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

[neild-mud at misago.org]

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Original message: http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2004Q3/msg00823.php

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:03:41 -0700
brian at thyer.net wrote:

> How is this really different than an experience system?  You go
> out, you kill a bunch of things, you accomplish something (becasue
> killing 150,000 goblins for your next level *is* an
> accomplishment) and you get your level.

If you look at it that way, there is no difference.  "Achieve ten
tasks to reach level 10" is the same as "each task gives 1
experience point, get ten experience points to advance".

Experience points, however, are almost always directly tied to
killing monsters: Kill an orc, get 5 points.  Different games have
tweaked the formula, but I can't think of any major ones that have
abandoned it entirely.  (DAoC has it's "camp bonus" to discourage
sitting in one spot; WoW offers very large quest xp rewards to make
questing a viable alternative to grinding; pretty much everyone
stops awarding experience for killing low-level mobs.)

The problem with this, as Vincent said, is that experience points
are fungible.  There's no difference between xp earned for whacking
rats, saving the princess, or killing the troll king--it all goes in
the same pot.  It's this form of fungible achievement that is the
problem.

The result is inevitable: Players will find the single most
efficient means of generating xp per hour, and grind on it.  They
will make tourist excursions to look at other content, but return to
the efficient grind when they want to progress.

This is hell on game balance.

A bug which makes one monster species trivial to kill rapidly can
throw off the balance of the entire game, as players level up far
faster than intended.  In a system where methods of advancement are
not fungible, this would unbalance only the parts of the game which
apply to that species.

Experience point systems are fragile.

> So is it grinding?  Certainly, but it's *mission* grinding.  Which
> I think is what you're describing as well.  The focus goes to the
> missions on your plate and you become more interested in working
> your way through them than you do working through the level you're
> in.

Grinding isn't the key problem of experience points, though.
Fragility is.  To use your example of City of Heroes: Players have
discovered that a character with good defenses and area-of-effect
attacks can run around a zone, provoke vast numbers of mobs to
attack them at once, and then kill them all simultaneously.  People
who do this have a ridiculously fast rate of advancement, of course.

In a system which didn't hand out xp for every monster killed, an
issue like this would still be a balance flaw--but it wouldn't be
one that utterly destroys the balance between different archetypes.

The exact same thing goes for the game economy, substituting
gold/credits/etc. for experience points.  Since gold is infinitely
fungible, a single means of making gold rapidly can destroy the
entire economy.

A Tale in the Desert has an interesting solution to this: There is
no game currency.  If someone finds a more efficient way of
producing a resource such as iron, the price of iron drops--but the
economy as a whole remains stable, since there is no means to
directly convert iron into any other resource.

         - Damien
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