XP per Kill

I found another MMORPG blog, with an interesting post by Jeff Freeman: XP per Kill. And somewhere in the middle is his brilliant realization what is wrong with giving xp for every kill in MMORPG: In a traditional pen & paper RPG you received xp for finishing a complete session, an adventure, and the number of xp depended on how hard the session was, measured by what you killed. But if you reduce that to giving people xp for every kill, and give them complete freedom to do as they like, with no dungeon master guiding them, they will simply camp the monsters ad infinitum, and skip the rest of the adventure.

One could solve that by having a MMORPG give xp only for quests. The quest would involve killing monsters, either as direct part of the requirement, or because they drop the item you need, or because they block the way to the quest item. But killing the monster would not give any xp, only finishing the quest would. And the quest would involve other other parts, like information gathering, or traveling somewhere. But I am not totally sure if that system would be better, even if it sure would be closer to the original pen & paper model. The disadvantage is that it would force every player to do only pre-defined quests, follow fixed story lines. By hunting mobs without quests, there meeting other players and interacting with them, players now often create their own stories. The "do you remember how we ..." stories current MMORPG players tell, rarely involve pre-defined stories, but rather what happened accidentally, as interaction between players and the virtual world.

Maybe the solution is not to abandon XP per kill, but simply make quests more attractive. Right now, quests often give a too small award. If the quest involves 1 hour of running around, and 1 hour of killing orcs, it often gives more xp than 1 hour of killing orcs, but less xp than 2 hours of killing orcs. So by stopping to kill orcs, and following the adventure story line, you receive less xp than if you just stayed there and camped them. Only if quests give the most xp per time unit, including all travel times, and the time it takes to get the quest, will following an adventure become more popular than camping. MMORPG players are simple creatures, they mainly follow the optimum reward/risk ratio. If you want to discourage a certain behavior, like camping, and encourage another one, like questing, you just need to modify the rewards.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:49 PM Permanent Link