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➜ MUDs
➜ MUD Design Concepts
➜ Crazy idea for a skill-based system (It's crazy I tell you!)
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Crazy idea for a skill-based system (It's crazy I tell you!)
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| Posted by
| Khandrish
(16 posts) Bio
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| Date
| Reply #15 on Fri 23 Sep 2011 12:57 AM (UTC) |
| Message
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Nick Gammon said:
But the flip side is, it is a disincentive to keep playing if there is a penalty for not logging in.
Say you go on a one-month holiday. If there is a penalty for not playing (eg. the skills drain away) you might think "oh no, I've been away too long, not much point in logging in again".
From what I recall in WoW you very rarely actually go backwards. You might not go forwards (eg, if you can't find any mobs to kill or quests to do) but you don't go backwards.
Even dying has a fairly minimal penalty (no XP loss, minor equipment damage, and a bit of time wasted while you "run back to" your corpse).
I completely agree with this and have never liked the idea of penalizing someone for not playing. There is simply too many unknowns in life to expect someone to play X amount every single day or every so often, it's a game and life should come before that. I would never play a game that penalized you in such a way. Not to mention from a developer perspective I can't imagine such a system doing anything but keeping the player base insanely small or driving the players away completely.
Actually as I wrote that last sentence I realized that there is one way such a game could probably work...it would need to be graphical and would need to be geared towards the Asian market. | | Top |
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| Posted by
| Khandrish
(16 posts) Bio
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| Date
| Reply #16 on Fri 23 Sep 2011 08:42 PM (UTC) Amended on Fri 23 Sep 2011 08:47 PM (UTC) by Khandrish
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| Message
| Was thinking about this whole thing last night and this morning and came up with a slight tweak to the system and wanted to see what you guys thought.
Forget everything about bonuses and just get back to the basic system of having a bucket that drains at a specific rate for players. Now, we have established that different players--whether due to playstyle, real life obligations or they have just been in the game a while and are playing less now--have different amounts of time to dedicate to the game. What if a 'slider' was introduced to the skill system that would create the following effects:
At one end of the spectrum (let's call it the right side for illustration purposes) the bucket size would be smaller but would drain at a faster rate, let's say an hour or less, much closer to what a more 'traditional' skill learning system might be. In this situation a player would be doing a lot more grinding and it would suit a player who could dedicate 30+ hours to the game per week and is willing to sit there and just train, train, train.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum (the left side) you have a very large bucket that drains a bit slower, basically the system I originally described with it taking a week to drain. This would be ideal for players who could only play for a few hours a week, or those people who want to spend much more of their time roleplaying without being completely left out of the advancement loop.
There could be a couple steps between those two for people who are, obviously, more in the middle.
The amount of time it would take to completely fill up the bucket would need to be examined, obviously, and tweaked to work with the range of settings now available.
This slider could only be moved IF the character currently has zero experience in their bucket, helping to prevent the system being gamed. To support this players would have to be able to turn off their learning while still being able to perform any/all normal activities in case they would want to switch the slider.
Now, to help make this system a bit more fair to those players willing to put in the extra time and effort (those all the way to the right), anyone with their slider set more to the left will learn at a slower rate. By slower rate I mean in terms of absolute skill levels learned in any given time period, not how much they learn from a successful activity. If we assume that someone with their slider all the way to the right learns at 100% of maximum speed, someone with theirs all the way to the left might learn at 60%, or 70% speed; I would need to do some number crunching and testing to see what the optimal difference would be.
From an implementation standpoint it would be incredibly simple to do, just a matter of changing something like three numbers/variables in the exact same algorithm depending on where a slider is set.
The potential benefits, as I see it, are numerous. You keep players who can only play for short periods of time interested, those players obsessed with the maximum advancement/grind would get to do their thing, roleplayers would get to roleplay without being left in the dust and more people would get to enjoy mid-higher level content that the GM's/Dev's spend the time making.
I would still want to give same-character bonuses to related skills--a high level large sword skill giving a bonus to learning a low level medium sword skill--but I am not sure if any other bonuses such as what I was describing in previous posts would be desirable. I'm still thinking through the implications with this new tweak. | | Top |
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| Posted by
| KaVir
Germany (117 posts) Bio
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| Date
| Reply #17 on Mon 26 Sep 2011 01:27 PM (UTC) |
| Message
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Khandrish said:
The first point is a good one, I hadn't really thought of new players viewing it as a penalty. Of course if given the choice of no bonus at all, and thus longer training times, or gaining some bonus do you think most newbies would still complain?
Yes, because they won't see it as a bonus, they'll see it as the "normal" training time.
In my mud, I introduced a "boost" system that allowed players to get 2.5 times the normal primal (effectively exp) for their first couple of dozen kills each day. It was part of a mechanic I introduced to discourage botting, but the players were initially happy with the faster advancement.
A few months later, the next generation of players complained that it wasn't even worth playing the mud once they ran out of boost points, because the unboosted "penalty" was so severe. They said they might as well go and play a different game until their boost points had recharged.
I later reworked the system to something a little reminiscent of your slider, introducing casual, hardcore and skill boosts, and ensuring that the more time-consuming activities also give the largest rewards.
| | Top |
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| Posted by
| Khandrish
(16 posts) Bio
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| Date
| Reply #18 on Mon 26 Sep 2011 03:37 PM (UTC) |
| Message
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KaVir said:
Khandrish said:
The first point is a good one, I hadn't really thought of new players viewing it as a penalty. Of course if given the choice of no bonus at all, and thus longer training times, or gaining some bonus do you think most newbies would still complain?
Yes, because they won't see it as a bonus, they'll see it as the "normal" training time.
In my mud, I introduced a "boost" system that allowed players to get 2.5 times the normal primal (effectively exp) for their first couple of dozen kills each day. It was part of a mechanic I introduced to discourage botting, but the players were initially happy with the faster advancement.
A few months later, the next generation of players complained that it wasn't even worth playing the mud once they ran out of boost points, because the unboosted "penalty" was so severe. They said they might as well go and play a different game until their boost points had recharged.
I later reworked the system to something a little reminiscent of your slider, introducing casual, hardcore and skill boosts, and ensuring that the more time-consuming activities also give the largest rewards.
Human psychology is an interesting thing sometimes. I can see how the new players would view such a system differently from those people most familiar with the pre-boost system. Have you been satisfied with the results of your new boosting system? | | Top |
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