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Classes vs. Skills in MMOGs
An anonymous reader writes "The buzz in the MMO blogosphere is yet another resurrection of the Class system vs. Skill system debate. A number of prominent online gaming bloggers have chimed in with their opinions on the subject, including: Scott Jennings, Raph Koster, Ryan Shwayder, Steve Danuser, Damion Schubert, and a host of others you can find linked on those blogs. The conclusion? Most of the devs favor class systems because of their simplicity and ease of communicating character roles, while a few devs and many players favor skill-based systems because of the freedom they provide for user customization."
This is no different than what happened in the Pen and Paper RPG world - ten years ago.
Most earlier PnP RPGs (AD&D, 2nd Ed. as an example) were heavily class based. Almost everything you were able to do was dictated by your character's class. When WhiteWolf came on the scene with Vampire: the Masquerade, I remember a lot of people being initially confused by the lack of classes. Your character is just a set of skills. But, as people tried it out, they LOVED it - it allowed them to have tons and tons of freedom over what their character is able to do, instead of being restricted by a class system.
I'm not a MMORPG fan at all - recurring fees and a limited scope of interaction make PnP gaming much more appealing for me - but I'm surprised that it has taken people so long to figure this out, much less write a news article about it.
Love sees no species.
Yes, Anarchy Online's approach of being skills-based but defining classes which have preferential improvement point costs worked very well indeed. And the implants provided yet another level of skills customizeability in AO.
Guild Wars is even better in that regard though, and this was mentioned briefly by the fifth of the people mentioned in the headline article, Damion Schubert.
In GW, every character has both a primary and a secondary profession, but you can raise the attributes of your primary profession higher than a secondary could through runes that your put on your armor. Since armor is switchable on the fly, even while fighting, this gives you a lot of flexibility for optimizing your build for a particular zone or encounter. It's better than AO's equivalent, the implants, since those couldn't really be changed in the field (AO's portable clinics were useless).
And since in GW your secondary profession can be changed to any other one with a 30-second visit to Crystal Desert or Senji's Corner, the range of possible combination builds is truly astronomic, yet everyone still knows that (for example) the Elementarist can provide the most powerful nukes. One of the bloggers wrote that skills-based systems introduce uncertaintly, but that doesn't apply to GW -- the primary will always reign supreme at the top end of their skill's abilities.
Quite a few of the other points made in those blogs seem to have been overcome in GW too. For example, it's no hardship at all to call for a "healer" instead of a "Monk" specifically, and everyone is perfectly happy to be healed by a Ritualist or an Elementarist/Monk or a Mesmer/Monk who are running healer builds despite not being primary monks. In fact, it introduces some very pleasant variety.
In summary then, hybrid systems work really well in practice, so the "classes vs skills" debate is a rather pointless one. Just combine the two, and you get the best of both worlds.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You don't need to pick between skills because you eventually get them all.
I guess... but at last count, optimizing for speed in training, it'd take you over 20 years to get all the skills to maximum levels. So, for practical game play, you have to pick a path you want to go.
This actually works OK because you start off in frigates and advancement to other combat ships generally builds on that skill (you have to have Frigates trained to level 4 before you can fly a cruiser, and you have to have cruiser to level 4 before you can train to battleship, for example).
Then you have the tech2 tree with is kind of the same thing but more powerful... Assault Ships are frigates on steroids and require frigate to skill 5 (max) along with certain other support skills (mechanic to 5, engineering to 5). Heavy Assault ships are cruisers on steroids (have to have cruiser to 5, assault ships to 4, and all the dependences of those, plus a few more support skills).
Rolemaster used this system (yeah, yeah, Pen & Paper), I personally believe they perfected. The problem was that the game was way, way too complicated for a tabletop game (so many charts, gah, I dreamed of crit charts). This is not a problem with PC games, however, I'd be very curious to see some development team implement the rolemaster system into a MMO.
The only problem with thatm though, is that weapons in RM are deadly. One lucky crit by some lvl 1 goon and you're out for the count, or at least severely impaired. Impairment is another thing I'd like to see in an MMO. Get injured in the leg? Run slow. Get injured in the head? Uh-oh. This is the sort of thing that should be added into a true PvP game.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You need to play EVE online. Your character learns at a static rate whether you are online or offline :)