I am reminded of an atricle about games. To summerize players when interacting with a game expect feedback and the ability to change their input. They crave positive feedback, but negative feedback is a good learning tool as well.

CRAFTING

Let’s look at WoW for a bit and look at their crafting system. You gather the materials, aquire the correct recipe, and push a button. So there are 2 chances for fun: 1) Gathering materials, 2) Aquiring the recipe. In WoW #1 is usually the result of needing to grind certain monsters to get the materials. Grinding is typically boring. This brings me to a side point, making quests fun, but I will skip this tangent. #2 is either bought, or found on monsters. This part is really not hard nor too boring so i’ll skip this. Pushing a button is very boring and if you have to batch craft your in for a world of boredom. This is boring because they player is not involved in the process. His input into the situation is always the same it never changes. It is “OK, craft it.”.
We choose to eliminate the button press by making crafting interactive by using mini-games. By allowing the user to change inputs, providing solutions to the games you involve the player.
SKILLS

This is one place where it is easy in some sense and very hard in the other. By the vary nature of having skills the player is directly effecting what they are in the world. So they are able to see directly the result of their choices. The feedback loop is completed. On the other hand this is where we can fall into our biggest trap. If all skills focus on the same goal. Dealing damaging/stopping damage we have significantly flattened the whole scope of the character. This makes the other aspects of the game one dimensional. Skills need to reflect the other aspects of the game.
COMBAT

Combat is tactical and strategic. Information on your foe is just as important as having skill in a blade. This is not your typical select target and click. This kind of interaction gets boring and repeative. Having to change your tactics and stragetics based on your opponent and your knowledge of him make for a much more interesting combat that is hard to get bored of.

Another possible pitfall. Someone doesn’t want to be a scholar like job. They would not be able to figure out anything about the foe and would not enjoy the tactical aspect of the game. It would become click and prey for the character. I propose a basic information bar be provided to all characters so they can at least be stragetic and tactical.

SOCIAL

This is perhaps the easiest one. People provide their own interaction. We just need to make tools that facilite communication properly. I think we are going in the proper directions with our channel system.

WINNING

Winning in an rpg is a bit nebulus. Most people consider winning an rpg to either be the best or one of the best. Even this I don’t think is good enough. I think the real secrect to an rpg is you can NEVER win. If a player has won they are finished and have no reason to stick around. The trick is to keep giving the player positive feedback. Keep giving them more and more challenges. Look at PNP RPGs you can go on forever and ever with these things. So the challenge is creating more and more high end content to keep the players interested. PVP in this game promises to be more interesting considering the number of abilities and the slot
limits. PvP, raids, and PvP raids are a lot more promising in this system.

QUESTS

Quests are the part where we need to figure out how to make them engaging and not repeativite. Having live DMs helps with this but I think our automated quest system should be more advanced. I will post about this in another post.

Make crafting an actual game in of its own:

1) Make puzzle like components and the player has to figure out how to fit the peices together.

First this sounds strange, but this would give another element to the game besides combat and would take skill to achieve. Not only would you need the in character knowledge of the recipe the player would need to know or be able to solve the puzzle. Puzzles could be built up to. Easy puzzles from learning how to craft build components used for later. This would allow the accumilation of knowedge and skill on the player’s part.

The down side I can see is people getting annoyed with crafting when you have to do a lot of puzzles to make quanities of items. Mass crafting could either a) be discouraged by the puzzles and taking emphasis off of making a lot of items to get better at crafting, or b) helped by allowing them to specify batch quanities. They solve the puzzle, specify quantity, and the system crafts that many.

It’s an odd idea, let’s see what ya guys think.