NetGore

Yeah I would rather more complicated builds but you are allowed to reset whenever you want. Being stuck into a certain build is a pet peeve imo.

However some simplicity is important for strategy to a certain point. The more variation you have the harder it is to create viable counter builds and you end up with just tanks. However if you go too simple it becomes too easy to master and there is no high level gameplay or creativity. I guess its about balance.

Yeah, I agree with resetting. It should be available, but with a price of course. Nothing sucks more than spending a month building a character to figure out you did it poorly.

How would you go about restricting resetting? I would definitely add a real-time delay (such as only once a week), and possibly some minor experience loss (2-3 hours worth of leveling).

edit: woops double post

I dunno, torchlight has an official mod which allows you to reset for 15,000 gold. I ended up doing it (with the barter skill leveled up of course) but it was expensive enough to make me more careful about my stat build. I guess if you make it too easy the game loses the kind of immersion you are trying to achieve.

Time delay also sounds like a good idea. Personally if i was making a game like that i would just make it readily available whenever, but that's just me, i can see why people wouldn't want that.

Not sure about experience loss, losing experience in a leveling oriented game is perhaps the most depressing thing one could imagine. Depending on how much you lose it could mean rage quit, on the other hand too little and you are not achieving your goal. I think alternative methods would be better.

skill & stat resetting:
- usable once a month and expensive

were considering an item that will reset stats for the item shop but hmm,
havent thought much about it yet.

our stats are 6:
3 "active"; 3 "passive"

Strength: Attack power, bow Range, etc
Vitality: Life, resisting status effects?
Dexterity: Accuracy, attack speed
Agility: rather awareness, blocking, evading
Intelligence: Magic attack, mana regeneration
Wisdom: Max Mana, Healing Spell strength, magic resistance

while these stats do a good job influencing your characters build,
But these pure builds, if not level dependent or so, can be bad...

1. method:
35 strength
12 vitality
20 dexterity
20 Agility
6 Intelligence
6 Wisdom

here my 3 lowest stats are intelligence, wisdom, vitality.
Now the system randomly distributes 2 points among these 3 stats;
NOW: I distribute my 5 normal stat points.

with lvl 50 thats 100 random stat points distributed to the 3 lowest stats.
so if people need "little" wisdom, they only level a little into it.
evenly distributed a warrior would have ~ 30 wisdom & intelligance at lvl 50
and 50*5 => 250 stat points on the other stats.

2. method:

Have each stat level AND stat dependant. This is the old school method.

3. method:
Have each 5th point in an active stat increase its passive skill by 1;
correspondingly each 5th stat point in passive stats increases its active partner by 1.

Of course, in your game you would need a few "partner stats" that effect eachother

Conclusion

There are a few ways to do this. I like the method with 1 auto distributed stats and 3 manual stat points maybe;
dont now. team didnt handle this one yet.
PROBLEM: RESET: you would have to distribute all status points immediately to then apply the automatic stats.
hmmm annoying fact that can be abused. its easier to spam strangth and get the weak stats pumped afterwards;
than to level up slowly focusing on other stats.

the link between 2 stats (have 25 strength and auto-gain 5 vitality) sound nice to me too.
of course each layer needs a variable "total_statpoints" for this one (considering resets)

I played a game quite a long time ago that had you set your own stats and the biggest problem with it was. If you did did it poorly (balance out all your skills for example - jack of all trades). You ended up as a useless blob of nothing that could only kill enemies far below your level and you end up with endless grinding. Which ultimately comes down to you not playing that character anymore, this game did not have an option to reset your points and I often found myself committing suicide to lose a level and get some points back. Although being able to reset the points for a cost could fix this. However doing so you end up with people like in WoW that re-spec every time they do a different task so they are at the top of their game. Money cannot be used to reset their stats unless you base the amount on the players level. Because doing it otherwise high level players it will be simply to easy. I personally like the fact of no turning back it makes you think every last point though to its fullest. I often found myself not using points for quite a long time looking at equipment that I had plans to get to make sure I had all the required stats. This could also be tied into the proficiency system I stated in my other post. Since you don't have levels items would require X strength Y endurance which is entirely more believable and a much better system.

I don't think respec-ing all the time is that much of a problem.

Given enough time One build will shine over the others. Its the nature of gaming, Someone will find the most powerful option and everyone will copy that.

Dofus Had the problem that if you didnt do your points right you became a useless blob. there was no skill reset. It made a couple characters between me and my friends pretty useless. A stat reset there would have been rather nice.

Planetside let you Unlearn a singe talent, but only once every 12 hours, so given a week you could rebuild your character to somethign complety new, or in a day change your specializations. There were no penalties but the time.

World of Warcraft: Talents can be reset for 5g*number of times you've done it. Bit expensive for situational use, but again keeps you from being locked into a role, or skill mistake forever.

Just some of the ways games i have played have done it. personally i like planetside's, its limiting, but still useful. letting you partially reset every day, but making you take time to do so fully.

See but letting one redo their stats is unrealistic. Once you make a decision you can't always say oops undo - there we go. Maybe you could do something like when you get a stat point you have 24 hours that you can continue to move said points around before it becomes locked.

That sounds more like a design flaw, though. No one build should be best. If it is, your class's power is poorly balanced, or your game makes most all scenarios way too similar and there is not enough room for tactics.

For example, in Mercenaries of Astonia (old game I love to make references to for when it comes to tactics), there were quite a few ways to build some classes. The Templar (all fighting, no magic) only really had one way to build since there wasn't much to them. But the Harakim (all magic, minimal fighting) had tons of ways. You could focus on your Ghost Companion skill, which was a summon that fought for you. Using that, you could "dump" monsters on him and just run around doing what you wanted to do (which was useful a lot of the game involved getting around between closely located points). A lot of people went for the "safer" route of keeping most all spells around the same level, giving them decent damage and armor and could easily fight their own level. I personally liked the "perma-stun" route. You have very little defensive skills, no Ghost Companion, just a lot of stun and attack. You could stun monsters for long enough that you keep them stunned the whole time you fight them, not letting them make a single blow. That way, you could easily go places with monsters anywhere from 2-8 levels above you (which is a LOT considering the game only had like 24 levels spread very far apart), and even pick down some of the stronger monsters in the game. Of course, stuff your own level would kill you faster, and the stuff you'd be fighting could kill you in a few hits, and you were toast if they managed to do something like stun you.

Point is, no build should be best. The perma-stun build sounds ideal since they can fight such high level monsters, but they were a hard class to build up, incredibly risky, and couldn't do much at all against monsters with high immunity (reduces the length of your stun) or could stun back. But they could do stuff that the "general build" couldn't even imagine doing at the same level.

well yeah, one focus should be: keep gameplay hard!

The typical MMORPG tank is "go there, cast "provoke" every X seconds and wait"

That si major BS, you should be saving comerades, maybe have the ability to switch places with people, hold an enemy bound to the ground before you, etc.

just like 9-5 mages with "fireball, firebolt, etc"
a wind mage can have the ability to throw around his enemies with whirlwinds, etc.
maybe click an area and pull the mouse in a direction to smash someone away with a windstrike.
make it fun! water mages can push back waves of enemies with a tidal wave.

druids can create treants from trees around them (and also have a spell to regenerate these trees)

In our game, we have almost come to a conclusion:
having "random stat points" each level and then have stat points that you distribute.
These Random stats would be standalone in the code.(to even them out by +/- 20% regardless of the build)

BaseStats+LevelStats => The players real Stats.

There is no need to reset these stats.

In Aleron we also have skills.
you select skilltrees from a pool freely at char creation;
you will have the possibility to change your skill tress,
but doing so you will lose all skill levels.

So if you messed up, feel free to respec your skills, but youll be weak for a while.

In a skillsystem based on skillpoints, make skillpoints used for LEARNING NEW SKILLS,
but having skills advance via usage. This way, resetting skills automatically costs skill exp.

Yes there are a few ways in my posts, because not only 1 guy reads this, and I hope some things can inspire some devs.
Also combinations of these can be very effective, I dont know.

RPGs are unrealistic in nature, that is why they are fun. Coz who wants to play real life, srsly?

I dunno it feels like you are welded onto the way current RPGs/MMOs work, as you are kind of just repeating a mantra without really giving it some thought. Kind of like the "you have to be punished when you die" kind of thing, without really knowing why.

It would be cool if you could give some reasons why you think this way.

Nah I've seen plenty of games not reach that stage for more than a few months (although the more people play the game, the faster it changes), its to do with contention and reaction (i might create an article about this when i have time) which creates dynamic gameplay.

Basically if a person has to react to a certain build and create a counter build, then obviously the other person has to create a counter build to that, and then the 1st person has to create a counter to that, and the cycle continues. Or on a faster level the old build would have to compensate in use of different weaponry and skills and then the other player would have to do the same.

Introducing these kinds of mechanics into a game makes what you just said pretty much impossible.

The reason I see things that way is I've seen far to many times where people play a game and have a decision put in front of them. There is option A and option B said player picks option B and then realizes oh crap that was a bad idea and then loads his game and picks option A and gets the better reward. You see what I'm saying? It personally annoys the hell out of me when I see people do things like that. Your decisions should be final I'm not one that thinks you should be able to undo everything. I mean things that don't really have an impact on gameplay like allowing a user to change their name doesn't really bug me but things like I mentioned do. When I play an RPG I personally take what I get and think what may happen from me doing something not pick A load game pick B see which was better. This is talking from a single player game though in online games it's far worse due to people making wikis with what reward you get for this and that. And basically guides on what you should/shouldn't do.

See where I'm coming from? It almost makes having choices in the game pointless.

But if you dont do it correctly the opposite is true. you can destroy a character you have put a lot of hard work into, Im not saying making it as easy as restarting the game. you could even involve a long quest line to get a reset. But not having it can mean your character is penalized for life because you made the wrong decisions.

then dont make A better than B

if you save the princess, the king rewards you with a spell

if you assist the bad guy, he rewards you with some spell

make it alternates.

if the king gives you a sword and the bad wizard gave you a spell,

spells are there with lvl 80, lvl 20 swords arent!

make both of em worth it!

maybe so that class dependant people get rewards.
paladins cant make much use of the evil wizards reward.
black mages can

Games are getting easier to please the mainstream audience. Alot of indie groups are working on more PvP or open ended games ;p

its like the music biz

Frankly, I think RuneScape (it was long ago; laugh and make me a sad panda ) has a pretty good approach to this. It's at least an interesting variation.
RuneScape (it was long ago) and WoW (more current) are the two only MMORPGs I've played with any degree of seriousness, though.

Basically, WoW's level and stat system is kind of... centralized: it all revolves around your XP bar and your levels, and your stats are calculated from these and your class, and in many cases, your gear and equipment. Then, there are professions and other skills - many of which are dependent on luck in finding "harvestable" materials, etc.

RuneScape has (or used to have, whichever) a less unified approach. In short, you can specialize yourself in melée fighting, ranged (ie. archery) or magic. Ranged and magic both consist of one "skill" each. Melée consists of two. Attack (which decides your likelihood of landing a blow) and Strength (which decides the amount of damage you can hit.) In addition to these skills, you have the two "style-independent" HP (max amount) and Defense skills (for some reason, Defense has little to do with amount of damage taken, but more to do with frequency and probability.)
Your combat level (the level other players see) is determined by either melée, ranged or magic skills, together with HP and defense. It sounds complicated, but it does allow more specialized training - all of these skills have their own XPs, and you get XP whenever you deal damage (in melee, whether it's Attack, Strength or Defense XP will depend on your selected fighting style.) rather than whenever you kill a mob.

Combat aside, all other things to do (in WoW these would have been professions) are also skills on equal footing - from mining to fishing to.. firemaking. The point is, here you get a fixed amount of XP based on the "grade" of item you get/use rather than having it depend on luck like WoW.

The point is that Runescape has a fairly unique way of "mixing up" the skills system. Something I, for one, would wish more games had done.

Runescape was a pretty good game for the architecture it had to run on. Its PvP and gameplay dynamics were however, pretty shocking (bad).

It had lots of skills, but they were all clones, meaning you levelled them up the same way. Simply do the same crap over and over again until you level. This is why auto-miners became so prevalent in Runescape, because levelling any skill always used a repeatable pattern. No matter what Jagex tried, new autominers would just be able to find a loop-hole, and people would start botting again.

Stats should require dynamics, or be a part of dynamic gameplay.

All I see when people try to make an MMO is the same old shit of...

On top of PvP. We are going to have 5 trade skills, mining, fishing, smithing, swimming, flying.

In order to level your swimming skill, you have to swim a lot. Then you will be able to swim in deeper seas which will give you more swimming experience. You can also have a swimming trainer, or go to the swimming pool and level your swimming skill there.

W00t FuN!

actually bake, for a modern mmorpg, your swimming skill is quite advanced....

T_T

I had figured on making progression semi-permanent in my game, with no traditional level system. In a sense, I didn't see why, in the type of game I'm thinking of, there would be any need to change, and perhaps allow all skills/stats to progress indeninately (which would make some pretty overpowered characters after a while, and I haven't completely solved that, but I have an idea, more in a moment).

After reading this thread, I'm thinking that there does need to be a mechanic for some allowed change, and have a rough idea.

My game has four basic races, for now, call them A, B, C, and D.

A: "magical" beings that are long lived or nearly immortal.
b: "normal" humans, that are short lived
C: "nonmagical" beings that are long lived, almost as long lived as "A".
D: "protector" beings that have little to no magic, are quite small/powerless, but are immortal and necessary for various game mechanics.

Among "A", there are healers (though not in the traditional sense) with varying magnitudes of ability. Most are quite weak, and I'm thinking that the OP healers will be NPCs for special use/villians/etc. Low power are simply able to heal themselves, moderate can heal others, moderate-high can heal other races, and high can actually warp the "structure" of another character, which I'm thinking of adding as a "stat change" mechanic. An "A" with high level healing would have to be found (which might include a pilgrimage to an NPC in a quest like situation), and anything from payment or trade to a quest that would have to be completed would be necessary to have the stats changed. (this follows the story line that the game is based on).

Among B and C, there are no magical healers, but more like herbalists and doctors (witch-doctors, more likely, it's set in a pretty low-tech period of history). I'm just not sure how to balance "A's" magical stat changes with a non-magical stat change in these two groups and still have it fit the story. B and C are non-magical, and have little more than a simple chemistry set of natural items to combine into "remedies" or simple surgury (like stitching a wound).

"D" is a rather fixed race, no real ability for much progression or stat change. They are kind of an add on that will be asked for, I'm sure, but would be added at a later point/revision/addition to the game.

There will be no rules stating that the races cannot intermix or cooperate, however according to the story line the only races that truely get along are "A" and "D". "A" and "C" are tenitive trading partners on and off in the story, and "A" and "B" are nearly always trying to kill each other. In the story, "B" and "C" rarely if ever meet, though it is assumed that "B" pretty much only gets along with it's own kind (though that won't necessarily be enforced in the game).

(as far as developing it, I'm starting with the "C" group, as they are underground and far easier to build maps and test builds for, I'm thinking. Later, I'll add a variant of "A" race, followed closely by "B" race.)

Anyway, back on topic, I'm thinking that "A's" stat change method is a start, being that you still have to do something to get your stats to change. I suppose that B and C could also have a "recipe" requiring a special ingrediant that has to be procured as a limiter (but then you get into, if it's limited by the character only able to carry one bind-on-pickup item, they could just keep one around for the next time they want to change stats, and if it's a time-limited drop then a few people could farm it and keep others from getting it. I guess a bind-on-pickup, but goes bad over time solution would restrict players from only going to the effort when they want to change stats.

D should need no stat changes, however I'm not sure where they will fit into the game. they might just become NPCs.

One other dynamic I'm playing with: Lifespan. Among "B", lifespan is relatively short compared to A, C, or D. This does make skill set less important to change if you're remaking a character every few months because they died of old age. Some "A's" and "C's" are not immortal, but have fairly long lives compared to "B's". I'm thinking that one way of balancing the lifespan is to be able to "Will" items to another character, perhaps the next character created by the player, and perhaps have an apprintiship mechanic that allows a new character to be developed back to the old character's level relatively quickly. Still not sure yet, but here's where the age thing comes in:

Instead of traditional 'level' system, I was going to use age as a descriptor of level, to hold more to the storyline. Entry level characters would be children, and have child-like training quests to complete for experience, but progression would be set to time. After the character has "grown" a bit, into a youth, they are able to do more "adult" stuff, but it's still a "stick near the tribe, family, home" scenario, and the youth "learns" or builds skills faster than other times. When the character has "matured", skill progression is more limited, and stats are added to to a lesser degree, but progression still goes on. Especially with the humans (or "B"), age has dramatic influence on effective strength, influence on NPCs, and whatnot.

This might sound like a very long, drawn out, slow progression game, but the community is used to playing RPGs through MUSHes, very little fighting, more exploring the fictional world around them. I'm more or less trying to just put a graphical spin on it with more social interaction (I'll be using whatever messaging system heavily).

Input? Anything that can't be done/definitively excluded from by using the netGore engine?

Games have definitely gone the way of being more simple as of late, I played Lord Of the Rings Online (after downloading it for two whole days getting really excited) and I was pretty much appalled at all the mechanics, players who are willing to pay end up with the real experience of the game while free to players got what was basically a demo, I think what they want to do is hook free players in so they will later become pay to players.

As for this dumbing down of stats I think MMO's are really going the way of not having stats at all, annoyingly.