Online roguelike: solution to wilderness cheating

In next update I’m thinking to switch server back to wilderness mode (with adjusting Angband dungeon in Hobbiton). I so love dungeon-city (it’s reminds me about Moria..), but it would be fun to give players more freedom – someone wish to travel around ME, some would like to dive right after they create a new character.

All this time I thought how to solve the biggest problem os wilderness – ‘cheating’ with moving along the borders. I’ve also suggested some ideas there
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=135170&postcount=28 , and got some more thoughts, but finally it comes to my mind, how to solve it.

Problem:
If wilderness option is on, players using ‘cheating’ possibility to move along the borders to be able to change location immideatelly as soon as they noticed dangerous monster. This vulnerability in gameplay mechanics gives players non-roguelikish endless ‘escape’ option from danger and makes wilderness kinda pointless.

Suggestion:
When player change location – he should appears not at he border, but in the center of new location.

Description:
Winderness locations lay from [0, 0] coordinates to [10, 54] (to see them – move your screen with ‘shift+L’)

Player moves from sector [0, 0] to the north and moves to the new location. Right now he would appear on [10, 0] and could continue his way on border and are ready to run from any monster to another location in any moment.

My suggestion is: when player moves from sector [0, 0] to the north, he appears in the center of next sector, ~ [5, 27]. From there player is free to go anywhere, but he can not immideately change sector to avoild danger.

Results:
– this would remove the weakiest, anti-roguelikish point of wilderness – cheating at borders (one of the main reason why I turned wilderness off).
– makes travelling faster (it’s alone not a bad thing), more interesting, dangerous, fair.
– (in future) gives new opportunities for gameplay events, eg points of interests (in future every location could have a chance to spawn random point of interest in it’s center, to spawn there something like a ‘vault’ for wilderness: bandit’s camp, orc’s ambush, broken caravan etc). With currenty system (when you appear on the border) you won’t even notice such stuff cause you continue to run along the border from one location to another without a glance to the center. But when you appear in the center of next location and you are surrounded by band of orcs or see a broken trader’s cart ravaged by bandits – you would notice it 😀 … So such mechanics could be foundation for RNG-wilderness-events system in future.

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