Friday, April 8, 2011

Building quests and encounters to train the player base

So over at   Foo's WoW musings they wrote on Better than tank bribery?

Sparked some ideas and what not... its not tank failures or healer failure, or dps failures....  Its game mechanics and just not knowing player base failure... Of course there are some that do know and dont care and are just baddies...

Quests have evolved and there are a lot of possibilities... 
For instance.. durring the first 10 level progress quests are less about the STORY of AZEROTH and more about the BIRTH of a HERO...  kill squirls? and colect ghost beries?  OR...

The agro training quest concept:  You are in a vehicle, for instance control an Abom if you in the undead area, or giant mechanical if you are in the Gnome starting area... race appropriate... now the quest requires that you use the "Bitch Slap" (maul, sunder, hammer ability equivalent) on enemies to keep them attacking your verhicle while they are killed by your "buddies" that will die if hit too many times by them.  You would also get the "kick in the face" ability to "taunt" and a "Fart in the room" AoE threat ability and lastly, you get the "tell the dumies what to do" ability that marks the target you choose with a skull... and all your minions and budies will attack that target.

Now agro as a DPS uses the same thing, but you have to target the one guy marked in one scenario, and then there is a no marks scenario where you learn how to use /assist or target of target frames to not pull agro and die...

Simple and fun quests that can be instanced and perfomed in a way to create scores and times for achievements...  

For healing you get a video out take of the user interface and how to determine the health and how to heal the targets. example... video begins... "The HERO's of Azeroth have teamed up to conquer the foes of the land an the ways of their live.  Some bend the wills of her enemys to hate themseles and they are the tanks..  Some play a part with magics to drain the life, souls and very existence of our enemys or simply beat them to death.  The healers ensure that as those other go forth the magics of the land and nature or the church and holy powers are directed into the injured and wounded to sway the balance of victory...  blah blah blah... how to see, read health bars and heal the group...

The point is.. these elments DO NOT EXIST in questing... All questing teaches you is how to DPS...

Fundamentally change the questing experience at point along the way to give you a buddy... there was a great quest in grizzly hills that did this. the guy says what do you want me to do.. Heal or damage... or something.. been a while.. but the point is you got a buddy and they were the counterpart to you party...

Intuitivly design the quest to point out what agro is, and you would have a winner...  with that quest teach people that you have "HIGH THREAT ABILITIES" and they are needed... and such... great... 

now, when I get to a new guy that says, "whats threat/agro" "why is tanking hard" or the fail tank in  PUG needs help you refer them to the "quest" and your swipe is like the "farts in the room ability... or your "sunder armor is like your "bitch slap" ablity and your taunt is like the "kick in the face" ability...

to up it a notch, you can not que in the dugeon finder till you have completed the series of quests...  or even make capitol cities themselves phased so that you have to complete the quests in order to see most of the NPCs...

Most often the problem is not that players are "bad", its that the players are new, ignorant, dont know, too embarassed to ask, to berated to care... and the other players are mean, assume they are retartds, jump in their ass, and otherwise act in manners totally contradictive to the MMO environment, but in a digital world there are not consequences for those actions. 

Hmm, its fun to try to be a dev/designer... :-)  happy bloggin guys.

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