Why not exactly the same thing in implementation, I felt like Final Fantasy 8 had a similar system - at least in the feel of it.

While not a perfect match, because FF8 is a single-player offline game, it feels similar in this regard:

During combat, you'd kill monsters and get experience and level up, like normal. But also you had a bunch of 'summons', and your summons had pages of skills/attributes that also gained experience when you had that summon equipped to one of your teammates. But out of each summon's thirty or so skills/attributes, you pre-choose two or three of them to gain experience with you in battle, and the other attributes don't progress at all.

So it felt like, "okay, I'm grinding and leveling up my characters", but at the same time, your summons' attribute experience would progress so slowly, and only in the two or three that you pre-selected, that it basically felt like you were choosing what abilities/bonuses you wanted to acquire three or four hours of heavy gameplay down the road.

In MMOs, replace 'hours' with 'days' or 'weeks', but it still had the same feel. A choice you were making now, but without instant gratification - pre-planning for the future.

I like the idea of mixing many different methods of advancement - some controlled by the player, others not, giving progress in different areas of the game (i.e. *not* all going into a common experience pool).

More recent games in series like Rune Factory or Harvest Moon (and some of the 2nd gen and higher Pokemon games) I think also implement interactions with the passage of time - regardless of whether the time is passing in-game or while the game is off. But these mostly (I think! I haven't personally played them) are in relation to in-game events, not necessarily player advancement.

In my previous post, I named four really popular single-player game series that do something similar. Yes, it can be annoying for players to wait. However, it can be annoying for players to die in games as well. Removing death from games just because it is annoying would make many games overall less enjoyable.

If players want everything right now, right here, then why level up at all? Just start them at level 99 with all the best gear and skills.

Game design is about balancing dozens of mechanics so they work together. Discussing game design mechanics such as the one in this topic is important. Key word: Discussing. Thinking it through. Considering and contemplating. Weighing it out. I have to suppress my own player-blinded gut-reactions when designing games, otherwise games would be really boring.

The screen flashing red is annoying, so get rid of the damage indicator.

Not having enough money to buy the gear I want is annoying, so give me infinite money.

Running out of ammo is boring, so give me infinite ammo.

Not being able to jump high enough is boring so let me fly instead.

Finding keys to locked doors is boring, so let me walk through walls.

Having to wait before unlocking something is boring, so why even bother discussing it? But it could be leveraged usefully by designers to make great games.

Some constraints and limitations enhance games, even though from a player perspective we might think otherwise.

Any of the above 'boring' things can be removed from some games, carefully, and still make an enjoyable game. But it is done with thought, not just slapped into it. Some games successfully remove death, or successfully make respawning instant - and balance it with different annoyances in other areas - take VVVVVV for example.

To make games enjoyable you need to add a balanced mix of game mechanics - some of them that the player won't like.

But take any one game mechanic on it's own, and it'd look stupid in isolation. If someone told me, "Mario dies when touching an enemy", as a player my gut-reaction is, "What?! That's DUMB! Why would I even WANT to DIE just from TOUCHING a dumb enemy?! YOU STOOPID GAEM DEISIGNRS!"

First off, I don't like to think of "good and bad". I think these systems have their own merit, so I propose to examine them in light of their functional objective.

An interesting aspect of a system where you acquire experience over time is that it accounts for the time you spend offline. You could easily assume that your character is attending classes or training in specific fields (possibly by browsing the inter-space-web). This adds to immersion.

Another factor is functional. One means to insure that players come back to play is to give them reasons to, even if only to switch your current study field (so you've completed training in piloting VI? how about some weaponry engineering now?). This is known as a hook to user retention and is critical to a successful MMO. It's also a positive incentive which is far more interesting than "your crops will wither if you don't come!". In this case, we're saying "what do you want to learn next?" and you don't lose anything.

This does limit your ability to grind however, and players may feel they are losing control over this. In a number of games, there's a fun and addictive loop: to kill stuff and grow stronger. If your experience is time-based and that your in-game experiences do not affect your learning in any way, your approach to conflicts in general will be different. Unless your game plans to replace experience points with substantial loot, you risk altering this conception to the point where fighting will be less desirable (you only stand to lose something, not gain anything).

In general, I'm more of a fan of the Planetside 2 Hybrid approach: your CP's increase over time, but the longer you remain alive, the faster they grow, and the better you fare (kills during this life) the faster they increase as well.

My 2 cents!

I played a lot of EvE Online, but I came in about three years into it, so I spent a year or more being woefully underqualified in terms of skillpoints, and then I was more or less mainstream. The level cap (five levels per skill, offering diminishing returns) means that I can be 80% effective in under half the time it takes to be 100% skilled up, so that's not really an obstacle to competence, except that the better equipment and skills have some level 5 pre-requisites, so you wind up with a big hump to get over if you want to be able to leverage the most cost-effective gear. EvE has a lot going on, and you can spend fifty times the money to get a fancy module or ship that replicates performance without the skill requirement, but if you're in a long-term fight, the guys who can gear up with high-skill items will have a huge economic advantage over the guys who have to shell out for the semi-magical, ultra-rare items that let them compete. It's class warfare some of the time.

I didn't mind the time system, though. I really liked being able to disconnect my play from my XP. In most games, I feel like I'm not "doing it right" if I'm doing something that isn't leveling up my guy in the most efficient possible way. In EvE, I could be out in a weak ship, exploring or experimenting with builds or telling my mates jokes about physically impossible genitals, and I'd be accruing points just as fast as I would be if I was running mission after mission or grinding on mobs or doing forty-minute round-trip courier jobs. That allowed the players' culture to grow and develop in a way that you don't see in other games, and the high-level human interaction in EvE remains second to none.

The accessibility worked against the game in some ways, though. The biggest and toughest guys in EvE are often the guys who have eight accounts. They have a one-man armada that can include "classes" like Miner and Hauler and Trader and Pirate and Commander, so they'll grind for fat stacks of cash on five of their accounts, running a perfectly organized business with no risk of betrayal or corporate theft or lack of participation, because all those alternate characters have the same play schedule and mentality. Then, they siphon the funds into the wallet of their alter-ego, who is a merciless griefer with nothing to lose. He uses all his time to train PvP combat skills and never spends a moment learning how to do an honest days' work, so he's the baddest, meanest, toughest hombre to travel the stars. With his alt patrons, he's a pressure valve, providing the player with the catharsis of battle and murder and robbery, and even if he is billions of imaginary dollars in the red on his operations, the carebear alts are always there to earn it back with clean living and savvy trading.

So you get these meta-characters, one-man empires who aren't bound by the rules of ethics or commerce or political affiliation, and they're living in a world where a one-character player has to learn a few trading skills and a few mining skills and a few hauling skills and a few leadership skills and then build his combat prowess in such a way that it's good for both earning money fighting NPCs and defending himself from other players. He makes friends with people from other time zones who can, when it's convenient for them, bolster the weaker parts of his operations, and he depends on them. When that jack of all trades meets the high-speed, low-drag assassin, the conclusion is foregone.

EvE's time based leveling up is bad. It leads you to the point, unless you have friends to play with, to just log on, switch skills, and then log off, as there is no differences between playing and not so there is no reason to actually play if you are alone.

Another thing is that if you start a year later that someone else you are simply always going to be less advanced than someone that started a year before. No amount of playing or skill will ever make up for this so there is, again, not much point to play as there is no reward in a lot of ways.

Also, playing can cause you to lose effort as it can make you vulnerable to attack, so the optimal is to get what you need to get to the skill level you need and then just log on/off until you reach the desired level.

The solution is simple. Make it so that playing increases the speed that you increase your learning speed. And/Or if, for example, you mine, mining skills get an increase in learning speed. Flying in a given class type bumps the speed that you learn ship skills. From a story line point of view it is simple to explain by way of you are having the data written into your brain, but it takes time to incorporate into your muscle memory and such, but by actively training it increases the speed with which those neurons are shifted to their new arrangements.

I 've played a few MMO's where you had to do something to get your skills up.

Usually, it meant i had to log in once or more a day and expend my "action-points" which tends to get boring after a month or so,

the whole having to log-in/play on a regular basis to stay competitive becomes annoying and the grind becomes repetitive,

at the same time if i wanted to play the whole day, well, there was interaction(communication) with other players but these games tend to lack other types of content.

Time-based leveling seems a good system in accomodating the player.

Off course, this model works best in a pay-to-play model, or a pay-to-level-up model,

as to discourage inactive characters just to grind levels.

I am not in favor of the time-based-leveling system but one could see it as a "less demanding" version of the typical MMORPG grind. In most MMORPGs, you grind experience or gold to unlock the next character or equipment level. You are forced to spend X hours/days/weeks grinding to get there.

Instead of making you sink time into grinding, they just automate the process. In either case, you are forced to wait X amount of time to get to the next level, but for the time-based system, you can spend that time doing what you like instead of being forced repeat boring grind.

Unfortunately, players don't tend to see it that way. As pointed out by someone in this thread, because it takes away agency, players feel as if they don't have any control or impact on the leveling process. The time-based system could be timed in a way that it matches optimal grinding, but players will probably still feel bad about it.