10+ Hour AI War Campaign Complete

Any fan of strategy games should play through at least one campaign of AI War in their lifetime. James Murff puts it well in his review (which has recently been featured on the front page of AI War’s website):

AI War is, quite simply, the best experience you could have with co-op or single-player real-time strategy in this or any year. It combines grand strategy with emergent AI to form an excellent game perfect for parties and multiplayer. It is easily worth double the price that the developer is selling it at, and anyone with any affinity or taste for strategy games should not miss it. It may be daunting at first, but an excellent tutorial and amazing gameplay mechanics alleviate this into a game that almost anyone can - and should - play.

- James Murff, Big Download

A “game” of AI War can last anywhere between 6 and 36 hours; that’s why it’s called a campaign. I successfully finished my first AI War game yesterday, so now I feel somewhat qualified to talk about the game here.

After spending approximately 20 total hours playing co-op games of AI War, I can safely say it’s the most fun out of any co-op strategy game I’ve played. And it’s only $20. I’ve played titles that cost $50 that have half the playability and a quarter the fun.

I will provide a summary of AI War’s mechanics below, with analysis coming within the next week or two. The design of AI War is relatively unique and deserves closer study.

An Introduction to AI War

You and, perhaps, one or more friends fight for control of a galaxy against two AI opponents that have superior equipment, superior numbers, and a significant head start.

AI War is asymmetric: you and the AI don’t play by the same rules. The AI has already inhabited your galaxy, and has built thousands of ships, turrets, and warp gates with which it can bring in many more ships. The AI is only limited by how much of a threat it perceives you and your friends to be. This threat level is measured by an AI Progress number visible at all times at the top of your screen while you play. This number increases as time passes and as you defeat the AI's’ strongholds. The higher AI Progress gets, the stronger the AIs become. They’ll throw more ships at you, they’ll throw better ships at you, and they’ll build up defenses faster on adjacent planets.

Scope

The battle is waged across 40 to 120 planets connected by wormholes. Each planet has its own sector of space in which you’ll fight massive battles with thousands of ships and  build various defenses and buildings.

You’ll build tens of thousands of ships and hundreds of turrets and buildings in each campaign. The game allows you to loop build queues—you’ll be making good use of this feature. Ships are expendable and you will suffer losses. You’re fighting an uphill battle.

Most of strategy is on the macro and grand strategic layers. You’ll be shuttling ships between your planets to bolster defenses and prepare your own attacks and you’ll be commanding a thousand ships on a planet as they battle against AI forces. You’ll manage your resource income by activating and deactivating manufactories, and you’ll be turning different ships and builds on and off as your energy needs change. There are a wide variety of economic and military activities to attend to. Logistics is important, but doesn’t bog the game down.There is very little micro required, but some babysitting is occasionally necessary to ensure attack forces are moving on an efficient path from enemy stronghold to enemy stronghold.

Resources

There are four main resources: minerals, crystal, knowledge, and energy.

Minerals and Crystal are your typical RTS resources. You build harvesters on resource nodes to reap a constant stream of resources. You can build manufactories to convert one into another with some loss (right now it’s 12 of one convert into 8 of the other, per second).

Knowledge is a much rarer resource. Each planet has 2,000 knowledge on it that can be harvested by parking a science lab ship on the planet. Once the 2,000 knowledge is exhausted, it does not regenerate. Knowledge is one motivator for conquering neighboring planets. Knowledge is spent on buying technological advances. There are three tiers of standard ships that you can buy access to at a science lab (tier I is accessible at game start, tiers II and III are unlockable at the science lab). You’re going to need access to higher tier ships because the enemy will have more advanced ships as you push further into the galaxy. Ship caps (as I will discuss later) become a bit of an issue as the game progresses, and unlocking new ships adds to your cap space.

Energy runs all of your ships and buildings. Generators convert minerals and crystal into energy. There are three energy generators, from tier one to three. Energy production steps up significantly (along with build time) from one tier to the next. Building more than one of each on a planet will lead to decreased energy output from subsequent generators on the planet. This is another mechanic that forces you to conquer more planets. Energy will become scarce as you build up forces in the early game.

Planets

The space around planets acts as the stage on which your struggle against the AI will play out.

AI War is not a game where the optimal strategy is to take everything and steamroll your opponent. AI Progress will build up too fast if you take every planet. You’ll waste too many resources trying to take unimportant planets if you try to take everything. Wasting resources in AI War is punished severely by AIs attacking in force from multiple planets at once. AI War rewards fighting efficiently more than it awards total conquest. If you only take what you need, you will have a significantly improved chance of victory.

Each planet has a certain number of crystal and metal nodes. Some planets have special capturable enemy buildings and ships. Capturing advanced researching facilities grants you access to new ships; capturing advanced factories allows you to build tier IV ships (the highest tier ships a human can build); there are also missile silos and starship constructors that you can capture, but you can build them yourself without having captured them. Occasionally you’ll find data centers which, when destroyed, will reduce the AI Progress.

Planets are captured by destroying the enemy orbital command station and building a colony ship with which you construct your own station on the planet. Once you’ve built your own orbital command station, any capturables are transferred to you. If you haven’t taken out all enemy ships in the sector, you may find the capturables quickly destroyed by retreating enemy forces.

The goal of the game is to first survive, then to destroy the AIs’ home planet command stations. Once you’ve destroyed both home planet command stations, you win the game.

I’ll post analysis of the mechanics and dynamics of AI War within the next couple of weeks. Check the game out—if you like grand strategy, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth and much more.

Use-based Skill Gain, Revisited

My post on the character progression has informed my previous analysis on use-based skill gain. Using the tools I provided in that article, I’d like to re-examine use-based skill gain in more detail and draw some distinctions that I missed last week.

Ryzom vs. Darkfall

We are only concerned with systems that grant XP based on the use of specific abilities within a skill-based system. These systems are called “use-based” because the amount of XP you get towards an ability or ability group depends on how much that ability or an ability within that ability group is performed by the character.

Ryzom and Darkfall illustrate two distinct approaches to use-based skill gain. Here’s how their systems answer the three “scope of experience” questions:

• What will grant experience?
• Darkfall: Performing any action to completion.
• Ryzom: Completing a quest or killing an enemy.
• What will an experience point apply to?
• Darkfall: The ability group to which the action belongs that granted it.
• Ryzom: XP is distributed proportionally to ability groups depending on the abilities used to kill a monster. XP is scaled based on the difference between ability group level and enemy level.
• What can an experience point be spent on?
• Darkfall: Only on increasing the level of the skill or skill group to which the experience point applies.
• Ryzom: XP in an ability group goes towards leveling that ability group. Once the group is leveled, XP is converted into points used to buy new abilities and effects.

Runaway Positive Feedback

Notice how narrow and direct Darkfall’s system is. You get XP that is allocated to what you just did. You can’t specialize in any way beyond what you’ve done because of the narrowness of experience’s scope. If you want to perform well (before you’ve capped all your abilities—the lack of cap really kills specialization at growth’s end), you are stuck using the abilities that you’ve used most. So if you are pushing yourself by trying the most challenging content you have a chance at completing, you are stuck using the same set of abilities to the exclusion of almost all else. The positive feedback loop created in this way does not meet its end until you reach the ability cap. Then, and only then, does an optimal build begin bringing its other abilities up.

The pendulum swings between the necessity of complete specialization during character growth to the complete lack of specialization at growth’s end. I see this as the worst of both worlds. To play optimally, you’re trapped into using only what you’ve spent the most time using—until you’ve maxed everything out, at which point it doesn’t matter.

By broadening what XP can be spent on, a system allows specialization beyond exactly what the character is using. Ryzom’s system benefits significantly from letting players choose what their experience will improve within an ability group, instead of forcing the growth to occur in specific points. The positive feedback loop of growth in a certain area spurring further growth does not disappear, but it is significantly moderated.

Exploitation 

A system is more exploitable if the rewarded action is one swing of a sword. If the completed action is broader—like, say, killing an enemy in Ryzom’s system—then the problem largely goes away. Ryzom’s system proportions XP in a use-based fashion, but doesn’t focus all growth only on counting ability use.

The optimal strategy for becoming a master swordsman should not be:

• Find a friend who can debuff attack power and buff defense.
• Have him debuff your attack power.
• Have him buff your defense.
• Find a mob that has a lot of health.
• Debuff the mob’s attack power.
• Buff the mob’s defense.
• Swing at the mob a million time until it dies.

If that is feasibly the most effective way to gain skill levels, the system is broken. It’s trivially easy to level up that skill. In Ryzom’s system, you can’t gain XP beyond some fixed cap for a given monster, regardless of how many times you swing your sword at it. It’s clearly easier to exploit a use-centric use-based system than it is to exploit a system that rewards only broader accomplishments, like killing an enemy.

Limited Reward Potential

Darkfall has such as strict conception of use that characters cannot be rewarded for any activity above the use of an ability. Why should a system be so restrictive? It cuts out much of the benefit in the experience point abstraction. Ryzom reaps the rewards of using an experience point system while still maintaining the customizability and flavor of a skill-based advancement system.

Use-centric Advancement Systems are Inferior

It’s important that we draw the distinction between use-centric systems, like Darkfall, and other use-based systems. Use-based systems filter XP towards limited ability groups based on what abilities were performed to cause the XP gain. Darkfall’s system represents a pure version of this where use is the center of advancement: all character progress is based directly on use and little else. Systems work better when, like Ryzom’s, use has a more abstract incorporation into how character growth happens.

Your Job is to Make Tasty Sandwiches!

I walked into a Subway sandwich store for the first time earlier today. After ordering, I was confronted by a lot of options that weren’t presented in an efficient way. There were approximately four steps where I had to make some choice as to what to put on my sandwich—four distinct phases where different ingredients were either added or withheld from the sandwich.

When the sandwich was completed, it has a total of 4 ingredients in it (bread included).

I ordered a sandwich that had a distinctive name that suggested almost every ingredient that would be present. “Sweet onion chicken teriyaki” leads me to expect the sandwich has onions, teriyaki sauce, and chicken on it, probably with lettuce thrown in because that’s how sandwiches are usually made. Instead, after ordering the sandwich, I was confronted with four different decisions, each with more than four options. It was not clear at all what would go on this sandwich or what should. Why is that? Because I am not a professional chef. I don’t go into the store expecting to be saddled with making myself a good sandwich. I went to the store so that I could buy a good sandwich that they had thoughtfully designed and put together.

This is a great metaphor for a significant problem application designers face: giving the user as few decisions as possible while allowing them to effectively and easily use the application to accomplish their goals. Subway failed at this basic design problem by saddling me with far too many choices, almost invalidating its primary reason for existing (to sell me tasty sandwiches as easily and quickly as possible so as to make a profit).

Aion makes an innocent but devastating mistake in an effort to simply make a tasty sandwich. They’ve streamlined their game into a candy-coated, artificially enhanced stream of purpose-built monotony. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition falls into this trap as well.

When you log into Aion, you enter a world that is clearly made so that you can run around and effectively kill monsters. Everything’s arranged nicely for your viewing and killing pleasure. The ducks are lined up and a well-maintained rifle is put in your hand for an enjoyable afternoon of shooting—but the ducks are wooden and the rifle doesn’t shoot anything, a wooden duck flips backwards whenever you fire. The gameplay is directed; it’s so directed that, after 10 hours, it felt completely empty to me. My path through the game was perfectly clear. It was so well lit and nicely paved that I felt that I might try a different, dustier, less-traveled path. But there was no other path.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (4e from here on) streamlined the hell out of the tabletop roleplaying—or, perhaps more aptly, rollplaying—experience. Its predecessor, 3.5e, was asymmetric, arcane, and had a serious case of power creep. Wizards of the Coast apparently had enough of that and decided to finely tune the 4e rules to cut off all those rough edges and remove the arcane and less-trodden paths, to simplify the complex, and to run out of town all the rules but those that governed situations that could be vaguely described as combat. Suddenly the sprawling 3.5e is replaced by a very consistent, smooth 4e that has all the corners neatly rounded and all the danger areas surround in safety fences. 4e is a game system that is very obviously a game—it has clear boundaries that become quite obvious when you try to run a 4e campaign. All those fun utility items that abounded in 3.5e are gone. The unique and flavorful mechanics of each class are replaced by abilities that are minimal variations on a consistent framework. The abilities and, by extension, the classes, feel like repackaged and rebranded copies of the same few ideas.

Streamlining games can solve mechanics problems, but it ultimately rips the soul out of a game. When all of the interesting detail is stripped and all the excitement is paved over, it doesn’t matter if the game is perfectly balanced: it simply will not have enough flavor to be fun. You might leave the game feeling like it was well-balanced and complete, but you won’t find yourself excited.

The Abstraction of Character Progress

The first post I made here on That’s a Terrible Idea documented the four core design elements of MMORPGs: conflict resolution, goal generation, power growth, and player interaction. In my 10 Points, I point out ways that each of these core elements will change in the MMO Revolution. We haven’t discussed these elements in much depth (aside from a couple posts regarding accountability systems to facilitate dynamic world player interaction). The recent discussion of use-based skill gain has caused me to return to these basic mechanics and spend some time analyzing the fundamentals of character growth mechanics.

RPGs are defined by the fact that as characters accomplish tasks in the game world they grow—and this growth is independent of the player gaining skill. There are two fundamental mechanics to character growth that all RPGs possess:

1. Character advancement is granulized into some form of experience points. Experience points might be renamed, or be hidden, but they are always there in some form (even in Darkfall).
2. Based on how many experience points characters have, characters unlock abilities and bonuses.

It’s obvious to someone who plays these games, but it’s crucial that this basis is understood. Now, we can get to the meat of the skill-based vs. level-based advancement debate: How continuous (or discrete) should advancement in RPGs be?

Power Curves

The gamut runs between the most discrete system, one where there is one transition in power level that happens instantaneously, to the most continuous system, one where every single action performed increases the success chance of the next action performed.

Discrete systems have clearly defined jumps in character power. These jumps are monolithic and all-or-nothing.

Continuous systems have a smooth gradient of power growth. There are many small jumps and these jumps are specific to certain facets of the character.

Class-centric level-based approaches are the most familiar and common RPG character growth schemes. This discrete scheme leads to a power curve that looks like this:

The step-like curve is the result of discrete changes in power linked to gaining character levels. It takes longer to level the stronger the character is, and there is less of an increase in power at each level. Max level is the only exception, where the character gets her endgame abilities which are usually a bit of a jump in marginal power gain from her abilities gained at max level minus one.

When advancement is localized to specific abilities, as in skill-based systems, a roughly continuous power gain results.

As the character interacts with the world, she continually gains ability in various areas, leading to a smooth power gain that marginally decays as time increases. In skill-based systems, the character is comparatively always gaining power.

The Results of Growth

Without some resultant effect on a character’s capability, growth is nothing more than a symbol (usually a number) of the character’s efforts in the game. In RPGs, growth is a primary positive feedback loop that rewards characters who accomplish important or impressive feats. At some point, growth grants a character abilities and effects.

Abilities are the actions the character can achieve in the game world, some of which are

• Casting a spell
• Performing a powerful melee attack
• Making a bandage
• Shooting a bow
• Poisoning a weapon

Abilities are often arranged into ability groups—character classes are series of ability groups, one per level. Talent trees in World of Warcraft are ability groups. Ability groups allow access to be granted or denied to different sets of abilities. These grouping can be logical or mechanical. Logical groupings exist to allow the player to better conceptualize how abilities relate to one another, whereas mechanical groupings are higher-abstraction-level units of character capability that can be affected by different game mechanics. Tradeskills are a logical grouping of abilities, whereas fire magic is a mechanical grouping.

Effects are changes in the character’s stats, a passive bonus to that character’s capability. An increase in strength or vitality, for instance, is an effect.

The Scope of Experience

Experience points are the most common name for a resource that symbolizes growth. Growth resources alone account for several crucial design decisions:

• What will grant experience points?
• What will an experience point apply to?
• What can an experience point be spent on?

Classical class-based systems assume that experience is assigned (or applied) to the whole character and that experience points can only be spent on gaining character levels. The character is rewarded with experience for every encounter she solves and every bit of the story that she completes. This experience applies to her whole character and can be spent on a new character level when the quantity of experience crosses certain thresholds. Every facet of the character advances at once.

Skill-based systems have XP that applies in a smaller scope. XP may apply only to the ability that led to the XP gain, as in Darkfall. XP may be gained by the character as a whole, but only be applied to one ability at once, as in Asheron’s Call. Their may be multiple growth resources that are spent in different ways, as is the case in Final Fantasy Tactics. The hybridization of skill- and class-based systems can yield a lot of variety, though most of the possible systems, as Psychochild would say, suck.

When XP applies to less of the character and can be spent on smaller units of growth, character advancement becomes more continuous.

A Schematic for Character Growth

Based on the discussion above, we can construct a schematic that describes all character growth systems. By defining the following, we can accurately describe the character growth mechanics in a game:

• A set of abilities, their prerequisites, and their growth costs.
• A set of effects, their prerequisites, and their growth costs.
• A set of growth resources.
• A set of completed actions that grant growth resources and how much of each resource they grant.

All character advancement systems are a combination of a these few basic concepts. Understanding them as such can help us evaluate game mechanics without becoming caught in the rhetorical traps and false distinctions that doom so many discussions to religious warfare and unproductive pontification.

Moral Choice Beyond Good and Evil

While browsing through the Alganon website for publicly available data on the game, I was angered by the insistence on using the horrible good-evil dichotomy that has become the standard system of moral choice in games.

There are two factions in the game: The Asharr and the Kujix. Guess what they represent? Just pick the easiest possible dichotomy that has been used the most in videogames: Good vs. Evil. Alganon doesn’t stop there, though! It folds all of of the positive “good-aligned” traits—light, nature, heart, mind, order, obedience, and protection—into Asharr and similarly it folds the opposites into Kujix. They went all-in on this cliché. This kind of design laziness borders on the obscene. Reading about Alganon’s weak backstory brought memories of a certain AGDC session flooding back into my thoughts.

Mot and I attended a group session at AGDC ‘09 entitled “The Jesus-Hitler Problem” where we had a series of small-group discussions about how to make moral choice in games less banal and ludicrous. Everyone agreed that the good-evil dichotomy is weak, overplayed, and should be relegated to the trash heap, but few people had much to say about how to replace it. Some suggested avoiding the question all together and divorcing moral choice from game mechanics. Some suggesting having some kind of faction system in games to represent a players alignment with the wants of different important groups in the story.

It’s definitely time we ditch the good vs. evil dichotomy in games.  Both sides are stupid. No one actually ever fits into either of the sides accurately. They’re caricatures that have been dulled by overuse. (And I find it ridiculous that people don’t have a problem how MMOs imply that the moral caliber of one’s being has to do with one’s race.) We should keep moral choice as a mechanic, though, because leaving it out doesn’t encourage players to try different paths. The stakes become very low if moral choice doesn’t actually have an effect on the game world—we almost shouldn’t bother with moral choice at all in that case. Faction systems are a better idea, but don’t fit a wide range of genres.

My suggestion is that we keep moral choice, but change its gamut radically. Moral choice shouldn’t run from perfect good to perfect evil separated by a vanilla neutrality of uselessness. For moral choice to be effecting and memorable, players have to be forced to choose between two equally appealing (or equally disastrous) options. There should be a solid case for either choice being good or evil. 

Here are some dichotomies that arise in moral dilemmas; one’s beliefs on a dichotomy need not be either one or the other, there can be some degree of dithering:

• Idealism vs. Pragmatism (Hope vs. Reason)
• Material vs. Spiritual
• Mercy vs. Justice
• Need vs. Deserve
• Impulse vs. Reason (Heart vs. Mind)
• The Many vs. The Few
• Authority vs. Equality
• Self vs. Others
• Present vs. Future
• Certainty vs. Opportunity (Fate vs. Free Will)
• Intent vs. Consequence
• Unity vs. Diversity

If we profile NPCs through using their positions on these dichotomies, we can construct almost lifelike belief systems. Once we have belief systems, we can present the player with options that will either appeal to or disgust NPC groups that with which the player interacts. The tests of morality can occur relatively frequently, probing at the player’s conceptions of each of these dichotomies. Different factions react in different ways depending on how the player has behaved earlier in the game.

Through expanding the moral quandaries and removing the pretense of good vs. evil, we can create arresting moral decisions, and then have those decisions have deep-rooted effects on the way the game progresses. Such a system will be significantly more engaging, replayable, and thought provoking.

On Balance, Part 2: Ten Key Tips for Balancing

On Monday, I wrote about the fundamentals of balance. Here’s the second and final part of that discussion.

Here are ten important take-aways from Sirlin’s series on balance, but with an MMO bent. These tips cover a wide range, from ways to find imbalance to ways to quantify and fix those imbalances. I added specific MMO-related applications of some of Sirlin’s points about balancing fighting games.

Finding Imbalance through Tier Lists

• Ask players to organize classes, character types, and abilities within each class into five tiers based on their power or usefulness in different scenarios. The highest tier should be “God”-level—these are dominant strategies—and the lowest tier should be trash-level—these are strictly dominated strategies. You want to clear out those two extremes and ensure that the other tiers are as close together as possible.
• Tier lists can be applied to classes or abilities in MMOs, but with a caveat. Characters in typical fighting games are mutually exclusive in the context of play—a player can not be more than one character at once. But in an MMO, a character can have multiple abilities at once and those abilities can be at multiple power levels.
• In a class-based game, it’s easy to apply the tiering system: for each role, tier the classes in their effectiveness. It’s not a disaster if a class is God-tier in one role, as long as it isn’t God-tier in too many, making it basically a dominant strategy to play that class (ala Channellers in Shadowbane). You can use tiering to roughly balance the utility of each class in different situations. It’s a good idea to make the design intentions of classes available to the player so that they don’t make a terrible decision when they choose a class that gimps them at doing what they love.

Avoid Imbalance through Preventative Design

• Imbalances are avoided by the use of counters. Sometimes these counters are passive: Elemental damage is countered by elemental resistance; physical damage is countered by dodging, blocking, and armor. Sometimes these counters are active, like using a shield bash to interrupt a healer casting a life-saving heal spell.
• Design counters and counters to counters. But don’t turn your game into rock-paper-scissors.  Iterative deletion of dominated strategies can be used to determine where bedrock is hit. Sometimes counters can be generally weak, but they can exist just to counterbalance a possibly exploitable mechanic.
• Don’t become fixated on balancing at a micro-level. In a class-based game, you’re balancing class against class, not ability A against ability B. Keep this in mind—sometimes combos of a class’ abilities can make it overpowered and you’d miss that if you were focusing on micro-level ability balance.

Balance Towards Fun

• Abilities have to be powerful. Balancing games isn’t about lining numbers up so that they sum to zero, it’s about making the game as fun as possible for as long as possible.
• Maximize the time where both sides have a fighting chance. Always give each side a reason to fight further—there should always be something to lose worth protecting and something to gain worth taking. Be careful of runaway negative and positive feedback loops.
• Always pull the bottom up to meet the top. This can be difficult in MMOs, but you should work very hard to avoid nerfing classes or abilities. It’s better to have a gap filled a little too much than to leave a void.
• There should be gamist reasons why every mechanic is present in the game. There should be simulationist reasons why mechanics work as they do. The challenge is to pick the mechanics that are balanced for simulationist reasons—actually real-world systems that balance one another aren’t easy to find.

Mechanic Assessment: Use-based Skill Gain

(I made a more recent post which basically replaces this one while doing a much more thorough analysis. Please read it instead of or in addition to this one.)

From my experience with use-based skill gain systems in Oblivion, Morrowind, and Darkfall, I’ve noticed that such systems are inferior. They should be avoided in favor of other approaches to skill-based advancement (as in Fallen Earth) and class/skill hybrid systems (like the one in Final Fantasy Tactics).

First, three gamist reasons why use-based skill gain is an inferior character advancement system:

The character can only be rewarded for a much narrower set of tasks. And that set of tasks is doing whatever action the player wants to level. It’s not clear how quest (or whatever kind of achievement system you want) rewards can fit into this framework. Use-based skill gain cuts out an important part of the incentive structure. In an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Mousegard, combat isn’t an end, it’s a means towards surviving a precarious scenario. There are other means, such as parley, avoidance, and escape that serve that purpose just as well. With use-based skill gain, it becomes difficult to reward the player character for accomplishing anything except easily quantifiable combat and crafting tasks. This leads to gameplay focusing on direct combat and crafting, which narrows significantly the effective and beneficial conflict resolution methods.

Use-based skill gain leads to runaway positive feedback loops that restrict character growth and ability diversity. I kill using ability A so ability A becomes more powerful so I use ability A to kill stuff. This loop generates a second-order effect on skill growth. If you only have a few abilities that are strong enough to use against mobs that drop worthwhile loot, you’re going to use those abilities frequently leading to them becoming more effective and the farming being more efficient and worthwhile. In this way, characters are stuck using the same abilities because only certain abilities are day-to-day useful. But all the abilities are on a similar scale. The Illusion and Mysticism schools of magic were like this in Oblivion: they had some nifty effects, but they were largely composed of utility spells that you would never justifiably use enough to keep the skill level competitive with your melee skills or destruction magic.

Use-based skill gain encourages and rewards exploitation, macroing, and cheating. Some skills necessarily will be used less than others. By factors of hundreds. This forces designers to balance skill advancement against use. This problem cannot be solved. Designers need to measure skill-use frequencies and balance that frequency against how difficult advancement should be. But if a player wants to level a skill, he’s going to find ways to use it more than is reasonable, throwing these calculations off and leading to imbalance. If the player wants to level his buffing abilities, he is going to cast buff spells on everyone he sees if he’s nice, but more likely he’ll cast a buff on himself, then dispell it, and repeat those two actions until he has the desired skill level. Players will always seek to find safe ways to level skills, trivializing the advancement system—developers will always be behind in preventing this kind of behavior. Exploiting and macroing becomes the only way for an honest player to keep up. Darkfall’s EU server has fallen victim to this problem. Exploitation is always the most effective way of increasing skills and it breaks the balance of skill gain.

And one simulationist reason:

Use-based skill gain doesn’t make sense from an immersion/metaphor perspective either. People do not go out and put their life in direct danger to advance from novice to super-novice at using a sword. They spend years practicing with the weapon for several hours every day. The time spent practicing far outstrips that time spent in actual life-threatening struggle. When you’re engaged in combat where life is in the balance, the amount of skill you have when combat begins determines if you live or die. You’re focused on survival, not on dinging 34 on your sword skill. Certainly you will learn from direct combat, but not even a tenth the amount you learned from training since you were the age of 10.

Use-based skill gain should be avoided for primarily these four reasons. As a mechanic, I thought it was a great idea before I played games that implemented it. Now I don’t see a reason to go with use-based skill gain over a different skill-based advancement system, such as purchasing skill levels with XP or some other broader resource.