Leveling System Proposal

Hello there !

My name is Alex, I am a software engineer and would like to propose a new leveling system based on a probabilistic distribution.

This would have numerous benefits and can solve problems that exist or appear in the future, like:

1. Too many high leveled players "fighting" for weapons that are limited to 1/2 players. This is how the binding issue appeared.
2. Better control across all the weapons, not just Cerberus, Gungnir or Heart Rod. If just increasing the level for the mentioned weapons, the players will hunt those levels only to acquire them (by paying for levels usually)
3. Better balancing the game by introducing weapons to the groups where most people struggle to level up, and by restricting where there are too many people in a certain group.
4. More profits to the server. If you have a model, you can adjust you pricing based on tiers. For example, if you want to buy 10 levels, the pricing should be different if you are lvl 30 vs lvl 190. The model will tell you the percentage of players in each level group.

As I don't know what kind of distribution the levels of the players follow, I made a small script for 27.000 players with random levels that follow an inverse Gamma Distribution from 1-200. This is the distribution that the server should follow such that it will encourage low-level players to level, and discourage high-lvl players to have access to a lot of overpowered weapons.

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For example, let's say you want only 10% of the active players to have access to Gungnir. If we ignore the inactive players, there are around 1000 active players per week/month higher than lvl 20 (not interested in redirected players), 10% of 1000 is 100. Top 100 players will have access to Gungnir, the level of the 100th player should be the level where Gungnir should stay.

A big disadvantage of not implementing such a system, is that some people will buy the levels, get really easy to levels where most of the overpowered weapons are, and destroy the game for the unexperienced players. In the future there will be bigger differences between "unexperienced low-level players" vs "experienced high-lvl players", where the latter group would completely obliterate the first group as zm or as human.

The high lvl players are hard to infect and kill easily other zombies, which is okay, but also don't allow for low-level players to gather exp needed to level up. The low-level players get obliterated in the first 2-3 seconds as zm, and they cannot defend themselves properly such that they have kills to level up faster enough to levels where there are some decent weapons.

This way the engagement of the server would increase and motivate all players to level up

Would like to hear your opinions

Hi Cameron !

That is not the problem, of reaching or being a "high level". The problem is that you have 5-10 players on the sever and all of them are entitled to have Cerberus / Gungnir / other OP weapons, but can't. Or the level is set too low for access to such weapons, and produce great imbalance in the gameplay. You also proved my point that you can reach a certain level way too easy, where you can have access to pretty good weapons. You have almost 100 hours on the server and level 127.

The leveling system is supposed to follow the same distribution, by requiring more exp to evolve, but the problem is with the weapon level assignment, not necessarily the level-up system which works great in my opinion.