This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at the future of expansions after recent interviews.

In addition to all of these dilemmas or considerations that need to be made with an actual content, there are also some considerations in terms of the content introduced with it.

Skills and traits will undoubtedly be expanded to include new abilities. The question arises of how  players will acquire these new abilities. The easiest approach would be to just throw them in with the other skills and traits in terms of acquisition. So new utility and elite skills would be divided among appropriate tiers where they are unlocked with the same number of skill points. New major traits would just be selectable like any other major trait currently in the game.

During the earlier Beta Weekend Events, the utility and elite skills didn’t have a tiered system. Each skill was assigned an almost random number of skill points. This had two problems: the choice of utility skill would be overwhelming faced with the possibility of every utility skill available and it led to players saving up for the most expensive skills to unlock first (under assumptions that they were more powerful and therefore better than cheaper skills).

An expansion could reintroduce this problem. If we assume, just for this example, that the total number of utility skills is doubled with an expansion, each of those tiers now has an overwhelming number of skills when they are first unlocked. This wouldn’t be a problem for veteran players, but new players would be faced with that same issue that players in beta saw.

So how could you fix this?

Well you could not put any new skills in the first tier, that way new players still get the small selection of skills currently available. This, however, would still create the problem once the second tier is unlocked and potentially more so since more skills might be redistributed into the higher tiers if the number of added skills remained constant.

Another idea is to keep them in tiers but make newer skills cost more. So vanilla utility skills cost 1, 3 and 6 skill points each tier and expansion skills might cost 2, 4 and 7 skills but remain in the same tiers as the vanilla (so 2 skill point skills are bundled with the current 1 skill point skills). This would reintroduce the second problem from beta as players would potentially invest in the more expensive skills first even though they are not necessarily more powerful.

Giving a color differentiation, such as expansion skills having a gold border, would help to-- well it just would differentiate them but not solve the problem.

Something that could be implemented to help counter this is, creating a new skill tier system that stacks vertically on top of the current tree. At level 5 players unlock the first utility skill slot at which point they may progress freely up the utility skill tiers. It doesn’t require additional levels to move up tiers, just that 5 skills are unlocked in the previous tier. The idea is that there would be another set of three tiers that are not available until the players reach a higher level.

At level 5, 10 and 20 players unlock each of the three utility skill slots. At 30 the elite skill slot is unlocked and at 40 and 60 the last two trait tiers may be unlocked. This new tier system could then be unlocked at level 50, keeping the system unlocking progression more consistent across the levels in the game with something being unlocked every 10 levels.

This new utility tree could then function exactly like the current one. The first tier skills cost one skill point each and buying five will unlock the next tier in the tree. With this veterans wouldn’t notice anything different than if skills were just thrown into the game, with the exception of the tiers not being unlocked which could negate being overwhelmed by all the new skills assuming players hadn’t stockpiled skill points earlier. What this would do is prevent new players from being blindsided by the now immense number of skills available to them at lower levels.

This wouldn’t necessarily mean that every expansion would need to have a new tier added. After this second tier is added skills could be sprinkled between the two sets and, because these new tiers require a higher level to unlock, the need to keep things from being too overwhelming would be reduced.

Additional Considerations -->