Brainstorming: A Fishy RPG
Posted: 28 Apr 2009, 19:38
I had an idea today. I'm trying to think of new toys, new games, new things that work with fishing but don't require too much interaction. Passives. Bounty hunts and CPGs and contests rule because they just "happen" while you're fishing. The arcade-style games don't because you need to stop fishing and interact with them.
I remembered a "fish bingo" idea brought up on the forums awhile back, and extrapolated an MMORPG-esque system based on it...
"7Seas Adventure"
The game is a HUD that you wear, which offers a list of available quests. After selecting a quest to undertake, you get a story notecard or picture which introduces the quest, and either a list of specific fish to catch or a fish attribute you need to seek out ("blue", "shift", "guppy", "shark"). When you finish a quest, you get an Adventure Point, which goes on your account. New quests are added weekly, so you always have some fresh content to play, even when you've done them all already.
I'm perfectly happy with this design -- it's the best of all worlds. It's passive (just pick your quest and go!), it's fun, it allows a stream of content, it gives you something to do other than collect random fish. But the primary problem is rewards.
THE PROBLEM
WHY finish quests? It's a neat concept, but the concept alone is not going to be fun enough to justify the time and effort for a lot of folks. My initial thought was that each quest would be worth X "Adventure Points", or AP, a new metric you can measure against when competing against your fellow fishers. You could say "I have 50,000 XP and 200 AP!" in a boast. Heck, I COULD wire it to give you more XP -- XP is kind of meaningless and just for fun after 500, after all. But there's a serious, serious issue there.
The problem is farming. Just like in MMORPGs, people WILL find whatever adventure offers the most points for the least effort. Even if they all offered 1 point and no more, the lowest effort quest would be the only one undertaken. You'd end up with a dichtomy of play-to-win powerlevellers and folks who try to be honest about it (and then get sour over how much AP the grinders are getting compared to them). I don't wanna add drama to things.
This could be solved by disallowing players to repeat any one quest. Therefore, you have a maximum AP you can reach, and the only way to go higher is to wait for next week's quest. But this means it's a meaningless metric with no 'just one more quest!' factor, since odds are all the hardcore fishers will perpetually live at max AP.
Plus, this would require server-side storage of flags for every single quest in the system... a beefy database backend that may be overkill. (I'm a PHP newbie, and we'd be flying without the original 7Seas database backend coder. Adding an "AP" column to the user table and a script to update it, that's easy. Adding an entire system of relationally joined flags would be horror.)
Sooo, not sure. I guess it could be rewardless, but again, why bother doing it if there's no purpose? Filling out a bingo card is not thrilling in and of itself. Perhaps if it's wrapped in a story, then you'd have "enough" fun just fufilling the new quests that get released each week to see how they end? I don't know.
So, given the game type above (get a quest, fufil its conditions, repeat) what sort of reward wrapper would motivate you to play AND be difficult to impossible to exploit?
PS, if you value your lives, the answer is not "MOAR BAIT". That wouldn't solve the problem of farming, anyway.
I remembered a "fish bingo" idea brought up on the forums awhile back, and extrapolated an MMORPG-esque system based on it...
"7Seas Adventure"
The game is a HUD that you wear, which offers a list of available quests. After selecting a quest to undertake, you get a story notecard or picture which introduces the quest, and either a list of specific fish to catch or a fish attribute you need to seek out ("blue", "shift", "guppy", "shark"). When you finish a quest, you get an Adventure Point, which goes on your account. New quests are added weekly, so you always have some fresh content to play, even when you've done them all already.
I'm perfectly happy with this design -- it's the best of all worlds. It's passive (just pick your quest and go!), it's fun, it allows a stream of content, it gives you something to do other than collect random fish. But the primary problem is rewards.
THE PROBLEM
WHY finish quests? It's a neat concept, but the concept alone is not going to be fun enough to justify the time and effort for a lot of folks. My initial thought was that each quest would be worth X "Adventure Points", or AP, a new metric you can measure against when competing against your fellow fishers. You could say "I have 50,000 XP and 200 AP!" in a boast. Heck, I COULD wire it to give you more XP -- XP is kind of meaningless and just for fun after 500, after all. But there's a serious, serious issue there.
The problem is farming. Just like in MMORPGs, people WILL find whatever adventure offers the most points for the least effort. Even if they all offered 1 point and no more, the lowest effort quest would be the only one undertaken. You'd end up with a dichtomy of play-to-win powerlevellers and folks who try to be honest about it (and then get sour over how much AP the grinders are getting compared to them). I don't wanna add drama to things.
This could be solved by disallowing players to repeat any one quest. Therefore, you have a maximum AP you can reach, and the only way to go higher is to wait for next week's quest. But this means it's a meaningless metric with no 'just one more quest!' factor, since odds are all the hardcore fishers will perpetually live at max AP.
Plus, this would require server-side storage of flags for every single quest in the system... a beefy database backend that may be overkill. (I'm a PHP newbie, and we'd be flying without the original 7Seas database backend coder. Adding an "AP" column to the user table and a script to update it, that's easy. Adding an entire system of relationally joined flags would be horror.)
Sooo, not sure. I guess it could be rewardless, but again, why bother doing it if there's no purpose? Filling out a bingo card is not thrilling in and of itself. Perhaps if it's wrapped in a story, then you'd have "enough" fun just fufilling the new quests that get released each week to see how they end? I don't know.
So, given the game type above (get a quest, fufil its conditions, repeat) what sort of reward wrapper would motivate you to play AND be difficult to impossible to exploit?
PS, if you value your lives, the answer is not "MOAR BAIT". That wouldn't solve the problem of farming, anyway.