The Dilemma of Level vs. Skill In MMOs 463
Karen Hertzberg writes "Since MMORPGs became a mainstream medium, players have debated the two primary methods of advancement. Which is better? Is it the level-based system that is so dominant in today's MMORPGs, or the lesser-used skill-based system? This has been a strong subject of debate on many forums, blogs, and gaming sites for as long as the genre has existed. Ten Ton Hammer's Cody 'Micajah' Bye investigates the two concepts and gathers input from some of the brightest minds in the gaming industry about their thoughts on the two systems of advancement."
Relatedly, I've seen a growing trend of players saying that such games don't really take much skill at all. The standard argument is that it just boils down to "knowing how to move" or "knowing when to hit your buttons." In the MMO community, people often make references to FPS or RTS games, saying they have a higher skill cap. However, the same complaints also come from within those communities, with comments like "you just need to know the map," or "it's all about a good build order." At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
What about the third option? (Score:3, Insightful)
3. It's all about how much money you fork over for premium content.
Um, that's why they are games, not sports (Score:3, Insightful)
They are games for a reason. They're entertaining. They do not require a great deal of skill, or they would be a sport. While I am sure there are plenty of us who like to tease ourselves into believing we have "l337 sk1lz", the truth of the matter is that we are still involved in low base entertainment designed to appeal to as many people as possible. Successful games are the ones that sell the most, thus they have to be designed for the lowest common denominator.
There are plenty of other past times that do involve skill.
and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this different from any skill? Skill is the knowledge and execution of when/what/how to do things. I can bake a great loaf of bread if I follow a recipe exactly, but I'm not a savant who can stray from the recipe and make novel things taste good. Is following a recipe skill? Some would say yes, some would say no. Same with the "skill" of grinding your elf warrior to high scores or levels.
I was hoping from the title that this would be a discussion of "advancement through earned level rankings, or advancement through earned skill attributes," you know, actual game design theory.
skill? (Score:1, Insightful)
skill? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say that this is the definition of skill for an online game.
Character vs. Player skill (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like the article is talking about character advancement mechanics being based on skills (you use a sword, your guy gets better with a sword) instead of levels (you character suddenly gets better at everything). The editor writeup, however, is a commentary on player skill.
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:5, Insightful)
Along those lines... chess is just about knowing how to move pieces around the board.
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:5, Insightful)
Now going a step beyond that there is a difference between a person who is skilled at something and a person who is skilled and innovative. A skilled player can go online and read/watch tutorials on how to beat the hardest monsters in a game and then execute those (we call that person a cook). They have a skill - they know the game, they know their characters and the know how to follow instructions. Just like the cook who knows their kitchen (the game setting), knows their tools (there characters), and knows their recipie (the tutorial). Great let them back us a cake. The skilled innovator is the person who goes into an unknown situation, say a boss that nobody has ever encountered, and figures out a way to beat it (we call that the master chef). They have a skill - they know the game, they know their character, and they know how to solve puzzles.
I would rather be the skilled innovator but both types have skill.
The original article is just a way for someone to get posted on
Re:usage based (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends if you mean that chess is simply knowing where each piece can legally move or if skill in chess is knowing when and where to move those pieces around the board.
Fix Summary! (Score:4, Insightful)
Please fix the summary. Nobody is going to RTFA and now we'll never have an interesting discussion. Stats vs Twitch is an old convo that happens every time games are even discussed on slashdot. Ultima Online skill system vs Everquest leveling is something that would be interesting though.
I still favor Asheron's Call. (Score:5, Insightful)
You had levels which gave you experience points which you used to buy up skills with. The levels gave you points in which to buy skills. At first the points to buy skills come quickly but quickly tapered off to 1 skill point per 5 levels, the highest priced skill was 16. Since not all skills shared the same attributes you could not be totally reckless with your points. Also, buying up the skill also slowed as each point cost more and more experience.
What did it lead to that was negative. Well since both stats and skills cost experience to raise people would have absurd starting stats. You initially were given 270 points to spend across six stats (or was it seven?) which meant that 10/100/10/10/100/100 combos appeared. (think strength endurance quickness coordination intel and self:wisdom) . It was easy to over come the low stats with just a few levels worth of experience to bring them up to comfort levels. The reasoning behind this was that there was a cap to what you could spend experience wise in any stat - once it was hit no more could be bought so you started it as high as possible. Stats contributed to the base rating of each skill you bought - which again had a cap on how much they could go up.
Overall it was a great classless system. It however was placed in a world of great lore but the mobs were different enough to keep people from readily connecting to it. Tradeskills worked just like any other skill so it was not uncommon to have trade only characters who got experience by pass up through allegiances. Initially allegiances acted like the worst MLM, the guy at the top got a portion of everyone below, at different ranks in the chain you got percentages of everyone below you. They tweaked it later to prevent the huge trees people built out of allegiances to exploit experience pass up.
By giving people distinct classes and levels it does provide an ease of entry for new players. They know their role and how to progress. It does make for a simpler game - which hopefully has complexities elsewhere to make up for it . Think WOW. While many begrudge the ease of play they ignore the complexity of raiding.
Re:usage based (Score:4, Insightful)
Your solution here doesn't really offer anything better than the current grinding systems. In fact, it makes it even more frustrating.
You move the end-of-battle award to mid-battle and for some classes, you would reward them based on the play of others?
To take one of your examples: A healer gaining XP based on the party members health. So, the goal here would be to consistently let your party get as low on health as possible before healing them? And you would penalize them for keeping everyone full up? I can't think of a single worse reward mechanism for healers.
Re:Both are bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Iduno. TF2 has done this very very well. Character determines many things, including how high you can jump. If you spend a lot of time at the game, you get new capabilities. But every new capability is a tradeoff, and a beginning player using your items wouldn't necessarily do any better than without. If there were RPGs where time spent provided you more very well balanced tradeoffs to choose between, that would be perhaps interesting. And hard to develop.
Re:usage based (Score:2, Insightful)
....Because its trivial to use a macro to gain combos on monsters?
Tom is saying that there would have to be mechanisms for actual skill in defeating enemies, which calls for an overhaul of the traditional button-mashing system altogether:
Of course, that would require replacing the simple "click here for an attack, you'll automatically hit" system.
Re:usage based (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you misunderstood me. That would be rote playing which I specifically do not want to reward.
It's hard to come up with a good system along this line of thought. The basic idea is that anything that's trivial to do should give trivial (or no) XP. Simply waiting until the others are low on health is trivial to do.
Re:skill? (Score:5, Insightful)
At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
I'd say that this is the definition of skill for an online game.
Oblig. Bruce Lee quote:
Knowing is not enough, you must apply.
Re:Um, that's why they are games, not sports (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree, there IS "skill". It's probably not a useful quantity outside of the game, and unlike some athletic events there is probably a point at which you cannot be more skilled than another person, but there is a huge gap between some players in ability, you can call that skill. Also hardware, latency, etc. also can blur the line between skill and wealth. The problem with this topic is what "skill" means to various people.
The latest trends in MMOGs (which WoW still seems to want to be the frontrunner) is mashing keys fast. The entire design of the latest expansion is the concept of "rotations", be it dps, healing (previously a relatively cerebral job) and tanking. On one hand they've added an element requiring players to mash buttons faster and more accurately (throwing in some proc effects that require you to adapt your rotation periodically). On the other hand they've almost entirely eliminated strategy and situational awareness. But yeah, it plays a lot more like an FPS and there is "skill" in mashing your buttons fast, clicking fast and turning fast.
Then there's FPS skill, which has traditionally been being prepared, fast and accurate, usually in that order.
Skill is increasingly being defined, across genre's in a one size fits all way: a) competitive player versus player, b) a measure of reaction time and ability to manipulate the UI/interface well, c) familiarity with the content (and practice within it) and to a somewhat lesser extent d) familiarity with the boundaries of the simulator in question (not exploits, just how far the rules bend).
Other things that skill could be, and in some genre's should be: a) adaptability to dynamic, unknown situations, b) coordination across groups of people, c) preparation for encounters for which a few datapoints are known, d) how to combine/synergize abilities across classes, and how to make trade-offs as a unit, etc. I play MMOGs primarily for this concept of "skill", although it's been in serious decline.
So I guess I want to undermine the entire thesis of the article. People bitch about "level systems" versus "skill" systems, but often because they aren't playing the same game. Levels in MMOGs are supposed to be about lumping people into similar categories of character ability level, gear and progression, at least in theory. The idea behind levels is a social tool from game designers that helps people identify others with similar interests, to get together and collectively tackle content that is otherwise too difficult for them singly. This is also, not coincidentally, the idea behind the class system! You know for a balanced group you need some tanking, some healing, some slowing (in EQ) and a mix of damage (melee and magic, usually). The class system worked well for helping people identify what element they needed to round out the group, and provided enough class differentiation to make it interesting. This works well in traditional MMOGs where the game is primarily PVE, and where game designers go out of their way to use levels appropriately and define classes well. WoW blurs this a lot, and IMO, screws up the game a lot. In any event, in context of MMOGs, levels != skill. You can have one without the other, and it's absolutely OK.
On the flip side, in an FPS where you are primarily engaged in PVP, it makes a lot less sense to rank people by arbitrary factors such as level (i.e. time spent killing monsters, content completed, etc.) and more sense to lump them into categories that allow like people to interact with like people. A tournament system works here. Of course not all contestants are in the same league as one another, some have better hardware, lower latency connections, more playtime, etc. You don't want people to feel completely outclassed. In boxing/wrestling/etc. you have the concept of "weight class". Perhaps grouping people with similar characteristics and ranking them within their class makes the most sense, providing a good level of adequate comparison of skill, bracketed within boundaries that seem rea
Re:usage based (Score:1, Insightful)
Because its trivial to use a macro to gain combos on monsters?
So you change it so that your combat system isn't a simple "press button -} get sugar water" pavlovian setup.
Simplest way is to make *Ultimate* *Combo* expensive to use. Use a mana/stamina system so you can't grind down the Magma Demon with it. Or more subtly, make it so that using the *U*C* exposes the player to a devastating a counter attack. You *could* grind on the UC, but you'll likely die from it.
A more complicated, but arguably better way is to make the player react to something that happens randomly. Instead of UC being "hit button A, then 3.59 seconds later hit button B", do something like "hit button B when the dot crosses the line (which happens somewhere between 2.5 and 4 seconds after hitting button A)", or "when your hand just rises to the level of the shield (or something similar)". Or more realistically, have the monster respond to your attacks. Instead of standing there like a lump getting hit by laser beams, have him dodge after the first one. You can even have him dodge in different directions, and which attack you need depends on the direction he dodges.
These issues are not insurmountable - they just take a little bit of foresight and effort. Unfortunately, it's easier for the programmers to do the "push button, get XP" rather than do a more interesting, realistic settings.
Anonymous Coward (Score:1, Insightful)
Q: At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
A: When you play EVE online.
Re:usage based (Score:3, Insightful)
To stick with the healing example, it is even worse than that. At some point good play by the other characters would involve them taking little or no damage (the tank that gets really good with his shield/parry?) so there would be no healing required for fights that would still give other characters an opportunity to improve their skills.
In short, the whole "useful use" concept pretty well falls to pieces. Having said that, I must also admit a desire to see an mmo game with advancement based on character skill as opposed to leveling and twitching. My favorite would be the old Runequest system (2nd edition), but I also recognize that would be a very limited niche game.
Re:The Breakdown (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone who has raided well enough knows that raiding doesn't in fact take any skill. It has always been a matter of pressing the right buttons at the right time, and could easily be choreographed by 5 people at 5 computers each.
I was referring to PvP, which in Vanilla Wow, yes, Mage was ALSO an OP class. With Their IWIN button (AP POM PYRO) they nearly 1 shotted every class. Their biggest enemy: a Soul Link Warlock. No mage could outplay an equally "SKILLED" warlock. A very talented and skilled mage could on occaison take out a warlock who wasn't aware of the Deathcoil, fear, and Felhunter IWIN combo.
Re:usage based (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Breakdown (Score:2, Insightful)
I am a hardcore CSS player.
I pity you.
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:3, Insightful)
My boys know that if I caught them using cheat sites or hacks or something I'd lock the computer down completely for a while. I'm a firm believer in earning advancement, and the greater appreciation it gives in success. I have no evidence, but to me cheat sites (and any get-it-now shortcuts for kids) are the beginnings of a pattern of behavior that will lead to compromises in principles for the sake of instant gratification. And that is a recipe for disaster in later life. I would feel uncomfortable with allowing that type of behavior, personaly.
Re:usage based (Score:1, Insightful)
I think a decent system could be built off the parent's suggestions.
In order to encourage players to you know, play together, we could start to stack benefits on them for interacting in the party.
Of course, the point that healers would get more EXP for healing players in desperate need would be a bad idea mind you. Perhaps instead we could use a scaling EXP system for rewarding healing over time. If you have say, healed this player, and he needed a heal, you get EXP. If the player was truly hurt [i.e. you cast a heal that heals 300 hp, and the player had 300 damage, you fully used your heal. If the player had 150 health, you only used half the heal, so half exp reward]
On top of this, to encourage the fighter to work with the healer (say in a system where the fighter doesn't necessarily need a healer, which is common in many MMOs these days, such as WOW) if the Fighter is fighting a monster that has the priest on its hate list [priest debuffed the monster or recently healed the monsters target (the fighter)] then we can assume the fighter is 'tanking' the monster, and reward a % bonus to his EXP gain from attacks on the monster.
To keep the priest from being entirely party independent, they would also need some means of self sufficiency should they decide to solo. [but keep it so if a priest and warrior were to work together, they end up grossing more exp over time.]
One last thought however, rather than reward players immediately, why not combine this reward for action with the old EXP system. BUT rather than have a set EXP benefit for the monster, the EXP is entirely based on what the players had to do to kill the monster, and the EXP reward is added to a pool for the party. Successfully killing the monster concludes the fight [thus requiring players actually KILL something rather than just hit and run really tough monsters]. This EXP is then divided to the party. Now no one would be gaining EXP faster in the party for being a specific class. Everyone is rewarded for playing well [fighters have to combo, priests have to heal].
Re:Dear idiot Slashdot editor (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but you'd expect the submitter to.
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:1, Insightful)
Your cook vs. master chef analogy fits us perfectly except my cook thinks master chef's are dumb.
Chef's innovate because they like to cook. Cook's make food because they like to eat. Problem is, your kid is just hungry. He doesn't like playing, he likes winning; because why earn what you can take?
IANACP, but you might want to make sure that doesn't bleed into other aspects of his life; like work and school.
Re:Um, that's why they are games, not sports (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um, that's why they are games, not sports (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed. It pisses me off how much money is wasted on "professional", college and public school sports. School sports REALLY piss me off. School is there to learn, not for the public to pay for two dozens kids' entertainment on the football team. You want to play sports in school? Then YOUR family should pay for it, not mine.
Re:and baking is just knowing the recipe (Score:3, Insightful)