Umm, question. What's preventing players from turning the entire game into EvE Online and all the clusterfuck of IRL relations that implies?
Also, there was this manga I read somewhere, can't remember what it was, but essentially it was about a new classless VRMMORPG where you define you character by your initial skills you choose at the beginning. Players are literally incapable of doing anything outsie of those skills. The MC takes the most useless skills (I think those were potion-brewing, cooking, crafting, kicking and Archery) and made fortunes because none of the other players invested in any of those and relied entirely on the npc merchants after the devs decided to fuck everyone by closing all potion merchants for an extended period and making food give bonus after a meta had already developed. He literally became a meta trend setter because he didn't try to build for PVE or PVP
As well, the crafting system was completely bull. First, items created by players could be more powerful than anything created by the devs. Second, each creation was unique to the creator. It relied entirely on player's "discovering" their own unique creations through recipes that only worked for them and they had to spend time and in game currency to create. Wanna make a health potion? Hope you like experimenting and resource gathering cause that's what your gonna have to do. Wanna make food to buff you stats? Hope your creative and determined enough to combine arbitrary ingredients and cooking styles for hours. Like, he created his own fucking tier system of bows for himself. He also made bladed shoes, fucking bladed shoes to enhance his kicking ability.
I'm just putting this here because I feel that having a game rely entirely on skills would logically conclude in either everyone doing one meta, or having the Devs fuck with every so often to radically change the meta of the game.
Actually, now that I think about it, and as much as I loath to mention it, Re:Monster has an interesting system, only for monsters mind you but the idea counts, where the combination of achievements decides what you level into. For example, say we have two physical "Warriors", designated A and B. Like a Fighter from D&D, they start off similar.
A takes a more aggressive style, focusing more on dealing damage. He goes full Conan and decides Shirtless Murder is always the first option. Commits Genocide against everything, they respawn it doesn't matter. Learns how to channel his bloodlust or some shit for huge crits. He would level up into a class that focuses on melee damage, like Barbarian in D&D or the Marauders from FFXIV or whatever you want to call it. Or he decide Don Quixote had the right idea and puts on heavy plate and steals attains a magic horse and decides that being taller than everyone is cool and stays on it 24/7. But since he's taller and needs to control his horse, he can't swing his great axe anymore. Oh well, a lance is cool to, kebabs are always good. Voila, you have a D&D Cavalier or something.
B takes on a more defensive stance. Gets a fuck huge shield and some heavy armor, cause if they can't see his flesh they can't hurt it. Probably feels that having a puny sword looks weird and is hard to swing with a big shield, a so clearly he should get a fuck-huge flail or something to complement the ridiculous space marine pauldrons he has. Now you have your Meatsh-I mean Tank. Maybe he finds Crystal Dragon Jesus or something and starts dabbling in religion. Learn to recite some litany against constipation and use to buff himself, or, God-forbid, his allies. Now you have a Paladin or some other intolerant zealot.
huh, I swear I was more coherent when I was typing that.
