What do you think about showing skill level?

[Halaster]

What does everyone think about being able to see skill level?  When you type skills, and see "master" or "journeyman" and so on.  I was chatting with some folks about whether they're a net-good or net-bad thing and am curious what people think about it.

Pro's
You can see roughly what your skill level is so have a good understanding of what you might be able to do

Con's
It turns some achievement-focused people into skill chasers, where they are not satisfied until they see that 'master' label (or whatever the max is).

Once upon a time those weren't there and players didn't know.  Or rather, they knew how good or bad they were by performing the skill.  They might go around thinking "I'm a badass at kick because I never miss!" until they meet someone who truly is better than them.

Thoughts?

[mansa]

I think there is a good sense of knowing how proficient you are at doing something.

I think 5 skill levels might be too large.    3 might be better.
i.e. "Novice, Intermediate, Expert"

[zealus]

Removing the skill levels to prevent "skill chasers" will simply remove that part of gameplay, thus losing target audience

Showing when you have a skill increase, or even skill timers outright, encourages roleplay instead of "Let's get another fail just in case".

[Halaster]

Just to be clear as to not cause a panic, there is no specific plan to change this, this is just me being curious what the overall sentiment is.  The only way I could see making this change would be if an overwhelming majority of people voted to remove it (which I would be shocked to see).

[Riev]

In the short, I would agree to removing the skill level but only if there was a method to show that there IS progression.

Basically, I don't think we need the levels in our faces, but skills are important. I want to know that what I'm doing IS improving my skill in some way. It would be frustrating to spend 5d played working on a skill only to find out you're "failing incorrectly" or something.

I preferred the days of "My parry skill must be at maximum because I can kill a tembo" rather than "because it just ticked to advanced". However, it is 2024 and there's no reason to not feel you're better in a skill than you were yesterday.

[Kavrick]

Basically going to mirror what zealus said. If people want to chase skills, then that's another part of the game that people can enjoy. I don't believe it's good to try and control how people go about enjoying the game, it's just going to push people away. There's a reason why pretty much every other mud/rpi or even just generally RPGs show how good you are at x thing.

Also, if you want to dissuade achievement chasing, I think there are better ways about it. A lot of the game can be considered extremely undesirable at low skill levels. The game should really be fun from start to finish but from my experience, crafter, sneak or combat class, you're gated with what you can and can't do by your skills, and the stuff you can do at low skill level is pretty unenjoyable. Especially if you're a crafter who's snapping every piece of bone you get your hands on.

This may rub some people the wrong way, but if you don't want people to min/max or grind skills, make the game less punishing. This is a perma-death game where your skills directly correlate to your chances of surviving, that alone is going to push people to grind out skills. I personally don't feel "safe" until I can consistently kill carru, but even they pale in comparison to a lot of other mobs.

[Agent_137]

Basically going to mirror what zealus said. If people want to chase skills, then that's another part of the game that people can enjoy. I don't believe it's good to try and control how people go about enjoying the game, it's just going to push people away.

I think we should push people away that are focused on chasing skills, though. I want to RP with RPers that are here to RPs, not RP amidst progression-focused players enjoying watching numbers go up.

I like to watch numbers go up too, but there are other better games for that that don't delete your months of progression because you blinked.

That said, showing when a skill is being trained or increasing in the moment is important feedback to a hidden system. I'm on board for that. Like an echo that you can toggle on or off "such and such skill was trained by this action"

[Kavrick]

Basically going to mirror what zealus said. If people want to chase skills, then that's another part of the game that people can enjoy. I don't believe it's good to try and control how people go about enjoying the game, it's just going to push people away.

I think we should push people away that are focused on chasing skills, though. I want to RP with RPers that are here to RPs, not RP amidst progression-focused players enjoying watching numbers go up.

I like to watch numbers go up too, but there are other better games for that that don't delete your months of progression because you blinked.

I understand your point, and I've had bad experiences with min-maxers who grind their way up to high skill levels just to bully/pk other PCs but I also think you can do both.

I'm someone who fairly chases skills. As in, there's a point I like to get to before I'm "comfortable". Then I tend to slow down and focus on other things. But as-it-is, Armageddon is a very slow game with a lot of dead space. If grinding skills wasn't an option, I don't know if I would have played the game as long as I did, especially as an off-peak euro player, there are plenty of times where there are just no people around. Although I do think the issue of not being able to find people to RP with is something of itself.

[MarshallDFX]

I played a bit in the hidden-skills days.  I used to think it was so pretentious, considering how important skills are to the gameplay.

I remember feeling there was an in-club, who could just chat to their friends on staff about what their skill level was, or people who knew the code so well they were just in a different caste to me. It is so newbie unfriendly.

It made me no less of a powergamer.  I suspect it actually had the opposite effect as intended tbh. (quick edit to note, this may be a me problem.)

So: I want to see my exact skill level.    62/100.

[Lizzie]

Personally I'd rather see just an echo upon login the next day:

Your climb skill has increased by 2% in the past 24 hours!
Your parry skill has increased by 1% in the past 24 hours!
Your listen skill has increased by 12% in the past 24 hours!
Your Detect Gurth spell is 12% away from branching something new!
You have branched the Scan skill, which is now at 11%!

And then not show me any skill progression again until tomorrow when I log back in.

This way - if I've been sparring, or sneaking around, or climbing walls, I can feel a sense of accomplishment and not feel like I'm not really progressing.

[mansa]

I could get on board with skill gains being echoed up-until around 50% of the skill proficiency.

[Kavrick]

I played a bit in the hidden-skills days.  I used to think it was so pretentious, considering how important skills are to the gameplay.

I remember feeling there was an in-club, who could just chat to their friends on staff about what their skill level was, or people who knew the code so well they were just in a different caste to me. It is so newbie unfriendly.

It made me no less of a powergamer.  I suspect it actually had the opposite effect as intended tbh. (quick edit to note, this may be a me problem.)

So: I want to see my exact skill level.    62/100.

Honestly yeah, not only does it kinda encourage powergaming, but it can encourage... Wrong power gaming. People just wasting their time doing things they think work without actually knowing. I actually do not even slightly understand the bluntly archaic obsession with obscuring systems and stats. Nothing else in the modern age really does it, the most popular format for roleplaying doesn't do it (dungeons and dragons) and it honestly just feels like a relic of game design choices 30 years ago.

Just to edit to add onto this. I think the perception that less knowledge = better roleplay isn't quite founded. Echoing back to Dungeons and Dragons, whether or not someone powergames in my experience has had zero bearing on how good the roleplay has been. I've played dnd campaigns where the roleplay was amazing and nearly everyone fine-tuned their characters, and I've played campaigns where the people barely put any time into writing up their characters and the roleplay was half-assed. I don't really agree that you either play a game mechanically, or play a game roleplay focused, they're not mutually exclusive.

[Dresan]

Basically going to mirror what zealus said. If people want to chase skills, then that's another part of the game that people can enjoy. I don't believe it's good to try and control how people go about enjoying the game, it's just going to push people away. There's a reason why pretty much every other mud/rpi or even just generally RPGs show how good you are at x thing.

Also, if you want to dissuade achievement chasing, I think there are better ways about it. A lot of the game can be considered extremely undesirable at low skill levels. The game should really be fun from start to finish but from my experience, crafter, sneak or combat class, you're gated with what you can and can't do by your skills, and the stuff you can do at low skill level is pretty unenjoyable. Especially if you're a crafter who's snapping every piece of bone you get your hands on.

This may rub some people the wrong way, but if you don't want people to min/max or grind skills, make the game less punishing. This is a perma-death game where your skills directly correlate to your chances of surviving, that alone is going to push people to grind out skills. I personally don't feel "safe" until I can consistently kill carru, but even they pale in comparison to a lot of other mobs.

I agree with this. If you want to stop people chasing max skill, give everyone all the skills at max. Don't want to do that? If you see value in people training, well then strongly suggest you keep it, not only does it show progression, allow for a sense of achievement but also prevents people frustratingly practicing the skill just to make sure its maxed out.

I would go as far as adding a * or some symbols to let people know they have maxed out their potential in the skill, since just hitting master isn't really the cap.

[Armaddict]

I've been a critic of the visible skills for a long time.  The before/after behavior was pretty tangible.

So let me preface this, because I'm usually a big proponent of 'keep things hard'.  This is actually not about difficulty, in the slightest, for me.  It's about player-character modus operandi on how they improve.  With no visible skills, there was an ability to overestimate how good you were.  There was the ability to underestimate how good you were.  That was not due to shady mechanics or hidden skill progressions, it was because you had to guess based off what tools you had around you.

You had to use the skill.  Combat training was something where you wanted to train with the best, and they'd beat the snot out you; you never felt like you were any good, even though you were pretty high up there in 'global rankings' because you'd been getting your ass kicked by the best for 10 days of playing time.  Using 'hide' to survive felt good once you noticed you didn't seem to fail...but you were actually not good enough to beat that ranger's scan.

Yes, this leads to bad judgments and guesses and mistakes, which can be fatal, but it made character behavior, as a whole, actually organic.

I'm not looking for lack of visibility because I want you to have it hard.  I want the information you glean about your skill levels to be relative rather than objective, and I want it to be subject to judgment and misjudgment. 

Ideally, this could be coded as a 'relative' skill level to display, that is influenced by your recent failures and successes; someone training against low skilled opponents constantly feels like they're at master, even though they're actually just a high journeyman fighting against new players.  Someone who sneaks around all the time feels like they're really good at it, until they realize that no one was actively looking for them.  A crafter feels like they're progressing super fast, until they start trying to learn how to make this armor and it frustrates them and gets them down.

But that's a big coding project that is ultimately not needed.  We just have to acknowledge that there is an injection of character knowledge that influences people's behavior, and if we want people to behave naturally rather than in a typical game-skill-playloop, then there has to be some sort of variance rather than absolute information injection.

With that in mind, I prefer no visible skills to absolutely honest, objective visible skills.  But there are other good ideas that have been tossed around that can accomplish the same thing. 

[CirclelessBard]

I really like the idea of relative skill displays. Maybe because I get impostor syndrome and I feel like checking my IRL skill list would result in a lot of novice and apprentice readings for skills I have a degree in.

IMO there is always going to be powergaming regardless of whether the skill levels are showing or not. So I don't see skill chasing as a con of the current system, because there is skill chasing in any system. There are definitely better ways to address skill chasing (I like Kavrick's ideas about raising the floor on starting skill levels, or showing skill-ups like in Lizzie's idea). I imagine there will never be a 100% effective approach to this because RPGs are vast systems and there will always be some flaw in their game design. Minimizing their impact is probably easier than minimizing the flaws themselves.

I think the pro of giving players a reasonable level of information about their characters is a really hard one to give up.

[Halaster]

Just to edit to add onto this. I think the perception that less knowledge = better roleplay isn't quite founded. Echoing back to Dungeons and Dragons, whether or not someone powergames in my experience has had zero bearing on how good the roleplay has been. I've played dnd campaigns where the roleplay was amazing and nearly everyone fine-tuned their characters, and I've played campaigns where the people barely put any time into writing up their characters and the roleplay was half-assed. I don't really agree that you either play a game mechanically, or play a game roleplay focused, they're not mutually exclusive.

While I understand the comparison to D&D, we're not really D&D.  A MUD just isn't a TTRPG for a lot of reasons.  It's actually more accurate IMO to compare us to an MMO.  I don't personally know of an RPI MMO's, so the only really good comparison we can be made to is other RPI MUD's.  So personally, I'm not overly concerned with "no modern game does this" because we're not a modern game.  We're a very niche game who in days past were the trail blazer in certain areas.  In our heyday in the early 00's, we had other games imitating us.

Nevertheless, your point is still a good point.  Having less knowledge doesn't automatically equate to a better standard of roleplay.  In some ways we have to give some leeway because it's a text game and not RL or a video game where a lot of what we do is represented visually.  I personally believe that the biggest "con" with displaying skill levels is that a certain style of player will be enticed by it to chase after skills.  Is that a large number of our players?  Probably not, though there ARE a lot of discussions about skill levels.  Hard to say and I don't have a good answer!

Good discussion though.

[dumbstruck]

I personally believe that the biggest "con" with displaying skill levels is that a certain style of player will be enticed by it to chase after skills.  Is that a large number of our players?  Probably not, though there ARE a lot of discussions about skill levels.  Hard to say and I don't have a good answer!

Good discussion though.

It's impossible to avoid some discussion about skill levels in a permadeath game where some people invest RL YEARS into a character that can be snatched away like smoke in seconds due to those skills.

That said, I believe that the type of player you are referring to is drawn to games like this not for the skill level displays but because you can /waste/ someone's 3 year investment in seconds if circumstance allows. They're usually the ones I would look out for over people who just hang out in the wilderness and skill up to survive there, which can look the same from a glance, but sustained observation proves to be wildly different groups.

[Dresan]

I personally believe that the biggest "con" with displaying skill levels is that a certain style of player will be enticed by it to chase after skills.  Is that a large number of our players?  Probably not, though there ARE a lot of discussions about skill levels.  Hard to say and I don't have a good answer!

There are only a handful of skills which meet the criteria for these so called 'skill chasers'. These are specifically weapon skills, offense and defense. To a much lesser degree bash, disarm, kick and the combat style of your choice(except shield).  That's it and everything else, including backstab/sap can easily be trained in over a one to three week RL period to perfection depending on your availability without attracting any attention. Even quicker, once you figure out a handful of things which were passed down by cheating staff and OOC friends for years. 

In the past, a player looking to max out combat would log in, fight for hours at a time for those sweet sweet gains. Years later, there have been tons of changes to prevent people from skilling up easily, effectively driving these people away. Unless you are in a clan for a long time, or in a sponsored role/application that has already been boosted that type of gameplay does not exist.

However, if staff really wants to address 'skill chasing', they should really start with the fact that you can have  5 hp, 5 stamina, 5 stun and still be able to practically fight your way out of a city if you have enough skill. Combat can get so strong that even people who like to play mages are complaining about a mere 30 percent combat loss potential to their mage. Meanwhile if you play almost anything else, for example like a crafter, until a short while ago getting murdered by a newly created dwarf was very plausible. Instead of simplification of combat, the game might want to give it a bit more depth but that is another thread.

Finally, the game may no longer really support skill chasers but it will be interesting to see if it continues to support Elitism disguised as RPing.  I know this has been said before but this isn't a MUSH, some of us rely on code and code supported activities with other players to have fun. It certainly also isn't currently a game which should be trying to filter out anyone willing to genuinely play it based on its coded and documented rules.

[Kavrick]

Just to edit to add onto this. I think the perception that less knowledge = better roleplay isn't quite founded. Echoing back to Dungeons and Dragons, whether or not someone powergames in my experience has had zero bearing on how good the roleplay has been. I've played dnd campaigns where the roleplay was amazing and nearly everyone fine-tuned their characters, and I've played campaigns where the people barely put any time into writing up their characters and the roleplay was half-assed. I don't really agree that you either play a game mechanically, or play a game roleplay focused, they're not mutually exclusive.

While I understand the comparison to D&D, we're not really D&D.  A MUD just isn't a TTRPG for a lot of reasons.  It's actually more accurate IMO to compare us to an MMO.  I don't personally know of an RPI MMO's, so the only really good comparison we can be made to is other RPI MUD's.  So personally, I'm not overly concerned with "no modern game does this" because we're not a modern game.  We're a very niche game who in days past were the trail blazer in certain areas.  In our heyday in the early 00's, we had other games imitating us.

Nevertheless, your point is still a good point.  Having less knowledge doesn't automatically equate to a better standard of roleplay.  In some ways we have to give some leeway because it's a text game and not RL or a video game where a lot of what we do is represented visually.  I personally believe that the biggest "con" with displaying skill levels is that a certain style of player will be enticed by it to chase after skills.  Is that a large number of our players?  Probably not, though there ARE a lot of discussions about skill levels.  Hard to say and I don't have a good answer!

Good discussion though.

I've played MMORPGs that have big rp bases, such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2, and both of those games tend to have roleplay run parallel to the gameplay aspect, mechanics and roleplay rarely touch but I think that's just due to these games not really being meant for roleplay.

It's certainly a nuanced topic, I understand the desire to not want to have people who min/max/grind or whatever in your game, but I do want to point out that offense and defence are actually a really good example of skills you can't see that people still chase after. Even to be blunt and make my personal opinion on it known, I personally kinda hate the idea of my experience being worse just because of the existence of players like this. I think it's a common thing where the playerbase at large is basically 'punished' for actions of the few. I would honestly say the best approached is to encourage rp, rather than trying to prevent non-rp, if that makes any sense. Encourage good behavior rather than attempting to prevent bad behavior.

Also as a quick side-note, nearly every person who I had attempted or managed to get into playing Armageddon did complain about the lack of clarity in this game, the intentional obfuscation of gameplay mechanics in this mud has always been a puzzling one to me and I haven't seen it in any other rpi/mud that I've played. While generally you have a lot of old-guard players here who are used to these mechanics and to a degree like them, I do think it harms the new-player experience and Armageddon's ability to hold new players, which is especially important nowadays I'd like to say.

[Tuannon]

'RP' in most MMOs is knowing how to toggle walking.

Seriously though, I found a lot of it was triggered emotes during actual playing the game and then more expressive stuff during 'down time'. I'm not sure if this translates well to Arm, I know some other MU*s I have played or staffed are pretty much the MMO model, play vs roleplay being separate.

I think no matter what my stance is there will be 'No, but' so I'm not personally going to weigh in other than that.

[digitaleak]

I'm here to play as a character and knowing their skills won't change that.  The same as how I see my D&D character's skills but that doesn't stop me from honest RP. I see it as a fun additional tool for me as the player.

I personally like knowing my character's skill from a zoomed out perspective because it's fun to get an idea of the scope of my character's capabilities. Sometimes it can even inform RP.

It's super fun for me to know as a player that my character probably can't do something they want to do or are pressured to do and knowing they will likely fail and playing out that situation in character anyway because it will create a great story one way or the other.

I try to just set an example and make my RP as enticing as possible for whoever wants to join in.

[Evilone]

I'm happy with seeing the skill levels as they are. It provides a clear visual representation of a character's progress and helps me to RP his skill level, and motivates me to continue improving when I see a level advance. Much like Kavrick, I am off peak so there is a lot of dead time with no players around and there is only so much solo RP I can do, so training/practicing keeps me entertained and in the game, and not just afk or logged off. Without seeing skill levels, would that create more work for Staff when players want to Custom Craft and having to constantly ask if they can? Though things might have changed since I last did a CC as you don't need to be Master Level now, is that right? Without knowing exact skill levels, you might see more custom crafts at Master Levels failing cause people are maybe only at advance, wouldn't that be amusing.

I remember an OG ranger character with a bugged dual wield that wouldn't advance, so he never branched parry in the old system. If he could have been able to see his skills levels, he would have realised much earlier that something was wrong, but that is a very rare instance, and not a strong arguement for removing seeing skill levels in todays game.

I am just use to the way things are now, and it's always been there for the RPI's I have played. I don't think it would cause me to stop playing. It's an interesting discussion.

[Lotion]

also add an indication of when I reach the cap

[Windstorm]

I personally believe that the biggest "con" with displaying skill levels is that a certain style of player will be enticed by it to chase after skills.

Sometimes I think the age of Armageddon shows in its tendency to consider backtracking towards "the way things used to be" to solve problems, but the simple fact is that those things were changed in the first place because there was dissatisfaction with them.

Real solutions aren't old solutions that weren't working, they're new things that introduce better ideas, if even that means change. I honestly feel Arm's kind of done that with full vs subguild magickers recently, but that's another topic. Ontopic point being, I'd be willing to bet that before skill levels were shown there were still players playing Arm like it was Fortnite: Desert Roleplaying Edition.

If that is a problem that needs addressing, I would confront it more directly rather than making gamewide changes that would more broadly dissatisfy the playerbase over the mannerisms of a few.

Solutions:

1. You could confront those players about that playstyle directly, and take steps to ensure those means are punished and/or disallowed. Instead, this would be placing roleplay interaction at the forefront of the game's focus over MUD PVP gameplay, which frankly is not something anyone arrives at Armageddon looking for in the first place.

2. You could make it so combat, combat initiation, and even a possibility of death out of nowhere for a given PC isn't so instantaneous. I personally would like to be able to emote or go afk somewhere publicly for 30 seconds while knowing the horror of my PC being instantly dead was at least something I could have realistically reacted to.

3. Require risk or roleplay - not tedium - to increase skills. Right now, semi-OOC knowledge of where the master warrior is that's willing to train me is mostly the barrier to getting buff, not the journey of risk, roleplay, danger and adventure that should produce someone buff naturally.

[flurry]

I voted "keep it" but I'm close to "I don't care" on this one. When the change first went in, I think I was concerned that people would obsess about skills more than before. I'm not sure that actually happened, or at least not for that reason. Personally I find it helpful to at least have a general sense of where each skill is on the scale from novice to master.

I wouldn't be opposed to something even more granular, although I don't want percentages. I also think it would be interesting to have an echo anytime a skill increases ("you sense that you have made progress in learning to haggle"), much like you get when someone teaches you a skill. This could be a toggle, so if folks find it annoying they can turn it off.

[Bogre]

We should keep skill levels. It's a good split between perfect knowledge (#/cap) and imperfect knowledge (nothing). Progression/achievements are long standing devices that do keep interest in a game, which is important for logins and player #s. It's not like we are playing a Mush.


I both enjoy character progression, playing the game parts of Armageddon, and like knowing where the character is at, and like Kavrick, I tend to slow down once I've gotten the character to a point where I don't have to worry about basic needs / instant death to minor things.

The old way was not some golden age where people didn't grind or chase skills - all it meant was that the people in the know on how to gain skills and test levels through experience or being told OOCly were at an advantage to those people who didn't know. Plenty of people grinded until something branched. The other problem is that there is no end in sight. People will continue grinding despite having no benefit or being maxed.

[Agent_137]

I was here before skill levels were visible.  Now people obsess about getting to master and we have all these complex classes that have high advanced low advanced and it's all very gamey and not RP focused. Before you only worried about branching, and then you relaxed. You measured your progress against IC things. Adding public skill trees was great. Showing skill levels was not. But now we can't undo it and the game is poorer for it. It's not the worst thing though.

[Agent_137]

all it meant was that the people in the know on how to gain skills and test levels through experience or being told OOCly were at an advantage to those people who didn't know.

Keep in mind those days were before a lot of learning nerfs so you could generally just fight and get better.  And there were no subguild mages so combat masters were fully mundane.

There's no way to reliably test your combat skills other than "can I handle two scrabs usually." That's good. That's realistic and IC.

Being told oocly your skill level is a silly breach of rules.  If a staffer is doing that they're probably doing worse. It would be rare for any combat pro to know their skill beyond "I branched 10 days ago so it's probably high"

The golden days were golden.  Not just because of hidden skill levels of course. I don't remember any long lived non-sorc PvP masters like we've had multiple of lately. So whatever lopsided twinky imagination you have of how it was I don't think is accurate.

[Nao]

I remember far, far less twinking from those days. Seeing 'apprentice' on your skill list makes you think 'oh, I suck, I need to work on that', even if you're able to kill a black mantis and nearly everything you run into with these apprentice weapon skills. With the new classes, apprentice is even higher than it was before, so you can really be quite skilled and still get stuck at apprentice or journeyman.

Then there's the 'achievement' effect. Seeing your skill level increase is satisfying the same way that steam achievements are nice, and people will always chase them if they're achievable.

This is also why we need sparring NPCs in combat clans now - yes, they're very effective, but they're so effective that indies and everyone in a clan without one of those has no chance whatsoever to catch up. And even if you don't really care what your skill list says, even a minority who does care and keeps training these skills create pressure on everyone else to grind more and spar more in order to keep up. I don't think any of this is good for the game.

One thing that might help a bit without removing levels altogether is to condense the scale and massively lower the skill level that's needed for 'master'. Maybe even cut it in a half. We could also branch whatever still branches from weapon skills off some other skill to remove that part of the grind.

Edit: I'm really only concerned about weapon skills here. Nothing else is really causing an 'endless grind' problem because all other skills go up at a reasonable rate. Let's hide or adjust skill levels for weapon skills, and keep the rest.