Player Skills

[Mega]

Currently, all players keep the same abilities for the duration of the game. I propose a leveling system(Freelancer had a level system which really did nothing at all) that includes special skills that improve as the player increases in level. Skills like bartering(lower prices on items), field-repair(better use of nanobots), piloting skill(slightly better ship handling), etc.

Things like these make the game more dynamic especially when you decide to start a new game with a different skill set.

[Ingar]

I already reserved a variable for the player level, if you do list_players you will see everyone has level 1.
Besides that it doesn't do anything. We could, for example, limit ships to certain levels.

Before I do anything with player levels, it would be best to define a level scale: level 1 up to 60 seems approriate,
server admins would be level 65.

[Karvajalka]

A bunch of skills do seem like a kind of nice idea. At least I enjoy the feeling of *improving* over time and having more difference between players with skills supporting their individual playstyles. Still I do think that the effect from skills should be mostly kept quite small, but still slightly noticeable. At least the skills concerning ship handling.

Bartering seems like a nice idea, skills involving black market/counterfeit goods could be nice too ( lower prices there, a slightly better ability to hide them from police/equivalent ).

Some other ideas:
hacking: making the ship ai more robust, improving the targetting of the turrets and other automated stuff by few percents
engineering: being able to rig the ship to fit yourself, squeezing some extra power from the ship in exchange for reliability, skill affecting the ratio
leadership: how many ships you can have under your control

[Thorn]

Personally, I don't feel that player skills should take precedent as a main gameplay element, but like others have said the effects should only slightly be noticeable. The best balance here is that the effects are big enough for people to pay attention to and create characters of different gameplay styles, yet they don't alter the main gameplay mechanics at all.

Most of the already stated skills I think would work, apart from leadership, I don't think a user should be physically capped on how many ships he can control based on a secondary stat.