[MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam (was: Moving away from the level base system)

[Batir]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scatter" <scatter at thevortex.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2000 2:50 PM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam (was: Moving away from the level
base system)


>
> z032383 at students.niu.edu wrote:
>
> > Let's give an example of a teleportation spell. How often does a
> > player need to teleport in, say, 10 minutes? Generally, the teleport
> > spell is not used all that frequently, as it takes a lot of mana,
> > and you just don't need to be hopping all over the world all of the
> > time.  Let's say the game keeps track of how many times player
> > "Bubba" has casted 'teleport' in the last 10 minutes. . . 25
> > times. In fact, the mud realizes that those 25 times took up over
> > 90% of the player's mana pool in the last 10 minutes (this could be
> > estimated, or you could keep exact track of mana, etc). So now the
> > mud says, "No, I don't think so, you must be spamming!" (Not to the
> > player, it's talking to itself! ;)) So now the mud takes away most
> > of the points earned in teleport over the last 10 minutes, AND it
> > puts a hold for two hours or so on gaining any more skill points in
> > 'teleport.'
>
> What are you trying to achieve by blocking people from making use of
> the system you implemented?
>
> That comes across a bit blunter than I intended, let me expand. You
> (generic you, not you personally) designed and implemented a system
> where players increase their skills by using them. Why? The usual
> reason is game-world realism (the world feels and works more like a
> real place than it does with artificial constructs like experience
> points. The player's can increase their skills by practicing them,
> just like in real life.
>
> In real life, you might be bad at playing a certain piece on the
> piano.  What do you do? You play it over and over until you've
> practised it enough to get it right almost every time.
>

In real life, practicing one song gives you greater ability to play that one
song, and some marginal improvement in playing any song.  Unfortunately
every usage based system I've seen does not follow this.  Instead of being
able to play one song much better, and all slightly better, by spamming, or
macroing, I can now play all songs much better.

If you want to curb skill spamming, make it meaningless.  In most usage
based games, I practice my teleportation spell, not so I can teleport
without fail, but so that my fireball spell does more damage, or casts
without fail, or my shield spell, or any other spell that I need more, but
can't practice in a meaningful way by macroing.

Seems to me that if you really want to have usage based (which I for one
particularly like, despite the current downfalls), you need to have a tree
based skill system (not necessarily with prerequisites and all the other
bruh-ha, though those can be included as well) so that macroing one sub
skill has little to no effect on the parent skill.  At the very least it
would even the field, so that a mage could not macro one spell to become
master of all, and would require combat spells to be practiced in - imagine
this - combat situations.

Batir

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