Eternal Lands' MMORPG Postmortem: Mistakes and Lessons, Part V

Eternal Lands' MMORPG Postmortem: Mistakes and Lessons, Part V
Author: Radu Privantu
Description: The author ends the series with a discussion of some of the events that occured the past year as well as a summary of the mistakes and lessons learned during the development of Eternal Lands.

Just wanted to thank you for writing all of the articels.
They are really good and will help others in their future projects.

definately good stuff. Usually takes a few tries to get it right

Glad your one of many to realize that things like community forums where some players gets a chance to whine about everything only represents the vocal minority most of the time.

Often times your lucky if 10% of you player base even goes to the forums, so those guys screaming that you fuxored the game usually represent very few people.

You certainly dont want to ignore them, but you cant knee jerk react to what they say either.

heh comment on the macroing thing, if its a seperate app that they run to macro there is a super simple way to detect and not even let the client do it.

ask me if you want to know more as Id rather not post hows its done

anyway thanks for sharing, and even when you shipped a bunch of these there is always something new to learn.

Thanks for writing these articles. Really interesting reads

This was meant to be discussing the Tips on Developing an MMO Economy, Part I article, but there doesn't seem to be a forum created for this, andf= the link from the article redirects to this forum.

Since this is obviously intended to be a multi-part article, can we have a forum post dedicated to it and linked correctly?




Very interesting article and different to the kind of articles development sites tend to get. Hopefully this will be a very useful resource for the more serious MMO developers out there.

People probably don't realise what goes into creating aN on-line economy, and I for one an looking forward to the next parts.

Spree

Since most of the games work on the principle that the player has to create a lot of items in order to level up in some skill, there will be a lot of excess items flooding the marketplace. This problem is very difficult to avoid, but what you can do is create some quests where the NPC will need a high quantity of those items, so at least some of them will be removed from the game. You can also make it so that some higher level items will require low-level items as ingredients.

This is a thing that I think is easy to avoid but, for some reason that I don't understand, noone ever implemented it in a MMO (AFAIK).
Usually the crafting process go something like this:
1) I want to craft sword of destruction 1
2) create 1000 useless items untill your crafting skill raise
3) goto 2 until you reach a decent level
4) craft sword of destruction 1
5) I want sword of destruction 2
6) create 2000 useless items untill your crafting skill raise
7) ...you got the idea

All the useless items created during the learning process flood the economy with a lot of stuff that noone ever want/need.
The whole process of creating 1000 useless items is here to force players to spend a lot of time in developoing their crafting skills (and this is good but I think there's a better way to do it).
Usually useless item#1 require you some useless components and then you have to go to a forge (or similar) and hit a button.
The whole process take let's say 10 seconds (not counting the harvesting step).
Ok, what I say is: let the creation time be 1 minute instead of 10 seconds.
This way instead of 1000 items, you will have 170 items (and this is the good part 1).
Second, during the minute you need to craft, you could implement a sort of "fighting with the forge game" which is a sort of minigame where real skills counts.
For example, you could use a tetris like game that last 1 minute. At the end of the minute, you check the score and, based on the score, you decide if the player has improved his crafting skill.

Third, there is no need to give back an useless item if the player doesn't need it. After the creation process, you can ask the player "do you want the crafted item?".
If yes...ok, you give it.
If no, you give back the components and, based on the score of the minigame, you can decide to give only some of the components used so that you can't craft forever with the same set of components.

I think this could be a good way to improve the way that crafting goes today. This way real skills determine who is a good crafter. You don't only need to spend lot of time on crafting, but you have to be good at it and this also fix the problem of having a lot of "master crafter" all around the world.

Wow , I just want to thank you for writing it ,, i loved every moment of it, in fact i red it like a novel... not to learn how to make an mmo , but to get a piece of that magical journey you had with making your first MMo

I cant wait to read your next post