[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[Jeremy Gaffney]

On the general concept of "grouping with your buddies" check out the
sidekick system in City of Heroes - basically, you can take a lower
level player under your wing, and while within 100 ft of you, the
sidekick is boosted to an effective level 1 less than yours.

The boost affects all combat math - so you're not affected by the
cap that normally basically prevents damage against perps 5 levels
higher than you, etc.  You gain no new powers, but your existing
powers (designed to be useful throughout your career as opposed to
having planned obsolescence) are treated in terms of damage,
accuracy, etc. as if you were the higher level.  XP is divided such
that if you kill half of a monster the same level as your buddy, you
get the XP from half a monster of your level, so progress is
basically no faster than if you were hunting bunnies (well,
pursesnatchers) at your own level.

So far, it's worked very well - the intent was for you to be able to
group with your newbie friend who just joined doing your own
missions etc. without overwhelming the youngster.  Emergently, it's
made for groups who direly desire a tanker, defender, etc. to be
able to pick up a low level one and sidekick him temporarily to the
highest level person in the group.  We look forward to seeing how it
plays on a mature server.

Some zones are level restricted to prevent lowbies from seeing
absolutely everything.  Enhancement rewards are toned to a lower
level than normal so they're usable by the noob.

This is sort of a different spin than the AC Allegiance system,
which we designed to make new and old players interact - knowing how
people want to play now we have a much better idea than in '94 about
how to do these kinds of social systems; hopefully we'll start
seeing some good innovation in reaction to the emergent behaviors of
the players themselves.

Food for future thought: You could in theory make a level-agnostic
game to an extent by allowing rampant sidekick-like behavior - a
group of 2 level 10s, a 15, a 25 and 2 30's could spend time
debating who will take whom under protection before jumping
different groups of baddies ("uh oh, undead, better buff up the
cleric"), different classes could have multiple sidekicks, etc.

-jg
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