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A major problem with UO (and other MMORPGs) is ?power gaming? or spending all your effort in-game towards improving your character?s abilities (in the case of UO, this means skills and stats) as opposed to just enjoying the game the way it was meant to be played. People often fall into this craze to reach the top after an initial exploration and discovery phase; followed by the realization that their character is significantly weaker than the majority of the other characters they see. Once this sinks in, it is only natural to want to ?catch up? ? the problem being that the rabbit they are chasing is hopping just as fast as they are, so the race to the top never ends.

One obvious solution is to eliminate any stat or skill-based separation between players, but that would take with it all sense of accomplishment and identity that is such a necessity in an MMORPG. Even without skills or stats, players would quickly switch to a less interesting and even more tedious possession-chase (such is the case on the official servers now between players whom have ?7xGMs? and have since began trading ?rares?).

Another option is to make the proverbial ?rabbit? fall back every now and then ? that is, have a system that practically (but not technically) prevents any player from reaching ?the top.? One such tactic is to suffer the players a penalty on their hard-earned skills and stats upon death. This would obviously make having low skill levels seem far less an oddity. The downside, unfortunately, is that this could quickly lead to disillusionment amongst those whom have invested significantly in their character?s abilities as soon as they die an unexpected (often deemed ?unfair?) death. Disillusionment is a far greater risk to a player-base than power gaming ever could be, so risking it is a gamble indeed. Then again, widespread power gaming could just as easily disillusion a player in the long-term.

One more potential solution could be either make the ?rabbit? hop slower (less difference between low and highly-skilled players) or make the chaser run faster (fast advancement), but these methods suffer from both caveats above ? disillusionment as well as insignificant identification (a symptom of disillusionment, really) between the player and their character. Oddly enough, this is often the approach used on many player-ran shards I have seen.

Role-playing could be enforced, which by definition generally eliminates power gaming, but this has the large caveat of alienating new players and enforcing an artificial restriction on the minds of those who play which only caters to the escapement player. The elimination of such a diverse player base is often desired for a fuller emersion, but can suffer the shard a great deal more as well.

Somehow, the sense of competition needs to be masked by the sense of entertainment, while never weakening the differences and advancements of players. A player should be able to be proud of having advanced, but not feel the requirement to do so, and never feel an artificial restriction that tells them this is the case.

So my question to all of you is: how can this be accomplished in a reasonable manner?

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

I believe one way of reducing the powergaming-issue is to give the players other meaningful ways to play the game, ways that don't necessarily include constantly improving your character's skills and stats.

Examples include but is in no way limited to ingame mini-games(gambling, boardgames, cards, etc), tournaments/duelling arenas, politics (Give players the necessary tools to run their own towns, as well as allowing them to form alliances with other towns, declaring war, etc. Player justice is also a "holy grail" here).

Character individualism is also important I think; To give players the ability to stand out in crowds even if their character isn't level 280 and doesn't have all the most l33t equipment. Both base level character customization and "secondary" customization (clothing, equipment, house decorations/customization) are important there, and UO does the second very well compared to most other MMORPGs. It's quite lacking in the former though, as the only character customization that is possible is skincolor, and hair/beard-style & color.

A decent permanent death system could ensure that your characterbase (and most likely, playerbase as well heh) is continually "renewed", as there's no certainty that a player will ever reach the top even given enough time/patience, nor any guarantees for how long they might stay there if they ever reached it. I'm not sure if it would do anything about the "powergaming" issue though - perhaps it would even worsen it.

You have games like World of Warcraft where there's absolutely nothing else to do but to continue leveling, gaining more xp, praying that you're doing it quickly enough to keep up with your friends. If you're not, you won't be able to play with them since they'll go into more dangerous zones, and you'll only ever see them if they decide to have mercy on you and fall back to help you do a few quests now and then. I'm experiencing this myself almost every day, so I know what I'm talking about there heh This is what I feel is most negative about WoW (and other games with levels), that they force people to "keep up" or else they are split up from their friends/other people.

And then you the opposite in games like Second Life, where there's no focus whatsoever on the above - there are no levels to gain, no skills to raise(I think), instead it's all about players creating content for themselves & others.

I think there is a "golden middle way", which has room for both character improvement and content creation/roleplaying/socialising without necessarily having to hop onto a treadmill everytime you login.

I'm not so sure that 'making the "rabbit" hop slower' is such a bad idea. Less difference between low/high-skilled players would mean a larger playerbase to play with for each individual player, and it wouldn't force people to powergame just to keep up with their friends. Couple this with what I mentioned above about giving players other things to do than just levelling, and give players other means of achieving individualism than just being higher level than others and having better equipment than others - and you may have a winner


True. Most roleplaying shards cannot even begin to compare against the pvp shards when it comes to playerbase and number of players online at the same time. Enforcing roleplaying deals a heavy blow to powergaming, but it's not really a solution to powergaming, it just attempts to force the players to play in a different style.

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

Permanent death is a very attractive solution when coupled with ?slowing the rabbit? because it, as you pointed out, refreshes your player base actively, which, in turn, implies far less importance on being the best since it can only ever be temporary. Making the difference between highly skilled and lesser so players, when coupled with this system, would also take focus away from getting to the top, but at the same time, if they were to die, it doesn?t seem like as big of a loss if being newborn doesn?t have significant disadvantages compared to being more well-off.

Unfortunately, though, there are some significant drawbacks to this situation, as well. Losing your character every time you die could potentially be the most disillusioning event that could ever happen, especially if dying is easy to do (which it is in almost all games). Devoting weeks, months, or even more into a character, only to have it all lost when the power fails while in a dungeon is enough to turn even the hard-core believer into a bitter wallflower that no longer cares. Loosing that sense of care would, as a side effect, quite effectively eliminate power gaming. As an obvious downside, though, it also eliminates the connection between the player and the game.

The stronger the connection between a player and their character, the more enjoyment they generally extract from the game. The longer a single player plays a single character, the more important it becomes to them. Forcing them to start over at every unfortunate encounter makes forming this bond for the majority of people an incredible burden.

Not only is this mental bond important, but also there is the question of worldly possessions. Sure, having little difference between skilled and unskilled makes that less of an issue, but what about your hard-earned house or even castle? What about that ship you saved for months to get? All gone in the blink of an eye. That is enough to make me want to quit for a while, and once I do, chances are I?ll get distracted by something else long before returning.

Lack of difference between skilled and unskilled also seems to give the subconscious of every player the impression that they can never be better than anyone else ? essentially eliminating that behind-the-scenes competition I spoke of. That competition, I believe, is not something that can be lessened so drastically, no matter how entertaining the rest of the shard may be. This is true, to me, for the same reasons that communism fails ? people love the idea of having the ability to be better than everyone else, even if it means having an extreme probability of being worse-off than if everyone was on a level playing field.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Our shard is based on experience system. We solved that problem with logaritmic increasing of experience amount needed to gain next level and "final" level on which you have your main character skills on max and next level gives you only few stats.
So power players are happy, because they can hunt exps forever (we have no level limit) and other players too, because there is no real difference between level 30 (all skills max) and for example 35 (sligly better stats - reward for mobing fools).
We have death penalty too, you lost exps (even beneath your level, skills and stats remain, but you can loose level). Higher level, higher loss. So exp hunt is more and more difficult.

In our system are most playes +- lvl 30, only few mobing maniacs are +-35.


PS: we are preparing english version of our web and forum section for english speaking players.

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
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Eww...I hate games with levels of any kind. They work great if your playing AD&D on paper in your mom's kitchen but they are more trouble than their worth in an online RPG.

I cannot begin to count the number of people who have came and went due to not being able to keep up or slow down in all the other games that I have played. Games should be about "Fun" not realizm or the level race.

You can tie stat increases into the skill gains (which they are pretty much anyway) so levels in UO would be pointless to say the least.

If you want to fight the power gamer then simply do what UO did (and later removed) by placing anti-macro code into the game so after a certain number of times you no longer gain in a skill if the program detects that you are macro'n like a mindless robot. You can also restrict the number of points a player can gain in a game day or within a certain time period, that would also put a stop to most macro-monkey's.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

Sure, but again - it doesn't really solve the problem with why people turn to powergaming in the first place. I think that's where the clue lies - the games we're playing today almost seem to be made with powergaming in mind. Or at least, powergaming is a unforseen effect of how the games have been setup.

Perhaps it's the gameplay we should change, not hardcoding hinders for playstyles we don't want to see.

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

I play EVE online and it has levels but deals with them in a unique way i dont really want to get into severe detail but basically you buy books and train them and you dont have todo anything it just takes time like (1 hr, 34 secs) to train to Physics II

its a neat idea, although i am getting a wee bit bored with the content but it has a great handle on mmorpg politics

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Depending on how hard it is to get hold of those books/how expensive they are - powergaming may still be required anyway. Or twinking.

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

Yeah EVE's method is unique and I sort of liked the idea but people get around it by buying a bunch of small ones to train up while playing in between the large ones while their logged out.

There are dozens of methods for doing skills but I seriously dont think any of them will prevent anyone from "Powergaming" since you can macro almost anything in any game. Star Whores online actually made a self contained macro system so you could macro while you were logged off sleeping. They designed a system just for powerlamers.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

Best anti macro code is experience system. No exps, no skill gain. Every anti macro code is beatable, some players are pretty good programmers and they wrote very sofisticated scripts.

Maybe you dont like exp system, but it works. And lots of people like it. We have more than 200 online players in rush hours every day.

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
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Exp creates a big camp fest where people sit around killing the same crap over and over like all the other online games like Evercamp. Exp sucks the fun out of every game I have ever played and that would be quite a few of the latest and lamest.

Online games should never be about "levels" or getting to the top, the sooner they do or figure out they cant the sooner they leave. Your shard might have 200 players but I bet that most play for the company of the other players not for the level or exp system.

Just like the real online UO, once those players find the next big thing or get pissed and move on the rest will follow. Every game has that critical mass that is reached in population levels.

EQ was fun till the 900th time you smash a giants skull in after sitting for 400 hours in the same damn spot then the "fun" wears off...

Levels "leave" people feeling left out, so if your one who can't keep up or gets tired of waiting for people to catch up you "will" find something else to play... UO has the best skill system, use it and gain. People from any skill level can enjoy the company of any other and have fun.

I've played the online UO since 1997 and have been in the community lurking or starting trouble since just a few months after that and have seen literally "hundereds" of shards come and go like farts.....they all thought they had it going on.

The only ones that have survived are those few who actually stayed close to the original game but just changed the maps and certain skills to enhance them. Those who radically changed the game died even faster after the newness wears off.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

In our country are exp systems shards very stable. And players came to Endor because of the system. As they said, it was the main atraction. We have big competition of shards in our country. Its hard to attract new players. Now, we are running over one year a and day by day we have more players. It doesnt seem to me like dying shard.
Players staing because of company of others on stagnating shards/dying shards. But dont going to new ones....
Yes, if you make radical system and dont do it well, your shard will soon die, as you wrote. But if its premeditated and well alfa tested, you can have system "go-as-you-please" and it will work.


Of course, i dont like stupid mobing/exp hunt, so in our system its not necessary for "normal" player. And simultaneously it let powerplayers do whatever they want to do (exping forever, if this is their fun.....)
Our system enables you to create your avatar only by playing, not stupid macroing. If there is no exp. requirment, players can do afk makro sooner or later regardless your anti macro code. I saw amazing afk scripts combined with injection and easy uo simultaneously. One player do that and in one month it have whole community.
Exp system dont push you into crazy exping, it gives you possiblity of choose. You can play as you want and that is whats going on.

But i undestand, this is matter of opinion. Somebody dont like exp system, somebody like it. A so be it forever, regardles all flamewars on this themes. And i agree, that evercamp sux. Our system is far more complex, then i described, to prevent such "gaming"

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Ad topic. Fighting power gaming in large scale is pointless, its in nature of most humans (commercial games support that directly, because powergamers are majority).
For shard is best way to make such system, which do you like (i think every shard GM want to have good system, and good players, not only crowd of crying lazy childs and mobbers, which are common for commercial games) and make precausions in system to not support power gaming and leave powergamers alone. If their dream is to be in mine 24/7 and then stand before bank in mitheril complet and let themselfs to be wondered by n00bs, why not, its their gaming style.

I think power gaming is stupid, but in each system you can poweplay. And if someone want it, nothing can prevent it.
Why do you make your shards? To entertain people and yourself. And if some people like powergaming, so why bother them?

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Endor Team leader, visit our web site:
http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

Fighting power gaming is one of those things which fall into the ?knowing your players better than they know themselves? category, which is a grey area most people should avoid. It is similar to when you take a friend to a good movie you have seen, but they want to leave and go do something else right before it gets good. You can let them leave, or you can try to influence them to stay ? and hope they like it in the end as much as you did.

Immediate wants and desires are what drive most people in games, and that generally degrades into power gaming in MMORPGs. If you can distract, influence, and entertain your players into doing more abstract but longer-term desires, you will generally have a much more loyal and intent following. Give a group of kids a ton of candy and some will eat a little but most will eat a lot? you?ll be real popular until they start to get stomach aches and their teeth rot out of their mouths.

The tricky part is knowing how to make it actually pay off, which is the key to ensnaring more players and keeping them longer.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net