Well, common problem in experience system is that you gain unlimited experiance from doing exactly the same thing over and over. This was nicely summarized with sentence (somewhere on this forum) : "To gain level for killing dragon, you must kill 500 mice". What I'm proposing is a system in which you gain less and less experience from doing the same thing over and over until finally you get zero experience. Comments, suggestions?

If you do that you're going to have to provide many more enemy types. You can also try making it so you gain experiance for different things than just killing.

But keep in mind this is about a game, not a simulation. You should sacrifice some Realism in the name of Almighty Fun (and of course, in the name of the Archdemon Deadline)..

Good idea! First thing that popped into my mind was a class system amongst your enemies, something as simple as an integer array would work. Level one monsters give you so much experiance, and decrement the percentage of experiance you get from that monster. Here is some psuedo code. I hope this helps or leads you in the right direction.

int enemyExp[numOfMonsterLevels]
enemyExp[monster.classLevel] -=.01;
playerExp + monster.getExp() * enemyExp[monster.classLevel];

Yes, I understand what you mean but I am wondering would this kind of system offer greater replayability value because players couldn't build up by going to wasteland and killing everything for hours. It may actually force them to advance through game rather then through levels which IMHO most players do.

Quote:

Original post by JDev Good idea! First thing that popped into my mind was a class system amongst your enemies, something as simple as an integer array would work. Level one monsters give you so much experiance, and decrement the percentage of experiance you get from that monster. Here is some psuedo code. I hope this helps or leads you in the right direction. int enemyExp[numOfMonsterLevels] enemyExp[monster.classLevel] -=.01; playerExp + monster.getExp() * enemyExp[monster.classLevel];

Yes, that looks similar to my idea. This would at some point make useless killing some monsters. Also, some monsters should have different decrement values. You could also base decrement depending on your level and monsters level. Smaller and easier beasts quickly lose experince value. On exception would be human parties which are always considered extremely dangereous.

Another solution would be that monsters never respawn. When you've killed all the mice, you got to start killing other creatures.
Of course this would lead to a pretty dull and barren world when you've played most of the game, but it's not too illogical.

Many games (notably D&D) has an exponential curve for xp-levelup. level 2 = 1000, level 3 = 2500, level 4 = 4500 etc. When you have 100,000 xp it's not as useful to kill a 10xp mouse as when you have 50xp. In fact all those pesky critters becomes an annoyance, even if it only takes one hit to kill them.

I always thought that one of the best designed games WRT leveling was Anachronox. You never explicitly go rabbit hunting, and yet as the story progresses you find that the battles you've ended up in have given you more or less the "right" amount of experience. The moral: give players a rich and engaging enough story experience, and balance the play well, and they won't end up rabbit hunting. Once that's done, you don't have to bother with penalizing players for it.

One MUD that I use to play kept track of all the things you killed. The amount of experiance you gained from attacking each one went down each time, I even remember it going negative at some point. You also gained a little bonuse next time you attacked the same creature.

Another nice thing, since it was keeping track when ever you killed an animal it would display a message ever time you killed a creature based on how many you had killed. I.e. if you killed over 100 you would get a message like "You must have a vendetta or something", at 1000 "Mass murderer", etc.

If your going to decrease the experience gain from killing a certain type of creature, I think it should probably slowly reset over time - depending on the type of game, a player might at some stage have a very good reason for killing many of a particular monster type.

Ha, I love the title of the post, and the theory behind the quote is sound. However what you're talking about has pretty much been standardized in that it does take killing 500 smaller creatures to equal the experience of killing one big creature. I don't know about you, but if I'm playing a game and I'm supposed to be fighting creatures of type A to get good experience for my level, but you tell me that I can also kill type B for 1/500 of the experience, that pretty much removes type B as an option. If it's a 1:500 ratio, that other creature might as well be giving 0 experience for all i care. The only possible difference I can see in gaining small amounts over none at all is that over the course of the game you might kill enough of the small creatures at higher level to amount to one of the bigger creatures. But honestly, nobody's going to notice the surplus.

And on a side note, if I play basketball against Michael Jordan, he's going to obliterate me, but it's not like he isn't still playing and therefore practicing. He may not be getting any defensive practice in, but he's still got a ball in his hand. Still working his muscles and muscle memory, still dribbling, still running. Of course he's going to get a much better workout against a good basketball player, but the ratio isn't 1:0, ya know?

Hope this helps!