Mankind Reborn to have some sort of player progression?
Also this:
- How can we prevent the game from becoming stagnant/plateauing after a few months? (In terms of progression)
- You can wear any equipment without restrictions, you can produce any item in the game, how can we keep this loop fresh for older players who've already went through everything?
- Should we have a system where the more you do a certain action (produce ballistic pistols), the better you get at it?
- Should we have an experience system where you gain ranks/levels/mastery based on anything you do? Mainly for bragging rights or other bonuses that don't impact the gameplay as much (Getting exclusive camos/color mods, cosmetics, etc)
Bio from Discord:
personally id like to explore some sort of skill system like in eve although limiting the amount of skills the player can train to allow specialization, with the option of resetting skills back to 0 by spending UC
Yes, MR should have some sort of player progression, but I don't think mechanics for skills is the way to do it. Part of what was great about FoM was that the skills were by the player themselves, not some arbitrary stat that said they were good at something just because they did it a bunch of times.
The good fighters were good at the combat mechanics, the good ecolords had good organizational and preparation skills. Creativity, charisma, wits, etc should all be parts of the human that define the skills, rather than some stat on a server somewhere.
Skills of literally every kind will just lead to an unfair advantage that someone will have purely based on playtime. Add an endurance skill that at higher levels makes your stamina drain slower, and somebody at level 5 of that skill is easily superior than somebody at level 2. See: Tarkov skills. Why should that be the case? Plus, a skills system will just lead to XP grinding. Imagine people who just run around planets doing laps to grind their endurance skill up. That's not entertaining content.
There should still be progression, but in a unique game like this where we're toting player freedom, I think player progression should be based by leaning onto that. Mechanics for player progression should be designed to support those tenets, rather than define what player progression means. By that I mean, let players decide what they want to be their goal.
"I want to be the best fighter in MR". Supply mechanics that supports that. The Arena system. Track stats within that Arena. Implement that ranking system from that discord server into that Arena system. Blast the #1 Arena Ranked player on signs on various planets giving them a pseudo-celebrity status.
"I want to be a politician and make change in the game as one." Build a proper player-driven admin-overseen political system that allows players to campaign and/or acquire political seating, and allow them to inflict levels of mechanical and societal change all through their actions (in-game preferred).
"I want to own a player-ran business." Provide mechanics to support that, both for factions and civilians. Give them tools to manage their finances, their employees, their business operations. Perhaps mechanics that allow salaries, some sort of goods-trading system in which the buyers money goes to that businesses account (rather than the employee) and they get their item, while still having the employee as a middle-man. Etc, etc.
You can't possible account for every goal and motive that a player coming into the game is going to have or develop. It needs to be open-ended so that players can decide what their goals are and how to achieve them, and have mechanics that are broad enough to support all these different goals and the different ways players are going to try to achieve them.
Regarding
Specializations..
There is a way to do specializations without skills. It just requires specific thought on those elements. For instance, hacking. Instead of having a game skill that players can train that makes them a better hacker, the minigame associated with it should be based in a real-world skill. Those who spend their time practicing and/or are naturally talented at it are going to be better hackers. Those who suck at them should be expected to fail regularly and probably not worth doing it. It should be truly challenging to hack, so that not everyone can do it.
Thus those who are good at it are naturally specialized. They're important because they are good at something most aren't. Someone can always become good at it by practicing and learning that themselves. They can then apply that skill in the game.
Regarding economic specialization, I think part of the problem is that it is simply too easy to be an ecolord. For the purposes of the playtest, this is a great thing. We should be able to produce items and UC with ease. In fact,
we should be making more items and money right now than we currently are. Because in a playtest, the point is to test things so we can provide feedback. The more steps and time to do that, the less feedback is going to be gained.
But for the actual game, it should be much more challenging. In two wipes, I have been the primary supplier to the SYN faction pool, donating thousands of items to our faction, and way more than a faction of our size really needs even if we warred everyone constantly. And this was while we were the biggest active faction of the game. I did it mostly by myself, but even with assistance from my faction members the second time around, it only sped up the process, not made anything more of a possibility. As long as I had the financial capital to do it, I could easily shit out tons of gear. And we've all seen the pictures of HBNY's great stocks for GOTC.
That's where the lack of specialization is prevalent I think. It's not that there's no skills associated with it, just that shitting out gear as one man is really not that complicated or time consuming. If we can make thousands of pieces of gear for our factions in a week or 2 alone, a department will do it in a day. And an entire department can supply an entire faction on their own.
The actual methods to making ecoing more challenging and more based in specializations vary and honestly could be a thread of its own. But ultimately to get players to specialize in a particular market, there needs to be a real need to focus in one area, and there needs to be significant benefit to working as a team that isn't just a slight time boost. One person creating a handful of pistols to sell is okay, but I can shit out 100-200 in a day on my own when that should be a process for a department.
One more addendum; you've seen my threads about illegal production for SYN stuff. Part of the kicker to those ideas is that they're designed to be "production chains", so that rather than each individual person in the faction being able to run those rackets, they're designed for groups to work together. Everybody has a role to play in that process, and we're all depending on each other to make it work fluidly. Perhaps something in there can aid to the economic specialization angle.
To wrap up an already long post, I don't think the skills based system is necessary nor makes any sense. And if it's done half-baked it'll be even less viable. I think we as a community can brainstorm ways to develop opportunities for player progression and specialization that are not too rigid for player freedom and the likes.