Hi, ho.
If you've been following the "Technical Side" discussion at all, you'll know that some of us have been hard at work coming up with "XMPP bots" that can control a visible NPC inside the game. In lieu of an actual game server, this is one way we can bring the world back to some semblance of life outside of the players themselves.
We're a long way from having real "missions" as a possibility, but it's not too soon to begin a discussion about that burning question that any game has to address - Why run missions in the first place if you aren't rewarded for it?
Are rewards important? Yes. I don't know how many of you were around for the early days of City of Heroes but in the very beginning, the Cryptic devs, perhaps having played too much Everquest in their day, took the stance that street sweeping ought to be the main way to level up in the game. Missions were in the game but they were just a side activity, that barely generated XP.
The theory seemed to be that the payoff of doing a mission was supposed to be satisfaction of a job well done. That sort of worked in the early levels when any sort of XP was enough to level you up, and every origin had a unique mission or two that was only for that origin. Once people reached the first plateau in leveling XP, only the real story-driven diehards continued with missions. Everyone else just did endless street sweeping (which eventually led to the various strategies for perching and dumpster diving and other ways to massively improve efficiency).
Anyway, the point is, that until the game was reworked to become mission-centric and offer better XP for doing missions, people ignored them.
If a budding GM in Paragon Chat goes to a lot of work to implement a big adventure for people to play (however that might be managed, we don't care about particulars right now) he's going to be severely heart-broken if everyone ignores his work because, "Why bother?"
So, then - Given that we're in a world without actual combat (yet) or actual XP (yet) or inf or any other inherent in-game reward, what *CAN* we offer a player as a reward for playing with "mission content" that has been devised by a fellow player, whatever "mission content" happens to mean?
One possibility I've been toying with is the idea of an "achievement website" that a bot can interface with and record a player's activities. It wouldn't be "inf" or XP, per se, but it would be a cookie that a player could point to and say, "See? I'm a big damn Hero! Look at all the stuff I've done!"
So, what do you think? Let's brainstorm some ideas, throw some against the wall, and see what sticks.
