Aug 01
MMORPG Design Challenges
Riddle me this, Batman. My original thinking was that I’d up the maximum number of entities in a region to 300 (was previously 100), but would count the number of monsters against that. So you could have region servers that supported lots and lots of players, but only by lowering the number of monsters. It was a clever plan, I thought. Until I saw this, just a few minutes ago.
It’s a randomly generated starting area the game just gave me. Each region has 200 monsters in it, leaving the same 100 adventurer maximum as was present in version 1.0. As you can see, the monsters are very, very sparse in the large northwest region, but very dense in the tiny northeast region, just because the game is spreading 200 monsters more or less evenly inside each region, regardless of the region’s size.
Is that reasonable behaviour? I’m not convinced.
The more I play with this, the more I’m thinking that I don’t actually want to have nearly so many design options that affect the whole world; that really, what people want to do is affect a single region, or a single group of regions. So you could have a region with a town, and allocate very few monsters to it so that the region server has space for a lot of players, and then have outlying regions which have lots of monsters, as fewer players will be visiting them. And while I’m at it, maybe you should be able to create monster types individually for each region, instead of having one “master list” that’s used for the whole world.
But that’s going down the path toward micromanagement, and I really didn’t want to go there, initially. But maybe that’s the natural directon for this type of game to move into.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 am
You could continue with the slider for “monster density” and simply have that relate to how many monsters per unit-of-space. Making big regions have many more monsters, and smaller regions have less (giving the game a more uniform look in terms of monsters). That way it would encourage players to place towns and structures in smaller zones (because they have less monsters and thus can support more players), and try to coerce players to go monster-hunting in the bigger zones farther away from towns.
It handles the micromanagement issue (just one global slider), and adds a rather transparent level of depth (easy to understand and take advantage of). Keeping the 300 creatures/players per zone is good though, this would just work alongside it.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:24 am
I described that monsters per unit-of-space thing poorly.
Ex:
I have no idea what your internal scale is, but lets say a small zone is 50units, and a large one is 200units. If the slider is at 3, then it spawns one monster per 3 units of space (thus the small zone gets 16-17 monsters (depending on rounding) and the big one gets 66-67 monsters, spread out randomly among its area. And this would give it that even look cross-zones.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I suppose you could average out the mobs over zones of equal level range, but I think it would need micro-management. As you said, towns would be better placed in quieter areas. Something that could be a feature a little further down the line, higher XP rewards for denser zones; which would attract ‘hardcore’ players.