Today, Warhammer Online's Associate Producer James Casey featured one of the two "In Development" letters published by Mythic and GOA. I think it's worth mentioning, because I'd like to talk about some of the points he makes:

---

One of the things we've been discussing with the Core Testers lately is the economy of WAR. We received some excellent feedback and we're formulating plans based on that discussion, however we want to open up the dialogue to all players for broader input.

As we continue to look at Warhammer Online (where it's been and where it's going), we're examining the game from a macro and micro (big picture, little picture) level. One of the more macro areas we have discussed is the overall game economy. To put it bluntly, it's not where we or the players would like it to be. The designs and decisions made during development left us in a hard position, where, in order to jumpstart the economy, we need to make some changes. Before we go into that, let us look at the status of the economy now.

The basic principle of a viable sustainable economy is supply and demand. If these are balanced, economies can sustain themselves. Tipping too far to either extreme can cause an economy to falter. In WAR, one can see examples where we made a misstep based on this principle; too much supply for the demand (plenty of gold, nothing to spend it on), and not enough supply for demand (not enough items are tradable). In a way, these two dynamics feed one another.

Let's look at an example:

Public Quests provide loot bags which allow the owner to choose an item that is specifically tailored to their class and bind on pickup (BOP). This does two things; limits the potential demand for the product because it is class specific and makes it so it can't be offered in trade because it is BOP. This feeds the problem that there are not enough items being available. Compounding the issue, if the item is not useful to the person that earned it, they will sell it, gather gold, and due to the lack of items in demand, they have little to spend their gold on. It's a vicious cycle.

So how do we look at ways to change our current economy to balance both supply and demand? To accomplish this we need to look at solutions that will tweak the way items are rewarded. Not just how useful they are to the individual, but also as potential trade goods in the economy. We have a good idea on how to do this, but we want to throw the issue out there and get some feedback proactively, before we settle on a design.

What we'd like are some thoughts on how to change our world drops, PQ loot, and the like to make them more viable and valuable to the economy which will hopefully balance supply and demand. Examples would be: making items BOE versus BOP, making items useful to multiple classes, etc. 

 

Making some changes will allow us to redefine the balance of supply and demand and give us greater flexibility in introducing items going forward, which will benefit characters of all ranks.

---

I'd like to explain this a bit for those who didn't play Warhammer Online. When it comes to economy, the game came out with one idea on mind, keeping it simple and controlling the inflation at any cost (especially after some bad experiences the company had with DAoC), The result was that after the first months, economy was conspicuous by its absence. The crafting professions were supposed to be "supporting" and not too deeply involved in game mechanics (as apparently the only other option was to clone World of Warcraft). This meant you couldn't craft armors, weapons, clothes or basically anything useful for quite a while, until they got re-vamped, adding some extra flavor to talisman making (allowing players to customize their gear a bit with some saucy extra bonuses better than those they could get with random talisman drops) and alchemy (potion making, really reduced to a couple of overpowered potions).

Still, it's basically something done usually inside the guild. Why? Because being more simple doesn't make it less boring, the game really forces you to have "friends" at higher levels (so, usually, if you are somebody who would care for those extra stats and buffs, you'll have a 99% chance of being in a guild) and the often diluted realm pride, mixed with the auction house being only in the major cities (which means during the first 30 levels you won't be going there unless you specifically need/want to), means you really won't do stuff just to sell it. Also, as there's nothing you can buy, and money is "cheap", trying to exploit the system gets you nothing.

Because, yes, they also tried to fight with gold farming, making it unnecessary because gold was "abundant". Or better, because you really didn't need to buy anything expensive, and even if you spent a fortune in that ultracool weapon, it would mean almost nothing when it came to power increase. Not to mention the best gear was bind on pickup, so, in the end, you needed to get it yourself.

No crafting, no trading... yeah, this seems like the economy was broken. But is it broken at its core? It looked so obvious when the game came out, and it's almost hilarious the way it's now presented. As if somehow it was surprising for somebody. "Hey, look, we enforced a economy based on players not wanting to purchase stuff, and now it sucks". Offer and demand? I'd even mention interaction or usefulness. Also, I've only understood one "solution" by reading the letter, making some of the Bind-on-Pickup items Bind-on-Equip, or maybe not binded at all. It's a bit poor, considering this still doesn't make 99% of the items more desirable, and only the highest sets would get some actual market love. And I mean -the highest- sets, as getting high level armors got easier and easier over time.

Maybe the economy on this MMO can still be saved. Maybe it does need a complete re-vamp. Only time will tell if it'll be able to improve or not. However, it does already state something about what happens when you completely forget about it when developing your massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. I really hope, by the feelings I still have for this game, that these solutions shut my mouth up. And who knows, maybe at some point in the future somebody writes a developer diary saying something like "hey, segregating players by their levels makes them segregated, lololol!".

Or maybe, as Ozzy sang when he became a weird old man, "I'm just a dreamer".

If you are into retro-gaming you probably have some idea of what DOSBox is. If you're still not aware, it's the Disk Operating System (DOS) emulator. The project started several years ago, and it's aimed mostly towards video-games. It's quite mature and stable, and companies like GOG.com or Steam are using it, in most cases, to allow the execution of old games in modern computers. Have you ever tried to play a game pre-2000 in Windows 7, or even Windows XP? It usually won't run, as most of these games were written for DOS. Even when Windows 98 was already standardized, there was no reason to create a game that run on it natively. Even games that needed windows to run, still worked pretty much under DOS (it makes sense, as Windows itself was just, somehow, another layer over MS-DOS).

DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender is a drop-in replacement for the popular DOS/4GW DOS Extender and compatibles. During 1990'es many software applications and games were developed using Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers which allowed DOS applications to run in 32-bit flat protected mode environment, e.g. be "DOS Extended." This functionality was provided by the DOS/4GW DOS Extender from Tenberry Software, a middleware product which at the time was bundled with Watcom tools. While being royalty-free, DOS/4GW was big, slow and lacked many important features, all in favour of its commercial (and rather expensive) siblings. To remedy the situation a number of independent projects set out to create a replacement of DOS/4GW that could match and exceed it in terms of features, performance and price. DOS/32A is the result of such a project.

There are probably many more tweaks, but until now I didn't really need more. Also, notice that some particular games may be a bit picky, needing special settings for themselves.

I've been messing with Construct these past days, and decided to finally give it a chance and try to do some basic stuff; some kind of basic platforming + hack&slashing game. Maybe even just a short level, no more than 5 to 10 minutes to get through. Anyway, as I'm still thinking on how to deal with it, I'll show you what it'll get for sure:

As the dungeon system has been completely re-vamped (will talk about it on my next post), we currently found ourselves with an attribute that's more or less useless. Leadership doesn't impact anymore the amount of people that can come with you to a dungeon, as these are currently open to everyone. However, there's still the Pressure system (and we don't plan to remove it). Should we keep the attribute just for this? Well... with one of the great mechanics being developed at this very moment, it will be replaced by something that may prove to be more interesting. What am I talking about, you may be asking? Well, stay tuned and you'll know!

In case you're not still aware of it, Sleep is Death, by Jason Rohrer (Passage), may be the next big thing. This two-player (and only two-player) storytelling game follows a very original formula. While one player plays the main character, the other one is in charge of -the rest- of the game. Everything! You may be thinking of something like the DM client for Neverwinter Nights or Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, and I guess you'd be correct to a certain point. The possibilities, however, are a bit wider here. Plus, the more you play (and, especially, the more you play with different people) the more stuff you'll be able to do. Why? Because all the stuff created for one game is carried with you to the next one. A bit like Animal Crossing, when your character appears in someone else's console.The game is already available for pre-order for just $9. If you're interested, just check Sleep is Death's official webpage!

Today was the last day of the Second Season of the Death Raiders Alpha. To celebrate it, we run a small event where two of the players engaged in a small ceremony that reached its climax with the couple casting "Link" on each other:

General Bauhaus, the city's fascist dictator, has had all the green space in town destroyed! Trees are banned! Flowers outlawed!

I've played some Dragon Age during the past days. Even though I'm not sure if I'd qualify the game as something as amazing as the critics say it is, I've found some really nice stuff throughout the game, and hell, it's being quite fun. And some times frustrating, in a lovely way. Probably many of you have lived the following situation:

The last head falls to the ground. Enemy corpses lay around your badly injuried (but still alive) party members, as they rest for a couple of seconds cathing their breath. They need to ration the provisions, as the final confrontation against the $evilmotherfucker feels closer and closer.

The group continues its journey through the dark dungeon, following a perfect formation. The full-plated warrior walks first, followed by the rogue and the archer. Behind them, the mage. There's a big room at the end of the tunnel they're walking across right now, roughly at 15 metres in front of them. The warrior draws his sword and holds his shield, anxious. The party moves forward and... "click". Silence. Trap.

Fire everywhere.

The warrior tries to get back to verticality, only to see how the party is ambushed from both sides. First one to fall? The mage. The group tightens their positions, trying to overcome their enemies, and the battle rages. The archer is bleeding a lot, and won't be able to hold much longer. Her wounded look reaches the warrior, who suddenly pauses the game and, getting pallid by moments, exclaims:

I haven't saved the game for... 40 minutes!!

We got lots of new graphics for Death Raiders this week, apart from the tiles I mentioned in the previous post, and I'd like to mention a couple of them. While many were taken directly from the RL Tiles (altars, fountains, stairs...), and Tome Tik (jewelry...), there are some made from scratch (and consequently, worse, but I'm still kind of proud of the results).