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Do Skill Based Systems cause single-minded FotM builds as the sole choice in character type?
AccountDeleted12341
Member Posts: 351
Awhile back I proposed an idea for a Skill Based System (with Skill Cap) and I was told by a forum member that this never works due to players never choosing a pure archetype (Pure Mage, Pure Warrior, Pure Rogue, Pure Support, etc.) and instead EVERYONE tends to pick a mix of the archetypes to form the best dps that is the most tank-like in survivability. This was followed by another forum member stating that this is based on a single game, over a decade ago (where everyone played a Tank-Mage), and there is actually no evidence to prove this happens. Not even a little.
Obviously, with the Skill System I am creating I don't believe players will not become a "pure archetype" and I certainly don't believe that all players will be a mixed balance, min/maxed to provide optimal DPS and Survivability (Tank-Mage).
But what do YOU think? I realize "Skill Based System" is very vague, but if there is a skill cap, or perhaps some form of class system (DDO and Rift aren't pure class games, alhtough they aren't skill based games either), or a new system you or someone else has proposed.
You can define what a "Skill Based System" is and discuss what would be required in the system, if anything, to prevent this gloomy outcome (if it exists at all).
Discuss!
Comments
Def - A skill based system is one where you level individual skills that are not tied to a class or archetype.
1. Skill cap. The scenario you describe is the case in Darkfall overwhelmingly. That is primarily because they have no skill cap.
There needs to be a limit to the number or amount of higher levels skills you can obtain or use at a given time.
2. Balance of synergy in skills & stats. Some amount of synergy i.e. skills/stats working together, pushes people into roles which is good. It is bad when they are pushed to be as confined or more confined as they would be in a class based system. E.g. there is less build diversity in Darkfall (skill based) than in City of Heroes (dual class based essentially, primary and secondary power sets). This is because you can be a Jack of All Trades and Master OF ALL in DF, back to 1. but also because there is a lack of synergy in DF. Many defnesive buffs work no matter what your offense.
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Completely depends on the balance of the system.
I can imagine a system where specialization is overrewarded, and one where (like many skill-based games) players end up being bland and hybridy. The sweet spot would be in the middle of those extremes. All has to do with how skills get implemented.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Uh Guild Wars were pretty OK with class mix due to the enchants on gear i guess.
For example, if you wanted your monks cloth to be defensive and passive, you had to sacrifice mana and health enchant for an enchant that just protects you against swords for example. The best defense came when the meleer for example tried to debuff you making you more defensive actually.
The best thing is to make defensive skills require items that only certain classes can get. For example, healers in GW could equip shield and use tank cds which made them pretty OP.
Sadly, i think the easiest way to forbid FOTM is to make enchants valuable and "gamebreaking." Atm in many games the enchants wont affect your gameplay.
For example:
The wrong stats: Chest. 21 armor. +48 stamina, +28 intellect. Enchant: 2 mana per 5 sec.
The right anti fotm one. Chest. 21 armor. +10 stamina, +10 intellect. Enchant: Causes your absorb effect on critical hit to absorb less, but increase the total stamina on the item by 300% and intellect by 300%. Cannot be stacked with other item enchants.
Well thats like the only easy way to fight FOTM. Make items kinda useless but with enchants theyre usefull, along with epic items increasing enchant effect by a good percentage so every player wont qq.
Yawn
You bassicly want ultima online 2.0.
UO got destroyed by turning it into carebear game with tramel.
In pen and paper games, what you're talking about is called metagaming; be it a player having their character assuming special knowledge about a dungeon or trying to min-max the die rolls to get the best build. In MMOs, this behavior seems to be rewarded rather than punished. In some ways, I think it would be better to construct a game ruleset that rewarded less than optimal builds. A mage that focuses on a particular school of magic or a warrior that prefers dual wielding short swords over long swords, but neither is particularly great against certain foes and they're still good enough in a group to bolster each other.
Pre NGE SWG..nuff said.
Astoria pretty much covered it. Unless you have 100 different skills at the start, players are going to quickly figure out the optimal builds. As you tweak them, the players will continue to reoptimize, hence the FoTM phenomenon.
The trick is having a skill system where every skill is just as valuable and desired as any other. If any are even a tiny bit less valuable, you eliminate them from the meta-gaming pool, reducing the work needed to optimize an "uber build".
A couple of pitfalls of balancing can be too much synergy, basically forcing a set of skills on anyone who wants to take a particular role, and exclusivity-- limiting via skill points or other mechanisms a skill so that it is impossible to take on another role (you have 10 skill points and "magic" and "melee" each cost 6 points.)
One particular trap you have to try to not fall into as a developer is justifying your bias toward an "awesome" skill or set of skills by fooling yourself into thinking you will make it "harder" than other skills to play. You may try making it cost more outright (SP or gold cost) or by the old D&D method (mages are weak and pretty much crap to start but end up being the most powerful later on.) In the end, though, the hard core players and meta-gamers will blast through your hoops and end up dominating the game (and will post the exact plan to follow for everyone else to get to god-mode with the least pain possible).
It seems balance in all its applications is the holy grail of the genre.
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When UO was first released, you could cap out 7 skills before reaching the global skill cap, and there was just ONE skill for magic (magery).
What happened was that EVERYONE became what are called "tank mages." They maxed out magery at 100, then would get one or two maxed out weapon skills, some defensive skills, crafting skills, and be a master of all trades.
Origin realized their mistake though, and came out with a patch that did things like:
1. Add more skills that "empower" magic (meditation, something else I can't remember).
2. Add more skills that empower melee (tactics, anatomy, etc.)
3. Penalize mages for wearing heavy armor (slower mana regen).
All of a sudden, more variety in builds started to appear. It was no longer possible to be the old-school tank mage, because you just didn't have enough skill points to get all the magic skills AND the skills to be really good with a weapon. In addition, tank mages couldn't wear heavy armor because their mana regen would suck.
So it's basically all about the design of the system...I think you pretty much NEED a global skill cap. You also need to make it so all your awesome abilities are inside 4 or 5 skills that everyone can learn.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
This.
As long as skill system have LIMITS and is well thought you WILL have variety and no dps-mage-tank syngergies.
What is bad though game developers are afraid to put limits in game cause of people QQ-ing any form of limiting and then crying that everyone is same. Hypocrites.
people with no imagination or understanding of the mechanics will follow the FOTM.
Those of us who are creative and know what we are doing will then crush them all.
Indeed :P
I just wish there were no such thing as gimped builds. OP ones seem to always have their place for whatever reason, but when a class or build is "gimped" it really frustrates me, ESPECIALLY if I want to play it. Not that I can't do good with it, but because some of the better-than-sucky players with FotM can really put a gimped class (even if played by an excellent player) to shame.
Like the Shadow Warrior in WAR :P
That was sooo sad.... lol, not even considering the OP Fire Wizards.
People with understanding of mechanics also tend to be FOTM; in part because they're the pack leaders finding the new hotness, and in part because they understand the mechanics and the current FOTM is genuinely dominant.
It may be true that there are plenty of non-FOTM strategies in a game as well, but FOTM tends to trickle downhill from the most dominant players of a game -- so those top players are using the FOTM too.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Oh the irony... This comment shows that you are the one lacking understanding. Like Axehilt said, often those that use and those that come up with FOTMs are the very top players in the game with the most understanding and creativity. They are just using the build that is currently the best.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
What exactly happends with skillbased systems depends upon how they are designed.
Not all of them actually allow making an uber character like the OP describes. Thats just one of the many extremes skillbased games might develop into.
For example, from what I heard of Darkfall, people were running around naked (because of full loot and equipment doesnt matter) and in the end everyone was a mage (because they ruled in PvP). I think that was mainly because mages could have just as many hitpoints as everyone else, while in other games mages have, for good reason, less defense and less life than anyone else. And Darkfall, when I studied the game, also already had mechanisms that forced specialization (certain skills greatly improved performance of specific skill schools, but took away mana) and wasnt really pure skillbased anymore.
What however happends in skillbased games in general is that they always force uniformity. There are never two ways to do a thing. Unlike classbased games that can offer you, for example, three very different tank classes. If you want to make a tank in a skillbased game, the core abilities for tanking will always be the same. A classbased game easily can make tanking on the three different tanking classes extremely different, even if its in its core still the same job.
And if you want to play a Paladin, i.e. a tank that has some emergency healing, you will always run into the problem that you are using the same healing skills as anyone else, but as you have to be a warriorlike character with a lot of life and little mana, your healing will be just inferior and simply a waste of time.
A classbased game can fix this by making a special Paladin class that has high recast timers on their healing spells, but they are about as strong as those of a real healer and they can be efficiently used with the small mana pool of a warrior.
P.s.: Or speaking more generally, what you want to get with a rulesystem is
(a) balance: the overall power of players is the same. For each advantage of one player over the other they have a disadvantage that compensates it.
(b) diversity: how many truely different builds are actually played by the players. No not those millions of builds that your rulesystem may allow mathematically. But actual different accesses to the game.
But the more freedom you introduce into a system, the harder it is to archieve these goals. A classic pure classbased game (player chooses one out of n classes at game start and every player of a class has the same array of abilities) is still not simple, but much easier to balance than games with more freedom, and increasing its diversity is in the core simple: add more classes and balance them properly.
For what all skillbased games to date failed to archieve is having actually more classes than classbased games. Many of them actually have less diversity than classbased games. For example, in the TES games, thanks to the total lack of any trades, everyone would end up a Warrior/Thief/Cleric/Mage. Skyrim shows some hope of them actually introducing some true diversity, though. Reportedly they dropped attributes (which never served their purpose in that system anyway) and added feats to pick up).
Skill based systems in and of themselves do not create single minded FoTM builds as the sole character type. How a skill based system (or any other for that matter) is implemented is what decides as to whether or not FotM'age will rule the roost.
Regardless, power gamers and elite pvpers will always seek out and create the best 'specs' regardless of the system. What skill based systems do though is allow for greater flexibility and specialization for the individual outside of the combat/power gamer context.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
^^ That.
In games like UO and SWG you have a segment of players who will use certain build(s). Then you have everyone else and they might even pvp with the other builds.
Just as in every class based game you'll have this same segment of players who will leap to whatever class is supposedly the most OP... when that gets nerfed/adjusted they will roll the next OP class. Then you have everyone else who plays what they are interested in or what their guild needs.
I'd add in that skill based system beyond flexibility and specialization.. allow each gamer far more control and choice over their characters development. To me that is what not only MMO"s but all games should be about... Your character is the representation of you in a virtual world.. you should have more control over what your character becomes.
*edit* typos
Every mmo be it skill based or themepark talent tree system has min maxed builds that are just better than 90% of the option of each class.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
Employ proper limiting factors such as wearing heavy armor severely impedes ability to cast spells and skill caps will prevent FOTM builds from being a major issue.
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That was the beauty of such systems (Pre-NGE SWG had a similiar skill system).
You could roll the popular FOTM build. Sometimes it naturally happened when one toyed with a Profession Calculator enough and come up with that inevitable build.
But once you grasped gameplay enough, especially the PvP'ers, you wanted to toy around. Simply because of the drive to be successful and competitive (PvP, IMO, really pushed efficient builds that touched even PvE'ers). The awesomeness is coming up with a different build that slashes the competition, especially FOTM toons.
In Pre-NGE SWG, I remember "Defense Stackers" became a FOTM type. But then players started toying around with stuff like Combat Medics that used poisons, diseases, etc... stuff that didn't give 2 sh*ts about Melee or Ranged Defenses, and the Defense Stackers were howling in the moon to the devs about it.
There were counters to the Combat Medics too once people actually learned about how they played.
That was fun with such a system. Builds were dynamic in PvP in SWG back in the day. People could change their builds (requires work still getting a complete, new build). PvE'ers were far more stable in their builds, but could take cues from the PvP crowd when it came to some new, efficient build.
Again, it was great fun for me with such a system was finding a nice build that was effective but not FOTM, and people wondering exactly how you beat them and what build you had.
Because a Skillbased / Skillpoint System simply didn't peg a character that everyone could recognize as "Warrior," "Knight," "Mage," etc. with people knowing exactly what you were about the moment they look at you. In PvP with skill systems, you had to figure it out in the middle of a fight exactly what they were really capable of. THEN you devised and carried out a strategy in the fight.
I really enjoyed watching skilled PvPers in those Skillbased build fights.
I wholeheartedly agree. Power to the player in making their character, given the limits of any skillbased game. Flexibility in making your character in how YOU see him / her. Not some preconceived "class" with limited choices for variety.
If another player can simply look at your toon, and instantly know everything you're capable or incapable of in a few seconds, then that game has no variety at all in character building.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
But sadly its the majority. I would say in Gamelofts Order and Chaos, when rangers were OP, around 95% of the pvpers in the guilds were rangers. Required no skills to play at all.
I dont understand why FOTMs are played so much, i cant stand playing a class that takes no effort to kill other players.
The creative ones, us, would be around 5% of the playerbase i guess=/
Yawn
Why worry about it? FOTM are sheep for the wolf to hunt and slaughter.
The bigger the flock of sheep (FOTM) the better, especially if you're tailored to kill them.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Well the sad thing is that i sometimes have to roll a class that counters the FOTM. For example, back in WOTLK, everyone played rogues. I rolled a protection warrior and man did i have a fun time slaughtering the lambs one after one.
I know players will whine cause their main is useless against FOTMs, but i would suggest leveling a tank to mid level, they are almost always in need later on in PvP anyway. Again- i do love playing antifotm!
Yawn
FOTM builds/classes dont bother me as a lot of people who play them do not really know the class that well or how to twink it to here needs. I dont recall ever making a toon just because it was op at the time and really never really notice one class being way outdone by another. Everyclass is FOTM in the hands of the right player.
Its true that FOTMs are newbs. Its just the class who makes them skilled. When the class gets normal, they just quit cause they think the class sucks.
I wish the second statement is true. But for me it isnt. Any FOTM can take my class any day due to their unlimited stuns and gamebreaking mechanics. I just roll their anti class and own them up.
Yawn