I was a Everquest player a long time ago and I know lots of people are interested in what pantheon might have to offer its playerbase in terms of alternate advancement systems. While I loved grinding AA's back in the old days I feel like a more clever and socially inviting method to alternately advance your characters may be a better route for pantheon. What I'm talking about is Situational Alternate advancement. This system would be much like leveling weapon proficiencies or spell proficiencies except that it would rely on becoming acclimated to situations in the game.
What I mean by this is: You and your guild have been playing together in a desert zone and have set up a player made hub so it would be easy to rally everyone together and have a good time. As your guild spends more time in the climate of this zone it gains some resistance to the effects of the heat associated with being in a desert. This results in slightly less consumption of water needed, and maybe an increase (minor) in the speed at which you move through terrain because you've gotten used to it.
Also, As you fight specific types of creatures within this zone you begin to find their weak points making it slightly easier to land critical hits or break open an important artery for bleed damage. Maybe some of these less difficult creatures could serve as a mock fight for a raid within the zone and help practice coordination you'll need for that later on, on top of giving minor bonuses.
Another aspect of this is muscle memory for characters. You don't retain anything that you do not continue to practice regularly, and levels of high expertise in anything are harder to maintain. So these bonuses would diminish over time and higher proficiency levels would diminish faster than lower levels would.
I feel like these types of rewards for things that we do in real life: practicing and acclimating to our environments, make more sense than just having a skill tree that you click and just get bonuses for "leveling up". This kind of system would provide a greater sense of accomplishment and promote team efforts in preparation for content that requires bigger and more coordinated efforts.
Of course to regulate this and make sure people aren't taking advantage with bots or whatever, you might need to limit it to only recieving these bonuses within a group or guild group of certain size and implement a log out timer for afking and bot detection software. But I figured with the other things you have being implemented you'd probably already have those.
Hrmm...
AAs were ... VERY COOL
Then they became a pain in the arse! lol
I like the AA system, but I also get your perspective.
Attaining them had nothing at all to do with THEM.
You just clicked a button and DING! Yer now this-and-that! GRATZ
I've long hoped for more esoteric and action/experience specific lines of progression. Skills and qualities that are earned/shaped over long periods of time. Through varied experiences and actions.
I am interested to see if VR goes this deep in design :)
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/4318/alternate-advancement-aa-s
Some great things in this thread already if you don't mind adding your input here!
Thank you Eliseus :)
Welcome Rycid! Unfortunately your first post has already been discussed a few times, as Eliseus kindly linked to one of these discussions, please feel free to continue the discussion in that thread or copy/paste your post from here into that one but I will have to go ahead and close this down as we need to keep threads consolidated so it is easier to find information, using the search function prior to creating a new post will help avoid being moderated in future. :)