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Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 6:31 pm
by XxXshidoXxX
Hey everyone, lately i've been "playing" for the first time in a while. After trying various servers and different versions of Rose i noticed that everyone tends to have his own idea about how the whole leveling experience should be.
I noted several thing :

Some "structural factors"
-At what level should you get your second job ?
-At what level does having a "cleric" becomes necessary ?
-Are personal buffs even relevant ?
-What place should the Item mall have ?
-Until what level should you be able to buy weapons / armors from NPCS ?
-Should quests be important ? or should bashing reign supreme ?
-Should you run faster than a cart ?
-Should a castle gear be the "ultimate weapon" or just a props
-What should the rates be ?

Some "character fantasy factors"
-What should the skills impact be ? ( Ie : Big damage like pre-evo, medium ala irose... )
-Should there be more or less specialization ( ex : a soldier would have a spear spec, a sword spec, an axe spec...)
-Should we have a third job or advanced skills ? In both case when and how ?

some "balance factors"
-What should be the right balance between monster power and the player ? ( In actual NaRose you start being unable to solo monster after lvl 25... Which in my opinion is rubbish, player should be able to enjoy the first levels without worrying about buffs, parties and pots by billions...)
-Should we keep the 2047 limitation ( for irose servers ) or should we remove it ?
-If we remove it should we make the higher level monster with high defs and low hp ?
-Is pvp balanced ?

Some "content factors"
-What should the endgame be ? Do we push this new fashion of luring monsters by hundreds and AOE the fuck out of it ? or do we keep the standard small monster - medium monster - big monster - King - master kind of distribution ? Or maybe a little bit of both, or even something new like world bosses.
-Are dungeon really working ? Should we make more of them ?
-Is PVP really attractive ? Should we made new endgame scenario ?
-Should players be able to level up with pvp ? With maybe BGs or wild pvp
-Should we create raids like wow ? If so can we even balance a tank - heal - dps composition with the state of the classes ?
-Are the zones really ok as of today ? Isn't eldeon boring ? Isn't Oro just and soulless void ? Is karkia even playable ?
-Could we have some exploration ? Finding rare places and monster would grand rewards ?


As you can see from all these questions my minds is quite divided, playing Narose i burst out with rage when i realized that the game i loved became just another cashgrab where you pretty much can't level without spending money in various weapons / armor / buffs / boosters.

I then went on to try irose servers such as IrosePH and Arua, those are better but i personally still think a cleric becomes necessary too early. Junon is a planet with a phenomenal design, charismatic monsters and is pretty much the heart and soul of rose. I personally think that we should spend more time there by pushing the second job requirement to lvl 100 and balancing junon to be accessible for everyone until then.
Clerics would then become slowly needed as level go by but you shouldn't ever need a l33t lvl 270 ever to level up.

About the 2047 thing i'm still a bit puzzled, i guess balancing high end monster is easy if you keep it ? But its also a very frustrating and anti-game spirit thing.
Oro / karkia need to be looked at by a real level designer, they look like and play like trash.

Regarding the end-game i personally can't find what's so good about this "lure" way of leveling, i'd much rather have the option to kill single monsters like before.
Raids and dungeons are actually really fun in Rose, it becomes less stable the more you ad players but a 5 man dungeon is surprisingly fun.
Exploration is definitively something that i would like to look into.

there are a lot of other points where i can't really decide but that's not the point, I would like to hear what you as a player or a developer feel like the experience should be ? What do you enjoy ?

If you're wondering why i'm asking all of this its because i wouldn't mind opening an osiroseII server when possible :P

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:52 pm
by lazypenguin
IMO the cleric is the single worst class and requiring players to have a cleric or to dual-client to be able to even play the game is a mistake. I always thought each class should provide the party buffs themselves (e.g. hawker buff aspeed/mspeed, soliders health/armor, muse mana/dodge, dealer accuracy/crit). You would have to decide in the early game if you want to get the buff skills or the offensive skills and it would affect how you level up (solo vs looking for party members). End game parties would want to mix and match classes so they can get the best combo of buffs. I would make cleric a healer class and debuffer. They would be critical in boss fights to reduce attack damage/attack speed/w.e and to keep the party members alive. Makes them interesting in PVP situations to actively debuff enemies. This makes the cleric an active player that has to keep the debuffs up and the heals up, rather than being shunted into a corner while the party pot spams instead. (Oh, I'd also nerf the ridiculous instance pots).

I agree with you, Junon is the best planet and the others are uninspired. I always enjoyed low rate servers because the majority of the population was forced into closer proximity and so it was more vibrant. Also, it meant I got to spend more time in Junon!

I'm not sure why 2047 shouldn't be removed? Higher level monsters should just scale accordingly...If over-damage is an issue then you can make the power curve logarithmic or something.

One idea that a friend of mine came up with was to remove the refine/gem cap and allow refining past (9) gemming past [7] and removing 120dur/45 dodge limit. A big issue Arua has is an abundance of resources and once you (9) your 5/20 items or w/e there's never a chance of it going away so the economy is swamped with cash and it kinda sucks. Also, nobody cares about 5/20 level 200 gear because there's loads of 5/20 level 210 gear or w/e. Gotta have a way for those items to be removed from circulation. Why not give a user the chance to have an OP (20) sword with a ridiculously low success chance of refining and a chance the item goes away forever if he fails a refine step. Trying to get your two G10 into a G11 and fail on the gem step and lose you your g10s? Suddenly 16 G7 disappears from the economy and there's more incentive to farm/craft for new ones.

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 12:23 am
by XxXshidoXxX
First of all I'm happy to see i'm not the only one not linking the newest planets. ( some years ago i tried to make a server that would be only about junon with low rates and a lvl max of 100 but i ended up crying myself to sleep during the balancing calculations )
I do to a certain extend share your views on the cleric, i would much rather see more synergies between classes than relying on some crazy buffs.


Gotta have a way for those items to be removed from circulation. Why not give a user the chance to have an OP (20) sword with a ridiculously low success chance of refining and a chance the item goes away forever if he fails a refine step. Trying to get your two G10 into a G11 and fail on the gem step and lose you your g10s? Suddenly 16 G7 disappears from the economy and there's more incentive to farm/craft for new ones.

That sounds like the old **Delete Message** legendary quests where you had to be crazy lucky to get items like atiech or corrupted ashbringer but having them would make you a legendary player too.
I like it, i like having player seeking an almost unrealistic goal, giving them something to dream about.
I would make this even harder by requiring some special conditions on those high refine that players would have to discover themselves.

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 12:13 pm
by L3nn0x
I'd like to have world monsters that spawn once a week and require a lot of players (20-50) to kill. It'd provide with materials and equipment that are necessary to craft legendary items. The party that inflicts the most damage would have ownership of the drops. (I have an idea about mixing PvP here but I'm afraid the post will be too long if I go down that road.)

I'd also like to have dungeons for 5 people, tailored for a certain level range (so we could have dungeons in the early levels to change from grinding). They'd provide more xp than normal grinding and have bosses that provide materials and equipment. There would be a leaderboard with the best times for each dungeon, if you want to compete with other players. The record wouldn't be taken into account if you're too high level. You'd have a certain amount of entries per dungeon.

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 5:13 pm
by XxXshidoXxX
L3nn0x wrote:I'd like to have world monsters that spawn once a week and require a lot of players (20-50) to kill. It'd provide with materials and equipment that are necessary to craft legendary items. The party that inflicts the most damage would have ownership of the drops. (I have an idea about mixing PvP here but I'm afraid the post will be too long if I go down that road.)

I'd also like to have dungeons for 5 people, tailored for a certain level range (so we could have dungeons in the early levels to change from grinding). They'd provide more xp than normal grinding and have bosses that provide materials and equipment. There would be a leaderboard with the best times for each dungeon, if you want to compete with other players. The record wouldn't be taken into account if you're too high level. You'd have a certain amount of entries per dungeon.


That reminds me of the current "world bosses" WOW currently has where a new boss will spawn each week and you'd have to defeat it with tons of players to get a cool reward, i think its a really neat system. Having them drop mats for a legendary craft is an especially cool idea !
Finally crafting your legendary sword after defeating legendary beast really feels like a game objective.

When it comes to dungeon i would also like them to be accessible for lower levels, currently arua and iroseph do have them only for lvl 250+ witch is kind of weird.
If matt or tntn ever pass by i would like to know why they chose them to be only for very top tier players instead of having several that would gradually become harder.

I take it that you are ok with the current monster stats and the place of the cleric ?

PS : NaRose just announced that they will restrict access to european players LOL.

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 6:17 pm
by PurpleYouko
I have a ton of ideas related to this also.

I've been toying with a player level scaling system like they use in GuildWars2.
It would make it so that higher level players could still play low level maps and experience something like a real battle instead of being pretty much invulnerable to monsters there.

Dynamic monster spawning. in project 137 i can spawn any monster with any physical size, any AIP script and soon any level. It will require a custom STB LIST_NPC.STB which i haven't made yet. The code is already in place.
Also I have already introduced a collision map system that allows the server to check if monsters are attempting to move out of bounds (through trees, up cliffs, off the map and so on) this leads into custom spawns that can move around the map into new areas. Monsters could effectively colonize a map and even encroach on towns which leads into......

Custom Events (quest based). What happens when Moldies decide to start spawning inside Junon Polis? A custom event chain springs into effect. (I would like to have this completely dynamic but that might be a little hard with ROSE) Maybe Odelo could send out a shout across Junon for aid in pushing the invaders out. The counter attack could be used to spawn some really tough monsters (manager moldies maybe) making a pitched battle with nice goodies available as drops.

Modified drop system. I have never really liked the way that drops work in ROSE. First hitter gets the spoils. not good. Why not give drops to all participants in a battle with the quality/quantity of the drops being proportional to a Battle Status for each player. maybe a 3 tiered system Bronze / Silver / Gold based on percentage of total damage inflicted or maybe based on the DPS of the player. It would be trivial to make drops only visible and available to players who have earned them.

legendary crafting sounds awesome. Crafting could also be done in a lot of stages with multiple levels of prerequisite ingredients that have to be crafted themselves. This would make for a long chain (possibly with guiding quests) that would be followed to get your legendary weapon.
I've always felt that crafting in ROSE is over-simplified.

Truly unique items.... Oh wait.. I already made those in project 137 :D Kind of messes up wish lists though since there are literally infinite variations on the item stats.
The system at present has no way to procedurally generate the UStats in game. Only a GM command can currently create them.
My thoughts are that a whole load of items can be used like bindrunes to enhance some specific stat or other with diminishing returns as they get higher (maybe double the number needed to gain each 5 points or something. 1 item x applied to your sword gives 5 AP, 2 gives another 5, then 4, then 8 and so on.) And what it this item x has to first be crafted from rare ingredients?.
2 UStat values are available currently on ANY equipable item. Maybe they could only be activates by treating the item with another rare (craftable) item to create a UStat Socket. The possiblitys are endless.


Crafting in general. I don't think that crafting should be limited to Dealers. ALL players should be able to learn a "profession" so that they could follow set crafting trees within that profession. I have no idea what this would take to achieve but it would be very nice.

I also like XxXshidoXxXs idea of taking buff abilities away from the cleric and spreading them around the classes so that each class has its own special area of expertise with respect to buffs. What to do with Clerics though. They would mostly suck on their own, especially if most of their buffs were gone.

That will do for now. I have a TON more ideas and most of them I know precisely how to implement them too. ;)

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Fri Apr 27, 2018 5:58 pm
by L3nn0x
I like your idea for the drop system, but I'd do it by team (or solo if you're solo), make it drop everything for the highest DPS team and not hide the drops. If we do that, we can make the map PvP until the boss is dead (or just make all the maps PvP all the time) and you have a probability of dropping items when someone kills you. (We probably would want to allow that only in higher tier maps and allow for some kind of binding equipment.) Then you'd need multiple teams to kill the boss and protect the loot. This way you can mix both kinds of gameplay and appeal to different people. (Probably)

About the cleric, I've always liked the fact that it is a support only class but has terrific buffs. However I do agree that people shouldn't need clerics until a high level, simply because there aren't tons of clerics and it's hard to find one (or you have a second account). Also, I'd bring the car quest to a lower level, but provide higher tier parts, because walking is really slow.

Dynamic events ofc, but I'm not a big fan of dynamic scaling. If you can't easily kill the small monsters then what's the point of leveling up? To keep players occupied we could have really big dungeons that take a week to finish or something with 100 people. An arena mode with rankings.

One thing I've been thinking about crafting is how simple it is. Because we have materials, how about we'd need to shape them to create the item? And how you shape it would change the properties of the finished item. For example, you'd have the general shape of a sword as a shadow, then you add a iron bar that you shape to have the blade, then add a ruby guard and a leather hilt. And all of those would change the properties of the item. So you'd need to cut the leather so the weapon is lighter, and so on. That's still a very much WIP thinking so please criticize it ;)

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Fri Apr 27, 2018 8:05 pm
by XxXshidoXxX
I've been toying with a player level scaling system like they use in GuildWars2.
It would make it so that higher level players could still play low level maps and experience something like a real battle instead of being pretty much invulnerable to monsters there.


Ahah, this concept has always been extremely polarizing in the MMO community :mrgreen: Whenever it has been implanted half the community would like it half would hate it.
Would you allow high level players to drop the same items as lower level player on the sam monsters ?
Since cosmetics are a big aspect in rose this would be decisive ( worm dragon scale ect...)

Custom Events (quest based). What happens when Moldies decide to start spawning inside Junon Polis? A custom event chain springs into effect. (I would like to have this completely dynamic but that might be a little hard with ROSE) Maybe Odelo could send out a shout across Junon for aid in pushing the invaders out. The counter attack could be used to spawn some really tough monsters (manager moldies maybe) making a pitched battle with nice goodies available as drops.


This had been a dream of mine ever since they released a cinematic of junon being invaded by monsters, i found the concept so freakin' cool but was so disappointed when the actual game didn't have anything like that.

Modified drop system. I have never really liked the way that drops work in ROSE. First hitter gets the spoils. not good. Why not give drops to all participants in a battle with the quality/quantity of the drops being proportional to a Battle Status for each player. maybe a 3 tiered system Bronze / Silver / Gold based on percentage of total damage inflicted or maybe based on the DPS of the player. It would be trivial to make drops only visible and available to players who have earned them.


That's kind of both good and bad. Its good in the general way but at the same time its such a classic in rose it's almost amusing. I will always be keen on the memories of everyone rushing the aquaking and spamming the pickup like crazy back in the old irose days.

Also, I'd bring the car quest to a lower level

That i highly agree on.
WoW was kind of in the same situation as rose, they lowered the requirement for mounts and it only improved gameplay for everyone.

One thing I've been thinking about crafting is how simple it is. Because we have materials, how about we'd need to shape them to create the item? And how you shape it would change the properties of the finished item. For example, you'd have the general shape of a sword as a shadow, then you add a iron bar that you shape to have the blade, then add a ruby guard and a leather hilt. And all of those would change the properties of the item. So you'd need to cut the leather so the weapon is lighter, and so on. That's still a very much WIP thinking so please criticize it ;)

That does seem pretty sick and it would actually bring some fun to the artisan class !


PS: ever gonna host a server purple ? i would play on it ;)

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Fri Apr 27, 2018 10:21 pm
by Armii
XxXshidoXxX wrote:i would like to know why they chose them to be only for very top tier players instead of having several that would gradually become harder.


We do already? Our raids start around Level 80. There's four tiers up to 200+, each decreasing in group sizes. It starts at a 25 man raid and ends at 10 and get's a lot more difficult up the tiers. These run twice a day per tier. Then there's others at 220+ which are 6 man raids, on-demand.

We don't keep leaderboards for those specifically, but we do for some of our Game Arenas which makes them real competitive, i.e. Battle Royale.

Then theres...

L3nn0x wrote:I'd like to have world monsters that spawn once a week and require a lot of players (20-50) to kill.


Which we have a few of and highly competitive as they drop decent loot and on PvP zones.

lazypenguin wrote:Gotta have a way for those items to be removed from circulation.


I've always said that if/when we increase the refine cap, 1-9 remains unchanged and anything above that has a chance of being destroyed.

Too much text for me to otherwise comment on.

Re: Improving and balancing the Lvling experience

PostPosted: Mon Apr 30, 2018 6:51 pm
by XxXshidoXxX
We do already? Our raids start around Level 80. There's four tiers up to 200+, each decreasing in group sizes. It starts at a 25 man raid and ends at 10 and get's a lot more difficult up the tiers. These run twice a day per tier. Then there's others at 220+ which are 6 man raids, on-demand.


You're right there are actually some, i missed them when i went back to my old account.
Did not try them quite yet but from what i saw on youtube they look quite fun.

Speaking of arua i just saw that they will launch a classic server. Which is an awesome idea, i'll probably play it. This also could be a good opportunity to revamp junon a bit.