Post: #3

We're planning that most changes to existing areas will usually just be tweaks/fixes. But we're going to do monthly events where certain things happen in our world, and based on how the players react, bases what happens the month after.

For example, lets say there's a small village outside in the forest. Right now, it's a small, populated village. It's not a primary city or anything direly important. But it's there, none the less. With maybe 5-6 villagers.

For the monthly event, that village could get overran with orcs. A script will be written that keeps track of how many orcs are killed in that area in that month, or maybe the "orc leader" is extremely strong, and the players just need to figure out how to get to him and kill him. If the players meet the goal, we "free" the town the following month returning it to normal, or close-to what it was. If they do poorly, the village may be completely overran with orcs and become a new "bad guy location" forever. Or, until we do another event down the road to "Take back the village".

This idea could be expanded into many other aspects, like a "lets build a new town" event where players bring resources like Iron and Wood, and depending on how much they bring will reflect how big the new village is. The first month (start of the event) will be decorated with all sorts of building materials and basic layouts for a few base buildings. The following month the staff will complete the city.. or, if the players did exceptionally poorly, the project may become "abandoned", with most of the building materials just laying scattered about, but for some random reason ratmen moved into the area and live in the cave nearby, randomly wandering around in the build sight that's now torn to shreds.

But in order for this all to work out and the players have continuity I have to figure out how to "force" them to go update monthly or the lazier players will just never update, and end up completely out of sync with the world after 4-5 months of playing.

I think the client version detection may work, I just need to find 2-3 almost identical versions of the same client and rotate through them. Sphere will just detect what client version they are running and that will be the "update trigger".

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