I'm working on an online game. A mud. What's a good way to choose appealing amounts of experience needed between levels? Right now I have a table that looks like below. The pattern just adds 1,000. Is this suitable enough? I figured this would be the second tear up. The fastest leveling, or quickest agility would start 500XP bellow. Then I could just add 500 up for each stronger type of class.

It's almost irrelevant. What counts is how much exp you get per monster of equal level killed. Like you want to level up every 100 monsters killed (of equal level) so you make the exp from that monster equal to 1/100 of exp needed for next level. But even this it's rarely needed.

I use these two formulas in my games:

exp=level*level*10

exp=level*level*level*10

Overall, not worth the thinking, basicly all formulas and parameters I ever used worked out in the end (these just changed the pace of the game which I could easily counter by doubling/halving the exp from monsters).

It kinda depends on how much difference you want between levels;

right now going from level 1 to level 2 takes half the XP it takes to go from level 2 to level 3

right now going from level 18 to level 19 takes almost as much XP as it takes to go from level 19 to level 20

is this what you want in the game ?

Alternatively you could multiply the needed XP for every next level(1.000 - 2.000 - 4.000 - 8.000)

which is a way of making grinding low-level monsters a bad tactic for players and forcing them to take on bigger monsters as soon as they can.

(and as Acharis said, numbers can easily be tweaked later on to make the game balanced.)

Thanks guys. I was thinking about having a different table for each class, like traditional tabletop games.

Can you explain 1.000 - 2.000 - 4.000 - 8.000. I'm not sure how to read that.

For the first post is 80,000 enough XP for level 20? That would be 20*20*20*10.

Really that would only require 400 fights at 200xp. Seems a bit light, especially for a long mud.

Like other said, the numbers themselves are irrelevant, what matters is how they grow in relation to growth in xp gain.

It boils down to a few questions.

How fast do I want the first level to take? (usually pretty short to keep the player interested at the start)

How much longer should the level(s) after take? (1.5x as long? 2x as long?)

If you know the answer to those, then you can adjust the two curves to match what you want.

I'd play around with the numbers a bit and do estimations on how much playtime it would take to reach level X.

What happens at what level and what is the max level is also important to decide to design the curves.

It's part of the pacing of the game, which is 100% up to you as a designer.

Do you want it to be long? Or short? both are valid choices...

I like games that offer small, but decent amounts of xp in the beginning. I also like to see high levels of experience by the middle of the game. Number like 275-500 make me happy. The problem is the amount of fights is too low with the formula below.

20*20*20*25 gets me to 200,000 by level 20. This is still only 400 fights if high level monsters give out 500xp.

Am I way off here. What's your opinion on fights. I've payed muds, but never payed a lot of attention. I would think 400 fights is a really low number, but I'm not sure. Considering there will be a story to follow, harder places to survive. Would there be well over 400 fights in a respectable mud?

I picture the game kind of long. Story driven, hunting grounds, side quests, and a possibility for lots of fights.

Personally, I'd start by breaking the game into general "stages". For example, level 1-5 is a quick introduction to hook new players, 5-10 is challenging but not hard and content rich. 10-15 is hard and grind heavy, intended for the smaller group of players who take it very seriously. 15-20 is very challenging and very stretched out to give addicts endgame content.

Then I'd give rough hour guides to each: first stage is 10 hours, next is 40 hours, next is 150 hours, next is 1,000.

Then I'd estimate how much of each stage is combat driven vs. story, crafting, socializing, moving etc. Maybe (35%,25%,40%,45%).

Then I'd estimate how long a fight should last. I might go (1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes). Battles get more complicated as we go and in the end game are very much a grind.

Those numbers give me: 210 fights to level 5, an additional 200 fights to level 10, an additional 900 fights to level 15 and an additional 1,350 fights to level 20.

Then I'd divide the fights per stage into fights per level making the early levels faster and the later levels slower. For example (30/40/60/80) for your first 4 levelups.

Then you have to decide how quickly power scales. If it scales too slow, players can grind easy monsters. If it scales too hard, there's a risk of players rocketing through the levels if they can beat higher level monsters. As an example, let's use the level*level*5 as the monster value (5 at level 1, 1805 at level 19).

Then your first 4 levels are:

level 1: 0 xp

level 2: 150 xp

level 3: 950 xp

level 4: 3,650 xp

level 5: 10,050 xp

If you penalize player xp for dying, you need to factor in expected deaths.

Changing any of the assumptions gives you a different calculation. During testing (and if possible, after deployment) measure and see if you were wrong: do fights go faster? Do players spend more time traveling than you thought? Is the monster scaling too shallow? Is there too much content in stage 2 and you need to slow down progress through it? Just make the relevant adjustments and recalculate.

Can you explain 1.000 - 2.000 - 4.000 - 8.000. I'm not sure how to read that.

sure.

I ll make a table, note that i only write down the additional XP needed to gain the next level

level XP

1 0

2 1.000

3 2.000

4 4.000

5 8.000

6 16.000

7 32.000

8 64.000

9 128.000

10 256.000

It's just x2.

And as you can see, if a player is level 9 and tries to get to level 10, he needs 256 times as much XP as a level 1-player trying to get to level 2,

so killing weaker monsters that are meant for lower levels would take a looong time

Thank to both for help :) I'm going to consider both when making the game and see what the outcome is. Sorry for misunderstanding powerneg. Didn't realize you replaced ', 'with '.' in your numbers. I thought they were for ratios or something.

Polama just wondering if you used a formula to get these numbers?

level 1: 0 xp

level 2: 150 xp

level 3: 950 xp

level 4: 3,650 xp

level 5: 10,050 xp

They look really good, but not sure of the pattern used.

Hey,

I made a Google Doc anyone can view, edit, comment, or suggest. Just wondering if people could take a look and see if they can suggest ideas to help me get to my target note at the top of the document :)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kjjKRVFVSo9G9rQk854ZpgVkM0rc4zoI-wdXo81KAJ0/edit?usp=sharing