Caps

Levels and (in most implementations) skills operate on a linear scale. A character starts at 0 and improves incrementally. A level 22 necromancer isn’t as powerful as a level 55 necromancer, but would be roughly on a par with a level 22 monk or assassin or whatever and much better than a level 11 necromancer ¹. So what’s the highest value that a level or skill can have?

If you have no limit, characters will improve relentlessly, getting more and more powerful until newbies are little more than insects by comparison. Once-daunting content will appear trivial; players will demand more to satisfy their appetites.

For this reason, many virtual worlds have caps—absolute limits on how high a level or skill can go. For level caps, this stops characters from getting too far ahead of what the virtual world can offer as content; however, it can lead to frustration as there’s nothing to do except wait for other people to catch up in sufficient numbers that new content will be added. For skill caps, players will max out their characters in all the important skills so they still end up ultra-powerful.

The only solution that is truly guaranteed to stop this from happening is permanent death (PD), but this is often taboo—especially in commercial virtual worlds. Some designers have mooted the idea of having PD as the price for cap-busting (if you want to go off the scale you can do, but your character can then die permanently), a solution that has been implemented many times already in non-commercial worlds. The uproar from paying players who want the skills but don’t want their characters to die would likely be considerable, however. Players offered Achilles’ choice between a short life of glory or a long life of obscurity will want a long life of glory.

Without PD, either characters are going to become all-powerful or (achiever) players are going to become frustrated. That really is the bottom line. It’s possible to relieve these symptoms without resorting to PD, though. One way is to have an advancement curve that makes it increasingly difficult to progress to new levels, but not actually impossible. As long as the powers at level N are tangibly better than those at level N-1, players will want to have them. Eventually, though, an effective cap will emerge beyond which few characters will ever rise. Taking the caps off might mean someone can increase their archery skill to 134 instead of being stuck at 100, but they’re never going to reach 1,000. It’s a bit like world records for athletics: They’re always falling, but there has to be a limit. No one is going to run the 100 meters in 7 seconds unless the authorities change the rules currently disallowing the use of motor bikes. Steep advancement curves like this can work, but they really only ever delay the inevitable: Sooner or later, players decide that the treadmill is simply no longer fun.

An approach pioneered by Ultima Online was to make skills atrophy. Characters can learn several skills, but the more they learn then the less attention they give to other skills, which lose their values. This allows for characters to excel in only a few skills at once, while retaining some scope for changing what those skills are. Players can remain powerful, but can use different skills as ways to express their power. It sounds good, but unfortunately players don’t like it: If they learn a skill, they believe that they should always have that skill. They do have a point: It’s not like an English-speaker who learns French will forget the French if they then learn Spanish; indeed, a knowledge of French could help you learn Spanish. It’s true that if you become unpracticed at something, then it’ll take you a short while to get back up to speed, but this will be nowhere near as long as the first time you learned it. Being rusty at something is different than completely forgetting all about it.

The first-century Greek philosopher Plutarch said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” ² Atrophy systems embody the “vessel to be filled” approach: You can only learn so much; if you’re all learned out, you have to unlearn something to make room for new stuff. Although UO players weren’t exactly happy about skill atrophy as a principle, what really annoyed them was the fact that they couldn’t state which skill they wanted to atrophy next. Star Wars Galaxies uses basically the same idea, except that atrophy doesn’t occur automatically: If you want to recover points from one skill to spend on a different one, you have to do it explicitly. Skills you already know cost less to advance in than others, so the temptation is to specialize rather than take the jack-of-all-trades route.

“Vessel to be filled” approaches cap the totality of skills a character can have while leaving the distribution of individual skills relatively free. A more “fire to be kindled” way of doing it is to cap earlier in the process—that is, limit the amount of time that players can (or are willing to) spend in a virtual world (but not so much that they don’t feel it’s worth their investment). Ultima Online also pioneered this method ³, although not until 2000. The idea behind UO’s power hour is that advancement happens faster during a character’s first hour of play each day, but drops off thereafter. Interestingly, the advancement rate to which it falls is the same as it was before power hour was introduced, but players are reluctant to rack up points in it because they’re “paid” less for their efforts than in power hour. Consequently, whereas the average time players spent in UO before power hour was introduced was three to four hours a day, afterward it dropped to around one hour a day. The result was that although characters advanced faster per game hour, they advanced slower per real hour and therefore took much longer in real terms to rise than they had done previously.

This approach worked for UO, but it can only be taken so far: If a character that was played four times as much as another character could only ever be 110% as good as it, for example, that would certainly lead to the loss of many long-term players. It has other disadvantages, too, in particular it discourages players from adventuring in groups and it isn’t easy to make remotely realistic within the virtual world’s fiction.