I'm back from my rest, and spent a week-and-a-half working on some bugs, which became the update a couple days ago. I'm working on the next snapshot, which will focus on the new Gazluk dungeon! But that's a couple weeks away and I don't really have too much to say about it yet. Instead, I wanted to talk about a little side-topic: player-run challenges.
There was a thread on the forum about doing "challenge characters" -- where you make a new character and follow special restrictions you impose on yourself. The classic example is "self-imposed permadeath": you play for as long as you can without dying, and after you die, you score yourself somehow (maybe by how many levels you obtained, or how many bosses you killed, or whatever else). Then you compare scores with other people for bragging rights or a prize pool or whatever. (Then you can either delete that character, or keep playing them normally.)
Just to be VERY clear, I'm happy with the death penalties in the game and I'm not interested in adding permadeath! But I do like challenge contests, and want to help make player-run contests on the forums more feasible.
So I spent a few hours adding a new command to the game. It's undocumented right now, because it's untested and pretty bare-bones -- but if you're interested in challenge contests, I'm hoping you can help test it and figure out how to improve it. If you use "/behaviorreport" in game right now, you'll see a list of info about your character. It might look something like this:
Challenge Restrictions (for self-imposed hardcore challenges)
Bought Stock Items? YES
Bought Used Items? YES
Bought From Player Shops? -
Consigned Items? -
Died (In An Avoidable Way)? YES
Picked Up Others' Dropped Items? -
Placed Player Work-Orders? -
Sold Items to Vendor? YES
Took Item From Account-Shared Vault? -
Took Item From Guild Vault? -
Received Items In Trade? -
And so on. The idea is that after the challenge ends, you can take a screenshot of the output of this command, and post it on the forums as your "proof" that you participated without breaking whatever rules the challenge had. (Of course, screenshots can be faked, but that's a lesser problem right now -- we can always find ways to export this info later.)
One of the most common types of challenge is the so-called "iron man" challenge, where you have to obtain every item yourself, without help from other players. So I tried to think of every way that players can receive items from other players. And I added some tracking for a few other ideas, but it's pretty bare bones right now.
But I don't really need brainstorms, either -- I came up with lots of ideas, but I don't want to implement tons of stuff just to see what ends up being useful. That's a lot of wasted work! Instead, I think the best feedback will come from people who are actually trying to use this command -- and can give ways to iterate on it, improve it, open up more doors with it.
So if you think the idea of a "challenge character" is a fun change of pace, let’s run a few! I expect most contests to be player-run, but just to get things slightly more organized, why don't I start an unofficial contest here: http://forum.projectgorgon.com/showt...eath-Challenge No prizes or anything, because the command still needs to be tested and improved. But if these are fun we might do more official ones in the future.
And, of course, please help test that the command actually works right! For existing characters, many of these fields won't be right, because we didn't start recording it until this last update. I'm only worried about NEW characters that don't show the right info.
I'll be back next week to talk about the upcoming content!
