Design Talk - eXperience Points

IN a NUTSHELL

XP

RoE Experience Indicator


 why and how

Today we’ll release a small but significant new feature – Global Experience Points (XP)

We often see players, in new realms, establishing their feeding priority by listing their Realm of Empires honors:

 “I have played ROE for 2 years now”
 “I was in Realm 7, 9, 11”
 “I am a Divine Emperor in another realm” etc

Well, XP will speak of your previous achievements; it will be your “Realm of Empires Experience Indicator”

I want to take you for a design ride of this seemingly simply feature. I hope you will find it interesting!

Motivation for XP

We all know what XP is, but it took an hour long meeting to realize we just all knew it to be something different. What is it supposed to do? What is the purpose of having global XP. We agreed that our main motivation of XP is to be your “Realm of Empires game experience indicator”

Realm 4 

XP = Village Points?

We already have “village points” that speak of your experience. Titles are based on village points but titles are not game wide. Starting in a new realm, you are a “Peasant” like everyone else even if you have Divinity in your resume.

So perhaps XP should simply be your village points, totaled across all realms? Sounds good but that would result in huge XP (in millions), not ideal.

XP = Village Points / factor?

We could just scale the points down : 1000 village points = 1 XP, but there is also another problem - is a person who reached the level of Deity in just one realm equal in experience to a person who achieved a title of Emperor in 10 realms? Village point wise, yes they are equal, but Game-Experience wise? I could argue both ways.

Realm 5

Is 100 points = 10X10 points?
Also, is it harder to get your first 10 villages, than it is to get 110^th village? On some realms, going from 100 to 200 villages is trivial – just take rebels, abandoned, inactive – until you are left with hard core of bad-asses and getting one more village is roughly analogous to having your 10^th shot of tequila – you really want it, you’re not sure why, and it could result in losing it all - all the hard work flushed down the toilet; I may be speaking from experience.

Realm 7

So what is that tipping point? 100 villages? 200? 500? Well, it depends on the realm. The larger the realm, the more casual the realm,the easier it is to get more villages, so really, the XP should depend on the realm. But we don’t know this until the realm opens and runs for a while, so can’t do that well.

XP Only Village Points?

What about other things – is a player running a clan equal in experience to a person who has not? What about a player who organizes campaigns, helps new players via forum, chat, achieves top spot in tournament realm etc? Certainly these are things worthy of a bit of XP. Because of this, we give out a lot of XP per title to give us room to give out less XP for other actions in the game (and also a reason why we cannot simply scale 1000 village points to 1XP).

XP Levels

But giving a lot of XP results in a very big number that is inconvenient to display therefore we decided to introduce XP Levels – a collapsed version of your XP.

Final Decisions

Oh btw, I am an AD&D fan. [Established feeding order now] Been a dungeon master for many years, have a lot of great campaigns behind my belt, killed off many great characters, managed to put a friend to sleep once while he was talking – that was before twitter but now I would SOOO tweet about this!  Anyway! The point is, XP design was loosely inspired by D&D. 

XP loosely based on village points, with diminishing return 
For now, you get XP for accepting titles which is based on points but not linearly - there is a diminishing return as you advance in titles. We did this for many reasons, one being that we did not want to make it practically impossible for a determined new player to catch up to veterans.

More realm = more XP
We went with the assumption that a person getting fewer total villages in many realms, is more experienced than a player with more villages in one realm – reason: the former player has seen more types of game play, has seen more diplomatic situations, has probably participated in many more clans, dealt with more player etc

XP Levels - a linear function of XP

Unlike D&D, XP levels are a linear function of your XP.
Want to know what it is?
Get ready for it!
It is Level = XP / 1000 wooho! My mathematics degree finally paid off!

XP already nonlinear function of village points

Since XP is already a nonlinear function of village points, we figured it makes no sense to have XP level to be an nonlinear function of XP – its like double taxation; not sure exactly what it is, but we all know it’s really bad.

XP Realm specific so adaptable

At the end, XP is tied to a title and it is realm specific. Meaning we can tweek the algorithm by adjusting the XP per title in future realms based on your feedback. You will able to see this flexibility in action in tournament realms where we’ll give out fewer XP.

We look forward to your feedback!

We have not had a chance to get much on your feedback on this, partly because we screwed up… we did not foresee so many questions popup up and we must release this code before RX2 reopens tomorrow. However, because the algorithm is adaptable, we hope that once you guys get a chance to experience the experience points (pun intended), your feedback will be that much more valuable.

Thanks goes to my daughter for waking me up at 5:15 am and giving me a chance to write this.

Q & A - based on player's questions 

Q: How were the starting points calculated, today?

The points were calculated based on your title in all your current realms as of today

Q: Will I loose XP points/level if I stop playing a realm?

No, like titles your XP points, will never go down. Unlike titles, your XP will not go down even if you stop playing on a realm