Playable Worlds Details How Stars Reach Character Advancement Works | MMORPG.com

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Playable Worlds Details How Stars Reach Character Advancement Works | MMORPG.com

Stars Reach has revealed how its advancement and skill trees will work.

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Wargfoot

That sounds like the concept of 'grouping' has evolved into something worse.

My initial read on what will happen:

Players will create/multi-box so that 10 accounts can go use that campfire, get healed, or some such thing - feeding XP to a single main account. We saw something similar in LOTRO where you could only advance in PvP by killing other players - so we had trains of characters moving across the field to be murdered, one by one in turn, by a main character - rinse and repeat to the toon of months of XP gained in a few hours.

dirtyside

wont read ........last email i got on this only showed people DANCING IN GAME , that is all in needed to know what direction this is going . good job Ralph

Wargfoot

dirtyside said:

wont read ........last email i got on this only showed people DANCING IN GAME , that is all in needed to know what direction this is going . good job Ralph

I think dancing is a legit way to show off character models.
His name is Raph, by the way.

It is okay if the game doesn't interest you.

Scot

Even if you don't mutli-box you can just find out what skills give the most xp and start with those expanding slowly out with the next best set of levelling skills and so on. I hope they have sussed this (I think they must have, but then I have said that before about developers. ) the question is how much have they done to iron out that issue.

Angrakhan

My issue with the design is that it's just different lipstick on the same pig. We call this classless but in the next breath say you can only have so many skills active at one point. Each combination of skills you can have equipped could be thought of as a class. There will be meta. There will be optional combinations of skills for certain activities and suboptimal skills for certain activities. Why not just bundle the optimal combinations and call them classes? Jettison the suboptimal combinations. All we've accomplished here is introduce the ability for the player to make broken builds in an effort to provide the illusion of freedom.

The fact the XP bar and levels has been moved to the individual skills instead of an overall xp bar and level for the class doesn't eliminate the fact the same mechanics are there, just rearranged.

Have we really made any progress here? I don't really think so. I'll point out the PoE 2 is moving back to a class based model after years of running a classless model in PoE. I find that interesting. Teams with experience in the classless model move back to a class based model. If I were to guess it's because it's easier to balance and eliminates a lot of player frustration creating broken builds that fall apart at end game forcing you to basically start over which is what you would have to do in this design as you unslot skills that were leveled in lieu of skills that were unleveled.

I'll give a final down side in the classless design before I stop my wall of text. Quest rewards. In a class based game you can give XP as a quest reward making completion of the quest very rewarding as far as progressing your character. You can't do that in skill based because how do you allocate the XP? What percentage of the skill was used in completing the quest? Especially if you were working on a couple of quests simultaneously this is impossible to answer. That means the quest rewards are just going to be money and maybe some reputation? This can feel very meh when turning in the quest and make you wonder why you bothered with it when you could just be out grinding mobs to level your offensive and defensive skills or grinding your gathering skills to work on those especially if selling the materials or a crafted product garners more money than the quest rewards.

Food for thought.

olepi

My question is: if I log in on Tuesday afternoon when there are few people on and I play solo for an hour, how can I earn XP?

If the answer is "you need to group to get xp" then I probably won't log in on Tuesday afternoon to play a casual solo hour of the game.

If the game is skill based and you earn XP by using a skill, then it makes sense that you can't advance in healing unless you are healing somebody. There should be plenty of other skills I could level solo if there are no other players around. Ryzom, released in 2004, had this mechanism.

olepi

Angrakhan said:

My issue with the design is that it's just different lipstick on the same pig. We call this classless but in the next breath say you can only have so many skills active at one point. Each combination of skills you can have equipped could be thought of as a class. There will be meta. There will be optional combinations of skills for certain activities and suboptimal skills for certain activities. Why not just bundle the optimal combinations and call them classes? Jettison the suboptimal combinations. All we've accomplished here is introduce the ability for the player to make broken builds in an effort to provide the illusion of freedom.

Ryzom did this and it was very effective. Each skill levels up individually by using it. You can use all the skills at the same time though, so the semi-class limitation due to limited skills isn't there. I agree that limiting the skills you can use at once kind of ruins the whole skill approach.

The other thing I liked was that you weren't a "level", you could play at any level you had a skill in. For example, I'm lvl 200 in melee fighting and lvl 50 in healing. In a group fighting level 50 mobs, if I use the lvl 200 skill I earn nothing, it was too easy. I can use the lvl 50 healing skill though and gain even-level xp. You are all levels at once.

dirtyside

Wargfoot said:

dirtyside said:

wont read ........last email i got on this only showed people DANCING IN GAME , that is all in needed to know what direction this is going . good job Ralph

I think dancing is a legit way to show off character models.
His name is Raph, by the way.

It is okay if the game doesn't interest you.

its 2024 ......... the basics have been perfected , come on fanboi , go dance with him , hold his hand too , you sound stupid when you say character models lol , this isnt 2004 or even 2014 . show what this game actually has to offer. bring back that adventure and that Excitement of gaming that RAPH is claiming not people "OH everyone was even dancing " lol plz go join the players of pax dei then

Tiller

dirtyside said:

Wargfoot said:

dirtyside said:

wont read ........last email i got on this only showed people DANCING IN GAME , that is all in needed to know what direction this is going . good job Ralph

I think dancing is a legit way to show off character models.
His name is Raph, by the way.

It is okay if the game doesn't interest you.

its 2024 ......... the basics have been perfected , come on fanboi , go dance with him , hold his hand too , you sound stupid when you say character models lol , this isnt 2004 or even 2014 . show what this game actually has to offer. bring back that adventure and that Excitement of gaming that RAPH is claiming not people "OH everyone was even dancing " lol plz go join the players of pax dei then

lol