I’d been thinking about the problem of ever-increasing levels in MMORPGs recently. In almost every respect it’s a symptom of the source for those games, paper based RPGs and to some extent paper based wargames. Certainly traditional roleplaying gam…

http://soagcure.blogspot.com/2008/08/horizontal-vs-vertical-game-design.html

This is what I found on the topic. Was this the article you were refering too?

Levels wouldn’t exist, you’d have ranks if you were starfleet, or a wealth based system if you were a Ferengi, and your character would not be immortal. If you died in game no big deal, but after you get to a certain age your character would die or have a chance to retire. After your character dies/retires you’d pass down your legacy through some sort of crazy reincarnation mumbo jumbo that doesn’t make any sense so that you could start again with special skills/bonus/money as a different race.

And not all of the game would be killing stuff in the enterprise, why not have the game be during Deep Space 9′s war against the Dominion, and you could have a wow like horde/alliance faction thing. You’d be able to communicate, group with and spy etc.

What couldn’t you do in that Star Trek time frame?

I’d include trade, spy missions, grinding random beasties missions, diplomatic missions (think Mass Effect convo style but way more complex), farming, entertainment (like dancing/music in SWG) etc.

To address player effects on the environment, you could let players make mistakes, kill key characters, blow up stations, win/lose the war, etc and the game would reset for some bull reason at the end of the war, like someone shoots a torpedo at the wormhole and everyone gets sucked into a black hole which leads them to an alternate universe, 6 months in the past.

I don’t know, I have way more ideas in my head right now for a Star Trek mmorpg, but the amount of time spent on the project would be epic, along with the cost to develop it.

A better comparision would be the FFXI jobs. If I level to 30 as a red mage and then switch to the bard job, I would start from level 1 with bard if I have not leveled it before, but it is still the same character – same housing, same “guild”, same item storage – just a different skill set.
FFXI did not have any separation of areas like in this concept, but it would be a somewhat better comparision I think.

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What if you remove your levels entirely as absolute entities and introduce an individual relative “level”?

Enemies/mobs would have a relative level (-1, 0, +1, +2) etc to the player characters. As a player character obtains skills in some area he/she may choose to change the relative level for that character, e.g. lower it one step. A +1 enemy becomes +2 to that character – it would still be the same relative level for other characters who have not changed their relative level.

Rewards would be modified accordingly, perhaps to get a greater chance for some drops and/or more points to “buy” skills or whatever it may be.

1.) I’m assuming the game will have item progression and better loot will be awarded as each new area is released. This would be the only way to keep people interested, really. So how does it keep the content from being outgrown if the raiders have all the abilities and loot they need from it? They would move on and have no desire to go back to the older raids, even if newer players were joining them that needed things from those raids. It would be especially annoying to them if some ability were absolutely crucial and they had to go back to Delta to raid to get their new guys this ability. That’s going right back to flagging from Planes of Power in EQ. Maybe I’m not fully understanding the concept though.

Looking at it from the perspective of a new player rather than a raider, If they can just focus their leveling on the specific area that is being raided by the guild they want to join, why would they bother with the previous zones? Though this is where I get confused, because you state that this would make it easier for the player to catch up to raiding, but also talk about how abilities gained in one zone might be useful in another one. It sounds like all that is happening is you’re cutting down leveling, meaning they could technically join in on these level 20 raids in Delta rather quickly, but they wouldn’t necessarily have the best abilities that other people who have been to other zones have. Eventually, I think guilds would simply require certain abilities to join and then you are right back where we are with the raiding scene today, only new guys have to gear up with “abilities” instead of actual gear.

It sounds nice being able to start in the new expansion zone Epsilon with the vets, but the same issues arise here. Are you penalized for not having the abilities from previous zones? If not, why would you ever go back to them? Just play from there on. I just don’t see how it keeps the old content alive.

2.) Even if everyone is the same level in the wilderness, if they don’t have good abilities it may not even matter. People would be forming groups saying “Must have xxx ability” and so on, similar to my example above. It sounds like your character would be defined by the different abilities and gear they have moreso than level, so I’m not sure how reducing everyone to the same level in this zone really matters.

You could design it to where even a level 1 with minor abilities is effective in a battle, but by doing so you would have to lessen the amount of power gained by the abilities that could be earned, and the players who spent more time on their character may feel cheated when that effort is not properly rewarded.

I understand you go a little deeper into it, but I think it completely is out of the realm of “levels” and fits a skill system better. I have always been dreaming about a Star Wars RPG where you actively have to travel the universe to find trainers of sorts. I played a MUD for a long time that had such a mechanic and it was interesting to have to pick up every few weeks and move your home, spaceship, and character to a new planet or location to begin your next skill which was unlocked by attaining another skill. All while avoiding perma death :P