MMORPGs - Skill Vs. Time: which is better?

I disagree. A Lower maxed level means more time spent on the actual story developement and questing and less time spent on the gay ol' Final Fantasy Style Grind. 'I'm not quite strong enough to beat this boss, I'm going to hunt Malboro to make level up and become stronger to progress in the story.'

Longer isn't better.
Longer = More wasted time for the same thrills.

For anyone who's ever played Ragnarok Online, you know this;
Reaching lvl 99 on the iRO//kRO legit server 1x rates takes FOREVER.
Rebirth takes FOREVER. Hitting 99 again as a transcendant class takes FOREVER.

Those strategies of giving a player the better BANG for their buck don't work for everyone, me I'm impatient, I work fulltime, I hate playing by myself and try not to for longer than maybe 20 minutes. (EVEN in GW.)

I disagree.
Experience=skill.
But Experience not forcely = time.
If you grind say, farming grawls all day in Southern Shiverpeaks, you won't become better at the game. And it's true in PvP, gaining 9 mil balth faction in RA won't make you good at, say HB or GvG.
To gain experience (player's experience, that is), you need to experiment, test, practice of course, but to evolve constantly. If you stay farming grawls all day, you actually spend time in the game, but nowhere gain any player experience.
I prefer games rewarding Skill because I lack of Time. That's why I bought GW. But GW is becoming less and less grind-free.

I'm going to disagree with the "skill=time" folks.

If we all had the same ability, sure; but realistically people have different maximum skill levels, and learn at different rates. As well, time spent learning in one environment isn't the same as in another; one could for example become asymptotic playing withh one's current guild/friends etc, but begin learning agin by moving on to a group from who one can still learn; likewise, a group may be far above a player, and the player is unable to learn from them since the lessons they could impart are not accessible to someone of that skill level.

The equation for each person will vary, but will (under ideal circumstances) be of the form base skill+(rate of learning)(some function of time) approaching some limit for each person, based on their reflexes, ability to think in varying situations, tendency to panic etc.

As to which I prefer in a game, the skill based or time based approach, I'll wholeheartedly endorse SKILL.

As someone who came to GW from CS and DoD (FPS games) I have no patience for the concept that someone should do well because of time spent. Yes, even in pure FPS games there is a correlation between time spent and skill, but I've seen naturally talented folks and people who just never seemed to learn.

Generally, RPGs (and MMORPGs) have endorsed the gear-oriented/time spent approach. This is a solid choice for them for several reasons:

1) since the vast majority of these games are pay-to-play, it makes for money for them.
2) it panders to the lowest common denominator. No matter if you have crap reflexes, can't think your way out of an intellectual wet paper bag or are otherwise clueless - you too can be powerful and lord it over folks, simply by having played more.
3) since in MMORPGs the number of people online at any time determines the fullness of the world; encouraging folks to spend large amounts of time online then helps their world directly.

In short, I see no advantage save for developers in the "time has value" world. The skill>time approach is sensible, and still results in most cases with a correlation of skill and time spent.

I think many of the posters would actually say that Aptitude = Time rather than skill. Aptitude is learning to play the game and that happens over time.
Skill is being able to take the exact same char with the same skills as another player and accomplish something they can't or do it faster.

As for which is better or preffered? Everyone will answer a little bit diferently. I myself like both depending on my mood. When I log on to GW sometimes I want to just kill stuff and have fun, at other times I'm looking to be a little more competitive and want a challange equal to myself.

I can remeber the very start of GW, when it took the average casual player 3months+ to complete the storyline. I used to love taking my lvl 15 war back to Great North Wall and helping out a guildie that came to post-searing at to low a lvl, or at lvl 18 going back and doing Frost Gate just for some revenge on those blasted vamp dwarfs. Ascending was a rush and I so wanted a title to proclaim I had achieved this note worthy status.

It still is the case in some ways that time spent playing GW does give you a significant advantage over new players. Somebody that just bought the game will not have the easy access to all the skills weve unlocked and capped over the last 2+years. They won't know off by heart what monsters they need to face on every map or what skill totaly owns a certain boss.

In a way I really envy the new players as they get to explore and learn things, but at the same time I feel sad because it too easy to look up on wiki what builds to use or where to go or they join a PUG with a vet in it who tells them everything they would have learned before they get a chance to learn it.

In a long almost forgoten dream I can recall a point almost a month into GW when I was franticly searching for a place called Yaks Bend to purchase the elusive Expert Salvage Kit needed for crafting Ascalon Armor

The day GW goes to this sort of system is the day I quit playing. NOT having this is what makes GW so great.

I love having a character on the same level as everyone else, even though I can only play a few days per week. People that play more are more experienced and (probably) more skillful than me, which is cool.

Just to put it into perspective...LEGENDARY games like Magic the Gathering reward skill. Guild Wars is based off the Magic the Gathering style of skill>time played.

There is a distinction between skill and execution, however. Execution/twitch is inherent in Guild Was but not in turn based games like Magic the Gathering. Interrupts are an example of this, akin to FPS headshots.

And learning to get your group of real players to take down each boss in a dungeon is grind?
I think you should take a closer look at "such games".

/agree
One part that makes you advance in PvE another that keeps the balance in PvP.

I'm gonna be one of the many that says "becoming skill takes time", so there's always going to be time involved.

I will say that games that take no thought and just time (i.e. auto-attack, level up, win!) are pretty boring, though. I don't know a whole lot of those kinds of games anymore, however, so I think we're safe.

Levels don't mean much in Final Fantasy unless you want to just overpower your enemies. It is all about having the right spells. Look around the internet a bit and you will see that people have contests to see who can beat a certain game at the lowest level.

with more time, people will become more skilled. however, the RATE of which a player improves can vary greatly from person to person. sometimes a player's initial skillset that he brings to the game can greatly affect how fast (or slow) that player improves.

take for example, the guilds [Te] and [WM]. [Te] consisted mostly of FPS players, while [WM] consisted mostly of RTS players. it just so happens that high level gvg greatly favours those who have either A: really fast reaction speeds, and/or B: really good micromanagement skills. for those players, their prior skillset allowed them to become good at the game much, much faster than most of the playerbase.

of course, there are still those who have played since beta, and still slogging through pve with their mending wammos and absolutely insists that mending and healing breeze are the best skills in the game.

i guess the point to take here is: time played = experience, but experience does not always equal skill and in game performance. therefore, time played != skill.

I think it comes down to what you want to get out of a game.

GW does have a major roleplaying deficiency - your character just never gets very strong. Even at the highest level in the game, with maxed equipment, most of the monsters in the game are strictly stronger than you, even on a one-on-one basis. Many monsters are much stronger than you (don't you wish you could hit for 400 damage with a normal attack?).

Contrast that with, for example, Diablo 2. In D2, characters with the best gear and some stat/skill planning were essentially gods - you could easily go months without ever dying, and slaughter everything on the highest difficulties with relatively minimal effort. There's a lot of mindless fun to be had from this, as well as the nice feeling of being, well, very powerful.

Which one is more appropriate depends on what the player wants from the game. GW-style games are more appropriate for people who like the feeling they get from improving at something. D2/grind-style games are more appropriate for people who just want to sit down and have fun (read: be powerful).

One interesting thing to point out is that both games are likely to get old within the same approximate timeframe - but obviously for different reasons.

I meant like, doing a dungeon 100 times to get your uber leet sword drop from the boss at the end in order to progress (or in this case *get better*) is grind....

If it takes you a long time to figure out how to beat pre determined A.I... well.. I don't know what to say to that, sorry.

This is all my opinion.

I think both systems appeal to different types of people and every player should know the pros and cons of both.

A skill based system offers immediate rewards as a player is able to accomplish more in short sessions. The rewards may not make your character more powerful, but it's the thrill of successfully making it through challenging content that is the bulk of the fun.
However it requires a player to put themself into the proper frame of mind to figure out how to use their skills more effectively in order to accomplish such difficult tasks. If you aren't in that frame of mind, or not the type of player who cares about playing that way, challenges in the game can be quite frustrating and gameplay not as much fun.
Certain tactics will be found that can more easily get through content, lessening the rewarding feeling of accomplishment. Also the lack luster physical rewards given after each accomplishment often don't offer much incentive to invest much time with a particular character. Your characters don't noticeably become more powerful the more you play. Character's power potential is instead tied to the player simply becoming better at playing the game.

A time->power based system's enjoyment mostly comes from anticipation and physical reward. The gameplay is usually much easier and can often be considered trivial. It's intended to be doable with out too much emphasis in being as effective as possible in skill use.
However it's the anticipation of being rewarded in physical ways that make your character stronger which fuel the enjoyment of playing. It's much easier to feel rewarded in this system, if you have the time to invest, as the rewards are quite noticeable as your character grows more in power and can more easily breeze through content found earlier in the game.
Unfortunately it requires quite a bit of time to get things done. Short sessions usually see little gain. Also as characters grow stronger in power, content can become more trivial and the enjoyment becomes more and more dependent on more powerful rewards, which leads to what is called 'power creep'. There becomes more and more of a disparity in content as it scales to characters' power levels.
Starting a new character is far less fun as you are forced to replay all the old content in order to become powerful enough to see newer content. Longtime players eventually start complaining that there is not enough endgame content for their oldest, most powerful characters.
I've seen this happen alot in WoW and EQ2.

Honestly, I hate both systems.
But I hate the skill-based system less and I feel using the skill-based system as a base a new system could be developed that ensures that players will not only enjoy the thrill of getting through difficult tasks without the need to meticulously study skills' effects, but also offer incentive to continue playing with one character by offering fun rewards, that don't necessarily offer more power to a player, but instead offer more creative and interesting options.

The ironic part of the "skill/time" equation in GW is that not all time invested is created equal.

Essentially, the convertibility of time investment to skill has a lot to do with how much time a player has dedicated very recently, and how much time has been dedicated to the present meta. If you want to play at the highest levels, you have to play for ridiculous quantities of time (that I simply don't have) on an incredibly regular basis.

Further, large time investments in playing during a prior meta can actually be counterproductive. Unless I play a LOT, I fail at monking these days. Why? My instincts are all related to outmoded builds - off-heal/power heal (what most people probably thought of as WoH) in HA and boon prot in GvG/TA/RA. If I want to play well, I have to play enough to retrain those instincts. Given sufficient time away from monking, my instincts will revert to the baseline play styles - and that isn't a good thing. Energy gets used inefficiently, and, well, stuff eventually dies and I start swearing.

A significant part of the reason a lot of the top players left, IMO, is that the changes in the meta just became too rapid and uncomfortable for the top players of the day to keep up with.

I just finished posting my thoughts about skill updates in another topic.
I love the skill updates as I love the incentive it offers to experiment with different skills to find new effective builds to replace my old nerfed ones. But I recognize how incredibly frustrating it can be for some people and it's something I worry about. How do they do skill updates to make everyone happy?
I'm gonna go out for coffee and think about it some. lol

Nobody has mentioned youth as a factor.

The young have faster reaction times, nimbler fingers and all had a computer in their cradles. This contributes to what you call "skill". Also, the young have a capacity for grind that is unexcelled when they perceive a reward at the end of it. I doubt there are many players over 30 with a maxed out title.

Having said that, not everyone is a game player. There are a lot of youngsters playing games, because that's what their friends are doing, but in a couple of years time they'll grow up, get girlfriends, hang around in bars, get jobs and games will fall by the wayside. These are the kids who laugh at the concept of someone over 30 even playing GW, because they known inside they'll never get there. They may acquire a modicum of skill, or none at all, and they make up for it by calling people n00b.

The games players, on the other hand, are games players for life. The bug has bitten. The games will change, the skills will change, but they'll be in there, trying it out, finding out to best it. These are the players who will have, at the very least, a modicum of skills. They strategise, they analyse their mistakes and look for ways to solve in-game problems.

The measures for skill vary, of course. There was a young guy in our guild one day, playing on his dad's account, who told us he was a very skilled and experienced player because all his characters had black armor.

If playing games is really important to you, a life and death matter that you are the best there can be, then a thing called talent comes into it. But all the talent in the world doesn't help unless you actually train. Play. Learn from those who have gone before you.

You may like to read a book called "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. This is a wonderful book on youth and games playing, though if you move on to the subsequent books you will discover that nobody could foresee the consequences.

Umm. Lots do. My guild is all mature players, many of us over 30 - I have 17 maxed titles at the moment, am over 30, have three children and work full time, and I only play when the kids are in bed - so it's quite doable, without even being insane and playing all the time - 2 hours at night once the kids are all tucked in is plenty of time.

Skill > Time. But the game mechanics should be such that by spending time practicing the game increases your skill.

Skill based is better. PvE isn't better when its rewards are based off the amount of time you spend in the game rather than the skill you have at playing the game.

A game that is based off of skill is more open. I can go and do anything I want at anytime. I don't have to do something I don't want to do in order to be able to do what I want, or be restricted in areas I don't want to play in instead of the areas I want to play in. A skill based game rewards real improvement rather than false ones, which makes a skill based game more rewarding.

Sometimes people don't want to really improve their skills in a game and that makes sense. It's hard and requires focus, patience, and dedication to get more skilled at something and sometimes you just want some relaxing fun. Time based games allow that, you still get satisfaction from improvement but instead of you improving its a character improving while you just brainlessly kick back and kill things. This something I think is more suited for an offline game because they don't have the inherent competition that an online game has which leads to several problems because competition ,even in a co-op setting, is meaningless if its just a game of who has more time.

I think most people want both at different times. I know I do. They are somewhat mutually exclusive though, to reward time is to not reward skill alone and vice versa, but it still works on a continuum of time reward vs skill reward. To ignore the fact that in a skill based game with time rewarded mechanics the time rewarded mechanics are less satisfying than a time based game (Guild Wars for example rewards cosmetic upgrades and titles for time but they're less satisfying then getting actual stat upgrades from time spent) this works the other way too. I think a skill based game with some time based mechanics ( in particular time based mechanics that don't effect the strength of a character) address both better than a game with time based rewards that at times rewards skill.

In someways I think it's best to try and make games that focus on either or, so that when you want that certain experience whether it be time or skill based you can play that. Unfortunately there aren't many good choices for the skill based enthusiast ( the kind of game I want to play most of the time and I've only found Guild Wars that really does it at all) when it comes to MMO's. Hopefully Guild Wars 2 will drop the level mechanic so we have more.

Skill

Skill can be learnt over time, but only through practice, however Time Spent should not be an indicator if its based on gear, only as an indication of your rising skill level