[MUD-Dev] Removing the almighty experience point...

[Damion Schubert]

Matt Mihaly wrote:
> Bloo wrote:

>> That's one way to look at it.  Another is that people will put up
>> with a lot to sort of 'play' something online that is escapist
>> with other people from the convenience of their homes.  In that
>> way, the grind is something tolerated rather than desired.

>> And the lack of grind-free options that are entertaining is
>> another factor.

> This doesn't make sense. If the problem with grind-free options is
> that they're not entertaining, and if grinds aren't entertaining,
> then how are almost pure-grind games like Everquest entertaining
> to these masses of people who are playing it but apparently don't
> like grinds? If it's the other aspects of Everquest that these
> people are finding entertaining, what are they, and why can't they
> just find them elsewhere? There's precious little to EQ besides
> the grind, which should make it exceptionally easy to replace if
> it's the non-grind aspects of the game these players like.

> I maintain that current players, by and large, are at least
> somewhat entertained by the grind, and that slapping a new skin on
> the grind while polishing its mechanics is enough to get them
> excited (see CoH).

Some observations from reading this thread:

  1) 'The level grind' has served designers well primarily because
  the grind is a scalable activity- meaning that players can choose
  when and where they fight in order to manage their own risk and
  reward.  This is incredibly valuable.  Even in the much-lauded
  missions system in City of Heroes, I constantly had missions that
  were too hard, too far away, took too long, or required too many
  other people.  When that happened, I was happy to go beat down
  muggers.

  In this behemoth thread, I've read some who say that people want
  challenge and others who say that people just want to click on the
  button and get the reward.  The truth of the matter is that what
  players want from the grind varies from player to player.  Even
  more so, a single player can have different motivations from day
  to day.  Some days, you want to go in and slay the God of War with
  a well organized team.  Other days, you're exhausted, and you just
  want to kill a few orcs before bed.  Having the first activity is
  great, but having the second activity is crucial if you want your
  game to be the player's nightly login choice.  Remember, your game
  is like the corner bar where these people spend all of their time,
  and it needs to accomodate people no matter what mood they came in
  the door.

  2) MMO players like a challenge, and they eat it all up, and they
  are more than willing to fight bigger monsters and incur greater
  risks.  If they are with guildmates they know and trust, they'll
  tackle bigger, better mobs with more inherent risk for more
  implied reward.  If they are with other people who they've never
  adventured with before, they will steer those groups towards less
  risky adventuring areas.

  3) In the long run, players will _always_ find the most efficient
  way to advance their character, and yes, they will spend a lot of
  time there.  One of the largest factors in this is the penalties
  for death they risk.  If the most efficient way to level a
  character in your game is fighting low-risk mobiles with low
  reward for the lack of risk, that suggests to me that your
  experience curve isn't rewarding the best behavior.

  4) 'The level grind', at the end of the day, is only as fun as the
  gameplay that earns you the experience point.  If your combat is
  boring, then your level grind will feel like a level grind.  This
  isn't a problem with the experience point->level reward system,
  but rather the combat system.

  5) When people talk about 'risk' in these games, they often forget
  how persistence changes the risk equation.  For example, in Doom
  3, you risk death, but you are one reload away from being right
  back in the thick of things.  In a massively multiplayer game,
  there is no concept of a reload.  As such, unlike a single player
  game, a defeated MMO player will often have to (a) heal up (b)
  reequip himself, (c) pay off some sort of experience loss or debt
  and/or (d) traverse back to his comrades.  This stands in stark
  contrast to single player games, and is an important reason why
  players who have the opportunity to pursue challenge instead
  choose to scale down their own gameplay experience in order to get
  reliable returns for low risk.  Again, this is less a problem with
  the experience point-> level reward system than with the defeat
  scenarios of most MMOs.

  6) One of the key reasons we as designers keep falling back into
  'experience grind' systems is that it is so easy to create and
  maintain interesting group dynamics.  As interesting as crafting
  is, and as social the buying and selling transaction has the
  ability to be, playing a Master Armorsmith in Star Wars Galaxies
  was a lot of solo gameplay spent in front of the forge.  Compare
  that to the standard daily experience in EverQuest: everyone's in
  a group, teamwork is crucial, everyone contributes, and everyone
  is rewarded.  Most 'alternative gameplays' in MMOs I've witnessed
  simply do not pass the Teamplay Test the way that combat does, and
  they often feel forced or artificial and overly abstract.  Given
  that Other People is fundamentally our competitive edge over
  single player gaming, this is a big deal.

  7) Last but not least, the grind is cheap to make.  An experience
  levelling system is easy to code, easy to balance and easy to
  debug.  It's easy for us to make a near infinite-amount of content
  for an Achiever.  For an Explorer, for example, it's decidedly
  harder: they can devour the content faster than you can craft it,
  and to an explorer, new content only really counts as new content
  if it varies from the old content somehow.

This is not to say that we should only do experience->levels - in
fact, I have several good ideas on how to shake up the equation in
my next go-around - but the experience point is an awfully maligned
design concept.  Any alternative scheme really needs to take a look
at what the Experience Point does well.

--d
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