Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Designer Diary
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 898
In any game, but especially in a large MMO, the numbers can get crazy if you don't keep them on a tight leash. It's a delicate balancing act between making character abilities exciting and cool (which to most players means they look great, feel unique and do lots of damage or other useful effects) and keeping everything scaled appropriately in relation to everything else.
To accomplish this, everything must be built around a framework of numbers. We establish baselines for damage per second, time to kill (both monsters and other players), time to level, total hours of play (on average of course), value per point of each statistic, damage absorption, damage deflection, xp per level, xp per kill, xp per quest, attack speed, attack range, health for players and mobs, and so on for a dizzying array of interconnected numbers and formulae. Each of these must scale from the lowest available power levels to the highest (and of course beyond, both for high-level challenges and for eventual expansion). This of course doesn't even begin to touch on all of the baselines required for the economy, for quest progression and distribution, etc.
