Make Levels Useful

[voyager]

Currently, players are able to accumulate levels when performing tasks, however these levels don't seem to do anything besides quantify accomplishment. I think it would fit in with the idea of avatars as higher beings if levels applied modifiers to the task at hand. This would work rather nicely for things like construction, manufacture, and trade - although not for more abstract things like space exploration. A positive quality of this suggestion is that it would discourage spurious alts, and encourage players to strategically use what characters they have.

Apologies if this has been suggested before; I couldn't find anything with search here or on the wiki.

[Deantwo]

Character progression is indeed something we are missing. Currently a new avatar is just as useful as a 5 year old avatar.

The current "skill levels" are just the amount of minutes your avatar has spend doing something. The old values that used to be on the avatar pages.

But yeah, some ideas on how these "skill levels" could be used or what they should affect would be fun to discuss.

I think maybe my preferred idea would be using them as skill points and use them to buy/unlock abilities or upgrades for your avatar.

[voyager]

I think maybe my preferred idea would be using them as skill points and use them to buy/unlock abilities or upgrades for your avatar.

That might be a good use for the difficult to place skills. Stuff like poker games won, etc. But what sort of abilities or boons? Maybe extra DNA points for making previously impossible races? That might get abused though. Lower recall time might be a good one.

[Deantwo]

But what sort of abilities or boons?

Have some building types be locked behind construction or city planner skills. Having to build some buildings in order to unlock the next tier of building types.

Accuracy for ranged weapons unlocked with combat skill.

When you start looking at default things you can take away from new players, it becomes a lot easier to think of ideas. For example the current avatar being super good at everything could be the baseline for an avatar that has unlocked all bonuses. Limiting what a new player can do will reduce the learning curve, having them focus on just a few things at first and then have them unlock bonuses to become better and small progression goals.

[Chronovore]

Not to name-drop other games, but SoH seems like it could benefit from a Star Wars: Galaxies type skill system.

Another benefit from skills is to encourage alts with specialization or to encourage players to specialize and join empires.

That being said, anything to do with skills greatly increases the need for balancing, and that's a job for teams of people, not an individual.

[Systemicyco]

But what sort of abilities or boons?

Have some building types be locked behind construction or city planner skills. Having to build some buildings in order to unlock the next tier of building types.

Accuracy for ranged weapons unlocked with combat skill.

When you start looking at default things you can take away from new players, it becomes a lot easier to think of ideas. Cor example the current avatar being super good at everything could be the baseline for an avatar that has unlocked all bonuses. Limiting what a new player can do will reduce the learning curve, having them focus on just a few things at first and then have them unlock bonuses to become better and small progression goals.

I really don't like the idea of locking gameplay behind progression. It makes the game unapproachable for people with a life... like those of us that work for governments.

[Deantwo]

I really don't like the idea of locking gameplay behind progression. It makes the game unapproachable for people with a life... like those of us that work for governments.

I wasn't suggesting we would have to grind for days to get the needed skill levels. Just some minor tutorial-style unlocking of building types, so a new avatar has to actually be trained up a little bit. If it takes more than a week to unlock all building types, it would horribly fail.

I am not sure what would be good. At most any progression system with a clear cut maximum level or end of unlocks would be boring once it is fully unlocked. But we also don't want infinite power creep.

[jakbruce2016]

But what if we do want infinite power creep?