Comments on: Character Advancement Part III – Skill Based http://www.epicslant.com/2009/04/character-advancement-part-iii-skill-based/ MMORPG design, raiding, and guild leadership Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:23:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Cheshiremythos http://www.epicslant.com/2009/04/character-advancement-part-iii-skill-based/comment-page-1/#comment-784 Cheshiremythos Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:36:40 +0000 http://www.ferrel.me/?p=665#comment-784 My skill based experience comes from playing Eve, and looking over at Mortal Online. Your first character will almost always be of piss poor "design" when it comes to skill choice. Despite any goals you might have long term wise, short term things get in the way. People see near shiny and stop going after the further down shinier piece. The New Player Experience in Eve is counteracting this to some extent, less starter skills to wonder what they do, decreased time to train for a while. Also splitting the starter mission into 3 separate parts and giving needed skills and ships for those areas a long the way. It all keeps the short term pleased while trying to teach about the longer term as well. One way to get around the issue of new players getting frustrated is to clearly label what goes where in terms of metagame categories: tanking, melee DPS, ranged DPS, healing. To some extent Eve has this (gunnery, industry, science) but in other categories you have defence skills with character improvement skills (engineering has shield improving and energy improving skills). If you can group skills into categories that are obvious as to what they do overall your players will more easily be able to build what they want. Come up with some original, flavourful, names for these categories otherwise your RPers get a little pissed when they have to talk about tanking in character. My skill based experience comes from playing Eve, and looking over at Mortal Online. Your first character will almost always be of piss poor “design” when it comes to skill choice. Despite any goals you might have long term wise, short term things get in the way. People see near shiny and stop going after the further down shinier piece. The New Player Experience in Eve is counteracting this to some extent, less starter skills to wonder what they do, decreased time to train for a while. Also splitting the starter mission into 3 separate parts and giving needed skills and ships for those areas a long the way. It all keeps the short term pleased while trying to teach about the longer term as well.

One way to get around the issue of new players getting frustrated is to clearly label what goes where in terms of metagame categories: tanking, melee DPS, ranged DPS, healing. To some extent Eve has this (gunnery, industry, science) but in other categories you have defence skills with character improvement skills (engineering has shield improving and energy improving skills). If you can group skills into categories that are obvious as to what they do overall your players will more easily be able to build what they want. Come up with some original, flavourful, names for these categories otherwise your RPers get a little pissed when they have to talk about tanking in character.

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