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Who's Your Daddy?

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

LOTRO has a family system. Did you know that? Not may people use it, but there's a reason for that. It's purely cosmetic. You can adopt other players up to 10 generations but there's really no point except for getting titles out of it (son of, daughter of, etc). I would love to see this system expanded beyond just fluff and roleplay (not that either of those are bad).

Asheron's Call, Turbine's first MMO had a wonderful system (as much as I can tell via second-hand knowledge) where you could become another player's patron. You get rewards for them completing content and created this awesome network of players beyond a simple guild function. City of Heroes/Villians has a mentoring system where the higher level player can mentor a lower level player and the higher level player's skills and power etc would slide down to equal that of the lower level. This way you can play together but not trivialize the content you're doing.

LOTRO would be an awesome canidate for something like these two systems. We already have adoption. Why not allow the "families" to be able to slide to the level of a "family member" (only downard though) so they can play content with their friends but not be so far outleveled that it becomes boring? The Asheron's Call system would be a great way to further incentivize the system, giving player's xp or monetary rewards for playing together in this way.

I think the powerleveling option should still be available if they want to go that route. Sometimes it's just nice trying to catch a player up rather than pull yourself down to their level. And sometimes you might just be deed grinding and there's really no reason to be lower level because the mobs would die much slower.

A mentor/expanded adoption system would greatly improve an already wonderful game. I think this feature alone would really bring in a lot of people who wouldn't play because they have friends who are already in the game and much higher level. Or people who don't want to play because they can't play with their friends as easily and still get the same rewards.

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