Discussion about reviving MD

[Jester]

[quote name='Udgard' date='19 February 2010 - 11:24 PM' timestamp='1266647071' post='54816']
+1 to what cutler said.

Yes, MD has problems, at a quick glance it might be boring blah blah blah.

But remember, what made MD so interesting is how the players inside can contribute to the game. Have you seen what cutler has done? He is one person, but look at how many things he has added to MD with 'just' the astral plane alone. If everyone tries to do what they can by [b]CREATING [/b]something instead of finding ways to [b]TAKE DOWN[/b] something, MD will be too full of interesting things that you won't have enough time to enjoy all of it.

edit: fixed typo
[/quote]

I could be mistaken, but if MD was that full of interesting things there wouldn't be enough people to play games with. If each person in MD made a few additions to MD there would soon be more things to do than players to do them, causing MD to be more divided than ever. Feel free to prove me wrong.

EDIT: I read over Firs post and this seems to relate to it. MD has nothing that draws crowds, but instead people form their own groups and rarely interact except to complain. Its like high school all over again...

EDIT AGAIN: I keep remembering new things to say. Each area in MD doesn't seem to relate to any of the others. The only way I can see things improving from where they are is by tying everything together. A way for fighting to influence roles, which influence politics (alliances) and so on. I have seen a few ideas, such as people role playing the outcome of fights, but that doesn't seem to work. The only way I can see for this to change is for Mur to do something about it, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyone else see a way to tie everything together involving only the players?

Edited February 21, 2010 by Jester

[Pipstickz]

More war, accomplished by kings who actually want to see each other lose power/be humiliated/etc.

[Jester]

[quote name='Pipstickz' date='20 February 2010 - 08:48 PM' timestamp='1266724101' post='54868']
More war, accomplished by kings who actually want to see each other lose power/be humiliated/etc.
[/quote]

That was similar to my original idea for the last war, but it fell short of what I wanted. Back in the Shade Ballance there were spies, intel to gather, plotting new moves, finding out the opponents moves, etc, and people were interested in it. It mattered. What happened next would change MD as we knew it.

What I want is a way to recreate that somehow, but do more. Tie in roles with the war. Instead of people randomly making up back stories that have nothing to do with MD, have their roles come from what they've done. If you are a spy master, then that is your role. If you are a general, that is your role. Those are very vague, but more detailed roles could emerge based on the one playing them. The roles need to be built within MD for them to matter.

The problem with having a war where the Kings actually want the other to by humiliated is that they would cause a lot of conflict outside of MD with the people behind the characters. If the war was over something neither had yet, instead of to force one to lose something, that would be better in my mind.

Edited February 21, 2010 by Jester

[Udgard]

[quote name='Jester' date='21 February 2010 - 08:23 AM' timestamp='1266715417' post='54862']
I could be mistaken, but if MD was that full of interesting things there wouldn't be enough people to play games with.
[/quote]

Actually, that's almost exactly what I said. [b]IF[/b] [u]everyone [/u]contributed, there would be more things to try than the time to try it. Of course, the actual amount is closer to 10% than 100%.. But my point is that instead of focusing to take down something, people should focus more on creating something. Without anything interesting to do, people will be bored and leave, with too many interesting things to do, people will gather together on what they feel is the most interesting, and the game will thrive.
And, I do mean many forms of creating things. Quests is a good example. Quests does not exactly take away people and make them unavailable to play with, right? It's just a tool to bring people together to play a part of the game.

[Jester]

I must have misread your post, Udgard. My bad.

My issue isn't with the amount of things to do in MD, its how unrelated they are. MD seems to be a collection of random games and quests with no relation to the core of the game. That may have been the intention all along, but to me it just makes MD seem tacky and thrown together.

Take a look at nearly any random quest. It either has some crazy item that doesn't exist in the game (as far as I know) or it involves vampires or something completely random. There seems to be no cohesion in MD, people simply pick a topic from somewhere else and move it to MD with no regard to how it relates. Although I admit MD is hard to understand, I've been here for over 500 days and I'm just now getting the basics.

Burns quest is a good example for me. While he did tie in parts from MD to the quest, and he did an excellent job I might add (one of my favorite quests in the entire game, even though I lost it was fun) he still used some random princess (although the parody was amusing). Is there something about MD that makes it so people can't work within it when they create something?

[Burns]

just a sidenote on that...
My story originally WAS MD-related, but couldn't be published that way
Remember the ancient lores? It's obviously not allowed to speak, or even think of, the things that haven't "happened", so how could i go and write an actual story about characters, places and things that didn't act in exactly that way at some point?

[spoiler]If you want that quest to be MD-ish, just undo my changes while reading it: Apricot originally was Marind, the plumber-empire Marind Bell, the 'caves' were the underground, with SI as burglars, the icy mountainside was the less icy Storm Coast, the religious loonies in the moutain village were CoE in a Forest Village, instead of beans and flowers you could buy expensive useless armor (the medusa shield) or a golden ring, which would turn out to be an old wedding ring from Ailith and KB, and the whole last part after dieing or finding the bridge (ahm, staircase...) would take place at Mt. Kelle'tha, which holds forgeries and techies on the inside (hell and demons), quite obviously a beach and cliffs on the outside (yay, something i didn't need to change!), and finally the hideout of some dirty angiens at Fenth's Cave. There were some minor things i forgot about, but no place, no person, and no item in that story was not taken from MD when i wrote it.[/spoiler]

Unfortunately nothing of that happened, and a lot of people don't like satires that involve themselves, so everything had to be changed to not step on somebodys toes, specially not Murs, who might not find it amusing to abuse his places and good old Marind in ways that don't match with his story.
Tell me, how do you set a quest within the setting of MD, where things have to happen before they become real? Who am I to claim that the CoE kill people who are evil to their gods and children? Or that Fenths Cave is full of booty from pirate-angiens?

In the ancient lore affiar, Mur made it very clear that nobody was to make up things about MD, and only the things done by players are real. Aye, that's some very nice setting of the world to work with, lots of freedom in story-writing...

I was literally torn between forgetting about it or putting it online and take a lot of wrath, til i heard the news that a local politican was about to sue an author for writing a novel in which the moronic sidekick of a rightist king had exactly the same tatoo as himself... that's how Apricot sprang to life, formed as parody on Super Mario and Legend of Zelda to conceal that it's a story (not parody) of MD >.<



b2t:
Jester is completely right, the more mini-games and rp-quests we have, the more we shatter the community. I tried to bind them to a spot with my quest, but half the people didn't show up, and the others were obviously not motivated to stay at GoE for a little chat.
However, your idea of having deeply integrated roles doesn't work when there's just a limited set of vacant spots. Compare it to WoW: Players fight NPCs in their raids, and every week, thousands of drachorns and monsterworms and what not get slain. Each raid needs its healer, its tank, and whatever them WoWers call their classes, and millions of tanks and healers can peacefully coexist.
In MD, we have no raids to go on, all the action is PvP, and there is just ONE war at a time. So, we just need ONE tank, ONE healer, and ONE leader on either side. And we have about 40-50 players who already belong to the inventory of MD. How does newbie have fun in a war when the vacant spots are already taken by the veterans? And how likely is it that those vets leave after the war instead of just waiting until they can recycle their role with some slight adaptions? Speaking with personal experience, i needed 16 months to get from newbie-nobody to the role i desired, a knight and leading figure of Golemus. What is the likelihood for anybody else to reach that, at least while i'm still breathing?
There are simply not too many roles that are built within MD, they are much more likely to be built with pen and paper and then integrated into MD, and a few will do that with a lot of instinct and flair, realizing that their plans don't work and adapting, but the mass of players are morons and force their story on us, instead of throwing the plan away and living in the moment.

[Tarquinus]

[quote name='Burns' date='21 February 2010 - 03:13 AM' timestamp='1266743632' post='54878']
Who am I to claim that the CoE kill people who are evil to their gods and children?[/quote]
Just a word on that - the CoE [u]are[/u] religious loonies, and sometimes browbeat members who seem to be falling short of the standard of zeal. Lucius Tarquinus is almost a self-parody, and he and Keith both began their MagicDuel careers as satirical characters. I don't have much patience for people who resent being the objects of satire. Anyone who takes himself that seriously deserves to be parodied more rather than less.

Keep up the good work, Burns - by all accounts, your quest was a lot of fun.