SriNitayanda wrote:As long as you dont actually make these changes, they wont happen I see nothing wrong with posting them. But as you can see it got very minor influence posting them.
Then I would briefly outline what's wrong and what IMO to change. But it's way too much job on reworking and balance to be realistic.
TMW haves several key issues:
1) There is way too much grinding and low drop rates. This forces players to spend too much time on monotonous boring crap, which isn't epic. So it provokes botting. Machines are better at monotonous routine work which isn't dangerous at all.
2) On other hand, crafting and mining is absent. Yet, crafting and mining can be nearly main source of income instead of grind. Mining can also be turned into (dangerous) adventures in horrific caves.
3) Economy does not assumes items sinking, only items sourcing. This reduces value of existing items produced by players and would not coexist well with crafting.
4) XP rewards also not really well-balanced.
Solution? In general, to have good reward players should be forced to do relatively dangerous and challenging actions where outcome isn't 100% predefined so player haves some chance to die if playing poorly and doing too much mistakes. That's where bots suck.
Obvious things to admit are:
1) Killing weak monsters should not give any noticeable rewards in terms of XP. The best approach I've seen is taking (Target level - Maximum attacker's level) as "difficulty base" and computing XP reward based on this difference. This way only challenging actions are rewarded well. In principle, tweaking XP curve can achieve something like this without drastic changes, though mentioned approach leads to fact botting for XP getting nearly 100% pointless thing as you have re-target bot for different monsters and it would die a lot if it expected to get reasonable rewards.
2) If easy monsters drop too much of valuable stuff, it would attract bots which are good at safe routine works. Monsters should drop worthless crap most of time. You can sell it for few GPs, but that's all. At most, worst monsters could drop something valuable (e.g. needed by crafters, etc). But then there should be serious chance to die to keep bots away. For humans it can add some fun and team action(this is MMORPG after all?!) . For botmakers it would mean awful headache since bots suck when it comes to decision-making in conditions where battle outcome isn't immediately obvious.
3) Obviously, crafting items should give most income. Crafting good items should take some efforts or prices to get right materials. But action itself could be not too time consuming and not very repetitive so there is no need to bot.
4) More random, dammit. If you roam in caves and stab some crap for a while, you can awake some powerful horrors roaming around. Then you better to run for your life. If you can run fast enough, of course. Or try to fight back... if you came with friends and can make a stand against real horrors. Needless to say it can turn botting and grinding to epic expeditions and adventures, attracting many players around to have fun (and some profit) together. And that's what MMORPGs for. In TMW there isn't too much of multi-player action, actually. Which is odd for MMORPG...
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