Scout Archive

Alternative Advancement Skills

Massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG); need to give players things to do in their game. This is accomplished in two ways, using progressive advancement and content. These two items have to be present to keep an "end game" in their world. Without the end game, people get board of the game, and leave.

Star Wars Galaxies is finally on the road to adding enjoyable content its world however even with the content the other side of the formula is unbalanced. SWG lacks in progressive advancement. After you have full filled your characters template you have nothing left to advance on. In many cases, creating that template and getting all the skills takes a few days for the hard-core, a few weeks for the average player. Thus we are left with a new goal for the developers to work on. While content is the most important feature of any game, progressive advancement needs to be present.

This will eventually need to be addressed by the developers, it may be 3-6 months down the road, but it will need to get addressed by developers. One of Sony’s other MMORPG’s added progressive advancement in the terms of Alternative Advancement points. This game was called Ever Quest. To say the least, the system worked, you delegated however much exp you wanted into a new "skill point" system after you obtained a certain level.

This can work in Star Wars Galaxies also. Alternative Advancement might be the most streamline thing to add to the game, rather then elite-elite professions. I propose a system to the developers and players of Star Wars Galaxies. As a player, I have mastered many professions and played out many more. I personally think that an AA system will work in SWG.

How would a AA system work out in SWG? Well that’s some of the questions we want to kink out. The system I thought of is to make it so that AA points only are accessible to players who have mastered a profession. Each profession will have there own set of AA skills. Along with a universal set of AA Skills that everybody has. Even a Racial set of AA points that you can earn. Perhaps even a Faction AA points.

AA skills primarily are the same skills that you can get from skill tapes. Dodge, Melee Defense, Rifle Speed, Weapon experimentation, Armor Repair, creature level ect. Along with new skills that have never before been in the game. There should be profession specific AA skills that can only be gained in certain profession

Purchasing AA skills require experience, like pistol experience, combat experience, weapon crafting experience. Each AA point should require different types of experience logically. Like rifle speed should not require pistol experience, and weapon experimentation should require combat exp.

AA points should be expensive, EXP wise, starting out double of the top tier skill of that profession. Example: The first Master Pistoleer AA point would cost 900,000 pistol exp. As you gain more AA points the cost should increase. How much should it increase? I’m thinking 10-20% each skill.

Learning a AA skill grants additional skill mods to your character template. Putting 1 AA skill points into say: Pistoleer Speed. Will give you +1 to your Pistol Speed Skill. Putting additional AA points into Pistoleer Speed will add to that your character template.

Should there be a cap on the amount of AA points a player can earn? Say 50 per master profession? Or should it cost 1 skill point out of your 250 skill points for 1 AA point?

With the help of the community lets work out some cool ideals for each profession on what AA points they can get, what racial ones we can come up with one, the universal ones too. Also we should work out the few questions throughout the post.

What Specific AA Skills should Scouts have?

What new AA skills can you think of?

How much should they cost?

Should there be a cap on the amount of AA points a player can earn? Or should they cost skill points to learn?

Should the additional AA skills not count towards the max increase skill mods? (IE: +25 Pistol Speed is the most you can add with clothing attachments and then another +25 with the AA points for +50!, or should it be max at 25)

Novice professions are unique situation since mastering a novice profession will co-exist with upper professions, so we should think of skills that are unique to Scouts and would be useful in other professions also.

Evil,

This is an interesting idea.

I've not played EQ - only DAoC and SWG - so I'm not entirely familiar with how the system works there.

I do have a few hestitations - unlike EQ and other games of that nature, you're character choices are not permanent. For example, I played a Albion Paladin in DAoC. So once that decision was made, I was stuck - I couldn't redo my character unless I started over from the beginning. So that made it impossible for me to do. With SWG it's different, because you can always drop everything from your character and start over - there are no character creation choices (other than sex and race) that are permanent and locked in. So the need for alternatives is a bit different.

That coupled with the idea that Rangers are really our "further advancement", makes it tough for me to say what I would suggest for Scouts other than to go Ranger if they want more scouting.

Plus - we wil be getting the space exapansion in a few months, and I believe that may have more things for us old players to do.

I would think that no matter what- the multiplyers would have to be capped at +125. I think that because of the high levels of XP that we have capped, it would be better to make it more along the line of 10,000 XP = 1 AP. And that can be used to purchase a +1 of skill box.

I would think that AA would be best served purchasing modifiers, not new skills. But that's just me.

B