50 replies to this topic

[Pandilex]

The Past

Nightmist was started when I was 15 years old, hard to believe that's 10 years ago. When it was first made it was more of a programming project than us actually intending to create a game. Virtually everything we programmed was being written for the first time. It took us a long time to work out how to make the main chat window do colour;)
At that time we were young, had lots of time and enthusiasm to pusue a project that was ultimately pure hobby. As the years slowly progressed, various things happened. Firstly, improvements to the game. Initially 99% of the game additions were either my creation, or my adaptation of player suggestions. I knew a lot about the classes, and the game map, a reasonable amount of which was designed by me. Even at that point I never played it on an alt, but because the game used a grid system I was familiar with it thanks to the map editor. Also the map was very small in comparison to todays map.
The problem if you don't play it though is that small problems can go unnoticed, and a big factor that contributed to the destruction of multi nightmist today is actually the same thing that happened to original nightmist and caused it to go down the tubes.
The thief class in the original nightmist combined with some powerful monsters caused a huge amount of gold to suddenly enter the game. If classes are unbalanced, no damage is really done, and people will complain and point it out. Problem is, no-one complains about too much gold until it has ruined the economy. When someone bought the joke item Cobalt Staff of the Winds from the store in the original nightmist, we realised there was a huge problem.
Pacifists caused a similar problem with multi. Too much gold.

We reset the game and redid the map hoping to improve it all, but to summarise what went wrong, we had three major problems.

The first problem, was alts. We inadvertently made it so you could log on multiple characters at once. We didn't think it would affect the game at all. We were wrong... I imagined that people wouldn't bother with more than one character because it was troublesome.
The second problem was a change with JLH and myself. Once school turned into university, we had much less time to work on the game. This caused it to be void of innovations and things to keep it interesting.
The third problem was suggestions. Originally I was the person who audited the suggestions and decided exactly what should and should not be added, and how. This worked because I was impartial. However, JLH began to add the suggestions from players and I didn't have time to check what was being added. Slowly, the game deteriorated from them. The game is supposed to be challenging and not all revealing, but we have /library now that reveals a lot of information that should be secret. All kinds of helpful commands were added until the command list was several pages long, but the game isn't supposed to be that way. We had a lot of balance problems too. One huge testement to the fact I simply wasn't able to check things being added is mana leech. In order to improve the variety of weapons in the game, I requested to JLH a new feature be added called mana leech, which would allow classes that had run out of mana to recuperate some by going hand to hand. The idea was that a percentage of damage dealt would be converted to mana, so if you hit a goblin for 10 damage you would perhaps gain 1 mana from 10% leech. It was a long time before I realised that my suggestion had been implemented incorrectly. And if I can't even monitor my own suggestions how can I monitor others? You can certainly blame me for a large part of how the game got to be like it is now.

Present

So, how does the game stand now? The answer is obvious when we log on and see roughly 10 players. The game certainly had its day, but now it needs something radical to fix it. Yes, I made the suggestion of launching one alt. The reason it was launched is because I wanted to reset multi and see what happened, but obviously that would annoy a lot of players. As far as admin input works now, JLH codes the odd thing, usually bug fixes, and I don't do much at all. The people that know the game most are the players and the staff, and what they talk about goes way over my head. Perhaps that is how it should be. What the game really needs is a managerial approach, like a company, with the players reporting what's unbalanced, the staff fixing the minor issues and reporting the major issues, and the admins checking it all and making sure the staff solutions are the right ones. Such a system is however, impossible, because JLH and myself now have full time jobs and other pursuits. I spend most of my free time studying.


Future

In short, JLH and myself will never be like we were 10 years ago. The game has gone out of control and needs to be redone from scratch correcting the mistakes above, with absolute control of what gets added, and the class balancing etc. first approved by an admin.
Since I studied C# and realised how much more power it has than nightmist, I find myself very unenthusiastic about working on a game written in visual basic, a near enough obselete language. I still have thousands of ideas about how I'd like to see the game rise again but visual basic is too limiting.
I think we could launch a new server perhaps, a one-alt server with a new map, but the problems are too inherent and would still occur without changes to the code.
I think your best bet though is to wait for opal spheres, which may or may not ever come. It's something I tinker with in my spare time, but there is such a phenomenal amount of unrewarded effort required to get the thing into a playable state that it's progressing rather slowly.

In the meantime, what can we do? While I confess to have little understanding of what is happening in both servers, it seems the staff are trying very hard to sort things out and development is still occuring. However, the golden age of Nightmist has passed. We had some good times, but as we grow older our priorities in life change, and we focus more on making babies than making new areas. Full time job, full time relationship, and having to think about a career makes us too serious.

Perhaps one day the game will rise up again, whether in a new form or not.

Lay down your weapons, but keep them sharp. You might need them again sooner than you think.


Simon "Pandilex" Crowder

[Shera]

Give me an edited, restricted copy of the server so i can locally create area's, items, etc. Make it so it cant be remotely connected too so only i had access to it. Allow me to build and develop a new world. Then allow me to submit this to JLH, have it placed on the server and accessable to the population for testing. Rebuild nightmist from the ground up.

Im willing to put my time and effort into this, and im sure there would be a few people i know who would help me.

Give us a chance please.

Love.... Jase

[Pandilex]

I don't think it's the areas and items that are the problem. The issues are the game mechanics too I think. The classes should be rebalanced from the very start. Also they are a bit restrictive, an RPG should not have every character being identical in terms of abilities.

[EvilDognapot]

I don't think it's the areas and items that are the problem. The issues are the game mechanics too I think. The classes should be rebalanced from the very start. Also they are a bit restrictive, an RPG should not have every character being identical in terms of abilities.

The state of Nightmist is doing very well. Please don`t let the option of players who have not played in years, but still find the need to talk about the game as if they have a clue cloud your mind.

I don't envy your position, Pandilex; you can't please everyone all the time. As another member of the full-time job, full-time relationship, full-time university crowd NM is a hobby I spend most time on during breaks, but it's something I've observed as serious research interest too. As I wrap up my bachelors, the social concepts that I first observed here are likely to become part of my master's thesis; though NM is too close to me to submit to peer review, it has still been a project to me as well where after even pking grew tiresome, the development kept me watching. However, just because I'm a jerk, I do disagree about your focus on what's wrong. You're being too hard on yourself, the classes and client are perfect, areas and items do more to determine playing habits, but what do either of us know, we haven't played in years

[Angelus]

Funny to see how much I agree with Simon as far as NM goes. Even if I was on the players side, I basically went though the same. Uni and real life taking over and getting top (well kinda "all") priority.

NM in it's day was a real accomplishment...I would suggest for staff to go wild, go wacky and go out in a bang. No more trying to balance, or trying to make everything fair, just go crazy.

And for people wanting to build upon NM. The code is way to static, it's too old and too basic to build much further upon. Especially for anyone other then JLH, simply because I doubt he left comments so others would understand. I said it before and I'll say it agan, you would have better luck starting your own then building upon this (if JLH would even let you). This is because its easier to start from scratch then to understand and rewrite everything, it's just not possible. If you ever had to pick up on someones work wich wasn't properly documented then you would know this.


Still, mad props to the wild ride Didn't do much good for me in my career or social life but it was still a hell of a blast!

Edited by Angelus, 11 August 2008 - 01:14 AM.

[Shera]

Being VB its not really that hard to understand, commented or not ;P

But i wasnt even asking to have the code. I have built nightmist clones before, and would rather fix this damn game!

[Pandilex]

Being VB its not really that hard to understand, commented or not ;P

But i wasnt even asking to have the code. I have built nightmist clones before, and would rather fix this damn game!

I've seen the code and it's incomprehensible to anyone except JLH...

[Shera]

Well thats just plain lazy.

Well this was my last attempt to help the game.

<3 you all

[Ill never tell]

"The game has gone out of control and needs to be redone from scratch correcting the mistakes above, with absolute control of what gets added, and the class balancing etc. first approved by an admin.
Since I studied C# and realised how much more power it has than nightmist, I find myself very unenthusiastic about working on a game written in visual basic, a near enough obselete language. I still have thousands of ideas about how I'd like to see the game rise again but visual basic is too limiting."

I think that that would be the best thing that could happen to nightmist. Yes it would take some work and yes you might lose a few players but you could gain so many more. Think about it, If you reopend nightmist with all the huge problems from this one fixed you would still have the hardcore nm players playing and this might even bring back some of the ones who have quit. Not only that, but it would bring new players almost the same chance at being the top as the old players.

I do not think that nightmist 'needs' anymore than visual basic. Most nm and text based players dont mind the plain almost chat room look. I personally dont like RoK because it has to many visuals and its not as 'simple' as nightmist is.

If you did 'rebuild' nm and open a new or fixed one some of the changes that could help it get way further then this one could be.

-No Sharing (Sharing gives some people huge advantage over others and this would cut down in things staff have to deal with)
-Balanced Classes
-No Alts (You yourself said alts killed this game and currently it looks like people perfer 1 alt)
-New World Map (Instead of making new areas you could have a new world map but maybe a few old areas within it. This would keep old players from domintating the old map and make players actually explore and make there own maps to the areas. Was always my favorite thing about new areas.)

This probably has a slim chance of actually being done because we all know that you and john have full time jobs and other responsibilites but if you both really wanted to see the game come back to life, I think that this is its best option. Right now you can add some things that might intrest players for a while but after that, they get bored and start not logging on as much etc. I think that that was one thing that made 1a boost and still have the most number of players. Its not because its a 1a server as much as it was a new competition and still is. People are still fighting to be the #1 player on 1a and will for a while but, as you can see the, class balancing is off witch makes the server over ran with 1 class and it keeps hitting bumps that it should of had fixed when the server opend. Like the lvl 35+ Guilds, Gate training, etc.

I also think that even if you and john didnt want to go through the hassle of rebuilding nightmist from the ground up you could still save it. This would be the 'easy' way to fix it instead of the ground up time consuming way.

-Shut down main completly (There are only about 7-8 players that still even log on to main to kill things. And 4-5 of them play on 1a when they are not killing bosses. This would also make it to where new/old players wouldnt split the population and so that the old players on main couldnt trade over there main stuff for 1a stuff. This was and is a huge problem with the current 1a)
-Reset 1a (Release it after class balancing, guilds, bosses and etc are fixed.)
-No Sharing (Dont know if this is possible because I know a lot of players who dont share play at diffrent places having diffrent ips but heres an idea. Make it to where each account can only have 1 ip in it at a time and make it to where that ip can only get into that account. Example, I log into account Hope under ip 67.934.893. I can no longer log into any other account with that ip adress but I could log into the account Hope with a nother Ip adress but only one Ip could be logged on in that account at a time.)

I know that even this 'fix' of nightmist would take some time. But if you two really want to see it have another chance at living I think that this is honestly its two best choices.

You have a little to lose, but a lot to gain.

Edit: Underlined

Edited by Ill never tell, 11 August 2008 - 03:39 PM.

[Gaddy]

I support Nightmist as it is...
There are tons of games out there, the main reason that Nightmist doesn't have a huge following now. That isn't something that can be changed by wiping the game or changing the very simple system.
It's simply a small target group as far as who is going to be on a game like Nightmist, and we have competition.

[Ill never tell]

Nightmist isn't a bad game and is fun to play even now. But, this game is slowly declining just look at the forums and activity. Yes this game will die one day as all games do but if you have a chance to stoke the fire and make it last longer, why let it go out? The only way to stoke this fire is by something radical as Simon said.

Yes there are other games out there and yes some players perfer those, but not all of the players that have played nm or have looked at it have moved on because of this. They changed games not because of the type of game nm is but how routine it is and how some of the things in this game are done. I know plently of players who play RoK/Rev/and Nm and I know many original nm players that stoped nm for rev or rok. And the reason they play those more then nm is not because they are funner. Most of the people that I know that moved from nm to rok or rev did it because of connection issues. Not as much of an issue now but before the people who had dial up were pretty much slamed because they could only load 8-13 alts as others would run the full 20. There are plenty of people who enjoy the text based games and plenty of those players would be willing to give nm another go if it was worth it.

Edited by Ill never tell, 12 August 2008 - 02:18 AM.

[Angelus]

The ones responsible for the game simply don't care anymore, they moved on. They let it run because some people still enjoy it. Ofcourse NM is dieing out, what you expect if the only one who can actually do something to the game mechanics has better things to do (and right he is might I add). Been a sweet ride forhim, but you can't expect this to take up that much time, been a decade already.

If only a handful of the people who say they want to improve NM got together, picked up a book and learned a little bit you'd have a whole new game in a matter of months, maybe weeks even, with way more possibilities then NM will ever have.

It's all a matter of actually willing to do something, instead of just pushing others to do so.

Edited by Angelus, 12 August 2008 - 03:19 AM.

[joanna]

Reset both servers and replace with a a single server

Allow any race to be used by any class, with the exception of no zerk/druid races with over 19 dex, no ranger races with over 19 strength, and no pally races with over 19 wis. Allow pacifists (after better balancing them of course) into the game after 6 months.

With the knowlege of both servers, balance the classes before releasing the server (ie Main showed berserkers should NEVER have had access to weapons over 25bd, 1a showed how overpowering vampire weapons are). Look through kill lists to find obviously over-rewarding monsters and sort them out.

Give the map a slight re-jig - ie change some of the paths and deathtraps so they have to be re-explored (Halls of Ail originally cost over 300 mill exp in death trap exploration amongst players)

Allow between 3 alts and 5 alts. A small and sensible number that anyone can use and train/pk with, but nowhere near powerful enough to kill high end bosses. This makes both solo and cooperative play important, and keeps NM's almost unique selling point of been able to log your own small party.

Implement the 1 IP per account and 1 account per IP rule. This dosnt tie an account to one computer, all it means is whenever you log a character only that computer can log further characters from that account, but when you log all the characters from that account off, the account is no longer tied to that IP and can be logged from anywhere else. The second point is that once you log a character from an account, any alts you log must also be from the same account - hence stopping sharers from simply creating a seperate account for each character (and also stopping people using severak account vaults)

To compensate this, increace account vault size to 100 items and allow players to purchase more vaultspace

Cobalt Staff of the Winds is a JOKE ITEM and should remain so - remove it.

Dagger of the Winds can stay though, the current problem is that it gives thieves practically unlimited HP while other fighting classes have only thier starting HP plus 1400 (14 pots), but even with 3 alts you have the option of a cleric which can keep you healed.

edit - another point, with the current 'credit crunch' and broadband internet been one of the first luxuries to be sacrificed, i know of many people who are reverting to dial-up access, i havnt reached that yet but have gone from 2 computers with unlimited broadband to one with 1gb/mon and one with 3gb/month, remember some of these other games mentioned have huge bandwith requirements - for example worldofwarcraft, if you take it out of a box and install it, you need to dl over 1 Gb of patches before you can play! More people might revert to text-based games like this over the coming months, take advantage of it

Edited by joanna, 12 August 2008 - 12:53 PM.

[Gaddy]

Hrm...internet is handled very differently here in the United States then...

[jurian]

eventho i generally disagree with simon on his point of view of things i am completely agreeing with him.

what i also see as the main problem of nightmist is that we know too much and we are too similar. there is nothing left to explore. you know where to train best. what items to use at what level and where to go and with all the extra commands it becomes even easier. and in the end you can get level 30 really fast and end up[ beeing exactly the same in equip and stats as anyone else.

the first nightmist was still good because we didn't know that much and was much more interesting to play.

we should get a reset, maybe keep the map but put different monsters in different places to keep us looking for new areas and all that stuff. also what i would consider a great addition to the game is a talent point system. like wow or other rpgs have. once you level you get a talent point or an amount of points to spent. this will result in different characters (or atleast more variation)

also we should not know the details about items. you need to find out by trial and error what the best weapon to use is at what level.

in the end this will make nightmist interesting again for maybe a year - two years. and then we should do the same thing all over again because we will keep on running into the same problems as simon allready mentioned.

Jurian

[Hansol]

a reset is pointless

all it does is let the bad kids be in the same league as the good kids when they arent and the exact same thing will happen in a year anyway so there is no point

[Gaddy]

I don't see how a reset would cause more interest in Nightmist.
I personally would probably just stop playing; I have no motivation to play the same maps over with small characters, if I wanted to, I could. The game is VERY VERY open for new players as it is...

That's the multi server at least.



The 1-alt server...well, it'd take more than a reset and moving bosses around for that to be much more than functionally retarded. A point system for stats could be interesting. Adding cons at low levels to gain more hp, then going into dex, wisdom, and str later...indeed.
Or if cons didn't change HP, then just building a super character, which I could see working on the 1-alt server.

[Ill never tell]

Multi is dead as is and I dont see it ever recovering. True multi is new player friendly to the extent that they dont get pkd. Besides that what keeps them intrested? Everything on nightmist is already figured out (Mostly) and posted up for everyone to know. Yes that helps new players but being able to acess all of the nightmist information really kills the game. One person explores and maps the area then releases it to the hole nm population (- Tirantek and Such but new players dont even need to worry with those). The players can find on helpers and other sites where the best spots are what gear to use and everything else. This leaves no room for exploration. Look at the activity when the areas/quest are new and being explored to a few weeks after its found out. Another thing that leaves new players on multi unitrested in is because they log on and see 4-5 players?

1a on the other hand isnt dead but its been declining as of late. As for new player friendly we all know how people have low level characters just to pk the noobs. And yes it will take more then a simple reset to fix this. There are balancing issues and other things that would need to be impletmented and worked on before it could be re-released to make it work.

Having two servers is a huge flaw that doesn't help at all when it comes to new players. Yes they can choose pvp or pvm server but then they see the pvp server as too difficult so the go to the dead pvm one.

Nm would need 1 server that would need to be limited to 1-5 alts. Balancing issues and other things for it to even have a chance to thrive. If you think nm is fine the way it is right now, then you my friend are in denial. And thats the attitude that keeps nm down the way it is.

[Pandilex]

Jurian is right, and what was different about original Nightmist was that monsters had levels and thus you would have to change monster types every few levels.

[EvilDognapot]

a reset is pointless

all it does is let the bad kids be in the same league as the good kids when they arent and the exact same thing will happen in a year anyway so there is no point

qft

We've already done two resets, and that didn't solve much. A problem I see here is that because our playerbase has dwindled down to a small community of people who play pretty much same way (and for the same reasons), that most of our ideas will address only the concerns of players who are playing now. So we ultimately discuss the same options over and over again, reset, more areas, more levels, but the reality is that we've tried those solutions for so long that the game only appeals to that particular mindset; on the other hand, characteristics that appeal to players who aren't playing the game aren't going to be popular to those playing right now. The question is whether we should expirement in attracting new players for diverse reasons, or cater to ourselves until JLH gets married to a woman who can't stand him staring at incomprehensible code.

[Exor]

Ahh if only the classic pre-reset map/items/npcs etc were still saved and could be resurrected to put into an entire new Nightmist server or something of the sort.

That nightmist was entirely different than the current which would have provided new things to do and learning of the game again. What I wouldn't give to be able to play the classic Nightmist again

Anywho I'd say one big reason why NM isn't getting any new players is due to lack of advertising. It isn't because people don't want to play text based games anymore, thats not it at all really. I've seen plenty of players on MMORPGs and such who crave a well kept up(Read:Not Lifeless) old school MuD. It just seems to be the fact that the few out there are too unplayed and then some others where theres just no motivation to play after awhile when you see the best of the best so high up on the 'totem pole' so to speak, and you know theres going to be an unbalanced economy and such due to it. New players don't want to play a game where they have no chance of catching up to be as good as the top players due to how long they've played. And thats what I'd say happened to nightmist. Plus with JLH/Pandi having given up on the game due to personal reasons and what not nothing big will change. They can't be blamed for that really though as the game started out as a hobby. Anywho I haven't played Nightmist since WoW was released so I don't know that much anymore, but I've kept up with the forums somewhat to know at least a bit of what has happened to the game.

I just can't see Nightmist changing again, but I do think if Pandi keeps up with Opal Spheres this time that'll be something worthwhile.

Edited by Exor, 13 August 2008 - 08:16 PM.