Levels are killing this game

P2 is also homeless because he didn't rush through the opening scene. lol.

 

I dont have big issue with level, but, I hate PvE. It's depressing.
One thing for me, can I lvling with PvP Plz.
Killing people should give more XP than a easy monster with artificial intelligence.

Personally, I would remove the lvl adventurer from the statistical sheet. We play with the skills now. And, the level stats breaks the immersion.

 

Fun thread... I have to state I think Baron Drocis you're right about your observations since early releases, almost clockwork... you really have the good vision for this and I truely beleive you understand UO programmers more than some of the devs who argued (because yes they argued about it) for this system.

Your solutions are however often a bit off because you focus on the effect and not the goal (admittedly to dumb down your ideal), the goal is being a progressive game not a game about progression.

Theres a great divide between those two poles...

It amuses me because Xorinia has proposed solutions to all those compromises... theres no need for compromise anywhere, those are made between people who do not understand the subject at hand. Aight we both don't get why it was made that way, lets compromise.

Of course my inbox is still empty, my threads still ignored... but I don't mind really I'd rather just decorate my house and use this game a medieval sims second life and be happy I encouraged the devs who helped me meet Xorinia in the first place.

It's really funny in the end, cause that matters so much more than people having competitiveness without a goal.

I feel such peace...

 

Well to use the same logic the devs used for pvp, if you could kill something once, you can probably kill it again.

So why not just determine how much exp should be given to killing a wolf, and once you kill a wolf there's no need to go back and kill the wolf again because you've done that! So you just get exp and move on to the next thing.

This will force designers to rethink how they make challenges, and make the game more about problem solving and less about killing everything that moves. But that's probably out of scope for where we are now in development.

 

I agree with this, my solutions are often blunt instruments that are not prefect. It's difficult to propose solutions when you're outside looking in. I have no way of knowing what or why the devs do what they do, I can only identify problems as I see them, and any solutions I (or we) come up with may be immediately discarded by the devs for good or bad reasons that we will never know.

Still I feel obligated to at least attempt to offer a solution, else I hear from people "you're just yelling about things without offering a solution!" At least this way they can tell me my solution is horrible.

 

Too exploitable.
Let's say I'm in the beautiful mind club and we do a merry go round of 50 members in a basement. Or Ferrets best town could have XP Tuesday's where everyone can line up their Alts for the slaughter. I could level and skill up endlessly.
Non-cheaters wouldn't stand a chance.

 

hahaha, well as we know I often take the seat that's empty... noone wants to be that guy so I'm it.

Xorinia was so angry when I told her... well him/them actually that the devs had no interest in even hearing out her proposition for exchanging AI and algorythms that I got totally terrified of pursuing that premise.

They scared me back to a lil curved foetus asking for my mother... no kidding I've never felt such strong anger...

I shall forever be known as "the empty chair" and or the "empty stool" but the real question is : if you eat empty calories do you end up with an empty stool ?

Hahahaha

Its a paradox...

 

In the MMO "Shadowbane" (I know I keep referencing it...) - it had a diverse combat system, including characters that could fly. Large amounts of XP could be gained from fighting other players, because the focus of Shadowbane was end-game content. You could have a max'd out character in a few days. Getting the gear was another story. In the early phases of development it wasn't like this, but I found it more enjoyable when the rules were changed. Designing character builds that were effective in small scale PvP situations was certainly possible, and part of the fun - but it wasn't always the best idea either. Wizards could teleport long distances, Scouts were very mobile and often this meant a lot more - being able to get to an area quickly to recover 'discipline' runes when the server spawned them. The most important test of your PvP characters though - how would it perform in Siege warfare? Sieges were what really mattered because people were losing their towns over it. If the "spec" builds that your guild made to defend/attack a town didn't work out, you might find yourself on one of the PvP characters you designed...trying to save your town from being destroyed. Through all of this, characters were gaining XP from players and it worked out very well.

I suppose you could introduce a PvP and PvE resistance skill? Someone that fights monsters a lot would be more resistant to them, and someone who fights players a lot would be resistant to player attacks? Or not.. hmm.

Another way you could handle it is giving players access to PvP activities based on their effective adventurer level, modified by gear. It would assure that players are competing against players of the same effective strength/level. Twinks would get filtered out because their gear would put them into a separate adventurer level? The gear would modify the adventurer level quite a bit, so an adventurer level 14 character who gets epic gear has an effective level of 28?

The PvP system should be designed for end game content - because, we are all eventually going to get there right? We'll have high level skills and gear and we'll have to fight each other. But there should be opportunities for casual players to engage in PvP with players of their effective level. WoW has handled some of this I guess - but I don't want to see the PvP system compartmentalized simply into "join this battleground" ... I hope it will have more depth than this. PvP quests/activities that require players to travel the game environment or go on missions. When the players arrive to their mission objective, it becomes a pvp area (inside of a building), or when you accept a particular mission it gives you a pvp timer and you have to hunt down the other player or accomplish your objective within that timer, etc.

 

Player 2 would actually win i am pretty sure though. His weapon skill

We just tried that and P1 had slightly more health but P2 won every fight due to having weapon skill.
edit: lock everything other than swords skill at the top, spend it all on that. or put half into healthy..or put all into healthy for similar results.

 

they are putting the cart before the horse here developing the system of advancement, before the implementing the storyline quests, and balanced difficulty among the different scenes.

I can see the logic in this.

 

Yes, that's a good point. From a PVE standpoint that makes perfect sense. But from a PVP standpoint, do we have any evidence (even a quote from the developers) that suggests there will be some kind of meaningful progression for PVP? I don't see it. I see the game launching and people ignoring quests as much as they can so they can go out and kill 50,000 Elves in Greymark or Vertas Pass faster than anyone else so they can enjoy PVP because they're at the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, I see 99% of the remaining people never catching up to those people in a meaningful way, and the PVP population staying very small because of it.

I'd like to see more evidence that there will be pvp progression that makes sense. But that wouldn't solve the problem unfortunately, because there's still going to be a disparity of levels.

 

Because you mentioned Shadowbane, I thought this would be a good time to mention this video from Crowfall (kind of s 2nd iteration of Shadowbane). I don't support Crowfall, but they made a very good point in this video: If you create a game where the people that put the most time into it always win, forever - people stop playing and the only people left in the game are the ones that won the first few battles.

Watch this video and you'll see what I'm talking about. Only think about it in terms of LEVELS and people being at the top of the level food chain.


There are a lot of vocal "uncle bob's" in pre-alpha right now.

NOTE: What Crowfall doesn't understand (well, one of many things) is that even if you change the worlds, the characters that won the first time are probably going to be able to win the second time too. So allowing Uncle Bob to keep all his stuff and abilities, doesn't really help new people trying to challenge him.

 

There is skill decay and a level cap. It takes less than a month to catch up to a veteran if playing obsessively, about 4 months if playing like the average gamer. The only time it becomes an issue is when you expect forum time to win out over game time.

 

I wasn't aware of a level cap. I know people are going passed 100 in skills. What's the level cap?

I would also point out that it's not a zero sum game, so someone that has unlimited free time verses someone that doesn't is at an unfair advantage by default - forget about "fair" in the sense of it being fair or not to have free time. I'm talking about the game encouraging this behavior and allowing people to benefit from it to such great degrees.

If the skills were zero sum, we'd never have this problem. But what the game is saying is that you can train as high as you want, you just have to stay active. That's not much problem for the guy with all the free time, that's a much harder environment for normal people.

Not to mention the fact that if we're saying we made a game where normal people are 4 months behind those with all the free time, I think that's wrong.

I think normal people should have the expectation that they can play in pvp and win without putting 4 months of work into the first month of game play. Because not doing that is likely to make people stop playing the game entirely - at least in my opinion.

 

Yeah the adv level caps out hard at 100 and the skills are soft capped with decay. After X amount of collective playtime everybody is pretty much the same. You can work extremely hard and keep one or two way up over 100 ..but there is little point or motivation to do so. Even now with 3 month gaps between wipes you will see skills drop if you try and hold onto a dozen or more grandmasteries.

 

Ok, that's better than I thought it was. I thought there was still a soft cap on adventure levels.

I don't see the logic in requiring months of grinding and then maintenance grinding though. If what I want to do is PVP and RP (which it is) then why should I have to grind so much?

Let me put it another way, if what you wanted to do was grind so much, why should a game make you PVP and RP? It doesn't make sense. It might make sense to traditional MMO players that confuse grinding with fun, but it doesn't make sense for PVP and RP players that know there should be very little to no grinding involved in these activities.

 

Sweet, I stand corrected by actual testing.

This has me curious. That goes against the math presented to us in Chris' vid or I'm totally wrong about starting levels of a new avatar. I thought we still started at lvl 5? You say that P1 had slightly more health, according to the formula presented that should be a significant difference.
Did you take down some data? Like how much skill points you gained? Or how much the health difference was? Your EDIT seems to imply that you trained specific or sets of specific skills?

 

Thats the ACTUAL issue right there.. its not a PVP game, its not a PVE game.. its an attempt to be everything at once. That is why backers are constantly yelling at the devs and each other, everybody wants their vision of the game to be the priority and that (in almost every case) screws with what somebody else wants.

 

looks like 5 health (could be wrong, i will reroll them later) per level and yes i trained very specific skills and very few of them. If the gap was higher then the extra health per level would possibly win. For PVE player 1 has the advantage from increased hit chance on same target as player 2.

 

PVP is losing that battle - big time.