Wish List

[nephy13]

First of all, I'd like to thank the developers who brought us the Ring. It is great to have this sort of innovative feature in an MMORPG. I also don't expect it to be as good/versatile as the Neverwinter Nights 2 editor (even having things like a scripting language), since that is quite a different kettle of fish. I do, however, have a number of general and specific requests:

Features inside the Ring Editor
Most other people have concentrated their suggestions in this field, so I won't add much more:

• See the respawn point (as an undeletable entity) in the editor in addition to seeing which way incoming characters will be facing. Once you move yourself in the editor, you have no idea where the spawn point is. Being able to rotate and/or move the spawn-point in th editor would be even better. I still think that it would be fine, when first creating a new act, to have a number of specific spawn points suggested by the editor, as long as you can move it afterwards.
• Special effects for spawning and despawning. Does the creature appear in a puff of smoke (This could be done when we can spawn/despawn environmental effects and get a few more effects)? Does it rise out of the ground or fall from the sky? Does it shimmer into view?
• Having drops in corpses (like we would expect) rather than in magically appearing chests.
• Being able to test whether a character actually has a mission object in their inventory. Example: I give a player a magic amulet which protects her from all harm (or whatever). I can't tell which player has or has not got an amulet, or indeed if they have destroyed or traded the amulet that they have gained.
• I can force daylight so I can see while editing, but I can't force darkness/twilight to see what my world looks like for people playing at different times of the day.

Features inside the Ring when playing

• I'd like to be able to bring up a window that shows me what scenario I'm in, who wrote it, and what the access requirements are. Example: I've entered a random scenario from the terminal to try it out. I want to write down the name of the author now that I've seen that the scenario is good, but I've forgotten that too and I don't want to leave just to find that out. It is so good that I want to invite some people in to join me, but I've also forgotten what the scenario is called. Additionally, if a friend that I want to join me is of a different race/faction/level/shard to me, they might be barred from entering when they get to the terminal anyway (And I have no way of knowing this until they actually drop what they are doing and run to a terminal).
• The host (as AM or player), or perhaps all players in the Ring, should be notified when someone enters or leaves the scenario.

On the mainland
I believe we have a chicken-and-egg situation here. Noone looks in the terminals for scenarios because there are few (if any) being hosted. Noone takes the enormous effort to host because they know that noone will bother looking in terminals on the off-chance that someone is running a scenario. We could advertise in Universe, but only before we start a new scenario and we are risking breaking the "Q&A rule" on Universe channel (Universe is also not cross-shard).

• Please allow players to bring up a Ring scenarios listing window anywhere in Atys, even if they still have to go to a ring terminal to enter a scenario.
• Ring terminals near every teleporter, not just in capital cities.
• Getting optional notification of newly hosted scenarios, assuming they conform to the filter settings you set (see next point).
• Filter settings at the ring terminal (currently, there is a scenario "filter" button on some of the HTML pages, such as that you receive on steles and statues, so the functionality is already in the game, it is just being shown on the wrong windows!). Filtering will be important when people are "allowed" to host scenarios without having to jump through hoops.

Hosting scenarios
We desperately need a better way to host ring sessions or we are never going to get anywhere at all. The auto-invite function helped a lot, but we are still having to jump through hoops to get our content online to improve your game! e.g.

• Host one or more masterless session (possibly tied to your alternate characters) and still be able to edit or play. Being able to host more than one scenario could be a function of your ring ratings, in order to prevent casual developers churning out a large number of poorly thought out scenarios. Realistically, unless we allow people to host more than one scenario at once, we are going to force the serious developers to make a single enormous scenario (with a LOT of acts) rather than a number of short or medium sized scenarios.
• Be able to leave one or more masterless sessions running (for, say, 24 or 72 hours) without needing to be connected. This would be optional, since some people wouldn't necessarily want to leave sessions running. Currently, I need to leave my computer on to upload a single file once. I don't even host the file, the game servers do - I'm just using a whole computer to prove that I am still connected which is a complete waste of resources (both the PC and the electricity it is burning).

General requests for the team developing the Ring

• I think that the Ring development team should decide (and declare) to which of two audiences they want to focus. Either to serious modders (who will make compelling content which is a lot more interesting than the mainland's "grind content") or to casual modders (who will make shallow scenarios, which are fine in themselves, but that are really no different than the mainland content). In my opinion, the former drastically expands the horizons of the world of Ryzom whilst the latter gives players another timesink (as casual modders). Releasing a more general Ring roadmap too, would help us modders plan ahead with what we would like to develop.
• Please focus on developing primitive editor entities and functions before more macros. Macros are fine for unskilled developers who want to impress their friends with the minimum of effort, but skilled developers can make them in a couple of clicks from existing primitives (e.g. ambush is zone trigger + creature(unclick autospawn) + event: spawn creature when player enters zone). However skilled you are, you can't add new primitive behaviour if it isn't already there. Once a large proportion of the planned primitives are available, then, and only then, should you be making macros to make the Ring more accessible. If you want to, create a document that explains how to make more complex actions like ambush until there is plenty of time to create and test these macros (I assume that creating a macro is relatively simple for you, but it still needs to be tested nearly as thoroughly as a new primitive).
• The Ring editor can already make pretty nice scenarios. They could be a lot better, but they are already at a stage when they can be made interesting enough to play. Please then, for the time being at least, concentrate on the issues that will help people host and find out about scenarios. The best scenario in the world is useless if noone is hosting it and/or noone knows that they can play it.