Goblin Squad Member
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To really immerse the player, there needs to be a plethora of content as well as "sandbox do you own thing", so you have it all at your fingertips, but you get to decide what to do next - perhaps that quest boss is too hard at your current skill level, so you have to go out and skill up before trying again - also for immersion, LORE LORE LORE! I don't see this as being a problem with the trove of background lore to draw on from the Pathfinder world, but I want to see it in GAME! Books to read (like Elder scrolls), writeable books for fan fiction that can be passed around in-game (like Ultima Online)
Heres Hoping!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Books are easy enough to put in, though I wouldn't expect a ton of pre-written ones.
This whole idea of starting small and building up is so people that want to build come in early, and people that want to play come in late. Someone looking for a large wealth of content should really wait for the game to get populated.
There will be a point when there are 1000's of contracts and a plethora of player created lore.
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Goblin Squad Member
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+1 on player written books
-1 on 1000's of quests
The escalation system, player group politics, a meaningful trade system etc. should take the place of thousands of quests.
Player written books would be great though. I just hope there is some way of sorting the gems from the complete trash.
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Goblin Squad Member
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+1 on player written books
-1 on 1000's of quests
The escalation system, player group politics, a meaningful trade system etc. should take the place of thousands of quests.
Player written books would be great though. I just hope there is some way of sorting the gems from the complete trash.
-1 to both. Player written books should not be allowed unless they go through a rigorous approval process, and then feelings will get hurt because books get rejected as they don't match to the lore or vision of GW. Quests are not needed in this game as they are known from theme park MMORPG's. What the game should have is a deep and rich lore, which you can find from items/books/artifacts/etc that are created by GW hired writers.
Bounties, War-contracts/assassinations(ie a Kingdom putting up payment to anyone not in the kingdom who kills someone from another at-war Kingdom)? Orders for rare ingredients, protection while travelling.
These should take the place of quests.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah Quests are really VERY artificial constructs anyway and they consume huge amounts of development resources to create. Better to expend those resources creating dynamic, interactive and renewable systems that along with the players actions help the world tick and come to life.
An example in a Quest driven MMO that I tried out in the past....
I ran into an NPC that had a big question mark over his head. I went upto him he said "I want to build a new house for my wife, please go out into the woods and kill 20 Treants and bring me back thier limbs so I can use them as lumber to build my house." So I remember thinking my reactions were as follows...
- Really??? You are standing in front of a full stand of oak tree's, not 5 ft away, with an axe in your hand and you need me to go into the WOODS to kill 20 Treants to get lumber for your house??? Do we not see something wrong here ???
- For what it should cost to hire an adventurer capable of killing Treants, should we not be able to purchase and have shipped in from other parts that had them in more accessable supplies sufficient building materials to build at least 50 peasant houses ???
- Why would I possibly WANT to help you get your house built and how would helping you build your house possibly make me a better Warrior/ Mage/ Cleric/ Etc ?
- No matter how many adventurers wander by here and kill Treants to help you get your house built, you will still be standing here 24/7/365 with your House unbuilt asking adventurer to help you build it, there will still be Treants roaming those woods getting slaughtered in the umpteen thousands and NOTHING will actualy change will it? So what's the point of me going into those woods for you?
I think the above really highlights the weakness of the Quest system in MMO's from a player perspective. The sad part is, from a Developer standpoint creating the above quest took alot of resources and man-hours, all for it to be barely a blip on the radar screen of most players on their way to "leveling up". YMMV.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
-1 to both. Player written books should not be allowed unless they go through a rigorous approval process, and then feelings will get hurt because books get rejected as they don't match to the lore or vision of GW. Quests are not needed in this game as they are known from theme park MMORPG's. What the game should have is a deep and rich lore, which you can find from items/books/artifacts/etc that are created by GW hired writers.+1 on player written books
-1 on 1000's of quests
The escalation system, player group politics, a meaningful trade system etc. should take the place of thousands of quests.
Player written books would be great though. I just hope there is some way of sorting the gems from the complete trash.
Personally I would rather see a lot of trash books than no book option. I think it will be extremely valuable to be able to hand people books in-game. Like The Empyrean Order patrols in starter areas that are out hunting griefers may be able to hand new players we encounter "The Empyrean Order Guide to Wilderness Survival" along with some other items useful to newbs. Or "The Ideologies of The Empyrean Order" to those who are thinking about joining us.
If they don't want those books they can throw them away. Just like we will throw away any books we don't think are worthy to be placed in our library, or that we have too darn many copies of/nobody wants to buy.
But there are other ways to do it too. I already suggested a reputation system for user-created content in terms of a music system and it would work well for a book system too.
In order to get a book you write published you need X approval points. You get approval points by going to other players and asking them to approve your book.
Later a moderator may come scan over your book. Especially if your book gets flagged by someone. If they find it is trash, then you and everyone who approved your book looses player-content reputation. That means it takes more points for your content to get approved, and they have less approval points. If a moderator ever comes through, reads your book, and decided it's really great you, and the people who approved your content get MORE player-content reputation. Meaning it takes less points to get your content approved and they can give it more approval points.
Books would either be submitted as instruction books or lore books. Instruction books would be required to give useful information to the reader, and lore books would be required to fit the Pathfinder setting and be a good read and/or source or lore.
For instance comedic story about a 20ft. tall goblin with fire breath might be acceptable but a story about sparkling vampires that takes place in Azeroth would not.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-1 to both. Player written books should not be allowed unless they go through a rigorous approval process, and then feelings will get hurt because books get rejected as they don't match to the lore or vision of GW. Quests are not needed in this game as they are known from theme park MMORPG's. What the game should have is a deep and rich lore, which you can find from items/books/artifacts/etc that are created by GW hired writers.+1 on player written books
-1 on 1000's of quests
The escalation system, player group politics, a meaningful trade system etc. should take the place of thousands of quests.
Player written books would be great though. I just hope there is some way of sorting the gems from the complete trash.
Personally I would rather see a lot of trash books than no book option. I think it will be extremely valuable to be able to hand people books in-game. Like The Empyrean Order patrols in starter areas that are out hunting griefers may be able to hand new players we encounter "The Empyrean Order Guide to Wilderness Survival" along with some other items useful to newbs. Or "The Ideologies of The Empyrean Order" to those who are thinking about joining us.
If they don't want those books they can throw them away. Just like we will throw away any books we don't think are worthy to be placed in our library, or that we have too darn many copies of/nobody wants to buy.
But there are other ways to do it too. I already suggested a reputation system for user-created content in terms of a music system and it would work well for a book system too.
In order to get a book you write published you need X approval points. You get approval points by going to other players and asking them to approve your book.
Later a moderator may come scan over your book. Especially if your book gets flagged by someone. If they find it is trash, then you and everyone who approved your book looses...
I like this idea. I very much want to see player-written books, and think the good outweighs the bad. Even if there was a way to simply destroy books and/or report books, I would be fine with that. Player-written books are one of the best ways to foster and support the player-driven environment.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd advocate disabling copy/paste in the book writing interface. This way a long, well written book is a valuable work, and it cuts down on the ease of mass-producing books full of penis ascii art. Of course, you'd need some sort of "interim save" feature so you didn't have to necessarily write the entire thing in one sitting. Then maybe a "finalize" option that locks it as is.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I'd advocate disabling copy/paste in the book writing interface. This way a long, well written book is a valuable work, and it cuts down on the ease of mass-producing books full of penis ascii art. Of course, you'd need some sort of "interim save" feature so you didn't have to necessarily write the entire thing in one sitting. Then maybe a "finalize" option that locks it as is.
Right. Because it isn't trivial to set up a macro indistinguishable from manually typing.
I'd advocate disabling copy/paste in the book writing interface. This way a long, well written book is a valuable work, and it cuts down on the ease of mass-producing books full of penis ascii art. Of course, you'd need some sort of "interim save" feature so you didn't have to necessarily write the entire thing in one sitting. Then maybe a "finalize" option that locks it as is.
I agree Dario. I like Andius's idea as well.
Now we also need to be able to write on scrolls for short notice,advertisement type things.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would assume it to be the same as signing over character stories for the kickstarter. Anything you publish in game belongs to Paizo.
Edit to add: It's been the case in pretty much every major MMO that anything you create in game belongs to the developer/publisher, including your character.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Of course: we all intuit that: point of fact is that all you have to do is write something original in any medium and you have copyrights. Unless GW expressly makes an agreement in their EULA and/or terms of service that copyrights accrue to them then some jerkwad who gets canned for griefing could turn around and file a lawsuit nd possibly win big time. And all of us would lose.
Hence my point.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd advocate disabling copy/paste in the book writing interface. This way a long, well written book is a valuable work, and it cuts down on the ease of mass-producing books full of penis ascii art. Of course, you'd need some sort of "interim save" feature so you didn't have to necessarily write the entire thing in one sitting. Then maybe a "finalize" option that locks it as is.
I agree with this as long is there is a printing press type option in-game that allows you to easily make more copies of an already written book. Otherwise copying books will be overly tedious/not fun and little use of books will be made except by macro users as a result.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I'm a little skeptical of the in-game books. Make it too difficult and they'll just become out of game "in-game" content. For example Empyrean Order could put all of these "books" up on their guild page in an e-book format that would far easier to create and edit then a simple text editor field actually in-game. Then distribute a "book" that is basically the URL to the "real" book.
I know it's a cool idea but there are particle issues to consider.
I like the idea of in-game player written content partly because I want at least one of my characters to do basically nothing more then wander the land, chronicling events of note. However I was fully expecting to have to do this primarily through out of game means.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm a little skeptical of the in-game books. Make it too difficult and they'll just become out of game "in-game" content. For example Empyrean Order could put all of these "books" up on their guild page in an e-book format that would far easier to create and edit then a simple text editor field actually in-game. Then distribute a "book" that is basically the URL to the "real" book.
Not if I have any say in the matter. Beyond the fact that I enjoy the RP aspect of an in-game book, it's like pulling teeth to direct people in-game to go to an out of game website. If a newb has questions they are far more likely to skim a book in their inventory than tab it out and look it up in a browser.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I did never care for NPC quests except for their Exp/Loot, never read the quest description...
Books would be ok for me because these are likely easy to implement but I imagine not really many would do anything with this feature.
If you care about pregenerated lore (as opposed t the lore that the players themselves will have a chance to generate in this game), you might want to look here.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Not if I have any say in the matter.
In EVE people would put whole newbie guides in their in-game profile bios. I used to have a Fleet command guide in mine. Then again EVE had what amounted to a Rich Text editor backed by a real HTML web engine. The browser even worked in-game. CCP eventually replaced their home-brewed one with Chromium and added API that let out-of-game sites viewed through the in-game browsers do game related things.
In terms of in-game resource use, a hefty fee for the use of a printing press (yes Golarion has a printing presses in various places and I see no reason that few couldn't have made their way to the River Kingdoms) would seem appropriate. Most printing presses use custom made plates that take a few weeks of work by a print-master and helpers to make.
A few weeks of in-game time being more like a week or so out of game. That's assuming the print-master is free to work on your order. *wink and nod toward approval process*
Then you have fancy and really expensive movable type presses, which would seem to me to be good items to add to chartered settlement optional add-ons. allowing for 'guild' made books, with the costs associated with getting paper and ink in the volumes needed, which likely won't be super cheap... at least the ink.
I'm going on about in-game cost because that's really the final major hurtle to keeping just total garbage and books of dicks out of main circulation. Make it expensive to make it worth having good content.
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However despite all that thought I'm still skeptical. That requires GW to add a working plain ASCII text editor at minimum along with an approval/rating system. It's a good idea, but not one I'd expect to see get finished even after launch. Printing Presses almost have the feel of the first 'major' add-on after Kingdom warfare gets rolled out and working. Something like a Social Life pack boosting non-combat professions and odd jobs or items/features. I'd throw something like Glass Blowing in there.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I know how it worked in EVE but I don't think, and hope it won't work that way here. First off EVE's in-game browser was a piece of crap and I always just ran EVE in windowed mode so I could use a real browser. Second an in-game browser made sense in EVE's setting. It doesn't if PFO.
I think forcing someone to type out an entire book in-game, rather than using tools like Word, is kind of sadistic.
Yep <WEG>. I agree with Andius, way more immersive and a book I becomes something of a rarity again. As it should be in a fantasy setting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm a little skeptical of the in-game books. Make it too difficult and they'll just become out of game "in-game" content. For example Empyrean Order could put all of these "books" up on their guild page in an e-book format that would far easier to create and edit then a simple text editor field actually in-game. Then distribute a "book" that is basically the URL to the "real" book.Not if I have any say in the matter. Beyond the fact that I enjoy the RP aspect of an in-game book, it's like pulling teeth to direct people in-game to go to an out of game website. If a newb has questions they are far more likely to skim a book in their inventory than tab it out and look it up in a browser.
The more we keep in-game, in-character the better for the whole environment/community, imo. Player-made books/scrolls + printing press and/or copier scholars is the way to go.
As for the potential for abuse, this is easily curbed if they can be as easily trashed and reported. GW will know who created the book, and can tag them for abuse. Also, I imagine book/scroll creating will cost money, which will act as a slight deterrent to quick abuse.
Side note, player-created "scrolls" were available in Underlight, an old mmo, and they were an awesome addition to the environment. Whole libraries were created by players, and were used by the community to research histories, etc, etc. Want to join group X, then you will need to travel to the Great Library and learn the history, etc, etc.