Posted 11/15/10 07:58:00 pm A great paradigm for MMO’s today, if not the greatest, is its progression structure, based on experience gathered from activities such as killing monsters or other players, completing quests, exploring new places and such. This experience is then converted into levels, labeling the character a given level and rewarding him/her with points they can either freely spend on their desired attributes or with preset values that are added to the attributes automatically after each new level is achieved. The GameCareerGuide.com “MMO-OFF” contest had the objective of inciting the creation of ideas and designs which incentivized players to spend less time inside the game. As well as solving the problem of players burning through the hand-crafted content too fast, which these genres of games so heavily rely on. The problem, as the contest presented, led me to wonder about two issues of the standard system today, which were the following:Issue 1: Players spend too much time in the game. Now this is interesting, because can you really blame players for wanting to spend more and more time inside the game? When the precise message the gameplay yell is: “The more you play it, the further you get into it!”. It’s hard to think that players actually dedicated and truly interested in playing and exploring the game’s world, lore and gameplay possibilities would not follow this simple advice from the game itself. You’re creating the game and telling players not to experience it, not to enjoy it as deeply as they can. It’s like putting food for your dog and making the poor thing just sit still right by it and stare at it, you can’t really blame him if at one point, sooner or later, he starts eating. It’s just natural and instinctive. So, one way that could be changed is by having the experience of playing the game convey a different message. This “message” would be one that incites players to explore and dive into the world in doses, balancing time inside and outside the game in order to fully progress in the game, without worrying about leveling up or if he’s friend is going to surpass his level because he’s not investing 7 hours a day into it. So this is one point that ought to be re-explored and maybe even re-defined.Issue 2: One of the aspects that keeps the playing of the game interesting is the feeling that there’s always something new to be found in the next corner, in the next area, after a certain event, a new NPC to meet, someone new to get acquainted to or the latest development in the conflict afflicting the land the game features and the player ventures. This necessary aspect makes the game fun to explore, but when put together with the current message most game structures convey, players end up experiencing content rather quickly, sometimes even to the point where it renders the game boring. Even though it’s a given this state will be eventually reached by all players, unless more content is released periodically, it would be, nevertheless, interesting for developers to have a reward system that looks free and intuitive, even though it provides them with a subtly tighter control over how long it would take for all players to experience all content without making them feel like they’re being controlled or kept (be it either in time or space) from experiencing all the game has to offer.With these issues in mind, and attempting to create a solution that addressed them both, I came up with the PACE system, which was my submission for the GameCareerGuide’s Game Design Challenge regarding this subject, although it was rather poorly explained in the original entry due to word-count limits and other factors. The PACE system
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