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Star Wars: The Old Republic: Lead Combat Dev Makes the Case Against Skill Based Leveling
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
Star Wars: The Old Republic lead combat designer Damion Schubert made the case against the use of skill-based leveling in TOR in a recent post to the game's official forums.
Damion Schubert responding to a member of the community opining that skill-based leveling systems are more natural and offer more freedom:
One of my great pet peeves of pure skill-based systems is that they claim that they are more realistic, but they in fact can create extremely unrealistic situations inside the world.
In the original Everquest, it was not uncommon to see a player throwing himself off a cliff over and over again to improve his safe falling skill, or to see a person macroing some random text gibberish in order to improve his languages. In Meridian 59, players used to park themselves in front of low level monsters and leave the keyboard - they were unlikely to die, and could accumulate defense points in a slow, steady and totally risk-free manor. In Oblivion, the best way to build an assassin character is to hop through fields picking flowers. Jumping improves your Acrobatics (I believe), and the player needs enough flowers to grind up his Poisoning skill.
Sure, each of these could be destupidified with enough designer/programmer time and focus, but then you're coding, QAing and exploit-proofing a different advancement mechanism for every skill in the game. And you'll probably still end up with some silliness somewhere.
Read the original post here.
Damion's Oblivion example is both hilarious and sad, and something I've heard before. Indeed, I myself participated in a number of stupid behaviors leveling things up in Oblivion.
So my question to you all is: Keeping in mind that development is generally a delicate balancing act of manpower, do you think the benefits of such a system outweigh the massive "destupification" that would be required to try and keep the goofiness of it out?
Comments
Oh boy here we go......
Well, he has a point, if I take Darkfall, people do certain actions afk to get stats up, for example running or swimming against a wall (increased the skill, which in itself increases a certain stat). Or worse, using macros to cast e.g. certain spells over and over again to increase the skill and a corresponding stat.
Then again, this reasoning you could most likely take for level based as well, there are bots for games like Lineage 1/2, or even WoW that you while afk.
Both cases are against the Eula (well, the macros/bots at least), so it is in the mechanics of the game that people want to do this to get an advantage due to whatever reasoning they might have.
Or take poweleveling - fully legal, so to say, but in the end the purpose it to get up fast in level and thus skills, since for whatever reason a player might have, the current system is not liked .
There are simply too few skill based games with learnings to control "bad behaviour" - I would say the devs are simply taken the easier route, which of course one can argue is nothing wrong with either.
So instead of trying to find ways to make the mentioned actions not desirable to players to level their skills they just go for the usual grindy leveling bullcrap. That will cause exactly the same situation that he describes. People will use macros to grind their way through low-level mobs to gain their levels. Welcome to another lazy developer corner.
Just use a system like AC has. You gain XP, you put those xp points in different areas. Your total XP determines level.
The humans tend to go the easyest route. Like the Darkfall devs went the route with no soft / hard cap to dont have to bother with balancing issue. At least he is honest about it, a rarirty now days.
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Pre-CU SWG had a fine skill-based system, and it worked. I have a buddy who plays Darkfall, and it's sad to watch him "level up." He has Darkfall installed where we work, and he's done things like auto-run into a wall, shoot arrows into a wall, etc. He just macros it and goes back to work. How is that, in any regard, fun at all? How is that, in any regard, a way of rewarding a player for effort? There's no effort at all.
No offense, but I'm not sure how this is news since we've known forever that TOR is a class/level based game.
Nonetheless... its funny to see people jump all over the article.
Yea, because an exhaustion system i.e. advancement cap/time spent, is so hard to code =/
The fact that previous skill based advancement systems weren't thought through properly and allow(ed) horrible macroing is not any reason to prefer stale class based levelling systems.
Nevertheless, good classes (Vanguard, DDO etc) can compensate for what is essentially a weaker, class based system - in my opinion
Sorry Tao.. I was there on Day 1 for SWG, and the skill based system was a great concept, but it was far from perfect.. so much so, that it lead to the CU patch, which opened a whole new can of worms.. LOL As for the macro'ing.. OMG, I think SWG was the KING of macro-botting.. 50% of the player base was AFK botting.. It was horrid..
I prefer distictive classes, because when you go to skill based, it's just a matter of time that every DPS is using the same template, and ever TANK is using the same template.. etc etc..
Star Wars Galaxies Pre-CU Skill System is always going to be better than the Norm Class - 2-3 sub class system.
Darkfall failed by not allowing a hard cap, and some easy exploits in the beginning. Also making it into a korean grinder.
I will probably still try this game out, just because it is a Star Wars game, and I am a nerd of SW, but I so wanted bioware to make a sandbox SW instead of this WoWlike we have now, in fact it even looks even more instanced than WOW, which is just bad in many ways IMO got a subscription fee game.
Sure People macro'ed, but also SWG PRe-CU was not based on "leveling up" but more end game fun,
make this game fun at the end game, and not repetitive, one thing SWG PRE-CU did right, was giving you many many many many, did I say many? options for whatever end game you might want.
It failed because SOE lost hope or didnt have the tech at the time to fix the bugs/exploits/imbalances, Or maybe they were just retarded.
All I am saying it is, I hope they add something new to the table besides a WOW copycat.
At least he admits he is just another lazy dev.
Same here, can't see how someone could use SWG as an argument against the OP. It's skill system was decent sure, but macroing was rampant within it. Tumbling, spot camping, etc..... Was all done on a macro, hell you could loot whore with macros in galaxies, as most used to do in Nyax's bunker. Half the players I came across in galaxies were AFK macroing.
You're also right about FOTM templates.
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Well, as someone else already said, there are good options to leveling skills through their use which EVE and other games have employed.
As for people who macro, I would think it to be somewhat simple to code in a diminishing returns system so that if you did the same action too often, (through macroing) you'd quickly get no gain from it. Sure, I suppose someone could always code in a more complicated macro, but still I think work along this line would provide a decent alternative.
But the real kicker for me in this article was
"In a classic XP/Level based system, you are incentivizing your XP-granting behaviors (which in SWTOR is tilted strongly towards questing)."
I knew they were going to create complex storylines, but I had hoped advancement wouldnt' be so strongly tied to completing the quests. I'm pretty much done with the "quest to advance your level" mechanic, (it just fragments the community too much, but is great if you want to solo adventure) so there's a pretty strong chance I'll be passing on this game afterall.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
This is because your friend is a cheater and chooses to play Darkfall in this manner, instead of just playing the game the way it's meant to be played.
Ex:
If he's running into the wall, he's working on his run/sprint skills which (like most skills) won't give him any real or significant advantage anyways. He's basically wasting his time and/or electricity for something that would skill up anyways by simply playing the game.
In Darkfall, there is no "end game", only THE game because there is no need to max your character in order to have fun like you would in a class/level based game. You simply login and have fun from the start.
He does have a point. How many times do we read that someone in Darkfall is macroing some ability or setting his character to run in a corner or some such thing and they leave the keyboard.
Having individual skills that are different than other players is great. but coming up with absurd ways of leveling them seems somewhat antithetical to the idea that you level what you prefer through normal game play.
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Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Then obviously a player who's only been playing for 1 week can compete with a player thats been playing for 6 months, skill wise?
Thats not the case. The good thing about SWG was that you could literally reach max "level" (the levels didn't really even matter) in like, 2 weeks if you wanted to, and enjoy the rest of the content. Making the skill progression on such an incline that people feel they need to skill up this way to compete or enjoy the gameplay is the point of the OP.
Level based RPGs (when even skills have levels),only leads to one thing in the end, and thats progression. If you aren't skilling up your skills in a manner thats rewarding and viable in the current games atmosphere, then you aren't enjoying the game because you're behind the curve.
It's just the way a person explains it, and the way this lead combat dev explains it, makes skill based leveling look stupid. There are downsides for all leveling systems, but I do prefer a XP/level system.
If we take Darkfall for example. It is exactly the same as leveling, but transformed in some redicilous skill grind. You need to be level X for raiding, or you need to grind X weeks for raiding? Tell me the difference. However, for sandbox games, i'd prefer the grind skill system, as you can grind the skills you like, first. But on the other hand, when I was playing Darkfall, it was:
yeah first skill up your magic please.
But I want bow and arrows?
No, magic.
This and his obvious lack of an ability to think creativly is pretty much the only thing I got out of this. Just another person in charge of making a game that is beyond them.
I'm not one to link MMORPG.com articles but...
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/4248/The-List-5-Things-Every-MMO-Gamer-Should-Remember.html
When you guys make your MMOs I'll be happy to test them.
It's not about being news, it's about something interesting to read from the horse's mouth.
I actually totally agree with him on this point. In pretty much every skill-based MMO I have ever played, people have resorted to extremely silly activities to level skills. I remember sitting in my house in UO macroing fire field and walking back and fourth to build magic resist. Or trapping monsters inside the house with boxes so that I could practice my weapons on them in safety.
Or in Darkfall, running into a wall all night while casting self-heal to increase run, sprint, self-heal and lesser magic all at the same time. Or the ever-popular swimming into a wall to increase stats. And there are FAR more macros and/or exploits like these in Darkfall that people take advantage of to improve their characters.
And then of course there is the balance issue. With classes, it is at least possible for developers to balance different character archetypes against each other to at least some degree. When too much freedom is given in terms of skills, some players will always be massively imbalanced towards others... which then leads everyone to adopt the same character build in order to compete. Developers are then forced to implement a nerf of that build and everyone gets pissed off and migrates to the new most powerful build.
I think these are just unfortunate side-effects of skill-based leveling systems. As much as I love games that use skill-based character progression, I think they may not be worth the trouble. The problems are probably not really solvable without going the level-up route...
if that's what SWTOR devs see as limit of skill-system, they are just doing another D&D clone. meh, i hope they'll enjoy it.
I've always like hybrid systems, myself. Essentialy you gain experience, just like in traditional level based systems, to "level up" but when you "level" nothing actualy changes about your character. Instead you awarded a certain number of advancement points to spend on skills as you choose. You can set limits on the number of points you can spend on any one skill each level to avoid the min/maxing problem.
You can use such a system as class based or non-class based. With class based systems you differentiate the classes by either providing them with a one time bonus to appropriate skills (i.e. A fighter gets +10 to melee skill use) or you can reserve certain skills to only be purchasable by that class (i.e. only sorcerors can spend points in summoning skill) or you can tweak the limits that class is allowed to spend on certain skills each level or some combination of those.
From my perspective this is the best of both worlds....it allows people the freedom to build the type of characters they want without incentivizing stupid behavior in order to increase skills.
The downside is that people DO need to use thier brains in order to make good character choices and some character builds will end up better then others..... but I don't really see that as a problem...it is supposed to be a GAME after all.... not an interactive movie.
The real key to this is to make sure that DIFFERENT skills are useful in DIFFERENT situations. That's really where Dev's and games fail IMO....they fail to make the difference in skills relavent and make too many skills applicable in too many situations. For instance, stealth and attacking from ambush should be powerful...UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS.... but they shouldn't mean squat when you are in an empty well-lit room.
The problem is that Dev's don't take the time impliment systems where how functional a skill is depends upon the conditions under which it applies..... and impliment a wide variety of conditions in thier games. That's why you really see so many FOTM issues.