|  |
The following is based on personal experience gathered while playing for about 3 months in early 2005, updated to include rules changes made around the beginning of 2006.
Experience levels govern various statistics of your character, like health and mana, and the efficacy of actions you take. Unlike some game systems, levels do not directly advance your skills, either in number of skill areas known, or how advanced you are in a skill.
Skills are of two types with respect to what gaining skill levels do:
A character advances in skill level by using lessons. The number of lessons it takes to advance between levels for General and Guild skills varies according to the following table:
| |
For Mini-skills, divide each level above by 2.5, meaning that it is much easier to advance in these.
There are a few ways to obtain lessons:
IRE sometimes runs credit sales, where you will be given 10%-20% extra credits on your purchase.
| Level | Credits |
|---|---|
| 10 | 5 |
| 15 | 5 |
| 20 | 5 |
| 25 | 5 |
| 30 | 10 |
| 35 | 10 |
| 40 | 10 |
| 45 | 10 |
| 50 | 10 |
| 55 | 10 |
| 60 | 10 |
| 70 | 10 |
To facilitate these transactions, there is an in-game credit market that players can use. Sellers specify how many credits they are selling, and for what price. Buyers can view this list sorted by price.
While prices fluctuate, I have generally seen around 200-300 credits for sale at any one time, at prices between 3000-3500 gold/credit.
Every 4 ranking points you get, you rise one rank, getting 100 credits for the first, 200 for the second, etc. up to rank 7. (At least that's how I read it, though I suppose maybe you only get 100 credits/rank and the table is showing a cumulative count.)
Obviously, one can't count on winning competitions, but if one has the talent, this can be lucrative. Looking over the recent history, there are a number of repeat winners.
It's pretty clear this will not be sufficient if you wish to be competitive with other characters at your level. Also, the above assumes that you have reached experience level 100. It is likely that you will want these skill levels long before you reach that high. At level 50, you would have only 845 lessons (63% of the total at level 100). But at level 25, you would have only 190 lessons, or 14%.
If we were to purchase these credits, we could buy 500 credits for $169.
Or perhaps if you were a budding Rembrandt, you could hope to win an Artisanal, be runner up once, and 2 merit awards.
On the other hand, if you wanted to accumulate gold in the game, you could get the requisite credits by accumulating 1.6 million gold.
Buying another 400 credits would cost $135 (there's no price break in buying 500), or 1.3 million gold in the game, or a few more places in the artisanals.
The 3 remaining skills would take another 5301 lessons, and the 7 mini-skills would only take 4948, for a total of 10,249 lessons. Since we're now out of the bonus, this will take about 1708 credits.
If these are to be purchased, one could buy 2000 credits for $580, or 1500+200 credits for $512. Even though you pay for 300 credits more than you need with the first option, it is cheaper per credit, and you could always use the extras to purchase an artifact, or sell to other players for gold.
Buying these using gold would take 5.55 million.
If you go the gold option, I imagine the way to evaluate it would be in hours required. If you could accrue 10,000 gold/hour, the above could be done in 850 hours. I can't estimate this, as I hate grinding and never tried. I think by "ratting", I managed about half that rate, but I can't claim that I really knew how to make money in-game. So, I tried to be generous, but I have no idea if I was generous enough.
I cannot estimate how many credits you could obtain via winning contests, building, or coding. I know for myself that I could never win an Artisanal, but if you are artistic, you might find it possible to fund a majority of your costs in that way. Likewise, if you are a good writer, you might be able to accrue credits by building areas, or if you are a programmer, by coding. However, both of these require you to be effectively hired by IRE.
Another point is that there are really two styles of combat, depending on whether you are fighting an NPC (MOB) in player vs. environment (PvE) play, or a player (PvP). Due, as the game rightly says, to the complexity of the abilities that characters have, the PvE game has been mostly pared down such that the only abilities you can use on an NPC MOB are the ones that just cause damage. Otherwise, the NPCs would probably react rather unintelligently to the special attacks unless a great deal of artificial intelligence (AI) was written for them.
Therefore, if you don't want to participate in PvP, you will find that many skills are partially, but not completely useless. However, abilities gained by skill levels are precisely associated with certain levels. You cannot "pick and choose" the ones you want, so if you want a certain one, you will be forced to raise the skill to the required level. However, it is possible that you might be able to avoid maxing certain skills if the top levels don't give you useful abilities for your style of gameplay.
Unfortunately, IRE does not publish official lists of skill abilities, so it is not obvious as to what they are. Luckily, a community site, The Midnight Age, has done so for players.
Another aspect of the game is artifacts, which were touched upon previously. I have not included buying artifacts as part of this analysis because with respect to your character, they are indeed an optional component. However, if you desire to compete heavily in PvP, you might find that the advantages they give a character means that one who does not have the best artifacts might lose more frequently.
For example, Celestine spiked knuckles increase hand-to-hand damage by +35% and cost 1600 cr. This would cost a minimum of $464 (at $0.29/cr in a quantity of 2000), or 5.2 mil gold (at 3250 gold/credit). I can make no first-hand judgment as to these items' effectiveness or value. However, it is something a prospective PvP player should consider factoring into their costs.
You will note that doing that last scenario above, maxing out the last 3 skills and the mini-skills, it will cost more than what you had spent up to date. This is mainly due to the fact that you have lost the bonus and have used up all the freebie credits and lessons. It is a valid question as to whether it is worth it or not. I won't make that value judgment for you. The numbers are here to let you price it out for yourself, as you see fit. And given that I admit to not having gone over level 30, my choices above (like getting maxing 5 of the 8 skills) is based on what I had planned to do, and not based on actually doing it.
I'll also add a comment that perhaps reflects more opinion than I wanted to inject into this analysis. Note that while you get free lessons and credits for leveling, there is no requirement that you have a specific experience level in order to have skills maxed out. So, if you were wealthy, and had no concern for whether it made sense in-character, you could spend the money (and more of it since you don't get the freebies) to max out your skills while you are still quite new, perhaps level 10. I doubt that this is done much, but it does point out how the system is very out-of-character in my view.
In forming my own opinion about the monetary costs of this game, I looked at it compared to playing the average subscription-based graphical MMOG (World of Warcraft, Everquest, Eve, etc.). In these games, you would usually be required to pay $11-15/month (the cheaper rate usually associated with buying 6 months or a year of time at once), and thus $132-180/year. You'll note that the last scenario I outlined above is the equivalent of 4.5-6 years or so of a subscription. These MMOGs have huge operating costs, since the server farm needed is often 10s or even 100s of systems, with high network bandwidth requirements, as well as huge ongoing support and development costs. Thus, the profit margin on that subscription is not large. MUDs, on the other hand, have miniscule operating costs (in comparison, but definitely not zero), including employees. So the profit margin on money collected for a MUD is much higher. On the other hand, MUDs probably have a most a paying base of a 1000 or two, and MMOGs have the luxury of having anywhere from a few thousand, to over 6 million subscribers (see MMOGCHART.COM), a much larger base in which to amortize their costs. But that still makes me question much more on a MUD than I would on a MMOG.