While taking a break from the RBS AI (they're like a child sometimes; trying, and occasionally talk back), I had a thought.

One of the things I like to see in games is an alternative to mindless grinding for experience to make your numbers go up. The whole game begins to revolve around grinding to get the experience to make the numbers higher to grind more experience to make the numbers higher to grind . . . you get the picture.

Anything that takes focus away from the grind and back to actual gameplay is a Good Thing™ to me.

One such system I've observed is used in EvE-Online (www.eve-online.com). It's a nice game if you enjoy space sims focused on fleet engagements, asteroid mining, and production. It's pretty cool game, and if you're interested, let me know and I'll shoot you a Wingman invite (free 14 days, +14 days to both of us if you stay).

In any event, their system is time based. They eliminate the variables of "hardcore" vs "causal" by making advancement take just as long regardless of online time.

A skill has a few different statistics:
a Primary attribute
a Secondary attribute
a Rank (difficulty)
a level (how high you've trained this skill)
SP (skill points, how many SP you've put in so far)
TSP (total skill points, how many SP are needed to the next level)

You generate a number of SP per minute equal to your Primary attribute plus 1/2 of your Secondary attribute. So, for example, if the skill's Primary was INTelligence and the Secondary was PERception, and you had INT at 5 and PER at 10, then you generate 10 SP a minute for that skill.

Now, a skill's TSP is based on the next level to be trained and it's rank. I'll save you the whole forumla but essentially it breaks down like this:

1. 250
2. 1,440
3. 8,000
4. 45,255
5. 256,000

The time invovled is simply the TSP divided by your SP per minute. In this case, level 1 (250 SP) will take 25 minutes (250/10). That's for a Rank 1 skill. The TSP is multiplied by the Rank, so higher ranks take longer to train.

They also keep adding skill points whether you're online or not.

The advantage to this system is that it levels the playing field for advancement. No longer do you fall drastically far behind your buddies because you have a job and a life outside of the game.

The downside is that there's also no point in putting in extended hours to "get that next level".

Logging in is encouraged by other means. Generating money (ISK, in EvE) is an active process, as is faction point gaining.

I've been thinking of bringing this kind of system to BYOND, but a little more straight forward and customizable.

Rather than use EvE's interesting but complex algorithm for determining sp/level, I will go with a more direct method.

There are three constant values, ExpBase, Exp, and ExpMod. The formula (at the moment), is ExpBase^(Level*Exp)*ExpMod, where Level is the current level of the skill being trained. As a default, the values of 2 (base), 1 (exp), and 100 (mod) will be used, resulting in a progression that looks like this:

1. 100
2. 200
3. 400
4. 800
5. 1,600

This provides a basic, exponential progression. Level 1, 2, and even 3 will be common, 4 will be uncommon, and 5 will be relatively rare.

You can tweak the curve by changing the Exp value. A base of 2, exp of 2, and mod of 100 would present the following progression:

1. 100
2. 400
3. 1,600
4. 6,400
5. 25,600

As you can see, the effect is minor at the lower levels, but much greater at higher levels. Decimal values are perfectly fine and likely required to get a proper progression for your game.

There's two parts to this, however. One is the progresssion, and remember that the above is for a Rank 1 skill. Ranks 2+ will increase those point totals. The points mean little without some measure of how difficult it is to achieve said numbers. That's the second part, generating the SP per minute of whoever/whatever has the skill. There will be defaults and hooks in the system to be overwritten, but ultimately you need to look at how long it takes to get from one level to the next. Too few SP per minute and people will get bored and frustrated. Too many and the first levels will be worthlessly easy to achieve. Finding a balance between SP per minute and the TSP for skills is vital and will have to be left up to the game developer.

The default will be a base of 2, an exp of 2, and a mod of 100. The default SP per minute will be 20, resulting in the following time line for skills levels:

1. 5 minutes
2. 20 minutes
3. 1 hour, 20 minutes
4. 5 hours, 20 minutes
5. 21 hours, 20 minutes

If you're looking for faster advancement, a standard tweak might be to change the default SP per minute to 100, which cuts training time by five. Level 1 takes a minute, level 5 takes 4 hours and 16 minutes.