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How would you design "character skill progression"?
fl0w
Member UncommonPosts: 25
Ohai,
So I'm not usually the talker, more of the silent reading type of forum lurker. I'm an enthusiastic MMORPG fan though - specifically when emphasis is on the Massive part.
Lets say you're designing an MMORPG, with a fully persistent open world, how would you design skill progression? By classes and levels (a'la World of Warcraft), or maybe a more open system like in EVE Online (open slate, learn as you please). Should it take time to learn new abilities, or are they perhaps attached to equipment? Maybe you would like abilities to be "found"?
If I could be so bold, would you bite and share your thoughts or opinions? What's the pros and cons of any skill progression system you'd care enough to comment about?
Background: I'm a hobbyist programmer and while I'll (probably) never release a game worth playing - I do like to create prototype (heavily broken) worlds. These projects, whose purpose is purely for my pleasure of creating these prototypes. I've always struggled with skill progression for persistent worlds. In my opinion class based systems are flawed (in a persistent world) because once you invest time, down the road a potential class switch isn't necessarily "fun", and even though your play style evolves as you play the game, maybe you aren't eager to sacrifice what you've accomplished thus far. A horizontal skill system (EVE style) is far more adapted (in my opinion) to persistent worlds but it's harder to visually represent a characters skill progression. In example, you spot an enemy player out in the woods, what are you up against? Melee tank type champ or a magic based caster?
Please, share your thoughts and opinions. I'm an excellent listener! 
// Me!
Comments
I will bite.
First, you don't want to break what is already working. So take a page with the standard approach.
The key is not to be different, but have a better level of detailed design. Hence, classes and levels are perfectly fine. The important is to design the skills, animated them, and give them out at the right interval.
You want your players to experiment with skills, and try to use them in different combinations. So you want a system that facilitate that (like the D3 system), as opposed to lock people into decisions they may regret. Also you don't want them to horde their points (not spending skill points, or whatever you call them). So make sure they can do cheap or free respec.
My personal preference is a point-less system. Just give a list of skills (add to it from level to level), and let them pick what to use for their build.
@nariusseldon
Awesome man, thanks. And god knows I agree with you. When character progression is based on levels and experience - classes works good because the developer can always diminish longer re-rolls. I think Blizzard did this very well with heirlooms and whatnot.
The second levels is introduced, the concept of end-game instantly emerges. For my taste, that's kind of working against the concept of a persistent world.
But what if character progression isn't based on levels & experience gain?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Ideally, for me, there would be no "character skill"; rather, all skill would depend on the player.
If I could just take that one word out of the title, and make it "character progression", then I would have some thoughts:
I would try to keep track of all relative metrics, while picking out a few important ones. All metrics would have no upper limit, so that there would be infinite progression. However, these metrics would not have any direct bearing on how powerful the player's character is. This goes back to "player skill" versus "character skill".
The important metrics would allow the player to access different part of the game at certain levels; better items, resources, or areas. However, these would be only marginally better than the parts the player had access to previously. If one were to graph a player's power as a function of time spent playing, it might roughly follow an asymptotic or logarithmic function:
See here for an example.
Some consequences of this would be continual progression such that a player is able to continually advance in the game (if it truly were an asymptotic function there would be a hard upper limit that a player approached over time... logarithmic functions have no upper limit) gaining access to marginally better "stuff" over time, however certain players might also just be "better" than others at the game by nature of player skill. Hence, five or ten years down the road, a new player might be able to hop online and go toe to toe with veterans once s/he becomes accustomed to the game.
/2c
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Good question.
First, I would totally abandon the leveling system. It fragments the player base, which is death for player interaction. It also trivializes leveling up; since levels arerewarded from experience, character progression is just a matter of endlessly grinding experience points. It's mind-numbingly boring, and one reason so many players are quietly exiting MMORPGs; they are tired of grinding levels.
I would use an open skill tree system, but not the typical experience-point based system. First, skills would be unlocked either through finding a trainer, or by completing a special task that unlocks the skill. That would allow for questing to be tied directly to progression, and would strongly encourage players to explore.
Second, I would tie progression in a given skill to actual use of that skill. For combat skills, that would be using the combat skill against suitably difficult opponents. The more a player uses a skill, the more advancement points they would get in that skill, which would allow it to be leveled up. Players would get diminishing returns in advancement points for fighting the same opponents, though - but diminishing returns would be reset upon completion of quests, or changing to more difficult opponents. Different types of skills would realize progression based on different types of activities; so combat skills would be improved through combat, crafting skills through crafting, etc.
Finally, I would add challenges that the player would have to complete in order to unlock significant portions of the skill tree. A challenge would be a single-player encounter or instance that would significantly test the player - both a skill check and a gear check, to make sure the player is ready to move up to the next level. The whole point of the challenge would be to ensure that players are genuinely skilled before moving to the next stage of character progression.
So, an example: a starting mage would like to learn a new spell. He first has to level up any prerequisite skills in his skill tree. Then, he has to seek out a trainer who will train him in the new spell; but the trainer may have a quest that needs to be completed before the skill can be trained. Once the skill is trained, it starts at a low level of effectiveness, but the more the mage uses it against various opponents or in various situations, the more he would be able to advance it in effectiveness. Once he has advanced it as far as he can, he would have a special challenge to complete - like a short single-player encounter - that would test both his skill and his preparation. Once the challenge is completed, additional skills would become available for training and progression.
Well, the idea behind most class or skill based systems is that the longer a player is in the game, the more powerful their characters are. It's something that's worked since PnP games, and it still works now.
Goals: Allow players to have vertical progression. Allow players to have horizontal progression as well. Avoid artificial "using a skill levels it up" activities.
So, how do we accomplish all that?
Mechs.
Let players pilot mechs. The longer they play, the more money they get. The better they are, the faster they'll build their mechs up. At the same time they need to get the skills necessary to drive the mechs. This gives a combination of horizontal skill progression, vertical skill progression and just general player skill in piloting the mechs.
Wild West MMORPG? Mechs. Medieval Fantasy? Mechs. Mechs are the answer.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
You know how dungeon/raid ID's work? Your character get's linked to a specific instance so it "saves" your progress. Well I would take that to another level where a branching system exists for players to acquire sometime unique and one-off skills. Kind of complicated, but I'll do what I can to explain without going on too long:
You go into a randomly generated instance, it is labeled as a Type 1 dungeon. You successfully complete the dungeon and are given a choice between three abilities, lightning bolt, fireball, hurricane. You pick lightning bolt. This dungeon is now closed to you and won't populate for you again (remember they're randomly generated, but this layout has been eliminated from your personal options . . . along with the rewards). You will never again have the option of finding fireball or hurricane.
Let's say there is an even distribution and 33% of the population has lightning bolt as a skill.
Later on you discover a unique solo dungeon by accident (they also happen to spawn randomly around the world) and it contains a one-off skill. You manage to successfully complete this dungeon and beat the deathknight that guards the treasure. You discover the ability "Gaze of Entropy". No one else has this ability, just you. This ability will never populate in any one else's instance. But, let's say you fail. Now YOU are locked out of every finding this dungeon again, it will never generate for your raid ID, but it will for others.
So there would be Types (or tiers maybe) and let's say they go up to 30. So you can get 30 skills that are chosen from options. You get to mix and match your character from that general pool of skills. Then you have the rare and unique skill dungeons which are do or die. More than one person can populate a rare dungeon on their ID and can roll it again if they fail, but it's a low chance to do so, while uniques are one time only chance.
Each time a player discovers a rare or unique dungeon their chance to roll another one in the future is reduced; it will never reach 0%, but it will continue to high improbability (like .0000000001% - let's say if you find 3 unique abilities).
It would make a really interesting game world where you might play with someone who has two unique abilities that you've never seen (and never will see on anyone else). But it balances out because that person no longer can roll unique dungeons. That way people who play all the time can't just hoard all the abilities as they would have such a low chance. But it would be likely that most people would have at least a couple rare abilities and 1 unique while mixing and matching from the general pool that they've found.
Basically you can make a really unique character (and yes, the abilities you can discover would be class based) and create interesting group dynamics as they wouldn't be exactly the same all the time. It also allows for failure and missing out permanently.
First of all... levels and skills by level are the lazy developers progression. Then the lazy developer got even more tired and decided that the player should not choose anything at all, but get skills automaticly at level. No choices, no freedom, just autobuild a predefined character. Yes, the WoW crowd absolutly love this, but that does not mean it is the best way to progress a character.It is lazy and an easy way out, plain and simple.
So, looking at that system, the Character progression is completly automated. You do not build your character, you look at it being built for you. Even in action games today you often get the choice to decide skills for your character, in the new generation MMORPG, supposed to have an RPG element in them, you do not. A lot of people that actually play RPGs would consider that... insane that it is even accepted and ridiculous that some people actually think that is the higher quality of system.
In AO they did a nice mix. You have levels, 200-220 of them. So you pop a level a bit here and there in the beginning. At levelup, you get to choose your skills. ALL of them are open to you, I do not remember how many but +50 should at least be close. Some seem important, some seem not, but with that amount of skills, you the player suddenly have the option to build whatever the poop you want. Healer with a sniper rifle or a sword, maybe a grenade launcher? Go for it. An Agent doing hand to hand combat? I have no idea why, but if you want it, you can do it. A master swimmer/runner/driver built to scout.... EVERYTHING... well its your choice. 90% crafter/10%Martial arts? Go ahead! In such a system, just as in a simple system, there are more powerful builds than others, and less powerful builds. but you suddenly have the power to decide yourself what negatives you can live with to build the character you want to play. You can build the same class with the big, stupid brute as you can with the highly intelligent little stickfigure. You want a stupid magic user? Do it!
This.... Is RPG.
Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout are pretty similar to this, with levels AND skills, and they seem to do qiute alright. but when it comes to a really advanced, expensive game you are supposed to play for years... its suddenly really bad and impossible to do.
Then there is the UO/Darkfall way, with all skills and you raise the skills that you use. Also really fun, you choose what you want to do, and then you get better at the thing you like doing. The problem witht hat system is the botting, it is pretty much built for botting and autoactions. That is where the hybrid really shines.
But both are lightyears more complex and with a much bigger freedom for the player, together with the the feeling that you, the paying costumer, actually have the power to play the game you want, not just watch it being played for you.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
It would all come down to what kind of gameplay I want to pursue and what sort of mechanics I want to put in. Say if we would be designing a game for high fantasy setting, and I wanted to include body blocking, I would spend time trying to come up with abilities which would use that mechanic. Then if I wanted to include some rudimentary physics such as knockbacks, I would come up with abilities utilizing that feature. Terrain deformation/formation - same thing.
Once I've got a set of abilities I can start distributing these abilities into balanced, but distinct sets. These sets could end up being classes, but if not, I would need to impose restrictions to avoid the so called "tankmage syndrome" where every character build ends up being more or less the same. An example of one such restriction would be that you cannot cast spells while wearing heavy armor. This is what I call a "hard" restriction. A soft version of the same restriction would be something that allows spellcasting in heavy armor, but discourages it: Mana costs are increased, effectiveness is penalized, spell failure chance, casting time penalty etc. Whichever way I want to implement spells, I can come up with a way to discourage it.
In any case, these sets are far more easier to balance against each other than all abilities individually against one another. Crucially, when you treat the abilities in sets, it doesn't matter what you call them. This set might be called a "Mage", that one a "Warrior" - or maybe this set is "Dark Magic" and this one "Highland fighting style" or "Swordsmanship". Either way, you'll see that there is little difference whether the game has classes or no classes.
That being said, I am not a proponent of giving the player the illusion of choice by presenting excessive amount of abilities at once with seemingly no restrictions. Systems like that only makes gimping yourself easier and the aforementioned tankmage syndrome more likely. I get it, many a player was mesmerized by the passive skill tree of Path of the Exile at first, but if you're a smart player, you'll quickly notice that the amount of viable possibilities is not "endless" at all. This happens in nearly every game and some players keep falling for it over and over: They believe that the mere amount of possibilities creates depth. -Not true.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
There is a fundemental conflict of interest in skill progression in a persistant world: you want the illusion of ever-increasing power, but at the same time, you want everyone to feel relevent on day one. You also want to minimize the amount of time required to design and add new challenges.
With that in mind, I tend to lean towards a system where you can learn professions to unlock different minigames and different spells within a profession to increase your utility (with a finite number of active spells). But, other than unlocking all the utility of your profession, the advancement would be quest-specific rather than skill-specific.
For example: an orc chieftain spawns. You can march right up to him and fight him, but he'll probably be too powerful. Instead, you can take on the quest to fight him and then, as you fight common orcs, you slowly build up a buff that increases your defence/damage against that chieftain. But you don't gain any permanent experience/power out of it - the next orc chieftain who spawns will be a whole new quest.
Levels and experience is just a try and true way of pacing the progression. You can use other ideas. For example, PoE let you gain levels on skill stones, which also can be traded.
But the key is not just the progression but the concept of a skill build. A fun build system is one that let players customize what powers they can use. That is by definition, they can only access a smaller set of powers, than all that is in the game.
The extreme example of this are classes. You choose a class, you get a subset of all the skill.
The key to make it interesting is a) you let the user have as many combination of skills as possible, and b) don't lock them down .. so they can experiment.
D3 has a great system to do that. You choose 6 out of many skills. There are billions of combinations.
In principle, you can also do it without classes.
Skill choices need to be fun, and not one-dimensional. The old WOW cookie cutter builds is a example of what not to do. If you let people choose to add another 5% to their DPS ... no one will refuse that. It is not a fun interesting choice. However, if you ask them to choose between a magic missile has homing, or send out 2 more missiles at the same time, the choices become more interesting.
From what I understand with your system, a player that plays excessively will have the benefit of "being better faster" then a player that maybe doesn't have all the time in the world to play (theoretically)? Meaning that a player in an open world that play far less than the "top 100% play time player" will generally automatically be of less interest? It is interesting however if one would switch "better stuff as you gain skill level for an ability" to "better co-efficiency as you level your ability". In theory, say you have 100 int (intellect, as mage, whatever). At level 1 of an ability, you have 100(int)*0.05%(co-efficiency), then you gain a level an efficiency bumps to 0.06%.
Dude, I'm with you. I have the exact opinions about levels. As for what else you wrote, there's something to the progressions vs abilities as you put it. Don't know. I'm trying to merge that into "my current game", but it doesn't really fit. I'll elaborate once I've thought it through more.
Also, by "finding a trainer" this would become something that players would simply "thottbot the location" of, and learn everything there's to know about the encounters - feels a bit linear, maybe that's not bad at all, but that was my first thought about it.
This. So what's your input on players that start playing the game "late", so to speak. Say I'm the noob that joins 3 years post release. How will I ever become useful or an asset to other players? Or is that just how the genre goes?
Also, I'm sorry but I fail to understand the concept of mechs as you put it, could you elaborate a bit?
It sure sounds like an interesting system - never tried a game utilising it. For me thought, there's no instanced dungeons. There's dungeons, but these are similar to "rare-spawns" and a generated by NPCs actually digging hideouts (well, at least that's how it works currently). Any group or soloing players can go into it, empty it or what have you.
Question though, these unique abilities, does this mean that devs actually has to implement each unique ability (which for a larger audience sounds exhausting) or is this randomly generated somehow?
I'm with you man. I love the idea of no levels, no experience gain - and that's how I'm imagining it currently. My biggest concern is that new players fall too far behind if they join up 1, 2 or more years down the road. There's no way to "catch up" or become useful, so to speak. Though if there's a level cap - the notion of re-rolls will still apply? Or did I misunderstand you?
Huh, you make a sound point. I'll have to think this one through more thoroughly. Your point is a bit saddening though, because I wouldn't want it to be all that generic - but maybe I don't have a choice. But what's so bad about having the "tankmage"? A player would have more choice as to how they play the game, even though they're maybe not min-maxing a specific build? IF (theoretically) a world would be designed NOT to require min-maxing, every build would be more situational?
----- To all:
I'm not trying to criticise your input, but rather possibly test it, or constructively add to it. I'm trying to have an honest conversation about this.
Not necessarily; I find it's more important to even the bumps, so to say, while providing avenues in which to continually progress. I tried designing an elaborate system for a play-by-post cyber-RPG that would have run very much like a tabletop pen and paper RPG... you can find it here. I found it was best to create natural attributes that didn't change much, and then skills that could change quite drastically depending on what the character was doing. This tended to keep people more or less all together, so that if a new player decided to join the game s/he could be brought up to speed relatively quickly, and wouldn't be forever lagging behind.
Computer games allow one to take things a step further; whereas in my old tabletop-like game I had to fall back on "bidding" as a method of emulating chaotic outcomes, due to computer processing power it's possible to rely on the reactions of players themselves... some people label this "twitch" gameplay. If done properly, it can be quite chaotic enough to negate the need for any artificial skills at all.
To bring the question back to how to measure character progression, I suppose it would come down to "allowances" rather than the improvement of imaginary skills. In other words, my character is allowed to carry an emerald-hued humming greatsword, or whatever, by the local faction because s/he has progressed to the point where s/he has demonstrated the necessary "skill", not by increasing a set of numbers on a screen, but by actually performing the right tasks in game.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
You can't get rid of min-maxing. People will always try to find the most effective build to any given activity, so rather than combating it, you should focus on living with it or even embracing it.
And giving the player all the options, the ability to prepare for anything, you diminish the value of builds significantly. When people can rely on themselves, you're not encouraging cooperation either. By limiting choice you're stressing the importance of the choices the player makes.
For example, in an FPS, "no restrictions how many weapons you can carry" versus "you can have only two weapons". Suddenly with that restriction, it becomes very important which weapons you choose as opposed to just automatically collecting them all and using whatever suits the situation.
Or in Magic the Gathering, you know the game has a 7 card hand limit. When you reach that limit you must discard a card. It takes player skill to know which card you should give up, because the hand limit makes it impossible to prepare for every situation.
My point is, yes, restrictions limit the number of available choices you can make, but they can also add a lot of depth. Like I mentioned earlier, depth is measured in the amount of interesting (or viable) choices you can make, not by the sheer number of them.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I would honestly like to play a level-less game with skill based character progression and no need for macroing.
For instance, you could separate skills into ones that are actually fun to level, like combat skills, and have those on a standard per-use system like UO or Elder Scrolls.
For the more tedious skills, like tradeskills, you could use an Eve-like system, where your character practices those skills while you are out of game. So for instance instead of making 200 low level weapons to advance to the next level, just log your character out at the blacksmith shop, and voila, by the next morning your character's knowledge in blacksmithing will have advanced.
As an aside, I think games need to get away from spending most of your in-game time simply preparing yourself for later content, so lateral instead of vertical skill development is a must.
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
-The MMO Forum Community
Every skill goes from 1-100.
Skills available:
Swordsmanship
Magery
Summoning
Evocation
Shield blocking
Etc...
There may be 20 total skills but your skill point cap is 500 or so per character. If you want to play a paladin type you go for 100 swordsmanship, 100 shield blocking, 100 defense, 50 healing, 50 parrying, etc. up to a total of 500 skill points. You start at 1 skill and as you use each skill, it goes up in value and strength till you hit 100. The skill point cap is to narrow characters down so they aren't the best at everything.
In a sense it creates classes but it allows for malleable characters that become strong at whatever skills the player uses the most. If you get tired of meleeing, your paladin could unlock magery and start raising casting skills while allowing melee skills to deteriorate.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
Before making my suggestion I'll preface with my reason.
A character is supposed to represent anything from a virtualized self to an entirely different individual with entirely different skills. It's rather the norm to play a character who possesses skills and techniques you either will never or can never possess, especially when you very into nonfiction.
Consequently, we have to consider how we conform such skills to a game mechanic where a player can utilize such things, without having any real experience with it. This is a concept that is really easy to glaze over at general levels of gaming since the game mechanics translates into nothing particularly 'real' to begin with.
The closer you get to a simulation or more detailed/hands-on the game mechanics becomes, the more you have to be concerned with how the game mechanics represent the player's proficiency as well as their character's intended proficiency.
Consequently, assisted player skills would be what I consider ideal.
By assisted skill I basically mean that the game is focused largely on being driven with player skill represented foremost. Players have two things that support this though.
1 Skill Rank - I adhere largely to the principle that characters, like people, can at a basic level pretty much learn and do anything. Like people though, a character won't be able to learn everything either. As they train, their proficiencies narrow themselves down into their specialties.
This is not a direct translation into being abundantly more powerful though. Sideways progression where you are given more choice rather than simply more power is what I find preferential, with stat progression coming more so from the rebalancing of stats overtime than their outright increase.
2 Skill Control - Perhaps the more novel aspect. It's not revolutionary, but adding what it ultimately a companion AI that learns your level of proficiency in play and allows you to tailor how focused your play is on your personal skill versus your character's.
Basically this means that there is an integrated form of auto-assist for all combat aspects. The game will judge how capable you are at play and serve to average out things you are poor at. This isn't meant to replace flat out poor play, like forgetting to use valuable skills, heal up, etc, but the AI could help by reminding you of such things.
More or less, the AI could translate the action gameplay of a game into a more passive type with some auto-attack, dodging, and targeting done for the player.
The player can tweak some of these things to have a more comfortable experience, but to avoid it simply becoming a means to abuse or ignore game skill, the system ranks you and a fair bit of it's performance is calculated automatically. Alongside this rank is tweaked skill stats associated with player movement and actions.
So for example if you as a player is poor at dodging, the AI will actually reduce your fatigue pool at a penalty to granting a bit of auto-dodge chance. The more you rely on the AI, the more your core skills are reduced in compensation for the use of auto-skills.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I don't know really. In all the games I play, what gives me the greatest pleasure is starting something small and making it big. In Europa Universalis 3 I'd pick a small country like Georgia that under pressure from all sides and make them the greatest nation on earth. Same with Football Manager, I pick an under achieving team and turn them into Europes top team. In RPG I like watching my character grow and progress, but I'm always somewhat unsatisfied when I reach the end credits in RPGs. Back when I used to run guilds I was somewhat satisfied when my guild would complete a raid and the n00bs I took under my wing where all kitted out and knew how to play the game. But I will never run another guild, simply don't have the time anymore.
But RPG's are, at least for me, about the story of MY character. Humble beginings and the rise to power, the classic heroes journey. But I never really felt that in MMOs, except maybe EVE. I mostly feel like just a cog in the machine. To be honest, I never really cared about the level progress, but the gear progression was more my thing because it was tougher and the rarer the better. Levels on the other hand is just a artificial barrier to stop you going where you want and turns the game into something very linear. Arm me with a stick and let loose upon the world!
The "what am I fighting?" concern is valid if you have PVP. PVP is best when you have some sense of the opponent's capabilities (not necessarily a full picture, but at least enough of an idea to formulate a strategy around.)
This is part of the reason behind some recent games tying skill loadouts to weapon choice, so that if you see a Necromancer in GW2 with a Staff out you know the precise 6 abilities he's going to use. But he also has a second weapon which isn't visible, so he has some potential tricks up his sleeves.
Alternatively you could use some form of a job system. There are quite a few ways to twist such a system to your needs:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well, no. One concept I do not follow is the "New players need to be as good as old players, and fast" A new player will, in any system, be worse than an old player. There can be tutoring for old players so they can go down on the new players level. There can be instances where the new player get boosted to the old players level, but without the skills, if that is necessary. Of course. But it should not be given that a new player just entering should be able to fight alongside someone who spent two years building his character. He just spent two years on a game to be good, let him have that priviledge and honor, do not drag him down to noobie level just because a new player do not have any patience. Again... That is not RPG, that is "instant gratification" for really spoiled people that do not want to invest time, but be done before they start. That category of personality need to learn to toughen up and mature, not all other personalities that need to not feel the result of long and hard work.
BUT! At the same time, with a Skillbased system or Level/Skill system, the new player have ways, if he is ready to invest in them, just as in for example EVE. Focus on one area and excel in it from the getgo. Invest all your points into one category, like Healing, or Buffing, or CC, and you will be able to help higher levels and higher skillsets a lot faster, if you so choose. Again, player freedom. You want to help your friend who played for one year? Focus on healing, then walk behind him and keep him alive, you can probably help him with that after a week. In the level system though.... if you are a lvl 10 healer.... you are a healer for lvl 10 players. You can not change that in any way, shape or form. So even in this situation, the level/skill system is superior to the level system.
Second point: Rerolls. I think rerolls is a good thing. It is boring and tedious to start a new character from lvl 1, just because you do not like how that character work at lvl 150. I have no problem with them, and I dare say they will be a constant feature in any MMO coming out in the future, like banks and apple pie. but I do think rerolls should be limited and at a cost. Again, the instant gratification crowd will always switch to the skillset or combo that is overpowered, instantly and with no thought about their character other than "I got two more dps!" They do not care about any of the RPG elements in an MMORPG, which is the reason MMOs has become so damn shallow and automated int he first place. Not because dev do not listen to MMO fans, but because they listen to those that actually hate everything about RPGs. And again, its the people that do not even like the system they play that need to toughen up and adapt, not the ones that buy the game BECAUSE it's an MMORPG.
My 57 dollars, because I write too much for 2 cents.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Oh Heck.. I'll bite on this one as well..
For me, I want to see a reasonable vertical progression as well as an equal horizontal progression..
Now when I talk about vertical progression I'm talking straight up "levels" of character.. However, that level increase needs to be reasonable, which is a debate in itself.. For me I want characters to earn an edge while vertically progressing, but I do not want characters turning into gods.. Assuming a game has 100 levels for example, I can see a lvl 50 being twice as powerful as a lvl 1.. and level 100 twice as powerful as lvl 50.. So theoretically 4 newbies at lvl 1 should be able to drop a lvl 100 character like a bad habit.. LOL
The way I look at it, it doesn't prevent a group made up of lvl 1 to 100 characters from going out and doing their thing.. Now if the XP is done correctly (similar to original SWG) it will keep players from powerleveling artificially.. BTW.. I do want to add that I do enjoy GW2's style of level adjusting, and that is an option I'm very open to..
Now as for the horizontal progression.. To me this means exploration and faction building.. Gaming should be more then just climbing the same ladder or pyramid.. That is what I like about sandbox play.. People should have the freedom to move about without invisible walls, or be on rails like a themepark where the ONLY direction to go is UP.. Building up factions for a purpose.. awesome.. exploring an open world full of danger and marvels ... awesome.. It is a dream tho.. Maybe one day
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
I would make like this:
Players can select races (or not if the mmo doenst have it).
After they select their race, the mmo will generate a random 3 years old human char.
Players have some amount of points to use on their chars.
They can use those points to get skills, stats, advantages and disadvantages (they get points for that).
They do that on top of that random 3 years old equivalent char to create their adult char.
Unlike usual mmo, different races have different min and max stats and skills.
They increase their skills and stats by using it. How fast they increase it is based on their stats.
Your suggestion has a major flaw in that new characters lacking skill trees should NOT be doing the same content as those will fully developed skill trees. So you will still have the same problem of fragmented population.
Oh my god, you sure hit the nail on what's been bugging me. I'm telling you, once I read your reply it sure made things easier for me. I couldn't have verbalised it better.
Again, you make a good point. I've settled on a drafted character progress system, and I'll try to explain it below if you're interested.Aye. This is one of the major flaws I've been keen on solving. If I have a "learn whatever ability/skill you want"-system, how can I represent a capabilities, even if I restrict the full utility belt somehow.
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So lots of posts and I'm stoked I got so many interesting replies. I settled on a system, which basically is a quick draft at this point but enough to prototype it.
I'm going to go with the vertical & horizontal mix. I am Not going to have classes. A player starts with a "clean character" and the evolution will be entirely decided by the player. As Quirhid stated, restrictions can add depth. I'm buying this but haven't really decided entirely yet. One restriction I will pursue is utilising time, as in it takes time to learn an ability/skill. While theoretically a player Can have all abilities, it's practically impossible because (in a perfect world) there's to many choices and options. Basically anything a player chooses to learn can potentially be a "lesser optimal choice" for that specific player, but it's not wasted and is still part of your utility belt (much like EVE or The Secret World as I understand).
I'd like to group abilities by either type or something else. To combat my visual requirements (what Axehilt replied on), I'm drawing some inspiration from Naruto (heh). A tribe utilise a type of power and perfects it. My goal is that even though you have ALL the combat abilities available, once using one type the player is "stuck in that form" for a period of time - giving an opponent a window of opportunity. So in a more consolidated (highly imaginary) example:
I chose to skill shadow magic. Now there's N different branches.