I was thinking today of a system that could be interesting in a MMORPG. I put this purely out there for the purposes of generating discussion. In most MMORPG’s, players complete quests/missions to improve their character, increasing item and power stats. This allows them to fight bigger enemies, allowing them to get more gear with higher stats. The problem being that there is always a maximum level, and there is always the point where everyone is after the same ‘Golden Platemail of Titanium’ or some other such item, that is known to be the best in the game. What I was thinking of was generating a system that is a lot more dynamic, and requires the player to sink time into the game by getting them addicted to staying at the top of a ranking ladder (which could be seen as the equivalent as character levels), which work of a system that still has items and character progression, but avoids there being any ‘best build’ in the game. Essentially it has no end. The way it works is thus. Assume there are two main areas of progress – powers and items. Powers may include things such as ‘Fireball’, ‘Battle Rage’, ‘Heal’, ‘Teleport’ and so on. Items are things such as ‘Swords’, ‘Axes’, ‘Bows’. Although there are these base powers/items, it isn’t the power/item itself that makes it powerful, because players never actually collect pre-made items, or gain pre-made powers. Instead, every power and item has to be crafted, using pages of spell components or materials for items scattered around the game world. What makes one power/item more powerful than the other is it’s uniqueness in the world due to the crafting process. All items in the game are told to draw from a power of a light that guides the forces of good, like an unknown ‘touch of God’. It would appear that if everyone in the world is carrying the same sword, the effects of it drops dramatically, while those with a rarer sword suddenly become more powerful. It’s appears to be that the forces of good are trying to keep certain people seen as heroes in the world. What does this mean in game terms? The power of your character, the strength of your powers, and the strength of your items, are based off how rare they are, not what the pre-set stats are. Every power in the game must be crafted, and the more time the player spends crafting a spell animation and making it as unique as possible, the more powerful it becomes. If the player is able to craft a power that nobody else casts the same way, the power of that spell will skyrocket. Of course, chances are word will get around and other players will attempt to copy that spell, so players must make their version unique and continually update it, or run the risk of it being less powerful because everyone else has the same. Say Bob has the fireball power (10 powers can only be equipped at one time, although gaining the base powers themselves is quite simple), and for arguments sake, it is assumed that all powers are split into 5 different colours: Red, Blue, Green, Black, White (similar to Magic the Gathering). Bob has found the following spell-enhancers while traversing the world and beating up monsters and other players: Blue: 1 Blue aura (not compatible with Red) Black: 1 Demonic shadow Red: 2 Red Auras Red: 2 Fiery explosions White: 1 Blinding Light Bob now goes into the power crafter and decides to create a casting animation for his fireball attack as follows: Bob uses a fiery red aura to start, then creates a flash of blinding light, followed by a Demonic Shadow rising from the ground. The two fiery explosions then go off, at which point the player says for the actual fireball animation to kick in. A quick check which evaluates what spell components you are using, along with the order and the power it’s being used on (it could check for a whole range of things really) figures out how common it is in the game world, and then reports what the stats for the power are based on that factor. The player now has the stats for that power. He can check if the power has increased or decreased, and by watching the powers that everyone else is using as he plays, can check to see what power enhancements are being used more than others (if everyone is using the red aura for that spell, maybe replacing it with a smoke effect that nobody seems to use is a good idea). The same happens with items, where people gather materials and resources, and use them to build unique looking weapons and armour. The end result is that the (equivalent of) lower level characters in the game are those who have not played the game very long, and as such only have access to common spell enhancements. As such, they have quite generic looking characters, meaning they are not that powerful (a ladder ranking of players could be used as an equivalent to what level you are). As the player moves on, they find enhancements that are less and less common, and begin to see what players around them are using as well. Of course, finding a rare material on an extremely hard boss may be useless if everyone else has the same thing, so specifically hunting down items that nobody else seems to use is the key to the game. Better yet, you might have a certain item in mind that you know would be very rare, and after figuring out what components you need, you set off with some friends to hunt around the world for the specific materials, looking in mines for some, forests for others. Having a character covered in rare tattoos, casting spells that causes everyone around you to go ‘How the hell did you get it to do that!?’, and using items that have a very specific brand to your character is going to make him extremely powerful. The game is about trying to create a character as unique and individual as possible. The more unique, the more powerful they become. So, could a system like this work? What are some of the problems that could be caused? Would you like to see a system like this?

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What I was thinking of was generating a system that is a lot more dynamic, and requires the player to sink time into the game by getting them addicted to staying at the top of a ranking ladder (which could be seen as the equivalent as character levels), which work of a system that still has items and character progression, but avoids there being any ‘best build’ in the game. Essentially it has no end.

Interesting, but this would make MMORPG leveling even more of a chore. You don't have a fixed goal other than trying to 'stay on top'. It would kinda take away the sense of accomplishment that comes with leveling, since you know you can level on indefinately. WOW's PvP ranks used a similar 'endless' system like this and I know for myself that at one point I just gave up on getting any higher since it got quite boring to compete continuously for my position. At one points players will want to lean back and just enjoy being king of the hill.

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The way it works is thus. Assume there are two main areas of progress – powers and items. Powers may include things such as ‘Fireball’, ‘Battle Rage’, ‘Heal’, ‘Teleport’ and so on. Items are things such as ‘Swords’, ‘Axes’, ‘Bows’. Although there are these base powers/items, it isn’t the power/item itself that makes it powerful, because players never actually collect pre-made items, or gain pre-made powers. Instead, every power and item has to be crafted, using pages of spell components or materials for items scattered around the game world.

Sounds a bit like enchanting/spellwriting in Morrowind 3 up until here.

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Of course, chances are word will get around and other players will attempt to copy that spell, so players must make their version unique and continually update it, or run the risk of it being less powerful because everyone else has the same.

The horror! So one day I could log off as uber-ass-kicker #1 and come back one week later to find everyone copied my build, making my character utterly worthless with me powerless to do anything about it? If there's one thing I learned from being on the staff of a rather large Neverwinter Nights server, that would be don't never ever touch someones character unless you really, really, really have to! And then only when you're ready to handle serious player disgruntlement.

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Better yet, you might have a certain item in mind that you know would be very rare, and after figuring out what components you need, you set off with some friends to hunt around the world for the specific materials, looking in mines for some, forests for others.

Ideally this should be fun, but those will need to be close friends to help you with this without copying anything from your build. After all, this would make your and their character less powerful than it could be. Seen from this angle, this approach seems to promote solo-ing, which may or may not be what you want. For myself I find that I enjoy social interaction more than powerleveling solo, especially in the long run, so I don't think this would be a good characteristic for your leveling system.

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The more unique, the more powerful they become.

When I first read your idea, I thought it would be a good idea. I still think there's something to it that might be interesting to investigate, but without sovling the issues above, I'm afraid it will quickly degenerate into a solitairy quest for a unique character build (ie number crunching) which may only be top-notch for a week or so before clones start to appear.

Just my 2 cents though :)

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Original post by remigius Quote: What I was thinking of was generating a system that is a lot more dynamic, and requires the player to sink time into the game by getting them addicted to staying at the top of a ranking ladder (which could be seen as the equivalent as character levels), which work of a system that still has items and character progression, but avoids there being any ‘best build’ in the game. Essentially it has no end. Interesting, but this would make MMORPG leveling even more of a chore. You don't have a fixed goal other than trying to 'stay on top'. It would kinda take away the sense of accomplishment that comes with leveling, since you know you can level on indefinately. WOW's PvP ranks used a similar 'endless' system like this and I know for myself that at one point I just gave up on getting any higher since it got quite boring to compete continuously for my position. At one points players will want to lean back and just enjoy being king of the hill.

What if while there is one major list, there are lots of other smaller lists placed around the games cities. Basically each city in the game has a 'hero', the top player for that city (which could be based on how many missions you do for that area or how many PVP matches you win in that area) which gives that player quite a few buffs. The largest cities could have not only individual heroes but top guilds too.

By having a system which essentially has no end, would it really be a bad thing? Counterstrike has no end, yet people pump endless hours into that.

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Quote: Of course, chances are word will get around and other players will attempt to copy that spell, so players must make their version unique and continually update it, or run the risk of it being less powerful because everyone else has the same. The horror! So one day I could log off as uber-ass-kicker #1 and come back one week later to find everyone copied my build, making my character utterly worthless with me powerless to do anything about it? If there's one thing I learned from being on the staff of a rather large Neverwinter Nights server, that would be don't never ever touch someones character unless you really, really, really have to! And then only when you're ready to handle serious player disgruntlement.

Mmmm, that's a really good point. I suppose the easy answer would be to ensure that any changes to the power level of spells/items would be over a long period of time, maybe a few weeks to a month to notice your character is slipping. But that’s hardly a fix.

The tricky part is players who make very unique builds should be rewarded, but that then means that if your character isn’t unique anymore due to people copying you, you become less powerful. How do you reward one without punishing the other? Quite the quandary.

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Quote: Better yet, you might have a certain item in mind that you know would be very rare, and after figuring out what components you need, you set off with some friends to hunt around the world for the specific materials, looking in mines for some, forests for others. Ideally this should be fun, but those will need to be close friends to help you with this without copying anything from your build. After all, this would make your and their character less powerful than it could be. Seen from this angle, this approach seems to promote solo-ing, which may or may not be what you want. For myself I find that I enjoy social interaction more than powerleveling solo, especially in the long run, so I don't think this would be a good characteristic for your leveling system.

You are correct that it would generate an anti-social vibe to the game, since you would essentially be better off hiding between buildings and sneaking around the game world.

So there needs to be some kind of reward for trying to get everyone to notice the powers you have made. I don’t know how well it would work, but maybe a part of the power/item strength comes from the fact that people have the ability to ‘admire’ your character. Each time someone is impressed by the spells you’re chucking around and the items you’ve made, they can click on your character and select ‘admire’. The player can then take these points of admiration to apply to powers and items, giving it a permanent stat increase. That way your powers might suck one month from now, but if you can get enough people to go ‘WOW’ before that happens, you won’t have to change it as much. Essentially as you get further into the game, you would end up with a ‘perfect build’, where your character is just the way you want him, and the stats only sway around 20% depending on what other builds are running around, as opposed to perhaps the 90% sway with new characters.

Of course this could be abused by guilds or friends, so it’s only a partial fix I guess.

What if you didn't have a game that went on forever per say, but required 3+ years to beat? After the 3 years, the server would either reset your account, or you could get switched over to another server that was at the same timeline as you. If you had pleanty of equipment and could somehow combine magic abilities to produce a unique ability, you'd have enough variation to ensure your character was unique (at least in your particular world).

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Quote: Quote: Of course, chances are word will get around and other players will attempt to copy that spell, so players must make their version unique and continually update it, or run the risk of it being less powerful because everyone else has the same. The horror! So one day I could log off as uber-ass-kicker #1 and come back one week later to find everyone copied my build, making my character utterly worthless with me powerless to do anything about it? If there's one thing I learned from being on the staff of a rather large Neverwinter Nights server, that would be don't never ever touch someones character unless you really, really, really have to! And then only when you're ready to handle serious player disgruntlement. Mmmm, that's a really good point. I suppose the easy answer would be to ensure that any changes to the power level of spells/items would be over a long period of time, maybe a few weeks to a month to notice your character is slipping. But that’s hardly a fix. The tricky part is players who make very unique builds should be rewarded, but that then means that if your character isn’t unique anymore due to people copying you, you become less powerful. How do you reward one without punishing the other? Quite the quandary.

I disagree. This is a "copyright war".
If you're one of those people who feel good about themselves for posting on the net everything there is to know about a game, you're screwed. But if you protect your trade secrets properly, you'll still remain king of the hill.

The catch is that you can't just see someone casting a spell and instantly know how to do it! This would instantly mine your set of rules (not to mention it wouldn't be "realistic", if that can be said of a fantasy world -- there's much more to casting fireball than seeing someone else doing it, once). You must ensure that the second player needs to go through the same hurdles that the first player went through before he has the same spell.

Just to give you some perspective: would a bad-ass rogue hero tell everyone how he does it? Wouldn't he kill anyone who stole his secrets and intended to sell them to the highest bidder, or use them himself? If he fails, though luck. He doesn't deserve to be king of the hill.

That's actually a good point. Crafty players could actually stick certain power/item effects into their build to trick people, or mask certain effects that give them good bonuses. Part of the challenge could be that the top players tend to have power/item effects that are very hard to reverse-engineer.

Guilds could even have 'trade-secrets' for those who are quite high up, using effects that are quite rare and specific to their guild that nobody else can reverse-engineer. The secrets are passed on to this new high ranking guild officer, upon which he gets a massive boost to his character.

Asheron's call did something similar to this. The more people who knew a spell's forumla, the less powerful that spell was. The idea was that this was supposed to encourage players to hide the spells they knew from eachother, and not post them on the net, so that they could be more powerful than everyone else.

Within a week of the game's launch, all of the spell formulae and the reverse engineered method of generating them was posted all over the net. The entire system had to be reworked.

I think this would turn into the same exact thing. You'd get a bunch of sites up on the net like Thotbott that would show you what you the exact percentages of every combination on every server, and which is the least used combination on your server at any time; this would mean that basically, you would see a trend of an equal amount of people using each combination, to ensure that all population has equal power. The only people the system would then effect are those who don't "cheat" by looking at the sites and try to figure out which combination is the best on their own; these people will forever be inferior and weaker to those who just look it up on the site. This will not encourage uniqueness or player creativity; it will discourage it.

I agree - I think this has a huge risk of backfiring and causing mass homogeneity.

What about a slightly different method, based around runic inscriptions, or incantations, or something? For instance, to get your Basic Axe of Chopping to become an Axe of Flaming Ruin, you have to "bless" it with some kind of incantation. Incants could be groups of symbols or words that are known "magic terms" but vary in power based on their arrangement and length. You could even build a grammar, and have really long incantations, where the power is determined by how gramatically correct the incant is, divided by its length (so if you just generate 3 pages of random crap, you get a dud incant). If the method of constructing and/or invoking incantations is limited (say, you have to find an NPC spellmaster who is capable of "speaking" the incant dialect you need) then you've got a great way to constrain the system.

Suppose I've got my Axe of Flaming Ruin, but I want to upgrade it to an even better item: the Axe of Apocalyptic Hellfire. To do this, I need a really potent incantation. So now, if I want an uber item, I have to have a lot of incantations to get the "best build" in the game. However, you can make various incantations incompatible (perhaps based on some sort of meta-grammar similar to the base incant grammar) so that if I try to upgrade my Axe of Flaming Ruin, I shatter it and maybe set the hut on fire. To actually get an Axe of Apocalyptic Hellfire, I have to upgrade from an Axe of Burning Death instead, which requires a different base incant.

Take this up an order of magnitude, where various items can be accessed only by specific "tech tree" style layerings of incantations. If you make it runic engravings instead of incantations, you can limit the physical space which is available to engrave, and thus limit the upper power of any given item. Engrave a sword too much, and it becomes too flimsy to use, etc.

In the incantation method, you could even have incantations wear off or expire over time, and have to be re-cast to keep the item in perfect condition.


Structure the system around the concept of emergence, where the available set of items is not predetermined by designers, but is instead very huge and can be explored by the players in a reliable and safe (from a balancing perspective) way. Add in the regulation of the actual incants/engravings somehow, and you can both guarantee a high level of diversity, and guarantee that homogeneity can be artificially constrained if needed. Too many people got the Axe of Apocalyptic Hellfire? Kill off the NPC mage who can read the required incantation.

Even better, make certain players able to read incantations of varying powers, based on their experience and innate capability. Then you introduce all kinds of tactical elements: want to gank that guild that's been screwing you up with their Axes of Apocalyptic Hellfire? Use your special Teleporting Knives of Assassination and slay their incant-reader. Thus it becomes of paramount importance for players to protect their source of power, especially if that power can wear off or go away over time.

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Original post by makeshiftwings Asheron's call did something similar to this. The more people who knew a spell's forumla, the less powerful that spell was. The idea was that this was supposed to encourage players to hide the spells they knew from eachother, and not post them on the net, so that they could be more powerful than everyone else. Within a week of the game's launch, all of the spell formulae and the reverse engineered method of generating them was posted all over the net. The entire system had to be reworked. I think this would turn into the same exact thing. You'd get a bunch of sites up on the net like Thotbott that would show you what you the exact percentages of every combination on every server, and which is the least used combination on your server at any time; this would mean that basically, you would see a trend of an equal amount of people using each combination, to ensure that all population has equal power. The only people the system would then effect are those who don't "cheat" by looking at the sites and try to figure out which combination is the best on their own; these people will forever be inferior and weaker to those who just look it up on the site. This will not encourage uniqueness or player creativity; it will discourage it.

But this only happened because they had a simplistic formula, and/or a serious security issue that allowed the players to figure it out!

Now, assuming that there are thousands of combinations, and the formula is NOT in the public domain, posting any combination on the internet will instantly make players gravitate away from that combination.

About having a site that shows the percent "usage" of each spell: WTF??? Again, this is a serious exploitation!! How in the hell do they get regular updates on this information?? The problem is not in the system, they've been hacked, that's the problem.

BTW -- ApochPiQ, I didn't quite understand how those measures would solve this problem :P

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Original post by Jotaf BTW -- ApochPiQ, I didn't quite understand how those measures would solve this problem :P

Well, in the system I described, what kind of potential for exploitation or danger do you see? Where are the holes?