Levelling and customisation
Machiave11i
Join Date: 2012-08-03 Member: 154644Members
Join Date: 2012-08-03 Member: 154644Members
Comments
But i think he is talking about levelups in the actual base-oriented game. The major problem here is how to balance that: people might start doing silly things like intentionally not ending the game in order to increase their xp-gain.
As for customization of armor and alien colors, i belive UWE mentioned this in a stream. It's obviously a low priority though.
We just have to wait and see what the devs decide once the game is feature complete and fully polished in the public build.
Lobbys and team balance would be a better use of statistic tracking then the cosmetics, maybe one day.
As long as I can turn off your pink helmet with aviator sunglasses wardrobe, you can wear whatever you like lovelies.
i disagree here. prestige/fame/customization can be just as motivating as gameplay benefits. don't get me wrong, i love this idea! but i still think some people will try to abuse any kind of leveling system.
to give you an example: alien swarm (a coop campaign shooter which is free2play on steam) gives you levelups which unlock new choices when it comes to chosing your loadout for every mission. once you reach the maximum level (27), you can promote yourself with a medal. but promoting yourself will set your level back to 1, dramatically lowering your choices for equipment! you can repeat this process 6 times (so there are more than 150 levels) and each new medal will cause the level-up progess to slow down significantly.
people could certainly stop at the first time they reach level 27 and simply not promote themselves. but what do you think happens? i think the amount of people i have seen doing that are <5% (and i've played this game a lot, reaching highest medal long ago). almost everyone has some medals, the others usually have not reached the first level 27 yet so i cannot tell for those.
luckily, that game is coop vs AI and there are several mechanics to prevent players from things like farming etc.: you get a flat amount of 1000 points per mission and you can only get up to 100 points for kills per mission. furthermore, you get up to 100 points for finishing a mission quickly, up to 100 for not recieving any damage and up to 100 for not hitting any teammates (there are some more boni but you get the idea). even then i've seen a lot of idiots who camp a spawning point to farm their kills (which is not even effective in terms of total points), they might do this for some achievements though. i imagine this to be a lot worse, e.g. if kills are the only thing that matters.
even if you take the most general metric you can think of (wins vs losses), it will still depend on the duration of the match as well as the people you play with. plus there might be some mods involved...
you could also simply count the duration of game-time on steam, but then people would just idle while doing something else.
<b>the only decent metric i can think of</b> is actual time you spend on a server, not being afk (there are already methods to kick those people so i guess it'd work). this will not directly reflect your skill (does it have to? it's about cosmetics...) but it will at least reflect your knowledge about the mechanics of the game. this could also be helpful for other players: they might be more forgiving regarding newbies and be more likely to listen to suggestions of the more experienced players.
I seriously hope the devs do not listen to people like this and turn the game into a generic shooter
EDIT: If you mean purely cosmetic rewards for playing, then yeah I am all for it within reason (I dont want ridiculous hats). I DO NOT support a system whereby weapons and such are doled out for kills etc though.
Of course NS1 kind of turned into a sort of "if you have no commanded 100x on this server you will be insta-kicked if you dare even try" so that could happen aswell.
I just like having something to work towards. A 'pat on the head' for playing X amount of games.
Everyone just wants to make 'their' character.