>A number of MUDs offer classless/levelless systems.
>Generally, it shifts the focus more heavily to the skill
>system, which is usually open-ended, and designed to reward
>unlimited time investment.

And botting to the point of insanity. The bot I had that spammed skills all day and all night for one of these types of muds was ridiculous. I managed to rack up like 500 hours on a character in about a month. These sorts of places are also don't (can't?) have age death, so even after all of that I was still thousands of hours behind the other people.

>On the examples I've seen, they
>openly discouraged PK, but if it did happen there's no
>question that an experienced character could completely paste
>a newbie. ("Classless" also usually means "All characters
>fight the same way", but that's another digression.)

The one I played had pk, and it got considerably LESS interesting the more skilled the characters were. 2 newbs could duke it out for hours without even being capable of hurting each other. 2 demi-gods (that denoted a certain skill level in base skills) would have fights that didn't finish the first round. It was a stupid system.

>If you want to have all characters equal then it will not
>be an RPG but a different sort of a game. (Chess, Quake,
>Starcraft, Warcraft 3)
>
>Right, which is why we don't want to move 90% of the way in
>that direction.
>
>valguarnera@carrionfields.com