12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 1st comment:
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I've been thinking about methods of character advancement. I've always thought it a bit of a problem in MUDs (and MMORPGs) when a character reaches the maximum level. It means there needs to be some form of "end-game" content to occupy these max-level players, which A) has some entirely separate method of advancement (collect all your purple raid gear) and B) becomes viewed as the "real game," leaving the original advancement content as a sort of grind to occupy time until you get to the end-game.

The older alternative to this, of course, is the traditional MUD remort system, wherein you start over at first level (with anything ranging from a nominal to major benefit) and play through the game again, but this also becomes repetitious, with players doing it just to remort through all the classes and having mental contests as to how quickly you can level up to 100 again.

My original plan was to do something that I'd kind of seen done before, but never to the extent I thought to do: have statistical advancement be effectively endless. Given the size of the numbers that modern computers can hold, and a properly scaling equation to train yourself, this wouldn't be that hard - with this solution, all that needs to be done in the game world is occasionally making new areas with mobs of an appropriately high level for whatever players have gotten the farthest. The downsides to this are two-fold: first, the power variance between players could become boggling. A player who's just starting the game would have practically no chance of ever standing against a player who'd been on the game for a year. Secondly, I can see how the game could eventually lose its thrill in advancement - yes, you would be playing in new areas, but it might become less interesting when you have five million hit points and you only have to kill two more enemies to have the experience to get up to five million and five!

A new thought I had is to have no statistical advancement. This is to say, your character starts out at, say, 100 hit points and 100 mana and never gains more than that. Through gameplay you would gain access to new skills and spells which would expand your strategic options in combat, but not fundamentally change your potential damage output (or absorption). One might even unlock account-wide benefits, such as different races or some such. The problem here, to me, is also two-fold. One is the problem of continually coming up with new abilities that would let players feel like they're advancing without making them more powerful than other players. The other is having a whole world worth of enemies at the same power level - a newbie could stroll into the lair of the demon lord to get some experience (access/keys to areas could be controlled by time played or total experience earned, but the power level concern is always valid unless the harder areas simply require grouping to defeat).

tl;dr version: what options can people think of for continual character advancement that A) does not lead to a separate end-game and B) provides at least some kind of balance between older players and new? Or does one simply have to choose between the two?
12 Aug, 2010, Cratylus wrote in the 2nd comment:
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We use a large, vibrating egg.
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Me too, but that doesn't have to do with a MUD.
12 Aug, 2010, Davion wrote in the 4th comment:
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I think trying to balance older players with newer players in an advancement system is a fools errand ;). You'd pretty much have to make advancement meaningless after a certain (early) part.

Are you thinking of this from a ground-up game design question, or more, addition to an already running game?

If it's the latter, on a game I sorta ran I implemented a post-stage of advancement. Once a person got to level 100, remorted, got back to 100, hero'd, then cashed in a whole bunch of rp points, they could unlock another level. Once there, said player could then spend the accumulated XP that they gained to get to level 100 on various stats. This gives them an initial boost. A real separator between a basic hero'd player and this next level (you may not want that…).

XP Could then only be gained on some mobs that existed in the realm. These mobs were tailored to fight like players, using the strengths of their classes. An example, the bounty hunter would tie you down, then flee/backstab, flee/backstab, etc ;). So it wasn't easy just to pick up post-hero XP.
12 Aug, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 5th comment:
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I originally intended to have open-ended advancement, then realised it was a bad idea, for much the same reasons you described. I've also looked into outward advancement, where you gain more options without more power, and I found it works very well alongside regular advancement - but not so well as the sole means of advancement. Non-linear advancement also worked well for me, as did (to a lesser extent) an emphasis on player skill.

I'm also quite interested in the idea of gains tempered by sacrifice, and giving players the illusion of advancement, as discussed here, here and here.
12 Aug, 2010, Runter wrote in the 6th comment:
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My plan is actually to eliminate the grind in favor of a leveless system similar to what most mmos do with endgame.

Well, actually my plan is to make the grind period very brief but the choices in development perm.

Ideally it would only take an hour or two. It will result in players having many characters but that's fine. I think that's better than locking them in with a class they end up not liking endgame without and realistic way to change other than changing specialization.
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 7th comment:
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KaVir, I find the illusion of advancement post interesting. Is that something from God Wars II, or an older project?

Did you have some form of statistical advancement layered on top of that - was a player able to train their hit points and endurance as well as gain the ever-increasing but never-displayed advantage? It seems from my experience that unless the point of the game is like an FPS, where you plan on running around and dying quickly, that most people would be unsatisfied without some more tangible form of advancement.
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 8th comment:
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Runter said:
My plan is actually to eliminate the grind in favor of a leveless system similar to what most mmos do with endgame.

Well, actually my plan is to make the grind period very brief but the choices in development perm.

Ideally it would only take an hour or two. It will result in players having many characters but that's fine. I think that's better than locking them in with a class they end up not liking endgame without and realistic way to change other than changing specialization.


How? I have no problems with allowing people spontaneous respecialization, but how to the rest of it? Most MMOs have an end-game that consists of no statistical advancement on the part of the characters, but rather grinding raids to collect a specific set of equipment. Are you planning on making the entire game equipment-based, with restrictions on what you can wear based on total experience or time played?
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 9th comment:
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Something else that interests me is EVE Online's time-based advancement system. Skills take a set amount of real-world time to learn (based on the complexity of the skill, the level of that skill you're learning, and your two statistics associated with that skill). The low-level skills move fairly quickly, taking a matter of minutes to hours to learn, whereas the higher levels of those skills (or more advanced skills) can take weeks to gain a level in.

There are a couple of neat things about this. One is that there tends not to be a fatally huge discrepancy between young and old players. A new player might be able to train the skills necessary to fly a battleship within, say, a month. This puts them on the same general footing as an older player - the older player would be able to fly more types of ship than a battleship, would have skills to increase the damage resistances of his hull and use more advanced weaponry, but those numerical differences are usually within a few single-digit percentages. One-on-one, the older player would have a definite edge, but it's perfectly possible that two or three newbies could take him out.

The other neat thing is that this doesn't rely on the acquisition of experience, so what you do with your game time is irrelevant to your advancement. You could fly around mining minerals from asteroids, take missions to clean out a pirate base, sit in a starbase chatting with your corporation or research new blueprints for types of ammunition - you'll still be able to use that new gun next Tuesday at 3:15.

The possible downside to this is that there's nothing you can do to make your character better. While you can learn how the game works, and improve some aspects of your playing strategy, you have no control over how quickly you advance and I can see how some people might be frustrated with this.

I know Quix has spent more time on EVE than I have - does he or anyone else have further thoughts on the effectiveness of their advancement system? Has anyone played another game that used something similar? Or have thoughts on the effectiveness of it in a MUD?
12 Aug, 2010, Runter wrote in the 10th comment:
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I plan on making the game achievement based with team play. I gather from what you're saying that the best gear is most important. That's fine. That was never most important to me. The gear acquired from tiers of content will matter. But the most important goal will be solving problems and clearing content. There is a variety of mechanisms like artificial atonement, lockout periods, and various currency from different content that can balance advancement.
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 11th comment:
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Runter said:
I plan on making the game achievement based with team play. I gather from what you're saying that the best gear is most important. That's fine. That was never most important to me. The gear acquired from tiers of content will matter. But the most important goal will be solving problems and clearing content. There is a variety of mechanisms like artificial atonement, lockout periods, and various currency from different content that can balance advancement.


Interesting. So rather than an increase in in-game power, you'd have bragging rights via collected achievements be the impetus to keep playing? I certainly know enough people who care about increasing their Xbox Live gamer score that I could see merit to that.
12 Aug, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 12th comment:
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Just implement an accelerated time line and death and you don't have to worry about supporting continual advancement. :-)
12 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 13th comment:
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I'll call it HyperLifeMUD!
12 Aug, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 14th comment:
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ATT_Turan said:
what options can people think of for continual character advancement that A) does not lead to a separate end-game and B) provides at least some kind of balance between older players and new? Or does one simply have to choose between the two?

Logarithmic growth. I am favorable to log2, personally. Using log2, a person with strength 1024 has an effective +2 bonus against a person with 256, and a +6 against a person with 16. The downside to this system is that if you don't either keep decimals or round creatively, you end up with a lot of useless values. (i.e., 18 strength is the same as 16, 1000 is the same as 512, etc). For this purpose, I just created a random rounding function, which randomly rounds up or down considering the decimal portion as a percentage chance.
13 Aug, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 15th comment:
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EVE's system is a pretty good one. It works very well for a sandbox environment, because you really can choose to invest training into all kinds of things, or you can focus specifically down a given path towards a goal.

What it does is allow any new player to be able to do things quickly, but an older player can do them easier and be more effective at it. Example:

Using EveHQ to browse around the skill trees, for a player to be able to fly an Amarr Apocalypse battleship, they need to train these skills:
Amarr Battleship (Level 2)
Spaceship Command (Level 4)
Amarr Cruiser (Level 4)
Spaceship Command (Level 3)
Amarr Frigate (Level 4)
Spaceship Command (Level 1)


Note the skills are in a tree. To train Amarr Frigate, you must have already trained Spaceship Command to level 1 or more. To train Amarr Cruiser, you need Spaceship Command to level 3+, and Amarr Frigate to level 4+. In my case, my character lacks Amarr Cruiser and Amarr Battleship, but has the other prerequestites done from learning to fly other ships.

Were I to want to fly an Apocalypse, it would take me only 4 days, 8 hours, 45 minutes and 21 seconds to train the skills needed.

However, all I'd be able to do at that point is fly one. To be any good at using one, there are dozens of support skills you also need to train. To fight using one of these ships, I'd probably want to put some big lasers on it. Let's see… the Mega Beam I large laser is a popular choice for long range sniping…

Large Energy Turret (Level 1)
Gunnery (Level 5)
Medium Energy Turret (Level 3)
Gunnery (Level 3)
Small Energy Turret (Level 3)
Gunnery (Level 1)
Gunnary (Level 5)


It would take me another 5 days, 4 hours, 23 seconds to train the skills needed to use those guns. Likewise, you could drill down through armor plating, range modifiers, yadayadayada….. and then to not be out of capaciter in 10 seconds, a bunch of engineering/mechanic skills. You get the picture.

BUT, not the prerequesties. To learn Large Energy Turrets, I have to already know Medium and Small. So, this tells you that while you CAN push your skills directly towards that battleship if that's what you want to fly, ordering your skills properly will allow you to fly frigates and cruisers which would use the smaller weapons while you're still training for the big ship.

It's also worth noting that big ships != I win button in EVE. Big ships are very powerful against other big ships, and they can nail small ships from long distances with ease… however, a tiny frigate buzzing around a battleship is very hard to squash. Several tiny frigates and a cruiser can make short work of the toughest battleship because it can't easily hit them at close range.

So, while the new player can jump into a ship and start being effective with a fleet, right away, the older player has more skills across a wider palette, meaning they'll usually win in a one-on-one contest. Moral of the story, work with others. :)
13 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 16th comment:
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Tonitrus said:
ATT_Turan said:
what options can people think of for continual character advancement that A) does not lead to a separate end-game and B) provides at least some kind of balance between older players and new? Or does one simply have to choose between the two?

Logarithmic growth. I am favorable to log2, personally. Using log2, a person with strength 1024 has an effective +2 bonus against a person with 256, and a +6 against a person with 16. The downside to this system is that if you don't either keep decimals or round creatively, you end up with a lot of useless values. (i.e., 18 strength is the same as 16, 1000 is the same as 512, etc). For this purpose, I just created a random rounding function, which randomly rounds up or down considering the decimal portion as a percentage chance.


Off the top of my head, I don't see a lot of difference between that and a system where the strength values relate on a one-to-one basis with the training costs increasing logarithmically. I suppose it might retain satisfaction more easily to see your numbers increase at the same rate (rather than slowing down), but that would just be an illusion put to the lie when you realize your in-battle strength is not increasing as rapidly.


quixadhal said:
Stuff


Yes, and I like how it works in EVE. My qualms about trying to apply it to a MUD are mainly A) the reasoning. It makes sense in EVE's world that you can have information constantly downloading into your brain. It makes less sense in a fantasy MUD (which is what I'm primarily interested in right now), unless you make up some kind of magical knowledge crystal that does the same thing…feels somewhat wanna-be to me. Then, B) I am hesitant to base a game around a mechanic that encourages/requires grouping at a time when the playerbase of any given MUD can be expected to be quite small. Especially if PvP exists in the game.
13 Aug, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 17th comment:
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I understand your hesitation, but I would suggest that trying to design a game that caters to a given playerbase is a sure way to end up with something short-lived that nobody is happy with. If you think a multi-player game should focus around people playing together, then design the game that way. People who aren't so anti-social will find you, and probably build a pretty nice robust community. The soloers will drop by, discover they can't WTFBBQPWN the game alone, and either leave or start interacting with their fellow players to advance.

I've been that solo guy, and I still do like to solo for a while (I'm an explorer, and I find many people don't like to just explore the world to see it… they have to KILL!). But, I've also found MMO's to be far more fun with other people. Looking back, I realize a good many of my best memories from MUD's have been things I did with other players, or TO other players, and even on occasion that other players did to me!

In short, if you're designing a game to make money… appeal to the masses and hope you do it quick enough before they change their idea of what's cool. If you're designing a game because you WANT to design a game, do what feels right and let players who agree find you. The only rule of thumb is, once you HAVE a playerbase, don't made radical changes unless you're ok with losing most of them.

As for the offline training… dream a bit. Who says it has to be sci-fi or magic? Perhaps the spirits of the ancestors whisper such knowledge to you, and you have to contact the appropriate spirits in-game to commune with them (quest to select skills to train). Perhaps it represents books you are reading while logged out… too many games assume your character just disappears when the player disconnects. Studying could just be one of the things you do while sitting around waiting for your player to reconnect.
13 Aug, 2010, chrisd wrote in the 18th comment:
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I like advancement-over-time, but I am not a fan of EVE's system. It is impossible for a new player to ever catch up to a veteran (unless said veteran goes inactive) and it takes far too long to advance to what is considered a base level of competence. A large number of corporations in EVE won't consider hiring anyone with less than 5 million skillpoints (some have even higher standards). To give perspective, my 2.5 month old character has 3.5 million skillpoints.

Putting a cap on advancement would address the first problem (impossible to catch up to veterans), but as someone pointed out before, reaching the advancement cap can quickly become a prerequisite to playing the "real" game. Giving new characters a bonus to the speed of their advancement would help address the second problem, but if advancement after the speed bonus wore off made a significant impact, then time would still be a deciding factor. I doubt that these issues can be solved - after all, any time-based advancement is naturally going to give an advantage to those who have spent more time playing - that's the whole point. Speeding up the advancement process sort of devalues it, as well.
13 Aug, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 19th comment:
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ATT_Turan said:
KaVir, I find the illusion of advancement post interesting. Is that something from God Wars II, or an older project?

That was when I was running Gladiator Pits III - it was the same codebase though. It was basically God Wars II without classes, mobs, advancement, and so on. Towards the end I started introducing a few mobs, simple advancement, etc, and then eventually I had enough functionality and content in place to rename it as God Wars II.

ATT_Turan said:
Did you have some form of statistical advancement layered on top of that - was a player able to train their hit points and endurance as well as gain the ever-increasing but never-displayed advantage?

Not directly, but the Athletics skill was applied as a percentage to health, so your hit points did gradually go up.

ATT_Turan said:
It seems from my experience that unless the point of the game is like an FPS, where you plan on running around and dying quickly, that most people would be unsatisfied without some more tangible form of advancement.

Well Gladiator Pits III was a pure PK mud, and initially there was no advancement at all - it was all about player skill. It did pick up some degree of popularity, but the playerbase definitely grew once there was a more tangible means of advancement.

I'd also argue that advancement can be a psychological urge for many players, and all they'll care about is reaching the top as fast as possible (which is another big argument against open-ended advancement). No matter how interesting or diverse you make your content, many players will simply view it as another obstacle they need to grind through to reach their goal. As a result, I think there is much merit in Runter's plan - as long as there are plenty of things to do once people have advanced to the top.
13 Aug, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 20th comment:
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KaVir said:
I think there is much merit in Runter's plan - as long as there are plenty of things to do once people have advanced to the top.


I do also, and creating some sort of achievement system is something I've planned on ever since I saw non-Xbox games starting to add them in due to popularity. I've just never seen very much point in having two separate styles of gameplay and advancement for building up a character and then playing that character end-game - I won't say there's anything wrong with it per se, but I want to see what I can come up with to avoid it.

quixadhal said:
Perhaps the spirits of the ancestors whisper such knowledge to you…


That's actually a pretty neat idea. I'm having player heroes be avatars/followers of gods, so it could make perfect sense that your associated divinity is slowly imparting knowledge to you while you go about their business. Thanks for the input.
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