In most/all games, the people who get better with it, win from newbies. To counter this, the experienced people must make contact with other experienced players, to keep up challenge in the game. How would experienced players react if they where penalized for being good? In some games a handicap is present, so you have less life than the average player. However, this handicap is always an option. Would the players accept it as being a key element of the game design? Weakening experienced players, would put them at the same level as newbies, so it would keep ALL games interesting, to all players. As your level increases, so does the handicap (this will have to be tuned correctly). (All of the above could also be accomplished by rewarding newbies.) I think this system might work, but there must still be an incentive to keep playing. So for instance special things, which would only become accesable if you are a better player, but these come at the cost of something else. What do you think?

That''s like making Michael Jordan play basketball blindfolded. Why on earth would you ever want to do that?



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"Kierkegaard reminds us that belief
has nothing to do with how or why.
Belief is beyond reason.

I believe because it is absurd."

You might introduce the side effect that experienced players don''t play better then newbies, delibrately, to avoid the handicapping system. So, rather then having good players and bad players, you''ll just have bad players.

No, the handicapping option is a good as an option. If so desired, just have the handicaps be set at independant levels, and keep them strictly to just damage ratios. If you start going into handicapping their reaction time or something, then they''ll just learn to play bad.

Actually, I think it''s more like golf handicaps, which have become somewhat of a status symbol among golfers. Bowlers have this as well, I believe, and there may be other similar sports...

That said, I don''t think it''d work for videogames. Players want (need) rewards for doing well, not punishments. To respond to the original poster:

quote:
In most/all games, the people who get better with it, win from newbies. To counter this, the experienced people must make contact with other experienced players, to keep up challenge in the game.

This is actually only true for competitive multiplayer games. Obviously, it doesn''t hold for games like Final Fantasy [n!=11], since there''s only one player. And it doesn''t hold for games like Secret of Mana, where a second player can control one of the characters to help out during battles. Nor does it apply in, say, Starcraft when playing three humans versus the computer (which I did while in college), or cooperative Quake (which I''ve also done). And so on, ad nauseum.

Now that we''ve gotten the sweeping generalization out of the way--you state that "the people who get better with it, win from newbies." I''m not sure exactly what you mean here--everyone starts off a newbie, and then gets better? Or that, when an experienced player fights a newbie, the experienced player will win? The first is obvious; the second, very probable. Even if I play my dad at golf and he gives me twenty strokes, I''m likely to lose because he''s much better (more experienced) than I am. The handicap may make it a closer game, but will Dad improve his playing by having it? Probably not. Similarly, if I played him in Quake and spotted him ten frags, I''d still win (more than likely), and I doubt my skills would improve much (if at all). For me to improve, I need to either learn from people who are better than I am, or play against someone who''s tough enough for me to have to find new/better ways of doing something ("make contact with other experienced players, to keep up challenge in the game"). Having a handicap would not change this, other than introducing the extra hassle of having to figure out which tactics I''ve developed don''t work because the game has removed my ability to pull them off.

If there''s a decent userbase in a competitive multiplayer game, it shouldn''t be hard for players to find others of similar skill (ranking boards can help with this, obviously). Penalizing players for improving will not help them improve; rather, it will (best case) lead them to find an "optimal level" where they can still have fun without being too handicapped (I may chose to lose every third game on purpose if it helps me avoid the handicaps, or some such), or (worst case) go play someone else''s game.

-Odd the Hermit

A handicap system works in golf. Sure there may be some people who try not to lower their handicaps so that they can have an easier time competing with other people but most people take pride in having as low handicap as possible. This should be possible to emulate in a game, having a ranking system which doubled as a handicap system.


"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

To counter the ''all bad players'' and the ''good players want rewards'', what you could do is make a system like a cRPG. In most cRPGs, powerfull equipment has requirements that newbies can''t meet. As a player fights/does whatever he/she gains experience and is able to meet more requirements and have a more diverse selection (of both general and specialized equipment). You could counter this by making reducing the amount of health an experienced player has. I would say don''t try to make it so an elite lifer of your game has trouble killing a newb, but make it so a group of two/three newbs has a chance of killing the elite. That makes it somewhat challenging but doesn''t prevent the better players from being rewarded.

I feel that the last poster has closest understanding of what I meant (not your fault, mine! should have made the question clearer). I would only penalize the player with health and maybe speed, but not with ''moves'' (to be more specific, I was thinking of my own game-in-being, which is somewhat like Subspace, ie. a top-down space shooter).

Hadn''t thought about team playing yet, as I still have to decide wether or not I''m going to include this, but that certainly is a valid point.

Somehow you would have to know how good a player really is, so a scoring system would be in place. Obviously you would get more points for killing an experienced player than for killing an inexperienced (or bad player).

Inmate: why would all players then become bad players? A newbie won''t know all the tactics, so an experienced good player will be able to shoot them down using his superior moves, even though he does have a pea shooter as apposed to his opponents nuke

Odd the hermit: I think golf handicaps (as I understand them) is an excellent example. However, as I don''t play golf, I''m never exactly sure how they work. Could you explain them a little?

Extrarius: that''s what I was also thinking of. How do you reward a player? Well, one easy way is to give them access to new weapons. These weapons should be more powerfull than those a bad player can get (or at least the bad player should not be able to get them that easily). More powerfull --> more graphics would be a good reward. But to keep the game balanced agains rookies, you can only use this weapon in certain conditions (maybe it''ll cost you 50 healthpoints (good players have less health, so it''ll cost them relatively more)).

So in short, I think it is necessary to reward good players. But would they accept that these rewards go hand in hand with getting weaker? I think they would, if balanced correctly.

Odd the hermit: you are right, it is always a good idea to let good players come into contact with other good players. This however would be more difficult programming, which I am not sure I''m up to yet (but it would be necessary for a truely polished game).

You could do what most race car games and fighter games (tekken, etc) do and give good players cooler things, not nessessaraly (sp?!) better things, just cooler. If its a spaceship game you could make nicer looking ships or gun effects available based on the player''s skill ranking.

Another approach would be to give good players rewards and items that do not increase the amount of damage they do but offer a new variable in their strategies, like a teleporter or short term invisiblity or something.

Or how does this sound? (Using you example of a top down space shooter) Have the ships have a set of slots they can put weapons or powerups in. When a player creates an account all the slots will be filled with health (hull re-enforcements) and as the player earns ''skill points'' they can take out the health and add weapons, thus reducing their health in a trade off for fire power.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful.


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oooohhh, I like the implementation idea. That should accomplish exactly what I wanted, and even have a good ''story'' to it. Very cool.

Conkers. Your score is based on the score of those you defeat. Of course, for most games, you want to scale the effect down a little - maybe use a rankings points system like Yahoo! Games - if you play against a player with much lower ranking than you, then you lose lots of points when you lose and gain only one or two when you win. Vice versa, the low ranked player against the high ranked player gains a lot for victory, but only loses a little for defeat.

The obvious ways to abuse the system are by creating a "whipping boy" account and playing them down into negative figures (repeat until you get as high a ranking as you desire) or by abandoning your old account and starting a new one - something you want to be aware of the potential for in any case.

The modular design actually sounds like a fairly perfect solution - it also means that more experienced players don''t have to switch their massive health for the overpowered weaponry - though you probably want to give some thought to game balance so that it''s not automatically a significant advantage to either stick with the initial loadout or switch to a more advanced: in the first case, the modifications are worthless; in the second you''re not introducing the balancing effect you want.

You also should consider just what you want from the handicapping: if you want the situation where skill is the only determining factor in who wins, rather than time spent playing, then that''s achievable. If you want time spent playing to be significant, but not the player''s skill level, then you''re facing an impossible task - if nothing else, the skillful player can always start a new account and trash the real newbies with his starting power ship and experienced player skills. The only way to prevent more skillful players from winning is to totally randomise the outcome of conflicts - in which case you''d better hope your players don''t catch on for a while, because once they do, they''ll probably go back to flipping coins or rolling dice (or playing Progress Quest - where at least you get a sense of progress...)