Need some feedback for single play server project!

[duffstone]

As some of you know, the main focus of my modding & developing efforts has been to build a fun, yet challenging single player version of SWG.   I have had a few individuals show some interest, so I know it's not just me being odd & weird, although I certainly fit that bill.

anyway,  I'm getting really close to releasing a 1.0 version for testing.  What I'm currently missing is subject matter for quests,  a background process / bot that will troll vendors and the bazaar and randomly buy and sell loot & crafted items,  and some general game play balances to enhance fun.

All my other systems and improvements are implemented and have been play tested by me, and appear to be working well.  Including the Jedi system, a reworking of skills.iff to be more inline with single play,  xp boosts to take the tediousness out of the grind,  quest scripting to allow for skill checking for doling out rewards,  +14.1 content including all the windowed houses, NPC's, etc that MTG has compiled (along with whatever I had in my old projects), and a few extra client mods are included in my custom .tre file.

I plan to use this thread to bounce some idea's around and see if I can get some feedback.

So for my first few Q's, and keeping in mind that this is for a single play server, not a public MMO style server.

Currently I'm looking for input on Credits, availability, and necessity.  Right now my biggest gameplay issue is that I don't have the credits I need to train.  I have one Jedi character that happens to be strong enough to run 10K missions, but even so that's a TON of missions if you're trying to develop multiple toons in parallel...   While this was "Normal" on a live MMO server, this is single play, and nobody will spend a whole day running missions just to pick up 500K to train up architect & weaponsmith (or doctor / dancer), or any two masters...  (The intial intent here is that a player should be able to completely respec a toon from zero to master in a day of hardcore playtime, or in 2-3 days of casual play)

XP has been boosted to help take the tediousness out of grinding, but you're left with a new grind which is cash to train...
1)  Should training be free?  Thus taking the Burdon of gathering credits out of the mix. (currently 135K for an advanced class)
2)  OR should training costs be reduced & still required?
3)  or should missions payout more, and / or be more accessible to novice level players?
4)  do we need credits at all in a single play game?  or would removing them hurt the RP aspects?

I don't think credits need to be removed... they are an important character development throttle by requiring maintenance for structures and installations.  Speeder repairs, travel, and eventually a robust (if not fake) vendor & bazaar system.

I think mission payouts are fine, 10K credits for killing a lair on naboo seems appropriate, and 10K goes a long way with small houses, speeder repair, and personal extractors.

Which basically leaves the cost for training (135K for each advanced class)...  I really don't think this ought to be removed.  But it HAS to be adjusted. As an example, I used all my $ to get novice TK.  I ran 2 missions, and had capped my xp before I finished the 2nd mission,  yet had only earned about 8K credits.  which is enough to train 1 box, but I'm capped and could have trained 3.  go back out, and cap before I finish the 1st mission.  I spend more time @ capped xp while I'm trying to earn credits to train with.  

so obviously, I can lower my xp boost so that I don't stay capped as often.  I could also reduce the cost of training, and maybe the two of them would balance it out.  but even so there's still the bit of crafters needing the same 135K to train their skills and most won't have a viable combat prof to get them through it.  so you'll have to spend your time leveling a combat toon, to run missions, to get credits so your artisan can make weapons, so that your combat toon can make money quicker running missions... rince... repeat...

Anyone have any bright idea's for making this a bit less teadious and a bit more random and fun?  Keep in mind that I can create quests to do a bunch of stuff you normally see in RPG's and thempark games...  but I don't want to make it quest heavy, and I don't know if we have a quest marker or icon for an NPC yet. (I haven't looked into that yet.)

-Duff

 

[duffstone]

Just to add some perspective (and because the editor was getting figity about the length of my first post), consider this:

Using the classic & default MMO style gameplay, you'll end up netting +x% more credits per xp earned as you'd spend more time earning xp than you would needing credits.  Most of us ended up with hundreds of thousands of extra credits after grinding one simple box using mission terms alone.  The solo-group Jedi grind made us all multi-millionaires without having a single crafter...

I've nullified this result by awarding nearly 200% more xp right now.  I plan to balance that number back down into the 150%(ish) range before I release.  However, that boost "feels" right when playing solo and expecting to master an advanced profession in a couple days rather than a couple weeks.  

since it would be a nightmare to boost credits per mission to compensate, I'd have to reduce the cost of training instead.  not terribly hard with the new editors, but not without peril either.  the real Q I guess is how much...

-Duff

 

[Lasko]

I like the ethos of a single player version, so as credits are an important part of the current game I would prefer they were kept in. So.........

How hard do you want the game to be? 

Personally I like to work for stuff I get and I've always liked the "real life" feel to the game in the context of all the different professions working together and having to earn credits to get the rewards etc.

As I kinda keep odd hours in RL, I tended to play a mostly solo game on live and had many alts and accounts, not all active at once, but I used to change them on a fairly regular basis. This meant having to earn stuff many times over so a reduction in the training cost would have been appreciated.

Dont know if your aware of Tatwi's solo project, just do a github search for Tatwi - Legend of Hondo. He was adding some nice things to aid the solo player' like a merchant system for purchasing stuff like weapons, armour, vehicles etc.

I guess what I would be looking for in a single player version is content, new missions, quests, themeparks etc. As once training is complete, and you've made/bought your armour and weapon credits don't seem quite so important.

On my private server, i have disabled decay too. This for me was just to make thinks a little easier for me and not something I would suggest on a public server but may have it's place in a solo game...... That'll be down to personal taste.

I look forward to testing your work

 

[duffstone]

I didn't know of any other solo projects, but I am not surprised. if they figured out a way to manage vendors & the bazaar then that's a testament to their C++ coding abilities over my own.

I agree with you in that I liked to earn my way as well. that being said, there's a difference between feeling like I 'Earned' it, and actually having to 'grind' for it.

Themeparks & questing content is easy if not for a few hiccups on my end. 1) no idea how to write compact quest dialogue, and 2) haven't figured out how to show the spinning "I" over the head of quest givers... the screenplay / questing mechanics are getting easier form me each day, as is dressing NPC's and making things cute and custom.

 

[duffstone]

Ok, so a few changes seem to make a big difference and are yielding a much more smooth game play scenario...

XP:  Boost was 20x, Now it's 10x.  
Training:  Reduced prices to 100>100>200>300>400>500 for tier 1 classes, and 500>1000>2000>3000>4000>5000 for tier 2 classes, with the major hybrids being 1000>2000>4000>6000>8000>10000.  

so far this seems to offer a far greater ease of playing. I'm no longer earning XP faster than I'm earning money.  this has a few nice side effects in that a couple missions give you enough cash to not only train,  but to have a bit extra now to sink into a house or a couple extractors.  And / Or,  with extra money you don't ALWAYS have to run missions to earn both xp and cash.  Now you can explore a bit to earn some xp without running missions,  which is far more realistic.

Next step,  Rebalance Cities for single play & changing character creation rules (that 24hr thing is silly)...

-Duff

 

[Anach]

I've been playing mostly single-player for years. I have friends pop in from time to time, but mostly it's just me. What I've found is this.

Credits come really easily for combat classes; running missions to level up will leave you really rich (hundreds of thousands by the time you reach master marksman), so money becomes pointless, because all you have to spend it on is training, travel, insurance, speeder repair and maintenance. However, for crafting only, you wont have any credits, because there is no one to buy your stuff, so you have no way to pay for factories and housing etc.

Character creation I set to 5 minutes for the same reasons.

Player city requirements are already much lower than live. I believe it's only 10 citizens for level 5 currently. I did double the amount of skill trainers allowed in the city per level, so I could have most of them. I also doubled the amount of items allowed in houses.

Blue frogs were left in, but only for buffs, because doctors aren't easy to come by, and crafting buffs is probably one of the most difficult things to craft. I made the frog charge 5k per buff and left the quality slightly lower than doc buffs, just to encourage me to level up my doc.

I upped the resource quality back to 90% (live).

The biggest issue for single player is lack of healing for non-medic classes, and the difficulty of dungeons. I am considering upping the amount of heals done by stimpacks and having Stim-A enabled for everyone.

 

[duffstone]

You don't get rich nearly as quickly if you have your xp rates increased 20x.  That means you earn money 20x slower.   I resolved by decreasing xp to 10x, and decreasing training costs.  that's outlined above.

I think I've balanced cities properly, but I haven't had time to test them, it's just a few basic tweaks along with a maintenance adjustment.  

I'm planning a master document to outline all the changes I'll publish, but the two latest are removing the logic checks for "Withdraw Maintainence" that limited it to only guild halls (you can now withdraw maintainence from everything)...  I also split out the "NoBuild" radius to an LUA file (planet_manager.lua),  so you can tweak with how far you want your nobuild to be, if any at all.  Along with my favorite,  adjusting speeder velocities... man it's fun to actually "Move" on a speeder.

 

[duffstone]

I agree that medic / doctor / CM... and well the lack of healing for all other professions is a drag.  Jedi is a super fun class to play, not because it's Jedi, but because you can heal and don't have terribad downtime...   I've also overbalanced Jedi so that they never need armor.  Jedi toughness is basically a strait % reducer of damage (stock, I didn't change the code).  so as a 3 tree master jedi, you get like 80% damage reduction so you can fight nightsister protectors and spell weavers unbuffed and keep up.  Elders can still one-shot ya tho, so you'll need buffs for them.  That balances just about perfect for my tastes... 

I'm currently play testing TK,  3222 right now, and since I lowered xp to 10x, it's a bit of a drag, tons of downtime.  However, it seems to be trending along the same lines as my Jedi did when comparing relative profession paths vs. strength and viability.  The biggest difference is TK has no healing.  I think ALL the combat profs will need some sort of "toughness" stat to balance them out, but I haven't gotten to one that requires armor yet.  it may all be a wash, especially if you did something crazy like making doctor / medic cost half the SP as they do by default.  but that remains to be seen if it's necessary.

 

[Anach]

Actually, I came back to this thread to check and see if anyone had the code, or a brief run down, on how to enable roll yaw & pitch... I know other servers have done it, and I've looked at it, and I think it's doable, just not easily.

anyone played with it yet?

I looked into that as soon as I read about it here. However, the code hasn't been merged. I was going to add it myself, but have been busy.

Along with my favorite,  adjusting speeder velocities... man it's fun to actually "Move" on a speeder.

While I don't like changing too much, I'm looking forward to modifying speeds on my own server. It always bugged me they were so slow.

 

[Anach]

Along with my favorite,  adjusting speeder velocities... man it's fun to actually "Move" on a speeder.

While I don't like changing too much, I'm looking forward to modifying speeds on my own server. It always bugged me they were so slow.

 

[duffstone]

[quote pid='7779' dateline='1450748192']
I looked into that as soon as I read about it here. However, the code hasn't been merged. I was going to add it myself, but have been busy.

[/quote]
This is EXACTLY what I was hoping to find.  You, my friend, are my hero for the day!  Thanks much.  

BTW, I folded it in, compiled, and it's working great.  One more item checked off.

-Duff

 

[Viaron]

It isn't SWG if it is single player.

 

[duffstone]

I'll bite... what is it?

 

[Lasko]

Think what Via means (/waves), is SWG cannot (in his opinion), be turned into a single player game.

 

[duffstone]

while I respect your explanation Lasko, I wouldn't have expected such a trollish and off-topic response from Viaron. I'll hold out for his explanation. Until then the project is un-moved and I'll have something for you guys sometime after the first of the year.

I'm just playtesting and looking for bugs now.

-Duff

 

[Anach]

I'm still wondering what to do about medic XP without anyone else to heal. I'm thinking I'll end up macro botting some of my alts. Rather than spending all day healing my entertainer.

 

[duffstone]

Well my project has xp boosted to 10x normal rates, so Doc is one of the easier professions to grind up.  Even the crafting goes quickly, and easily keeps up with your demand for meds for healing.

My problem with medic and Doc is more along a different, but nevertheless mentioned by you tangent;  In a single player game, there's no reason to have a dedicated doc other than for buffs...  You'll never need a dedicated healer to group with... Unless you multi-box content...

I have yet to tackle this issue, but my main idea is to reduce SP requirements for medic (including novice), and increase the SP requirements for Doc.  This makes basic healing easy to include in almost any template, while keeping the heavier duty healing still expensive enough to not end up with a dual combat elite master WITH doc included....  I don't care if a master Commando or master BH has master medic.  But I DON'T want them to have master doc as well...  that's too much power, even for pve, and nearing Master Jedi levels, which is a much harder class to grind with the upper master tiers costing millions of xp.

lowering medic SP costs also makes combat medic a more viable class to include in your template.  it can heal well, AND help you dps harder mobs with DOTS...  As a single play environment, I ordinarily wouldn't waste my time with combat medic, but if it had less of a downside, I might.

All this can be done .tre side in the skills.iff datatable, and is pretty simple overall.  once I finish playing with CH, I'll mess around with medic / CM and see how it works out with lowered costs. - Duff

 

[Anach]

That is a good idea, as I think most of us start off taking medic to grind with, and have to drop it to recover points. However, lowering the points for medic will really mess with the point requirements for CM, Doc and Bio. Say you made the novice box cost 1 point, you are going to have an extra 14 points if you mastered Doc or CM, than you would normally have. However, if you made novice CM or Doc cost an extra 14 points, then you aren't going to be able to have the same specs available to you if your intent is to master parts of those two classes.

That's why instead of messing with the whole balance of 4 different classes and multiple mixed classes, making basic healing available to all classes, similar to CU, would probably be the best bet, as would upping the amount the basic Stims heal. So you would need to add Heal/Tend damage to Brawler/Marksman, leaving the wound healing and other items to the actual medics.

As for botting. I still think that's a real alternative. It doesnt take much to run a second client on the same PC, and there were plenty of people that would run second characters as a bot. I saw one guy on our server that had 7 alts running as his bots to level them up at once. I know credit farmers used to do it also.

 

[duffstone]

it's not as difficult as you thing to rebalance SP costs and achieve what you're looking for. and it's a hellofalot easier than giving healing to everyone by default, and/or boosting it.

Both Doc and CM require master medic. You can't add 15pts to each Doc & CM novices, that's obvious, but if you:
1) reduce the SP cost for master medic to 18pts (down from 77pts prior).
2) Increase all costs to Doc and CM by 18pts (1 extra pt per skill box).
3) Increase SP costs for 1111 BE by 10XP (2sp per box for novice and 1111)

The net effect will be more healing in almost all templates as medic is super cheap at only 18pts. doc and cm got cheaper as well since they both used to require a full 77pts of master medic but don't any longer. BE costs have been reduced as well as they loose a net of 19 required sp.

Yes this messes with the old paradigm & template system, but it makes healing more accessible to single play dynamics. it accomplishes what you want, basic healing for all classes. However, it doesn't make medic obsolete by giving healing to everyone without medic, and players still have a choice about it. Programming in default healing takes the choice out of their hands.

-Duff

 

[Anach]

Well I don't believe giving everyone enhanced Stim-A would make medic pointless, as there is a lot more medic can do, as well as increased speed and efficiency. Stim A's rarely get used anyway, because for the most part their healing isn't worth the time it takes to use them in the combat queue.

Another option would be to give everyone the tend wound/damage option, so they can heal themselves without stims, at the cost of mind wounds, as most medics would prefer stims.