Skill advancement over time

There are a few ways that you can handle skill advancement in your game:

• Increase over time
• Increase through use (either success, failure or both)
• Purchased with gold, experience or some other token
• Increase with character level

In the next couple of posts I am going to examine a few of these methods, starting with the skill advancement system used in Maiden Desmodus.

With Maiden Desmodus I chose a time based method of skill advancement where characters improve their skills gradually the longer they play. This was an important design decision because I wanted a system that would be compatible with our charging model, but that wouldn’t link skill advancement to any specific activity such as hunting, exploring or role-playing. This would leave players free to spend their game time on the activities they enjoyed and still see their characters advance.

The biggest flaw with skill increase over time is that it encourages players to log in and go afk while their characters raise skills. I knew this when I put the system in, but my hope was that due to the unrestricted PK environment the players would police themselves and, not wishing to see rivals or enemies gain an advantage, kill those that they found idle. This hasn’t really worked in practice as the players seem to have reached a tacet agreement not to interfere with each others idling.

So why would you even want to stop players idling their characters to improve skills? Well, there are two main problems with this as I see it. Firstly, it can be frustrating for players to find other characters that they may want to interact with unresponsive for long periods. The second problem is that it makes it very difficult to balance skill advancement when you have characters who may only get a few hours of training a week compared with someone who is logged in 24/7.

Our business model means we have to balance the time it takes to train skills carefully; slow enough that players see the benefit of paying to speed it up, but not too slow that they feel there is no point playing unless they pay. The danger is that paid advancement becomes redundant if players can idle their way to high skills, and if you slow advancement down to compensate you make it impossible for casual players to compete.

We already have a game policy which prohibits idling, but I wanted a coded solution that would reduce the need for administrative involvement by removing much of the incentive for players to idle. The solution we have implemented is to reduce the effectiveness of skill training for each subsequent hour of play, with a total limit of 12 hours training time in a 24 hour period. To compensate we have increased the rate of skill training for the first few hours with it then reducing each hour. People who play less than 6 hours a day should see their overall rate of skill advancement increase while those who play more than 7 or 8 hours will see it decrease.