If you were in charge......

[Linuxmage]

Imagine, just imagine for a moment, that NGD had called on your services personally to help them make improvements to the game, short of redesigning it from the ground up. They need a bigger draw, a better playerbase.

Your budget is not a worry. However, we need a gameplan for the next year, thats all the time we have. In that time, we can develop and rollout up to 6 updates.

What would you do?

This can include new content, Balance updates, pretty much anything goes, as long as you retain the main objective and idea of the game -- 3 realms, RvR, the Dragons, a Warzone, forts and castles.

I have put some thought into this, and I personally would start by more or less hiring Bois as a player representative, and take on board all his Balance ideas, and some of his his ideas for redesigning the existing spell trees.

However, I would also strip out starting with three major classes, and make it so you start with your chosen subclass effectively. I would also rename the conjurer class to Healer, and alter the spells tree to reflect this. At the same time, the hunter class would be renamed to Scout, and the pets tree removed. I would also remove camo from this class.

I would then introduce two new classes on top of the current 6 - Rogue, and Beastmaster.

Beastmasters would get the pets tree, with the ability to use either a close range weapon or a shortbow. They would have the ability to really train their pets to make major attacks, be able to do something new in the game -- equip them with armor, and at the same time make a short ranged kill. They effectively pick up the other half of the hunter class, but without camo, and will resemble a barb or knight in armor rather than an archer type class.

Rogues -- well, no doubt some of you know this class well, also be a close ranged class, able to sneak in, use camo, and assassinate people without being seen more or less. However, in his case, being camoed slows his movement to just above walking pace, and the target has to be standing still for him to make the kill whilst camoed. He would be a master of a new weapon in the game -- Daggers, and knives -- He would have the ability to throw them with amazing accuracy to kill in one hit.

I would introduce some new weapons -

• Daggers - Self explanatory, I would make it so that rogues, barbs, and beastmasters can equip these.
• Crossbows - For Beastmaster, and scout. A "Very Slow" weapon with short range, but dealing very high damage, able to do hits of 500+ with the right buffs.
• The weapon on the Alsius Shield -- I though it was possibly a boomerang glaive, but it might actually be a two headed circular axe -- someone enlighten me on this??

I did have some thoughts about a new race, maybe making the Orcs a playable race?

Make some simple fixes like a progress bar for quests, and increase the amount of quests available to level 50 drastically. Make it possible to PvE play if you want to level 50, but introduce PvP kill quests above 40, and make it more warzone centric.

I would add the ability to put armor on your mounts. This might just be a cosmetic premium item though.

Thats all the ideas I can come up with for now.

However, before you reply, PLEASE think about what you are going to say. I do not want this thread to become full of biting comments and sour remarks.

I want to see small essays (no walls of text though....), and well thought out answers. Write your plan up on paper beforehand if you have to. I really want to see what we can come up with if we, the players were given the ability to make a significant impact on this games development over the next year.