The problem with the level system in AO (long)
The purpose of this post is to try and document the problem with the way the level system works in AO today. I am going to compare it to another system used in some MMORPGs, the skill system.
First of all I must say that I have not played any MMORPG that uses this system (the skill system), so I am using the knowledge I have from reading about SWG and what I have heard from other players who play games that use it. Therefor I might be wrong about some things, but it is not important to the thread...
The skill system is a very interesting system. It is very simple, but it prevents one of the main problems with the level system the way it is used in AO. You don't have to kill anything if you don't want to. If you want to be a weapon smith, you just have to make weapons to become better at it.
Of course there is a problem with this system too. You could sit down and start making a 1000 weapons, all the same weapon, over and over again untill you became really good at this skill. It is also kind of repetative.
Moving on to the level system, this is one of its strengths. Ideally you could be doing a lot of different stuff to achieve a level, and then you could use all of this level to become better at for example weapon smithing. So you wouldn't have to just sit there and make weapons.
But the way the level system has been implemented in AO, this is unfortunately not the case, and we are getting to the point of this thread now. In AO the only real way to level is by killing stuff. You cannot really get enough XP from for example making weapons to make it worthwhile. AO is VERY repetative. To get better at fighting, you must fight. To get better at weapon smithing, you must fight. To get better at building implants, you must fight. To get better at healing, you must fight. To get better at running, you must fight. (You get the point, right?)
So the level system, that really is a great idea in the first place, is really not working very well the way it is used in AO. The only way to achieve a level is by killing.
I remember in the old days of AO when you could get lots of XP running missions. You didn't have to fight anything, just complete the mission, and you would get the mission reward. So you didnt have to kill anything to level. They nerfed this, and with good reason. Of course it was not working like intended. Leveling was waaay to easy. You could easily call it an exploit.
Still, it was a step in the right direction of the ideal implementation of the level system. Letting people do lots of different stuff to achieve a level that you then use to put points into different skills. It is a system that allows for great diversity in gameplay, because there would be many ways to level. If you are an engineer, you could make weapons in your little workshop in Omni Trade, giving it to your trader friend to distribute on the market weekdays, and then go off hunting in the weekends, or maybe pick up a few missions for your faction now and then.
Every profession could do what he is good at to gain a level, and every player could do a lot of different things, instead of repetative stuff like doing team missions.
So how could this be implemented in AO? Simply just let every profession get XP from doing what they are good at. Doctors from healing, agents from sneaking and assassinating. Traders from trading and doing tradeskills, fixers from hacking computers and acquiring items and information. And make it so that we get as much XP for doing it as we would from fighting, allowing professions not meant to be good at fighting to level without ever even using the "Q" button.
To make every profession a bit more unique you could even let f.ex. soldiers, which is a fighting profession, get more XP from fighting than a trader. And then let the trader get more XP from tradeskills than a soldier doing tradeskills. The agent would get more XP from sneaking than other professions sneaking and so on...
Now this sounds all good, right? Of course not. Well, yes, it sounds good, but of course there are some major problems with it. It could easily be exploited to level very fast. Therefor it has to be implemented right. If you increased XP for making a weapon enough to make it worthwhile for a trader to do it to level, it would not work. He could just make a 1000 weapons and level many levels without any risk at all.
To prevent stuff like this, and using tradeskills as an example, I would first of all add a few things to the tradeskill process (this is just a suggestion, flame me all you want for it). What if you could use the players tradeskill as some sort of attack rating. Whenever you combine something to make f.ex. a weapon, there will always be a chance of failure. The higher attack rating the player haves, the lower chance of failure. If he fails, the process might blow up, hurting the player severely. This would add a bit of risk, and make raising tradeskills just as important as raising rifle skill is for an agent to do more damage.
SWG has a wonderful system for tradeskills. If you make a weapon, you dont get any reward for it. But the minute someone starts to use the weapon you created, you get your XP for it (or in the case of SWG, your weapon smithing skill will increase). This prevents people from making a 1000 weapons to increase the skill.
Another way to implement "the perfect implementation of the level system" and to avoid possible ways of exploiting it, can be showed in the following quote from a thread I made on the professionals forum about profession related quests. The idea can be adopted to missions too. It is basically all about letting professions do quests/missions that involves what every profession is good at, and then give them XP on completion of the mission.
For example, the agent could get a mission to sneak into a clan base and get some information from the clans, and then when he returned with it, on completion, he would get an amount of XP calculated from every guard he successfully sneaked by. If he just ran in or killed everyone to get to the information, he would not get XP at all.
Anyway, here is the quote. The thread was called "Quests, random and profession related" and is really a thread about quests, but it can be used to showcase how FunCom could let us do other stuff than killing to get XP and level.
These are all just a few examples. It is just to show the problem with "the perfect implementation of the level system" and suggest how it could be worked around. Back to the main point of this thread, the level system in AO atm, makes AO a very boring game because the only way to level is by killing stuff.I am glad to see that we are finally starting to get more quests in the game, it is something else to do when not missioning.
But I think that the current quest system needs some work. These are some problems I see with the way it is now:
- Camping. Lots of useless waiting for stuff to spawn, and lots of people camping them. Basically the players with the most friends gets loot.
- Guides. The quests are very easy to make guides for as soon as someone has completed it once. IMO the quests should be impossible to write guides for (I will get back to how later).
- Very tedious. I havent tried the new quests in 14.4 yet, but the Alvin quest was very much all about killing (and sometimes tagging before killing). Why not make some more profession related quests where you let every profession use what they are good at? If I want to kill, I do a mission.
- To few quests at the same time. When you introduce quests, introduce 10-20 different ones at the same time, so you dont have all of Rubi-Ka doing one quest at the same time.
- Tokens. Since they are so predictable, and give lots of tokens, people use them to farm tokens.
So how do I think that quests can be improved? It's all based on the idea of randomness. Take a look at this example-quest:
You walk up to NPC A in Omni Trade and start talking to him. He tells you about his friend (NPC B) that needs some help making an item. He has the parts, but he is not skilled in tradeskills (this could be a profession related quest for traders or engies). He tells you where his friend lives, and what his name is.
So far it's all very much like the quests we already have, but this is where my little idea of randomness comes in. In the quests we have now NPC B would be stationed somewhere all the time for people to sit and camp. But this quest spawns a new NPC B everytime you do the quest. On a random location. This is to prevent camping and guides. As soon as you have completed the quest he will give you reward and despawn again.
If this was a quest aimed at adventurers you might wanna give out some clues on how to find NPC B, but as this one is more aimed at tradeskillers, the quest will give you an exact location. You go there and talk to NPC B. There is a problem. Someone has stolen one of the parts, and you have to find it before you can assemble the item for him. He gives you all the other parts and a location for where you can find the missing part. Everytime you do the quest you could get different parts as the missing part to prevent people from stocking up on that part.
Normally, since this is a quest aimed at tradeskillers, it wouldnt involve any killing, but I need it for the example, so here we go: We all know there are lots of camps where mobs wander around on the planet. We used to hunt there earlier, before missions became so dominant. When NPC B tells you to get the missing part, the quest randomly chooses between all the mob-camps on the planet and gives you the location of one of them. As long as you have this quest, one of the mobs in this camp will drop the missing part when you kill him. He will only drop it to you, and only when you have this quest (This part might be a bit complicated to make, I dont know. I am not a game developer...).
So you go there, kill the mobs, and find the missing part. You have to assemble it using normal tradeskill processes, and then deliver it back to NPC B. He says thank you, and tells you to go to his friend NPC A. He might have a reward for you. NPC B then despawns. You go to NPC A and get your reward. The reward must of course reflect the amount of work the quest is.
This more or less moves us away from the "static" quests, and onto something that you might wanna call "dynamic" quests. There might still be uses for the static quests, but they have too many issues the way they work now.
I think the most important thing here is the random factor. It prevents camping and guides. It prevents token-exploits, and it is challenging. And by letting players use the skills their profession is good at, you actually give people an option to killing. It really is a shame that with all these professions and features in the game, the only way to level is by killing, which is really something just a few of the professions are meant to be good at. Imagine an AO where your crat didnt need to carry a weapon at all. He could wander about looking for quests specifically aimed at his profession, without killing, where he could make enough XP to justify the work and the time it takes.
My agent would love to do some quests that requires him to go undercover and get information from the enemy, without having to kill anyone. One of my specialities is to sneak, so why not let me use it? Quests could also be used to help the storyline move forward.
This is all just my idea of quests should be. You all might have other opinions, but it all boils down to random, and profession related quest. It might be just a dream that will never come true, but I am sure the citizens of Rubi-Ka would love this. People are really getting sick and tired of missions, and missions, and missions. Oh, did I remember to say missions?
And like I mentioned earlier, please introduce at least 10-20 quests at the same time when you do introduce them. There should be so many quests all over the planet that even the most hardcore powergamers couldnt do them all
The way I see it, a level system where you can get enough XP to level from other stuff than killing too, beats the crap out of the skill system. It is how I would like to see it in AO.
I hope to get a constructive discussion on this, because I feel it is an important issue, and maybe the main problem with AO today.
