Topic
Grinding, Levelling, and Whimsy
First, I am still wildly eager to be able to spend time in Glitch freely, not just during testing intervals.
But as I go through the Start-from-zero, level-up-character-yet-again, and only-then-do-some-exploring cycle, I'm wondering a bit how much Glitch wants to emulate that aspect of MMORPG. "Levels" in GNE were strictly social/reputational (and financial), and although I can see some value in formalising the process to a greater degree, too heavy an emphasis on levelling risks undercutting the element of whimsy and creativity in favour of the grim march of grinding (albeit in a more graphically and literarily congenial guise).
I think we see some of the ramifications of the difference between loosely-defined vs. formalised levelling in the Help channel and forums advice on how to level up most rapidly. Someone whose concern is to level as fast as possible isn't *playing*, they're *grinding*, and there's a reason that word caught on as an effective description for the process of attaining levels.
Less grinding, more playing. Less formulaic, game-defined behaviour, more whimsy and user-defined behaviour.
Replies
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yea, after a few test sessions now... i don't know how much fun the grinding levels will be. I do think that spice racks and bags of holding will at least make the grinding easier...
I really love the exploration aspects, personally. -
grinding of some kind is probably unavoidable, and rendering it impossible might even displease individuals who take pleasure in finding optimal grind paths. also, tiny speck is a business and level based games tend to hook players for longer time frames than free-form sandbox games.
that said, i agree that the way grinding is currently encouraged takes much of the whimsy and character out of the game. i think XP might be the culprit.
XP versus Branch Points
XP kinda stinks. it's so abstract and disconnected from the game world, that it kind of takes you out of the world. it punctures any suspension of disbelief because you end up doing the same things again and again .. the things that are most XP efficient .. even if they have nothing to do with the skill you're trying to gain. right now, XP is leading to frustrating, repetitive and 'disconnected' feeling grinding.
in clare's topic about "flat spots" [ alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea... ] we see problems with XP, in that it becomes a hinderance for leveling in different branches of the skill tree.
elsewhere, players have suggested a more purely quest based or action based way of gaining skills. that would be very cool but it is difficult to have distinct quests that span multiple play sessions. i think they work best as self-contained modules that provide a sense of accomplishment with every session. the problem is, in order to maintain long term play, the game can simply not let people level that quickly.
which brings me to Branch Points, which i think work much better. these are the gardening points, cooking and animal kinship points that currently have to be partnered with XP based skill points in order to advance.
i think the game could do away with XP entirely, and leave Branch Points as the lone limiting factor. This way, in order to advance in cooking, i'd have to actually cook, instead of pet pigs. These points could be more difficult to acquire than they currently are, in order to compensate for the lack of XP restrictions.
then high level people starting at the bottom of a branch won't be hindered by low XP starting quests, and in order to advance toward a skill, you'd have to perform tasks related to that skill, which seems like a more cohesive game world experience. -
I am not a fan of xp points either, I just want to be immersed in a big giant story, but I do have to say in their favor:
Doesn't offering XP *and* branch points increase the overall possible paths that a player can take to progress through the game? And if there is more than one approach to progressing in the game, I would think that would appeal to the biggest cross section of potential players. Some people get the enjoyment from the game specifically out of finding the path or paths of least resistance and I like that too, provided there are many paths to discover, not just the "right" way to play fast. -
"Doesn't offering XP *and* branch points increase the overall possible paths that a player can take to progress through the game?"
maybe in theory, but the opposite is demonstrably true. check out clare's topic where she talks about being unable to advance my maxing out gardening and then starting on animal kinship, because the XP costs for even the most basic animal kinship skills were prohibitive, since the quests returned such minimal XP.
under the current system, there is only one "right" way to play fast, which is to level each branch evenly with the others, so that the quest XP rewards remain level appropriate. progressing in any other way becomes nearly impossible after you reach a certain level.
XP pushes the "one right way to play fast" mode very strongly. if a grind on the animal kinship side offers more XP than one on the cooking side, it makes sense to exploit that grind and do as little cooking as possible, even if you want to become a cook. or do as little gardening as possible even if you want to become a gardener. it makes sense for absolutely every player to push that one grind to its limit, no matter what they want to ultimately achieve in game, skill wise.
at this point i've played through 2, 3 resets? that's the dynamic i'm seeing emerge. over time, word of whatever the best XP gathering method is will spread and everyone who hears about it will do it, even if they don't figure it out themselves. -
"Levelling fast" strikes me as antithetical to the spirit that informs Glitch. If the goal is getting to a high level as rapidly as possible precludes taking time to admire the design of the sectors, to enjoy the quirkiness of the tasks, to interact with other players, to use creative thinking within the world that the devs have framed for us. If Glitch is just WoW with more pacific quests and funkier design, I'll lose interest quickly.
My most vivid memories of my experience of WoW involve the first times I saw Stormwind and Ironforge, the first time I participated in a successful instance group, the first time our guild succeeded against Garr and Rag -- all discovery- and accomplishment-related experiences. Once that game became oriented exclusively to the highest-level players, all the effort that went into crafting the beginning and intermediate zones and levels became redundant. The more that WoW tilted toward "Everyone knows how to do this right, do exactly this, and you will level/gear up/whatever more rapidly," the less interested I felt. Again, grinding (or the rote application of fixed strategies) are the opposite of why I care about Glitch.
My best suggestion for Glitch would be (as striatic suggests) foregrounding skills (for which paths of advancement are at least logical) and backgrounding XP. In fact, I'd be pleased if XP were even hidden from players, so that when you level up it comes as a surprise. You could even introduce a variable (background) XP factor, so that tasks were not always worth the same XP. Anything to disarm the obsessive urgency of getting to the highest level possible as fast as possible. Encourage players to dawdle, experiment, do things that don't necessarily generate XP. -
I think "Levelling fast" is more a spirit that informs a player, not the game itself. I hate staring at a dashboard, but for some players, that is what it is all about, and I don't think those players are necessarily missing out on other aspects of the game in their rush to the next level. If there are multiple equally effective trajectories for levelling, then achieving them becomes an exercise in creativity within the game, and sharing what you know becomes a social bond.
That being said, I would love it if XP and Branch points were minimized, backgrounded or even eliminated. They preclude the possibility of an experience that is "epic, cinematic, intense" (see discussion with same title). A truly "different" experience means players should be guided by fate and serendipity, annoyingly round poetical words that don't have numerical values at all but mean everything. And if the point of this game is to save the world by re-tooling 11 giants' minds, then play should incorporate a gradual awareness of *that* specific, epic-sized dashboard-- yet players learn to play by obsessing over their individual stats--it seems antithetical to what I understand is the game's innovation--that anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. -
As someone that is maybe a little on the rush to level side, the reason I do this is so I can do new things. The fun of games like this, for me, it to be able to do different and interesting things in the game. It's not at all competitive.
This is part of what excites me the most about glitch, you can have skill trees, and skills that are wildly different in their rewards because there is not combat, the skills don't have to sacrifice fun on the boring game-killing altar of "balance". Want a bubble blowing skill tree, or one that lets you specialize in planting trees, or talking to animals? Great! Who cares if bubble blowing doesn't let you maximize some return the most, it's a game, it should be fun first.
I want to get to "Level X" a lot in these games, but it is always a proxy for being able to plant trees, or turn invisible, or something. I would love if "Level X" didn't exist, and the branch points mentioned above were all there was. And have a ton of them! :D -
""Levelling fast" strikes me as antithetical to the spirit that informs Glitch."
there is going to be a public leaderboard for every skill in the game. in order to get on those leader boards players are going to have to "level fast".
it's clearly intended to be part of the game, though hopefully not the entirety of the game. - i think part of the grind right now is the small windows of opportunity to play. we want to see what we can do int he game, and to do that we want to level fast to get to do more neat things. once the game is open for longer periods of time, i think some of that grinding will go away.
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This has been a very good thread! Thank you PeterVerona for bringing it up and for everyone else adding more colour.
We agree with the general sentiment and have been thinking about different ways to get where we want to be (encouraging whimsy, play, exploration, creativity; not requiring mundane, repetitive tasks in order to continue the play). We have a solution now, though it might be a few more test sessions before it shows up.
We are going to decouple xp/level from skills and do away with the current "skill point" concept. Instead of choosing a new skill at the time of leveling up, each player will continually learning new skills. Skills take a certain amount of time to "learn" and that amount varies from skill to skill (anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of days). As soon as one is done, the next one can start (a dynamic that's very familiar to people who have played the Civilization games).
Decoupling Level and Skill means that Skills just come over time (two players who have put exactly the same number of hours in to the game will have exactly the same amount of Skill, in the formal game sense).
Level, on the other hand, would be a measure of how effectively someone is playing the game (given their time and skills) ... for the purpose of obtaining a higher level number. Players don't *have* to level up in order to continue to develop; indeed, leveling doesn't give you anything except bragging rights. (We could consider showing an indicator of how long someone has been playing, like 'X game years old' and normalizing level against that age in order to rank people who want to play for those bragging rights – those who don't care are free to play in a more open-ended way and ignore it altogether.)
Aside from the fact that people don't have to play the level-up game in order to develop their character and continue to explore more of the game, there are a number of advantages to decoupling when it comes to developing the skill tree:
* We don't have to worry about balancing skills against each other (with the intent that they are roughly equal in value) which makes it much easier to come up with new skills
* We can have a far greater number of skills in the world, partly b/c it is not limited to the number of levels players can attain and partly because skills which are just incremental improvements to existing skills make perfect sense in this system
* This should improve the game play experience as well: when upgrades come with increased frequency (regular intervals of gameplay) players almost always have something good just around the corner ("just 5 more minutes and I'll have Animal Kinship VIII and then I can do a proper guano run and start on Croppery III") which should make the game more engaging.
Finally, it lets us more easily allow do more things with basic tools early in the game (even without a related skill) so they can experiment and learn more about the underlying mechanics; they just do it poorly, even uneconomically (e.g., they have a net loss in min-max terms from engaging in certain activities, but they are learning about the world and discovering enough to choose which areas they want to concentrate on). We can support this further by warning players before they buy things they can't use effectively (or, filter NPC stores so that you can't buy certain items till they have the appropriate skill).
So, that'll be interesting. - Looking forward to a proper guano run.
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thank you for the detailed reply, stewart.
the changes to the XP system sound great. the major problem i had with the previous alpha versions was all the time spent grinding that made it impossible to socialize and hatch plans.
such changes should make money and tools/gear a more important aspect of gameplay - in terms of enabling what players can and cannot do.
i think that would appeal to me, and hopefully other players. unlike XP, money can be traded, which is more social. it can also be communally pooled, which can help build group dynamics. tools/gear can be sold back to vendors at a small loss if need be, whereas skills cannot be retrained. tools/gear can also be gifted from one player to another, or sold, or lent, in a way that can't be done with XP or skill points. tools and gear are also more visual and fun than skills, which are sort of abstract. the game can also introduce scarcity effects with "rare" tools, that would be more difficult to introduce via skills/XP.
obviously skills will still be part of the game, but the way you describe things i can see a shift in gameplay from "grinding to acquire skills" to "working to acquire tools/gear in order to use or better use skills you have" - which seems much more visual and social and FUN : ]
also, easier to understand. - Sounds like good changes, I'm looking forward to them!
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This is all very interesting. With the current system and content I have definitely hit the wall around level 11 or 12 where my skill order decisions have left me with the ability to only gain a small fraction of the level via quests [and the rest via pig molestation].
The direction and changes do seem a bit drastic -- i may have just suggested more non-skill based quest content which may have already been planned as a way of filling that leveling gap. But I'm very eager to see where this goes. -
I dropped in today, ready to become redundant at work for another afternoon. I am at level 7 and did all the quests given to me so far except for one having to do with feeding piggies to sniff their plops. But without a house that's pretty tough to execute, and there's no property available. Last time I petted and meat-ed and hoed and watered my way up the animal husbandry and gardening trees far beyond where my skill points could earn me any other abilities, and for some reason totally neglected cooking (and mining wasn't available at the time). So there I was, wandering around, picking up quoins, occasionally petting some piggies or harvesting some fruit, but I couldn't find anything to *DO*. No one needed help with anything, I didn't have a property to garden or animal-husband in, it was just sort of... boring. I finally went back to work after not finding anything to help anyone with, disappointed that I was sort of plateau'd out. I am hopeful that the above changes would offer me (and others like me) something to do to make some sort of progress rather than just wandering pleasantly but aimlessly without a purpose.
If I wanted to do that, I'd stay in real life. :-) -
Elearnor: We don't want to you to stay in real life!
We've made a lot of progress on fundamentals now and are going to start building out a lot more world and, more to the point, are prioritizing getting proper houses done. So, everyone should be able to have a house with an outdoor or underground production area and a indoors in which to store and craft those resources, as well as decorate and show off.
That will be many tests away, but now that we've gotten enough feedback on the core mechanics and know what needs to change, we can start building out. And then there will be less boredom of that kind. - Stoot, you better make sure Eleanor doesn't stay in real life. She has a posse!