Luke Carruthers: Class in most games is a restriction on what you can do. Not so in Tactica Online. In fact, you don’t get to choose your class, it’s chosen for you according to the skills you know, and the equipment you wear. Lots of melee skills, you might be a Knight. Put on an eyepatch, and you might become a Pirate. Add a few healing skills, you might become a Paladin. Remove the melee skills, you might become a Priest. Class thus becomes more of an indicator to your opponents of what you might be capable of, rather than a restriction on the skills you can learn.

Similarly, level isn’t an indication of progress, but a reflection of the Point Value of a character. If your Point Value goes down – let’s say you remove some of those melee skills – your level will go down too. Again, level becomes an indicator to your opponents of what you might be capable of.

This is a very different conception of level and class than most people are familiar with, and we may end up changing the words we use because of that, but testing so far seems to indicate people are comfortable with the new usage.