This could have been a comment in the discussion thread of the Autopilot Character Development post, but I thought it merited enough attention to separate it out. It might also be a good idea to check out my Replayability and Keeplayability article, since this is a natural extention of both discussions.
I keep revisiting the idea of a classless MMO design, with the ability to respec at will, changing anything from basic character attributes to skills to “class”, should that be part of the system. I think that offering that sort of freedom is a great way to give players the ability to keep playing your game.
In my mind, MMOs should be designed to be keeplayable more than replayable, or rather, it would be ideal to have both. Replay value in MMOs is typically generated by offering the ability to make “alt” characters to experiment with other classes. Keeplay value, on the other hand, the ability for players to keep playing with characters they have become invested in, is largely found in the “endgame” of modern MMO design. (It could be argued, as I have tried to to before, that having the “endgame” style of play throughout the game would make for more sustainable design, but that’s yet another tangent.)
The trouble comes when someone reaches the endgame with their character, and wants to try that bit of content with a new class. The only present option in most MMOs is to create a new character and level them through to the endgame. That is an onerous, obnoxious task if all the player wants to do is play the endgame. (Even Blizzard recognizes that, and made the Refer-a-Friend promotion that wound up a dual boxer’s delight, and they now have account-bound Heirloom items, accessible to any character on the account, that speed up the alt’s journey even more. SOE might be catching on with their new EQ2 51/50 server, brought to my attention by Tipa.) That decision point, where the player realizes that he/she has to play through dozens of hours of content they have little or no interest in to get to the “good stuff”, is a huge exit point for that player. I don’t have numbers, obviously, but I suspect that many players who reach that point just stop playing, or maybe take a sabbatical from the game.
These players no longer keep playing, in other words, and the game has lost keeplayability for them. The game has lost their revenue stream.
It is those players that are a key demographic for my notion of offering complete character rebuilding. If they were given the ability to change the way their character played, all the way down to attributes and “class”, they may well try on some different hats and keep playing with the character they are so invested in. They don’t need to get a new alt up to speed, reforming guild ties and friend lists and whatever else a new alt needs to do. They can just change their one “main” character and keep playing.
Now I’m wondering what the retention rates are on something like EVE, UO or even FFXI are compared to WoW. I suspect that the greater ownership that those former games offer, complete with open skillsets and character building flexibility, leads to higher retention rates. I wish I had numbers, but if my suspicion is correct, and retention is a desirable aspect of a business plan, character flexibility leading directly to keeplayability and retention is a Good Thing.
Of course, the point to remember, and what I’ve tried to hammer home in the Autopilot article, is that such respec options are just that; options. People could still create alts if they wanted to (since respeccing isn’t the only reason for alts). Those who want to keep playing with their favorite character, though, would be able to, and I can’t help but think that would be a valuable thing to offer to customers. Smart MMO providers really should provide replayability and keeplayability, and not confuse the two.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I predict Blizzard will do this soon, potentially with WoW’s third expansion. Players who have leveled at least one character to 90 (naturally forcing them to purchase all three expansions) will be able to create level 90 characters with entry-level Raiding Gear. Naturally they’ll have to pay for each 90 character, probably something like $50 each, being equivalent to approx. 3 months of subscription.
I’m glad that you separated it from the class vs no-class debate going over there, as it’s a separate issue 🙂
The other option than allowing respec to any skill in the game is to make it a non-grindy process to level up a new character – for example, in Diablo 2 the pace of leveling in online play was fast enough to remove the grind feeling.
This is good because:
a) It stops people from losing the flavor of their ‘class’, as we talked about in the other thread
b) It still strikes a nice balance between making you money (by keeping players playing the game, since *some* repetition is still involved) and not making the players hate you by being forced to replay content they’d rather not.
I can’t help but link that in my mind to what a friend told me about Healers spec in WoW: you do the leveling part shadow-specced and only respec to Light (or something) once at max level, the idea being to speed up the leveling process.
So, in your game, I suspect many people would find a certain set that would make the game “easier” and respec to what interests them “in the end”. As a consequence, a good portion of the game would see the majority of players playing this set (or a close variation), no?
Also, As you level, in most games, you unlock abilities little by little, giving you time to discover. If suddenly you change everything at once, you will be completely lost in the available new options…
I do not have data about retention rates, but Ultima Online still has players and will also get a new expansion this or next year, called “the Stygian Abyss” (ironically, “Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss” was one if not the first full 3D dungeon crawler).
But so does Everquest 1, it still has lots of players. And if players do not like EVE or burn out, it has different reasons IMO.
I know many long time UO players that do not only have many “alt” chars, but their main char also had a very vivid and lively history. Swordsmen who became Mages turned into Tamers or Bards, some became crafters or even some kind of MMO socialite, traders and event organizers.
I also feel that a rigid class system does not have so much the game world and player interaction in mind, but balance in the sense of pvp power balance.
It is quite interesting to see that more liberal and class free games also allow their players more freedom to interact with the environment/game world than let’s say WoW/EQ.
Tesh, if your ideas come to fruition, you will have at least one subscriber for as long as the servers are open-me.
The current character model used by Blizzard is one that allows very little customization. The 3 talent trees may be great for hybrid classes that can change rolls on the fly -Paladins and Druids are nearly perfect as they can change from tank to dps to healer- but for pure dps classes like the rogue/mage/warlock, they don’t offer anything other than the ability to change the way dps is done. Leveling an alt to experiment with a new class may be fun the first time around, but the 3rd time around it becomes incredibly boring imo.
I’ve never played FFXI, but I have friends who have been playing since the game was released. They have 1 or 2 characters that can easily switch from dps to tanking to healing without having to go through old content that is essentially empty. When my friend found out I had 3 characters at level 70 -BC days- he said I was playing the wrong game, but when I asked him how long it took to level all of his jobs he responded with “you don’t want to know.” So FFXI may have a good system, but it still suffers from the same time-sinks found in other MMOs.
I speculate that one of the major obsticales a developer would encounter with a class free system is endgame. If you have 85% of your playerbase using 1 character, the end game better be good or incredibly difficult or people will rush through the content and then be left with the “what now?” feeling.
On a side note, I would like to see a game that permits my character to level all of the crafting professions available. If I choose to spend 400 hours leveling all crafting professions, why shouldn’t I be able to do so? I understand restricting the amount of gathering professions because you don’t want to tank the economy, but from a keepability standpoint I believe I would be less inclined to quit a game if my character were nearly self sustaining. EVE does this well -albeit in a different way- despite the fact that everything is trained in realtime thus restricting the amount of training that is physically possible.
Keep up the good work man. Who knows, you may end up creating the perfect system that will be copied by Blizz someday 🙂
Cap’n, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they did that. I’ve argued that they *should* do just that before, to capture that revenue stream of players who want the endgame without the grind. (Of course, there’s a tangent to explore about overall game design, when the endgame treadmill is more attractive than the “world”, but that’s perhaps obvious and a tangent too far for the moment.)
Melf, a drastically shorter leveling process would indeed alleviate much of the same pressure. Games like Team Fortress 2 work with “classes” because each gaming session is short, and trying something new is easy. It’s these long DIKU death marches that cause a lot of the stress. Shorten that appreciably, say, just long enough to teach someone their class abilities (under an hour, then), and you’ve solved a lot of the problem. Of course, then the keeplayability has to come from solid gameplay (including dynamic living world design), rather than the loot lust treadmill, so it would change the design of the game considerably.
Modran, yes, power gamers might settle on a “spec of the month”, but that’s their prerogative. That’s the point. It’s up to the devs to make sure one “flavor” isn’t the only way to play, and if players settle on one major “spec”, it’s good feedback on what the devs need to do to rebalance the system. (Or what the players are ignoring.)
Also, I’m not too fussed about giving players a wealth of options. I’ve played a handful of MMOs now, and the “learning period” is way too long. It’s stuffed with grind, rather than teaching, and I really do think that people can learn much faster than devs are giving them credit for. I don’t need to kill fifty Defias to understand how my Rogue’s combo points work.
Beside that, grind itself doesn’t teach anything. If we’re really going to talk about teaching players how to use their abilities, throwing them on a grind treadmill is about as useful as Investigations Math. Which is to say, almost completely useless, occasionally damaging, and exterior sources (WoWWiki/Thottbot for WoW or a real math teacher for IM) can teach more in shorter time.
Grind is not a good teacher.
Longasc, good call on the PvP/PvE notion. I agree; class balance is an easier beast to tame if PvP is a significant portion of your game design. I do think it’s a bit of a copout, especially for a game that continually charges fees, but yes, it’s easier.
Also, I’m not against classes so much as I get tired of them, and want to offer options. That’s the point of the ACD post; if I want classes, they are there, but if I want to go off the rails, I can. That’s also the point of this post; if I know that the only way I can explore more game options is to make a new character, I lose interest because of the soul crushing grind inherent in the system.
I’m not against alts, either, but I do know that not everyone wants to play through the game again and again just to try new things at the endgame.
Wolf, thanks. I agree that the FFXI system isn’t perfect, what with its insane grind totals. It’s a air warning that changing “jobs” doesn’t necessarily obliterate the grind.
I’m actually not too worried about the endgame, since I’m of the mind that an MMO can actually end, and that if people get to the “endgame” and run out of things to do, it’s OK for them to wander off. I’m not planning on the subscription model, so I don’t need to artificially get people hooked, I just need to give them fun things to do if they want to stick around.
Beside that, my notion of an endgame isn’t a raid treadmill, it’s more of an open world where players can interact with the world at large in interesting and profitable ways, rather than being shunted off to private farms. Still, yes, the goal is to give people things to do at all levels, with whatever builds.
If 85% of players are using the same build, that doesn’t really bother me. It does mean that it might be time to shuffle things around to see if we could make other options equally interesting, but ultimately, if people are playing and having fun, I’m not too fussed over it. They don’t have to conform to what I think is the “best” way to play the game.
Good call on crafting. I’ve been playing the LOTRO demo, and I’m deeply annoyed that I can’t make a character self-sufficient. If I want to let other players do the farming of materials and such, I’ll do so; I don’t need a game telling me that I *must* rely on other players. That’s a sure way to tick me off in any game. Players wind up making a stable of alts for crafting anyway to make their *account* self sufficient; why make players jump through those hoops? It’s very much the same thing as the class concern; why make a *player* create a stable of alts to be able to see what the game has to offer, whether it’s content, class mechanics or crafting? That’s exactly what I’m trying to obliterate.
If people still want alts for Role Playing reasons or just to get away from any given avatar, that’s perfectly fine; I’m not anti-alt. I’m anti-grind, and the mechanics that make a player require alts to see the whole game bother me deeply.
I can concede some small allowance if there’s story to be crafted that can only be told via alts (like the racial starting stories in LOTRO). This may be what Bioware is doing with their MMO, and I can see alts offering greater individual (replay) value that way, but there, it’s almost like offering a whole new game for each alt. WoW and its ilk don’t offer that, they just offer the same story through slightly different eyes. Since the *player* has seen it all before, it’s just a grind at that point.
Since the WoW world is so highly static, I really think that they would benefit more from keeplayability than replayability to cut down on the heavy repetition that burns people out.
And as always, I know that some people actually *do* like that replay in WoW, so I’m not saying to get rid of it or to get rid of alts. I’m calling for more options for those who want to keep playing at a high level without enduring replay (grind) mechanics to do so.
I think a lot of people equate getting rid of classes to having 1 homogeneous class that does everything and that’s simply not the case.
Having a classless system means I am free to take whatever skill I want, as well as learning more along the way by doing certain things (practicing with my weapon, clutch timing things, etc). People will be free to play whatever it is they want and while it’s true there WILL end up being manifestations of rogues, warriors, wizards, etc … these will be terms used BY the people, not the game.
If you look at WoW’s class system, you’ll see that in many cases, the hybrids simply dominate over the pure classes that they mix together. Druids can tank, heal, spell cast AND melee and they can do it all very well. Paladins can melee, tank and heal, while spell casting is … lackluster :p Shamans can heal, spell cast and melee dps and tanking is … lackluster. But WoW isn’t classless, it’s homogenized its classes and made them bland. Why play anything else?
In a classless game the idea is to promote freedom so that if I want to start as a roguish person, I need only practice the skills that make me that way. If one day I want to pick up a sword and board and tank, I can learn to do that as well.
The system I had in mind for a game would actually have a sort of … decay system on skills though, so if you don’t use one for a long time, its effectiveness goes down to the point where you’d have to be taught the basics again. It’d be like riding a bike, you’d just have to practice it a bit to get the feeling back.
Well stated, Wiqd. It’s precisely that notion that the player is in control (interesting use of the “by the people” mantra :)) that I’m angling for.
Decay sounds like an interesting idea, so long as it’s not an onerous grind. It would certainly give a nice feel of “shaking out the rust” when you respec, which is nice for storytelling.
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