Quote:Original post by BrianLarsen
In a game based on player skill, levels become almost meaningless but you end up with the problem of a few skilled players ruling the game and usually they are teens with too much time on thier hands and no sense of decency.

Strictly speaking, levels gained over time have to be *completely* irrelevant to game mechanics for the game to be fully skill-based. But, as evidenced by COD prestiges, such levels can still be fun for some players as markers of shared experience.

But "teens with no sense of decency"? Can you actually name a competitive game where high-level players or clans are such people, or even contain a significant portion of such people? People being dicks to worse players in public play are mediocre players as a rule. Their kind is a rarity at the top.

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
Okay. So in most Action or Adventure games that's already the case. You scroll through kick the crap out of people and/or solve a few puzzles and you're done. But in RPGs, it's a little different, obviously. So for a RPG (and if this has been done before... my bad), how about just making me as strong or slightly stronger than every one else? I start out with all the bad ass magic, good weapons, and great items.

So where's the leveling up? Well actually you level up in real time. As in you, the real person, not the character. You have enemies. In an one-on-one, you can take them easy. 5 on 1, not so much. Mindless brawling will get you a restart back into town. You have study your enemy, find patterns, use them against each other even. You have a set of moves you can use. And they're all at your disposal from the start. Now you have to figure out which moves are effective and which aren't against your enemies. Same goes for your magic.

Your job as the character is to be crafty, clever, and actually move the story along. You actually play your role. Thief, mage, warrior, bandit, whatever.


....Actually this needs more fleshing out.... hmmm

Why not play competitive multiplayer games? They are like you described, only taken to the extreme. You are exactly as strong as the other players, and you really have to be clever/better to win---there is no other way, because you are facing other humans. I mean if you really want to be clever, you have to play other humans. AI can always be exploited in some way. And, why not? You are probably online all the time nowadays.

I can no longer (for quite a while now) play singleplayer or non-competitive games. I literally don't think any non-competitive game is fun (OK, with one exception, WoW, because of leveling up, but that's more like a drug). I think there are two reasons I find competitive games so much more fun.

1) Mind games---you can trick your human opponents, but you can't deceive a computer in the same way. For example: I cleverly don't pick up this weapon when I'm playing Quake, tricking my opponent into thinking that I'm probably not around; doesn't work against computers. Maybe there is some AI that allows that specifically, but that's really beside the point. In competitive games, all kinds of subtle things matter, and it doesn't matter that AIs can be "good" or "challenging" because you can't play mind games with them.

2) In a single-player game, once you get good, the AI will stop challenging you, and it's not fun anymore. But with online games, you can always find better opponents, unless you are at the very top, and it will be challenging anyway. That's why StarCraft, Counter-Strike and Quake have been around for so long. Not only that, the same people have been playing them all this time. I've been playing Counter-Strike for 10 years, and it doesn't stop being fun. And you don't have to buy new games :)

Extra reading material: Playing to Win

Quote:Original post by Ravyne

Quote:Original post by Doctor Shinobi
The whole concept of improving your character is one of the things that make RPGs fun. spending 20 hours on an RPG where i am as strong in the beginning as i'd be in the end would most likely be boring.

Its not the act of leveling up that's fun though -- its mostly the reward, and the only reason you have for doing it is to get that new spell and a handful more hitpoints so you can do the whole thing over again against slightly stronger enemies.

I don't agree---it is the leveling up that's fun, not the reward; at least for me, and I think for others too. I don't think people are that different when it comes to this. I have multiple times hit the max-level in WoW for example, and just right at that moment thought "Ok, this sucks, nothing more to do." Although along the way I have of course thought "Oh, the grind! I just wish I hit the next level!" But then when I hit the last level, it's not fun anymore. Even though people don't think of grinding as fun, I think that they actually DO think it's fun, they just don't like to admit it. That's mostly what MMORPGs are about. It would be pretty stupid to play MMORPGs if you thought grinding was boring.

[Edited by - tufflax on June 24, 2010 12:31:20 PM]

Quote:Original post by Doctor Shinobi
The whole concept of improving your character is one of the things that make RPGs fun. spending 20 hours on an RPG where i am as strong in the beginning as i'd be in the end would most likely be boring.

Agreed. Also if no one was able to level up everyone would have the same skill level so your fighting people with the same weapons, items, armor, ect. that you have.

Agreed 100% with the original poster. It's much more ideal to make the player learn instead of the avatar learn. To me, levels are just like high scores: worthless. It's what I can do in the game that matters (and sadly, that's often limited by the level the character is at).

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
Okay. So in most Action or Adventure games that's already the case. You scroll through kick the crap out of people and/or solve a few puzzles and you're done. But in RPGs, it's a little different, obviously. So for a RPG (and if this has been done before... my bad), how about just making me as strong or slightly stronger than every one else? I start out with all the bad ass magic, good weapons, and great items.

So where's the leveling up? Well actually you level up in real time. As in you, the real person, not the character. You have enemies. In an one-on-one, you can take them easy. 5 on 1, not so much. Mindless brawling will get you a restart back into town. You have study your enemy, find patterns, use them against each other even. You have a set of moves you can use. And they're all at your disposal from the start. Now you have to figure out which moves are effective and which aren't against your enemies. Same goes for your magic.

Your job as the character is to be crafty, clever, and actually move the story along. You actually play your role. Thief, mage, warrior, bandit, whatever.


....Actually this needs more fleshing out.... hmmm

A long while back, I had an idea similar to this after watching something on Discovery about Kali, Philipino martial arts. What struck me was the idea that you literally start out in Kali with weapons, whereas you move up to weapons later on in other arts. The idea is to adopt the weapons (the sticks, the knives, the swords, staves and spears) as part of your own body right towards the beginning of your training. Maybe I took the lesson the wrong way, but this basically made you a killer in training within days. Your coordination, understanding, and respect for these assets is what improves from here.

The game design parallels should be apparent, I hope.

Quote:Original post by Dathgale

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
I don't want to level up. I just want to kick your @$$

For what it's worth, I feel the same way. But for some reason, level grinds sell.

well if you looks at borderlands, the quests you do offer XP. They're fun to play and display tons of variety while offering XP as an extra rewards. XP works as an incentive to make the player do ANY quest. There's your reason.

Quote:Original post by Bladerz666

Quote:Original post by Dathgale

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
I don't want to level up. I just want to kick your @$$

For what it's worth, I feel the same way. But for some reason, level grinds sell.

well if you looks at borderlands, the quests you do offer XP. They're fun to play and display tons of variety while offering XP as an extra rewards. XP works as an incentive to make the player do ANY quest. There's your reason.

That's not a reason at all. If a quest or the endgame of an MMO is worth playing at all, it's worth playing without killing arbitrary amounts of time leveling.

IMO it's hard to argue that filling up the XP bar, increasing one's level number, gaining new abilities, earning quest rewards, etc. are not the driving forces behind the level grind.

If they simply enjoyed the process of exploring the world and killing the same things over and over regardless of the reward, then we should see max-level players continuing with much of the same behavior they did when leveling up. There would be no need to level an alt because absolutely nothing is stopping you from taking a level 80 character and going back to Goldshire and killing 10 kobolds, then heading to Westfall to kill 25 murlocs, etc. etc. In fact, that type of playing behavior is not very common. Why? IMO because for a max-level character the *rewards* for killing low level monsters are insignificant. It's simply not "worth it." Which suggests that many players are looking for some value over and above the satisfaction of killing things, or even their meager loot droppings.

(In the case of WoW, Blizzard introduced the Achievement system that offered "rewards" for going back to complete old quests in the form of Achievement points, titles, tabards, etc.)

The fact that so many people do have alts rather suggests IMO that they enjoy the psychological "high" of being periodically rewarded for repeated actions. Incidentally, that's the same psychological principle behind training animals.

It took me 4 80s and 3 other 70+ characters in WoW to realize that I was heavily addicted to the effort->reward mechanism that that game had to offer.

Of course, there are still a significant number of people who only care for end-game content, and will either "buy" or want to start off with an equipped max-level character...but these people are generally looking to avoid the leveling grind altogether, not just trying to start with a powerful character.