An idea for Character Leveling up in an MMORPG

Somebody on these boards eloquently described the grinding level system as being analogous to a slot machine. You work and work and work at it, and then there's this little tiny payoff, and that's enough to flog you into grinding up another level. It's that tiny psychological reinforcement that keeps people playing boring, ridiculous games for weeks on end.

Your system doesn't have that. In fact, it almost punishes you for playing, by penalizing your stats over time. Have you ever Played Final Fantasy II? Not the American one, which was the Japanese FF4, but the old one that looks just like the first one. It has a skill atrophy system almost identical to what you describe. Taking damage and surviving causes your HP to increase, you gain weapon-specific combat skills, and your various magical powers increase with practice. But if neglected skills decrease.

There's nothing so discouraging as swinging an axe into an enemy's face and winning a battle, and then seeing "Sword skill -1" appear at the bottom of the screen. I know how that would make me feel, and it wouldn't be "moralized".

Maybe it's possible to balance such a system, but even if you get it just right, players who work at your game for months EXPECT to be way tougher than the n00bz who just logged in.

And to be fair, it is in fact possible to be absolutely unbeatable at high skill levels. Fencing is a good example. I used to compete in college, and there were some guys (St. Johns, for instance) who were untouchable. They spent so much time training, and had such terrific coaches, and steped onto the strip knowing my style better than I myself did, it seemed, that it was all I could do to keep distance and try to get some double-touches (saber). 0-5 was the norm for those bouts, and if you're dealing with melee skills in your game, it can be expected that Miyamoto Musashi would in fact be able to take on a half-dozen thugs without a scratch.

Why those guys can take an arrow through the eye and shrug it off is beyond me, but that's a huge issue that we've addressed here time and again.

If you're going forward with this idea, don't forget to take the gameplay experience of the more dedicated players into account. If you make a mewbie-friendly game, then "hardcore" players will scoff.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage Somebody on these boards eloquently described the grinding level system as being analogous to a slot machine. You work and work and work at it, and then there's this little tiny payoff, and that's enough to flog you into grinding up another level. It's that tiny psychological reinforcement that keeps people playing boring, ridiculous games for weeks on end.

Its not the bonus in stats that the player cares about really. As you level up, the enemies in zones level up. The challenge is consistant.
What gives the players that psychological reinforcement is the new abilities they get and the new weapons/armor they can equip. Its the noticable change that player want.

So you've given me an idea I hadnt thought of. as your skill in certain areas, you get new abilities. Once you get X points in heal magic, you learn Ressurect. If you stop using heal magic and your stats ebb away, you dont lose the ability, but instead it's success rate drops. Also, Itd be neat to combine skills to make abilities. for example, If you have X points in Blades and Y points in Fire magic, then you can learn an ability to enchant your weapon with Fire to deal Fire damage on top of the Physical damage.

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Your system doesn't have that. In fact, it almost punishes you for playing, by penalizing your stats over time. Have you ever Played Final Fantasy II? Not the American one, which was the Japanese FF4, but the old one that looks just like the first one. It has a skill atrophy system almost identical to what you describe. Taking damage and surviving causes your HP to increase, you gain weapon-specific combat skills, and your various magical powers increase with practice. But if neglected skills decrease.

FF2j's system was interesting, and i liked the concept. Its obviously the underlying concept of this game im conceptualizing. However, FF2j's system was flawed. Im looking to create a workable version of it in the scheme of an MMORPG where players can end up being unique.

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There's nothing so discouraging as swinging an axe into an enemy's face and winning a battle, and then seeing "Sword skill -1" appear at the bottom of the screen. I know how that would make me feel, and it wouldn't be "moralized".

If you never use Sword skills, then what does it matter? If you dont use your sword, your ability to use it obviously diminishes. On a quick side note, I think its a bad idea to show the player is losing skills. That is demoralizing. Its got to be something that the player only notices over time. After playing for a week as a Fire mage, they shouldnt expect to be as good with Ice magic.

Another idea i just had is this: Suppose you built up your ice magic ability really high and stopped using it. I already mentioned that it's stats would diminish slower that other skills you rarely use, but it would also be nice that if you were once great at it, if you pick it up again, you learn it a little faster up untill the point you once knew it at, and then it begins to rise at a normal pace.

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Maybe it's possible to balance such a system, but even if you get it just right, players who work at your game for months EXPECT to be way tougher than the n00bz who just logged in.

After thinking about it, I think that long time players will be more powerfull, however, since those long time players still have weaknesses, they're still vulnerable against certain attacks. also, since there woudlnt be a feasable way of showing every stat the other players have, some players might be a little wary of fighting random people and hoping their noobs. I guess i mostly want the casual player to be able to fight against a hardcore player and still have a fighting chance. Even if they lose, the other player shoudlnt have full health. In WoW, if someone is 5 levels higher than you, its damn near impossible to inflict even 100 HP of damage. I want it so that if a hardcore player enters a zone with other weak players, they shoudlnt be able to go through any more than 4 or 5 noobs before having to run away.

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And to be fair, it is in fact possible to be absolutely unbeatable at high skill levels. Fencing is a good example. I used to compete in college, and there were some guys (St. Johns, for instance) who were untouchable. They spent so much time training, and had such terrific coaches, and steped onto the strip knowing my style better than I myself did, it seemed, that it was all I could do to keep distance and try to get some double-touches (saber). 0-5 was the norm for those bouts, and if you're dealing with melee skills in your game, it can be expected that Miyamoto Musashi would in fact be able to take on a half-dozen thugs without a scratch.

I see your point. But in real life, Miyamoto Musashi would probably never find a guy who's just learning how to shoot fireballs from his hand. That would be his weakness. While he would still probably win, he's going to be in at least a little pain from being bombarded by fire.

I think same classes (Fighter vs Fighter) would be interesting if they fought against eachother since one fighter has more abilities and better armor and weapons. Obviously the weaker one will lose. But should he fight a mage, he wont walk away unscathed. Not everyone will be fighters. Not everyone will be mages.
So I suppose that in a way, you level up as the style of combat you're working towards. A hardcore fighter will kill a casual fighter. But since not everynoe will be fighters, a hardcore fighter can not simply go around murdering low level players. But still, PVP could be fun since most people woudlnt feel hopeless when someone comes in Ganking. Everyone would ahve the chance to make a unique character with their own strengths and weaknesses and abilities, and they would want to show off how their unique character could do in combat against other unique players. Think sort of like Final Fantasy Tactics. It was fun to make combination unts like Archer/Knight or Summoner/White Mage and see how well they do in battle.

Ultima Online (UO) used a skill system similar to what you're proposing. There were X skills and you had 700 skill points to use. That gave you enough to raise 7 skills to 100%, or 14 to 50%, or 28 to 25%. Your skills also atrophied, but at a fairly slow pace. In my 4 years of playing UO, I only ever got 3 skills to Grand Master (100%), so despite what Iron Chef Carnage is saying, you can have respect and love for your powerful character you've spent time building. The rate at which you gain / lose skills will define how accepted your game is by powergamers.

Personally, I love the skill based system. I played Shadowbane for 3 months, built my character to level 65 only to realize that the supposed "end game" everyone preaches about in level based MMOs was crap. So I quit. Killing 800 MonsterRank2 in Boring Zone 2 was no more exciting than killing 400 MonsterRank1 in Boring Zone 1. By the final levels, you've hunted all of the big-game creatures and there is zero reason to continue to play.

I want to explore, have fun and dick around. If I want to hunt dragons with 60% magery, I should be allowed to. Throwing a few spells and than running for my life still increases my magery skill, and I have fun. I can try to do these things, because no matter what, my skill increases.

You will never see "where should I go at 60% magery?" in a skill based MMO, but you'll see 100s of "what zone do I hunt in at level 4?" in a level based one. What's the point of playing an "open ended" game like an MMO if it inheritantly dictates where you have to go and what you have to do?

Always remember - there is no such thing as a "skill grind".

how do you define use?
for example, I cast ice spell 7x and attack 10x using my axe. will my ice and axe skill increase? what if I lost, ran away or somebody put in the killing blow?

if skills increase per use, players could hit each other (or make scripts) to increase stats. then they would have high resistance to everything.

or I cast fireball on me to increase fireball skill and fire resistance.

I thought about that a little bit earlier. Im thinking that against NPCs, your skills go up as you use them (that is, per strike). Based on your current skill and the skill of the NPC (or monster), you have a certain succession rate at raising your skill. So in the beggining, you could fight practice dummies for a while and raise it to, say, 10 points. you get one point for every 1 or 2 hits. If you continnue fighting the practice dummy, you might get one point for every 3 or 4 hits. Or if you're a master swordsman, fighting the dummy would increase your skill every 100-200 hits. you'd be forced to move on to things with higher skills in defense against your weapons. Alternatively, if you're a Fire mage, and you continue attacking things weak against fire magic, your skills wouldnt increase that quickly.
Also, as you use your skills, they dont ever go down. So your stat wont decrease just because its not increasing.

Against players.. i think the same thing could be in effect. Now this is where Im tossed. i like the idea of players being able to train other players. Like a master swordsman spending hours to get a newbie better at his weapon. I like that idea alot, but theres alot of room for exploit. So maybe it could be that you could only increase your skill up to half of what the other player's skill is. If player Y is training with player X and player X has 100 points in swordsman ship, then player Y could only train up to 50 points. That would prevent players from power leveling too fast, but also provides a way for friends to help friends build up their skill to go questing with them, and maybe a way for stronger players to earn some extra money.

Thats if you train with another player. That means, no one dies. Also, the closer the weaker player gets to half the stronger player's skills the slower the stats build up. The stronger player shoudlnt gain any skills.

If you're attacking another player, then someone could die. The skill points are only added when the other player dies and can only increase by a maximum of, say, 10 points. not a whole lot. Also, you can only gain points if you're the weaker than the other player. If player Y has 100 points in Poison Magic, the player X woudlnt gain any poison defence if he has more than 100 points in the resistance. something like that.

i like the training idea alot. but even so, theres a potential for exploit. a potential for the player to just turn on a macro and go to work or sleep while the other player does the same thing. So any ideas on how to avoid that? maybe have the training player do mini games of some sort? sort of like in the Karate Kid where the kid had to do the wax on/wax off thing.. something so the players cant just leave.

I think this idea has merit, i dispise the level grinding of MMORPG's like Everquest, i waste all my time leveling a character that doesn't require much skill on my part for a few month's only to be rewarded with a "Your to uber to do anything interesting anymore, thanks for paying us while you grind and waste your time!"

With your system, the players never stop evolving, you don't need to be uber elite to have a good time, and even if your skills degrade (and they will anyway) the player would at least have the same number of skills and the equipment and style he's worked to get. It somewhat pleases me that i can come back with rusty skills and have something to work on while going out with my buddies in my shiny armor to get back into the 'groove'. I do agree also that the rate at which you gain/lose skills will be a big factor in how well the game may be accepted.

As a personal preference though, i'm far more in favor of FPS hybrids that rely more on the players individual skill rather than statistics that represent skill.

One, I fail to see how this will affect ganking. I mean, UO definitely had ganking problems in it's heyday as well. There are going to be less skilled players that get picked on and ganked by more skilled players. Skill atrophy systems aren't going to change that.

And the problem with skill atrophy systems, they require constant maintenance to keep your skills the way you want them.

If I want to maintain a decent resistance to fire, poison, and ice, I have to constantly monitor my resists and shift the focus on my target playing areas to maintain such a balance. I'm not the kind of person that will want to do that. I'd rathe focus on playing where I'm playing, doing what I want to do, working on what I need to work on, as opposed to maintaining my desired skill set.

And WoW has rock/paper/scissors already built into the class structure as well. Warriors are weak vs mages, who are weak vs rogues, who are weak vs warriors. The thing is, the strengths and weaknesses are not so significant as to be insurmountable in any given situation, simply an advantage that SHOULD tip the scales in the favor of one side or the other. You don't want any guaranteed outcomes in these games. Any given player is going to cry foul if he stands zero or little chance of winning against any other given player.

I thought about this idea for a while and decided that I don't like the whole idea of levels. In a MMO setting I agree with what The Iron Chef and others have said before and thats reputation system would work far better and be a better way to judge the superiority of other players. If you combine it with various titles and awards it works very well. It also serves as great way create a sense of rivialry, comrodery and Hero worship. After all if you are off in the wilds and encouter Miyamoto Musashi the Sword master a title representing he is the greatest swordsmen in the land you are either going to want to take a shot at him and see how you really compare to the master or ask for his autograph.


But as to skills what if instead of using levels, there was a rating system that went from pathetic to godlike. Skill ratings would represent a comparision between the character and the other character in the game and not acutal values. So a charcter with average sword skill would loose badly in fight to someone with godlike sword skill. But since they are comparisons it means that if the godlike swords men decided to spend their time developing their poetry skills and ignoring their sword training then the next time they are involved in a fight they could discover there former godlike sword skill is now consider pathetic in comparison to everyone else. They haven't got any worse it just that everyone is now far better.

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Original post by jRaskell One, I fail to see how this will affect ganking. I mean, UO definitely had ganking problems in it's heyday as well. There are going to be less skilled players that get picked on and ganked by more skilled players. Skill atrophy systems aren't going to change that.

I agree. This will not prevent ganking, but good idea nonetheless. I don't know how a battle is implemented in WoW, I played AC2 and ganking is what made me stop playing that game. You were walking happily to a dungeon to finish your quest when all of a sudden a high-level player jumped on top of you and killed you in one hit.

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And the problem with skill atrophy systems, they require constant maintenance to keep your skills the way you want them. If I want to maintain a decent resistance to fire, poison, and ice, I have to constantly monitor my resists and shift the focus on my target playing areas to maintain such a balance. I'm not the kind of person that will want to do that. I'd rathe focus on playing where I'm playing, doing what I want to do, working on what I need to work on, as opposed to maintaining my desired skill set.

I have had this idea for quite a while too, and one way to improve it is to apply it to a set of skills only. For example, your primary stats (strength, intelligence, etc) won't suffer if you do not use it. They gain permanently. Other skills, such as resistance skills, may lose points if not used. These stats, however, are not that important to care about. Even if you have 0 points on all of them, you can still survive fighting a multi-element creature.

Second, the area you are no longer working on will not diminish completely to 0. There will be a minimum threshold. You do not lose entirely. For example (in a 0-100 scale), you start at 0. You work at it and it reaches 30. Then you shift your focus to other areas. It will not reduce to 0, but only to 15. Then when you come back to it, you can still gain more. Let's say this time you reach 50 and you stop and move on to others. The minimum threshold would be 30. You could then design it that the maximum minimum threshold is 75 (if you manage to max it to 100, the minimum threshold will be 75). Even if you never work at it anymore, you still have 75 points in that area, and you won't lose these 75 points. If you decide to get back at it, it can go back up to 100, but not permanently.

These stats are not that important. They help you in battles somehow, you don't normally want to max these out, because they are not permanent.

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Fighters could have....Blunts

I like where this is going.


To stay on topic, there's a MUD out there called Dragonrealms. Completely skill based. Everyone can use every skill, with certain exceptions. For example, only traders can learn the trading skill. Other than that, anyone can use any weapon, any armor, etc.

Based on your class, you may be more hindered and less able to dodge if you wear plate armor instead of leather. It's possible, but impractical, for thieves to wear plate for example because it hinders hiding quite a bit compared to leather. Basically there are 5 skill sets: weapons, armor, magic, survivial, and lore. Each class is "primary" in 1 skill, secondary in one or two others, and tertiary in everything else. It works on a cyclical 8, 4, and 2 rank system.

Each skill has a "pool" that you fill up with potential XP by doing stuff. Cast a spell alot and your primary magic skill will go from throughtful, to concentrating, to perplexed, eventually to mind lock after which point you can't get any more potential XP. The size of this pool is determined by certain stats and your level. Every 300 seconds you "pulse" and based on a formula also dealing with mental stats and level, you convert a certain amount of that pool to real XP points.

If you are primary in magic, then at rank 1 of the cycle you'll convert 100% of your potential XP, then as you progress through the cycle you convert at a slower rate.

Rank 1 - primary magic: 101.10.34% mind lock --> pulse --> 101.60.24% thoughtful
Rank 2 - primary magic: 102.10.34% mind lock --> pulse --> 102.50.11% concentrating
Rank 3 - primary magic: 103.10.34% mind lock --> pulse --> 103.34.17% perplexed
...
Rank 8 - primary magic: 108.10.34% mind lock --> pulse --> 108.18.54% dazed
Rank 1 - primary magic: 109.10.34% mind lock --> pulse --> 109.59.01% thoughtful
...

The last rank in your cycle is called your "wall rank" and it's the hardest to get through. Then it resets and it's again relatively easy to earn your next ranks in the skill.

If you're a mage trying to learn an armor skill though, you'll find it much harder yet still possible, since armor is tertiary and basically every other rank will be a wall rank.

This way your character can be and do anything, within limits, some things are just harder to attain than others.

Fundamentally speaking, I don't care for classes at all - who wants to be "stuck" in a class that you can't solo in later because the class is so wussy alone that they will die within 3-4 attacks due to specialization? Morrowind does a decent job at a semi-classless RPG. With enough time, you can do anything with your character but it still limits you. Classes are more realistic, mind you as hair stylist designing and flying super sonic jets isn't too realistic at all, however - if you start as a hair stylist there shouldn't be any problems with you learning about flying and getting skills as an engineer if you want to do that later.

The biggest downfall to the class/level system is realism. How realistic is it for someone to chop all day with an AXE and up their sword skills when they "level up". Hence why I agree with the skills base concept - if you axe you get skills in axe, if you bow you get skills in bow, and if you fire magic you get skills in fire magic.

I don't agree with the "degragation" of skills. As with most games, time in game and time in real world rarely are syncronised. If I play 4 two hours sessions and axe in the first two hours while it takes 3 hours for a skill to atrophy I won't be hurt like a fellow who plays the 8 hours back to back. You would encourage people to attack with a sword every 40-50 monsters to keep atrophy at bay and not much else.

Atrophy defeats the urge for a wizard to go back and pick up sword play. The atrophy is built in so why add atrophy to unused skills. The wizard, while learning to skewer chipmunks isn't using his magic so his magic skills are not going up, just his sword use. Essentially time spent elsewhere degrades his time in games application towards ubering his wizardry skills. Hence implied apothy.

As for Gacking, either honor can be added (how honerable is it to kill a non-attacker who is at such a lower level?) or some similar device. A dishonored hero will be berated by villagers, skipped over for trade promotions, or neglected from organizations of dissimilar honor. "No kingly appointments to positions for you, worm."

Unfortunately, the world of Warcraft (ironically) prevents the signature of honor. If you are a good guy you are supposed to fight evil, if you are a bad guy you are supposed to fight good. You are either totally honorable or totally dishonerable towards either good or evil. The best bet is to track "gacking" stats and flag repeated gackers via their name tags. Such flagged folks are "free kills" and don't detriment a player who kills them in any way.

Personally, I want to see an MMO with a system something like Champion, or GURPS, or some other point-based system. Instead of levels with exponential power, you could have 'mini levels' (like levels, but instead of doubling in power, you get a few character points to spend).

You still get much more powerfull over time, but generally you gain in breadth instead of depth - a powerful warrior is better because he can use any weapon he finds (definitely a good thing with randomish magic items), not beacuse he does 100 times as much damage, has 20 times the armor, and can take 1000 times the beating. A mage is better because he can cast fireball, ice dagger, and lightning as appropriate to the situation, not because he has fireball, explosive fireball, Big Boom fireball, and One-Hit-Boss-Killer fireball, and Kill-Everything-In-Zone fireball.

These systems are already in their 5th and 4th editions respectively - around the same place D&D is. Why haven't such systems been adopted? Because they're conductive to play but not addiction - if you stick with the game it would be based on the game's merits rather than the fact that it abuses psychology.

Well, I've been playing WoW lately as well, and I'm sickly tired of the static level system, and especially the quests, oh my god someone must have lost their imagination.

So, I feel urged to describe an old MUD I used to play, I can't wait until its system is implemented in a MMORPG, basically it has alot of the ideas presented in this thread. Maybe someone might recognize it :)

Briefly, nothing is presented in numbers, there is no such thing as classes, there is no traditional 'level up', ganking is not a problem and people are still very addicted to it, there is people who have played for nearly 20 years now :)

Ok so first, nothing is presented in numbers: The character levels got names like Beginner ... journeyman ... adventurer ... veteran ... champion ... legend etc.. Also being a champion does not immediately mean you can beat a veteran, or even adventurer for that matter. The 'level' you are is based on your stats, there are six of them, strength, agility, constitution, wisdom, intelligence and discipline (bravery) which levels are presented like weak .. well built .. strong .. titanic etc.. and you can estimate how close you are to each (very far, far, halfway, close, very close), skills are presented in a similar way, with major and minor levels, i.e "apprentice student", "seasoned craftsman", "confident veteran", "superior guru" where "apprentice, seasoned.." is minor and "veteran, guru.." is major.

No classes: You do not choose class, all general skills is available for everyone, but only to a certain 'level', say 30 or 40 out of a 100, and with skills and abilities comes the real power.

Now to get higher skills and to get abilities you need to join a guild, the guilds is the big thing about the system, they are created by the people that make the game, but they are basically ruled by the players, and work pretty much like any organization. Some guilds are stronger than others, some are weaker, there is no accurate balance, the most dreaded mages are really terrifying, you don't want to get in a fight with them alone, but they don't abuse it, because if they do they get severely punished for it. Also you can't just go and sign up and start kicking ass, it's a long process getting in to the overpowered guilds, which also makes it an honor to get in.

The guilds are alot about politics, some guilds are at war, and there is even an alliance formed by the players to join forces against the evil. This is really what I think is lacking in most MMORPGS, the real sense of politics, that the players control the world, and this way legends are made. "The old war between the knights and the army..", "When was the ruler.."

Also the ganking: It is not a problem because players know if they gank someone without reason, someone will find out, and it might get you punished by the guild, thrown out if done repeatedly or even get your character deleted if it is very serious.

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Original post by Thex0 Well, I've been playing WoW lately as well, and I'm sickly tired of the static level system, and especially the quests, oh my god someone must have lost their imagination.

Is this your first MMO? I'm supposing it is, well it's mine too. I hear this complaint from a lot of Warcraft people whom are playing an MMO for the first time. The one bit of perspective I have that they don't is that you really should be thankful for quests at all. Take an MMO style like EQ2 and instead of even saying "you get 1000 experience for walking from point A to point B" it's just "kill [x] of creature [y] until you get 1000 experience". Sure, WoW has a grind, but at least they attempt to obfuscate it. There are also a lot of very cool quests out there - Distress Beacons in Tanaris, Hinterlands, and Feralas come to mind. Other than that, realize that levelling is just a way to move from dungeon to dungeon - where the real cool stuff is. Sad fact is that there simply isn't enough manhours in the dev team of a game like WoW to support thousands of completely unique quests. Given the problems of creating these quests, bugtesting them, balancing them, and keeping the server load from them to a minimum - it's just not possible.

very interesting reading the posts. I got a question on that skill based system:
how do you increase some particular skills? In low levels, its not a problem, you can just go out and kill some monsters around, or train with someone higher, as in almost all mmo games there are a lot of medium skilled players. But what if you want to get better than normal in some skills, especially in resistence? take example if you want to get "professional" in sword skill, you go out and kill harder monsters with sword, but if you want to raise your melee defence, what can you do? go to a horde of monsters and let them hit on you until you got minimum life and then run away? And how do you know that they are especially using melee attacks? of course its possible to make any type of creature only using one or a few type of attacks / defences, but without random stats on creatures, its going to be like "survive one more thousands of super-xtreme-hard-using-melee-attack-monsters-attacks" to get your skill of melee defence up to level xxx. And thinks everyone agrees that this isnt what's making "fun" in a game.

by the way, the pvp problem, is it better to have a complex system, where everything (every exploit possbility) or almost every is thought of, and to adjust the system on every new problem, or is it better to have a simple solution for example the possiblities of creating friendly only areas / games, pvp only areas / games?

i've played a long time games like diablo, and the way they solved it (by creating a game you setup if pvp is allowed or not or the maximum level of characters which is allowed to join your game) maybe isnt the perfect one, but it works, as for example you can just create a game where only people of +/- 10 levels of yours area allowed to join that to prevent those "a-high-level-suddenly-hostiled-and-killed-me-with-one-hit" phenomenas.

I see this type of problem solving a lot, and disagree with it 90% of the time.

Your in the business of solving problems, dont make more. Your problem is players killing you in one hit. Lower the damage, dont rewrite a system that works. Solve one problem at a time, fun is the absense of all that is not fun. Take away all the bad your left with (mostly) good.

(I do not believe this is how all problems should be solved, but it works most times).

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Original post by James Dee Finical I see this type of problem solving a lot, and disagree with it 90% of the time. Your in the business of solving problems, dont make more. Your problem is players killing you in one hit. Lower the damage, dont rewrite a system that works. Solve one problem at a time, fun is the absense of all that is not fun. Take away all the bad your left with (mostly) good. (I do not believe this is how all problems should be solved, but it works most times).

The problem with that appropach is that it doesn't scale at all. Sure, it will fix that one thing you don't like, and then you can fix that thing the other guy doesn't like, and then you can patch something else on, then you find you need to totally start from scratch because the patchwork is falling appart.
Of course you don't need to invent a new system to fix such problems, you just need to look around and use what already exists. There are hundreds of approaches to RPGs, but most of them have been burried under the few methods adopted as standards.

Interesting... with the levels/pvp/uber-high-lvl-chars issue, I always thought that was the main *reason* that people choose to play online RPGs rather than games like counterstrike. That being, that if you invest the time in your character then your character will become uber, and *should* have no trouble dealing with many low level characters.

The problem with 'ganking' is apparently being addressed in WoW 'real soon now' with the introduction of an 'honour system'. Time will tell how well that works, but at a last resort one could simply do what JoeDB suggested, and have a level difference cap on combat, so a lvl 60 actually *can't* engage a lvl20, nor vice versa.

Either that or simply accept that there are high level enemy players around, and be careful. Admittedly I've only had a few quests in contested areas so far, and I play on a low population server so the chance of running into a high level enemy is low, but I find that the chance of encountering an enemy player adds some excitement to the game. That aspect lacking, I may as well be playing a single player or small-scale multiplayer RPG and saving myself the monthly subscription fee.

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Original post by Extrarius The problem with that appropach is that it doesn't scale at all. Sure, it will fix that one thing you don't like, and then you can fix that thing the other guy doesn't like, and then you can patch something else on, then you find you need to totally start from scratch because the patchwork is falling appart.

I said 90% of the time and this does not work in all cases (gotta read the whole message).

Why would it fix fall apart? You shouldn't assume everything is going to turn out bad. Sometimes people make mistakes, then they fix them.