Classes vs. Skills in MMOGs 224
An anonymous reader writes "The buzz in the MMO blogosphere is yet another resurrection of the Class system vs. Skill system debate. A number of prominent online gaming bloggers have chimed in with their opinions on the subject, including: Scott Jennings, Raph Koster, Ryan Shwayder, Steve Danuser, Damion Schubert, and a host of others you can find linked on those blogs. The conclusion? Most of the devs favor class systems because of their simplicity and ease of communicating character roles, while a few devs and many players favor skill-based systems because of the freedom they provide for user customization."
Hybrid system (Score:5, Interesting)
The disadvantage is that if you want a particular advanced class, you need to plan ahead -- and have the manual page that shows the tree. On the plus side, it means you can get a feel for what you need during gameplay, rather than try to guess from the start.
I'm not sure how well this would translate to MMORPGs, because I'm one of the three people online who doesn't play any. But it seems this would be simpler than a fully skill-based system, and more flexible than a static class system.
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The most prominent reason was that it was really a pain in the butt to create a mage class, play it to level 10 and then say "you know, I want to be a nuker" and select said subclass. Then, you work your way to level 20, and say "I think I'll be a warlock" only to find out you don't really like the warlock. Now you've just spent 20 levels to find out the basics of how your class will behave. It hurt.
There was a whole lo
Re:Hybrid system (Score:5, Interesting)
EG: a nanomake and agent can both use the rifle skill... only the agent can get it far higher (both in base skill and self only biffs) and cost less then the mage. But if the mage REALLY wants to use rifles then she can.
it allows for a good amount of customization and also allows the devs to 'nudge' the player base in a specific direction. Of course it can be abused (caterwall rifle was so destructive in PVP that EVERY class used it untill it was made agent only) but what system cant be?
Further improvement to hybrids in GW (Score:5, Informative)
Guild Wars is even better in that regard though, and this was mentioned briefly by the fifth of the people mentioned in the headline article, Damion Schubert.
In GW, every character has both a primary and a secondary profession, but you can raise the attributes of your primary profession higher than a secondary could through runes that your put on your armor. Since armor is switchable on the fly, even while fighting, this gives you a lot of flexibility for optimizing your build for a particular zone or encounter. It's better than AO's equivalent, the implants, since those couldn't really be changed in the field (AO's portable clinics were useless).
And since in GW your secondary profession can be changed to any other one with a 30-second visit to Crystal Desert or Senji's Corner, the range of possible combination builds is truly astronomic, yet everyone still knows that (for example) the Elementarist can provide the most powerful nukes. One of the bloggers wrote that skills-based systems introduce uncertaintly, but that doesn't apply to GW -- the primary will always reign supreme at the top end of their skill's abilities.
Quite a few of the other points made in those blogs seem to have been overcome in GW too. For example, it's no hardship at all to call for a "healer" instead of a "Monk" specifically, and everyone is perfectly happy to be healed by a Ritualist or an Elementarist/Monk or a Mesmer/Monk who are running healer builds despite not being primary monks. In fact, it introduces some very pleasant variety.
In summary then, hybrid systems work really well in practice, so the "classes vs skills" debate is a rather pointless one. Just combine the two, and you get the best of both worlds.
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There is something wrong when you might have to go to such lengths as paying a trader to skill wrangle you to cast some buff to install an implant. Laddered buffs (in ANY system, not just spells or items or whatnot) like that are terrible. I'm of the opinion that buff spells and item equiping should be limited to *BASE* stats only,
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This is not true, some people will discriminate against people who are not the build which they consider optimal for a particul
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The only problem with thatm though, is that weapons in RM are deadly. One lucky crit by some lvl 1 goon and you're out for the count, or at least
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"You trip over an imaginary turtle and stab yourself in the chest. You die in three rounds..."
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As compared to AD&D and WH, which seemingly resolved around combat after combat after combat.
Yes, part of it depended on the GM, and YMMV, but I felt the system really guid
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In AO it can take up to a factor of FOUR times as many IP points to raise a skill for one class as it does for another. To go back to my example... the nanomage would have to sacrifice a LOT to get her rifle skill to max... to the point of crippling a lot of her primary skills (casting) for the majority of her lev
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Still, the thing about Diablo was that stats for different classes had different effects. A Rogue with the same exact stats as a Warrior would have more mana, less health, do more damage with a bow, and less damage with melee weapons. So, for example, you had to pump more points into vitality to raise the Rogue's hit points compared to the Warrior's. And they still topped-out a lot faster.
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EVE-Online uses what I consider a really nice system for skills and classes. Although there is really no concrete 'class' system, your character creation involves you choosing paths through race, education establishment, and specialisation. Each of those choices determines the skills you start out with and their levels, and also your attributes. Attributes are Memory, Intelligence, Charisma, Perception, and Willpower, and each skill has one of these as a primary and secondary attribute. The higher your
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It usually ends up that you need to very carefully fine-tune a character in such systems so that you aren't painfully underpo
Trial and error. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think that's what he meant by viable; and none being underpowered too.
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Maybe I misunderstood the OP, but s/he seemed to feel that all combinations of skill sets need to be viable. Maybe they meant that the bar needs to be lowered (thereby nerfing the 'best' combos) in order to make sure weak combos aren't overpowered, but there's no reason to ensure that a fisher-basketweaver is as viable in PvP as an archer-mage.
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Re:Trial and error. (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't that where a lot of fun in a skill based system is for players? Less in any campaigns or quests the devlopers create and more around creating strategies to boost certain skills, so you can use them to, umm boost other skills? In the end it's pointless of course, but we are talkings games after all.
It's a hard balance to strike, though, since players in a class system often feel as though they're being oppressed, but every game needs a structure, and skill-based structures are too close to chaos.
I guess my point is why is the chaos a problem if people are enjoying the game?
I can see that a sufficiently fanatical player with sufficient time on his hands can create a character that is so powerful it's not interesting to play anymore. In that case force some tradeoffs for the character; after all that's what these games are about on an abstract level. Maybe your advancement level in a skill is a function of the total level for all your skills, not the total level in that skill. So if you are a high level enchanter and a low level fighter, you can advance a level in fighting but it's just as hard as advancing a level in magic. The player would have to undertake increasingly more difficult tasks to advance his player's skills at all. Ultimately, characters would reach a point where they could not, in practical terms, gain any more skills. If the point is to take the emphasis off of skill acquisition, then the player would have to shift to playing that character in whatever scenarios you devise. Naturally serious players will have several characters, which means more revenue.
"Enjoyment" is relative (Score:2)
Chaos is a problem when it gets beyond the scope of even the player's ability to 'control' it. Just look at WoW's PvP system. No, not Battlegrounds, Open PvP. Whats the number class for ganking? Rogues. Only counter-measure against them? Paranoid, constant vigilance. How is that enjoyable? And before someone says 'just call for help', thanks to recent updates players below a certain PvP rank cannot use the World Defense channel.
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Suppose instead of hard-coding the values of all the various skills, you tracked how often they were used, and dynamically decreased the value of overused skills, and increased the value of underused skills.
Overpowered skills would self-nerf, underpowered skills would self-enhance. You would still want to add a bit more structure, but the basic structure would be there.
I've actually wondered why they don't do something like this already; why tune, tune, tune manually, where y
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Re:Trial and error. (Score:4, Interesting)
They had a system where it was actually more difficult for everyone in the world to gain in certain skills based on how popular they were, or how many other people were also trying to gain at that skill at the same time.
Think if it kind of like the WoW PvP ladder, but for every single skill. You had to compete with the entire realm just to gain another
UO did some other pretty revolutionary stuff too. For instance, all items, weapons and other goods decayed when used. Sure, you could get them repaired, but they'd still eventually wear out to the point they weren't worth repairing any more. A similar system kept mages in check. Every single spell cast required massive amounts of reagents, also in limited supply. This meant mages might well be the most powerful class in the game, but it came at an extremely high monetary cost.
This meant you might be able to slice down a town full of wood-cutters, miners, blacksmiths and herb-gathers as an archer-mage, but you'd be begging them later on to sell you enough goods to keep yourself equipped. (At least, that's how it was supposed to work in theory)
Re:Trial and error. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that there are two things that make a game "addictive". Clearly the "leveling" concept feeds an addiction in the same way that gamblers are fed by "payoffs". This very obviously has driven why this has become the norm. However, I would suggest that this eventually gets boring to the player in the absense of any real game content - and for that you need a truely immersive world. I haven't seen that since UO.
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Attack of the Clones (Score:2)
Asheron's Call, for all the flaws it may have did a fairly nice job of this WITHIN SETS. By that I mean, the melee skills: dagger, staff, spear, unarmed, mace, axe, sword were fairly balanced. The more you paid (low to high cost in that list) the more damage you did. But t
AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:5, Informative)
Most earlier PnP RPGs (AD&D, 2nd Ed. as an example) were heavily class based. Almost everything you were able to do was dictated by your character's class. When WhiteWolf came on the scene with Vampire: the Masquerade, I remember a lot of people being initially confused by the lack of classes. Your character is just a set of skills. But, as people tried it out, they LOVED it - it allowed them to have tons and tons of freedom over what their character is able to do, instead of being restricted by a class system.
I'm not a MMORPG fan at all - recurring fees and a limited scope of interaction make PnP gaming much more appealing for me - but I'm surprised that it has taken people so long to figure this out, much less write a news article about it.
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:3, Informative)
It hasn't taken long. Ultima Online was the first really successful MMORPG and it came out almost 10 years ago. It was skill based.
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:5, Insightful)
Your group must have been gaming in a cave if White Wolf's Storyteller (1991) system with its lack of classes was so surprising. Skill based, classless systems had exists for over a decade at that point, including well known systems Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing System in Call of Cthulhu (1981), Hero Game's Hero System in Champions (1981), and Iron Crowne's Rolemaster (~1980). By the time Storyteller showed up, classless gameplay continued in games like Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986) and Mayfair's Mayfair Exponential Game System in DC Heroes (1985).
Furthermore, it's not a clear case of "classless with skills is better than classes." D&D remains the most popular RPG in the United States; these aren't millions of players who are simply ignorant of classless systems. Classless systems have existed for almost 25 years and are widely available. For many younger player, classless games have existed since they were born. Yet they play D&D.
Class based systems provide some advantages, in particular it provides guidance. Builting a character from absolutely nothing can be daunting; while many enjoy it, it can be hard to craft a character that fits well into the expectations of the game. In first edition D&D you would be hard pressed to design a character ill-suited for the D&D-style play, while in Vampire it's pretty easy to do so, possibly by accident.
Of course, guidance don't need to come from strict classes. In particular, many games now provide "archetypes", archtypical characters which players can use as a basis. For example, Shadowrun's Street Samurai, Mages, and Deckers; or Cyberpunk's Glitterboys and Reporters, or Big Eyes, Small Mouth's Gun Bunny's, Magical Girls, and Mecha. I find it telling that in many games with lots of character freedom, they still tend to neatly fit within the archetypes because they fit the game well.
It's also interesting that many games eliminated "classes" that represented training or profession, but kept some sort of rigid grouping that limits characters, especially new characters. This is true of most of White Wolf's products in which characters are sorted into Clans, Tribes, Kiths, and Traditions, all of which impact a player's choices at start up.
Also, you're completely missing why MMORPG's have classes: balance issues. MMORPGs are up against very different problems than tabletop games. In a tabletop game, if you make poor choices early in the game that limit your character later in the game, be it role-playing or mechanics, things can be tweaked. In a MMORPG, a poor selection of skills early in the game may lock you out of further advancement, meaning many more hours retraining or building up a new character. They is less of a problem for players interested in gaming that part of the system, or players willing to do lots of online research up front, but it's bad for casual players. Classes also make design easier. Given the complexity of MMORPG design, "easier" may mean "feasible." Many games designs want to create interesting mixes of player characters with different focuses. In a pure skill based system you are more likely to end up with a bland mix optimized in a small number of ways. This is tied into the poor skill choice issue: you might optimize in a way that seems cool ("I want to be the best fire mage possible") only to discover that no one wants you in their group because it turns out that the fire-mage/healer hybrid is far more efficient. While classes force you to sacrifice flexibility, it means you can better ensure that the remaining selections are more evenly attractive and playable.
Ultimately the line between class-based and class-less is a continuum, one of many. Few games exist perfectly at either end. There is no single answer for all games, tabletop or online. Game designers should reconsider the issue with each new game.
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:3, Insightful)
IIRC, TFT featured classes and skills, with skills available to all classes but more expensive if you purchased a skill outside of your class core competency. Useful for mages to have a hold out weapon, or for warriors (or thieves) to have a one-trick spell. Also notable for it's influence on GURPS, and does much to prevent accusations of SJGames having ripped off the Hero System (it's more likely Hero bo
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:3, Insightful)
The "cool" factor of class systems (Score:2)
Another downside of sklil-based systems seems to be the lack of excitement in some of the choices that you get to make. When you play a melee class in D+D, you might obtain the ability to go into berserk mode, or get a strong pet and strong scouting skills, or a smattering of holy spells, or maybe just a lot of different melee feats. When you look at something like Gurps, you don't see a lot of truly unique skills like that. You get "karate" and "first aid" and the like, but you don't get "uncanny dodge"
GURPS as an example (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the template method actually holds the most promise from a programming point of view. A possible implementation in a computer RPG would be for the player to choose the template (say, a woodland scout), and the character generator then sets the minimum stats, the beginning skills and the list of recommended options. If the players clicks "advanced", he can access the larger list. This may sound like a lot of work for the programming team in the beginning, but it pays off later.
You see, once the skills are chosen, the program doesn't have to treat each class differently. The chance to hit or not comes straight from the weapons skills, not from the class list. It's all stored in the character. It seems to me that the skill method means less info to look up, less databases that have to be added to the game. It also makes the game engine more universal, easier to adapt to different genres or even to allow transporting characters between game worlds (one of the things the makers of GURPS like to claim about their system).
It's also easier for the players to change professions, as class systems are biased to "once a [CLASS], always a [CLASS]" manner of thinking. This prevents the classic backstory of so many tales, like the priest who once was a bloodthirsty warrior until he found remorse and devoted himself to his god, or the thief who was an apprentice wizard. With the earlier versions of AD&D, this was clumsily handled, with (for example) a warrior-turned-wizard being demoted to 1st level again, and unable to use his old to-hits in combat (if he did, then he didn't get any XP).
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
V:TM came out in 1991 at Origins, IIRC. Runequest (1978) was an entirely skill-based system without any hint of classes, published only 3 years after D&D.
I'm so ashamed I knew this without referring to Wiki.
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
There could be a few "logical" reasons and restrictions invented for a particular game:
1. if a mage casts a lightning spell while holding a sword or wearing plate armor, self-zap-death
2. the guild that trains advanced swordplay won't train a mage and there's only so much the mage can figure out simply by self-practice and observation
3. the sword is too heavy for the limp-wristed mage to swing effectively
I don't see why they should be barred fr
Re:AD&D vs. WhiteWolf (Score:2)
After after they kill themselves once they will learn to never cast lightning bolt while wearing armor or wielding a sword.
2. the guild that trains advanced swordplay won't train a mage and there's only so much the mage can figure out simply by self-practice and observation
A two year old can figure out how to use a sword, let a mage use a sword at a penalty rather than not at all.
3. the sword is too heavy for th
Simplicity always wins... (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need to pick black or white, good or evil... Better to have a compromise between the two... A shade of grey as it were.
Perhaps Blizzard's ability to stay in the "Shades of Grey" is why it has 50% of the MMPORPG market at the minute?
Re:Simplicity always wins... (Score:4, Interesting)
Great, so I have slightly more ways to be pigeonholed. I can be a "healing priest," or a "damage priest," or a highly ineffective combination of the two that will get me killed endless times and put me at a huge disadvantage to specialized priests in PvP.
Naturally, some "builds" have to be more useful than others, but in modern MMOs there's woefully little in the way of innovation when it comes to player skill sets. Barring changes after patches, hardcore players VERY quickly filter out the most "respectable" builds, which then begin to propagate themselves among the players. Everyone wants to get their player's various numbers as high as they can as fast as they can, and so they settle down into a variety of the most effective builds. The players who aren't savvy to these builds will clunk along, having various amounts of success depending on the way the game is designed. If I want to play a Wizard that has a morbid aversion to fire, but all the "good" Wizard spells are fire-based, then my Wizard's going to have a hell of a time finding people who'll put up with his "useless" Freeze Orb + Mystic Heal combination when--as EVERYONE knows--you MUST have Hell Dagger + Burning Pee in order to kill Trogdors in the Highlands. Why kill Trogdors in the Highlands? Because they drop the only sword that a Chevalier should ever use: Cloudbranch.
That's going to lead into the whole damn field of item builds, which I don't wanna get into since I've basically gotten completely away from my point. I will say that total randomization of item character would go a long way to preventing the "must have" mentality that plagues so many MMO builds--e.g. your Bow-Using Amazon (in Diablo 2) _must_ use this certain ultra rare Bow to have a snowball's chance in hell in PvP.
Re:Simplicity always wins... (Score:5, Insightful)
Be honest. How much are you really depending on playing, say, a Wizard with that personality trait?
This is a discussion that gets brought up repeatedly in the pen/paper RPG discussions I've been party to. In lots of RPGs (the MMO kind included), the "roleplaying" takes a backseat to the dungeon crawling / killing the Trogdors in the Highlands without getting burninated, et cetera stuff. Except that it seems worse in the MMOs - the roleplaying is all of the "let's pretend my guy is beating this troll with a +7 Morning Star of Ouchiness." Click click click. "Ha! He's dead. Loot! pwned! BRB, gotta pee."
The only games I've played where people are actually interested in stuff like that are the pen & paper games, where occasionally (not always) people are willing to stop min/maxing enough to play things like, "One of the local wood sprites has decided to start waging a practical joke war on your character."
I'm rambling at this point, but here's what I'm getting at: once you decide that you actually want to play something like "My wizard has an aversion to fire," it helps to have the attitude that maybe killing the monsters isn't such a big deal. Maybe it's more fun to, you know, actually play a role, as opposed to getting irritated because you can't get that "generic smiting enemy spell #43" in blue instead of red.
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you can change the kind you are. Albeit it costs in game money.
"a highly ineffective combination of the two that will get me killed endless times and put me at a huge disadvantage to specialized priests in PvP."
the most effective PvP players are not 'spec
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That's not really a mix or a compromise, you're still pigeonholed, there are just more holes to go into. A true classless system would enable you to practice any skill and have any hybrid, with your effectiveness only limited by your stats.
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As a WoW character advances, it is able to purchase every skill and spell available from the trainer, limited only by available funds. Eventually, as the character reaches the level cap, every one is indeed trained, even the ones the player may seldom use. I know of very few systems like t
Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Class
- Simpler
- Easier to balance
- Heavily Contrained
- Easy to communicate
Skill
- Users aren't locked into one behavior
- skill based games are expandable
- There's no assumption that every role is equal
- There can be multiple reasons to play
Summary
Of course, the game design secret here is that class systems and skill systems are the same thing; they simply have different parameters.
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I also think at least one of those bullet points is inaccurate. How can classes be easier to balance, when a strictly skills based game can basically ignore a whole part of game balancing completely? In a skills based game, if one skill gives an unreasonable advantage to people
An issue for more than just MMOs (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the biggest problem with the skill system is that it makes the experience way too "loose" for the incoming player, and in MMOs or traditional CRPGs, that can be a serious problem. With a class-based system, you can make the player focus on one or two things early on instead of allowing them to run free, which gives them an ample chance to learn the game, the interface, and to get familiar with the characters and story. With a skill-based system, there's more of an unstructured feeling. You can't really force everyone into doing a few basic skills right away, because if those skills don't interest the person, they are going to feel like they are wasting their time. Since a lot of the developers who make large scale games, esspecially MMOs, don't have the time/money/desire to put a lot of instruction and guidance in for every single skill combination in the early game, it can be tough for people to stick with it long enough to find their niche.
I think that's why a lot of MMOs go with a sort of combination of the two. You get a class (or even just give characters generic experience levels that effect statistics and the ability to use equipment), and then later allow them to learn and explore different trade-skills. Some MMOs even go for keeping the character as a jack-of-all-trades earlier on, and then allowing the player to specialize once they are familiar with the different skills that they can use.
I still think that some of the best games only have skills. UnReal World is one of my favorite roguelike CRPGs, and I really enjoy it's skill system.
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Compare EVE to WoW (Score:2)
EVE is a classless system- you can learn anything in the enormous tech tree. But what? I was seriously confused as a noob since I had no idea what I needed now vs. what I might need in a few months. There are prereqs for every piece of equipment, and it's hard to figure out a decent way to get what you want to do. However, when you do figure it out you can make any character you want. (And then have everything you own wast
skill-based system is same as class-based (Score:3, Insightful)
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You end up tweaking a few variables to make your character fit your playstyle a little better, and it's nice to be able to do that --
Experiential vs. Formalized Knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it would take a spellcaster longer to level if they're focused on hand-to-hand combat (it would actually happen incidentally, through repated use of the skills that are associated with their class, but when they do eventually level, they would have the ability to increase their strength significantly more than if they had focused exclusively on spellcasting.
I find this to be a surprisingly effective compromise, and it reflects somewhat on the nature of experience and growth in the real world (minus the spellcasting, of course). By this I mean that if I were a surgeon, the more surgeries I participate in, the higher my skill is likely to grow, and therefore, my standing as a surgeon (overly simplified example, yes). This does not, however, preclude the option I have for taking tae kwon do lessons and improving my martial skills. Since I don't make my living as a martial artist however, even though my ability is improving in other arenas, it does not reflect back on my ability as a surgeoun.
Consider it as 'career track' versus 'personal development'.
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Actually, I would say that Oblivion encourages power-leveling. And in many ways it makes some form of power-leveling necessary. I'm not normally a power gamer. Oblivion made me a power gamer. I usually just take whatever exprience/skill/eq. the game gives me and stay away from fights I know I can't win until I am ready. The Arena was great for that, but
I like pure skills that reinforce neighboringskils (Score:2)
Ultima Online (Score:2, Interesting)
I quit UO years ago
Skills rock (Score:3, Insightful)
Now it's just like any other EQ/WoW clone, you are locked into single professions without any multi classing. Only 2 even have talent trees.
Back when I started SWG (pre-CU, before all this revamp the game to death nonsense started) it didn't even HAVE levels. Now the AI is so braindead that damage/defense is basically higher CL - lower CL. Pre-CU it wasn't.
Hybridized (Score:2)
Whew that was a lot of reading. :-)
I definitely agree with those experts. My own observation was that Battlefield 2's introduction of the dynaclass system was an interesting evolution in the characteristically static realm of online shooters. You could choose your "class" every time you spawned, allowing yourself the freedom of experimentation without the punishing nature of a repetitive level grind (commonly found in MMORPGs). Dynaclasses also provided a mechanism for filling vacant roles within the gam
MMO's (Score:2, Interesting)
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Not really no, SWG had created a rather crappy game (a game that didn't live either to it's promises or to it's franchise), and then they pulled the usual SOE trick: if it's broken, fix it... with a hammer... a big one...
That's the path they usually took with any i
No classes is the problem (Score:3, Funny)
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Best argument for class based systems I heard... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, look at the real life. Do we say that some employee can do a bit of accounting, some direct marketing, little bit of sales and has extensive skills in drafting legal contracts? So how do you find a job for such person? How do you talk about him? How can you put him in a social context? Or do you just say he is a "Contract Lawyer" with some extra business skills? We simply tend to stereotype that is how our brain works.
The problem with "choices" (Score:4, Insightful)
When playing D&D there's either the core classes or multiple prestige, which works well except that there's always players who find the one way to get a character who at level 10 is so significantly more powerful than everyone else in the power that it's boring to play because the game becomes "hide behind loserboy".
Classes allow a simple way to balance a game, certain classes have certain skills and roles. A rogue might be able to solo in WoW but with a healer he's a lot more effective. A paladin can do well healing or fighting but he's not a master at either.
Imagine if you could have a stealth enabled caster who could equip heavy armor and knows the strongest magic in the game? It'd be unstopable but some open skill systems basically allow that. The secret is to give the players the option of any skill but to require specialization at the very least. Of course most games would even balk at that because that's going back towards Classes again.
Honestly The question is more what works best in your game? In a single player game do you want there to always be a solution to the problem so you can beat the game? Then you'll want classes. Do you want the character to possibly placed in a situation where they can't complete the game? Then skills will be you're option.
Or instead you can constantly play the game and change the rules over and over but by the third rule change many of your fans will start walking away because if there's one thing the fan's want is stability, especially stability with their own characters.
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Imagine if you could have a stealth enabled caster who could equip heavy armor and knows the strongest magic in the game? It'd be unstopable but some open skill systems basically allow that."
that shows an incredible lack of imagination.
Why would the player be the only one like that? What's the limitation of the armor? In DnD its what -12 to stealth and -6 to casting?
Personally I use SavageWorlds.
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Give me a stealth any-character that isn't completely revealed to the entire zone by a n00b mage casting his first level spell "Reveal Invisible." It was that way in EQ, it's that way in WoW. What is the point of having a Rogue who can hide and backstab if the lowliest of n00bs can defeat his advantage with a starter spell?
It makes no sense at all.
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Btw in WoW A 10 warrior can probably take on a 15 caster if he knows what he's doing, an
skills vs classes just masks the real issue (Score:2)
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You can enjoy some variety if you try for a quicker game or for c
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I can sum up that post in two sentences:
"I love Nethack. I don't know anything about any game other than Nethack."
Besides, Mission: Thunderbolt is better.
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I'll have to check out Mission: Thunderbolt. Looks pretty cool
One last thing: I'm a physicist, and if anytime a physics article comes up a bunch people can post "So I guess
Final Fantasy XI (Score:2)
classes win out in team play (Score:3, Insightful)
if an MMO is trying to get smaller groups, then perhaps this is fine, but if you'd like a more traditional group of Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Thief each with their own defined roles, then classes are the way to go.
Player skills vs. level grinding (Score:2)
Many skill based MMORPGs.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen this behavior in both (the original flavour) SWG and UO.
no classes (Score:2)
Over time I've realized that I'm strongly anti-class. In this postmodern world, I just find it incredibly difficult as a dm to construct, and as a player to believe in, a world where everybody has to fit cookie cutter stereotypes. Where vampires are evil, magicians can't cast healing spells, and clerics must use bludgeoning weapons, just...well...because. Of course this leads to class-system equivocating in the form of "class spra
Another advantage of classes: (Score:2)
The most interesting gameplay I've ever seen in an MMO was Nexus TK [nexustk.com]. Four classes: Warrior, Rogue, Poet, Mage. Warrior and Rogue are fighters, and early in the game (before level 99), they are useful for completely different things. Rogues can "ambush" around creatures, and can thus charge straight past a huge hoard o
Get what you use (Score:2)
The idea I've had floating around in my head is to link progression with abilities used. Every time you make a melee attack, there's
Class Offers Some Advantages to the Designer (Score:2)
Class also offers the player a clear definition of their role in a group - and thus the ability to choose that role. Essentially they all boil down to the D
Tweak the numbers! Tweak the Numbers! (Score:2)
They don't care about role playing, or talking with friends (unless it's for the following reason). They care about tweaking their numbers and making their characters more efficient "systems" at doing things designed to to reward the "ahhh" pathway in the brain and start the cycle all over again.
Kill monster, get gold, buy armour, so you can kill bigger mon
That freedom is only virtual (Score:2)
In fact, caused by game dynamics, the truth is more often than not a few "working" templates you can choose from. Usually, when you go for generalism, you suffer the "jack of all trades, master of none" fate. Yes, you can heal, fight and cast, but you still suck at any
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I guess... but at last count, optimizing for speed in training, it'd take you over 20 years to get all the skills to maximum levels. So, for practical game play, you have to pick a path you want to go.
This actually works OK because you start off in frigates and advancement to other combat ships generally builds on that skill (you have to have Frigates trained to level 4 before you can fly a cruiser, and you have to have cruiser to le
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