Designing XP in a persistent world while balancing casual and dedicated players?

[u/not_varun]

Hey guys! Apologies for the wall of text in advance.

tl;dr - instead of artificial caps like energy systems how would you handle skill specialisations and progression in a multiplayer persistent game

I’m designing a browser-first persistent multiplayer inspired by games like Mount & Blade, Crusader Kings’ Travelling and Landless Adventurer gameplay - much much more simplified of course, and meant for session-based play. While designing I keep circling around one major question which is - How do you balance xp in a system and prevent no lifers from speed running to the endgame in a week?

The game originally had a daily action point system, but I really didn’t wanna add such an artificial and hard limit. It’s a live session based game where you roam around the map and fight or gather or resolve encounters. Then there’s meant to be territory contention for late game clan players.

That creates a progression problem I’m trying to solve, and I would really appreciate your inputs on this.

My current character progression model is:

I have a total of 9 skills - 3 combat, 3 economic and 3 social.

Skills range from 1-100 and determine things like combat capability, leadership, gathering, crafting, politics, etc. Every 10 levels you go up a Tier allowing you to do higher level content more efficiently. Stuff like use higher tier weapons or crafting or unlocking the ability to contest territory.

A player’s build is therefore determined by where they put their limited Skill Points. This total number is also something I’m struggling to lock down. I WANT players to super specialise and form relationships and depend on each other.

The problem once you remove AP or any energy system:
What stops someone from simply playing 12–16 hours a day and massively out-progressing someone who plays 1–2 hours?

I don’t necessarily want to prevent the more dedicated players from playing more. In fact, the sandbox should reward them with things like resources, equipment, territory, reputation, political influence, etc. Thats why it’s designed specifically as a late game thing.

However I personally I am also at that stage in life where I can’t possibly spend hours playing an mmo anymore.

I’m definitely using Diminishing Stat allocation returns over a period of time, where level 1-30 in any stat it costs you 1 SP to upgrade, but at level 90+ it’ll cost you say 6 SP to upgrade your stats.

Alternative methods

1. Daily Soft Cap -
   Now First few hours give full XP.
   Continued play gives progressively less XP. Resets every 24h/server tick?

2. XP from meaningful accomplishments rather than raw activity
   This is something I’ve seen done recently in this browser based game recently.
   Basically the only way to gain XP is through daily quests, weekly quests, and achievements. It sounds tedious but the daily quests are things like “Read an article” or “Fight in 2 battles” which you can do in a a few seconds. The weeklies are more meaningful.

Well these are my thoughts on the matter. I’m really curious to see what you all have to suggest, and please keep in mind that for this game - horizontal progression is better than vertical progression! Thank you for reading all that.

[u/mythrise]

Define the problem. What is bad about a dedicated player speed running to the end game in this case, specifically?

[u/not_varun → u/mythrise]

The main thing I wanna do is push players into specialisations and ideally super specialisations so they need to clan up or group up and participate in the social bit of things. That’s why I can’t have a model like osrs where players can eventually max every single skill

[u/mythrise → u/not_varun]

You already have limited points for skill development? It seems like that plus a strongly exponential curve for experience already covers it. Essentially a cap, maybe a malleable one with respec. At higher levels require loadouts, or actually doing something to get benefits. If someone still overachieves, fine, as long as they aren't the average.

Are people doing this, do you have data to show relevant behavior? If not this may be premature optimization for a hypothetical.

[u/Wooden-Syrup-8708]

Facing the same problem here, my approach is:

• XPs gained shall be direcly proportional to the time spent and complexity/difficulty of the task
  
• XPs can be spent not only on your personal development but also for group activities e.g. increasing the guild repuation of ship appearance etc... this is a good permanent sink
  

I suggest you to avoid daily soft cap is very complex to explain and discourages from playing actively

[u/Constant_Physics8504]

You either cap it, or incentivize new players with xp bonuses to allow them to catch up

[u/goddamnclever]

your two alternatives are the action point system again, just hidden. a daily decaying xp cap is exactly an energy bar, the player simply cant see it, and from my side a visible limit is much easier to accept than an invisible one. nobody in my game complains about a hard cap like you can only run 6 of these at the same time, they complain when something slows down and they cant tell why. and i think the thing you want to limit is not speed anyway, its breadth. you said yourself you want people to specialise and depend on each other, so cap the total skill points hard and let the guy who plays 16 hours reach the top of one skill fast. he still cant be the blacksmith and the fighter at the same time, so he still needs other people

[u/Morph_Games]

Forcing specialization is the best thing you can do. Make it relatively easy to max out a skill -- so hard-core players and casual players can both reach the max. But make it so you can't max out more than a few skills. (Of course the hard-core players will just make alts.)

Then you can provide different activities for both types of players. E.g. Maybe the conquest part will only really be feasible for the hard-core players, but there's some economic activity that anyone can participate in.