Item shops and dungeons for player-created content

[Mikko]

Let's be honest, a lot of small user-created content will never see the light of day otherwise.
It takes a lot of effort to make a well polished content pack with quests, artwork for mobs, items or whatever.

By giving potential devs an easier way to get their stuff in the game, you can at least have some sort of positive feedback loop to encourage them to contribute more.
What TMW needs most right now is developers and lowering the bar to allow one-off alpha quality content would help with that.

So I suggest adding an item shop for players who want to have a go at making items and maybe some kind of a dungeon/alternate dimensions thing to let players make some simple maps and have other players try them out and give feedback. What I'd like to see is TMW's player base getting more involved in TMW's development, more so than they are now. I think treating the main game as the development platform instead of restricting ourselves to strict content releases would help in achieving that goal.

[Cassy]

I see your point, but randomly adding new stuff leads to imbalance and stuff that doesn't fit together well. Problems we already have to deal with

[gumi]

and maybe some kind of a dungeon/alternate dimensions thing to let players make some simple maps and have other players try them out and give feedback.

That alternate dimension for player-created content already exists. It's called the test server. Here devs and other players can test your content, review it, give you suggestions and tell you what would need to be modified for it to get in game.

Keep in mind that we can not just add a map with no quest that goes with it since we already have too much empty space with no purpose other than being a grinding spot.

What tmw really needs right now is quest writers. Not necessarily scripters but people that are good at writing stories. If someone takes time to write a good quest scenario (including all npc dialogs) I will gladly script it so you don't need to learn tmwScript. You can either write your quest in text in the play form or using Twine (which is interactive and easier for organizing things)

[Mikko]

Here's an excerpt from an article posted by a developer of another popular open source game which explains what I'm trying to get at here:

Instant Gratification is your friend:
Making the barrier-to-entry for contribution as casual as possible is really important, because it's usually only after they've tried making art for you, that a person will realize they love doing it. In most life activities, people don't decide they're going to do X, and then decide to like it. People try X casually, like it, and then decide they're going to continue doing it. If they don't have a chance to casually dabble in it, they don't get started. This is exactly the way most game-modders get started - frivolous dabbling with the included editors, which they find to be fun, and which snowballs into further work. This is probably the same factor that got everyone reading this article started on programming - you wrote something trivial in some friendlier programming environment, it worked, and the joy of creation kept you coming back for more. Instant gratification is really important - it creates momentum and motivation.

Instant gratification is necessary to keep artists motivated. If an artist starts making a kind of asset for you, it's important for you to get it into the game and visible to them as soon as possible. It's very exciting to get that kind of approval of seeing it in the official build of the game, and vice-versa, it's very damning not to have one's work put to use. Artists rarely understand how difficult programming is, and will usually assume that you're not putting their art in because it's not welcome. It's also agnostic to either art or code, that they are not you; if you've put it on your mental checklist to take care of in a few weeks time, they're not aware of that. If you're not immediately working with a contributor of code/art/music, they usually will stop making more. This is fine for an one-off bugfix patch, but this is a death knell for someone who sending you the first in what might be an entire game's worth of models or sprites. You must follow up, you must work with them and keep them engaged. Almost all contributors who might contribute a whole game's worth of art will be lost if you don't get back to them in the space of a week - preferably a few days. This strongly speaks in favor of a RERO (release early, release often) policy.

It's a good read. http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=26396

[wushin]

I agree with all points made by everyone on this thread. Adding content is a plus. Doing so often is great. Now finding the help to do it and do it right is the hard part.

[gumi]

Also with adding more content comes the burden of maintaining more content so content should scale according to the number of active devs we have. If we have a lot of content and we need to do code refactoring or fix bugs it might be long and hard with very few devs. Having more content without having more devs could be unmaintainable. For example I have created the Sanguine Vault which was supposed to be some kind of fight club but right now we can't enable it because it still has bugs and I'm too busy with more important things like magic-v3. If we had more devs then maybe someone else could work on magic-v3 while I do this or I could work on magic-v3 while someone does it. The Sanguine Vault is just one example but there are many others. Just look at the pile of unused items that are part of unfinished quests.

tl;dr. we can barely maintain the content we already have in game

[Steingej Eisenserg]

i like the sandbox idea, no need to have sandbox content mix with the rest therefor no balancing issue. just needs a rad framework. logging into a server where everyone has @ abilities aint the same. (just dreaming here btw) sry aparently the earlier it is the more cryptic i get

[Mikko]

Balance regarding items is easy enough to deal with, just use an existing item from the main game like the dagger as a template for stats so they won't disrupt other aspects of the game.

Maps and mobs are a bit trickier, I think(?) there are flags do designate how much exp you can gain on certain maps, if there is then that could be set to zero exp.
Item drops are another issue, for new mobs you can again use existing mobs as templates and make them give no exp/drops, but maps with mobs added from the main game are going be a pain to deal with if you can't turn off drops with flags.

As for implementing this stuff, you could add the items to an existing npc shop and have another npc give warps to the maps.
At least adding the items would be a piece of cake to do, so we should just start from there and see if it attracts interest from players.

[gumi]

we have a flag for the drops but no flag for exp

[wushin]

We've been talking about having a Boss Points vendor for the longest time. Maybe we should try that out.

[gumi]

To avoid inflating the number of rares the items would need to never be removed from the shop. If we keep all those items in a shop we'll need more and more shops. Or we could add a script to OnEquip that would remove the item after 1 month.

[soseki]

It looks like nobody saw my post, I'll quote here:

Since the game hasn't received much new content lately why don't we make some old (rare) items or unreleased items available for a certain time thorough Ishis Monster Points. This is something that can be added to the game really fast, of course the items should cost crazy amounts of MobPoints, this way each player would get only a few.
If we add lots of different rewards, probably not everyone is going to choose/get the same items and it wont affect the economy negatively.
This will also change the number of online players, I'm sure it will increase it as everyone will be farming/killing/grinding mobs for those extra points that they might need to get their so loved item.
I would like to work on this if its accepted.

[Cassy]

Personally the only idea I don't dislike is adding unobtainable items (not new, unreleased ones because when we finally can care about new quests and such we might need them urgently) to a shop that sells them for money and/or boss points- and of course not few of them.

[Mikko]

The intent is to get players to contribute, so we should try to make things as easy as possible for everyone involved, having the item shop use boss points instead of gp could end up making players grind for points, i.e make players spend more time playing the game than contributing, which would be detrimental for what we're trying to achieve here.

I'm not suggesting dumping a bunch of items to the shop from the get-go, just one or two items to show players that they can add items to the game if they want to, we just need to get the ball rolling.

[soseki]

Just like the Contributors Shirt, why not do the same and reward anyone that finds a bug by giving them money or if they create a good quest give them any item they want?