New Ideas Wishlist, Fall/Winter

[Embri]

Mm... so some ideas I've been thinking of.... feel free to add or comment.


Restore old Service MOD to the Stores
The Services option for items really was quite convenient, is there any chance we could get it back?

More Items
Finish up the various item trees, notably weapons and armor/shields etc.

Implementation of a proper map -
*Overworld, with larger scale close up maps for each area.
*Thinking of making the map active, thus a visual navigation tool in addition to the current forum organization.


Character Skill Tree
* Abilities which grow over time and/or have pre requisites.
* Accuracy increases with successful use or training?


Multiple Item Abilities
*Javascript run contextual drop down menu for varying abilities/uses for items.


Defensive Armor Modifiers
*Not sure about implementation of this one, it would be difficult at best.


Shopkeeper headers/descriptions for the board shops.
*From what I've read about Zarath's original Shop mod, there's the ability to apply a stylesheet that allows the modification of how the store displays items as well as additional descriptions and things... these would be a small banner possibly with the shopkeeper or just a picture of the store, plus flavor text.

Human registration verification field... with instructions put up as an image, that say something like:
"Please write in the box below how you found Blackstar - this is one of our anti-spam account measures, that let us authorize real people quickly and prevent spambots from invading our board."

New Anti-Spam:
Disallow the entry of URLS in the profile Website field and signatures until an account has at least 20 posts. Prevent accounts from posting URLs in the forum until they have at least 20 posts. Could replace current "register and be authorized" system.

Multiplicity Item Control - Essentially, speed up item handling.
Multiple Buy in Shops. Buying one item at a time = T_T
Multiple Add to Shop
Multiple Discard in Inventory.

Safety Deposit Box - with multiple item deposit and withdrawal. While not as critical now that we have expandable inventories, it would still be nice to be able to stash extra items away from view, and keep profiles loading quickly.

Synth store(s) which can output multiple copies of one item as the result of a Synth, and/or several different items. For example, 1x Log = 5x Paper, or 1x Chicken = 1x Chicken Carcass, 10x Chicken feathers. impossible under the current system. No idea as to the feasibility of this.

Trophy Cabinet/House/Garden - Places that users can buy and display their items in, arrange items. Now we're dreaming. >.>

Ability to bookmark threads. Unsure as to usefulness of this.

Variable PM Box Sizes - Set by user instead of Global, expansion buyable through the Board owned stores. Really would be helpful, especially with the volume of PM's I get in regards to items...

Get our Mods off their butts and either helping with the Wiki, or recruiting more Dojodians! Regular users too! We need an advertising campaign, overt and/or grassroots.

Ability to save posts as drafts. For instance, half completed stories.

Expanded character limit for item flavor texts. The current cap is quite limiting, and a lot of items would benefit from more than 255 characters. (or whatever the limit is, I don't recall at this point, only that it's fairly low.)

Daily Humor news article (Daily Duck) and weather forecast. Ideally, a 7 day rotation for both - seven news fields tied to days of the week, and seven fields for our random item drop MOD, so that there would be variable weather.

[LordPsycho]

RP based ideas:

-New Relic

-Mutant Chicken revolt

-Elements out of Potter or Potter puppet pals (depending on the tone we are after)


About the skills, we can actually dictate that accuracy can increase with each successful use, but I think some kind of "Training Dojo" should be used (for a fee) to gain new skills.

Or when a skill accuracy (lets call this skill experience) gets to 100, you get whatever skills are below it on the skill tree...this approach would be trickier

[Embri]

Hm... a fee associated with them would be good, I was thinking about something like this...

One of the Dojo's icons is a gold dragon, of course, though as of yet, we haven't really seen/heard of it as an NPC... but what if this dragon actually existed and was willing to award new skills/upgrade them in exchange for certain pieces of jewelry to add to his/her/its hoard? I never particularly liked the idea of dragons as monsters, but a scholar dragon might have potential.

Possible problems with a skill tree I can think of:
- requirement to limit now often players can buy/upgrade their skills by a time factor, a piece of code similar to the drunk code for the bar would work, creating a timer that counts down and won't allow the player to buy a new skill/upgrade for that time.

- Are skills transferable/tradeable? My personal theory would be no, they are not... helps separate them from items.

- Cost - they should be expensive - two reasons, economy health, and balance - skills after all do not wear out nor break.

- Could a modified Synth system be used to "give" skills? Not sure about that, but let's say you bring the ability granter (training dojo, dragon, divine power, whatever is decided on) Items X,Y, and Z, and then can trade those in for a permanent ability.

[LordPsycho]

a) Goron's back! (yay)

b) I was thinking maybe we have a store type thing that exchanges a cut gem for the skill (higher skills would require a more expensive gem). Skills are stored in the item system with a different worn value than your average item, so they won't show up in stores, for sale, and aren't tradable, but are visible to the item usage system and would be used similarly.

I'd think it would be best if we tied this into some RP, so these spells could be used (nay, required to be used) to defeat an enemy (Mutant Chickens anyone)...this means we'ed have to send our users on a quest to find the sacred Golden Dragon and his hidden temple-dojo to learn how to defeat the enemy.

[Embri]

An excellent idea, tying it into a plot - just because the grove RP fell through, doesn't mean we can't have our own special events!

Hm... Hm.... how about making it a Feature RP (when it's ready)?

*Plot Prizes
*Special Medal
*Maybe a limited edition item or two, varying by participation levels:

-Posted at least once in the Plot - Medal
-Helped achieve X Event - some other prize
-Helped achieve Y Event - prize, etc.

Would have to be easily quantifiable "triggers" for various prizes.

Store-like thing that exchanges stuff for skills - sounds perfect - can we make it a hidden Shop? So you'll have to find the link or get it from someone to find it?

My one concern is that those with lots of money will have an easy time loading up on skills with abandon... so either a time limit system, and/or the requirement of a special item to obtain a skill? Something, perhaps, like a key that would provide access to the Skill area.... this is starting to sound complicated. -_-

Hm... *thinks* if it's set up the same as the Synth system, there should be no problem requiring multiple items in exchange for a skill. Thus, something like this:

Sapphire + Topaz Ring + <Skill Token>

Thus, the number of skills made available would be controlled by the random item distribution, made appropriately rare of course. As part of the Plot RP, participants who get to a specific point/solve a specific puzzle should be given one of these skill tokens as a reward.

(The jewelery/gem items could vary with the type of skill, possibly also including precious metal items, if we do go with the idea of a scholarly but treasure poor Dragon. X3 )

[LordPsycho]

well, we pretty much agree that skill accuracy would improve with use? how about putting a limit in there that you can't get a new skill before you reached x accuracy on the prerequiset skills?

[Goron40]

And accuracy shouldn't always max out at 100. Or how bout you CAN get it to 100, but it's no necessary for the next skill?

[LordPsycho]

hence why I put x accuracy in my last post

[Embri]

Daily Duck News Clips - silly, humorous, and/or relevant newspaper style short articles on Dojo current events, plus a weather section.

________________________________________________________________________________
| BREAKING NEWS:..............................................| WEATHER FORECAST:
| Bristle Brush Valley - yesterday's mongoose..... | Today's forecast is sunny with partial clouds,
| monsoons wiped out the crop of snake venom.....| with a 60% chance of a Duck and Goose storm
| for the rest of the year, so It looks like the..........| this afternoon. Tomorrow's weather will be
| anti-venom won't be ready for a while yet. ........| windy with early morning fruit showers.
|
________________________________________________________________________________

Okay, so I suck at doing ASCII tables, but you get the idea... basically a two column, one row section with text in each one. These text clips would be pulled out of an Admin CP, which has fields for up to seven days worth of news/weather. The main purpose of this would be to put in RP current events without breaking OOC - instead of saying, "Well we have a great RP kicking off in the Wilds" a news feature could be run detailing the starting scene/plot, plus a link. The weather would sometimes (not always, we know how precticable the weather is!) relate to the Random Events - thus there will be days with no Randoms, some with varying ones.

[Embri]

Alright, I just dealt with a problem with a 0 post count user: liolok@yahoo.com, aka Lio000.

Apparently he/she has PM'd at least 7 or 8 members, basically trying to recruit them.

I have revoked their PM rights and sent along a nice warning.

Would it be possible to make a modification to the system that prevents PM's from users with less than X amount of posts? *slightly annoyed* Or should we just chalk this up to one troll and forget about it?

[addman]

Sorry to barge in since I'm not really involved in running the place.

Lio is from a Halo-based Evil Council that our group tried to contact a long time ago. Obviously, Lio has tracked us down to this forum and tried to poach our members (He's sent a lot of PMs to current EC members).

The fact is, their community are nothing more than 1337 speaking trolls. I do believe they were actually banned on Bungie at some point for flaming other groups and generally being intolerable. Perhaps it's worth one of us EC members putting up a notice about this and warning people who they are and what they're about. Considering you guys are supposed to be banned and all, it'd probably be better if one us did it.

Also, I love the news ticker idea. If you need writers, I'll gladly help out!

[Embri]

You're always welcome to post here, addman, even if it's just to comment on things.

I'll leave lio in your capable EC hands, I'm sure you could inflict far worse punishment than anything I could ever come up with... my PM was basically:

"We don't appreciate people coming to our forums just to snipe our members, your PM privileges are now revoked permanently, have a nice day."

And yes, I agree that a news reel would be a great piece of humor... and another uniquely Blackstar touch to the site. Writers would be very much welcomed if it gets put in, addman. ^_^

[Embri]

I don't know if it's possible, but could the rather small character limit on the item use text be increased? It's really hindering towards writing good item use texts, they could be much more creative if there wasn't such a low cap on characters... >.<

[LordPsycho]

I'll look into hit, but it will need to be increased in both code and DB to do so

[Embri]

*nods* I realize it'd probably mean a variable type change... don't know how easy/hard that would be... *goes back to work on more buttons*