[Game Dev] What do you want?

[erethizon]

Originally Posted by Horse

Surely you see that there is only one of them which presents any sort of palpable conflict?

Man vs. Himself
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. God
...and newer... Man vs. Machine


I'm all for rewarding someone for doing things, but just like it's a touch goofy in Mass Effect to gain experience for looking at the window of my ship, it's goofy to "cross the streams" and give someone cachet for resolving MvHimself that can be used for MvM...

Ie, why would rearranging furniture in your house get you anywhere closer to discovering a mountain village, let alone killing the troll leader at the end of it?

This system was tried and the audience was split in Morrowind and Oblivion. Some liked one more than the other, I personally disliked Oblivion. Why was me spamming some lame ability artificially (even worse, spamming a bunch of them evenly to maximize point gains) making me a better player worthy of everything in the world getting harder? Err?

The ends need to at least be analogous to the means, yea?


The issue of balance, when someone tries to balance that stuff, comes into play, is probably a huge roadblock towards establishing this sort of holistic gaming: 1 dead rat is worth what, proportionate to "talking with your friends?" Some games have systems where you gain fame by interpersonal relations... but the rewards seem odd for that, alongside how you figure out what a good number is to acheive.

I see how these various gameplay mechanics having their own levelling components can be enriching - language skills in EQ - but to tie them into the core concept of "level" which is really just a quick designator of baseline stat accumulation, stats that are used for combat, seems offputting.

It may be interesting tho, if your levelling up "chatting with friends" made your taunts more effective. Or reorganizing your room a lot gave you the Anal Adventurer bonus that reduced armor decay ;P That'd be similar to the LOTRO AA system where you eventually gained bonuses via skill usage. It gives you the option to naturally level them up without paying attention or hardcore it and go out of your way...

There does not need to be a conflict. What does casting the divination spell True North (which pointed your character north so you would know what direction you were headed) have to do with killing creatures? The system already makes virtually no sense. I can spend 1000 hours healing and buffing everyone I meet and I will be no better at healing and buffing than someone that has been playing for an hour. But if I spend 10 hours beating in the heads of monsters with my club I will have stronger healing and buffing spells than the character that spent 1000 hours doing nothing but healing and buffing even if I have never cast a spell in my life.

Somewhere down the line someone got the silly idea in their head that power should be based on how much murdering your have participated in. That works out fine for people that enjoy killing stuff, but for those that do not or for those that are simply bored with it because they have done too much there needs to be another way.

These games are filled with classes of adventurers, not simply murders. Even the classes that are heavily focused on support and do very little killing (clerics, enchanters, etc.) are equally required to participate in mass murder to progress in these games. That makes no sense. If my job were not about murder, how would murder make me better at my job? The only answer I can come up with is that murdering is part of being an adventurer. Well if my non-combat oriented character gets experience from combat then he better get it from doing things that are more directly related to what he is about (such as casting non-combat spells, crafting items, and exploring the world). If one part of being an adventurer is rewarded with adventurer experience then all parts should be rewarded.

Even the killing of things rarely resolves any conflict. There are a fixed number of spawn points for rats in the newbie zone. If there are 50 spawn points then there will always be roughly 50 rates because they keep coming back. If you kill zero rats, there will be 50 running around the zone. If you kill 1000 rats, there will be 50 running around the zone. No conflict is being resolved here either.

I can agree with you that rearranging furniture does not seem like it should make you better at killing a troll leader (other than perhaps the strength you gain from moving furniture), but likewise, clubbing rats should not make you able to cast higher level healing spells.

There are two system you can use. You can use a system of individual skills where each time you use a skill you are better at only that skill (like Morrowind) or you use a level system where any time you do something related to your class you get general “experience” which simply represents getting better at some aspect of your class which should average out to getting better at the whole class. If your class heals, buffs, and clubs creatures then it is assumed that you will spend some time doing each of those things and will get experience in the process marking you as better at the overall class without looking at each skill individually. This works out fine, but only if all aspects of a class are rewarded with experience. Somewhere down the line they decided that only the killing of things would be rewarded with experience and at that point the system stopped making sense. Either you reward all activities with general “experience” or you reward each activity separately with its own skill bar. But to give general experience only for the use of one skill (i.e. killing) and ignoring all the others is not only silly, it makes for a very boring game that people quickly get tired of playing because they feel that all there is to do is endlessly grind creatures.

You are correct that balance becomes an issue, so you would likely base it primarily on time invested. If there is any source of experience that is faster than any other then people will just do that and the grind will continue. The idea is to get people to think first, “What do I want to do today” rather than “What will give me the most reward today”. You want people to be looking at it as a game where the goal is to have fun, rather than a job where the goal is to achieve as much as possible. The only way to do that is to either have no achievement (which would not appeal to all the achievement oriented people) or to have numerous ways to get the exact same amount of achievement.

[rangoth]

Originally Posted by erethizon

cool stuff

I bring it up in many of my posts but I have to mention Gemstone III here!

I was an Empath in that game. Which for those that did not play, was like a cleric in the sense that I could "heal" dmg, or repair broken bones, mend wounds etc(Gemstone III had a detailed dmg system where parts of the body can be hurt/broke etc).

In this game I "leveled" almost exclusively by never leaving town. Sure I could go out and put the smash(smack?) down on rats and goblins and improve THOSE skills, such as 1hb, or whatever offensive casting I had, but when I sat in town people would come into this main square....think like PoK in EQ or auction house area in WoW and ask for their wounds to be healed.

As an Empath I would literally take their wounds, be it broken arm or whatever(obviously higher skill can take higher wounds etc). I would then have special abilities to heal myself. I'm sure there were some restrictions though I fail to remember the details.

As you mentioned though this was far different than the path of a warrior in this game. My entire existence in this game was a social one. I hung out in the town square, collected gossip, pass on info about special events/places, healed people who would in turn often donate to me valuable items found during their adventures or give me some money. I, and other Empaths, were an integral part of the functioning game and community but I never had to "mass murder" to get there.

God I loved that game until AOL started charging 2$ an hour to play and it went to the web with a serperate 10$ a month charge. I was only 13 or so at the time with family based AOL service and parents were not going to pay a monthly fee for me to game Needless to say it ended my career.

EDIT:

I read the bottom of your post more and thought about it. While the idea of rewarding skills seperately sounds nice in the end it just becomes another stupid grind. Because if there at least 1 valuable use of each "skill" then everyone will just spam them all to the top anyway. I think VG tried to get around this by having a max number of skill points which would be divided among a group of skills. Using any in that group advanced that skill naturally but taking from the "pool" for the whole group. In short, you could not have all of them maxed forcing the player to make a decision. Much like the rest of VG however it was never even utilized or brought to fruition(sp?).

[erethizon]

Originally Posted by Vali

I didnt much care for it either. In all honestly, there was some camaraderie that brought folks together because of it though. Bringing people together (forcing them to work together) is always what I think of with social dynamics.

Back when the auction houses were only in org and iron forge, there were tons of people running around, in the same vicinity - I wouldn't call it great social dynamics. How is this any different than EQ without the competition?



I'd agree, but I think its only one piece of the puzzle. I think the best way to go is to provide as many paths of character advancement as possible. Competing faction systems (a la, Kael & Sky EQ1) which limit and increase world involvement, exp systems, character based stat bonuses on a decreasing scale, maybe a religious system with competing deities, item advancement, guild advancement, and quest and story line advancement. Recent games with kill counters (EQ2, LOTR, TR) which provide titles are pretty nifty ways of progression. Lore books (WAR, LOTR) are other good ideas. PVP rankings. The old key lines, which showed up on magello profiles were good. I cant believe WoW has no clearly visual way to see what someone is attuned for, and in that regard, what instances ? a character has accomplished.

The more advancement options you give, the better.

I guess it depends on what you call great social dynamics. I suppose one could argue that Hitler had great social dynamics with the Jews because socially speaking some very dynamic things happened. Personally though, that is not what I am looking for. I suppose you can have great social dynamics with both friends and enemies, but the difference is that I want to have great social dynamics with my friends and I am really hoping I can avoid great social dynamics with my enemies. The idea is to keep all the aspects of having other people around that are good, and minimize if not eliminate the ones that are bad. In other words, make everyone your friend and no one your enemy (because the enemies are usually detracting from your fun).

I do not know if I would call an auction system a great social dynamic either. It definitely gives that bustling world feel that I enjoy (since auction zones are usually very alive), but the auction house was actually designed to eliminate social interaction by making player-based sales automated through an NPC intermediary rather than making the players interact face to face. I am not saying it is necessarily a horrible thing that needs to be removed, but it is not really a tool of social interaction at all, but rather something designed to minimize it.

As for the other part of your post, I like the ideas you mentioned and I think we agree on a lot of it. When I talk about rewarding all aspects of being an adventurer the primary reason to do that is so that people can do whatever they enjoy most or a combination of any number of things that they are in the mood for and still progress. Everything you mentioned on that list was a good thing to have in a game. Some people will focus on building faction fame, some will raid, some will PvP, some will do a little of everything.

The only area that we probably differ on is that I feel that it is important to be able to ultimately get the same rewards. If a person hates PvP then do not make an item that person will desperately want only available from PvP. If a person finds crafting incredibly dull then do not make an item he desperately wants a no drop item that can only be self-crafted. The idea is to have fun and you should be able to do that by mixing and matching those activities you enjoy with the rewards you wish to achieve. You should be able to get that breastplate you want either by slaying a dragon in a raid, crafting it yourself, or building your faction with the King up high enough that he gets it for you as a present. Making it available from only one of those sources dooms some people to hours or participating in an activity that they hate just so they can get the reward they want. While that is a very realistic system (and is often the way real life works) it is a horrible game system since games are meant to be fun.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by erethizon

There does not need to be a conflict. What does casting the divination spell True North (which pointed your character north so you would know what direction you were headed) have to do with killing creatures? The system already makes virtually no sense. I can spend 1000 hours healing and buffing everyone I meet and I will be no better at healing and buffing than someone that has been playing for an hour. But if I spend 10 hours beating in the heads of monsters with my club I will have stronger healing and buffing spells than the character that spent 1000 hours doing nothing but healing and buffing even if I have never cast a spell in my life.

Well I thought the SWG model of healing was extremely ridiculous, and it featured sitting in a hospital to heal folks, and skilling up based on skill usage.

Making a game where you rely entirely on other people interacting with you is just a haven for "play an alt"-itis.

True North is an example of how that skill spamming doesn't make sense in terms of progression.

"Better at healing" is what's up for grabs, and I agree that there are ways of integrating skill gain through usage into a more organic model. This is what was interesting about the LOTRO skillup bonus system.

The problem, again, is that you gaining skills by usage needs to be given a context or else you can spam Goner for x hours and become the most powerful healer in the lands.

Somewhere down the line someone got the silly idea in their head that power should be based on how much murdering your have participated in. That works out fine for people that enjoy killing stuff, but for those that do not or for those that are simply bored with it because they have done too much there needs to be another way.

Specifically there needs to be parallel routes of progression for people playing different aspects of the game.

Healing hurt people involves people who have been in combat, so you're still not coming up with an example of something that warrants giving someone generic "levels" for doing something non-combat driven.

The simple solution is to give people a combat level, a tradeskill level, a socialism level, etc. Have a dozen things people can level that are separated into their own little world.

I was excited when WoW mentioned that there'd be tradeskill gathering that relied on a party. I was less so when that only meant there are mining nodes in raid zones. Even less when there are so many ways to bypass mob interference in gathering with various classes.

These games are filled with classes of adventurers, not simply murders. Even the classes that are heavily focused on support and do very little killing (clerics, enchanters, etc.) are equally required to participate in mass murder to progress in these games. That makes no sense. If my job were not about murder, how would murder make me better at my job? The only answer I can come up with is that murdering is part of being an adventurer. Well if my non-combat oriented character gets experience from combat then he better get it from doing things that are more directly related to what he is about (such as casting non-combat spells, crafting items, and exploring the world). If one part of being an adventurer is rewarded with adventurer experience then all parts should be rewarded.

It is simply much easier to make a game where everything you can do in the game hinges on a common aspect or action. As soon as you bring up multiple parallel progression routes, you're talking about more than one game and thinning out the audience within the game that is relevant to each other.

For instance, the common two non-killers would be crafter and healer. Unfortunately the healer is most useful at the point of conflict. So that brings the healer to the exact same fulcrum as the killer.

The crafter also cannot live in a conflict-less world. They have to be supplied and the better items would clearly be guarded by the stuff that's more difficult to kill. Now in any guild situation there's a guild crafter. Who would simply play that role, and how could it be made fruitful enough to warrant someone who only crafts, with the nature of farming, bots, exploits and the like?

Sure, it's possible to have that but it isn't boundless - number of relevant crafters are limited by guild, tier, etc. You may need 25 people to kill something but when would you need 25 people to craft something?

Even the killing of things rarely resolves any conflict. There are a fixed number of spawn points for rats in the newbie zone. If there are 50 spawn points then there will always be roughly 50 rates because they keep coming back. If you kill zero rats, there will be 50 running around the zone. If you kill 1000 rats, there will be 50 running around the zone. No conflict is being resolved here either.

Nothing is ever resolved in a MMORPG, or else the game would end as the content would disappear.

The conflict is resolved in the player. I killed the big bad rats until they're *no longer a threat to me* and so now I'm killing the snakes.

I can agree with you that rearranging furniture does not seem like it should make you better at killing a troll leader (other than perhaps the strength you gain from moving furniture), but likewise, clubbing rats should not make you able to cast higher level healing spells.

To be fair the abstraction is:

keep yourself alive
make your enemy dead

So defeating a rat as a healer, even if its pounding it with your fists, has in fact made you a stronger healer.

There is, of course, plenty of room for adventuring being something you level (exp for killing stuff) and then spellcasting being something you level (exp for casting heals). The trick there is how you'd ever balance those relative levels versus someone who's levelling something (1h swords) that's directly killing the mob. You'd end up with either someone who is missing a ton of healing skill at level 2, or someone who spends far longer killing things because they need to heal themselves. Both of these are apparent in various MMOs and are simply not fun. I've met a few masochists who enjoyed early healing in star wars galaxies. most all of them had a guild supporting them and giving them the mats needed to create the healing items. tradeskilling for 30 mins to have enough heals (yes, heals were mainly consumables) was fun for people, i guess?

grats me at the end of some killing session having barely levelled healing while the killers all gained a ton of this or that.

There are two system you can use. You can use a system of individual skills where each time you use a skill you are better at only that skill (like Morrowind) or you use a level system where any time you do something related to your class you get general “experience” which simply represents getting better at some aspect of your class which should average out to getting better at the whole class. If your class heals, buffs, and clubs creatures then it is assumed that you will spend some time doing each of those things and will get experience in the process marking you as better at the overall class without looking at each skill individually. This works out fine, but only if all aspects of a class are rewarded with experience. Somewhere down the line they decided that only the killing of things would be rewarded with experience and at that point the system stopped making sense. Either you reward all activities with general “experience” or you reward each activity separately with its own skill bar.

You can do both: give the various activities an umbrella. Combat level only goes up when you've levelled the 5 aspects of combat all past a certain point. Tradeskill level goes up when you've done the same, levelled, say "experimentalism, dexterity, history, quality and efficiency." That'd allow anyone to make the baseline item but if you had certain skills you could make higher quality versions of the items.

The same could go for gathering. Allow EVERYONE to gather anything. But only allow the gatherers with skill to get a chance of *more* or *higher quality* materials.

The problem here, again, is that it becomes so convoluted that it drives the demand for any crafted item up. If the crafted item becomes necessary rather than simply nice to have but inessential there are few players at any stage of investment who would not simply level their own crafter up.

That which makes crafting supposedly vital in essence crushes the interdependencies as guilds and players get their own to do it rather than rely on open market.

But to give general experience only for the use of one skill (i.e. killing) and ignoring all the others is not only silly, it makes for a very boring game that people quickly get tired of playing because they feel that all there is to do is endlessly grind creatures.

You can't use the "people get tired" argument as defense because that logical fallacy is rebuked by the billions upon billions of people playing WoW that utilizes a system that you're talking about. I think the concensus is that making the game caveman simple where it is very clear what you're supposed to do and essentially limited in your options besides "which rails do you want to progress on" keeps the churn rate as such that for every person getting bored there are some multiple still playing, bolstering their harem with another alt, who just really enjoy it.

You are correct that balance becomes an issue, so you would likely base it primarily on time invested. If there is any source of experience that is faster than any other then people will just do that and the grind will continue. The idea is to get people to think first, “What do I want to do today” rather than “What will give me the most reward today”. You want people to be looking at it as a game where the goal is to have fun, rather than a job where the goal is to achieve as much as possible. The only way to do that is to either have no achievement (which would not appeal to all the achievement oriented people) or to have numerous ways to get the exact same amount of achievement.

You are underestimating the power of the carrot on the mass populous. An entirely freeform MMO is the stuff of legend (and nostalgia of UO)... without the push to do something or achieve you're losing the largest playerbase there is to be had with roots in the RPG pen and paper realm as well as video games...

The quantifiable progress through a game is king. While I think the way you achieve in a game will be under scrutiny and getting tweaks here and there it has yet to be proven if you're going to get a large/profitable/reachingWoWLevels playerbase from any game that doesn't have the rails to the top at its forefront.

Skillups from usage was one of the first ideas in MMOs, and it has diminished as history goes. Nothing more obnoxious in WoW as a melee getting a new weapon and having to sit there on a mob for hours getting the points to tick up. Some things need to be baselined as you level and serve little or no purpose other than timesink.


I don't think the idea of holistic levelling is bad, I just think it always has to be considered in context of the rail driven "here's what you do next" scenario. I'd love to see something that could combine all sorts of disparate skillsets in a game under one label where it all makes sense.

As it stands the only purpose of a level is to let someone quickly know what point of the game you're at. Level cap is the proof of how that should work. Your level should be a grade, really. Using wow as an example, you should basically hit 70 via experience and then continue to level up via gear. When you see a level 135 you know they're in tier6.

[erethizon]

I really liked Rule’s idea (post 445). If I read it correctly it has most of the elements I want from a game. I like the idea of any character being able to use any skill but they take a long time to build up. Morrowind character development is a good way to go for an MMORPG, but there needs to be many more skills and they need to take a lot longer to build up. I could max all my stats in Morrowind in only a few days and at that point I could no longer bring myself to play because there was just no satisfaction to be had at that point.

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

Now to my last point:
"what do you propose devs do to make games "fun enough" without any kind of endgame? If you can hit a max char in a couple weeks, then what do you do?"

What I did in other games, what I do in other games: Just play them. The gameplay itself should be fun enough to keep you playing. There are singleplayer games you play again and again because they are fun.
When did you play a sport game (soccer, etc) the last time to finish it once (whatever tournament, career, etc is there to play) and then not touch it again? You just start it and play same matchs because its FUN! You dont get better players, you dont get purple footballs and so on. You just play it because its fun.
What about games like Counterstrike, UT or Quake? You play them over and over again. People tend to play dust2 for days and dont get bored by it. Why? Because the gameplay itself is CHALLENGING and fun.
What about console games? Tekken? Mario Party? Guitar Hero? Do you play the "content" once and then stop or do you play it againd and again because its FUN?

The trouble is, none of those games were fun because they were pointless. After playing them once (at the most) there was nothing new to do and they were not worth playing again. Heck, most of them were not worth playing once. Saving the princess has not been enough motivation for me to be willing to play a game since Super Mario Brothers. For a game to be fun I need both fun game play AND character development. Deus Ex was fun to play many times over because the game play was fun and I could develop my character differently each time. In rare cases a game can be fun without character development (Thief was fun especially since it was the first real stealth-oriented first-person shooter and sadly still appears to be the only one I have seen), if the game play is fun enough, but even then it requires multiple ways to play. In Thief you can kill everyone, knock them out, or ghost pass them without bothering them. You can find every piece of loot in the whole game or just complete the objectives. The game still suffered a lot from a lack of character development, but it had enough different ways to accomplish goals that it was fun to play several times (and it truly got first-person stealth right). Overall though, games without character development are just not worth playing.

You perhaps are not as achievement oriented as I am, but for people that are very achievement oriented it is critical to have some way to improve the character. MMORPGs tend to attract achievement oriented people very strongly because they have traditionally be oriented primarily to our personality type. You are right that they do not have to be, but that is trying to market to a totally different kind of person that does not really like MMORPGs as they currently are. That is fine, but naturally you are not going to find a lot of support from the people that currently like MMORPGs.

Originally Posted by rangoth

I bring it up in many of my posts but I have to mention Gemstone III here!

I was an Empath in that game. Which for those that did not play, was like a cleric in the sense that I could "heal" dmg, or repair broken bones, mend wounds etc(Gemstone III had a detailed dmg system where parts of the body can be hurt/broke etc).

In this game I "leveled" almost exclusively by never leaving town. Sure I could go out and put the smash(smack?) down on rats and goblins and improve THOSE skills, such as 1hb, or whatever offensive casting I had, but when I sat in town people would come into this main square....think like PoK in EQ or auction house area in WoW and ask for their wounds to be healed.

As an Empath I would literally take their wounds, be it broken arm or whatever(obviously higher skill can take higher wounds etc). I would then have special abilities to heal myself. I'm sure there were some restrictions though I fail to remember the details.

As you mentioned though this was far different than the path of a warrior in this game. My entire existence in this game was a social one. I hung out in the town square, collected gossip, pass on info about special events/places, healed people who would in turn often donate to me valuable items found during their adventures or give me some money. I, and other Empaths, were an integral part of the functioning game and community but I never had to "mass murder" to get there.

God I loved that game until AOL started charging 2$ an hour to play and it went to the web with a serperate 10$ a month charge. I was only 13 or so at the time with family based AOL service and parents were not going to pay a monthly fee for me to game Needless to say it ended my career.

EDIT:

I read the bottom of your post more and thought about it. While the idea of rewarding skills seperately sounds nice in the end it just becomes another stupid grind. Because if there at least 1 valuable use of each "skill" then everyone will just spam them all to the top anyway. I think VG tried to get around this by having a max number of skill points which would be divided among a group of skills. Using any in that group advanced that skill naturally but taking from the "pool" for the whole group. In short, you could not have all of them maxed forcing the player to make a decision. Much like the rest of VG however it was never even utilized or brought to fruition(sp?).

It is nice to hear that such a game existed in the past. I cannot tell you how much time I have spent thinking back to my days in Everquest wishing I could have just sat in and around town healing and buffing people and becoming a better cleric in the process. I probably would have lasted a lot longer in that game if I could have.

Your evaluation of a skill-based system is correct, it is a grind. That is actually one of the reasons level based systems are popular. My point was that from a logical (and desirable) perspective there are two ways to run a system. You can have every skill level up separately (in which case you grind each skill individually) or you give general experience for using any skill and just gain a level every time you gain enough experience. The trouble with the level system is that it has traditionally only given experience for performing one specific activity (killing) when there are many aspects to a given class that should each be rewarded with general experience.

Both systems have their advantages. A level based system allows you to build up all your abilities by focusing on those activities you like best. You can stay in town and heal or head outside and murder and gain levels either way. The skill-based system allows you to quickly get better at one particular ability that you enjoy most because each skill levels separately. To get level 50 healing spells in a level based game you would have to earn enough experience to get to level 50, which takes a while. To get level 50 healing spells in a skill based game you would only have to use your healing enough to get level 50 spells which should take a lot less time because you are focusing on maxing just one small part of your overall character. I am okay with either system, but I do want one or the other. The current hybrid system of giving experience, but only for one activity (killing) is unacceptable.

[erethizon]

Originally Posted by Horse

Well I thought the SWG model of healing was extremely ridiculous, and it featured sitting in a hospital to heal folks, and skilling up based on skill usage.

Making a game where you rely entirely on other people interacting with you is just a haven for "play an alt"-itis.

True North is an example of how that skill spamming doesn't make sense in terms of progression.

"Better at healing" is what's up for grabs, and I agree that there are ways of integrating skill gain through usage into a more organic model. This is what was interesting about the LOTRO skillup bonus system.

The problem, again, is that you gaining skills by usage needs to be given a context or else you can spam Goner for x hours and become the most powerful healer in the lands.

I can go along with an argument that someone has to be hurt in order to gain skill from healing them. In Morrowind you could build skill just by casting spells even if they had no target. I can see why such a system may not be desirable, and so I can support the idea that you must have a valid target that can be affected by the spell in order to gain experience from it. But that said, a person that spends all day every day wandering around spamming heals on every injured person he meets SHOULD be the most powerful healer in the lands. Someone that spends their time traveling all over the world, killing powerful monsters, and participating in dangerous raids is wasting a lot of time not practicing his healing like the person that spams heals all day on every injured person he sees. Being the best healer should come from having the most productive practice healing, not from having bashed in the most skulls with a club (which has nothing at all to do with healing). The person traveling to the dangerous raids is probably doing a lot of healing, but not as much as the person that does nothing but healing. The traveling person will be much better rounded with a far better range of skills, but he will be an inferior healer because he does not practice as much.

I have not played SWG or LOTRO so I cannot comment on their systems.

Originally Posted by Horse

Specifically there needs to be parallel routes of progression for people playing different aspects of the game.

Healing hurt people involves people who have been in combat, so you're still not coming up with an example of something that warrants giving someone generic "levels" for doing something non-combat driven.

The simple solution is to give people a combat level, a tradeskill level, a socialism level, etc. Have a dozen things people can level that are separated into their own little world.

I was excited when WoW mentioned that there'd be tradeskill gathering that relied on a party. I was less so when that only meant there are mining nodes in raid zones. Even less when there are so many ways to bypass mob interference in gathering with various classes.

Healing requires that someone was in combat, but it does not have to be the healer. A healer can spend all day sitting in town healing the injured people that have come back from battle without ever being in battle himself. The main reason I gave the example of the True North spell was because that is about as non-combat oriented as you can get. A person should be able to get max divination skill (and all the spells that go with being maxed out at divination) by sitting around casting divination spells like True North. Divination is primarily about information acquisition, which does not need a target as often as other spell schools do (though Everquest did make invisibility spells divination spells though those are easy to find targets for since you can just cast invisibility on every person you meet as well).

Having separate combat, tradeskill, and socialism levels (like Vanguard) is fine and it is a hybrid between a single level based system and a true skill based system. A skill-based system gives every skill its own level. A level based system has just one level for the whole character. This system gives 3 levels and divides the skills into the three categories. I support any of those systems as long as you can gain experience in each area by using abilities in that area. In the case of the three areas you mentioned I would imagine that healing and divination magic would still fall under the combat level (unless you consider them social skills) in which case a person should still be able to max their combat level by endlessly casting spells in town.

Originally Posted by Horse

It is simply much easier to make a game where everything you can do in the game hinges on a common aspect or action. As soon as you bring up multiple parallel progression routes, you're talking about more than one game and thinning out the audience within the game that is relevant to each other.

For instance, the common two non-killers would be crafter and healer. Unfortunately the healer is most useful at the point of conflict. So that brings the healer to the exact same fulcrum as the killer.

The crafter also cannot live in a conflict-less world. They have to be supplied and the better items would clearly be guarded by the stuff that's more difficult to kill. Now in any guild situation there's a guild crafter. Who would simply play that role, and how could it be made fruitful enough to warrant someone who only crafts, with the nature of farming, bots, exploits and the like?

Sure, it's possible to have that but it isn't boundless - number of relevant crafters are limited by guild, tier, etc. You may need 25 people to kill something but when would you need 25 people to craft something?

I would imagine you usually would not need 25 people to craft something. I suppose you could make it take 25 people to craft a castle (since that would normally require a lot of people), but I do not think most players would want you too. Being forced to group to accomplish a goal it not a good thing. People should group to accomplish a goal because they want to accomplish the goal with other people, not because there is no other way to achieve their goal. Gathering together 25 people when you do not want to is not at all fun and games are meant to be fun.

And yes, the healer would be most useful at the point of conflict, but being a better healer should not require being at the point of conflict. Most healers probably would practice their skills at the point of conflict because there are a steady supply of wounded people, but they would be gaining experience not because monsters are dying, but because they are healing wounded people. If they were healing wounded people at a location where no monsters were dying they would be leveling up just as fast.

I am not advocating a world without violence. The Sims already exists and it is quite dull. Violence is a key part that makes these game interesting. The problem is when the only way to improve any aspect of your character (including the parts that are not related to violence) is linked to being violent. Why did my Everquest character need to kill creatures to raise my swim skill cap? For a skill based game practicing swimming is what should raise my swim skill cap, not killing monsters. And in a level based game if my swim skill cap is going to be limited by my level then I should gain experience for swimming so I can swim my way to a higher level. If killing creatures using my sword skill raises my swim skill cap then swimming should raise my sword skill cap. In other words, experience should be given for both activities and you should be able to level up either way.

Originally Posted by Horse

Nothing is ever resolved in a MMORPG, or else the game would end as the content would disappear.

The conflict is resolved in the player. I killed the big bad rats until they're *no longer a threat to me* and so now I'm killing the snakes.

Okay, that makes sense, but in that case the word “conflict” needs a broader definition. In the case of my healer, the “conflict” is that I am too inexperienced at healing to cast powerful healing spells. I resolve the conflict by practicing my healing until I can cast level 50 healing spells. At no point do I ever need to directly participate in murder and if I choose I can even refuse to ever practice my skills where murder is taking place (meaning I avoid grouping with people that go out fighting). I sit back in town and wait for the injured to come to me. My conflict is resolved because I am getting the practice I need to become better at casting healing magic. At no point did I need to be anywhere near a battle.

Originally Posted by Horse

To be fair the abstraction is:

keep yourself alive
make your enemy dead

So defeating a rat as a healer, even if its pounding it with your fists, has in fact made you a stronger healer.

There is, of course, plenty of room for adventuring being something you level (exp for killing stuff) and then spellcasting being something you level (exp for casting heals). The trick there is how you'd ever balance those relative levels versus someone who's levelling something (1h swords) that's directly killing the mob. You'd end up with either someone who is missing a ton of healing skill at level 2, or someone who spends far longer killing things because they need to heal themselves. Both of these are apparent in various MMOs and are simply not fun. I've met a few masochists who enjoyed early healing in star wars galaxies. most all of them had a guild supporting them and giving them the mats needed to create the healing items. tradeskilling for 30 mins to have enough heals (yes, heals were mainly consumables) was fun for people, i guess?

grats me at the end of some killing session having barely levelled healing while the killers all gained a ton of this or that.

As I said, I have not played SWG, but it sounds to me like the big problem was that casting spells required items. That is a crappy system that I have strongly disliked in every game I have ever played that had it. Heck, it was the stupid spell system that ruined Asheron’s Call for me. Making spells item dependent may be an effective money sink for the economy, but it makes for an awful game.

The balancing system depends on what kind of system you are playing in. In a level based system, a level 2 character is a level 2 character. It does not matter if he gains experience from swinging a sword or casting healing magic, they are both level 2 and are equal to all other level 2 characters of their class. In a level based system you give experience for doing what your class does. A cleric that got to level two by swinging a club should have the same stats as one that got to level two by casting heals. Even Everquest (which had character levels as well as skill points for each skill) had some level 2 clerics with maxed healing and no weapon skills and others with no healing skill and maxed weapon skills. Assuming we are following an Everquest model (for simplicity of discussion) you would still need to use all your skills in order to gain those skill points, but you would get experience for doing any of them. You could be a level 50 cleric by just sitting in town and healing, but all your skills would be at zero except for healing because you never built them up.

Originally Posted by Horse

You can do both: give the various activities an umbrella. Combat level only goes up when you've levelled the 5 aspects of combat all past a certain point. Tradeskill level goes up when you've done the same, levelled, say "experimentalism, dexterity, history, quality and efficiency." That'd allow anyone to make the baseline item but if you had certain skills you could make higher quality versions of the items.

The same could go for gathering. Allow EVERYONE to gather anything. But only allow the gatherers with skill to get a chance of *more* or *higher quality* materials.

The problem here, again, is that it becomes so convoluted that it drives the demand for any crafted item up. If the crafted item becomes necessary rather than simply nice to have but inessential there are few players at any stage of investment who would not simply level their own crafter up.

That which makes crafting supposedly vital in essence crushes the interdependencies as guilds and players get their own to do it rather than rely on open market.

The umbrella system sounds fine. I could enjoy that. Still though you are basically talking about raising levels through the use of each skill (which is what I am advocating) and not the mass murdering of creatures. Gaining a level of combat weapon skill may require leveling 5 weapons (e.g. swords, clubs, spears, axes, and maces). However, gaining those skills only requires using the weapons. You technically do not need to ever kill anything, you just need to swing your weapon at a valid target. Some targets would probably end up dying. Others would just run away and you would not care since all you are after is skill points, not murdering. Gaining a level in magic skill ability would require even less combat since many schools of magic have spells that do not require any combat at all. It is a good hybrid system that also avoids the poorly designed system of only being able to progress by killing things. Technically you could even gain your weapon skills by sparring with other players and never killing anyone.

Originally Posted by Horse

You can't use the "people get tired" argument as defense because that logical fallacy is rebuked by the billions upon billions of people playing WoW that utilizes a system that you're talking about. I think the concensus is that making the game caveman simple where it is very clear what you're supposed to do and essentially limited in your options besides "which rails do you want to progress on" keeps the churn rate as such that for every person getting bored there are some multiple still playing, bolstering their harem with another alt, who just really enjoy it.

There may be some validity to this. I have no intention of taking away the “caveman simple” option of game play. People can continue to progress the same way they do in WoW. I simply want to have additional options for those that do not want to progress the same old way. Would adding these options really cause the cavemen-minded people to leave? I really do not know.

Originally Posted by Horse

You are underestimating the power of the carrot on the mass populous. An entirely freeform MMO is the stuff of legend (and nostalgia of UO)... without the push to do something or achieve you're losing the largest playerbase there is to be had with roots in the RPG pen and paper realm as well as video games...

The quantifiable progress through a game is king. While I think the way you achieve in a game will be under scrutiny and getting tweaks here and there it has yet to be proven if you're going to get a large/profitable/reachingWoWLevels playerbase from any game that doesn't have the rails to the top at its forefront.

Skillups from usage was one of the first ideas in MMOs, and it has diminished as history goes. Nothing more obnoxious in WoW as a melee getting a new weapon and having to sit there on a mob for hours getting the points to tick up. Some things need to be baselined as you level and serve little or no purpose other than timesink.


I don't think the idea of holistic levelling is bad, I just think it always has to be considered in context of the rail driven "here's what you do next" scenario. I'd love to see something that could combine all sorts of disparate skillsets in a game under one label where it all makes sense.

As it stands the only purpose of a level is to let someone quickly know what point of the game you're at. Level cap is the proof of how that should work. Your level should be a grade, really. Using wow as an example, you should basically hit 70 via experience and then continue to level up via gear. When you see a level 135 you know they're in tier6.

I do not think I am really talking about a freeform MMO here. What I have mentioned so far in this particular conversation could be done to any MMORPG by simply giving experience for other activities. I am not talking about a game with nothing to achieve (i.e. one that has no carrot), but rather a game that has several pathways to achieve the same carrot rather than just one single way to get it. The carrot of character progression is still there. I would never want to eliminate that carrot. It is was too important and something that I require to have fun. What I am talking about is making the game less linear so there is more than one way to get to the carrot so that you can take whichever path you are in the mood for that day.

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by erethizon

The trouble is, none of those games were fun because they were pointless. After playing them once (at the most) there was nothing new to do and they were not worth playing again. Heck, most of them were not worth playing once. Saving the princess has not been enough motivation for me to be willing to play a game since Super Mario Brothers. For a game to be fun I need both fun game play AND character development. Deus Ex was fun to play many times over because the game play was fun and I could develop my character differently each time. In rare cases a game can be fun without character development (Thief was fun especially since it was the first real stealth-oriented first-person shooter and sadly still appears to be the only one I have seen), if the game play is fun enough, but even then it requires multiple ways to play. In Thief you can kill everyone, knock them out, or ghost pass them without bothering them. You can find every piece of loot in the whole game or just complete the objectives. The game still suffered a lot from a lack of character development, but it had enough different ways to accomplish goals that it was fun to play several times (and it truly got first-person stealth right). Overall though, games without character development are just not worth playing.

You dont save a princess in Mario Party; its like a collection of minigames. Also a couple of games I mentioned has progression, but no "main character". Means you can earn special levels, models, outfits, sounds, whatever while playing. Afaik most new console games feature this.

And yes, I understand your point. I was also always a fan of character progression even thou I dont consider games "not worth playing" just because there is none. In some games its a big downside, take BF for example. While all the awards are cool, the unlocking is not.
However, character progression should neither be the main focus of the game or should it be pure enginepower.

[Hatorade]

Longest page ever with no pictures...

[Horse]

People don't *really* start work 'til Monday, even tho we're sitting in our offices today.

Saving responses for tomorrow's workday. ;P

[erethizon]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

Longest page ever with no pictures...

I do what I can.

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

You dont save a princess in Mario Party; its like a collection of minigames. Also a couple of games I mentioned has progression, but no "main character". Means you can earn special levels, models, outfits, sounds, whatever while playing. Afaik most new console games feature this.

And yes, I understand your point. I was also always a fan of character progression even thou I dont consider games "not worth playing" just because there is none. In some games its a big downside, take BF for example. While all the awards are cool, the unlocking is not.
However, character progression should neither be the main focus of the game or should it be pure enginepower.

I wasn’t trying to say that Mario Party involved saving a princess, only that I have not been motivated by seeing a game’s ending since Super Mario Brothers. I sometimes ask people why they are playing a certain game (especially when they seem especially bored or frustrated by it) and a common answer is, “I want to see the ending.” I was simply saying that seeing the ending gives me no motivation anymore. It is all about the fun factor and fun, for me, almost requires character development. I occasionally have fun in games without character development (the Splinter Cell games were not too horrible), but such games virtually never offer much replay value and my general rule of thumb is that if a game is not worth playing again, it probably was not worth playing to begin with. This rule of thumb has rarely failed to be accurate for me.

You are definitely right though that character development is not all there is to it. Games can be horribly dull and have character development. But trying to make a great game (in my opinion) without character development is extraordinarily difficult. It can be done, but you would have to be crazy to try to do it. Technically you can run a marathon after shooting yourself in the foot, but you are making it unnecessarily difficult for no good reason. Technically you can make a game fun without character development, but you are making it unnecessarily difficult for no good reason.

[Inconsiderable]

I rarely finish singleplayer games, means I dont see alot of endings. When I was younger I still finished every game I bought or got. But if some level is no fun or the story isnt interesting, I just stop playing because I cannot get myself to start the game again once I made a break.

Most good single player games I finished (keep in mind, thats rare), I never touched again even thou I consider them great games. Take FEAR for example. FEAR was an awesome FPS (imo), the feeling and atmosphere kept me hooked till the end. But whats the point of playing it again? I know the story, the noises and things that happen wont scare me again the next time I play it. Such games are made to be played once and at some point maybe again when you forgot most of it. Its like a quest in MMOs, simple content to be finished.
Games that are designed for being played multiple times, usually offer things more close to dynamic content. Take those space trader games from Privateer to X; they all offer a big universe where only few places are required for the storyline. I dont think many people start those games, play the story line and drop the game again.
Similiar fantasy games come to mind, like Daggerfall and the other Elder Scrolls games. The replayability (sp?) is not created with character developement (even thou its usually part of such games), but with gameplay outside of the "storyline/content" itself.

Problem with many MMOs nowadays is that they offer content that is to be played once and not again, but want player to play it for a long time, so they add timesinks and gamemechanics to addict people (low-% epic drops anyone?), instead of designing the games right.