I think experience in general is a good thing. People like to be recognized for all of the work/time they put into the site in some (semi) tangible way. However, experience has a bad side. People get too tied up accumulating points. The following thought may have been discussed before, but I couldn't find it.

The role playing game Amber is completely diceless and has an interesting experience and attributes system. Basically players do not know exacly what their attributes are or when they gain experience, only the GM knows. All the players know is where they rank with regard to the other players and to the well known NPCs.

How does this apply to PM? Well if we hide the exact experience that a given monk has and simply state their rank it might alleviate some of the excessive weight that people put on gaining experience. We would not see indication of when exactly we gained experience (perhaps there should be some general indication of what has gone on over the last day so that people are not completely lost, just a general indication of good or bad).

It might also be interesting to remove the explicit point total from posts and only show rough textual descriptions depending on how many points they have on the back end.

Thoughts, comments?

-ben

In reply to Hide Experience Numbers? by knobunc

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