Ok, just an idea. In my game I've something similar too experience points, for the sake of simplicity I call it just XP. You gain XP by picking them up from *surprise* killed monster or from quests. The quest reward is not just a instant XP reward but a "potion" of XP which can be consumed.

Well, the rubberband effect idea is, that you loose XP over time, even faster when you approximate the next level. Imagnine a XP bar which needs to be filled, the character will not loose any XP as long has his XP bar is filled up to 50%. Once he starts gaining more XP, he will loose XP. Starting with a low rate (1% every 5 mins) and ending with a higher rate (1% every min). So, theoretically you can have 99% filled up and just wait until your XP drops down again to 50%.

The reason is, that my game work with creature generators, which leads to natural grinding. The rubberband effect enforces the player to do some basic planing. As an example, take a powerful creature with a high XP reward. When you try to camp this monster you will not gain much. The monster spawns not fast enough and fighting it will result in a longer cooldown time, the rubberband effect will neutralize the grinding effect. The most effective way to gain the next level is to hunt down a larger crowd of creatures.

An second benefit will be, that grinding of low level creature will not be enough, the XP gaining rate is just too low to overcome the barrier of the rubberband effect.

And one of the most important aspects are the quest rewards. At the right time you can consume them to get the last bit of XP to leap to the next level.


Thoughts ?

Personally I don't like the idea of losing XP. I think a more player-friendly way of achieving the same outcome is to only allow a certain amount of xp to be gained by different actions or different types of mob kills. Possibly reset the counters whenever the player levels up.

Wow... that sounds horrible. If you really need something like that, a much less painful system is dropping XP on death. Some games cap it at one level, like diablo 2. Others like everquest let you actually de-level.

And dropping XP on death can be a good reward system to teach you not to die or overestimate the encounters you can take on. EQ for instance, could be too hard, because your items were on your body when you died, so it was even hard to get all your stuff back. But, it was semi balanced by having ways to restore some of that XP loss (being rezd). Diablo didn't have quite the same issues (you could just exit and reload to get your body back), but it had a balancing point of not being able to de-level you. In an entierly equivlent system, EVE online punishes you by destroying most your items when you die, forcing you to repurchase them.

I, personally, would be more disgruntled at losing Xp every 1-5 minutes more-so than grinding.

If the goal is to tackle grinding, I think the best solution I've seen is to implement the lays-potato chip effect. The slogan of lays is 'I bet you can't eat just one'. This slogan, for the most part, holds true because lays chips are so small and bite size that its easy to pick one more up. Next thing you know, the bag is gone. If you were to implement rooms or areas with a fair number of monsters that can be killed within a few minutes, then offer another room/area to the player to explore, they will do this because 'well, its just one more'. Then there is one more after that, and then one more. Break it up with a boss or mini-boss, and suddenly the feeling of grinding is gone.

The drain rates sound too low. If the idea is that the player needs to plan for "xp sprints" to reach the next level (which I find quite interesting), I'd much prefer to see those sprints be short which also allows them to be more intensive and challenging and also allows for some meaningful planning. I'd start from 5% per minute and adjust from there.

You haven't explained the rationale behind disabling the drain at <50% XP. If you want double the amount of "safe havens" for the player, why not double the amount of levels and have the XP bar drain at all times until empty? It's a simpler, more elegant design.

Another alternative would be to enable the drain after player hits 50%, but only disable it after player hits 0% or gains a level. This would form a different kind of challenge, that of trying *not* to break 50% until you are ready to sprint to 100%. Could give the game a nice rhythm with no aimless "just grind" time.

At first I thought you might be on to something but the negative reactions so far seem to suggest it's not a good way to go. Anyways, it sounds like what you end up having is the player out there combat grinding for awhile until they reach the 50% point and then after that there's one single event to snap them over to the next level. Seems like there's nothing wrong with that on the surface but what happens if the player only goes to 47% XP for the level, attempts the event and luckilly succeeds? They're missing the last 3% needed to lock in their level. And what they have earned will be rapidly depleted and they will be left with no way to get that back.

If leveling is supposed to be the result of completing quests rather than endless combat grinding then why not do away with XP altogether and simply perform the level increase at the completion of the quest and nothing else. This way, killing 1000 slimes is no more benifit to the player than killing 100 especially if you were only tasked with killing 10. Or when you go on the escort mission, since there's no benefit to combat, stealth can become a more significant factor.

If you want to get rid of grinding in the most efficient way possible, just eliminate XP and give the player a more tangible reward for killing monsters/monster generators/whatever.

Like, for instance, no XP, but if you kill a monster generator, you get a stat upgrade.

(Illusion of Gaia did something similar in that if you wiped out every enemy in a room/area you got a stat boost).

I'm with the negative reactions here. It seems to me that this would be a really bad idea. I also feel it would have the opposite effect you desire. Instead of preventing players from grinding, you now encourage it by taking away their experience points if they spend their time doing anything that isn't combat.

If you must have experience points and want to avoid grinding, make it so being a higher level than an enemy reduces the experience you gain, up to getting 0 experience at a certain point.

Well,seems not to be a popular idea :-)

Quote:

Original post by amnesiasoft Instead of preventing players from grinding, you now encourage it by taking away their experience points if they spend their time doing anything that isn't combat.

I never really thought about that, but you hit the mark.

I will drop this idea, thank for all your input,.

You could try something like "betting".

1) you have a normal exponential leveling curve (with no "max level" which seems to be one of the goals of you first system). Monster experience is set up to be something along the lines of being line+logarithm.

2) You can bet past levels to increase your leveling rate, however if you don't fulfill the condition you agreed to you lose those levels(not dying, finish X quest in a time period, other difficulty modifiers like not letting hostages die, and similar).

Basically if you stick to the normal leveling you'll reach a sort of max because of the exponential increase to the next level, but you can play "comfortably". If you want to get out of the "kind of max level" valley you can bet past levels to get out faster.

The biggest problem I see is that if players get past the most difficult content in your game, they'll be able to grow insanely fast by betting everything since they know they can't die.