Bad Guy Games

YouTube video by HikaruUtadaVEVO 宇多田ヒカル - Goodbye Happiness

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUhh...

Poorly!

Ahh. 0 attack doesn't usually do anything on it's own, so usually just used for blocking. But they can still trigger on-attack effects from other sources, or be pumped before damage.

Toughness 0 before or after? Any time a creature has toughness zero with no +1 counters on it, it immediately dies as a state-based effect.

704.5f If a creature has toughness 0 or less, it’s put into its owner’s graveyard. Regeneration can’t replace this event.

It's crazypants!

This looks like Chicago style to me. Not my jam at all, honestly.

There's some very good pizza in Chicago, but this form factor is not one of them (despite the name).

One last note - I play on the Blue server, which has 1/3 of the population of the more recent Green server. I hear there are lists for the item drops on Green. Sucks to be them, I guess.

You can read about this event on wiki.project1999.com/The_Cracking...

1. Enticing high level players to revisit lower level zones quickly turned into a quest bottleneck
2. One itemization error worsened this, to where I see people cursing this particular zone
3. Creating perverse, temporary incentive loops due to oversight in quest design and reward structure

To summarize, I just thought this was an interesting piece of unique, temporary game design that immediately created the following issues:

These were written with a bit of unique, non-canon lore to entice the player, but it's quick and punchy while remaining serious. This is also interesting - the staff of Project 1999 are volunteers, and the server(s) have been running continuously since 2009.

It took less than a day for all the quests to be solved - they're relatively simple, but effectively written. Everquest tends to have extremely verbose, lore-ridden quest dialogues, which can make them a bit difficult to care about beyond what is next to complete the quest.

The druid and wizard classes have the ability to teleport to certain places in the game, either solo or for a whole group of players. Suddenly, these quick fedex quests can be very quickly repeated and exploited for their loot potential.

You see where this is going if you've ever played Everquest. Caster classes have the ability to "bind" to a location, and "gate" returns them to the spot for a small mana cost.

Many of the gifts are effectively useless - food, or little magic effects creators (think sparklers or holiday poppers), but sometimes you get a gem worth some money. Or a gem or random item worth a fair amount of money. And the quests can be repeated... infinitely.

Back to the "gifts" I mentioned. These are an item that, when activated, can give either the player or another character a randomly selected gift. Using it on another player increases your "naughty or nice" rating, and using it on oneself lowers it.

While these are actually very well written for being so simple (one involving a long missing gift, the other a forgotten selfless guard), they also introduced an interesting opening for certain classes to exploit.

The third item of note: The quests were designed to send the player across the world, to many of the game's "snow" zones (and a couple fire) in order to complete the final quest. However, two of these were reduced to "fedex" quests, not requiring a drop from a monster.

Oddly, this is very much in line with classic Everquest, but something hardly ever seen with the current state of Project 1999, which is very top-heavy level wise. Most lower level characters are the Nth alt of a player with multiple level 60s.

High level players from the top raiding guilds could be found sitting in individual rooms, waiting for the zone timer to respawn one or two mobs for a chance at the drop.

The second item of note: This floor also has a problem - half of the mobs were itemized with the wrong item! I believe this was in error, but combined with the slightly lower drop rate, all of a sudden the time to get this item went from a few minutes to an hour or more.

Some of the pieces for the quest dropped almost immediately, but a bottleneck formed on the third floor for a particular piece.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see that this quest line was bringing us to some lesser-used dungeons, including my favorite dungeon in the game, a multi-level tower of undead that almost no one uses due to an extremely punishing key system.

A little context: many quests in (classic) Everquest involve killing monsters in public dungeons or outdoor areas, often for low drop rate items. Respawn times vary, but many dungeons can only accommodate so many players before you just have trouble finding things to kill in a timely fashion.

as well as random "gifts" along the way. Very quickly, it seemed like half the server was working on the quest. This is the first item of note - lower level zones suddenly seeing an influx of high level characters.

This year they went all out, with gifts and a 7 part quest line that had to be discovered.

This was initially just investigated by those who like solving puzzles and discovery. But it turned out to have some extremely good quest rewards at the end (a couple options of raid-level gear)

I wanted to write up some observations on a particular mmo seasonal quest, while it's fresh.

#project1999 #everquest #gamedesign

I play on Project 1999, a classic Everquest emulator, from time to time. Each year, they run some variant on a holiday event.

argh it's so cute

I think one of the big takeaways we're already seeing is if it's unpopular, it will simply be lied about.

It's really hard to pretend you never use AI for anything at all, especially when you aren't being given a choice right now in some regards (such as google search).

Never had any issues with Godot on Fedora or Mint. (Abandoned Fedora after a couple weeks for unrelated reasons)