Everytime someone criticizes skillbased games for being unsuccessful some others always cry out "Amagad! Look at EvE FFS!!"

However I don't think it's fair to compare EvE and their skillsystem with a classbased system in a game where you create a character and explore the world with him/her/it from a third-person view. Even if both types counts as MMOs the settings are completely different.

Maybe the space-setting in EvE and the structure of the game as a whole makes a skillbased system suitable for it. Or can it be implemented in other games as well? Games where you stay on the ground with your character that is.

I'll suggest

http://www.play-earthrise.com/

its a completely skill-based MMO, set in the future. Its ground only though, no space-fairing in it. It's view is also set as third-person, though there might be some first-person thrown in possibly.

Sadly the game still is in development, and beta isnt expected to be out for some time, but its a game to look foreward to.

There's not really any difference between putting armor on your ship and putting armor on your avatar in WoW, just that in Eve you can only do it in the station.

When stuff like the Gnome Death ray has an ability tied into it (and pvp trinkets) the code is already there in WoW.  Now just eliminate all trained spells and instead make other items provide them, like your staff has a heal spell or fire spell, or a ring gives you a spell, or a dagger gives you backstab or a 2H mace gives you overpower.   Now you got yourself a classless system fantasy avatar game that works very similar to EVE.

space ships and armor are no different, the system is VERY possible in a more mainstream avatar based game.  some people just don't understand that deep down they are all MMOs and all work the same way.

For it to work in an avatar based game you need some system that ensures players can only fulfill 1 combat 'role' at a time regardless of how many skills they have trained . ie in EVE you need to change ships/weps etc at a station and cannot do it on the fly, and only certain weps/modules fit on certain ships. This ensures that any one player can only do 1 'thing' in a fight.

For an avatar based system you need a way of ensuring an archer can't suddenly turn into a tank when his target gets into melee range.

You could just say you couldn't change armor unless you were at an inn.  Or you could say changing armor takes 30 seconds per piece of armor... unless you're at an inn, which is kind of already built into wow with the 30 second cooldown on abilities of items with abilities, so you can go from archer to a tank but you can't do anything for 30 seconds.  Or you could take advantage of being able to change armor anywhere and assign weights to your stuff in inventory and have weight be a speed penalty that way part of your tactics could be the ability to change armor if needed but at the expense of speed.  Also maybe your gear could make you an industrial ship and your armor would just be lots of backpacks and pocket space and other armor that increases your speed so you could haul a lot but have paper thin armor, maybe that would be another welcome "class" on raids to haul loot and other peoples change of armor so they wouldn't be bogged down by the weight.

If WoW wasn't such a success maybe the new MMO's would be willing to try this type of stuff.

Eve's skill system really isn't like the skill systems that people generally talk about anyway.  Eve's skill system has NOTHING to do with what you actually do with your character, and only how often you log on to train a new skill...Most skill based systems have you actually performing some sort of act related to the skill in order to level up in it.

Just felt like that was worth pointing out.

Originally posted by Draenor

Eve's skill system really isn't like the skill systems that people generally talk about anyway.  Eve's skill system has NOTHING to do with what you actually do with your character, and only how often you log on to train a new skill...Most skill based systems have you actually performing some sort of act related to the skill in order to level up in it.

 

Just felt like that was worth pointing out.

Perhaps EVE's skill system is not what people truly wants but it's funny how EVE always is used as an example of a successful MMO to counter the haters. This makes me even more uncertain that it is possible to make a successful avatar skill based game. Plus the fact that the system probably must be limited in some way to prevent un-balanced gameplay as FischerBlack pointed out.

I will keep my eyes on Earthrise that's for sure.

"can it be implemented in other games as well? Games where you stay on the ground with your character that is."

Have you people totally forgotten UO? Choose any skill you want to character, but your total can't go over 700. So basicly you have one role but lots of possible variations. That's how it should be done IMO.

Originally posted by froz3n

Have you people totally forgotten UO? Choose any skill you want to character, but your total can't go over 700. So basicly you have one role but lots of possible variations. That's how it should be done IMO.

I have not played UO myself but if they did it right, how come we haven't seen their system implemented in other games? Why is all we get nowadays class based games? I don't get it.

Indeed. I have been waiting for that since I first time tried UO. It's very boring to get like 5 classes to choose from and then thousands of players are exactly the same. UO's system could very well be used in any new MMO. It's also boring that mages always must wear cloth and staff. Why no mages with plate? it's your choise if you want to trade mage valuabled INT to STR just so you can wear plate. you can't cast that many spells then before you run out of mana. All these kind of decisions are premade in class systems and I do find it very boring. Building a char the way you really want is fun, since you can always try new things and find some new combinations you want to play with.

Don't forget Asheron's Call.

It wasn't the most successful game, but for a brief time it was one of the "Big Three." Back then, EQ was king with a whopping 200k subscribers, wow! (Yeah, sarcasm)

The skill system was very sophisticated, with lots of options. Basically at character creation you used a point buy system to set things like your base stats, then a separate pool of points to set skills to trained, or specialized -- specializing a skill cost a lot of points.

When you kill monsters you gain experience, which you then choose to apply to any skill. This is the main method to increase your skills. Also, whenever you use a skill, it gains a small amount of experience. This is more to augment your combat experience, and not a way to increase your skills in and of itself.

Trained skills, if I remember, did not passively increase. Specialized skills gained a 5 point bonus, meaning the cost to increase them was as if it were five points lower. This may not sound so great, but at higher levels five points can make a huge difference. Those same five points might cost you a few billion XP if you are nearing the skill cap ;)

I once made a character named "Angry Wife" on the PvP server (Darktide). I specialized her in cooking, and thrown weapons. I stocked her up on dinner plates, and ran around accusing female characters of being "that harlot" and male characters of being "pigs," while flinging various dishes at them. I know, horribly sexist of me, right?

Ahh, those were the days!

I just wanted to give an example other than EVE. AC was a successful game, even if time was not kind to it! I feel like a lot of people here have no experience outside the more recent games. EVE and AC, though not perfect, are evidence that somewhere out there in the hazy cloud of possibilities there lies a game which can be different and successful!

Eve has always been a 3rd person game. (You don't look though the cockpit of ship, do ya?)

At the moment, only small Indie developers appear to be willing to take a chance on creating a skill based system  (Earthrise, Darkfall plus one or two others)

Generally people have strongly supported games with pre-defined classes in a big way, and I think its a lot easier for developers to balance the gameplay when the roles are clearly defined. 

Skill based systems present challenges as others have mentioned, figuring out how to force players into a given role at any particular time is the issue. Eve does it by limiting changes in ships, not sure if UO even bothered to try (never played), but I rather suspect there really weren't many limits.

Also, while EVE's duration based skill training is different than most games, its an improvement for those of us who can't spend 8 hours a day endlessly wacking low level crap and trees just to level up our skills to 300. (ever switch to a new weapon type in WOW and then run around Westfall beating up trash until your new axe skill is back up to the level of your other skills? Ugh)

I can't believe no one has mentioned SWG. 

That game sucked, always did, but the skill-based system was probably one of the best things about it, and it was pretty successful until they got rid of the skill-based system.

I love Eve's skill based system. I think its great that you get to choose many different roles, you are not stuck to what the developers wanted. Again it gets back to the whole sandbox feel that I wish was the direction for mmos (thanks WoW!).

For me I would like to see a game that uses a combination of Eve's system and skill systems like AC. If ever in the future I were to create a MMO (don't count on it) I would use a sort of hybrid system. It would have an Eve-like skilling system in the sense that you choose a specific skill as your primary. This skill will increase slightly overtime (all skills would have something similar to Eve's skill lvls). I think this would be beneficial to more casual players because you don't have to quit your job to keep up. With that in mind, players in game would recieve both general skill point xp and specific skill point xp. General would work very similar to how people obtain xp in mmos today. General activies such as killing monsters or the such. Specific xp would target a very specific area of skills. So killing monsters not only would you recieve a slight general xp bonus but you would also recieve a larger "fighting" skill bonus. So this system allows for a player to have multiple roles, but that playing a "jack of all trades" is not necessarily the most powerful thing to do.

Now how this sytem would work in a game setting is not something I know will work. I think with some imagination it could work for an avatar based game but again it would require a bit of genious dev work to make sure it is all balanced and systems are in the game from the start to make sure there isn't imbalances in the different skills (In Eve most people agree that there is no single combination of skills that makes you overpowered). I think it would work much easier in a game that has your avatar controlling something, like Eve's space ships, but that avatar combat is not completely out of the question.

Looking at the title and then the thread I have to wonder how they relate?

There have been a bunch of successful skill based games, UO, AC1, SWG(pre NGE) etc etc, just none lately because no one wants to take a chance and differ from the Wow model.

Things will change, skill based games will make a come back