Totally unrelated

Just a story that I somehow remembered two days ago, and I still keep smiling about it.

It was one of those nights when right after logging in I've got a message whether I'd join a group to do DPS. I knew the ones in the group from the guild, even went with them a few times, so I agreed. They told me that we are going to the pyramids. As an infrequent grouper (is that a word?) I knew next to nothing about these pyramids, except that they are some kind of an ancient Egypt alike pyramids with lots of undead.

This time, with me around, the group was strong enough to go to a place where they have never went before. In the way in we killed some weak and a few stronger monsters, I adjusted my tactic to use more fire. We also crossed a few traps - for example, big swinging rock blades. Then we arrived to the place. Cautiously, we went in.

As I usually need a few seconds to adjust to new places, I looked around. We stood in a corridor, with a stone walk in the middle, and huge, dark openings on both sides, where you could see something.. like.. I was zooming in .. acid lake? Wow. Something was moving in it. As you have guessed, these were some undead. They looked agitated, and were running towards a point I couldn't see.

I looked up to see where my group mates are, and realized that they got out of sight. Hurried after them - carefully - and found a monster standing in the corridor. Hmmm.. there is no other way.. where the hell are they then?

It is a bad habit to ignore the chat channel. But of course I did just that. Now, looking there, I realized that my group mates are fighting something down below, and were asking me to help. So I jumped down and joined the fight, but it was already a lost case.

After the wipe I  asked what happened. I was told that while I was looking down, my group run ahead, into a trap, which pushed them into the opening on the side. Now I don't even remember who the other players were, or when this whole thing happened, but this surprise was so funny that I still remember this after all these years.

The home is where..

There was a post on The Altoholic this morning about an interesting topic: Which MMO is your home?
Honestly, I don't have an easy answer for that.

Being the Vagabond and all, I don't really have such a home. But there are places to which I return from time to time. The most significant of these is Vanguard.

SOE's Vanguard is special for me for several reasons: When I started playing VG (after WoW), it was a buggy piece of .. a game, but it got significantly better in a few month. Then I stopped playing with it for a while (and returned to WoW), and then I returned to VG again. For non gaming related reasons, that was the time when my wife moved back to Hungary and started the divorce procedure, so I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, and a reason to flee from the real world. So I finally managed to get a character to the max level (first time in an mmo, not counting Guild Wars) and started raiding. Then we got back together, moved to another place, where for half a year I didn't have a broadband connection, so I stopped playing again.

But the story goes on.. this summer, VG goes free to play, which gives me the perfect reason to pick it up again and play some more..

How do they do this?!

Every time I feel that the Secret World is old news, and I really should buy GW2 now, TSW comes up with something new.
The Secret War ended yesterday, but, as you could see from the video that was left behind on the site, a new mission began. The first hint is in the video..
I'll not spoil the fun. Just a caveat: Do not give up until you are told that you passed the test. It took me about 20 minutes to get there.
I wish you good luck and sharp eyes.

Running around the Caribbean

Now, after I've found out that Port Royale 3 was published recently, and because I didn't really play anything in the last few days, here is another 'Musings' post: Caribbean MMO.
Yes. I know. PotBS. I know. I even played it. But no, thanks, it's not what I want. What I really want is an MMO where ships are for transporting people and goods (well, maybe an instanced fight here and there, but certainly not ship battles) and you have a normal person view, just like you have in every classical MMO. You can visit and explore the islands as well as a part of North and South America. You can fight pirates, soldiers, merchant bodyguards on land, you can explore Mayan ruins and you can learn the magic of the Indian shamans. You can take the one true religion to the natives and steal their gold. You can search for treasures marked by big red X-es on old treasure maps. Etc. Etc.
Combining this with a character background system such as the one found in Darklands, introducing new game systems for plagues, ship blockades and four sided pvp.. I'd love it.

PvV - Player vs. Vault

One of the most innovative MMO games I ever played was Code Of Everand. In general, I hate flash based games, and would have simply skipped this one too, but that time I came to this one from another angle: I needed to teach my daughter how to cross roads. 

The reason why Code of Everand is so special is the same reason why it was developed: It was a government funded project to create a game to teach road safety. While I have doubts about how efficient this game was to help the children with that, the goal certainly changed the way you would play the game.

Normally, a theme park MMO will have quest hubs, and when you are done with one such a hub, you go to the next. Travel is usually safe if you stay on the road, and you also have some quick travel abilities to basically teleport between places.

But that is not the way to go (pun intended) for a Road Safety MMO. In Code of Everand, your main challenge is to get from point A to point B in one piece. How did this work? Basically, the word was criss-crossed by glowing channels in which big monsters were travelling. To get to the other side of the road, you needed to look around (to both directions) and lay traps to blow up the monsters. Also, there were marked crossing places, where it was easier to cross the road. The analogy is obvious, except for the laying traps part, but I guess the game designers wanted something that would make the game interesting. 

The game was killed sometimes last year, but - to be honest - it is a good riddance. Still, I think it's a good idea to take an aspect of the game that is usually boring and repetitive, and make it challenging. 

To give you an example how this could be extended to other parts of the game, let's take a look at vault access. It's usually the same in every game: In the big cities/towns/etc you have the kafra, vault, lockbox, whatever that you can use to store items in a way that you can easily access is at the next similar city/town. By spending real/ingame money, you can also extend it. Now, let's take this, and make it challenging and rewarding at once. 

First of all: Foundation. If this is something that you can access from anywhere, if must be some kind of a pocket dimension between the worlds, right? Well, no, it can be anything, but let's say for the arguments sake that it is. This is a place with rooms and corridors where you can simply drop your stuff, and keep it there. 

Ok, now, let's introduce the Pest. The Pest is an extra dimensional parasite that eats background magic radiance. If there is a lot of background magic around, there will be a lot of Pests there as well. So, the more magic stuff you have in your pocket dimension, the more Pests you will have. Pests are relatively peaceful, but they hate if someone wants to take their food, and may be somewhat aggressive towards the player when he/she wants to withdraw the items. Simply put, your magic items will generate some resistance when you are trying to take them out of the pocket dimension. 

Now, obviously, we don't want to make this so hard for the player that they never use it, so let's see the the carrot: first of all, whatever else you store here - crafting components, etc - will not attract the Pests. Also, these dimensions can be accessed from anywhere, not just from the towns. Also, the store size can be relatively limitless. (But beware of the pests :D )

One more interesting aspect is getting more space one. If the space is not limitless, but it indeed is limited, then there should be a way to unlock more of it. My idea for this is the vault questing. Instead of paying for it, you would need to do quests to unlock more. The type of the quest can be anything, really: you may need to sacrifice a black goat, or collect magic crystals, or kill ten rats - but the main thing is that you get more space as a reward. 

Now, I am sure this could be even more interesting, but I've only came up with this example while I was writing this post.  I'm sure even this was enough to show how the boring elements could be made more challenging.