Does it benefit RP to make the game harder?

[Pestilence]

I have been seeing in a lot of threads that a lot of people feel that roleplaying should be enforced by making the game elements so hard it\'s practicly unplayable and in this way only be left with people who roleplay.

Now ofcourse this makes you wonder why you should make a game anyhow, but my question is if this would really work.

If you make the game harder will people start roleplaying? Will the \"powerlevelers\" leave? Personally I think not.

I think that if you make the game elements harder you will only get more powerlevelers and the people you lose are the people who like to roleplay but also have a little fun playing the game now and then.

The powerlevelers wont leave becuase now their work pays of for real. It takes a lot of effort to become strong in a skill and so you will have to train endlessly to get anywhere.

The ones leaving will be the ones annoyed by this will be the ones who roleplay but not all the time. They\'ll see that their efforts towards training something will not be enough to really make a dent and will probably give up on it. Some may turn to roleplaying, but I think many wont find that alone satisfying and in the end PS will lose these players.

PS would then be really be consisting of two groups. One of powerlevelers and one of hardcore roleplayers. This is ofcourse asuming PS has enough roleplayers who actually are ingame enough to still have a community with the loss of the \"semiroleplayers\"

[Karyuu]

I think making \"leveling\" so hard as to be nearly impossible is a silly idea, and I doubt it\'ll ever come to that point :) The thing is that it should take far longer than just 2-3 months to reach the max in any skill, at least in my opinion. I do agree with you - making things more difficult won\'t really solve anything. The correct \"fix\" would be to include or require as much roleplay in everything as possible - perhaps have a sort of fame system that develops from doing in-game quests or events that will greatly influence speed or difficulty of training, or actively invite players into RP sessions, etc. Or perhaps have such a wide variety of skills (or splitting skill trees) that it would give players way too much to explore without sticking around long enough to see that roleplaying will benefit them as well. If that made any sense.. :)

[spydirweb]

personally, the overwhelming recent push to really enforce the roleplaying is... a little offensive to me.

I\'m exactly the kind of person you described.  I really only RP when there\'s people around RP\'ing, because I don\'t see the point in offending them by not RP\'ing.  The thing is, this game won\'t go ANYWHERE big with strict RPing rules.  It\'s fine now because the game\'s still under such heavy development, but once it gets to the point where all that\'s left are little bug fixes, expanding the world, and making the servers more stable (AKA: what would be the release time for a normal, paying MMORPG)...you won\'t be able to get many new players.  it really pushes people off to join get in game and suddenly realize \"...I\'ve gotta RP? screw this.\"  I showed PS to a couple of my friends that play WoW and they said \"...it looks like a good time killer, but I can\'t see ever getting into it.\"  It\'s pretty simple.  You won\'t get the AVERAGE gamer.  All you\'re going to get is people that want to RP, and all this work with all this other stuff seems pointless when all it turns into is a bloated chat client with pretty graphics.

[Karyuu]

That\'s the point though - catching the eyes of people who want to roleplay, or are at least willing to learn. This isn\'t a p2p game, so it doesn\'t matter if the game doesn\'t attract thousands upon thousands of players. The community is looking for certain types of people, and that\'s pretty much the way it\'s been since the PS project began. There\'s no big rush or push to attract anyone who doesn\'t find roleplay interesting.

[Pestilence]

I agree. I think one should think of ways to make roleplaying more appealing. How exactly is still open for discussion ofcourse as there are many who have feelings on this (specially with the new RMS )

*edit*
Way to slow in my reply it seems

To comment I do agree with Karyuu that the games goal is that roleplaying is a large part of it. If you dont like that I\'m sorry but then you indeed chose the wrong game. On the other hand roleplaying doesn\'t exclude the game element and would find it a waste of time for the devs to make a \"fancy looking chatbox\"

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by Pestilence
I have been seeing in a lot of threads that a lot of people feel that roleplaying should be enforced by making the game elements so hard it\'s practicly unplayable and in this way only be left with people who roleplay.

Now ofcourse this makes you wonder why you should make a game anyhow, but my question is if this would really work.

If you make the game harder will people start roleplaying? Will the \"powerlevelers\" leave? Personally I think not.

I think that if you make the game elements harder you will only get more powerlevelers and the people you lose are the people who like to roleplay but also have a little fun playing the game now and then.

The powerlevelers wont leave becuase now their work pays of for real. It takes a lot of effort to become strong in a skill and so you will have to train endlessly to get anywhere.

The ones leaving will be the ones annoyed by this will be the ones who roleplay but not all the time. They\'ll see that their efforts towards training something will not be enough to really make a dent and will probably give up on it. Some may turn to roleplaying, but I think many wont find that alone satisfying and in the end PS will lose these players.

PS would then be really be consisting of two groups. One of powerlevelers and one of hardcore roleplayers. This is ofcourse asuming PS has enough roleplayers who actually are ingame enough to still have a community with the loss of the \"semiroleplayers\"

I agree.  There are a lot of misconceptions flying around here among people who should probably know better.  Some are on the dev team, many are not.

The mechanics that happen to lend themselves to power levelling and combat do also serve role-playing.  They shouldn\'t be eliminated because they happen to be a part of combat and grinding.  Instead, using them as a part of RP should be encouraged.

[Zan]

Making the game harder won\'t simply fix things no, like has been said. Making levelling up in the old fashioned way, camp monsters to get experience and money, harder while providing an easier way of levelling up tied in with roleplaying  is something that could work though.

Roleplaying and working together to improve has to be rewarded, while mindless levelling (or grinding) should become less and less important.

As for the skills and their limits ... we only have a very limited ammount of skills right now and of those we have some hardly have any effect at all which leads to people maxing out a few quickly.
I think that raising their limits and making them progressively harder near the end would already fix a lot. Since the previous wipe we noticed an increase in trias and skillpoints required in certain skills making it very hard to get off the ground without any powerful weapons. But the most used skills and also the stats were kept easier and stayed easy as they progressed. Making skills and stats rather easy in the beginning but harder and harder as they reach their end keeps the new players around but makes maxing something out as good as impossible.

It\'s realistic that you learn a lot about something in the beginning but as you know more and more there will be a lot less improvement.

Of course there are the RM\'s too now who will be rewarding roleplaying so you can get experience and money without having to hack up hundreds of rats.