If I have a habit of bashing heads in, I don't want to become dumber because of it.

You didn't actually refute anything Alpheus said. Sure, the larger pattern of behavior contributes more than an individual action, but the individual actions of bashing individual heads in contribute to the overall gameplay style of bashing peoples heads in. If you say that should make me better at bashing heads, sure I see the logic in that. But it doesn't sound very fun to become weaker at other abilities because of it.

I get your point, but that mechanism just tries to balance each player keeping the game challenging. I still insist that this is based on gameplay, so if you want to bash heads in and use magic and throw agile melee moves in, that is still possible. But because of the gameplay system you can't max out all your primary stats because if you did so then again everyone would do that and the players will be always the same. This mechanism tries to make each player unique, based on the skills they prefer, while keeping the overall power balanced. And after all not being an intelligent wizard type of character doesn't mean you cannot cast spells or brew potions, but if you are that type of a player, you'll have a slight boost in things like Magic regeneration time, spell range and those kind of stuff.

And the gameplay analysis isn't counting hits you throw in or the number of heads you squashed. It analyzes how you approach each battle, weather you like to run and throw stuff at them or you like to break to the middle of the battle and chop everyone's head with a huge axe, or you stay back and use your troops and cast spells on the people, so your character will be gradually build by the way you behave in the game. You won't be dumber hitting people, you'll become a wizard with some muscles, but if you haven't done magic since the first day, you'll just be a muscular hero(or maybe not).

Vagrant Story did something like that with their weapons. The more you use one weapon, the better you got at it, but then switching to another weapon (and sticking with it) gradually decreased your proficiency in everything else.

Yes something like that but in my mechanism the stats wont change on use, as I explained above.

One thing I'm mentally exploring is also the subtraction of power as the player plays the game, so as his real-world skill increases, his in-game skill decreases, thus the challenge also increases, making things (potentially) more enjoyable. Ofcourse, players don't like things getting taken away, so the presentation of it, as well as alternative reward systems, must be considered to make it palatable, since it flows contrary to the current language of games. A few games have done this, but very few, and I've yet to personally play any (other than the annoying "start off with all your equipment then lose it an hour into the game" trope. Grr, Metroid)

Actually it may be done more often than it looks like. When player can control difficulty level without restarting whole game or creating a new character that is basically what you've described. Enemies tougher and mistakes more punishing in exchange for better rewards.

I think a good example here is diablo 3. As player collects better items allowing him to kill harder monsters he increases difficulty for better odds of even better items. Enemies still look the same, visited dungeons still look the same. It is no different from decreasing player's power, but sounds a lot better "I can easily clear a rift on difficulty Torment X" as opposed to "I can easily clear a rift after decreasing my power by 87%"

I wonder if a measure of not using an ability for an extended period of time would actually add to the experience. So you're not punished for using some skills often. But you are punished for not using other skills at all (after X days, for example).

That might be more enjoyable for players (or rather, less aggravating).

The reverse is sometimes also done. In some games, there are skills that the longer you go without using it, the more powerful it becomes. Usually it's more of a gimmick item and gets too powerful (i.e. you forget you had the ability, then when you use it you instantly take out half a boss's health), but I think both directions could be explored in more balanced ways as well.

Guardian's Crusade, for example of what I'd consider a 'gimick', had a skill that the more steps in-game you took, the more powerful it got, until you used the ability and it reset to 0.

Unrelated, but reminds me of 'Walk Armor' in Castlevania SOTN. The more of the game world you've visited (i.e. the more of the map you've uncovered), the more defense it got.

I get your point, but that mechanism just tries to balance each player keeping the game challenging. I still insist that this is based on gameplay, so if you want to bash heads in and use magic and throw agile melee moves in, that is still possible. But because of the gameplay system you can't max out all your primary stats because if you did so then again everyone would do that and the players will be always the same. This mechanism tries to make each player unique, based on the skills they prefer, while keeping the overall power balanced. And after all not being an intelligent wizard type of character doesn't mean you cannot cast spells or brew potions, but if you are that type of a player, you'll have a slight boost in things like Magic regeneration time, spell range and those kind of stuff.

And the gameplay analysis isn't counting hits you throw in or the number of heads you squashed. It analyzes how you approach each battle, weather you like to run and throw stuff at them or you like to break to the middle of the battle and chop everyone's head with a huge axe, or you stay back and use your troops and cast spells on the people, so your character will be gradually build by the way you behave in the game. You won't be dumber hitting people, you'll become a wizard with some muscles, but if you haven't done magic since the first day, you'll just be a muscular hero(or maybe not).

You're still saying the same thing. How would the computer analyze how I approach a battle if not by counting the things I do? Like when I "throw stuff" or "chop everyones head with a huge axe". It can't measure my enjoyment, but it can count the number of times i do different things to give me stronger abilities in those things.

But that's not really the point. It's not how you decide what ability of mine should improve, it's that improving one ability causes me to get worse at another. That doesn't sound very fun. I don't know of many games where players end up with every ability maxed out. Usually you'll improve abilities at different rates, making your character unique because of the stats they gained, not because of the stats they lost.

That said, I remember ultima online did that when you hit a limit on skill points. At the beginning of the game you could gain a wide variety of skills, becoming better at whatever you wanted to try. But in the late game, it ended up being about choosing which skills you wanted to have maxed out, and making sure you didn't get too good at any side skill to accidentally take away from one of your primary abilities. It felt kind of weird when I hit that skill limit. They were worried about exactly what you described, that players could end up maxing out every ability, and would be identical to each other if they played long enough, and I think there are funner ways to solve that problem.

And you're saying the same thing again. The main goal of this system isn't to stop players from maxing out all the stats... Let me describe it in another way. Like Dota's Heroes, the players are separated into 3 different types. Agility, Strength, Intelligence. Now instead of a choose character type menu in the beginning of the game, the game decides which one you are actually willing to be automatically. Based on things like movement in battle, distance from target, distraction techniques used, the weapons/skills used, attack/defense ratio and basically things that players don't usually grind. And the stat loss isn't based on how much you use another skill, it's based on how much you don't use the skill. So if you want to gain a max level of strength you will not have much time to use magic and that would make the intelligence stat decrease. The higher the stat is, the faster it decreases if you don't use it. So to keep your strength at max level you'll need to use a strength based gameplay.

I didn't just make up a design I didn't like and blame it on you. My responses were based on what you said. Like right here; you said when you gain a point from using one ability, you lose a point from the other.

Sorry, my bad, I didn't explain it exactly as it was in my mind.

You also pointed out that this would keep players from having all of their stats maxed out (which is exactly how it was used in Ultima Online, and why I made that comparison).

Yes it would, but that is not why I thought of this system. As I said, the main goal isn't to prevent them from maxing out, but it also balances the players overall stats and prevent them to max every stat.

Instead, if you make the system smarter about it like you described, analyzing how you approach each battle, this would prevent the player from abusing the system by simply spamming abilities. But with this system, there's not really any difference between getting dumber because you hit stuff, and getting dumber because you didn't cast spells. I think you're just defending your point with semantics, and it really doesn't change a thing. Ultimately I think it comes back to the same point, that losing abilities generally isn't going to be as fun as gaining abilities.

There is a difference between them; you won't lose your Intelligence stats by not casting spells as long as you keep playing the intelligence way, so the game should take a lot into account before changing your stats and I do agree with you that if the game isn't really smart about understanding battle approach, it would just be a bad spammable boring stat system.

I am trying to defend my idea because I think I failed at delivering the idea completely and correctly.

And I disagree on that losing stats is always a bad thing, if I don't use them that much then it doesn't matter to me and I wouldn't mind if a skill that I did not intend to level up has a low stat. So if the game is smart enough in giving points to stats relative to my play style then I wouldn't mind. And I think I've missed something, everything the game does to balance a player based on their play style is done in the background so you won't see bars going up or down, cause it would be annoying to see every stat change every hour when you don't know why. The game tries to make the gameplay experience more enjoyable by making things that matter to the player the most, better.

Thank you for giving your honest opinion on everything I say and I really enjoy this argument :)