I saw another topic regarding power creep, but in a different sense. It was more revolved around the power creep via character level vs scaling enemies.
In this topic, i'm specifically talking about the item power creep. Many MMOs suffer from having a huge item power creep every expansion where all items from the last expansion become completely obsolete.
One example of this can be seen in how World of Warcraft's expansions were done.
Here is a basic graph showing the approximate max dps 2h weapons for classic through the cataclysm expansion. I couldn't get more info after this, because after that expansion, they started crunching all the numbers down since everything got out of control.
As you can see here, the item power creep was massive in WoW and pretty much even the best in slot items from the previous expansion were easily replaced once you hit the new level cap.
Not only does this system place less value on the upgrades you obtain, but it trivializes older content.
Will pantheon have more of a linear power creep or will it be exponential like we have seen in many other MMOs?
Interested to hear other's thoughts on the subject.
The chart doesn't start at level 1, therefore, I cannot make a conclusion.
That aside, if you are planning a game to add expansions I don't see why you can't plan for this from the beginning. I'd rather have the graphed data be linear rather than exponential. I really do not like trivialized content. A level raid mob should still be challenging many levels later.
bigdogchris said:The chart doesn't start at level 1, therefore, I cannot make a conclusion.
That aside, if you are planning a game to add expansions I don't see why you can't plan for this from the beginning. I'd rather have the graphed data be linear rather than exponential. I really do not like trivialized content. A level raid mob should still be challenging many levels later.
Good point. I've included another graph starting from level 1 for approximate best in slot 2h dps items obtainable at the given level.
Early Gameplay footage (June 23, 2016) timestamp: 1:46:39.
Corey said: "There isn't a whole lot of Voodoo behind it, we just sort of have worked out internally what our projected spread is going to be for our stats and formulas and from that we've just kind derived what we feel is a good balance, a good starting place for kinda get in and test things out and see what feels right. Just as kind of aside we've gone and done some pretty heavy lifting and we're already projecting well beyond whatever our early level cap projections going to be. So we are designing items and stat progression in mind for like a 10 year probably runway as far as content goes. If you've played everquest it's going to a very similar feel, you'll start out with a couple points in stats here and there but by and large it's going to mostly just be Armour Class and upgrades to that until you start killing more boss mobs and start getting some better loot. It's not going to be sort of what we've gotten used to in more recent MMO's where every level you're completely replacing your entire suit of gear, and it's 10 - 20 times better than previous sets of gear that you had."
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Early Gameplay footage (June 23, 2016) timestamp: 1:46:39.
Corey said: "There isn't a whole lot of Voodoo behind it, we just sort of have worked out internally what our projected spread is going to be for our stats and formulas and from that we've just kind derived what we feel is a good balance, a good starting place for kinda get in and test things out and see what feels right. Just as kind of aside we've gone and done some pretty heavy lifting and we're already projecting well beyond whatever our early level cap projections going to be. So we are designing items and stat progression in mind for like a 10 year probably runway as far as content goes. If you've played everquest it's going to a very similar feel, you'll start out with a couple points in stats here and there but by and large it's going to mostly just be Armour Class and upgrades to that until you start killing more boss mobs and start getting some better loot. It's not going to be sort of what we've gotten used to in more recent MMO's where every level you're completely replacing your entire suit of gear, and it's 10 - 20 times better than previous sets of gear that you had."
Thanks a lot for that link. That is good to hear.
As Bigdogchris pointed out, you absolutely must plan out the character power progression from day one for the what you estimate to be the lifespan of the game. If you decide that a 10 year lifespan is your baseline expectation, plan for the expected maximum character power (including stats, gear, spells, abilities, etc) and build your curve/slope from 0 to X. Then, if your game passes your initial 10 year estimate, you then can extrapolate out to your next expected point, say 5 additional years.
I don't think any developer so far has truly taken a long term approach to character growth progression, only really ever thinking about that next single step. Such lack of planning inevitably leads to rampant, unchecked growth in player power. I really hope VR will not make these same mistakes, but call me nay-sayer if you must, but I remain doubtful all the lessons of past errors have actually been learned.
EDIT:
Oh, and as for this tidbit: "If you've played everquest it's going to a very similar feel, you'll start out with a couple points in stats here and there but by and large it's going to mostly just be Armour Class and upgrades to that.." I gotta say that sure does help the tank classes, but really screwes everyone who relies far more on mana to do their job. Yeah, someone will pipe up and say 'but my wizard needs AC too'. Sure, but if your wizard is getting pummeled by a mob when grouped, you're doing it wrong. You would be served far better by other stat increase over that of AC.
So, VR, your initial design of gear better recognize that not all classes benefit the same from a given stat and make the appropriate drops reflect that. I don't want my shaman to only see +AC gear and complete ignore everything else. Just as the Warrior really likes that +1AC I really like that +1WIS.
@Pindrought
I was concerned about this in general as well. Over a year and a half ago I wrote https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/7131/leveling-exponential-linear-or-logarithmic-increase/view/post_id/132025 . It focuses on the power growth by level and the danger of an exponential power growth like in your graph. Most of the guys in this thread have seen my post before but you might not have read it so maybe you will get something out of it.
Pindrought said:bigdogchris said:The chart doesn't start at level 1, therefore, I cannot make a conclusion.
That aside, if you are planning a game to add expansions I don't see why you can't plan for this from the beginning. I'd rather have the graphed data be linear rather than exponential. I really do not like trivialized content. A level raid mob should still be challenging many levels later.
Good point. I've included another graph starting from level 1 for approximate best in slot 2h dps items obtainable at the given level.
The exponential growth was pretty obvious in the first one but this just makes it look even worse. Thanks for sharing.
I think power creep in the leveling process is distinct from power creep that occurs due to expansions.
Leveling: In the leveling process there are two things that cause you to have to upgrade gear - the rate at which you obtain gear of value and the variance in quality of gear. In a game like WoW as you reference, you get gear at a very high rate and the vast majority of it is tightly balanced to your level. This means that as you get gear, it's very common to find that it is a minor improvement over what you have on. I would imagine there's some deep psychological gaming going on here. Do people prefer the constant reinforcement that they're making meaningful progress to advancing their character (the WoW approach) or do they prefer the infrequent high that comes with getting a huge upgrade. I can only speak for myself in that I found WoW's approach to be a chore and I still remember some of the upgrades I got in EQ, so it's clear where I stand.
Expansions: For expansions it's similar, but different. The modern approach dictates that when any new expansion comes out that you should be able to upgrade your gearset at least once, but likely multiple times in succession. You go to the first wing of the new raid dungeon, upgrade a good portion of your gear to the new "tier 1", then progress to the second wing and start upgrading to "tier 2". Then again, most expansions seem to target raiding with 85% of the new content and just include a new faction with fluff for the lower levels. So, if a new expansion came out that mostly included raid content and you played it for 9 months and only ended up getting 4 new pieces of gear for your character, would you be happy with that? The main variant on this approach is horizontal progression, rather than vertical. When the fire expansion comes out then everyone needs to rush to get their fire-specific gear, fight the fire-specific bosses, and usually get fire-specific rewards. Then when the ice expansion comes out it repeats. To me it's all basically the same hamster wheel, just that the horizontal progression doesn't give you the ever-increasing numbers that the OP cites, but it also a bit makes the futility of your progress a little more opaque.
I don't think there's any one answer that would make me permanently happy and I don't think there ever would be. There's going to be pros and cons to any concept. That said, I would like to see Pantheon go with high gear quality variance with a low drop rate, horizontal progression in the late game, and have a wide variety of meaningful content introduced in each expansion (long quest chains, group dungeons, group farming, some raiding, crafting, etc.).
I discussed my opinion on this a little in the DLC thread, but this type of thing happens in games. Developers put in significantly better gear for little or no more challenge than prior content, then this happens. They have to stay completely objective when designing gear. From day 1 create a linear power vector and stick with it even through expansions. You can clearly see WOW developers did NOT do what I suggest.
It happened in EQ too. Items in Kunark and Velious, for the same level range in classic, where much better. People should want to buy content because it's fun to visit and explore in, not because you are basically giving them more reward for the same work as before. It leads to this exponential growth problem.
Time to post https://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-everquest-paradox/ again, although it doesn't exactly/entirely address the question.
@Keno Monster
Maybe Brad could enlighten us but it always struck me as roughly for every 10 levels a mob had that translated to how many characters of that level were required to kill it. I.E. level 1-10 could be soloed, 11-20 duo, 21-30 trio and so on until the 50s when everything was tuned to a full group. Kunark mobs were also a higher difficulty level than original mobs for their level.
It always seemed by design that each tier was intended to be harder than the previous. But that is on average. Outside of the average mobs there were lots of very sloppy designs where the mobs were either ridiculously over powered (try the basement of Kurns when the mole SKs can harm touch you in mass or any healing mob with gate) or were trivial exp/loot pinatas for certain classes. Without having a good mathematical basis to both player power levels and mob power levels crafting mobs is like playing darts when drunk.
If you ramp up the difficulty too fast when players can defeat it everything previous becomes trivial. If you don't accelerate the difficulty fast enough then gaining levels can feel pointless. Then again thats why I actually favor skill tree based RPGs rather than level based as levels are always too powerful and they trivialize lower level content.
P.S. Eww Wolfheads political agenda is . . . is very . . . likely to get my post deleted for comment on so Ill just say ill never intentionally be clicking on any of his links again.
Power creep - of course - applies in many ways. It is an issue when new content (and especially expansions) are released so that older content isn't trivialized. Horizontal increases are far less disruptive than vertical ones. Thus - increasing the level-cap by 10 levels is quite likely to trivialize any earlier content unless some of that is instanced and scaled to character level. Which VR has no plans to do. Whereas adding a new zone of fire and forcing us to grind for gear that has the same item levels as earlier gear but works better against enemies found only in the new zone will have *no* trivialization impact.
Power creep applies as characters level-up within the existing content - as Trasak and others have said.
Factors that need to be considered as characters level-up include:
1. The rate of improvement in gear. As with many of us I do not want gear to improve too rapidly with level. Let that best-in-slot item I worked *hard* for at level 20 stay useful until 30 or 35 or 40 not 22 or 25.
2. The rate of increase in character attributes. This should increase, if at all, far more slowly. If attributes increase with level I would far prefer +1 to the main attribute every 10 or 20 levels to something quicker. Starting attributes should matter all through the game. If a dwarf gets +1 to constitution, her contitution at level-cap shouldn't be 1,000 or even 100 or even 50. That would trivialize the choice of race. With items working similarly - a +1 hammer should be rare and precious until the middle game and a +3 hammer should be best-in-slot at level-cap. Well I am giving the general philosophy here not saying these specific numbers are critical.
The impact of character level versus mob level. In many games this is really all that matters - a naked character can slaughter endless waves of mobs three levels lower just through the force of her greater experience. I am not convinced level should be a factor at *all* other than through the improved abilities granted by any new skills, improved gear, any attribute increases and the like. Maybe a first level giant rat *should* be a threat to a level 50 if that level 50 uses level 1 gear and doesn't use any skills gained over the 49 levels.
Counterfleche said: Horizontal progression is long-term sustainable, vertical is not (without a big budget). Vertical basically requires much more new end game content since the old content is made trivial.Suggestions to cut down on inflation:
1. The skills/attributes you earn in expansion content replace existing skills/attributes, instead of adding to them. Basically you're becoming more customizable, not necessarily better.
The introduction of a skill for which existing content was not designed with it mind would make that content easier and, given enough time, trivialize most everything introduce far enough back.
Counterfleche said:2. Instead of earning new powers, you basically relevel through your existing powers and get the ability to modify them, starting with your level 1 powers and working your way back up. For example, expansion 1 allows the damage type to be switched to ice, expansion 2 fire, and so on.
What I said in response to Point 1 also applies here.
Counterfleche said:3. One existing zone gets enhanced per expansion, boosting its challenge. Over time, this keeps old zones more up to date.
What do you do about the new players who have not yet reached that zone but is now suddenly faced with content far above what they are capable of handling? You can quickly alienate new players entering the game as more of the content they progress through gets upgraded and because they have yet to reach the point where new skills/abilities enter their repertoire they are at a huge disadvantage.
Counterfleche said:4. The best new items in expansions are mostly cosmetic improvements.
Players need to feel like they are advancing, improving, getting stronger. Cosmetics are not what will keep a substantial portion of the playerbase interested.
Counterfleche said:5. Challenge is mostly increased by content being more strategically challenging, instead of just harder because of increased stats.
While I agree with you in principle, there is a limit to how diverse content can be with a limited skillset available to the playerbase. You can only apply the same X skills/abilities so many ways and content is developed with those in mind. To throw content at players for which they have no defense, no ability to counter or deal with appropriately that is not challenging, that just builds player frustration and can drive the playerbase away from the game.
Newness, be that new skills, new abilities, new gear, new areas, new level caps, new skill caps, etc is what keeps a game viable long term. How and in what increments that newness is introduced is critical. Power creep is inevitable, it is necessary. Players need something to strive for.
Vandraad said:Newness, be that new skills, new abilities, new gear, new areas, new level caps, new skill caps, etc is what keeps a game viable long term. How and in what increments that newness is introduced is critical. Power creep is inevitable, it is necessary. Players need something to strive for.
Nailed it.
I have said it before and I will say it yet again. The progeny system depending on how it is implemented could easily be the solution for most of the issues that arise from the implementation of later expansions. I don't think that it is ever too early to be concerned with how future expansions will change the game for better/worse. However, until more is known about the progeny system, the developer's stance on future content, and their ideas of implementation; I think that it is to early to speculate how things in the future will be handled.
There are still many things in "Vanilla" Pantheon that we don't have an understanding of yet. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the progeny system was something that we didn't see until sometime towards the end of "Vanilla" close to the first major planned expansion (or see changes made to it around that time).
I think the development team is composed of people who understand the potential pitfalls that future expansions can cause, I think they also understand that something needs to be done to improve on the current industry standards. They have already shown that they have an understanding of how leveling, progression, and community convergence should work by working to implement verticle progression at all levels.
I'll be honest though, the only way to stop the exponential increase in power between expansions is to not increase the level cap. However, this poses its own set of issues. If you are a developer in this situation you have several options on how to proceed.
Option One: You can continue to produce content for your max level players. In this situation what happens is that the max level player base eventually pushes through the new content that is offered and runs out of things to do. They then start complaining about the lack of content being offered and it leads to a vicious cycle of trying to continually provide content to please these people. This solution also leads to several other issues as well. The player base starts to become top-heavy because that is who the new content is being designed and released for. The issue of drastic power increase isn't addressed as max level players completing the newest content will be drastically stronger than newer max leveled character. Then there is also the issue that expansions don't feel like expansions vs a massive patching phase.
Option Two: You could still choose to go with the traditional expansion route. This option comes with three sub-options though.
Sub Option One: You develop a new expansion but keep the max level the same. Anyone who had reached max level during the previous expansion would then be hit with a level and stat squish bringing them down to level 50 or so. This option would address the exponential power increase as well as out of control max level. However, it still comes with the issue of content being created for higher levels, and the game eventually becoming top-heavy. This can be viewed as either good or bad in this situation. It's good because level wise the player base is still in the same boat, however, the newer content will still make older content irrelevant and players will want to rush to experience the 5-10% of content that is deemed the most relevant.
If you need an example of this WoW is currently in this situation. Blizzard has already had to implement one stat squish in Warlords for armor because stats were getting vastly out of hand. It has now progressed to the point where they are not only considering another stat squish, but a level squish as well. This level squish would take max level (which is currently 120) back to level 60.
Sub Option Two: You develop a new expansion but instead of the expansion creating a new pocket of content it revamps the whole world. In this situation, you make your players re-level through a newly revamped world. Instead of 10 levels of new content and experiences, they would have access to 60 levels of new content and experiences. This can come with its own set of issues like any other possible solution. This can be taxing on a development team in terms of work, you can have players who don't necessarily want to re-level even if it is a new experience, you run the risk of having to remove certain content which can lead to items no longer existing
If you need an example of this Path of Exile kind of takes this option. However, Path of Exile doesn't really revamp the leveling/ zone experience when playing through consecutive playthroughs beyond adding additional random encounters. You could also view WoW and its Cataclysm expansion as an example of this (in theory). The zone revamp introduced in Cataclysm completely revitalized classic zones, it gave new flavor and context to these existing zones, it introduced new mobs to these zones, and the leveling experience was vastly different compared to classic. It was a great idea, in theory, its only downfall... was that it was optional content. The only two types of players that would have experienced this content were players looking to level an alt, or players who were interested in achievement farming. The issue with this is that once a player hit level 15 there were faster ways to reach level 60 that didn't involve questing. Since everything relevant was tied to max level there was no reason to progress through these zones when there were faster options such as instance queuing, and battleground queuing.
Sub Option Three: Is a combination of the two above options depending on what you need for your game at the time.
I am not a game developer, and I don't have a lot of insight into what is and is not practical for pantheon to do. However, I do know how daunting it can be to level up when you have to climb to some unreasonable level. In my opinion, 60 is a great number, 70 is ok, but when you start pushing into the 80s, 90,s 100s that's a bit excessive. I quit WoW back in December and before I quit I was at the point that I refused to level up a new class from level 1 to 120, as it was just too excessive. I would like to see a game be developed that can break this excessive level increase normality. I also hate it when zones become irrelevant and player traffic in those zones basically die out. I tried to get back into EQ about 1 1/2 years ago. It was a good experience and it was fun to travel through some of the zones that I was vaguely able to remember (it was sort of like a time capsule experience). However, all the lower zones were basically empty and devoid of players which is something to be expected after 25 expansions. It just kind of sucks that there is all that potential space and it's not being occupied or played by anyone. It would be really cool to see a game also break this normality.
Do I expect Pantheon to do either one of these things? No, I don't have that expectation. However, do I think Pantheon could have the possibility, of changing these normalities? Honestly, yeah I think it could. At this stage of development, I believe that anything is possible it just depends on the direction the developers want to go, and how they set themselves up for the future through the systems they implement now.
Baldur said:I have said it before and I will say it yet again. The progeny system depending on how it is implemented could easily be the solution for most of the issues that arise from the implementation of later expansions. I don't think that it is ever too early to be concerned with how future expansions will change the game for better/worse. However, until more is known about the progeny system, the developer's stance on future content, and their ideas of implementation; I think that it is to early to speculate how things in the future will be handled.
The progeny system would not solve the problem that, without 1) new areas to explore; 2) new creatures to fight; 3) new quests to run, you would just be playing the same content over and over. And one would quickly get bored of the sameness, even if it was with a new class.
One of the mechanics that has gotten overlooked is “chance to hit”. In many games “chance to hit” is 100% and all progression is in damage magnitude and attack rate. Other games have some chance to hit but usually there is still a soft cap to reach after which you effectively fall back into the damage/rate progression system. If the system on the other hand is virtually impossible to soft cap then progression can shift from damage magnitude to damage consistency. It is still a change in DPS even if it is still roughly the same damage magnitude from level 1.
The MMORPG systems have their roots in table top RPGs where regular polyhedron dice were used and we were limited to a maximum of a 20 variance on a single die (one could in theory make a set of 100s of d10s each with a place marker and a flat value to make dInfinity but I only ever saw a d100 set). In programing there is no reason we are restricted to regular polyhedron values or even base 10 numbers.
If I were designing the math from the ground up I would use a d1024 based system. By standard progression your base defense would be 512+level and your attack would be 1d1024+level. This would give you an average hit of 513.5 but a max hit of 1025 and a min of 2. Each level from 1-9 you would add a flat value to both defense and offense. At level 10 you would switch from 1d1024 to 2d512+level and base defense would advance to 513+level. At level 100 you would have 512d2+level (100) for an average hit of 868 but a max of only 1124 but also a min of 612.
Over time your average hit chance value advances vs old content but new content is still roughly even with you (or slightly higher to increase difficulty by tier). Level 1 Mobs would have a defense target of 513 and a level 100 creature (no difficulty modifiers) would have 868. At no point though is a level 1 unable to hit a level 100 but the chance is very small. A level 100 will be able to hit a level 60 and below 100% of the time but the damage will not be that much higher than a level 1 with the same gear.
Alternatively the base value could be 1d1048576 or in the easier to read format of 2^0d2^20. Each tier shifts the exponent from the right to the left which raises the average and min value but not the maximum value. A d2^20 system would allow level 1-100 without trivializing any of the content because the math was based on 20 tiers rather than just 10.
None of this is to say that you could not add damage magnitude as a second path of vertical progression. One of the ways to do that might be if your Hit roll is equal to or higher than your Target value then you do damage based on the following formula.
(Weapon Damage + Strength Modifier)*(Hit Roll + “damage increase vertical Progression value)/(Target Defense value)
In this way you could introduce different damage scaling values but would never do more than double damage. There could also be many layers of defense penetration based on horizontal progression collection of weapons of different material types. These weapons could make it easier to hit or decrease the Target defense value in the damage formula.
Another added benefit of a 2^0d2^(10 or20) system is that small integer values will not drastically shift the average values so it would be much easier to implement many small improvements in gear and abilities across the level range without destroying game balance.
P.S. On further reflection I would set the system to be 2^(current tier – 1)d2^(total number of player tiers +1 – current tier) + Sumation[{1 to level} (10*( total number of player tiers +1 – current tier)/( total number of player tiers +1)]. Paired with defenses being the average of the first half and a flat +level*10 you have an increase in difficulty across the level ranges while not trivializing any of the content.
WoW doomed itself to ridiculous power creep when it decided the top end raid gear needed to be replaced by the next expansion's quest gear. They then compounded the problem by adding multiple levels of raid gear by "difficulty" and made all of it improve by raid tier as well. If you look at the numbers, there was as big a gap between the lowest level 80 gear in WotLK and the top gear in the last raid as between level 1 and top end of level 70.
Statflation or power creep as you call it, is a symptom of bad game design.
I'd prefer equipment to really be secondary to skillpoints and statpoints of the character itself. And not the ability of a character being reliant and heavily based on the gear they wear.
Early on in EQ1, your base stats/skills mattered more than the gear, as gear with stats was rare. This made any piece of gear you did have that had stats a huge deal. Naturally as time passes on and more expansions come out, desingers started pushing the stats higher and higher to give people an incentive to acquiring new gear, and thus spend time in game getting it. The gear treadmill is real. EQ2 as an example, being unashamed in their practice of negating previous content (even last expansion) by rendering top tier raid gear from the previous expansion useless, by the next expansions vendor bought/craftable/solo content drops.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping the same item for 10-15 levels. When you design a game for players to replace their equipment every 5 levels, this inflation happens.
Thankfully Pantheon has pledged to be designed so items last a lot longer because getting upgrades will be more challenging.