Expertise - An elegant alternative

[Vetril]

Disclaimer: I've not worked out the math completely and there's at least one problem with the system I propose (ie, valor inflation) that "worries" me (relatively, since this is merely a suggestion). I'm posting because I think this is an interesting idea (one that pretty much any FPS game that wants to keep track of players relative skill uses) that adapts well to the Expertise situation, and I'd like to discuss it with you.

 

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I've always wondered why Expertise, as in "a number that scales your stats against players" was tied to grindable gear. People complain on forums that this approach comes with inherent problems:

 

1. it makes people pvp for the grind and not for the pvp in itself (but I would point out that this is a problem of people's attitude, not a problem with the system).

2. it rewards grind time over skill - which is very fair (given the same amount of time, everyone will have roughly the same success), but hardly competitive.

3. it inflates the gear gap, making it harder to enter the level 50 bracket.

 

Anyway, that's beyond the point of this post.

 

If you think about it, we already do have a stat on the character sheet that measures our success in PvP. Well, kinda. Let's say it could easily be tweaked to do that. It's Valor.

 

Now, consider a system where you start with a determined amount of Valor, and this amount is modified everytime you kill (or you are killed) by another player - effectively enabling players to "steal" Valor from each other. If you modify this Valor gain (Vg) with diminishing returns (such exponential decay, for those who have the math) that go with the ratio between the killer's Valor (Vk) and the victim's Valor (Vv), you end up with a function that looks like this:

 

Vg = S* e ^ ( - Vk/Vv * K)

 

S and K being two arbitrary parameters that allow us to control the exact range and steepness of the function.

 

The resulting value Vg would obviously be clamped to force it within an arbitrary range, and then would be added to the killer's total Valor (up to a maximum), and subtracted to the victim's total Valor (down to 0 minimum).

 

For those that are not good with math, this means that it would be possible to make it so that the more Valor you have compared to your victim, the less Valor you would gain by killing them. On the other hand, the less Valor you have compared to your victim, the more Valor you would gain by killing them. Think of it as "PvP experience". If you trash weak players, you get 0 Valor (and they lose 0), whereas if you somehow manage to kill a better player, you get a ton of valor (and they lose a ton, relatively speaking). This approach has the usual mmorpg inflation problem (as players create new characters and effectively bring more Valor into the game), which can be solved with Valor degradation over time (hopefully).

 

This alone is obviously not enough to replace Expertise. So far, we've only put a system into place to move Valor points between players. However, this means that one can effectively "measure" PvP skill using Valor. Thus, by rewarding players that have a high Valor score with the same benefits Expertise yields (including Expertise diminishing returns, obviously), one can effectively replace Expertise with Valor. Furthermore, it also provides a measure to organize rated warzones and arenas.

 

This approach has some relevant advantages over the gear based approach:

 

1. risk vs reward; since everytime a PvP death happens, someone's gonna lose Valor, and someone's going to gain it, there's a very "real" stake.

2. rewards skill over gear

3. discourages grinding - since even if you grind low Valor players without being good, you'll still lose your Valor pretty quickly everytime you're killed (because of the Valor gain function).

4. makes sense: one character isn't more expert because he wears specific gear.

5. bragging rights: ie, e-peen.

 

Please discuss.

Edited February 26, 2012 by Vetril