One other issue i've noticed, the gear and effectiveness scaling in general is too drastic. Players who notice this are discouraged from adventuring or exploring at lower levels, knowing the gear they get is not only surpassed, but surpassed by many multiples. Its best to just straight up skill while ignoring most everything else. Theres a lot to do but only a small amount you *should* do, if you dont want to be wasting your time. Why bother going gear hunting or crafting at the lower levels when the stuff you get becomes entirely worthless within a day (this problem is exacerbated by the gear binding system, your old gear cannot be resold, it must be junked). When three of us were only a few days into the game we found a skycleaver tower, the mobs werent that tough when we teamed on them but suddenly our characters which had 60 or so mana get a +100 mana belt and +100 move gloves for a very marginal increase in difficulty over killing the sewer theif. It gave off that feeling typical of poor scaling in games, boredom. It seems to scale a bit better as it goes on but it's still pretty extreme.
Empires that get to be the dwarves size also have the problem that people joining once everything is built miss out on all the gameplay of construction and gathering, especially if NPCs are already doing a fine job of it. This wouldnt really be a problem if there was a much larger map, if there were bigger sinks, or if territory wasnt mostly limited by player count. One solution might be to try a more robust NPC population system with slow growth, food consumption, hazards, to make maintaining a population a challenge, and then to put less weight on player count in the territory calc and more on that. This would make a big workforce change what the challenge is while raising the gameplay's scale, rather than just making everything easier as it does now(or just raising the scale on more stats).
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Topic: EmpireMUD: The Founding of Tradesea (Read 27913 times)