[CF List] New experience system on metalforge

[Yann Chachkoff]

Some thoughts about all this...

Another alternate experience system was tested some time ago on my own server 
(chachkoff.dyndns.org): Maximum level of 29, for an amount of experience of 
934999998 points/skill at most.

The idea behind this was to make life harder for high-level characters (the 
experience progression stayed the same as they're in the standard scale), by 
making high level progression much slower.
 
Setting the maximum level for skills to 29 would make it harder to cast 
powerful spells; it would also mean that common spells like Burning Hands 
couldn't reach as much destructive power as before. The main wish was to push 
players to more cooperative work - A group could achieve tasks a single person 
couldn't.

Results were somewhat disappointing, although not entierly unexpected. Results 
could be summarized as follow :

- Power gamers generally didn't like the idea of lowering the maximum level of 
power one could gain, mostly because some quests would have become "too 
dangerous to make". Few people were actually ready to make dangerous quests 
with their high-level character.

- Power gamers generally seem to avoid team-play if they can; cooperation in 
Crossfire appears to be more item/trade-oriented ("I give you this item to 
help you") than direct "cooperative hunt" ("Let's regroup to kill those 
dragons").

(I don't say there aren't exceptions - but those appear to be 'common rules').
Both of the above points are directly related to the psychological profile of 
the average Crossfire power-gamer. Both are in direct contradiction with the 
ideas behind the tweaked experience scale. I - and some others - would have 
preferred a higher average difficulty level for Crossfire at high levels; 
however, since too few people accepted the concept, I put an end to the 
experiment.

Since it seems that the idea is showing up again, I restarted my server for 
those interested - it could be interesting to see concrete returns from 
players on all those systems and try to take the better from it.

Y. Chachkoff
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