RINE'S PROFILE

Finally stepped back into development with some pressure from family/friends, and finished the update that had been sitting on my PC for a full year. Four new missions, all of them testing my horizons on them, along with a complete redo of my hub. All still RTP of course, but I'm trying to avoid letting the lack of cool art keep me from working on the bones/meat of my project.

Gonna try to keep myself to weekly or bi-weekly updates.

I will take a bit of a side-step to the whole discussion and mention one important thing about challenge: If it is really challenging and difficult, and the player is likely to fail, make the iterations exceptionally short as well. A lot of what Dark Souls and other games do right is that there is no long drawn out sequence or cinematics you have to watch back through to get back into the action. You die, you restart. FFXIII I think did this really well as well, since you can just restart any fight you lose from the start.

Of course, that goes for really any game, there is no excuse to force players to sit through stuff they've already seen because they died. Let them retry without even going to game over!

My main issue so far has been balancing making interesting boss fights with making some that players can reasonably take down first try. So far, most of my bosses haven't been that much more powerful than the players (some are just the character the players get when they recruit them) plus some minions, with the difficulty coming from being worn down from the prior enemies. No easy/cheap recovery options means I tend to go for whittling down my players.

So I feel I have to give players plenty of warning so they can use abilities, and not blindside them with obscenely high health enemies or the like, or abilities that are far out of the norm. Self-limitations not helping matters, but so far it has just limited my epic challenges from being Final Fantasy/SMT level 'prep everything perfectly' challenging, and instead being normal enemies+

I worked on a MUD as well for a while, and one thing people always underestimate when doing multiplayer RPGs is how -fast- people go through content. If I released an area, and it wasn't particularly complicated, it would sometimes be finished the same day by the players who were consistently on. Everything about the area would be dissected after some time, people would find the ideal manner to go through it (sometimes not even the way you intended), how much of it was actually useful to do, etc.

Never underestimate players ability to optimize everything, especially in an MMO. In a single player RPG, you basically have a nice straight line for everyone to go down (to varying degrees depending on your story). In an MMO, everything is a calculation, and if a particular dungeon isn't worth it more so than just grinding further, or doesn't have an acceptable risk/reward ratio, it won't be touched but by a few people. The MUD I designed for had been around for decades as well, and there were hundreds of areas...of which maybe a dozen or so got touched regularly. Players would find the best place to farm gold, exp, with/without certain classes, and hammered those areas. The ratio of work done -> used content is much lower in MMOs than in single player RPGs.

Now Ratty has to retire from RMN entirely, its official.