Roleplaying Gameplay Improvements
General Roleplaying
Configure option for look to do ‘quicklook’ person or a full look, full set as default.
Add items and players referenced in emotes with # or @ to a table that allows future uses to be shortened. Example: emote pleads melodramatically to #Jeremy in the hopes that #1_he will acquiesce to his whining. The item bit isn’t as necessary, but the player one would be pretty helpful.
Body part descriptions – Aside from the teehee usage, this has a lot of merit in making descriptions more dynamic. For a couple tropey examples, having a weird eye that’s covered by an eyepatch or scars on your back. If covered, the line could default to “His eyes are covered by @item.” Or “Her body is covered by @item.” Crafters should be allowed to flag this off with a default of on.
Clothing lines – Break the clothing spam into a bulleted list with mxp for looking at it on the person. On top of being more legible, it’ll remove the need to police commas weirdly in short descs. Aetolia does this, and it's great.
RP Experience. tl;dr Reward people for roleplaying with minute RP experience boosts that are aided by some other systems later. In long:
Formula – (RP score/25) * 200,000 * [Lesser of 1 and level/100] * (player multiplier)
RP score would go up to 25, scoring into the RP experience pool every 5 minutes. Performing custom emotes would add 10, say/sing/chant/etc 2, and predefined emotes or witnessing any of the previous three items 1, each with a 30s cooldown.
With this formula, someone at level 100 roleplaying with one other person for an hour with full scoring and a 180% xp boost would receive 4.2m experience, or 112k per minute. For comparison, I average 1.7m per minute while bashing, which means you’d have to add 15 people with this method and get a full score each tick to match my output without the gold generation (until you start adding in persps, anyway). If the player makes an effort to go RP with different people to maximize their multiplier, it might then start to really compete with bashing as an experience source, but at that point you’ve got 16 people emoting and talking.
Failsafes - RP Experience gain would be disabled or receive a hefty malus while in combat. A command like SHUN person will remove the user from the person’s player count as well as current and future RP experience ticks for that person.
By rewarding custom emotes more heavily and tying the bonus to both player count and player frequency, you create an impetus for group RP and widespread interaction.
----Codex
One of my favorite parts of Mass Effect and Dragon Age is how small flavor items reward little glomps of xp and can be referenced to later in a collection of lore called the Codex. While likely a large project, something similar would be spectacular in Imperian.
Get a story from the guild tutor for the first time? Read your city’s oath of loyalty item like Khandava’s redwood? Solve the riddle to get into that one town? Complete quest1245? Slay a mob type for the first time? Wham, a dose of experience, and you get a journal entry that you can refer to later. For the crazy alt people, this would help them tell what knowledge their character has.
Definitely not a small project.
----Achievements
RP Experience earned
RP with X people in Y time
RP with Z people at once
Codex entries found
Codex categories completed
Crafting
----Experience for crafting
For the effort it takes to both create a design and the material cost, adding an experience gain to crafting seems like it would help incentivize crafting in general more on top of the meager gold gains that will take ages to pay off the buy-in fee. Experience should scale to commodity cost of the design and be reduced for granted designs. I’d expect transmute and duplicate to be removed or nerfed by then to prevent feedback loops of make comms -> craft to gain faith -> make comms. (Credit for this one goes to me being confused about what EXP is on design list)
----Cooking and Libations
With level 80 removing hunger and liquids only ever being mechanically relevant as an alcohol delivery system, these two feel meh. I would create a food and a drink buff slot. Eating and drinking would add the buff for 5-20 minutes, providing a bonus to RP experience depending on the quality. Buffs could be plus player count multiplier, faster frequency falloff, general increase, and other things like that either randomly (to encourage gorging for sicc buffs) or based on the design somehow (choice/ingredients/pattern type).
----Achievements
Usage per trade - Food items consumed by others, drinks consumed by others, clothing items worn by others, stationary items placed in homes (interior decorator!), layouts applied, etc
Items created per trade
Items designed per trade
Shopkeeping
---Ambience
Allow the use of ambience orbs
----Command improvements
I think everyone is aware that the shopkeeping commands could be improved, namely by removing shelves and creating single pools for basic, crafting, and pet shelves. Shop Stock item price category is easier than shelf summary – hunt for shelf – put item in shelf – price item price.
Allow promo items to be listed in shops, as well as allowing them to be listed on market at the same time.
----Achievements
Gold earned through sales
Items sold
Customers served
Make X gold in a day
Houses
----Add-ons
Stage – Allow the use of illusions in the room and potentially the script from the W Nolmine Theater for performances.
Observatory - Allow viewing of the stars and weather anywhere in Aetherius, up to ? months prior and a month or less forward.
Card table
Profession crafting rooms
----Ambience
Allow orbs to be set per room and some other options like time of day, month, season, etc.
---Achievements
House size (Put in a 20-room McMansion achievement and watch the tokens fly!)
People in house at once
Gold won in your house
RP Experience earned in your house
Cities
Cityfavours – Add an RP or general experience boost (or malus for disfavours)
Add the ability for those with culture power to activate an RP experience boost at a location for an hour. Cost could be a generator bar or X shards from the generator.
Same add-ons as mentioned in houses
Guilds
Guildfavours – Add an RP or general experience boost (or malus for disfavours)
Add-ons: Same as above but with a special guild-only RP experience room
Allow guild secs and HoN (Is that still a thing?) to take control of some mobs from time to time as their own Docents.
Sects
Rituals for RP experience boosts
Relics for RP experience boosts
Possession ritual for controlling sect mobs.
Comments
I wanna add to the DA/ME thing - that is something I would LOVE to see. It would immediately make me more inclined to explore the game's massive world. It would make the quests inherently more valuable and intriguing. Add to the lore of the game.
I'd personally be willing to give up all my mortal characters and devote myself to making that happen because it would be SO. COOL.
If we did that, though, we need to establish a wiki for -at least- volunteers/admin to sort out and keep streamlined the game lore.
On shops, I'd also like to see them become expandable. Allow us to create shopping complexes. Break up the shelves into multiple rooms. You could have a restaurant with a bar in the back. A tavern with an adventurer's outfitting station and a breakfast nook. That'd make the shops add to the game atmosphere more and make them 1000x more interesting (at least to me) from both a shopkeeping and buying experience. Maybe encourage folks to go explore/purchase from shops more.
Rewards based on custom emotes would be pretty easy to game as well, defeating the purpose. What's stopping me from getting my buddies to just spend an hour spamming emotes at me? What's stopping me from just walking into random rooms, spamming some emotes at people I don't know and then leaving? I can't see this working at all.
I think "rewards" (if they are needed) should be done in the way they used to be: "Gods" (admin now) can offer rewards when they see interesting things happening, e.g. random cosmetic items given out if someone hosts a culture event, or a drinking competition, or Ithaquan story-time, or whatever. I have memories of the Gods (Shallah or Epiphany? I forget) popping up in Antioch, and doing stuff like "bring me an item and tell me what it means to you, most interesting thing wins.". I remember RPing around that smelly orange cat in Antioch - Now I have a perfumed orange cat in my kennel because I sprayed it with something to make it smell better. I really liked stuff like this. It was personal, it was fun, it was different and it was optional since it was only cosmetic items that did nothing - I'd much prefer more of this than yet another mechanism to easily gain experience that I don't need.
On the flip side, I'd like to see people being warned and punished for obviously violating RP. If this can't be monitored by admin, then some sort of system to flag people - not issuing though, something more... minor? If you talk about LoL at the Spring, that's a paddlin'. Etc, etc, etc.
I did have some issues with it myself that I forgot to address. I'd expect some sort of malus for it taking place in unreachable areas due to locked doors or special exits and when in combat with players or mobs. The guildhall benefit later was meant to counteract the former, so guilds could have normally rewarded events in their halls sometimes without corraling everyone inside of them constantly. In combat, the cooldown, low value with the new reduction, likely shuns, and balance cost of custom emotes should all combine to make that not really a factor compared to the millions of xp being dropped per kill.
The relatively low value of experience in general is unfortunate (I have 5.8m aspect points), but I'm praying/shouting for more relevant xp-only 'aspect perks' for that reason. I'll gladly take people doing says and emotes for hours on end to get to aspect and perks, because that's the whole point.