Behind the Curtain: A look at skills
In their current state, skills in MMOs could be improved. Tell me exactly what kind of 'skill' is involved in clicking a button a few times until the game decides that you're able to make something better? What if your character's skills were a direct result of how good you were at actually performing the task in question? What if an action's level of success was dependent on how well you actually carried out the action and not on how often you had clicked a button?
The effects of a system like this would be most apparent in crafting; imagine a game where, in the crafting interface, you had direct control over the creative process, a system where the quality of the item varied according to the level of skill employed by the player during the creative process, and not on how many times you had clicked a button to make the item in the past.
The beauty of a system like this is that players who naturally excel in a certain skill would be rewarded for it, regardless of the amount of time spent grinding their skill level up, but at the same time, players who simply created the same item again and again would get better anyway, because after all, practice makes perfect.
The system would also give rise to 'master crafters' – players whose items were consistently better than the competition's, not because they'd looted some super-rare recipe from someone, but because they were quite simply better at making things than the others. Crafters could charge competitive prices for their work, having actually put work into making the item. It would give rise to a player-driven economy that would put EVE Online's to shame (and that's saying something).
I suppose Second Life might come the closest to this ideal just now - Second Life provides you with the tools to create items of your own, and the quality of those items is a direct result of your skill with the toolset. Also, while it doesn't really follow the model I'm talking about right now, I can't help but like EVE Online's 'pick and choose' approach to skills.
I can picture some kind of interface where you see, in real-time, your item being created. In Blacksmithing for example, if you're crafting a sword you might want to heat it to a very specific temperature, or fold the steel a certain number of times, these could be things which would be left entirely up to you to control. There could be UI functionality which told you the metal's current temperature precisely, or you might be left to figure that out yourself, but you would make the decision about whether or not the sword was ready whenever you felt it was time, and not because you had spent the requisite 5 or 10 seconds waiting on a bar to fill up.
This is just an idea of course, and there are plenty of technical obstacles that would stand in the way of implementing a system like this; if you're waiting for a precise window of time to occur, the last thing you want is to start lagging; coding the system would probably be a nightmare, and would likely end up chock-full of bugs to begin with; interactivity is an issue too, controlling a system like this could be tricky, unless the MMOs of the future start shipping with anvils and forges bundled in. That being said, Nintendo have shown with the Wii that motion controlled games with force-feedback are possible, despite what Sony might have claimed earlier.
Still, I think it's an interesting premise, to say the least. Any MMO that made a good job of a skill system like this would be very different to play than anything that I've seen, and could well be the kind of thing that would tempt non-gamers to join our ranks. It's just a shame that the computing power that would be required to run a game as complicated as that is almost certainly a good few years down the line yet. But we can still dream, right?
