[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Frankly, the idea that you only get experience for killing is stupid, and it leads to game play abuses. First, in the real world, you learn by doing. If you were practicing martial arts, or marksmanship, or whatever, you do really learn by trying to hit an opponent. If you only learned by defeating them, no one would ever learn anything, because beginners could never defeat experts. As for the gameplay abuses, it's not fair that one character gets all the XPs because they were lucky enough (or in MP, aggressive/sneaky enough) to land the Last blow, regardless of whether someone else did 99% of the work to kill the target. Which was one of the things I liked about the SWG MMORPG: you got XPs proportionally based on your share of the damage that was inflicted when you gang-banged an enemy.

There is no perfect XP system: Your great SWG system, for instance, neglects the value of support characters. If you only get XP for something based on the amount of damage you actually inflict to a target, then characters which are "support", and perform actions such as healing, buffing, and other tasks which allowed the party to inflict such damage, but did not actually cause damage directly, are without value to the XP system.

A system which rewards only for killing, on the other hand, results in the "vulching" issue where weakened units are saved for the person who is to finish them off, or, in a MMORPG, people "steal kills".

A system which rewards you for merely performing an action, on the other hand, results in players that perform purposeless actions for the sole purpose of acquiring XPs. An adaptation of this in which only acts performed upon appropriate targets qualifies results in "punching bag" behavior, in which the player intentionally preserves an otherwise crippled opponent, who has been intentionally hobbled due to a pile of negative status effects or is trapped upon an terrain obstacle, so that he can beat on this opponent repeatedly.

A system which rewards you for simply being in a group and/or being in proximity of those who commit an act which gains such an award, on the other hand, results in leeching: People that join and follow others around, and do not actually make any kind of contribution, for the express purpose of acquiring this experience.

All known XP systems have some sort of abusive pattern built into them: Either some form of artificial behavior becomes the easiest path to gaining XP, or some actions become artificially unrewarding or even counterproductive.

In theory, the only way you'd come up with a "fair" XP system is to include all of these methods simultaneously: At least then, there's no single pattern of abuse that can be followed, as you can abuse the system in a variety of ways. Until somebody comes up with a better solution than manually awarding the XPs, however, XP systems will always be abused.