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

[Tom Hudson]

On 8/21/07, Caliban Darklock <cdarklock at gmail.com> wrote:

> Regardless of what you think about the grind, it is a solution, not a
> problem. Taking it away is not a matter of forcing the player to find
> a different solution. It is a matter of finding a new solution to the
> problem which the player finds preferable to the grind. You haven't
> actually solved the grind; you've simply replaced it with a new one.
> Now, instead of finding a place where monsters respawn quickly, the
> player must map out a complex path through the game where he never
> does any task more difficult than absolutely necessary. A list will be
> made and sold on EBay. Eventually, it will leak to a public web site.
> It will become common knowledge. The "power level" will no longer be
> "earn many XP quickly" but "efficiently restrict task completion".

Caliban, I think you're still misunderstanding the proposal and
attacking a bit of a strawman, but I just wanted to provide a concrete
anecdote addressing this particular tangent, if RPG rather than MMO.
As Vincent has said several times below, this already happens in real
games. I was once so bored that I mapped out the ideal power-leveling
curve in the demo section of one of Spiderweb Software's Geneforge
games (I forget if it was I or II) - figure out when every quest
becomes available, what sort of minimal skills are necessary to handle
it for the ones that are skill-gated (conversation, trap disarming,
and partially lockpicking), and how its XP award decreases with
increasing character level at quest completion.

Or for something more MMO-ish: it's easy in Guild Wars I (Prophecies)
to have quests left to do in an area, with substantial XP rewards
attached, where every mob in the area rewards you with zero XP, yet
still requires effort to kill and (if you pull too large a group) can
kill you. This is content that is really, really frustrating to
consume; the design assumption appears to be that characters will
advance the plot and move on to new areas of the gameworld without
cleaning out more than about half the quests available to them.