Guild Wars 2

What do people think about this as a model for skill balancing/avoidance of stagnation:

Every skill has an expiration date of, say, either Jan 1, May 1, or Sept 1.
On those dates, those skills no longer exist in the game and new skills are introduced, replacing them (of course some old fun/popular skills can always be brought back at a later date).

Advantages:

• keeps the game fresh.
• don’t need to balance as much: if a skill is OP or is no good, it only exists for a few months. If it’s way too game-breakingly-OP, expire it prematurely; that profession would be short one skill, but only for a few months (this should be used very very sparingly).
• devs can be more bold in introducing and trying new mechanics because they can only hurt the game for a few months. If the mechanics turn out to be good, they can always be brought back at a later time.
• As skills are introduced in large batches, they can all follow a single theme or mechanic — perhaps relating to the current Living Story. This gives some cohesiveness.
• no more tears from nerfed skills: people expect skills to expire. They expect their favorite builds to die every few months and look forward to developing new builds.

This is pretty much exactly the model that the card game Magic: the Gathering (very successfully) follows and I feel would be much better than the current model of band-aid skill changes every few months.

Thoughts?

what you have written here is MTG type II (standard) model
dont forget about modern, legacy and vintage

But I am sure it woudnt work in character, skill based, non colectible MMORPG

Main issue: bugs. Some skills have been properly fixed severals months after release, so we cannot expect skill rotation working fine.

By the way, I would like some kind of skill hunting (as in GW1) and better racial skills ^^

I am definitely not convinced.

If ever, this system should be limited to a few extra skills and not affect the basic skillset. Anything else would require an insane amount of work and would still not yield an even remotely balanced build. (I don’t think trading card games were ever aiming for a good balance?) Plus, I don’t like the idea of working on my armor every X days, simply because my old one is near to useless with the new skills.

M: TG has the advantage that if you just have some old cards you can keep playing with them. If you play the game half a dozen times a year, they’ll still be fresh.

A few months isn’t long enough for the casual player to get a proper grip on the skill set. And it would shatter any illusion of reality that might remain after the (necessary and unavoidable) gamification of the notional environment.

Cerol Brisingr.1893:

I am definitely not convinced.

If ever, this system should be limited to a few extra skills and not affect the basic skillset. Anything else would require an insane amount of work and would still not yield an even remotely balanced build. (I don’t think trading card games were ever aiming for a good balance?) Plus, I don’t like the idea of working on my armor every X days, simply because my old one is near to useless with the new skills.

it’s only 1/3 of all skills every 4 months so I don’t feel it would be so devastating to people’s builds that they would need to get new armor sets every 4 months.

And there are very few skills in this game. Given an overarching theme or a couple new mechanics, I think i’d be easier to create new skills based on the theme or mechanics.

Cassius.4831:

Main issue: bugs. Some skills have been properly fixed severals months after release, so we cannot expect skill rotation working fine.

By the way, I would like some kind of skill hunting (as in GW1) and better racial skills ^^

Each skill actually would be in the game for a year so there’s some time to fix bugs. (of course, the fact it takes this long to fix bugs is ridiculous!)

womble.2153:

M: TG has the advantage that if you just have some old cards you can keep playing with them. If you play the game half a dozen times a year, they’ll still be fresh.

A few months isn’t long enough for the casual player to get a proper grip on the skill set. And it would shatter any illusion of reality that might remain after the (necessary and unavoidable) gamification of the notional environment.

Actually, each skill is in game for one year so there is some time to get used to the skills!

kitten .. banished to Suggestions where the thread will never be seen again

Applying this to the entire game would be absurd, but adding an area like Codex Arena in GW1 would be lush. Codex was a lot of fun.