[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Removing the almighty experience point...

[Tom Hudson]

On 7/30/07, Caliban Darklock <cdarklock at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/27/07, Tom Hudson <hudson at alumni.unc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Vincent's proposal was more to say "As a level 5
> > character, you received level 2 XP for killing a level 2 mob - which
> > doesn't do you any good - and level 5 XP for killing a level 5 mob -
> > which helps you towards level 6." This means that farming easy targets
> > all day gets you nowhere, at least in the XP department.
>
> Here's the question that comes to my mind.
>
> Ten level 1 characters get together and gang up on some level 8 mobs.
> Can they use the resulting level 8 experience to skip levels 2 through
> 8 and go directly to level 9?

In the original proposal, they'd have earned level 2 - but the work
they'd done would make it easier to get up to level 8. If they kept
doing level 8 tasks, they'd only have to do 7 more to get up to level
9 - but then they'd have made no progress from 8 to 9, and have to do
9 level 9 tasks for their next level. To get a "smooth" fast leveling
progression, working in a group, they should keep doing tasks well
above their current level - they can theoretically advance with O(lvl)
tasks, although it'll be a bit worse than that in practice. Working
slowly and methodically, they can do tasks of "barely appropriate"
difficulty, but they'll need to do O(lvl^2).

This is another possible motivation for ATitD3 to only make low-level
tasks available at low levels.

> If you say "no, they can't"... well, that's not fair. I beat a bunch
> of level eight mobs. If I were level 8, I would be level 9. But
> instead, you're going to make me stay on level 1? That's a bug.

Only if you beat a bunch of level 8 mobs AND did 7 other level-8 tasks.

> Now, I *can* see a way to potentially resolve this. Instead of level 9
> being a set of statistics and abilities that incorporates everything
> prior, have it ADD statistics and abilities as a differential from
> level 8. So once you earn enough level 8 XP, you get the abilities and
> bonuses of level 9, but since you haven't earned the abilities and
> bonuses of levels 2 through 8 - it's not all that impressive. Your
> stats would say "Level 9", but that wouldn't mean you learned
> everything else.

So then when you earned levels 2 and 3, your stats would still say
"Level 9"? That's pretty misleading, and doesn't give much of a sense
of advancement.

> For example, imagine that at level 1 you have some arbitrary skill
> with a rating of 15, at level 8 you have a skill of 75, and at level 9
> you have a skill of 83. If you earn a bunch of level 8 experience at
> level 1, you would get "Level 9" on your stats and your skill would go
> up to 23. If all you care about is what your stats say, you'll be
> happy. If you want the skill of 83, you need to go earn different
> experience.

You're getting at a slightly different advancement method here, I
think. Levels no longer depend on one another at all. And after a
character has done several level 7-9 tasks it seems petty to make them
do some level 2-3 tasks to increase their stats, if the tasks are
really organized in increasing order of difficulty. I think the
numbers are a distraction here, but I might just be biased by the
advancement models this thread has made me think about, which are
mostly ATitD-like.

Tom