Age of Conan Gold game is the latest MMORPG offering from Funcom, the developer of previous games such as Anarchy Online.

This week I got the DT to 79, and we did quite a bit of city building. One part of the Age of Conan Gold game I am not focusing on (right now) is crafting, this is due to many reasons. The Devs have a lot of fixes to implement as well as the fact that my guild already has a lot of crafters in it. (If you have any questions on crafting, I can get the answers for you)

Age of Conan Gold game is the latest MMORPG offering from Funcom, the developer of previous games such as Anarchy Online.

Only if you set a special PvP flag, you can attack other players, and be attacked. Without this flag you are totally protected from other players, but can't harm them either. SWG is doing this. It enables them to have classes that are basically useless in combat, like pure crafters, or even dancers and barbers. But their combat classes are still very sameish, to avoid unbalanced PvP fights. The level problem is solved by having a rather flat power curve, where you quickly reach a plateau, and can only develop your character further by giving up other skills you previously learned. Ends up making SWG rather unsatisfying in PvE.

Usually you get some sort of negative flag when repeatedly killing defenceless other players. In EVE for example you had some sort of score which made the police hunt you if it went too negative, and force you to go hunting pirates to bring it back up into the positive region. Didn't work very well, some people simply didn't care about whether they were wanted by the police or not. And as all travel in EVE went through special worm hole gates, those gates were often camped by PK players shooting down every harmless trader wanting to pass. The EVE game developers are still trying to work out a better system, but they might already have lost too many customers due to PvP. Another game, Lineage II, will also have unrestricted PvP, and people are already reporting PK occurences in the beta.

One could well design a PvP combat game based on warriors, mages, and monsters, with every monster being played by a player, and no artificial intelligence monsters at all. No levels, no quests, no RPG, just pure player versus player combat, well balanced. Counterstrike goes fantasy, so to say. And then do the MMORPG games without a PvP element. By the way, my favorite online comic strip is PVPOnline. But that one has nothing to do with PvP combat, although it does play in a fictional game magazine company, and thus mentions a lot of computer games, and makes fun of computer game players typical behavior. And a computer generated world does not have to follow the laws of the physical world. Two parties entering the same cave entrance can very well arrive in two identical, but parallel caves, with no possibility of interference. In short, quests are a way to bring back story-telling into MMORPG. Story-telling is probably the biggest loss when moving from single-player to massive multiplayer role-playing games.

And this sort of item often can not be sold or traded between players. This makes the "reverse quest" situation unlikely, and totally solves the problem of the player buying quest items instead of actually doing the quest. But often this causes a new problem, camping. That was specifically bad in Everquest, where the monster you had to kill was spawning far too rarely in most cases. For example the Testament of Vanear was a quest reward you got by killing a renegade guard named Dyllin Starsine, but Dyllin only spawned every 8 hours. And as the reward was highly useful for different character classes of a wide range of levels, people literally started queueing up for the chance to do the quest. There were conflicts, and problems of "kill-stealing". And that was just for a mid-level item. For high-level stuff server-wide waiting lists were organized. But SWG still very much has an unfinished feel to it. Missing features that were promised long ago. Lots of bugs.

Having to sit and wait for hours to solve a quest is bad enough. But standing in line to do so completely takes away your sense of "being on a quest". A similar problem occurs when players don't have to kill a monster that only spawns in one place, but one that is rare, and that not always drops the quest item you are looking for. In that case you can't even organize waiting lists, but usually find the whole zone full of players trying to find the monster in question before the others. And that can take days, because even if you happen to be faster or more lucky than the competition in finding the monster, you still have to be extra lucky for it to drop the quest item. If you don't have a PS2, or can't get an adapter, buy a gamepad for the PC with two sticks, a directional pad, and lots of buttons, in fact a Dual Shock lookalike. The game gets so much better using such a controller for simultaneous movement and camera control. SWG just had the big November patch, introducing mounts and player cities, as well as a lot of bug fixes.

FFXI already has this sort of encounter, the Burning Circle Named Monsters, the first of which you encounter for the rank 3 mission at around level 25. The quest-taker and his group step on a magical circle and are teleported to the monster to slay. Nobody else can interfere. The quest monster never appears to people not on the quest who just happened to pass by. And nobody has to wait in line for hours for his turn to kill the dragon. Unfortunately, while this good solution already exists in FFXI, it is applied only for very few cases, for few missions and high level encounters. The level 18 sub job quest, which practically every character in the game has to do, is of the classic "find a rare monster and kill it, hoping for a rare drop from it" kind. If you are unlucky, that can be very frustrating, especially if you feel you "must" do that quest to advance.

Another short post, with useful links. One of the problems in designing a good MMORPG is to give the players what they want, because different players want different things. So somebody named Richard Bartle went and actually wrote a scientific paper about the different player types. It is about players in MUDs, multi-user dungeons, the text-based grandfathers of the modern 3D MMORPG, but the same classification still applies. He roughly divides players in 4 groups, Explorers, Socializers, Achievers, and Killers. Of course everybody is a bit of everything, I'm much of an Explorer, a bit of Socializer and Achiever, and not at all a player Killer. To find out what you are, somebody designed a Bartle test questionaire that gives you your Bartle (or ESAK) quotient. They also have extensive statistics, showing for example that killers are more likely to play Shadowbane, or the scores of some "famous" people in the genre.