to go from quiet to riot.







Thanks to all who participated.  I needed the stimulation.

Meet, Greet And Seat

I wish that Clan Lord had more tools for players so that they could hold more community-driven social events.  Bard auditions are a good example of people getting together to support other members of the community.



I also wish that I could think of examples of "social events" that do not involve hunts and quests.

Procrastinationcomplete!

I had intended to spend this evening debugging the mannequin script.  Instead I spent four hours hanging around the Fairgrounds and chatted about music, red onions, boobies, clothing, and the Clan Lord community.

In short, I completely procrastinated.



While I did not spend any time debugging, I still feel that my evening was well spent.  Thanks to everyone for stopping by and keeping me company.

Double-Clicking

The other day I logged on and noticed that the eleven people online comprised of

• one individual double-clicking in the foothills,
• one individual double-clicking in Metz cove,
• one individual triple-clicking (!) in noids,
• one bot healer in town,
• one bot librarian,
• one solo hunter in the east forest,
• and myself.

I do not know if I can adequately describe how troubled I felt witnessing this.  The heart and soul of Clan Lord has always been its community, and even though the population has declined, the sense of community has remained strong.  This is partly due to the role that players fill on a hunt: a hunt organizer determines what is needed for the hunt and seeks to fill those roles by contacting various players.  Sometimes players have hunted together and know each other, and other times new faces are introduced and new individuals are met.  Such interaction with each other strengthens the CL community as a whole.

I can not say the same for double-clicking.  It is an anti-social practice, and I feel that it is slowly strangling the game.  I wonder how many times a player playing a healer has logged on, asked if healing services were needed somewhere and then logged off because those roles were being fulfilled by double-clickers.  And as more people double-click, less roles require fulfilling.

I understand that sometimes a player may find it easier to just double-click instead of going through the hassle of organizing a hunt.  Others may not have the time to organize a hunt.  Some players may simply wish to be alone.  And I understand that the population is low and that there are time when there are no other people online to fill a hunting role.  This is when the problem becomes cyclical in nature.

I wish I knew how to address this problem.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

My RL deadline was met a day early.  This was a great relief for me, and after a long day of work I relaxed this evening by running a small invasion the east field.

It's tricky running an invasion, as I can never predict on who will attend (although I have grown apt at predicting who will not attend).  It's a bit of a balancing act: I want to include enough low level monsters for the weaker exiles, but I also want to give the veterans a bit of a challenge.

When the mini-boss was discovered in the Orga Camp, I was very pleased to hear one player ask the other players to wait before killing the boss orga, allowing others to gather around and participate within the battle, taking their best shot at the boss.  This lead me to think of an idea: what if there was a monster whose reward grew in proportion to the number of people who hit it?  Such a monster would be a guaranteed slaughter when soloed, but it would be a dispatch when five people tagged it, a kill when ten people tagged it and a vanquish when 15 or more people tag it.  The idea behind this monster is that it rewards participation of larger groups.

Clan Lord isn't really designed to support this type of a reward payout, but I betcha I could rig one – which leads to the question is this good design?  I'll give this some more thought before giving it a shot.

The State of Oz

Nunul started a thread on the Sentinel inquiring about the state of game development and if there were any motivated GMs.  I learned of this thread because one of the thread's reply had pointed to my Twitter feed – which accounted for the inexplicable doubling of my followers from four to eight.

My involvement with the Sentinel went from daily replies in most threads to daily reading of all threads to daily browsing of all threads to daily scanning of some threads.  While I admire the passion and energy of the Sentinel contributors, I openly admit that its tone often saddens me, and sadness is not a feeling that I should experience while reading a game forum.  As a result, I find my involvement lessening within that forum.  Ignorance is bliss.

I can not speak for the other Wizards Behind The Curtain, but if one desires the State of Oz, one need only read this blogs.  (Hey, that rhymed.)

The Journey Is The Reward, Unless It's Designed Otherwise.

Garr recently suggested an interesting quest variation: all monsters in the quest area have no experience value, but the boss's treasure chest more than makes up for the loss of combat experience.  My understanding on the motive for such an area is to award non-fighter characters an equal share of the area's experience.  Neither mystics nor healers need concern themselves with how many combat shares they have: they would receive an equal slice of the reward pie at the end of the quest.

That is, assuming that someone doesn't solo the pie.

I have run numerous invasions which have included the appearance of an invasion boss.  It has been my observation that players typically strive to take down the boss as quickly as possible, and that typically means there is no waiting for others to tag the boss.  And any chest which is dropped by the invasion boss is picked up just as fast as it is dropped.  This observation leads me to wonder if a quest based around a sizable end treasure would be shared consistently and equally.

The idea itself isn't a bad idea, and it would make for an interesting social experiment.  There are still a lot of questions that require answering: would players wait for other players for a predictable quest chest?  What incentive is there for sharing a large treasure chest?  How does a player get compensated if that player misses the reward?  Assuming that issues around the reward distribution may be resolved (I have some ideas on how to address that), the larger questions remain: is this a good quest?  Is this a fun quest?

I don't have the answers, but I do have the questions!

#yappygm

Yesterday was a very busy day for me: I pored through the bug logs and was able to fix and close out over thirty bugs.  Thirty-plus bugs!  I should give myself some experience for that achievement.  I felt very good about some of the bug fixes: I resolved the horrid bounce-around-the-bridge bug in the wetlands.  I also moved a certain altar away from a certain pool of blood so that certain subclasses won't accidentally collide into said altar.

This evening I had an idea for randomizing quests.  It's not a great idea, but it's a start.  Personally I prefer to not know the next step within a quest.  I like surprises, and I think that I'm not alone in feeling this way.  If I know that I need to visit NPC-X and then immediately run to NPC-Y, then the quest is predictable.  But if NPC-X were to tell me "please take this treasure to NPC-RANDOM," then I won't know what to expect.

On an unrelated note to nothing, I created a Twitter account today.  I'm not really sure why I did this, other than I seemed to have gotten caught up in some sort of buzz excitement from reading Mashable.com, and thought that it would be a good idea.  I've been good about making a journal entry every day here, and I wonder if I can do the same with Twitter.

Creating the account was very easy, but the Pooch Café image that I use looked absolutely terrible on Twitter, so I opted to use the silly Sparky and Yappy image instead.  It's a good size, but still looks a little dark.  I guess that I should treat that as a bug and fix it.

I don't yet know about what I'm going to Tweet.  Or should I say "Yap."

[Update]: I was annoyed enough with the Sparky image that I created a new, small picture of the Pooch Café dog.  Much better.

Push-button Role-playing

I recently chanced upon someone who was role-playing.  I was excited to see this, so I hung around and observed.  As I watched, I noted that some of this individual's actions were being repeated.  And repeated.  Randomly repeated.  This person was AFK and running a macro.

This was slightly disheartening to witness, and it lead me to reflect upon my (overly ambitious) plans to create Story NPCs.  One of the great thing about CL stories is not so much the plot, but it's the interaction between the characters.  It's fun to see the players' reaction to a developing situation or to have them match wits against a wily antagonist.  No matter how skilled the GM, I doubt that players would react the same way to a scripted NPC.  In fact, they would probably react to a scripted Story NPC the same way that I reacted to the scripted role-player.

Skirwan had a pretty good observation between macros and scripts:

Macroing is a Good Thing -- it saves typing, and lets people participate in the world at a more reasonable speed than if they had to type out "/action waves." every time.  Scripting is a Bad Thing -- it separates the player from the character and the game, and almost invariably hurts the game environment in the process.

I think that his comment applies to GMs just as much as it does to players.  Story NPCs could be a good way to spread some basic information, but NPCs should not be a substitute for good ol' fashioned organic role-playing.

Invasion for Two, Please

I observed today's FMOCR (as I have mentioned before, I really enjoy that quest).  The group was small but scrappy.  They made great progress, but unfortunately ran out of time.  I thought that an appropriate response would be to have the orga march upon the town.

I created a sizable invasion for the relatively small number of defenders.  Some stronger members of the party ran forward – separating from the main group – and were ambushed in Tanglewood and fell.  Some individuals left the main group to solo-rescue the fallens who in turn got ambushed and joined the fallens.

This intrigued me: why would a group leave the strength of the party and run ahead into danger?  Could it be the glorious call to battle and the wish to demonstrate one's bravery?  Or is it some deep-rooted rankwhore compulsion seeking to get some secretive vanqs?

Or is the answer simply an aversion to mobs?  Could it be that some people prefer to act in groups of two or three instead of a group of fifteen?

I'm now thinking a little differently on how I run invasions.  Perhaps I could try making some small-scale invasions for smaller groups of people and see how they go.  And I still need to be a little better on improvising stories on-the-fly.  I need me one of those generate-an-instant-adventure charts.

Post Scriptum

I had so much fun with the Wild Tuesday that I completely forgot to visit here!

I knew that I was overtired and it was time for me to stop when I tried to extend the Mirror Steeple Chase.  I placed the new steeple mirrors in locations that were accessible without having to go through the earlier mirrors in the chase – essentially I was creating short cuts to the goal.  Oops!  Regardless of that, I think that the players got a kick from seeing the old Mirror Room again, as well as the Desert and Cold and Snowy.  These areas used to be fantastically challenging, and it was very telling of the player's strength to watch them tear through these areas like the rat towers.

The experience was still a lot of fun.  All of the server admin work was completed in record time.  We could have ended the Wild Tuesday early, but since everyone was having so much fun, we just kept going Wild.