expierience gaining

[zinder]

I think you should achieve expierience in a skill, when you use the skill. Also i would like trainers for some of the combat and non-combat skills. (here is athread about that.)

for the non-combat skills, it would be not hard. A formula, where you put in the complexity/difficulty and time and it returns the expierience value.  When you was succesfull, you get it full. If you failed, you get only a part of it, perhaps  40%. For some (esp stealth skills) it would be dificult, but i think this is a good way for non-combat skills.

For combat skills, i believe,  it is a bit more complex.  You can get the expierience for the hit, the kill or the attack.
IMO the kill isnt a good way. You know the issues with \"kill stealing\" for example in DAoC.
IMO the hit, i refer to the damage dealed, is a good way for the normal weapons. But with magic you get problems. You would have to differentiate between bufffs, heals, anti-buffs and the damage dealing spells.
Thats why i would prefer to get expierience for the attack. You get the amount similar to non-combat skills
by a formula and for a hit you get full, for a miss you get a part, perhaps 10%. But in all cases lot lower then the non-combat value.

[Ravna]

2 types of level:

1) general level (affects stats like hp, strenght etc in general)

2) Skill level (affects a certain skill, and the corresponding status)


Experience should be gained upon succesfully doing something (like: healing 100HP to some-one would give you 1exp in healing skill and 1 in general) for combat this is almost the same like this: monster 100 hp you deal 30 damage, friend deals 60, some random player deals 10, as soon as the monster dies, you get 0.3 exp for your sword skill, your friend 0.6 for his bow skill, and the random player gets 0.1 for his fire-magic (and offcourse the same amount of exp to general)  
note: the experience is only gained after the monster is dead, so no 1 slash and teleport out to get exp, the monster heals completely as soon as all players near it are gone (by teleport or death) the way to distibute exp whould allow people to team up and help, yet get their fair share, and prevent kill stealing situations.

Now on higher levels you can eighter increase the amount of exp needed for a level, or decrease the amount gained.

Also I think you should not limit levels to (lets say) 99 because this will partially block the expension of your character, so I whould suggest that levels should increase in power unlimited, BUT that getting levels above 30 whould be a little bit more dificult, above 60 whould be hard, above 90 whould be even harder, that way players who play 24/7 should be able to continue to grow, while the differences do not get enormous straight away, it is true that some players will be powerfull, but you can always team up and get 3 players with an easy to get skill level 30 to kick the level 90 player.
I do realise that in the end there might be level 150 players, who whould be as strong as 5 (relatively new) players, but since there will be tons of those I think it shout not be a problem and balance out nicely, provided that getting higher skilles gets more and more dificult (so that even people who play 60 hours a week whould not get more then 1 level a week at high levels.

Also because you keep sword and bow and magic etc skills seperated, you can not get an enourmous healing skill by just slaying a dragon and direct the exp to the healing skill, this way, if you want to be good at other skills, you will have to use them to, while (especially with new skills) you whould almost not increase you general level.


ok, I hope I got it typed out understandible enough any reactions from players and / or dev\'s about if this can be implemented and what you think about it are (as always) welcome

[tygerwilde]

heh, uh huh, ok, if I get fourty percent experience as a blacksmith for a failure... ok, heres what I\'m doing first time they let me use my skills


I\'m gonna go buy myself some platinum, and try to forge myself a great platemail suit. man, the experience is rollin in now!!!

see why that just don\'t quite work? I\'d be a master blacksmith right away... however, yes, you should have to use most of your skills to raise them, I think you should get some free xp, just because you learn from what\'s going on around you, but it shouldn\'t be anything like what you get in AC, AC let you ultimately do whatever you wanted, a fighter could be a master mage without ever casting a spell... it was a bit rediculous

[Ravna]

ok, it was not to smart of me to post actually right under an other conept but it seemed less spammy to do so... your reply is about the first post, however if you read my post wich is here to, you\'ll see me clearly stating \"Experience should be gained upon succesfully doing something \" in other words, the second post is a whole new concept in wich I tried to undercatch all \"weaknesses\" that were in the post made by zinder.

note: weaknesses are just an opinion, anyway, I whould really like it if you also read my post and told me what you think of that one

[tygerwilde]

I don\'t have a problem with gaining experience for failures, it\'s called learning from your mistakes, my big problem lies in the powerlvling thing, I mean, in AC, it\'s possible to gain 50 lvls with one kill, and I know that lvl is a moot point in this game, but there\'s going to be an equivelency thing anyway... if someone can get 10 points of blacksmithing with one failure there\'s a problem, every skill should be difficult to achieve points in, you shouldn\'t be able to play for an hour and become an indispencible part of the community. am I clear here, or am I rambling?

[Ravna]

ehm.. your actually not even reading...

read the SECOND post that one has an entirely different concept then teh first one and also catches some of the things you discribe as \"power leveling\"

[Yann]

I just wanted to say that i like your idea a lot, Ravna, it looks like a very good exp system.

[Ravna]

Thanks :)

I am thinking of writing it out completely during my (computerless) 3 week holiday in france (if there is interest in a full system AKA if there allready is one and no-one cares, I\'ll save myself the work :)

[tygerwilde]

well, I did read it, and I read it again, but it makes very little mention of recieving random xp that I saw, and a lot of this is about that random xp, basically what was said in the first post is that there should be none, whatsoever. I honestly think there should be a small amount of random xp, just not as much as is given in other skill based games

this is all I saw mentioning random xp in your post

Also because you keep sword and bow and magic etc skills seperated, you can not get an enourmous healing skill by just slaying a dragon and direct the exp to the healing skill

what I think about random xp goes like this, rather than like 90 percent of xp going to free spending, maybe 3% of all points earned could be used for what you want. That way, if you go out and kill that dragon for 1000000 xp, nearly all of it goes into your defence and sword skill. you\'ve now got like 30k to divide among any other skills you want. it\'s not a whole lot now is it?

I do love the idea of splitting the experience based on damage

oh, and one thing bothered me...

so that even people who play 60 hours a week whould not get more then 1 level a week at high levels.

man, this would hurt, casual gamers, who only play sometimes an hour or two a week, would get sick of this to the point they\'d quit right away, not only elite, 60+hours a week players should be able to play any game

in general I liked it, but I had to point out it\'s weak spots

[Ravna]

well, what I said was: the higher you level the more dificult it whould be to get a level up, this way the players who play only 2 hours a week, whould have in 5 months about level 35, while the player who play much (20 hours a week) whould not have (10Xtime = level 350) but just level 56 or so (because the higher level are more dificult to get) that way, the \"not so much time in a week player\" whould not be that far away from a \"much time in a week player\" while if you whould not make higher levels more dificult the difference whould be enormous. (and yes, people who play 60 hours a week whould get a big amount of level ups the first few weeks, but later on it will slow down to prevent the enourmous differences in level (as explained above))

I hope that explained your concern a bit.

And about the random xp, actually my post made completely NO mention of it, and this:

------
Also because you keep sword and bow and magic etc skills seperated, you can not get an enourmous healing skill by just slaying a dragon and direct the exp to the healing skill
-----
 is not about random ex, but about the absence of it :)
Because, well asuming it was there, you could use you sword skill to slay monsters and improve you healing power? now that whould be weird....  however, if your general level raises, you also get some magic points from that (so in a certain way it is there allready, it\'s just not that you get a better skill)

edit: finetuning + spelling

[Slipha]

I thank there should be a timer exp system

For having made a chr you will be gaining about 1x exp( reletivly low) this timer will constantly raise so in first level it would take about 20 min not doing anything

for those of you that cant wait and want to play would gain about x10 make your way out of level 1 in about  2 min (nice)

But people still like to afk so for those people that actualy do things make it x50 place a timer for what you fight on how long you will have x50 like if you just killed some realy weak monster you would have it for like 15 seconds if you kill like one of the toughest monsters in the game have it last 5 min this will work similar for crafts. if you build up enough you can go role play and many other things

the exp timer would never pass 5 hours to insure that people play enough.

well even if your bored of the game you will gain exp so its so inviting to come back. makes the game real inviting even if you lose intrest.

For each level multiply the time it takes by 5 so as to make sure it will take awhile at higher levels.

Make sure to include a max level like 255 just so someone cant just create a chr then come back like 5040 sometime next year or 6 that would be dull.

as for trainers? what i thought combat would alow anyone to train in any combat style other than that i thank your refering to professions. i thought thats what chosing a predeturmined profession was all about so not everyone could become a blacksmith.

other than that people gaining skills and not playing would mean a lack in money all the more reason to play right.

[tygerwilde]

first of all, you\'re splitting hairs, the absence of it is still a mention of random xp, you\'re discussing it, whether it\'s the presence of, or absence of...

\"Because, well asuming it was there, you could use you sword skill to slay monsters and improve you healing power? now that whould be weird.... \"

the problem with this is that there actually is a reason that you have random xp in so many games. It\'s called learning through observation.
Have you ever been in a situation where you\'re standing around and someone takes up some kind of activity, and you see to a small extent what they\'re doing? well, in a game, things are going on all around you, which you could learn from, a mage casting a spell, a healer healing a party member, that weird guy in the corner making fishing lures. :p All these things could be learned to an extent by watching them take place, however, the game would have to keep track of a lot more things happening in order to actually determine WHAT you happen to be watching, therefore all of these things fall under the catchall of random xp, you kill the dragon, get the xp and determine for yourself what you want to spend it on, be it healing or learinin a few nifty spells

my big problem is that with random xp being so high in some games, two things can happen...

either you make an uber character that can\'t be beaten except by other uber characters

or you make yourself a nice gimp that can\'t beat a raging gobling.

I just hope the devs can find a nice balance somewhere between, I think that 3 percent random xp would be more than enough to allow for a bit of customization, yet wouldn\'t put up so much xp that it unbalances the game for those that want to have fairly unique abilities

[lostprophet]

I like the two level system, maybe one for the specific level, then a mutiplier would be added to you roverall level which would increase buy like 0.05 every time you levelled up in anything. This multiplier would affect all skills.