[crossfire] RFC: Wild idea to make experience more interesting

[Lalo Martins]

So I was re-reading the "experience inflation" thread and thinking about
it.  One of the main problems, as it turns out in that thread, is that
maps with wide spaces tend to get crammed with monsters, who can then be
slaughtered en masse with magic or good old "run over them".

It seems there are two categories of players these days; those that want
to accumulate levels, and those who like to explore the ways in which
the game can be fun.  The former are usually on the look for heavy
weaponry or "good" (in the slaughterhouse sense) maps.  The latter seem
(these days) to be focusing in developing all their obscure skills.

There is a general feeling in the mailing list that we want to encourage
two other kinds of gaming experience; the inter-player interaction and
teaming (think mmorpg - to my knowledge crossfire is one of the first
mmorpg! and never claimed to it...), and the role-playing.

I digress.  :-)

What I thought is, by mass-slaughter, you can, as reported in that
thread, get to level 90 quite fast.  This makes it more or less
mechanical for the level-seekers - and a mechanical game gets boring
quick.  It also makes it uninteresting for the game-explorer-types, who
will try each of those dungeons once then leave in disgust, back to
their alchemy labs.

So I thought... a very-very-high-level character should, supposedly,
have a wide range of skills, no?  It's weird that someone is level 90
and only have three or four skills with levels above 10.

One way to achieve this, would be to reduce the contribution a skill
gives to overall XP, proportionally to the skill level.  So when you get
X points in a skill, if L is your level in that skill (before the points
are applied), your overall XP gets max(0, X * expmul * (100 - L) / 100)
- or, the same as you would gain today, minus L%.  This way, if your
fighting skills are at level 100+, they can't contribute anymore, and
you'll have to develop something else.

(Note that if you're a role-player and you really REALLY want to be a
warrior-only-non-magic-user, you can still get to level 120, by
developing both one-handed and two-handed weapons, punching, throwing,
and archery...)

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
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