Hey all, I'm halfway though making my super awesome funtastic MMOish game where you level up your character and unlock skills as you kill other people. The problem is that new players will get destroyed by experienced players who are a much higher level then they are, and may get discouraged and leave. I've implemented an XP system where you recieve more experience for killing a player with a higher level, so technically a lvl 100 versus a lvl 2 is fair in a risk/reward model.. but it's still not going to be that fun for the new lvl 2 player. My game is very fast paced.. imagine counter strike with levelling. Thus, I can't do anything like in WoW where you have to ask for permission to fight someone below you or anything like that. Anyone know of any nifty solutions to this problem? Thanks, Ben.

Quote:So make sure you're prepared for that kind of thing somehow. The best way I can think of doing it would be to give the ganked victim some XP for getting owned. Then, not only are the gankers gaining nothing, they're actually making the guy more formidable for the next time, which is counter to their objective. A long career of ganking will lead to a large number of dangerous individuals who hate your guts, and it's worth going into battle, even if you just get killed in the first round every time.

You'd have to be careful doing something like this, the rewards and how long it takes you to rez/gank someone, along with any death penalties should be balanced carefully, otherwise you may end up with players doing it on purpose in order to farm XP for their friends/alts.

Level's imparting power tend to chronically suffer balance issues. Planetside managed to avoid it by making level's give versatility, not power. Level's determined how many weapon/vehicle/support skills players could have at a time, but level's in no way effected how powerful/effective/useful they were, they were the same for everyone. Another example is Guildwars, where more experienced players usually have a greater skill selection, but every player could only equip 8 to be used in combat, thus evening the playing field and making choice/strategies more important.

In Lineage II there was a karma system in place to tone down ganking. Basically when you kill an unflagged person(someone who is not willingly in PvP mode), the killer receives karma points and all npc guards would attack this person on sight. If the person managed to get by the guards, the player could not use shop, bank or service npcs at all. Also added to this was the fact that when that player died, they had an extremely high chance at dropping a piece of their gear for someone else to snatch up. Karma could only be gotten rid of by dying until all karma is removed, killing mobs much higher level than the player, or by doing a very long and difficult quest. The amount of karma someone received was based on level difference. So higher level players really didn't want to gank lower level mobs because the karma would be a total pain to get rid of or they could loose very expensive gear.

The current model I have is this:

You can level from 1 up to 100.

At lvl 1, you have 100 hp, 30mana, and 1 skill point.
At lvl 100 you have 1000 hp, 120mana, and 100 skill points.

Skills require mana to cast. Skill points work in a similar fashion to Diablo2. Each time you level up, you gain a point, and can invest it into a skill. You can stack them to make a certain skill more powerful, or invest that point into a new skill.

Whenever you kill someone, you gain their level in xp.
So if you kill a lvl 27 player, then you gain 27 xp. It doesn't matter what level you are, only what level they are.

So if a lvl 1 person fights a lvl 100 person.. the lvl 1 person will recieve 100xp each time he kills the lvl 100 guy.. while the lvl 100 guy only recieves 1xp for killing the noobie.

This means there's a lot more to gain for the lvl 1 guy in the fight, although he's still going to die a whole lot of times. Chances are, a lvl 1 guy on his own would never be able to kill a lvl 100 guy.. simply because the lvl 100 guy would be able to reheal any damage recieved in the time it takes the noobie to respawn. However.. theoretically, 100 lvl 1 guys could easily take down 1 lvl 100 guy. Not that I'd ever have 101 people in the same server.

Right now, lvl 100 guys would simply be considered a boss monster. And if you're only lvl 8, you're best bet is to run. Although if you manage to kill a lvl 100 guy.. it'd be the equivalent of killing 12.5 other level 8 characters.. so it'd be a pretty awesome kill.

I do like that versatility idea, although I think it might limit the amount of skills I can make. Also, people won't be as excited about leveling up, because the gains aren't that great.

The PK also factors into it still as well. For an event I decided to take an abandoned character and kill a bunch of bots so the real players could actually do the event. Since the event didn't care what level you had to be to do the event, all the bot farmers made level 1 characters. Normally when I PK someone around my level I only got about 500-1000 karma, but my level 54 character got about 6000 on the first kill. By the time I was done, when the bot boss showed up with his maxed character I had about 65 PK's and over 1.5 million karma. For fun I actually tried to get rid of it by killing mobs my level, but I was only getting about 5 karma off per kill so decided to die my way back to good standing. I deleveled down to level 32...

Honestly I would dump the leveling system and use a badgeing system instead. Its a fast action twitch type game perfect for fostering player skill...but the leveling system negates that as higher level players effectively run around with statistical boosting on par with full armor and quad damage.

Leveling works as a zero net gain system. Where as you raise levels so do your opponets/challangers. Either by raseing the levels of the opponets, or replceing them with new tougher opponets. Net gain is still basicly zero, the game remains challangeing but with the illusion of improvement.

Unless you have lots of bots/npc/mosters for players to fight that can provide challanges to the high level players. Then as they gain levels, the game can become easier and easier through no fault of thier player skill set improveing.

Its like playing a RPG where as you gain levels you still face off against those pesky mice and rats. Only you got a block of cheese hanging around your neck that gets bigger and bigger with every level increase.