Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
 
What to give xp for

We recently discussed MMORPG systems in which different activities gave different types of experience points, like the skill based system of Ultima Online, or the different xp types of Earth & Beyond, or EQ2's adventuring and crafting level. Now lets have a look at the more common type of game where there is only one sort of experience points, which is given out for different activities.

The reason why I'm talking about this now is that I now can talk more freely about Pirates of the Burning Sea. And in PotBS there is a glaring design flaw on how experience points are distributed. PotBS has 4 character classes, of which 3 are for combat, and the 4th, the freetrader, is specialized in the economic gameplay. But, and that is where the flaw comes in, economic gameplay reward little or no experience points. You can easily earn 100 xp for a newbie quest or sinking an easy ship in battle in 5 minutes, but building a frigate in a week rewards you with 10 xp. Most other productions don't give any xp at all, nor do you gain xp by any sort of trading activity. There are special freetrader quests where you get xp for shipping goods from A to B, but the goods aren't provided, you have to pay for them yourself, and thus you end up paying huge amounts of doubloons for gaining xp as a freetrader. Thus freetraders are forced to do combat missions like everybody else to advance in level. Only they are very bad at it. The special freetrader ships are slow and bad in combat. The freetrader combat talents are worse than those of all other classes. And the freetrader can't even spend all his talent points for combat skills, as he need to spend around half of them for economic skills. As a result many people in the beta just made a main character of some other class to do combat, and then had a lower level freetrader alt for earning money. Level 50 freetraders were much rarer than level 50s in any other class. Get to level 21 with your freetrader, where you have access to the huge capacity of the Atlas bark, the fast mastercraft Bermuda, and the ability to build a medium shipyard, and then you can concentrate on your navy officer, privateer, or pirate.

Other games are more balanced, with less obvious design flaws. But that doesn't mean that lets say the distribution of experience points in World of Warcraft or similar games is already perfect. If you look at the Bartle types of explorer, achiever, socializer, and killer, you'll quickly realize that the achievers are rewarded best and level fastest. Exploring zones in WoW gives some xp, but far less than doing quests and killing monsters. Crafting doesn't give any xp. Social gameplay like groups give better loot than solo gameplay, but not necessarily better xp. And PvP doesn't give xp at all. Thus if different players with different preferences of gameplay modes spend the same time in the game, they will earn xp at vastly different rates. Also in WoW the different character classes don't earn xp at the same rate, with some classes being more suited for solo play which gives more xp, and other classes more suited for group play, which gives less.

To some extent that is unavoidable, you don't want to give out xp for people spending hours spamming nonsense in Barrens chat. But it is important to know that giving out rewards has a strong influence on player's behavior. For example WoW gives out much better rewards for quests than for grinding mobs, while the original EQ had it the other way round. So players in WoW do a lot more quest, which encourages them to travel around a lot more, and makes the game less of a treadmill. If Blizzard would want to encourage more group play, especially at the lower levels, and get more people to use the LFG system and play in pickup groups, they could simply do that by increasing the bonus xp you get in a group. In Everquest when the devs found that too few people visited dungeons because of the higher risk there, they added zone xp bonuses, which got people to use that content more.

It is possible to give out xp for activities like crafting or PvP, which currently don't give any. But that has to be very carefully designed. For example in the WoW crafting system the crafting itself takes very little effort, the problem is finding the ingredients, and those can be bought. Thus if WoW crafting gave xp, people would either buy gold or give gold from their mains to their alts and just press one button to brew 100 potions to gain 1 level, which is not what you want. In EQ2, where crafting is actually a game, xp for crafting makes more sense. In PvP giving out xp has several pitfalls. One is the opportunity to conspire with somebody from the other faction. He lets you kill him 100 times, then he kills you 100 times, and both of you come out with lots of quickly earned xp. The other problem is that xp for PvP, if badly designed, could encourage ganking and other negative forms of PvP behavior. World PvP is already often characterized by the attacker only initiating combat if he is sure that he can win, and giving out rewards would only encourage bad behavior.
Comments:
"WoW gives out much better rewards for quests than for grinding mobs"

TOTALLY disagree with you on this one! Don't mistake QUANTITY with QUALITY.

Sure, quest rewards come by in larger QUANTITIES, but usually, you can find better stuff in the AH that someone else had as a drop even from lower level mobs than those you had to grind for your quest.

With a few notable exceptions, quest rewards in WoW SUCK and, gear-wise while leveling and instancing, WoW favors random LUCK MORE than HARD work...
 
I think he states that quest exp. is better than grind exp.

Equipment rewards tend to be lacking, is true.
 
Yes, I meant quest xp are better than grind xp. For getting gear neither questing nor grinding is ideal, you'd better join a group and be lucky in an instance.
 
"World PvP is already often characterized by the attacker only initiating combat if he is sure that he can win, and giving out rewards would only encourage bad behavior."

I have to ask if this should really be considered bad behavior. One of my biggest complaints with MMO's now a day is they downplay the effect of death to the point where people tend to get recklessly suicidal. Perhaps its simply because I'm a UO vet, but I've always felt the problem with wow's world pvp is the exact opposite, that people attack regardless of if they can win, because they have nothing to lose.

I miss the days when attacking someone was a big risk, that potentially had big rewards. I miss traveling in packs for protection and the community that builds up around a game where lawlessness is possible, and order is enforced less by in game mechanics and more by the community.
 
if they were to give out exp for pvp they would have to give it out only in battlegrounds. Like you said, world pvp would be abused by friends killing each other over and over.

Although if this did happen then I just wasted 2k on my twink :)
 
You have to ask yourself why friends would be playing on the opposite faction, also you have res timer increases that would make it completely pointless.

I wouldn't describe encouraging PvP as bad behaviour, why else roll on a PvP server if you don't want to fight other players?
 
PvP which involves risk is fine. PvP ganking where the attacker is sure to win and the victim has not a chance is bad behavior. Reward systems need to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
 
I've said for a long time that what they should do in wow is set up a faction gain/loss for world PVP that works on kills of players characters.

Something along the lines of if they are 10 levels or more below you you take a faction hit to all the pvp factions. I'm sure there are all kinds of tweaks that could be applied say a faction hit for killing someone with res sickness etc.
 
XP is an achiever reward. There's a good reason it's mostly given for achiever behavior.

The reward for the other Bartle types aren't XP. That's why their activities have less XP attached. Give them more XP/effort and the achievers will do them - so only give the XP if that's desirable.
 
To me it seems experience is in a lot of ways a leftover game mechanic that could just be removed and replaced with other possible advancement routes (honor, raid rewards, money, wider skill diversity on one character, etc.)
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool