Small collection of new ideas and missing features

[Lucan]

Although I started here in the game only two weeks ago, I already have a fine list of new ideas and missing features. In the past I played quite a lot of other browsergames so I somehow know the standard structure and standard features of such games, which also make the player life easier. Would be great to get some feedback what you think about the suggestions.

[b]1. creation of combat rituals without attacking[/b]
I think everyone would be glad if there is a chance to manage rituals as seperated game feature. Fighting is a bigger part of the game which makes the whole fighting process quite important in my opinion. I would suggest a link in the creature overview which opens the ritual management dialog. This provides a possibility to create offensive and defensive rituals everywhere, especially at places where no one can be attacked.

One drawback of such a feature would be that players attack faster and have a good defense ritual set most of the time. This makes everyone less vulnerable, which removes some of the random fun moments at fighting.

[b]2. split defensive and offensive rituals[/b]
In my opinion the ritual management dialog lacks of a good overview and sorting. If you have quite some rituals and want to attack you need to scroll a lot to find the attack ritual you want to activate. To counter this effect an option to hide all defensive rituals would be great. Another possibility is to bring more structure in the whole dialog. This means seperating offensive from defensive rituals and build a small menu. Maybe two sections that can be collapsed easily (+ / - button).

Such a change would do no harm and make ritual handly much easier.

[b]5. Reviving "dead" rituals[/b]
Currently a ritual "dies" if all creatures of the ritual are dead. If you want to have the same ritual again you need to go through the whole process from the start to the end. Therefore, a small button "revive ritual" would be great. This button just creates a new ritual with the same creatures and creature settings like the original one.

[if there is already such an option I never said anything ]

[b]4. add a real messaging system[/b]
I know it is only an alpha version and it might be by purpose, but I think there should be a "standard" messaging system. This means a new message window where you can simply add a receiver no matter where he is located. This makes communication much easier, especially if you need to talk about things besides the ingame-character-talk.

[if there is already such an option I never said anything ]

[b]5. better caching of the game locations[/b]
It seems that already visited locations are reloaded quite often no matter if there are changes or not. In my opinion it would be better to put most of the visited locations in the browser cache and only reload them if there are changes. This lowers the data load on the server and speeds up the game a lot. Maybe too few locations are actually cached at the moment.


That's it so far... there are a lot more such things for sure. I might come up with more ideas in the future.

[Burns]

1. was suggested and denied a few times, rit-setting should be a tough job to make the mp3s life harder^^

2. nice idea, but how many combat rits do you need? LOL
i guess it could be an option to hide it if you have the same rit more than once [thinking of skipping trees] but i'd not want to hide my defences from myself...

3. (or 5.? =P) could be handy, but you need to keep the combo count in mind, that would need to reset too... but overall a good idea, i like that one^^
but will most probably be denied due to the reason i gave in answee 1

4. friendlist, buy it in shop and have your pals available at all times^^

5. no idea about that :/

[Lucan]

1. Sad but true then. I can live with it somehow but I don't think it's a good place for adjusting such things.

2. Hmm I am currently in MP3 so I set up a lot of defensive rits, especially if I hunt for losses. So I have about 15 def rits and maybe 3-4 att rits which aren't that easy to find in the list. Another solution would be to sort the list according to the alphabet. So a player can organize the list at least a bit.

Grouping attack and defense rituals with an hide-option would be the easiest and currently also the best in my opinion. But the hide-option should be saved so that you don't need to hide them again next time.

3. Resetting the combo count shouldn't be a problem, at least if it is well implemented. Again I can only say that there should be other spots to adjust the difficulty with rituals. Otherwise it would be an artificial annoyance for the players. In my opinion a game should provide the best comfort possible and therefore make those regulations in the "background".

I really don't like the current ritual handling because it isn't really comfortable. The only reason for that fact is to make the attacks last longer, as far as I can imagine. A better solution would be some sort of cooldown where you have to stay at the same location for x seconds after attacking.

4. I know this feature but I don't see a reason why I should at a random person to my friendslist just because I want to send him one message. Putting for example enemies on my "friendslist" is somehow disturbing. A standard message system should be added to every game in my opinion. Can't think of a reason why there shouldn't be such an option. As you said the friends list provides this feature anyway so just make it easier without additional complexity.

I also think that such a feature shouldn't be a premium feature as it is somehow essential for a browsergame. To be honest this missing feature was the first negative impression I got from the game. Others that are used to normal "internet life" and internet playing will miss this feature too.

5. This point is pretty technical. Maybe some feedback about the general speed while walking around would be good. If the general opinion is that the game is too slow then some adjustments are necessary.

[Burns]

LOL, you face difiiculties finding your rits among 20 defs?
i don't leave home with less than 200 defs set ;-)

name them matching to their purpose (damage, steal, victory and D for defence, for example), and scroll down, they get saved according to when they were made^^


then, rit-setting... well, it would be too easy to get wins if hit and runs got even faster, and nobody would get a chance to get a fight against non-idlers...
and comfort is not everythign in an alpha, we are still experimenting =D

and PMing...
it's part of the thrill to find a player before you can message him/her, especially RPCs for quest-solving, else it would really get too easy to spam players inboxes...

[Lucan]

I don't really have difficulties with 20 rits but I find it annoying. If there will be even more later on then such a feature is really necessary. Naming convention are only really effective if the list is sorted by alphabet.

As a player you can get used to many things and even complex settings. The question is if it should be more complex as needed.

In my opinion the current ritual handling is no real option for preventing hit-and-run players. If you really want to be save you set your rituals in a nearly empty location, the Dojo or GGG. To keep the number of those unwanted fights low you can also create a mass of rituals for attacking. So you actually don't need enough time for attacking. I think the effect on hit-and-run players is pretty low compared to the missing comfort for all the other players. But ok that's my opinion and everyone is allowed to see it the other way round. =)

You are right that this is an alpha version and I am aware of that fact. But an alpha version should be used to define the game mechanics and build up a good form for the game features. If you talk of experimenting then don't say a change to the feature isn't possible. Experimenting consists of changing features. *g*

I got your point concerning finding players for a chat but on the other hand there are features like the friendlist and the RPC map locations that make searching unnecessary.

Btw... thanks for the discussion. It's always good to talk about such features to open some minds.

[Kafuuka]

5. This has been mentioned before, although it's not the main issue in [topic="3301"]that thread[/topic]. I don't know flash but I think it restricts access to the users' hard disks. No code that will be executed by a browser should be allowed to write on your hard disk for security reasons.
If the game wasn't embedded into a browser, there would be a whole lot of optimizations possible but a whole lot of new troubles like platform dependence and firewall issues would arise too. It's a trade off which is likely to have made the designer pull his hair out on various occasions.. I know I would have cursed choosing flash, last I checked there was only an alpha version for 64bit linux, which makes it as platform independent as c++ imo.

[edit] MD works with the alpha flash plugin. Somehow a lot of other flash apps crash though, so the alpha plugin is far from stable. Maybe I am biased against flash, but the platform independence is supposed to be it's main asset. For that matter I don't like java either, they had the same problem for a long time and the language has no explicit pointers! Give me back my memory leak creation tools dammit!

Edited April 24, 2009 by Kafuuka

[Lucan]

5. If I am not mistaken Flash has an build-in caching mechanism which can also support embedded pictures. So you should be able to cache the pictures without the code. Nevertheless the browser should be able to cache the whole flash file. You can imagine flash more like an interactive video with some code instead of code with embedded pictures. There should be no real security issues at all because the browser (flash plugin) writes the cache and not the code itself.

Concerning linux support did you check the development tools for the flash plugin? The plugin should be available for most platforms or at least on every platform that's usually supported by Adobe.

[I am Bored]

actually sending a message to anyone is possible, you just need something (that i won't post on the forums) to message anyone, although i think mur likes the current messenging system than if he were to add the option to just type in the name, because then he would get a huge number of messages.