Rewarding players for what they are doing

The first MMORPG I played was Ultima Online, and UO doesn't have levels. Instead it has skills for about everything you can do, so if you fight you gain skill points in fighting, and if you tailor you gain skill points in tailoring. Every single skill can get up to 100 points, and the sum of all skills together can't exceed 700 points. Thus everyone can create his own character class, mastering 7 different skills to maximum, or even distribute the points further. The general idea behind this concept is that the rewards that lead to character development are given out for whatever the player wants to do, and they are given in a form where he gets better in what he is doing, without getting better in other activities.

The other extreme of reward models is a pure level-based one. Whatever you do earns you experience points, which make you go up in level. And then the success of what you are doing depends on your level. Again you are rewarded for whatever you are doing, and your character develops and gets better, but there is only one way to count progress, and different activities all add to this one count, your level.

World of Warcraft is mainly level-based, but in fact has a hybrid model in some other areas. Many activities like solo PvE combat, group PvE combat, questing, or exploring new areas all give the same sort of xp that make your level go up. But for example crafting doesn't earn you any xp, you get skill points in the tradeskill you are doing. And PvP doesn't give xp either, instead you get honor, badges, and arena points. The problem is that your success in crafting or PvP still depends very much on your level. You can't get past certain crafting skill point caps unless you are of a certain level. And of course your level determines your power in PvP and your chance of success there. You can't make a pure crafter or pure PvPer in WoW.

Our recent discussion of class roles promptly spawned the old discussion in the comments of whether a MMORPG is for group play or for solo play. The answer is obviously: for both. The more different activities a MMORPG offers, the better it is. It is good that you can log into WoW and decide to solo, to play in a small group, or in a large group, to PvE, to PvP, to craft, or just to hang out and chat. If there is a problem, it is in the reward structure and the character development:

With World of Warcraft getting older, the large majority of players is at the level cap. By definition for group play you need other players, and because of the way WoW handles it you need players of around your own level. Thus most group activity, and *all* raid activity, as well as most PvP activity, takes place at the level cap. Somebody who creates a new character and wants to participate in all of these activities has to level up as quickly as possible to get to the level cap, so he can group with other players, or fight them in the arena. But the fastest way to level is solo play, so between 90% and 100% of the experience point needed to reach the level cap are earned soloing. Only then do you reach the point where you really have the full choice of all the activities that WoW offers. At lower levels you could still group and do some battleground PvP, but not to the extent that is possible at the level cap.

This obviously goes totally against the original principle of doing the activity you like, and by doing so getting better at it. Nearly all of the rewards (except the fluff) you get for doing things raises what I call your meta-level, a combined power score which adds your gear to your level. Of course at the level cap you *could* do PvP to get better at PvP. But you could also raid to get better at PvP, or craft yourself some gear to get better at group PvE. The rewards aren't very specific to the activity you are doing. And in the end it diminishes that great choice of what kind of game activity you would most like to participate in. You want to raid? Well, then solo to 70, do small groups to equip yourself, and craft the consumables you need for raiding. You're forced through a lot of stuff you didn't want to do just to arrive at the place you want to go. The system also causes lots of problems with regards to class roles. Some classes perform different roles in different environments, others are doing more similar things. But all the functions of a class have to be balanced for all environments, solo, group, raid, and various forms of PvP. And as you only see the aggregate score, the level, you can't look at a character and see how skilled he is at performing the different class roles.

So I was wondering whether it wouldn't be better to unravel the level system, and rather give out scores for different activities. For example you could have a solo level, a group level, and a PvP level. If you wanted to participate in end-game raiding, you would need to raise your group level by playing in groups, and soloing wouldn't help you to advance. Your different levels would reflect more closely the different activities that you pursued, and thus also tell more about the player skills you picked up on the way. If you needed lets say group level 70 to raid, and could only get there by leveling up in groups, one could be pretty certain that you learned notions of aggro management on the way. Your solo level or PvP level would be irrelevant to your power in group combat, so nobody would be forced to engage in a type of gameplay he didn't want. But by making group play the condition for group endgame play, there would be far more opportunities to group at lower levels. But unlike the original Everquest, which *only* had group play, there would still be the possibility to solo, or to PvP, and to gain levels in those activities, independant from your group level. You could level up all three if you wanted to, or you could concentrate on the areas you liked more. You would be rewarded for the activity you are actually doing, and the reward only developed your character in that direction, so you wouldn't need to do an unrelated activity to advance.

World of Warcraft is so big that often people get the impression that this is the final word in MMORPG development. Far from it! WoW certainly has refined and polished many of the existing concepts of the genre. But that doesn't mean that better ways don't exist. By observing the obvious flaws of the WoW level system, maybe a future game can come up with a better system of rewarding players for what they are doing, and making that reward relevant to character development in that specific sort of gameplay.