Off line experience

There's a game (can't recall which one at the moment) where if you belong to a constant group who always likes to play together and sometimes someone has to be absent, that person could gain a bit of the groups experience so they don't fall too far behind the group and not fit in any longer. Possible? Plausible?

jr

 

I've seen games that give XP bonuses to members of a guild based on activity and membership (SWTOR). I haven't heard of any way to gain XP while offline, unless it is part of the progression model (i.e. EVE).

I sometimes do this in tabletop games I run, but I suspect it would be quite exploitable in an online setting. Powerlevelers would have a field day with it.

 

Its one of those things that's probably very hard to implement without exploitation as Solstar points out, EVE did offline levelling but the whole of the eve levelling system takes an amount of real-time to gain in skills so it is just counting up the xp if the player is playing or not and in recent times you can set a skill queue in EVE so that as one skill finishes another starts. The other main difference is that in EVE there is NO way to grind up a level or skill fast when you need it, you are always at the mercy of a timer for skill gains.

I think to put in an offline levelling system that works it would have to be part of the game's design from day 1 and factored against all of the ways xp can be gained, SOTA will have xp gained through crafting as well as killing mobs as far as I am aware making that balancing even more difficult.

I think it is probably best left alone. Not only is it exploitable from a regular player perspective but it could also be exploited further down the road in the selling of characters and accounts by third parties such as gold-farmers, better to give them as few avenues along which to poison the SOTA community as possible.

EDIT: Implementing a sidekick style system such as that which existed in COH or other such games so that you could play with friends using scaled up skills but gain only the amount of xp relational to your actual level would be my preferred way of letting players 'catch up' and play with their higher level friends. This all depends on how much more powerful a level 5 character is versus say a level 50, if they can survive and contribute a little damage without dying all the time surely their friends will be willing to carry them anyway?