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

[Damion Schubert]

On 8/27/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
>
> Damion Schubert writes:
> >
> > Realism is the Atalantan Apple of online design - a tempting
> > distraction from the goal of making truly engrossing and compelling
> > virtual worlds.
>
> I wonder how many replies here have countered a point that was never
> made.
>
> "Too great a departure from reality" was my attempt at saying that the
> use of levels as the primary structure of entertainment in games is too
> limiting.  It departs from reality *so severely* that any attempt at
> employing many other entertainment structures simply goes down in
> flames.


Needless to say, I disagree intensely.

When you have one primary reward structure inside of a game, it suddenly
becomes very easy to fine-tune and balance the system so that rewards
and new abilities are given as appropriately throughout the course of the
player experience.  It becomes easy to fine-tune and balance these
abilities, experiences and systems against each other.  It becomes
easy to ensure that there is no cheesy way to 'game' the system that
ends up creating even more unrealistic behavior.  Other systems have
frequently failed at this.  To wit:

In Everquest, players would throw themselves repeatedly off cliffs to
advance their Safe Falling skill, and speak endless gibberish in their
chat channel to advance their languages skills.

In Ultima Online, people would fence in bears and poke them endlessly
to advance their combat skills.

In Oblivion, hardcore assassins found that the best way to advance their
skills was to hop through fields of flowers and pick them, to get better
at their Acrobatic and Poisoning skills.

It may not make a whole lot of sense that players can gain a level by
playing epic orc whackamole, and then spend earned points on their
needlepoint.  And I'll concede that there are probably better ways to
go about it.   But that does not change the fact that, for "departures
from reality", it has not been the level-based schemes that have as of
yet created the most tedious and/or surreally stupid scenarios known
to date.

> Levels persist because they are very good at what they do.  It's very
> > easy to fall into the trap of thinking that players shouldn't be
> > interested in personal character growth inside of the gamespace, and
> > that the true growth should be around what happens on the server.
>
> Yes, levels are very good at what they do.  The same could be said of
> concrete and steel to hold things together.  When you want to bend
> something, all that concrete and steel begins to get in the way.  In a
> world dominated by concrete and steel, nobody even thinks about fluid
> movement. Thinking is dominated by robot-like joints, elastic collisions
> and such. Levels are too restrictive.


I have quite the opposite perspective.  Levels and experience are valuable
because they are so flexible.  They are simple.  They are easily understood.
They can support almost any game system that your game world requires.
They funnel all of those systems into a smaller number of code paths,
resulting in fewer bugs and exploits.

You say levels are steel.  I'd say they are plastics.  Of course, that also
implies that levels will never die. =)

> In my experience, most players are interested in the goings on of world
> > games like politics and city building, but only the top 1-5% of them
> (the
> > movers and shakers who can truly shape the world with their actions) are
> > invested in them.  Character advancement schemes make these games
> > something where all players are invested.
>
> I have zero problem with achiever schemes.  I think that achievement is
> a perfectly viable means of entertaining people.  However, it should not
> be the backbone of a game's structure.  Because it is too damaging to
> the game designers' ability to add other types of entertainment to the
> game.


One of my big problems with this train of thought (and what follows) is
that it makes an errant assumption, which is that players who are
explorers and/or socializers have no interest in playing the achievement
game at all.  All of Bartle's stuff, and most of the discussion I've seen
since then, has strongly suggested that most people are a blend of at
least 2 or 3 of these archetypes.  Strong games tend to be ones that
blend these types of gameplay together.

Everything in level games becomes a level game.It's nearly impossible
> to have non-achievement entertainment in level games.  Explorers can't
> explore because the monsters are far too dangerous in most of the world.


Most explorers would hate a world where anyone can go anywhere.  It
cheapens their own accomplishment of going to strange, exotic and
dangerous places.  If any noob can stumble into Mordor, it's no longer
the home of all evil, it's a Disneyland Ride.

Socializers can't socialize because their friends are the wrong level.


Socializing-questers (i.e. guildmasters and instance runners) appreciate
levels, because they communicate to those players a relative level of
mastery with that player's character abilities.  Level 70 in WoW, for
example, means that you have hopefully developed some level of
mastery and experience with all of your class's abilities.

I realize this sounds stupid, but the most rewarding social experience in
most MMOs is taking on extremely large challenges (such as raids in WoW
and EQ, relic runs in DAoC, city sieges in Shadowbane) that require a
large degree of tactical coordination and cooperation.  The hardest part
of being the guildmaster is actually building a team that is ready for the
challenges ahead.  Classes and levels make it easy for these players to
advertise their needs, find each other, and determine when they are ready
to become a contributing part of the team.

Socializing non-questers (i.e. roleplayers) don't care, as the dozens of
people roleplaying lesbian Blood Elves in Silvermoon on my RP server
can attest to.  Most of these players never get above level 20.  These
players are also the minority.

Crafters never actually craft because they are bound by the same rules
> of 'power' as the levelers.


Levels are very good to crafters - they create a market for low-level items,
so
that more inexperienced crafters have a market to sell their goods.  In
games
without an item gate such as levels, entry level crafters frequently find
themselves
squeezed out of business by more experienced players, because experienced
players only need to make a small subset of their goods (the best ones), and
can
engage in monopolistic practices to force smaller crafters out of business.
In a
gated scheme, there is a much larger variety of valid and useful goods to
craft,
and the materials for doing so takes valuable space, which results in the
high
level crafter leaving space on the market for the low level crafter.

My summary means of saying all that was that level games are too great a
> departure from reality.


And my summary is that levels, while definitely being an artificial and
arbitrary game mechanic, definitely have wide-ranging benefits to a game
design that are frequently glossed over.  The myth is that levels are a
hardcore
achiever feature that has no benefits to other classes.  In practicality, a
good
designer can use levels to support the needs of other play styles as well.

Levels are not all about achievement.  In fact, in games like Shadowbane
and WoW, levelling is so easy that hardcore achievers dismiss reaching max
as
a significant one.  Levels have many other functions, such as pacing
content,
ordering story content, creating means for players to advertise their power
level, creating a fully fledged crafting market, etc.  Do you need levels to
do
these things?  Nope, but the alternatives you should consider will need to
factor these losses into their design.  Most alternatives that I have seen
end up being woefully complex, buggy, unintuitive, exploitative as well as
being a coding and QA nightmare.  Not all, mind you, but enough to be
scary.

In contrast, consider a game that doesn't use levels as they are
> employed today.  So you have a human character that does things.  How
> can achievement be entertainment in such a game?  Well, how about king
> of the mountain in duels between characters?  How about the best time to
> reach the top of Mt. Foobar?  How about most orc kills?  Richest
> character?  Having a complete set of Gorbil stones?  Highest political
> position?  Largest land owner? Fastest ship?


Of these rewards you cited, most of them are utterly lousy because most of
them can only be won by one person, and are therefore by definition
exclusionary.  Having server firsts as a core concept has social value that
appeals to hardcore achievers, but for most of the players, these are
flat out unobtainable, and if these are the primary achievements of your
game, leave 99% of your players destined for mediocrity.

Advancement 'schemes' such as levels are better because they offer a
sense of character growth, advancement and success to all characters,
and not the guy who managed to get there first through an undue level
of catassing and/or bug exploiting.

The number of ways that achievement can be worked into a game are
> countless - but only if the game isn't fundamentally structured around
> levels.  A "real" world isn't a necessary step in having a game with
> many types of entertainment in it, but a non-level world sure seems to
> be.


Why, again, are little coded achievements unfeasible with levels?  LOTRO's
heroic
task system seems to work great with them.

> Popular entertainment is, for the most part, about power fantasy.  This
> > is absolutely true for music (heavy metal, rap, even Mozart) and movies
> > (Die Hard, Lord of the Rings).  This is especially true for interactive
> > media, due to the experiential nature of video games.
>
> I can only disagree.  You see power fantasy and I see a spectrum of
> other motivations.


That's fine.  The rest of your spectrum is a tiny tail on a very large bell
curve.
Players who want to roleplay a blacksmith want to roleplay an exceptional
one.  Players who want to kill things want to kill bigger things than a
deer,
which is their likely upper limit in the real world.  Even players who
roleplay
(which I want to stress, is a niche market) aren't choosing to roleplay an
average-looking, average-intelligent everyman.

Video games are an experiential medium - players play them to experience
things they cannot in the real world.  They play Guitar Hero to feel like a
rock god - and the fact that GH delivers on that feeling has been a huge
part
of their success.

Players play these games to feel heroic, or barring that, at least heroic
and
important.  Any world where only 5% of the player base can feel significant
or important is doomed to become a ghost town when the other 95% realize
that, if they really wanted to feel average and adequate, they can get that
in real life.

--d