Experience Sinks... Keeping Level Cap Experience Meaningful.

[Jerich]

A. The problem: At level cap, Experience ceases to matter.
Most current MMOs have two different types of games. The leveling game, where characters gain rapidly in power and the end game where characters are at max level and progress slows down or stops. As seen in this thread, people are divided as to what kind of level cap they would prefer. There are a huge contingent of players who dislike being at level cap, however. I think this is the primary reason why:

While you are leveling, you are doing a variety of quests and are getting three different rewards for these quests: item upgrades, in game gold, and experience. The pace of advancement is fast and furious and you are consistently bombarded by short term and long term advancement. Once you hit level cap, however, you cease to get experience. In a sense you are only getting 2/3 of your previous loot, so you are losing some of your short term reward. At the same time, your long term rewards become further and further apart (no more levels and item gains). The game loses some of its fun appeal.

Failed Solution I: The level cap is difficult to reach (I.E. Diablo II)
The Diablo II solution is generally fairly good. It becomes increasingly difficult to reach level cap so experience stays meaningful. After about level 95, however, getting to the next level becomes so difficult, that most players cease to strive to reach it. In a sense, experience ceases to have value at this point for most people.

Failed Solution II: Endless Level Caps / Endless alternate Experience (EQ)
In Everquest you were able to buy perks for your character with excess experience once you reached cap. Some games go further in the sense that they do not have a level cap. The problem with these systems is that new players are faced with an insurmountable burden to catch up. Also, it splits community. If there is an infinite number of levels, it is harder and harder to find someone with whom you can meaningfully play.

Failed Solution III: No Leveling System
Some games avoid a leveling system at all and opt for a skills based system. The problem here is that most of these systems are actually just levels in disguise. They generally have all the problems of leveling with the added hardship that it is more difficult to tell if a certain part of the game will be too hard for you or if two players will be able to profitably group together.

B. A Similar Problem: Gold ceasing to have meaning at a "Gold Cap"
In many early games, Gold drops had the same problem as experience. Eventually players would reach a gold cap and gold would begin to become meaningless. In games like Diablo II, gold has no real trading value at high level. It is too common.

The Gold Economy Solution: Gold Sinks
MMO designers quickly realized that there was this problem with gold. The problem is that there is an endless supply of gold entering the economy and not enough for players to buy. The solution... MMO economists, theorized was to generate new ways to remove gold from the system. At first they used relatively putative systems like repairs, but as times have progressed the money sinks have gotten more and more creative. Wow in particular is incredibly creative in the way they implement money sinks. The economy is relatively stable and most players do not feel like they are being punished. Game developers now have such a good understanding of money sinks and MMO economies that most players would agree that an MMO economy where dropped gold is valueless has serious design flaws. Unfortunately, people have not made the proper extension to experience.

Why experience is a commodity like gold
Experience is like gold in the sense that it is a commodity that continues to enter the game as monsters are killed. Like gold, there are only a set number of things you can usually buy with experience (levels). The end result is exactly the same as a poor gold economy. Eventually every player has enough of a surplus of experience that it ceases to be valuable. Unfortunately, the problem is not as transparent because experience is not tradable between players. No one can truly see how valueless it is in most MMOs. If you look up "Gold Sinks", you will find a lengthy Wikipedia article. If you look up "Experience Sinks" you find nothing. This is an acute failure on account of MMO developers to understand the commodity nature of experience.

Using this understanding... why endless level caps are a bad idea
Having endless level caps is like using the following money sink... Allow players to buy better and better items, but make them cost increasing amounts of money... This is the only money sink in the game. Any MMO developed along these principles would be laughed at. The developers obviously would not understand MMO economies in the slightest. Unfortunately, most serious attempts to sink experience out of the economy have been this shallow.

What makes a good gold sink?
In order to understand what will make a good experience sink, we must understand what makes a good gold sink.

• Good gold sinks are divided into two types. Necessary gold sinks which any player can afford (repairs, training, etc) and luxury gold sinks (mounts etc)
• Luxury gold sinks provide utility, not absolute power. Examples... Mounts... Pets... Bank Storage Etc... Items...
• Luxury gold sinks ramp heavily in price (flying mounts, etc)
• Gold sinks provide services that players want to buy without them feeling like that service is punative.

C. The solution Experience Sinks
A good experience system should take the principle of gold sinks and split experience into two necessary experience sinks that every player pays and luxury experience sinks that will continue to make experience meaningful for even the most hardened power leveler.

Examples of Necessary Experience Sinks
These are the common things that current MMOs allow players to spend experience on.

• Character leveling (The better the luxury sinks, the faster this process can be)
• Any type of death experience penalty (not needed, but it is a sink), with better luxury sinks, this can be limited.
• Limited Respec (requires people to re level characters), with better luxury sinks, respec can be allowed.
• Pet Leveling (One pet)

Examples of Luxury Experience Sinks
These are examples of experience sinks that will keep experience meaninful for a long time. I believe Torchlight is uniquely poised to take advantage of several of these options.

• Character Retirement - The ultimate experience sink
• Pet / Mount Leveling (All 300 of your pets=P)
• High level Moonlighting (require higher levels to burn experience)
• Using Experience for High Level Crafting
• Asymptotic extra skill point system.

Benefits of this system

• It enables a quick level cap which will keep the community together. You will have a lot of people you can meaningfully group with.
• It keeps the rewards coming at an interesting and reasonable pace.
• The majority of content can be targeted for the lower level cap.

- Jerich

[Rob]

This is a great topic Jerich, here are my thoughts:

A level (or skill) cap is definitely a necessity for balancing the game.

Under the system you proposed - What would happen if someone was at the level cap (lets say level 20) and they purchased a luxury or crafted an item using experience but they didn't have enough experience for the purchase? Would their character go down to level 19, or would the character be unable to make the purchase/craft until they have obtained the required experience after the level cap? If the latter, then I really like this idea - Experience accumulating infinitely (or fixed) and serving as another form of currency once the character has reached the cap level.

There's also the idea of compensation. This is a relatively cheap method compared to the one stated above, but characters that are capped could receive a bonus to gold or item drops.

Also, I would consider the reputation system in WoW to be an experience sink in a way. Building on the reputation system or implementing similar mechanics into the game could serve as a substitute to the 'wasted' experience.

[Chameleon]

For me high level caps are only relevant if skill levels caps are high. According to mediumheadboy in my thread here you stop adding points to skills around lv 36. So after that equipment will be the main source of damage and stat points will be secondary and most likely not make to much difference to ones damage. The way it looks to me is that the game is designed to be "beaten" around lv 36 and from then on leveling for levelings sake doesnt have much influence on how strong you are...I could of course be completely wrong.

[Jerich]

Thanks for the comments Rob.=P You raise some good points that need clarification.

I agree with you... characters should not be able to delevel themselves using this system. I think that would be anti-climatic. I see experience caps as primarily a means of of keeping experience gains meaningful at cap level. Whether or not you should allow non-cap players to spend experience is another debate altogether. I can see benefits in doing this (if one friend levels faster than the other) and minuses (if the slower friend spends experience and that frustrates the faster leveled friend.

There's also the idea of compensation. This is a relatively cheap method compared to the one stated above, but characters that are capped could receive a bonus to gold or item drops.

Wow providing extra gold to level capped people is an example of this. While I think this is interesting, it is just a partial fix (like you said). I believe experience sinks allow experience to retain its unique feel and identity as a currency which distinguishes it from gold.

Also, I would consider the reputation system in WoW to be an experience sink in a way. Building on the reputation system or implementing similar mechanics into the game could serve as a substitute to the 'wasted' experience.

Reputation systems were definitely introduced as an attempt to solve the issue of level cap. Achievements were introduced for much the same reason. I would like to see these systems in place in the Torchlight MMO, but also want more meaningful experience caps.

On a side note, one thing the developers need to avoid with this system is allowing players to bank experience for later use. You should not be able to store limitless experience and then automatically be at max level when the next expansion hits.

For me high level caps are only relevant if skill levels caps are high.

I think this thread is primarily designed around the single player. While the MMO will most likely be similar to the single player, certain leveling mechanics may be tweaked to fit the MMO world better. That being said, I think experience caps increase in importance the lower the actual level cap.

- Jerich

[hawkn]

I like the idea of still having some use for experience after you reach the cap. I say this though, not ever having reached the level cap in any mmo.

[bTomfoolery]

I do like to have an experience sink after reaching a level cap. Especially because I enjoy an early endgame with loads of content. (I would provide an explanation to this but this thread isn't really the place)

However, I don't really see this working before one reaches the level cap (and it doesn't have to) without there being a Total Experience, which governs leveling, and never goes down (think of it as a history of all the EXP you've gotten) and a Current EXP, which is EXP in it's currency form. The way I see it is that, whenever you get EXP, it adds it to both Total and Current, and when you spend it, it just takes it out of Current.

It would be acceptable to just use this as an endgame feature though.

Sorry, no multi-paragraph response to every line of your post this time

[Michael]

What about letting us continue to gain EXP past the level cap, but it doesn't earn us anything that actually makes us more powerful. Like we could grind our ways to vanity perks, like titles or something. Just a thought.

[Jerich]

Thanks for the weigh in Hawkn.=P

I do like to have an experience sink after reaching a level cap. Especially because I enjoy an early endgame with loads of content. (I would provide an explanation to this but this thread isn't really the place)

However, I don't really see this working before one reaches the level cap (and it doesn't have to) without there being a Total Experience, which governs leveling, and never goes down (think of it as a history of all the EXP you've gotten) and a Current EXP, which is EXP in it's currency form. The way I see it is that, whenever you get EXP, it adds it to both Total and Current, and when you spend it, it just takes it out of Current.

It would be acceptable to just use this as an endgame feature though.

Sorry, no multi-paragraph response to every line of your post this time

No problem on the shorter reply Ben=P I have been under the weather myself this last week and will probably be silent for a little bit after getting torchlight because I will be spending most of my free-time playing the game.=P I agree with you... most of the experience sinks should be designed for people at cap. I think the one exception would be for using experience sinks to purposefully slow down your leveling so that you can stay similar in level to a close friend who doesn't have as much playtime. The total and current ideas are interesting, but might be problematic if the level cap ever changes.

What about letting us continue to gain EXP past the level cap, but it doesn't earn us anything that actually makes us more powerful. Like we could grind our ways to vanity perks, like titles or something. Just a thought.

I think the majority of luxury sinks should be this. They should also definitely be tied to things like vanity perks and achievements. This is a great idea. I do believe, however, that it is possible to have experience sinks that provide some progress. An example would be pet leveling... you only need to level one pet to get the full advantage. If you level more pets, you are mainly getting horizontal advancement instead of vertical advancement. There should be achievements for leveling X number of pets.

- Jerich

[maanto]

Hi Jerich. I enjoyed reading through your post (quicker to read through than your moonlighting one).

I completely agree with 2 or 3 of the suggestions you have close to the end.

I could see retirement and the asymptotic extra skill points systems working well, retirement even maybe better since the devs have some personal experience with that system, and could improve upon it.

I think we could do without unnecessary sinks that punish the player, like losing exp after death. It would only serve to drive away the more casual audience, while keeping something like retirement would keep the hardcore who are willing to sink endless amounts of time into it.

[Quintessence]

This issue has been around forever with RPGs. Back in the old days of MUDs once it became obvious that it was too easy to cap a character at a single level cap, whether it was 20 or 40 or whatever, different MUDs branched out on their solutions. Some kept raising the cap, some made each level much harder to get. I didn't particularly like either of those because it didn't seem like they were rewarding the player much, but they were making things a lot harder.

The solution I liked the best was MUDs that went with a quad-class system. I.e., instead of your character just being a Thief, a Warrior, a Cleric or a Mage, your character was all four. When creating it, however, you chose the order of the classes and that would affect the character in key ways. A Warrior/Thief/Cleric/Mage would never be as good at Thiefy things, and would not ever be very good at Magic things (i.e. they didn't gain a lot of mana on level ups, and in some versions their spells had a penalty on the damage.) This meant you now had FOUR TIMES as many levels to gain before you could cap out, and the other levels were harder and harder to level in terms of their XP cost.

But even this eventually was outstripped by the dedication of the players, and when I made my own MUD in the 90s my solution at the time was not only to raise the level cap to 69 for all four classes but to add in an "Avatar Level". I.e. when your character hit the level cap of 69/69/69/69 you could choose to do an Avatar Level. This would reset you to 1/1/1/1 and grant you skills associated with the Avatar Level. Your XP cost per level was increased, and you could avatar level again once you hit the cap again.

It was not the most elegant or even best solution, but I think it followed the right idea; which is to offering MORE to the player is always the right way to go rather than less.


All that said, I do think there are some distinct advantages of having a level cap that is reachable, and having all end-game content take off from that point.

1) It focuses end game content. When everyone is capped and the only source of progression afterwards is gear, it allows everyone to focus on gear. Everyone at the level cap will be going after the same thing, it is thus easier to get groups going, etc.

2) It's easier to balance. If you know everybody doing the end game content is going to be at level cap X, then you know what their base stats will be, what skills they will have, etc. it's much easier to design for that rather than if the people coming in can be anywhere in a level range, and may or may not have certain abilities that you want to interact with a boss mechanic, etc.

3) It lets players feel like they really accomplished something. When people hit the level cap it's kind of like reaching a major checkpoint in the game. Hitting the level cap is as close as most players ever get to "winning" WoW. Very, very few ever beat all the raid content before new content is put in and truly "conquer" the game.


So I do think it is important to make sure things don't stagnate for players at the level cap, but I don't think it's necessarily a BAD thing that people "finish" leveling at some point. And of course there's always prospects of expansion packs down the road that then raise it again.

[Jerich]

Hi Jerich. I enjoyed reading through your post (quicker to read through than your moonlighting one).

I completely agree with 2 or 3 of the suggestions you have close to the end.

I could see retirement and the asymptotic extra skill points systems working well, retirement even maybe better since the devs have some personal experience with that system, and could improve upon it.

I think we could do without unnecessary sinks that punish the player, like losing exp after death. It would only serve to drive away the more casual audience, while keeping something like retirement would keep the hardcore who are willing to sink endless amounts of time into it.

Thanks... that moonlighting post is huge.=P I still haven't posted two of the parts... Successful Micro transactions and player name vetting. LOL.=P I think I could write all one line posts for the next 300 posts and no one would accuse me of a lack of verbosity.=P

I agree with you... I don't think you need punishing sinks like excessive death penalties. I don't think game developers in the past understood the idea of an experience sink and were stuck in a rut where they viewed experience only in one dimension instead of seeing a wider application of sinks.

This issue has been around forever with RPGs. Back in the old days of MUDs once it became obvious that it was too easy to cap a character at a single level cap, whether it was 20 or 40 or whatever, different MUDs branched out on their solutions. Some kept raising the cap, some made each level much harder to get. I didn't particularly like either of those because it didn't seem like they were rewarding the player much, but they were making things a lot harder.

The solution I liked the best was MUDs that went with a quad-class system. I.e., instead of your character just being a Thief, a Warrior, a Cleric or a Mage, your character was all four. When creating it, however, you chose the order of the classes and that would affect the character in key ways. A Warrior/Thief/Cleric/Mage would never be as good at Thiefy things, and would not ever be very good at Magic things (i.e. they didn't gain a lot of mana on level ups, and in some versions their spells had a penalty on the damage.) This meant you now had FOUR TIMES as many levels to gain before you could cap out, and the other levels were harder and harder to level in terms of their XP cost.


But even this eventually was outstripped by the dedication of the players, and when I made my own MUD in the 90s my solution at the time was not only to raise the level cap to 69 for all four classes but to add in an "Avatar Level". I.e. when your character hit the level cap of 69/69/69/69 you could choose to do an Avatar Level. This would reset you to 1/1/1/1 and grant you skills associated with the Avatar Level. Your XP cost per level was increased, and you could avatar level again once you hit the cap again.

It was not the most elegant or even best solution, but I think it followed the right idea; which is to offering MORE to the player is always the right way to go rather than less.

Thanks for weighing in here Quintessence. I appreciate your long time experience in this genre. I think the current MMOs get a lot of their inspiration from the old Mud scene. Players did a lot of experimentation on what would work and eventually came up with ideas that worked well. One example is the skill system in Everquest and WoW which was directly copied from Diku Muds. I honestly think a lot of companies copy these proven strategies without completely understanding why they work.

I agree with your main point. Offering more to players is better than offering less. I think, though, you need to do it in such a way that does not give the person who has more time etc an overwhelming advantage in this front. I think a lot of the experience sinks should be horizontal development rather than vertical development (which matches your experience). Some of the sinks should be mainly designed for people who are achievement fiends.

All that said, I do think there are some distinct advantages of having a level cap that is reachable, and having all end-game content take off from that point.

1) It focuses end game content. When everyone is capped and the only source of progression afterwards is gear, it allows everyone to focus on gear. Everyone at the level cap will be going after the same thing, it is thus easier to get groups going, etc.

2) It's easier to balance. If you know everybody doing the end game content is going to be at level cap X, then you know what their base stats will be, what skills they will have, etc. it's much easier to design for that rather than if the people coming in can be anywhere in a level range, and may or may not have certain abilities that you want to interact with a boss mechanic, etc.

3) It lets players feel like they really accomplished something. When people hit the level cap it's kind of like reaching a major checkpoint in the game. Hitting the level cap is as close as most players ever get to "winning" WoW. Very, very few ever beat all the raid content before new content is put in and truly "conquer" the game.


So I do think it is important to make sure things don't stagnate for players at the level cap, but I don't think it's necessarily a BAD thing that people "finish" leveling at some point. And of course there's always prospects of expansion packs down the road that then raise it again.

You made this point elegantly. There are multiple reasons that a quickly reachable level cap is important. In fact there are several reasons an early level cap is also good. I think the lower the level cap, the more experience sinks in the end game that need to be put in place for the game to stay interesting.

- Jerich

[Darker123]

I think experience sinks could be applied to a type of crafting system, and maybe at end-game, a type of random chance game that gives the player random chances at unique or special items/gold by using the experience they gain while battling to pay for random chance items (kind of like a mini-game that uses experience as it's currency).

Just bashing ideas against the wall. lol.

[brainfizz]

The problem with all of this is that while the level cap is reasonably high and can get higher (lets say for the sake of argument it starts at 50 and gets 10 higher with each content release) the skills system has you handcuffed as it is capped at level 10 (12 with rare bonus items). A skills system that had caps the same level as the level cap would be more appropriate or even a percentage based skills system. If each level of skill has diminishing returns over the previous level and costs increasingly more exp to purchase (obviously a system like this wouldn't be able to just add one level automatically every time you level, you'd have to purchase skill levels with exp. Each level would just increase your level cap on that skill), then as people reach the level cap it will be very very unlikely that their skills will be maxed out, with most of their exp having been spent on levels and maybe three or four essential skills.
For example:
Level 10 fighter could train tier 1 attack, defence, utility skills to 100% of skill level cap, tier 2 skills to 60% and tier 3 skills to 20%.
Level 50 fighter could train tier 1-10 skills to 100%.
If tier 1 skills are quite cheap, then low level characters will be able to advance quite quickly in those skills, with each successive tier being vastly better than the one before it but costing vastly more experience to advance. Since this is an MMO then you wouldnt want people to just inflate their levels with experience and be rubbish in groups so there would have to be a minimum skill level attained before a character could advance each level.
All of this successfully solves the problem of experience at level cap, as the cost of each tier 10 point will eat up huge chunks of exp but will have a benefit to the character.

Also, if some sort of class switching is enabled with a total experience tax it will eat a lot of exp. it would also enable merchant only characters who could level up and gain tonnes of exp as a fighting class before class switching to merchant/miner/herbalist/smith/whatever trade class and using the exp there.

[Etna]

I like the idea of still having some use for experience after you reach the cap. I say this though, not ever having reached the level cap in any mmo.

I played in a mmo that used diablos 2 exp 'cap'
1 through 199 is normal, going to 200 is just asmuch exp as from 1 to 199, so i never really got to 200

[Jerich]

I think experience sinks could be applied to a type of crafting system, and maybe at end-game, a type of random chance game that gives the player random chances at unique or special items/gold by using the experience they gain while battling to pay for random chance items (kind of like a mini-game that uses experience as it's currency).

Just bashing ideas against the wall. lol.

This is a good idea Darker. I think high end crafting could be a good experience sink.

The problem with all of this is that while the level cap is reasonably high and can get higher (lets say for the sake of argument it starts at 50 and gets 10 higher with each content release) the skills system has you handcuffed as it is capped at level 10 (12 with rare bonus items). A skills system that had caps the same level as the level cap would be more appropriate or even a percentage based skills system. If each level of skill has diminishing returns over the previous level and costs increasingly more exp to purchase (obviously a system like this wouldn't be able to just add one level automatically every time you level, you'd have to purchase skill levels with exp. Each level would just increase your level cap on that skill), then as people reach the level cap it will be very very unlikely that their skills will be maxed out, with most of their exp having been spent on levels and maybe three or four essential skills.
For example:
Level 10 fighter could train tier 1 attack, defence, utility skills to 100% of skill level cap, tier 2 skills to 60% and tier 3 skills to 20%.
Level 50 fighter could train tier 1-10 skills to 100%.
If tier 1 skills are quite cheap, then low level characters will be able to advance quite quickly in those skills, with each successive tier being vastly better than the one before it but costing vastly more experience to advance. Since this is an MMO then you wouldnt want people to just inflate their levels with experience and be rubbish in groups so there would have to be a minimum skill level attained before a character could advance each level.
All of this successfully solves the problem of experience at level cap, as the cost of each tier 10 point will eat up huge chunks of exp but will have a benefit to the character.

Also, if some sort of class switching is enabled with a total experience tax it will eat a lot of exp. it would also enable merchant only characters who could level up and gain tonnes of exp as a fighting class before class switching to merchant/miner/herbalist/smith/whatever trade class and using the exp there.

Class switching would be a good experience sink. Retirement is also a good one. My argument is that the more variety of experience sinks, the better.

I like the idea of still having some use for experience after you reach the cap. I say this though, not ever having reached the level cap in any mmo.

I played in a mmo that used diablos 2 exp 'cap'
1 through 199 is normal, going to 200 is just asmuch exp as from 1 to 199, so i never really got to 200

This is one reason I like an early level cap. Once you hit 199, most people are not willing to grind to the level of 200. If experience sinks are varied, the end game will be more interesting. Torchlight single player is a good example of a mix of experience silk schemes with its retirement system and endless dungeon.

- Jerich