All powers have upsides, all powers have downsides?

It could be: “complete all the quests”. But once all the quests are gone (which could take only a few weeks), what does the player do then? It could be: “gain every ability”. But if this were possible, it would defeat the entire purpose of your game, not to mention involving a lot of grinding.
Giving out minor rewards (that might be visible to other players) for maxing out a given skill could be a good compromise. But once you have maxed out your best skill, you are then forced to play with skills that you enjoy less.

My point is that levels are a quantifiable way of measuring a player’s skill and progress within the game, and that the player gets a lot of satisfaction from increasing these numbers. Unless you find some way to replace this, the player will have no goal in-game.

PS: Some sort of achievement list, perhaps? Achievements for discovering secret areas, using a certain power in a certain context, for playing the game in all possible modes, for killing/collecting/befriending/casting/using X of a certian item, for displays of remarkable skill, etc…
Having little similarity between achievements would make them fun to get.

You’d start by joining your experienced friend in an area where he’s got all his stacking buffs active and you’ve got nothing, and since you’re a total newb, that gives you a little leeway to figure out the basics. But then the two of you would venture outside that comfort zone he’d established. As he wandered into new areas and came up against new baddies and so forth, his experience bonuses would go away layer by layer and the new guy would take on more responsibilities and challenges.

This allows for a ramp-up in how much a total newbie would have to carry his weight. It also means there wouldn’t be a stark dividing line between areas of expertise and areas of incompetence for experienced characters. It has a few side bonuses, too, like making exploration a social activity rather than just a timewaster for isolated completionists.

Also, I should have mentioned that when I talk about buffs and bonuses, I’m talking about something completely different from the usual disproportionate nonsense that separates players by level. Maybe someone in a completely unfamiliar situation does one third of their potential damage and suffers full health loss, while someone at their absolute peak reverses those proportions. Enough to where there’s a definite difference, sure; but a handful of neophytes can be just as effective as a single expert.

@Pentadact: The powers definitely become more niche at higher ranks, since they’ll necessarily reach a point where the benefit from that extra rank outweighs the ever-growing cost of leveling them up.

I don’t think this is a problem, though. This system’s intended to complement genuinely entertaining gameplay; the idea is that once you’ve sort of settled into a niche you like, you’ll keep using it because it’s fun and effective, or because it’s useful in the pursuit of other gameplay goals. But as you keep playing in that niche the skill will train quietly in the background, and at periodic intervals you’ll be surprised with that extra little rank.

The “using the skill on people most resistant to them” bit was probably a little badly worded. The idea is that you’ll learn more by swordfighting master swordsmen, or by taking harder shots with your ranged weapon, or such. Not that you’ll be able to level up your Marksmanship skill really fast by repeatedly shooting at a tank with your slingshot.

. . .

And the nature of the skills themselves would totally make a huge difference in how this plays out! I actually had something of a rules set in mind for this – the above plan came from working on a (much smaller scale) RPG/wargame thing with EVE in the background, and pondering how that project would translate into a massively multiplayer environment.

It’s squad and point-buy based, but the cost/benefit balancing issues still amount to something similar. I don’t want to babble all about it here, but for an idea of the sort of things I had in mind:

– Marksmanship skills, where you get an accuracy bonus the longer you spend aiming at a target, with your rank in the skill capping the maximum bonus. But you have to stay still and looking at your target while you’re aiming, and are vulnerable for the duration.

– Teamwork skills, where you get bonuses to attack or defense or such based on the number of adjacent people doing the same thing, with your rank in the skill capping the maximum bonus. The downside is that you’re necessarily running about in the open in a tightly clustered blob, which leaves you all collectively vulnerable to people firing into the crowd or lobbing AOEs or similar.

– Dueling skills, making you more effective against single targets but leaving you extremely vulnerable to being blindsided by other opponents.

. . . and similar. So more ranks in the skill let you take more time to aim, and run around in larger formations, and batter more on more isolated targets . . . at the cost of having to take more time to aim, and being stuck in a larger blob, and needing your targets to be more isolated.

And stuff like that.

If the powers you gain are worth gaining, they’ll make you more effective and the game will get easier: this is basically true. If you earn a big area-of-effect attack, even if its average damage-per-second isn’t more than your blasting power, either it makes dealing with crowds easier or it doesn’t. So to a small and subtle extent, enemies need to pile on more experienced heroes in greater numbers. Running to fetch help is a good example – I found out recently that Champions baddies do this if you’re in a group of three or more. Here it could be as simple as small, early mobs only attacking newbies one or two at a time, but all pounding on more experienced players at once.

I’m not totally on board with Doc’s idea of accumulating stacking buffs, though, I think that could end up with too large a power difference between new and experienced players, and I might start feeling useless when I pair up with my eight-hours-a-day hardcore friend.

If you’re not getting outright better, you won’t feel a sense of progress: Partly addressed above, in that inevitably you will get slightly better. Partly fair, on some level no amount of trickery is going to give an RPG like this the same progression feel that current RPGs have. But I don’t entirely want it to, I don’t want the player to have to buy into this idea that a level 80 unarmoured mage has three hundred times the hitpoints of a level 1 warrior. But I would want to make the player feel a sense of achievement for completing a new area. A genuinely useful new power is a huge reward already, but in a superhero game I’d also want a jail where you can visit your vanquished heroes, random missions unique to players who’ve completed certain zones, badges that mark them out as a ‘Thug Killer’ or something, unique costume pieces related to the gangs they’ve defeated, cameos by characters they’ve saved in future quests – basically everything short of a straight stat boost. I’m not averse to giving them levels, either: a hero who’s unlocked ten powers can be called a Level 10 hero to make him feel like he’s progressed. You just have to be careful not to give the enemies a level, or it’d start to get confusing.

Noc: Your system has a nice and natural way to level up. I’d want to know about more of the skills on offer and how they’d progress. It sounds like the benefits of levelling them up could get so niche as to be not very desirable. If you level them up fastest by using them on people most resistant to them, it sort of encourages you to spend the game using all your powers wrong.

Some of the ideas here come up in more depth in the other two posts I’m half-writing, I’ll try to get one up this week.

I think the key is that you shouldn’t just perform better here or against this mob; there should be a whole array of different stacking bonuses that you can accrue. Your character gets to be familiar with certain environments, mobs, and weapons, but also learns to defend against certain attack types, use particular combat styles, and so on.

Some of these buffs ought to nest within each other. You’d have a weak general buff for defending from melee attacks, a more specific and slightly stronger bonus against attack types (slashing, piercing, etc), and then a very strong focused bonus against particular weapons or weapon types.

Eventually, your effectiveness would be plotted on a big Venn diagram of layered combat bonuses. So when you venture off to new areas, it’s not like you’re a complete novice: you’ll still get bonuses from equipment you choose and slight buffs against attacks you’re familiar with. You just won’t stack up well against someone very familiar with the terrain.

This also provides a big social incentive. When you enter a new area, you’ll want to make friends with a “native” who can handle the challenges there. If you already have a friend who’s been playing, you’ll want to visit them on their home turf so that you can check out some high-“level” content earlier on.

This would also make PvP much more of a mind game, as you try to guess based on a character’s race, class, and equipment which types of attacks they would be less familiar with. It’s not just a matter of “well I’m a rogue so I better use a dagger” — you’ll be trying to judge what weapons, magic elements, etc you’re familiar with and your opponent isn’t.

My main point is it may be impossible to have progression for those who put time and/or effort into doing something (gaining more power to take on greater challenges) and have new players on an equal footing with the long players.

Combine as needed.

You would allow the long players and new people to play together, but would lose the long players altogether.

I’ve greatly enjoyed MMOs like PlanetSide that had only subtle elements of characters getting explicitly better, as opposed to just gaining new options. I tried the Champions Online beta having not played a more traditional MMO since the City of Heroes beta (so it’s not a field I pretend to know well), and just found levels frustrating. Often, I knew a few rocket jumps away was an area I couldn’t fight in; this made my lower-level objectives feel less worthwhile and very artificial. Teamplay was fun, but teams seemed few and far between (even compared to the CoH beta) partially because of not great numbers of players in one area being the same level. And don’t get me started on how terrible other levelled features seemed to be (crafting, I’m looking at you).

So, yeah, I think we do need something clever like you’re saying in this post.

It’s a good idea, but as long as we’re revamping the system, I figure we might as well go a bit further. I was pondering alternatives to this the other day, and I came up with something. It’s a bit more suited for a broad, persistent PvP setting (as opposed to the PvE environment the article’s written about), but I think it’s still relevant:

. . .

First, scrap levels entirely and replace it with a skills-based system. You’ve got a collection of skills, each of which gives you one or more abilities. These abilities let you take advantage of situations you come across: your rank in the skill limits how much of that situation you can take advantage of.

So, suppose you’ve got a “Backstabby” skill that gives you a damage bonus if your target’s embroiled in fighting multiple enemies. Your extra damage is determined by the number of distractions, with more distraction letting you get in more damage. But instead of multiple ranks in the skill increasing the bonus you get from distractions, your rank would just limit how many distractions you can take advantage of. So everyone would get the same bonus from one or three or five or ten distractions, but someone with Backstabby II might only be able to take advantage from two distractions, while Backstabby IV might let you take advantage of six.

Skills get increasingly more expensive to raise as they get higher, but a very high skill is only useful in very specific circumstances. Players can snag a few ranks in the skill without too much trouble, which gives them a useful utility. Specializing, though, lets them be very effective, but only in the right circumstances – so team play would be about setting up those situations.

An old character who’s out of their element, and denied circumstances they can take advantage of, is just as vulnerable as a new character without any skills at all.

. . .

Secondly: you raise skills by using them, Elder Scrolls style. This seems problematic and grindy, since no one wants to sit there using the same skill over and over and over again to improve it. But there’re some twists that make this easier.

You improve a skill by using it. You improve the skill faster by using it in combat, under fire. You improve the skill faster by using it against something or someone better at defending against it. You improve the skill faster by doing things where your skill caps out; Backstabby with too many distractions, or doing really difficult shots with Snipey, or such.

You ALSO improve a skill by seeing other people use it. You improve the skill faster by seeing someone who’s very good at it use it. You improve the skill faster by seeing other people use it in a combat situation. You improve the skill faster by having it used on YOU.

The benefit you gain from using a skill (or watching it be used by) specific characters or enemy types slacks off after a bit, so you improve the skill faster by using it against different opponents.

All of these multipliers stack which each other. So the quickest way to improve your skills is to go out and find a bunch of folks with a similar playing style and go take on some challenges. Since early ranks of skills train pretty quickly, you can become useful to the team (or competent on your own) pretty quickly, and still have longer term goals to work for.

There are a few other advantages, too, such as that if you’re consistently getting crushed in PvP by some jerks spamming the same tactic, you’ll quickly start to acquire the tools to remove their advantage.

. . .

So for our established goals:

– It makes you feel like you’re achieving something by playing, both in a character improvement way and a player skill way as you start to get better at your chosen tactics set.

– It doesn’t give you wholly new abilities at intervals, but acquiring competence levels in skills (i.e. reaching the point where the skill is high enough to take advantage of the most common situations) does open up new gameplay strategies.

– Lets you enjoy feeling more powerful than you used to. (See goal #1)

– It lets – and even encourages – players to pursue the same content regardless of character skill levels. Underskilled players are still useful against tougher enemies, and will quickly reach a point where they can help out significantly.

– There’s likely always going to be a lot to improve. The nature of the system means that you’ll reach a point where a given skill covers most of what you need it to and will take a long time to improve to the next rank. So once you reach competence, if you’re having fun you can keep doing that, and get even better at it, or you can experiment with different play styles that rely on different skills.

Obviously the gameplay itself has to be interesting to support this: since skill progression is a matter of utility instead of game progress, it’s going to have to hook you in by being fun instead of pulling the “Constantly dangling carrot” trick. But I think the idea has potential.

I could also see this working very well with an infamy system and factions with different characters.

Say I have my character and have been in this particular area fighting and slaughtering these mobs. They know me. They avoid me and only a large group or the tough guys will attack. Now I have a friend with who hasn’t been here before. Fresh meat. Lowly mobs will attack the friend but the majority of them will attack me because they hate me now and I’m a much greater threat.

I could see an instance where you have generated enough threat/hatred from a given faction that as soon as one sees you and runs away to get help you would have the entire faction/dungeon/instance coming down on your head, all gunning for you.

It would truly be an epic fight that would require enough friends to keep you alive and distract some of the mob away from you.

I would say instead of learning new powers after completing quests (unless that quest was to go learn a new power) as you kill thing your powers become more effective against that particular mob, just like you become more effective at killing it and resisting it’s attacks.

This would also be interesting in PVP. The more times you meet an enemy player in battle the better you are at hurting them, BUT it should also work the other way. The more you get beaten by a player the more resistant you are to their powers.

I can see this working very well if executed correctly.

Also, Google Reader cuts off the post after “particularly useful in” right at the beginning. Is there some way I can fix this or is it a problem on your end? Not that I don’t come here to read the comments half the time anyway, but I do like the whole post on Google Reader.

Ideally this gain would not have a large effect on the combat so that things would be fresh again, but perhaps it would open up new areas or allow you travel between the existing ones in a more efficient manner.

Besides, it’s not a problem for other games. The Mario that beats Bowser at the end of the game is functionally the same one that gets killed by a Goomba on World 1-1 – the difference is in player skill. The Garrett that gets spotted in the first level of Thief is the same one that does a flawless run a couple of months later. There’s no core reason MMOs can’t be similar, except that historically they’ve been designed around making numbers get bigger.