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Old 04-21-2017, 10:41 PM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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What Salkand said was Rhialto's policy. When he put in the age limit he explicitly said (to us) that he really just wanted to discourage some of the people who were sending him bad submissions because it was getting to be too much but if the maps were serviceable, age didn't matter so much. Thus, when Legolas and I started doing the bulk of the submission reviews a number of 12-15 year olds got through in cases where it was known how young they were.

The same seems to have applied to his minimum required level because I had a level 6 account and I got Arilou to level 2 while waiting for Rhialto to randomly see me online so he could promote me after our email exchange. That's it. I came to Wyvern with no intention of playing, just to make maps. My goal during those 6 levels was solely to get a feel for the game that I was trying to make maps for.

I was the one who decided that these things needed to be strictly enforced.

There was a mess of problem wizards in 2003 that made me realize that the age one was important. No 13 year old ever submitted any maps that was anything beyond serviceable, they never improved their craft, and they were all problems in some way or another because of their immaturity. They actually created more work for us than anything and are responsible for you having had less permanent maps in the game because guess who had to babysit them?

People would regularly ask; "But howd u no if i was 12?? i cud just saay im 16," and obviously, it was not very difficult to spot a 13 year old, which is why if you go through the archives you will see me pause a map development conversation and remind them of the rule.

We did have two 15 year old people who I wouldn't lump in with the above, but even so if someone has good content and they're 15, my position was that they should wait. The fear is that they will give up if they're made to do that, but if they didn't wait, that only showed that they wouldn't have had the patience to be wizards and would have been among the many people who just wanted to put one area up and then play around.

I made the mistake of promoting my first player because I had first made him go back several times to make revisions and he told me that if he didn't make wizard this time, he'd give up. I ended up recommending him not because I thought his maps were good but because I thought maybe he could work on his maps as a wizard and improve as I was trying to do. It was a train-wreck from beginning to end, as were many of the other people promoted that year because the view was that if they had serviceable maps maybe they could improve with testing access.

I felt that the level requirement needed to be strictly enforced, as well, but considering it was instituted when skulls were a major challenge in the game, it was generous to leave it at 15.

The reason for this stance was because I had to do a lot of unnecessary on the job training. For one, I hadn't done much exploring outside of Alaria while trying to get a feel for the game for the few days prior to my promotion (I went to every town on the world map, but just to look in at the start maps quickly) so there were some things that were too heavily based on my limited experiences there. That was minor, though, and was basically a problem with a couple of tower maps.

I started getting into real problems when I tried to make high level areas (Forgotten Oak was originally all mid-level). I would ask players what monsters they liked in maps, they would tell me, and I would put them into the game. This wasn't because I was trying to curry favor, but because I legitimately didn't know how to populate high level areas and it wasn't immediate to me that building a cave filled with dragons and liches and other high XP monsters was a bad idea.

At one point Rhialto told me that a map in the Forgotten Oak Skull Cave was giving out the second most XP, next to a map in the fae Wynston Graveyard. The reason being that I didn't know how much experience monsters with a lot of spells gave out because I didn't fight them myself and their XP is generated by the game, not set manually, so there wasn't a read-out of that info in the Map Editor.

I ended up nuking that area when I was able to see how much of a problem it was.

I also spent 2 months working on an almost 200 map quest as a followup to Forgotten Oak and I opted to scrap that after having Legolas review it. He kindly gave me a lot of helpful feedback and the recommendation that I spend some time trying to do quests in the game. It was then that I leveled an account up to the teens, trying to do as he suggested. That ended up being the highest level account I've ever had.

I actually didn't learn a lot that way because I didn't know Random Dungeons could lead to a hand-made map, so I got stuck on one quest just looking in the map with the RD stairs in it. What I did instead was spend a lot of time observing people play in my areas, (even when I was making that Skull Cave mess I would ask people if they minded if I watched them and they were all very nice to say yes) and I also did a lot of testing of private maps.

While I ultimately got to where I needed to be, I did it the hard way so if I ever had received a set of maps from a player with no account above level 15 I would have told them to do that first, then resend me their maps after they've gone over them again. The thing, though, is that this has never happened. I am an oddity. People who'd come to Wyvern did so to play and they'd either end up not being interested in doing that and leave or they were and got hooked on playing. That then became their focus for a bit. Maps came when they started to slow down or when they realized they could try putting together a rush submission in the hopes of getting Wizard powers, either for general fun or so they could make unbalanced maps for their alts (which was something that's important to high level players).
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