Stars Reach And The Skill Cap

I hope we can all agree that it would be a problem, if an MMORPG allowed a player to train up a character that is a level infinite soldier, priest, mage, ranger, summoner and assassin all at once.

A: “So, what’s your role?”
B: “Oh, I’m a tank, healer, melee dps, ranged dps, pet class. But I also can do stealth, buffs and debuffs and crowd control.”

In an MMORPG that is designed around having separate roles that complement each other, this would be game breaking. And the same is equally true for both combat roles - as well as economic roles: If the game is designed around having separate economic roles that complement each other (a corner-stone of a player-driven economy), allowing one player to fill all the roles simultaneously would be game breaking.

But in a survival crafting game where combat, crafting and cooking are not designed to be separate roles - but more like side-activities, the opposite is true. Since those games are often meant to be playable singleplayer (or completely solo) as well, forcing role separation might be game breaking instead.

Since Stars Reach does not have classes (which limit what skills you can train in the first place), and does not have levels (which give you X skill points each level up, thus effectively defining a max number of possible skill points) - not having a skill cap would be equal to allowing said level infinite soldier, priest, mage, ranger, summoner and assassin character.

To many, not having classes and not having levels feels a lot more like a survival game than an MMORPG. Apart from that, because many of these things like skill caps, are not implemented in the current test version of Stars Reach yet - so even when playing, the game feels more like a survival game than an MMORPG.

Thus, if you do look at what the game currently is and feels like - then adding a skill cap feels obviously wrong. It doesn’t fit in. It makes the game worse.

But if you do look at what the game is planned to become, and the social sandbox MMORPG we want it to be, and the player-driven economy we want it to have - then adding a skill cap is a necessity to get there. It feels wrong for what the game currently is - but it’s very right for what the game is supposed to become. And it is necessary to make changes like that, to get us from where it is now - closer to where we want it to be.

But if you can’t really imagine yet the vision of where the developers want to go with the game - you might also not be able to see how the skill cap fits in, with that future vision. You only see that it doesn’t fit in well with how things are right now. And you’re right about that.

But Stars Reach is still in the very early pre-alpha stages of development and testing - and thus what the game is right now, and how that feels to play, is not truly representative of the final intended design. And since it is pre-alpha, it is still undergoing major changes and shifts in feel.

And when player vendors were added to the game last October - that was a huge shift in that direction. Away from survival game, and closer to MMORPG. Vendors were a much beloved addition of course, and testers were exstatic about that - but not all the needed changes are that way. Skill caps are a needed change that feels more like something is taken away - something that the game used to allow is no longer possible. And to people who already took that ‘something’ for granted - this might feel like something is taken away from them. Thus, developers have already identified this change as potentially controversial, ages ago. Together with other changes like, implementation of property passes, skill training costs, item decay, and more.

You either have to trust that the developers know what they are doing - and then re-evaluate your opinion, once enough changes are in, so that everything starts to fit together again - or, you can dig deeper into the design philosophy behind the game, and learn to understand why those things are so important, and why they are done this way.

If you want to dig deeper and learn more, I can give you a few pointers of where to start:

1. Raph’s developer blog posts Designing for Social Play and Player Driven Economies
2. My own blog posts Game Economies and Interdependency
3. Raph’s SWG postmortems, especially Designing a Living Society, part 1 and Designing a Living Society, part 2
4. Raph’s blog post Do Auction Houses Suck?
5. My post What You Need To Know About Stars Reach - which is the most popular (most read and most shared) post about Stars Reach I’ve written so far
6. My old post Stars Reach Explainer - although keep in mind, that this one is a little out-dated by now

P.S.: “Players are gonna multi-account and work around the cap anyway.” is not a valid argument against a cap. There will probably also be gold-sales and leveling-services somewhere on the web - but that doesn’t mean that the developers should just allow that and start selling gold and max-level chars in the cash-shop. Heck, crimes keep happening as well - doesn’t mean we should abolish all laws.

P.P.S.: Economic role separation is needed to achieve an emergent economy. That stopping multi-accounting is hard to achieve, is no counter-argument to that. What can and should be done, what incentives, discouragements and how strict it should be enforced (Many games choose to intentionally turn a blind eye, and pocket the extra subscriptions it brings.) - is a different topic.