 |
Trophy equipmentNovember 6th, 2006 |
There’s a Terra Nova thread titled Source Identification and Soulbinding which basically says,
…soulbinding is a “source identifier.” In WoW-like systems, you know if a person has been through a particular dungeon because the item they’re carrying could only have come from there. I have a Misplaced Server Arm, thus, you know I’ve been in Naxxramas. Fine.
But in DDO (which does have soulbinding, but to a lesser degree), the difficulty is that I can’t read the life story of a potential groupmate in their equipment.
Or you could use a badge system, which actually tells you where people have been and what they have done, does not have limited slots for historical record, and can even provide finer detail, such as whether the person in question was actually effective in that raid or not — while still leaving the channel of equipment open so that the player can use it to broadcast things like whether they prefer to play frontline tank or backup, whether they have a sense of humor or are grim powergamers, whether they are more interested in cybering than in quests, and so on.
The problem with relying on this whole “item trophy” paradigm is that it actually dilutes the profile of the character. It forces badges to be displayed on the basis of their utility in the game, not on the basis of how much the player values them, what sort of achievement they represent, how reflective they are of player personality, or even whether they are appropriate for the combat role you want them to play.
Combat statistics (which is really all equipment trophies tend to be) are not a sufficiently rich language to capture a player’s profile. Their chief virtue is that you can read the very small amount of info they convey at a distance. We’d be serving players better to instead find ways to surface more useful elements of the profile and history in visible form.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
[IMG] On this post about “Trophy Equipment” over at Raph Koster’s blog, Raph was suggesting that badges (ala SWG) be a viable alternative to using wearable inventory items as “trophies” in MMORPG games, though an implementation of the idea that’s actually cool has yet to be found. Folks seem to be leaning both ways
[...] Long answer is on my blog. [...]
[...] Comments [...]
[...] There was an interesting topic doing the rounds earlier this week, related to a post on TerraNova about the concepts of soul-binding, “trophy equipment”, and how different designs impact the general ability to gauge a player’s level of experience, at least, via a review of their equipment. Raph also commented on the topic, and there was some significant follow-up commentary. The impact and ramifications of RMT on this kind of situation were touched on as well. [...]