My suggestions.

[hearmeroar]

So. I decided I might post a few suggestions as to things I can think of that could benefit the server.
Keep in mind that these are only my thoughts however!

Okay!

DMing : Let those who want to be a Dungeon Master be just that. Keep in mind that every little drop of water adds to the Ocean. Of course within reason. DMs should be rolemodels for the rest of the community, so they shouldn't break rules etc. Encourage DMs to be active. Perhaps make a sort of schedule once there are a few DMs to have them "Work on shifts" where they will have days where they do no RP and instead stick to the DM client, lurking and doing DMy stuff.
Reward RP with exp.

Factions: Limit them to two or three. There is no reason to have alot of factions that no people play, and by doing such you further promote conflict RP, though it would be best if the factions weren't allied with each other. I would suggest three factions, which could be something like The White Tower, The Black Tower and The Children of the Light.
However, despite temporarily removing factions encourage people to play whatever they want. Though make them realize that playing an Aiel whitecloak for example would be rather.. strange.
It is also possible to remove the factions entirely for a small period and just concentrate on RP between characters, yet offer leniency towards character creation.

Faction Gear and Gear in general : Re-balance it all. +5 ish for gear, +6 for weapoons, +7 for a heron if those are to remain implemented. Add haste items, though make them less powerful than the old Warder Epic 2 Amulet, obviously.

Areas : Remove unneeded areas such as old player housing and the like. Other less used areas as well. Implement a traveling system between cities like Caemlyn, Tear, Tar Valon to still give off the illusion that the server is still a large place.

Player housing : Either make a few areas that can be rented out to players for a monthly rent in gold, or allow players to rent "empty spaces" which they build themselves.

Leveling and leveling areas : Up the Exp, though also make the penalty for being in party with someone less and thus also encouraging dungeon crawls. Make the mobs for leveling easier, which should allow people to choose whether they want to level or stay at the level they are at the moment. Instead of being forced into standing around at level 1 because they cannot kill a beetle.

Add a few Haks : Neverwinter Nights is an old game, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be made a little bit prettier. Add haks for more heads, outfits and the like. Perhaps a few new tilesets\Areas for the toolset to give builders more to choose between.

Misc : OOC teleport widget, that teleports a person into the OOC area or the beginning.
Scripted pvp area \ Capture the flag event run by DMs? Could be fun, right?


Will post more if I can come up with something!

[Dreamchild]

Dec 16, 2013 3:09:51 GMT -5 hearmeroar said:

So. I decided I might post a few suggestions as to things I can think of that could benefit the server.
Keep in mind that these are only my thoughts however!

Okay!

DMing : Let those who want to be a Dungeon Master be just that. Keep in mind that every little drop of water adds to the Ocean. Of course within reason. DMs should be rolemodels for the rest of the community, so they shouldn't break rules etc. Encourage DMs to be active. Perhaps make a sort of schedule once there are a few DMs to have them "Work on shifts" where they will have days where they do no RP and instead stick to the DM client, lurking and doing DMy stuff.
Reward RP with exp.

Sounds fair, when we have a feeling for how many we are and the workload such a system should be up. DM is something you should do for fun, not to get something.

Factions: Limit them to two or three. There is no reason to have alot of factions that no people play, and by doing such you further promote conflict RP, though it would be best if the factions weren't allied with each other. I would suggest three factions, which could be something like The White Tower, The Black Tower and The Children of the Light.
However, despite temporarily removing factions encourage people to play whatever they want. Though make them realize that playing an Aiel whitecloak for example would be rather.. strange.
It is also possible to remove the factions entirely for a small period and just concentrate on RP between characters, yet offer leniency towards character creation.

I think we have 5 atm, one not really active the Band. WT and defender of the flame is really I team up, so I am fine with it. No more factions will be made till we know that we can fill the ones we have and get RP.

Faction Gear and Gear in general : Re-balance it all. +5 ish for gear, +6 for weapoons, +7 for a heron if those are to remain implemented. Add haste items, though make them less powerful than the old Warder Epic 2 Amulet, obviously.

Areas : Remove unneeded areas such as old player housing and the like. Other less used areas as well. Implement a traveling system between cities like Caemlyn, Tear, Tar Valon to still give off the illusion that the server is still a large place.

Player housing : Either make a few areas that can be rented out to players for a monthly rent in gold, or allow players to rent "empty spaces" which they build themselves.

Leveling and leveling areas : Up the Exp, though also make the penalty for being in party with someone less and thus also encouraging dungeon crawls. Make the mobs for leveling easier, which should allow people to choose whether they want to level or stay at the level they are at the moment. Instead of being forced into standing around at level 1 because they cannot kill a beetle.

Add a few Haks : Neverwinter Nights is an old game, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be made a little bit prettier. Add haks for more heads, outfits and the like. Perhaps a few new tilesets\Areas for the toolset to give builders more to choose between.

Misc : OOC teleport widget, that teleports a person into the OOC area or the beginning.
Scripted pvp area \ Capture the flag event run by DMs? Could be fun, right?


Will post more if I can come up with something!

As for the last parts, I need to work on it or find someone who can, because I am a novice in this area, but I will do my best to get better, so I hope that you can all be patient with me.

[Deleted]

Thanks Arc and Dream.

I'll respond with points as the quote's getting long.

1. Dms

(To Arc) From experience: impossible to make schedules. But the more the merrier, agreed. Can encourage to do events, share ideas and so forth, but only works so far. Dms should approach if they honestly have the time to create some more fun for the community. Always try and reward XP as often as I can and also to figure out ways of including as many as possible in events.

2. Factions

Feel the number, at the moment until things settle etc., is ok.

3. Faction gear/general gear

Agreed (Arc), more opinions would be good.

4. Areas

Agreed (Arc).

5. Player housing

Would love to see a low-cost rent-able apartment complex/block...that shoves players together sorta thing. DM fun and mischief making potential.

6. Leveling areas

Feel exp level is fine, but no problems with balancing it more to encourage parties and to maybe balance some particular areas where you need good gear at low levels to survive.

7. Haks

I have no opinion, not important personally, but don't mind whatever is come up with in consensus and over time.

8. Misc

Happy with a capture the flag thing (map as event, or as both event and some few scripts) if it can be done at some point, could build a map as an Andoran Noble's sort of 'training complex for hire' and get it through that way, so as to place it on neutral ground.

No opinion on OOC widget, happy with a consensus.

[Necro-367]

As for factions I like the idea of limiting the factions. Maybe allow any returning characters to move from that andor guard position to an equal level child of the light position.

I like the idea of a cheap complex of housing where everyone lives close together. Especially if we put it right by a general hangout location like four kings crossroads was. It will encourage a lot of rp. Especially if there's a child living by a ashaman.

Another note on factions... if we're going to limit the available factions I think we should do it in a manner to help rp. If the two main factions are black tower and white tower then give them a reason to regularly interact, otherwise let's limit to factions that are quite likely to regularly interact so we don't have a aes sedai alone and afk at the white tower and a ashaman alone and afk in four kings? Just a thought.

[Deleted]

The only difficulty in swapping factions around is that people could end up with elites that have no model for teaching and/or no notes.

Factions can really only survive long term if people work on how they will do RP teaching and progression, else new people will join and get frustrated or not join at all. It's kind of what happened toward the end of Gathering Storm IMO.

Having said that, I'm not opposed to the idea, but would just like to hear that intention to swap comes with a desire to actually participate in the new faction's life.

I hope that more BT/WT interaction will emerge as they compete or cooperate, variously, through some of the major events to come - similarly, with respect to the CoTL, the other faction with some players.

The Band doesn't have any members at the moment.

One idea could be to open up the Legion instead of the Band as an option for swords/melee in closer affiliation to the BT, or it could be conceived that the Band are pushed by Rand/Mat to closer cooperation with the BT, or are on a kind of semi-permanent BT contract.

Just some thoughts? Cheers.

[Necro-367]

A semi-perm BT contract sounds fun.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Keying in player housing dynamics is fairly easy from the programmatic side. Hak maintenance and distribution also rather simple to employ to keep players up to date regularly.

[Aurell]

I'm all for the legion instead band ^^

[DeathProphet]

LEGION!!!!

[Deleted]

Dec 20, 2013 15:59:46 GMT -5 Aspect of Sorrow said:

Keying in player housing dynamics is fairly easy from the programmatic side. Hak maintenance and distribution also rather simple to employ to keep players up to date regularly.

Thanks for your input. "Nod Nod"


Also will wait to see anymore input on the faction issue (pertaining to Band, Legion in this thread) and then will make a poll with some options or something based on that

[Aspect of Sorrow]

With the custom content hosted on Dropbox, a small program can be written to look at the differences of the player obtained CC and those which are hosted on the server end. When finding a difference, the application can automatically make the update to the player. I've written this tool for two other communities.

The player housing situation may vary depending upon what database was employed for the use of this module.

[thecapulet]

Personally, I don't see the point in haks, when we can just override the vanilla content that we'd realistically never use anyways. When it comes down to it, haks would simply be used to make things look better. But with NWshader and the multitude of different texture and model replacement packs, we can make the game look several years younger already.

With that said, I do plan on releasing a WoT specific override that changes very specific things to fit WoT lore. Flags, cloaks (like a real gleeman cloak), etc. More info on that later though. (Had most of it done for years now)

As for player housing, you don't even really need a DB as long as you have active DMs. Place a locked vault in each house with a few keys that only a DM or someone with the key can obtain. As for renting, what's the point? I could understand if we were back to 30-40 player days, but when we're running with maybe a dozen or so revolving regulars, it starts to look much more like a classic roleplay group than a large community. And ffs, if we can't keep track of player housing for a dozen dudes, we're in trouble.

Another think you could do is add it's variable in the player token. Then trigger the door so it checks whether the player token is marked for the door or not, so that DMs could add/remove housing from players at will using the DM tool.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Dec 22, 2013 15:22:17 GMT -5 thecapulet said:

Personally, I don't see the point in haks, when we can just override the vanilla content that we'd realistically never use anyways.

Incompatible overrides are known to cause servers themselves to crash, not just clients. Haks gives a finer grain of control over the player experience than to permit abusive C1 collision mesh exploits, etc.

Dec 22, 2013 15:22:17 GMT -5 thecapulet said:

With that said, I do plan on releasing a WoT specific override that changes very specific things to fit WoT lore. Flags, cloaks (like a real gleeman cloak), etc. More info on that later though. (Had most of it done for years now)

If distribution of custom content, why not officiate it formally as a hak?

[thecapulet]

If we're going to do that, why not go all out and incorporate some of the NWN2 models into the hak so we have proper WoT themed buildings and trollocs?

I don't disagree with you, but I feel like it's a bit beyond the scope of this server.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Given the server is likely to succumb to continued development over time, and the technology and capacities available to us today, there doesn't seem a need to inhibit the module any more from it's conceptualized scope to what's put on paper. It's well documented the fragmentation of CEP support across the existing NWN1 servers, such that even newcomers will have to compare and potentially make adjustments as needed. If to provide the users with a single application that handles this for them, that will enable content developers like yourself more free reign with putting your vision to something playable without a limitation to a standard defacto of something that is clearly aged. Just make sure that the palette doesn't exceed it's nominal limits else instability will occur. If you're putting the effort to finely tune a WoT themeatic as implied in a previous post, I would imagine you would like to see that a standard than to try supporting overrides that have mixed results with overrides meant for other servers as well.

As for player housing, you don't even really need a DB as long as you have active DMs. Place a locked vault in each house with a few keys that only a DM or someone with the key can obtain. As for renting, what's the point? I could understand if we were back to 30-40 player days, but when we're running with maybe a dozen or so revolving regulars, it starts to look much more like a classic roleplay group than a large community. And ffs, if we can't keep track of player housing for a dozen dudes, we're in trouble.

Another think you could do is add it's variable in the player token. Then trigger the door so it checks whether the player token is marked for the door or not, so that DMs could add/remove housing from players at will using the DM tool.

Your idea is sound, but there's several issues with this approach. Saving variables to player tokens, if left up to a multitude of systems invoking this, increases the BIC sizes substantially. A limitation prior to BIC write corruption can occur (there's a lot of bugs in Aurora), and although having a plethora of DMs makes sense, it is my understanding DMs are purpose driven to storytelling, if they're undergoing module maintenance for a lot of systems that depend upon them, burnout is likely, not to mention it takes away from what their roles are designed for. In addition to this, who is to keep track of who has access to which door / building, etc? If a player logs off a character for x amount of months and someone else has moved into their house as an example, that person returning would have unfettered access to a place he shouldn't. An external database resolves this issue rather easily in addition to making the module maintain itself from a scripted basis. Once a time comes that there are more than ten players in the community that is active, with hundreds if not thousands of BICs to juggle, it will become increasingly regretful to haven't written a system designed to maintain itself and provide a feature automatically when much of the code will have to be replaced, maintenance / patch up code implemented, etc.

I write these posts with an eye toward efficiency and write-once-and-forget module design, not that it's a heated debate, just declaring my experiences over the past few decades of gaming and development.