[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Character Growth Models (Was: Removing the almighty experience point...)

[Aurel Mihai]

On 9/18/07, Ian Hess <ianhess at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> After reading the items in this thread, I find myself wondering if the
> problem is assuming one model for character growth will fit all
> bartle/player archetypes.
>
> Why not have:
>
> achiever tasks give achiever skills and advantages
>
> exploring, maintaining information stores and puzzle solving give
> informational storage (shared maps?), divination, and movement powers
>
> group building, leading and participation give communication networks,
> synergistic bonus systems to skills, and community infrastructure like
> auction houses, legal systems, or taxes for mutual benefit managing
> resources and building items give
>
> customization options, different patterns, access to gathering or
> transmuting progressively more rare resources, more patterns, better
> returns on investment vs output, etc.
>
> I think in this model you end up with 1 ladder of achiever tasks, and 3
> pools of tasks where players can enter activities at various points in
> the flowchart and exit at other points.
>
> An example of this:  A person joins a guild, and gets the quests to work
> towards maintaining and manning a communication channel for city
> defense. A second player gets attacked on the edge of town, and appeals
> to the people on the defense channel to join him to extend enough
> synergy combat bonuses (shieldwalls, massed fire, dogpile style
> grapples, group channeled spells, etc) to overcome the individually
> powerful achiever who is doing the ganking.
>
> I am specifically thinking of these gameplay 'pools' as being a circular
> flow of civilization tech tree style options, with several entry points.
> In this way, its less important that a explorer gets 'divination rank5',
> as he does critical pieces of information that allow him to play the
> role of expert, scout/guide, or spy.
>
> In the same way, socializers don't have to field level 50 fighters, but
> they need ways for a grouped militia with dug in fortifications and comm
> channels to fend off the lone villain or group of bandits.
>
> I think a system like this would go a long way to replace a class
> system, or at least serve as a framework underlying it.  I'm not sure
> how much content you would have to plan for the intersections of the
> models, such as when Bob the hero decides he wants to learn enough
> armorsmithing to create that legendary dragonscale breastplate from the
> dragon only he and his friends can kill. Building out the intersections
> makes for a much more massive feature set than just supporting the 4
> bartle types.

There's already a game that does this: EVE Online. There is an
achievement model, but it doesn't revolve around experience points.
Those just accumulate through time spent as a subscriber. Other
achievement type goals can include all those things that lead to the
acquisition of money (ISK) and goods, such as PvE and mining. Beyond
that you have all the other tasks you talked about, which include
maintaining player owned stations, strategic warfare, roving PvP gangs,
exploring, industry, etc. Also there is a ton of metagaming going on
there.

This system DOES work, but it doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't
work for nearly as many people as the traditional system. EVE is a great
experiment, but IMO you can't have the sort of revolution you're talking
about here unless this sort of thing becomes the mainstream MMO model,
which means it needs to work better than the traditional model and be
more fun to more people than the traditional model, which EVE isn't as
is evident by the fact that it's the only such game with any sort of
popularity.

To make it more mainstream, I think the system needs to be more casual.
A player that can only log in for an hour a day three times a week
should be able to have a good time with the game and feel like the hour
has been spent in a worthwhile manner. Taking your example:

An example of this:  A person joins a guild, and gets the quests to work
towards maintaining and manning a communication channel for city
defense. A second player gets attacked on the edge of town, and appeals
to the people on the defense channel to join him to extend enough
synergy combat bonuses (shieldwalls, massed fire, dogpile style
grapples, group channeled spells, etc) to overcome the individually
powerful achiever who is doing the ganking.

This sort of thing needs to happen spontaneously and frequently so that
anyone logging in at any time can hop into the action. The mechanics of
the game need to support this in a fun way too, to make up for the fact
that you have very little or no achievement points (experience, gold,
whatever) to show for the time spent.