Controllable vs uncontrollable player stats

[shoespeak]

Hello everyone,

This is something I have been thinking of  lot in the past few weeks.  Let me explain why.  I have been playing this MMO for a while now, and recently in the community there has been a lot of problems with high level players "re-rolling" their characters; that is, starting a completely new character because their current one has low stats. Now, the way that this game works is that there are a number of different stats characters have (speed, strength, attack, etc.) Every time a character gains a level, they have a chance to gain some stat points in one or more stats. How many and how often are determined randomly, but there is a certain distribution based on hidden numbers when the character starts.

If anybody remembers playing the old Pokemon games, they had a similar game mechanic in those games (I think they were called EV points.) This mechanic is nice because it makes sure that all characters are different, even among classes. The problem is that after a lot of time an levels, your character would be weaker or stronger then others. In the MMO I play, this is what was causing high levels to re-roll, (or just quit) becuase they were finding out after months of playing that their character was pretty weak at high levels.

Now, contrast this to those type of games where characters have a choice in determining their stats, either by training just specific ones or by manually distributing stat points when they gain a level. This method allows players to determine exactly the type of character they want and to make specific builds. This can be fun for some players (those who have experience with the game) but can be overwhelming or daunting to new players (or those that just don't care.) The main problems that I see with this method is that its just kind of boring, from a developer perspective. It is a lot more fun when players stats are determined by the choices they make.

Anyway I'm just wondering what other people's thoughts are on stat distribution. Do you guys use a system where players are in control of their stats? Is it boring? Or are stats determined randomly?

Also, one idea I have been trying to flesh out is combining both of these systems. For example, have two tiers of stats; one set can be used to determine attack/defense values (eg train your 'sword mastery' skill, do more damage with swords) an the other set of stats can be used to determine the types of quests/NPC interaction (make a lot of violent choices, your quests are more "kill X mobs" then "do X for NPC")

Thanks for reading 

[Chris]

It is not about controllable vs uncontollable, but fixed amount vs random amount.

Random is unacceptable. It does not matter if the player can decide where the stats go or if the program decide where these go. But everyone have to get the same amount. And everyone should have exactly the same freedom of distributing the stats like other players.

If you make "a random stat is increased by 5 points per level" then obviously players will be quitting because lucky barbarians will get all the rolls add to strength while unlucky barbarians will get the rolls add to intelligence which will completely destroy their character.

Random stats distribution works in single player games only and in more hardcore games (like roguelikes) and games that are short (so you don't care if the game destroyed you without your fault).

[dsheroh]

I tend to like "improve with practice"-type skill gain systems.  As you've categorized them, this would fall under "controllable", since you choose what you want to do and, whatever you do, that's what you get better at.  Your Barbarian will go up in Strength if he runs around swinging his axe at everything in sight, or he'll go up in Intelligence if he sits around playing chess all day.

Yes, this is exploitable, as the world discovered when Ultima Online came out and people started standing in fields swinging their swords thousands of times so that they could improve their Sword skill by "using" it in the safest and most trivial way possible, but I find it to be better than most of the other options overall and there are ways around the problems.  (e.g., "If swinging your sword doesn't result in making a to-hit roll against a non-trivial opponent, you gain no Sword skill.")

[bbgames]

One system that I've seen occasionally and seems to handle this very well is a "auto-distribute or assign" setup. You get the points put into your skill point pool when you level up, and then you can either pick "auto-assign" to have the game put them where it thinks they should go, or you can click "assign manually" to distribute them how you like.

In these setups, it's important to be able to respec your character - but it gets around the issue of lucky/unlucky barbarians, instead separating them into default vs. customized.