Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Kithani said:

I guess I could imagine it but I don’t really think this system will cause much of a gameplay change tbh, mostly because you can already basically do it in game to a degree.

Like nowadays if I have a drop that I don’t want to deal with selling for a while I can just knock 10-15% off the price and sell it pretty quickly to some dude that spends all day in EC and wants to flip it for the market price. This system doesn’t seem much different it just doesn’t require that dude to have the capital themselves. I imagine now we’ll see “selling XYZ, no consignment offers” or you’ll get a few people spamming you to sell your items for 5-10% commission.

I don’t remember anyone running around Sebilis offering to buy stuff at a discount so they could go sell it in town, so I’m not sure I’d expect anyone to do it with consignment but I guess you could see poor noobs offering it to make some starter money

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Hekotat said:

A handful of weeks for 4 classes is a snails pace?

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Hatorade said:

Here is what controlled spaces with limited access will turn into, same guild or group rotating in their people once they get control of a zone. Solution is a time or kill limit but that is not fun for anyone. Rather see instances then running all the way to a zoneline only to be met with zone is full…

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# Progression to Level 60

The Monsters and Memories design has since the beginning put a large emphasis on the journey.

This has informed discussions around pacing, progression, and content availability - even if all this isn’t currently reflected in game.

Much of this has been discussed in the past on Discord or on livestreams, but we want to list the main points here:

* Progression in Monsters and Memories is slower by design, both moment-to-moment and in overall progression.
* The journey should be long, but a lot of activities that are considered “late- or end-game” in other games are available to you across the journey.
* For example, the first dungeon experiences are available as early as level 4.
* There are worthy high-difficulty group targets across the levels.
* Items do not lose value very quickly.
* The grouping level bands are larger than most games. You can group with players a decent bit higher or lower level than you and have a good time. We are also continuously evaluating this and looking at how best to fine-tune the limits of this system.
* The zones have mixed level content. You will find areas suitable for low or mid level players, while other areas are suitable for high level players.
* You should have a variety of activities to engage in throughout the levels:
* Grouping with 1-5 other people and grinding for experience and items
* Solo activities, including opportunities for solo leveling, even if soloing is hard and/or slow
* Camping items
* Crafting
* Doing quests
* Exploring and finding unique areas and rewards
* Trading
* Socializing


We have been spending significant design bandwidth in aligning our current game with these goals.

We have made changes that we will list here but will further elaborate on in future updates:

* We have adjusted NPC HP values
* We felt the combat experience was too rapid/hectic around the low-mid levels with most enemies dying within 10-25 seconds.
* Whereas the experience is more on target after level 45.
* You have to watch out with your pulling, you have to be careful not to pull too many.
* Crowd control, Damage over Time, Debuffing all start to have value.
* We have made adjustments to those level bands. NPCs will die slightly slower. We are targeting 30-60 seconds.
* This will also indirectly increase the time to level, as the rate of killing NPCs will be going down (vs the current trend of pulling 8-10 NPCs and blasting them)
* Time to level will continue to be balanced around feel, while we work to improve the moment-to-moment pacing.
* The value of stats
* Previously, many stats either did not do much, or had very limiting soft/hard caps.
* We have reviewed all stats, have increased their utility while reducing innate character power.
* We also relaxed soft caps and removed many hard caps.
* The net result of all this should be more need to go out and seek items, instead of depending entirely on rusty/common drops that you get along the way.
* Acquiring items should also be much more rewarding.
* We will be looking at itemization and discussing how to maintain this approaching, while dealing with the topic of excessive ‘mudflation' and its impact on 'twinking’

NOTE: AC value is still not where we want it to be at high levels. We are working on rectifying this, but this will not make it into 0.25.0.0. We will pull it into a subsequent patch soon!

Ultimately, we want the journey to 60 to be filled with different activities. Currently, it is weighted too hard towards a straight experience group grind with little need to engage in other activities.

We expect to find that the average players will be accumulating at levels 30-50, while a slow trickle of players make it to 60. We are keen on providing both aspirational goals for those players to make it to 60, while also providing them with enough content to provide a varied gameplay experience without needing to hit maximum level.

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# That brings up the question of **What Happens at 60?**

Data shows that most players are accumulating at the 25 to 40 range in beta currently. A lot of players have significant and consistent playtimes within those level ranges. We have found that many players also like having multiple alts that they play with different groups of players. Around 7% of the player base is 50+ and only approximately 100 players have hit level 60.

However, this is also a vocal segment and so we wanted to address them separately.

We have stated this in the past, but we will restate this: You may run out of things to do while we build out to 1.0.

Our major priorities over the next modules is to fill out experiences for the various races and classes. Some high-end content will definitely make it in: We already have 3 in-progress zones that will all be released at or before EA that target more high-end content. But it is unrealistic to expect us to outpace the rate at which this content will be consumed.

If you run out of things to do and don’t want to roll and alt, then you may want to take a break and come back at some point when we have more for you to do.

That said, the immediate content that is available and will be available in the near future:

* High level areas within zones or lower level dungeons
* High level zones
* Plane-like areas (we have been referring to them as expeditions)
* Additional dungeons
* Single group content and smaller multi-group content
* This is driven by the fact that the game is non-instanced, and so far we have not limited your ability to “zerg” a target. We have driven group size mainly by having an appropriate number of rewards for the kill.
* We have yet to run through the existing encounters, but expect more abilities to come online that impact difficulty while also making it less beneficial to zerg.
* We are also looking at implementing controlled spaces which may limit how many players can enter at a time. We are working out the details here and will come back with more details in the future.
* As the game grows toward 1.0, greater emphasis will be put on adding quests that require players to travel to the various corners of Aêthoril.

The types of targets are:

* Bat-phone targets for lack of a better word. World bosses that are on some spawn delay - they spawn and you have an opportunity to kill them. The process may often ends up being competitive various guilds.
* Seasonal, conditional, or ultra rare encounters. These are typically hidden behind multiple conditions being fulfilled and are occasional targets of opportunity
* Triggered targets
* This will vary between requiring 4-5 drops from other camped mobs or bosses, which may end up being competitive between guilds
* …or collect a number of drops from anywhere in the zone
* …or some other mechanism, or even a combination of mechanisms.

Engaging with any of this content is still subject to the Play Nice Policy.

Monsters and Memories is a social game where we have intentionally not systemized and gamified many aspects of this process.

This requires guilds to coordinate/compete, which may create some burden on our customer service.

However, as stated before, we feel railroading the process takes away from the experience and there are many other great games that already do that.

Ultimately, the development team is small compared to typical MMO teams, and we must prioritize making a good base game first before we can cater more towards end-game.

But content will accumulate over time and we’ll continue to evaluate the end-game as the game progresses to 1.0 and beyond.

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