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.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:31 AM Permanent Link