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

[Jason Messer]

On Sep 17, 2004, at 8:18 AM, Vincent Archer wrote:

> Usually, the game penalises those hairy situations. Hairy
> situations require long recovery times, whether or not you fail or
> win. With interchangeable XP, it's far more rewarding to keep on
> killing easy stuff with the lowest downtime, rather than attempt
> things that are difficult.

The only mainstream MMO that I've seen really try to address that
was FFXI, a well organized group would get chain bonuses for
tackling more difficult mobs and using heavily interdependent group
roles to keep things moving. The failure of that system was that
since you were near the limit of your abilities (character and
player wise) that a heavy spike of lag of even one party member
could easily kill most of the party, with a large amount of downtime
- a poor time/power tradeoff for power gamers and a frustrating
experience for people playing for fun.

I like the aim of "heroic play" vs "grinding", but it has deep
connections with every other aspect of the world. If you specialize
content for groups you penalize (and maybe even drive away) casual
players, if you then create content for solo play then power gamers
will discover a way to grind it. Any time you do manage to create a
thrilling and dangerous experience the reality of computers and
computer networks threaten to destroy that experience at any moment.

As far as I can tell reward systems are all fragile right now
because they are intertwined. Your idea (whether billed as badges,
feats, or whatever) seems like an attempt to untangle parts of the
various reward systems. It could be that levels and a combat focus
for virtual worlds are doomed to keep creating the same grinds over
and over. I'm not sure how to fix that, but feats are at least an
interesting variation on what already exists.
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