As opposed to grinding, repeatedly killing the same enemies over and over, why not let skill determine your experience points? For instance, a minotaur. There are several ways to kill minotaur. But as opposed to killing 100 minotaurs just to get to level 3, why not just kill the minotaur in less than 2 minutes? Or kill the minotaur without getting hit? Or kill the minotaur by attacking and getting as close as 100% hit accuracy as possible? The experience gained by expertly killing a minotaur should determine the amount of experience as opposed to how many times you kill a minotaur. Ex: Blinding a minotaur and then running my sword through its neck should net me 100 XP vs. Standing in front of said minotaur and exchange blows until I'm down to 2 HP and squeak out a victory should net me 10 XP. I think this method rewards skill and ingenuity and not boredom and mindless play. Agree? Disagree?

I agree, but the game would have to be fairly complex for you to masterfully level up this way. For example, if one way would be to "not get hit", you would need many types of dodges, shield blocks, etc in order to make the game interesting. Having one button labeled "dodge" or "shield block" would take the fun out of trying not to get hit.

I like the Street fighter / mortal combat approach. You have, in your arsenal, an array of skills you can use to not get hit. You have high block, low block, you can back flip, and so on. Build a game complex enough, with many different counter attacks or evasion and you, sir, have yourself a brilliant game.

But this is my opinion, and I should say my brain is still recovering from 3 years of grinding in WoW.

I agree, and have been working toward the same goal. I've been brainstorming for several months to come up with "tricks" that reward varying experience during combat. Just about every type of gameplay that I can measure as being effective or not provides an experience modifier. For an example, there's one that grows each time a successful ranged weapon accurately hits a hostile. One miss, and the counter resets. As it builds up, there's more and more incentive to stay steady and accurate, because there's more to lose.

Another system I'm using to fight against systematic-grinding-tedium is experience mufflers. When killing 10 goblin creatures, the first will present more experience than the last. If the player fights other types of enemies for a time, the muffler on goblins will be transferred to the new enemies, making goblins educationally useful as enemies again. The muffler system is applied to everything though, not just combat. So if the player simply does something other than combat, the goblin muffler will dissipate. The penalty effect is pretty minor, but I think it's enough to encourage varied exposure.

I very much like this idea, although, as RealMarkP pointed out, it could have some pitfalls.

Ultimately, it seems to me that this relies heavily on player skill, as opposed to character skill. Given this, the means by which the player applies skill seem to me to become more important.

One solution might be more direct control over the avatar's actions (such as was used in Die by the Sword, albeit, hopefully, more easily usable). This should allow the game to use player skill where character skill is more usually used.

I think that I would be very interested to see a good implementation of such a control system. (Implementation on the Wii might be a good idea, although, being a PC player, I would love to see such a system designed for the PC. ;))

However, one could also, I think, achieve such a system in the higher-level-control games (those that largely involve commands along the lines of "attack", "cast spell", "select current spell", "collect item", etc. - think along the lines of Baldur's Gate or Dungeon Siege 2, perhaps). In these cases, I would imagine that it would be strategy, rather than direct combat skill, that would be rewarded. In such as case I would imagine that offering a wide variety of strategic options would be advisable.

One caution that comes to mind: if the conditions involved in the "XP granted" equation may vary for various creatures (and this could be an interesting and potentially-rewarding system, I think), the player should have some means of figuring out what those are. For example, most creatures might give maximum XP if killed quickly and efficiently. However, if deductions are made for harm taken by party members, then it might be a good idea to emphasise that such harm is a negative thing - have the party members be more vocal about being hurt, perhaps. If a creature is, for some reason, to be killed slowly (perhaps to allow time for NPCs to do something), an NPC could run up to inform the player of this (in a preferably unavoidable conversation). Similarly, if points are deducted for every house that the dragon destroys, then perhaps have it exult at each, accompanied by the traumatised screams of the townsfolk. This should hopefully reinforce.

If you want to be very clear, have the conditions appear in a box when the creature is examined.

Either way, I would recommend that all creatures that look the same have the same set of conditions, as I suspect that most players will assume this to be the case unless taught otherwise fairly early on.

All in all, however, I like this idea. ^_^

On a fundamental level, this would reward "good" players with more powerful characters, and punish "bad" players by keeping their avatars at novice status, the effective opposite of auto-balance, which is currently in vogue (see flOw and Left 4 Dead). If the guys who got the most headshots in Halo got to spawn with sniper rifles and the guys who missed started out with less accurate weapons, I'd quickly be staring at a Klobb and wondering why I was still playing the goddamn game.

Nintendo's hippie-assed scoring system, much reviled by Penny Arcade and others as rewarding mediocrity, seems like a better way to implement this. In Mario Party, you get a star for being the guy with the fewest stars at the end of the level. It's a pity star. In Super Smash Bros., you can come in dead last in every round and you'll still get points, for "achievements" like "Didn't block at all" and "never performed a special move". At the same time, you can win every round with the same spam-tacular combo and lose points for being "stale".

So how about linking the levelling system to style and performance, so if you go out there and give it your all and try a dozen different tricks and wind up getting a minotaur's axe shoved through your face anyway, you still learn something? On the other hand, if you take your platinum uber-sword of doom out there and perform the Fist of Justice maneuver eighty times, killing 500 minotaurs with each movement of your arm, you don't get much out of it except bloodstains and a huge pile of horns.

Simply leave the option to kill 100 minotaurs, and add the new system.

Good players will take the challenge.
Poor players can still kill 100 to level up.

This way, you don't completely strand the poor players.

I know it's the same old analogy for game design, but let's compare this to chess.

Chess skill based, in that players with the exact same abilities to work with can play in entirely different ways. There are natural AND artificial barriers that balance the game. A system based exclusively on character skill, is like using a chess board with only rooks that determine a 'kill' with a coin toss.

As long as "player skill" does not mean purely reaction times, I'm all for more of it in MMO combat.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Standing in front of said minotaur and exchange blows until I'm down to 2 HP and squeak out a victory should net me 10 XP.

Love it. Maybe it could be done by having the monster's XP value multiplied by the player's current health. So if the player were at say 50% health when the monster died, then the player only gets 50% of the monster's value.

Or if the game gives XP for damage instead of kills, it could give negative XP for taking damage. Down to the bottom of the current level (no levelling down).

That HP ratio is tricky if you give the player the option of potions. The player might find himself burning potions to maximize xp gains to find they would have been handy for the boss that keeps killing him.

That and if any is to have the ability to heal, they will generally gain much more xp.

Dont get me wrong, i think its a great idea, but just seems like it narrows things down, which might end up a good thing.

I'd like it. A GURPS-addicted friend of mine when not designing polymers once tried to define a function to modify a base set of XPs in a meaningful way.
The result, made by somebody with a rather high-level degree in chemistry, had something like 20 parameters, of which some were vectors (such as "vector of all dices thrown by each player").
Did it work? Not much.
It seems that having a rule (maybe only slightly tweaked) for each context to be the only way for this but... will the player tolerate those variations?
Moreover: considering those variations are to be made manually after a ton of testing, will this amount of work fit in production?

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Original post by Thaumaturge I think that I would be very interested to see a good implementation of such a control system. (Implementation on the Wii might be a good idea, although, being a PC player, I would love to see such a system designed for the PC. ;))

Such as having real gestures? It would be awesome!

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage On a fundamental level, this would reward "good" players with more powerful characters, and punish "bad" players by keeping their avatars at novice status, the effective opposite of auto-balance, which is currently in vogue (see flOw and Left 4 Dead). If the guys who got the most headshots in Halo got to spawn with sniper rifles and the guys who missed started out with less accurate weapons, I'd quickly be staring at a Klobb and wondering why I was still playing the goddamn game.

Games reward players who play more skillfully. That's been a fact since the very beginning.

If you increase the difficulty of a game when a player has great results, then your goal is to cause that player to have average results. Correct? So what happens to players who only get great results because they try harder and harder to play well? They will have gaming sessions that are twice as difficult as another player, but end up with the same end results. And if they decide to relax a little, stop trying to be perfect for a change, and play like everyone else, the game will stomp them into the ground.

Leave difficulty selections up to players. If you control it automatically, you're going to alienate players who only do well because they try harder than everyone else. Reward skillful gaming, period. Players who enjoy your game and do well in it will enjoy the bonuses regardless, and players who do badly (and suffer because of it) can turn the difficulty down.