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Legendary Adventure: The World of Higher Ground Profile by Jay Watamaniuk
If people want to learn more, or check out the servers, where can they go?Can you give us a brief rundown on how Higher Ground got started and how it has grown?Higher Ground was started several years ago by a group of players who met playing the original Path of Ascension module, by AW Trespasser. Because AW, a gaming clan, was community-minded enough to release their original module, others in the community were able to take it, learn from it, and expand on it. I was invited to join the HG DM team about two years ago, at which point most of the original team had moved on to other pursuits. At that point we were already somewhat popular, with around 15-20 players on every night. I had never opened the toolset before, let alone scripted anything, and I was suddenly thrust into the position of head builder, with only one other DM helping out. It was, needless to say, a bit of a trial by fire, but we have prospered since, and are now running 4 32-player servers with around 100 players on nightly, making us one of - if not the busiest - servers on GameSpy. We've been the top-rated server on the Vault for over a year now, and we are still making changes and additions on a weekly basis. What sort of server is Higher Ground?
Higher Ground is first and foremost an action server. It was built by players, for players, to provide a place for action enthusiasts to test their skills. We do, however, have many groups that enjoy some light role-play, along with their hacking and slashing. We strongly encourage group play, giving experience and loot incentives to party up. In fact, many of the higher level areas are simply not possible to complete on your own, requiring a balanced and skilled party to achieve victory. What are some of the features of this server that would attract players? Why is it so popular?I think our popularity is due to a number of factors. One is definitely the level system I developed that allows characters to gain levels beyond level 40. Another is the amount of customization that we have. Even before legendary levels were introduced, we had rampant customization of spells, class abilities, and classes themselves. Still another factor that makes us stand out is our combat. We do not resort to fewer, smaller, and more powerful spawns to keep lag down, as many servers do, and instead use large groups of monsters, giving combat an epic feel and an added tactical dimension. Our random loot system is also popular with players, and creates quite a demand for harder-to-get items. Lastly, I think the extent to which players are able to shape things makes us very popular. We receive many suggestions every day on our forums, and every single update includes many such suggestions. You mentioned that a big draw is the crazy, high levels you have created systems for in your world. Can you tell us about them?
Using the system, characters are able gain ability points, feats, skills, saving throws, and hit points for each new level, as they gain the experience needed to attain it, much the same as ordinary levels. The availability of these skills and feats, and the hit points the character receives, is determined by the character's 'control class' - the class they have the most levels in. I opted for that, instead of allowing individual class selection each level, to avoid having players take one level of a class late in development just to max out a certain skill, for example. It looks as if NWN2 has dealt with this issue in its skill system, however, so the NWN2 incarnation of the legendary level system will probably allow characters to take more levels in whatever class they please, including possibly a fourth class! This expanded level system has allowed us to expand the range of play for our players, presenting them with foes of ever-increasing power, to match the rise in power of their characters. Or, as one player so eloquently put it, "To think that you can go beyond level 40, become immortal, find some of the most powerful weapons and equipment out there, and still get your butt kicked is just fantastic." What about the rampant customization you mentioned? What sorts of things have you changed?We originally began changing spells because the standard versions simply didn't pack enough punch in higher level areas. So we scaled most of them to level 40, for starters. Having done that, we looked a bit harder at the balance between the classes, and found that a number of classes were unaccountably weak in the conditions present on our server and therefore underplayed. Wanting to encourage a diversity of classes and play experiences, we set out to make those classes viable and fun to play. Meleers had been focused heavily around the weaponmaster, for the high attack bonus and extended critical range, so we began modifying the other melee classes. Barbarians, for instance, received a number of abilities, and we rescaled their existing abilities to level 40. Shapestrong rage, for instance, allows them to take on the appearance of a giant and wield large weapons one-handed. Over time, similar changes have been made to all the classes, to better scale their powers to their level progression. Listing all the ability changes, changed progressions, and added abilities would take a small novel, but check out the Palemaster: Palemaster
Each class has many changes, small and large, so those listed for the Palemaster are just the tip of the iceberg. When we introduced legendary levels, we began rescaling everything up to level 60, a lengthy process that we just recently completed. Rogues, for instance, now gain a +1 to dexterity for every 5 legendary levels, and things like caster levels and spell resistance scale to 60 as well. Since releasing it to the Vault, we have taken the core legendary level system and expanded on it to the point where it affects just about everything related to character development. You also mentioned bigger spawn sizes as one of your standout qualities. What influenced you to take that approach?Our spawn sizes are one of the legacies of our founders. They had a taste for intense combat and suspense, and we've continued in that tradition. Having many enemies of many different types creates big, epic-feeling battles, filled with impacts and explosions. There is just something wonderful about the chaos and confusion in such battles, and the sheer amount of mayhem surrounding your character. Not only that, but they add a tactical dimension to gameplay. Like other servers, players have to choose which spells, abilities, and gear they will have to use in every given situation, against any given foe. However, adding more foes adds another dimension. The players then have to think strategically, identifying threats and prioritizing them. It allows us, as modders, to create different synergies between foes, which players must learn to identify and neutralize to gain advantage. Combine this with the fact that many character spells and abilities can be very powerful in the right situation, yet very dangerous or harmful to the party in the wrong situation, and you get intense combat, the spoils of which go to the skilled, the adaptive, the thoughtful. Why is it that other servers don't follow that approach?Such an approach does have its pitfalls. More monsters means more things happening, and if you aren't careful, more lag. We've had to get very creative in combating lag, and designing areas, monsters, and scripts differently. In the end, we decided that our best server size to keep lag minimal was 32 players, smaller than many other popular servers. To keep pace with growing demand, we've had to create 3 additional servers of that size. Even with a shared servervault, there was a concern that having multiple servers would fracture the community, preventing players of the appropriate levels from finding each other to party with, and making it more difficult to meet up with friends online. We've had to work very hard to combat that tendency. First, we developed an interserver listing showing player name, character name, and level, so that players could see who was on where, simply by using an item. We then added an interserver messaging system. That system enabled players to announce that a party was forming for a specific quest, across all servers, and to send someone a tell from one server to another. Both systems were a pain to set up, but they have definitely helped to maintain the feeling of community present on single-server worlds. That sounds interesting. Did you create any other systems to help manage your servers?
It sounds like you have some pretty powerful machinery there. Have you released it to the community?I have. It's called SIMTools, short for Speech Integration and Management Tools, and it's available on the Vault. Because Higher Ground itself is based on a community release, I feel a duty to give back to that community. It was in the same spirit that I released the Higher Ground Legendary Level system to the Vault. Both programs should have a bright future in NWN2. HGLL will be updated with more flexibility for server admins, allowing them to select different approaches, and SIMTools has a few potential projects, collaborations, and additions in the works as well, including an entirely speech-driven conversation AI system, and possibly an in-game translation system for real-world languages (we have a number of players for whom English is not their primary language). Both are extremely tentative at this point in time, but are potentially amazing additions. Is it a challenge to create adventures with such high level characters?It most definitely is. Nearly every aspect of creation grows more complex as we progress. We have to be careful not to destroy the rather delicate gameplay balance we've managed to create. That means many, long, dev team discussions and forum debates, and a lot of added work. The more items we add, for instance, the more powerful characters become, as they take advantage of increasing gear flexibility, even if we don't actually make more powerful gear. And, of course, we do have to add more powerful gear in higher level areas as we create them. This means a lot of hedging, guesswork, and revisions down the road, in many cases. We'll typically err on the side on underpowered and boost an item later on based on play test and player input, if necessary. That also makes it more efficient to replace and change items. Instead of scanning for them and replacing them when characters enter the server, we can rely on players to update them by passing them through their bank vaults, because the changes are all to their benefit. What is the best darn thing in NWN history in your opinion?Easy. The Neverwinter Nights Extender (NWNX) by Papillon. There's just a huge variety of things that a builder can do with NWNX that they just can't do otherwise. I was first drawn to it because I wanted permanent stat increases for subraces to get around the +12 bonus cap. The nwnx_letoscript plugin allows builders to edit characters in this fashion, altering almost any aspect of the character you want, while the server is running, on a completely automated basis. I then used the same plugin to create the legendary level system and SIMTools. I've also made use of the database flexibility of NWNX to optimize database reads, using only one read instead of 10 or even 50 in some places. The reads themselves are also much faster than the standard BioWare database, allowing for uses that simply would not be realistic otherwise. Most of our best systems, including the interserver list, the interserver messaging, the bank, and the market, rely heavily on the NWNX database functionality. I'm able to use it to tell what server the mod is running on, despite the fact that all servers run the same module. I plan to extend the banking system soon to deal with numbers outside the int range of NWN (a bit over 2 billion) by doing the math in our SQL database. What are your plans for the future?Higher Ground has big plans in store. Once CEP releases, we'll be adding on the highest-level areas on the server, the Nine Hells. We weren't really satisfied with the 2 areas of the abyss where characters first attain immortality, and wanted to provide a more in-depth experience for the Hells. They are currently expected to be around 30 areas, on all nine infernal layers. The City of Doors Initiative creature being added to the CEP should prove to be a huge boon in this regard. Other than that, we want to add a subclass or profession system, a bunch more areas, and to go back through the existing areas and add a fresh look using all of the new CEP 2.0 content. We'll be hard pressed to finish by the time we start work on HG2 for NWN2, but we intend to keep the NWN1 servers running for quite some time after its release. Learn more about Higher Ground:
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Next week: We continue our conversation with an eye towards the future with tips on how you can prepare for Neverwinter Nights II! Related Links
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One of the world's most striking characteristics is the legendary level system, which I created to expand the level range that characters could achieve. This was done not as an attempt to see how high we could inflate character statistics (and indeed, we could've gone far beyond level 60, the current limit of the system), but out of a desire to bring new and interesting things to the game, to keep it fresh and evolving.
Player management also became a greater issue, because our DM team was spread out across servers. It was with that in mind that I created a management scriptset. It relies on a chat plugin, created by dumbo, for the 
