Skill progress mechanics should be improved to be more fair and avoid grinding

Since recent patch I found one new annoying thing - Skills are progressing only within a few minutes window after you kill a target.

I find it annoying and time wasting.

If you spend 20 minutes killing a boss (without killing weaker enemy a few mins before), it'll be just waste of time and your skills will not level up.

Also I have no idea how to level up non-combat skills such as moon or sun.

Leveling up with hard enemies and bosses is not productive anymore. This encourages dumb grinding by fighting multiple weak targets.

Now it works like this:

- Kill one easy enemy.
- Spend a few minutes staying and dumbly pressing all your skills on a deck.
- Repeat.


This video shows that Skills XP doesn't progress on the first enemy. It means that killing the first enemy is always waste of time.



My suggestion how to improve leveling mechanics:

1. Keep adding very small amounts of progress to skills used during fighting enemy even without killing it. The toughest is enemy, the more progress is gained.
2. Divide by two gained progress of said above skills (#1) if player is killed in combat.
3. Multiply progress of all the said above skills (#1) if enemy is killed and the player remains alive.
4. Non-damaging deck skills (heal, modifiers) must progress is they are used while there are aggroed enemies around.
5. Non-combat skills (vanish, night vision, lighting) must continue leveling outside of combat, but amount of progress becomes lesser and lesser if they are used frequently - to discourage dumb grinding or using of macros.

 

You are working as designed oyu have to HAVE points in your experience pool, This is by design, sadly most of us started with ALOT of points in our pools from R20 and we don't have to gaine EXP to have points to train with.

Did you start with a fresh char or low level in R20?

 

Yes, I continued from previous release. My char's level was about 30 in R20, but for some reason all my progress in R21 were spent on melee skills which I never used. So I just level all needed skills from zero.

 

I'm currently learning that if I don't kill things then I can't progress.

So there's a bunch of stuff in Desolis. I'd like to be able to kill these things I suppose. But would would be even better is if I could not kill them and still learn from it.

 

Exactly, killing something is very difficult at low levels and learning curve becomes too difficult, annoying and time consuming.

I added some suggestions about leveling in my first post.

If somebody has more ideas how to make leveling more fair and exciting, lets discuss it.

 

What makes me the most upset is that I can gain experience by killing, but I can't gain it by not killing (not really). So I'm forced to kill everything which makes me need to be a tank and use the best builds and ignore roleplaying.

Meanwhile, I can't train non-killing skills WITHOUT killing things. Which when you think about it defeats the purpose of USING non-killing skills. It's like double taxation for not killing things.

I think if my Torch and lose durability over time...so too can I gain experience over time.

I would love to play a game where I don't have to play EQ/WoW to gain levels. I want to pick skills and learn to be good with them. Not stand around killing stuff for the sake of it. If I want competition (which I do) then I'll play against another player (which I would if I wasn't always 30 levels lower than they are). I don't understand why arbitrary progression is so important to some people.

 

Sorry just like UO in the early days you HAD to go out and find a Rabbit, Kill it, Skin it, sell stuff for gold or resources, LOVE IT.

Sadley people are already getting in the mindset that I will be able to go out and be a MONSTER right off the bat, I hope they stick to their guns and make us PLAY the game

Yes it will take time, yes It might be tedious, some will call it boring, some will call it a grind, :-(

As you get stronger you will find a Wolf, then a Large Wolf, then a Bear. I sincerely HOPE that it will take about a Month (or MORE) of PLAYING to even consider taking on some of the harder creatures. (I know there will be players who just grind away 8 hours a day to gain crazy and become god like, good for them) and already players want this to be balanced sorry if you play 10 hours you will be stronger :-( than those who only play 2 hours a day.

This is where "community" comes in where those that have time "help" those that don't, or they chose to lord it over them (or in PvP just kill the weak because they can)

 

We are talking about different things.

Yes, may be in future devs will add mice and rabbits with hides that give some XP and gold for lowest level chars and that would be wise.

But now if you are newbie and you enters nearby forest, wolves and small spiders kill you with a couple of bites.
Moreover, you can spend a hour trying to kill low level enemy and don't get any XP for spent time because your skills doesn't progress until you kill a enemy, but you cannot kill a enemy until you train some skills, it's dead loop and this is not OK.

I hope SotA is not a hardcore RPG for nolifers who are ready to spend a month playing 16 hours a day just to get to the next level.

 

Its monsters that gives you a dot i.e spiders that causes me most problems

 

100% agree with this. Shoot, I died in UO to a hind...who would have ever thought a small deer would be too much for my mighty warrior?

In the QA build, I stood around and used my pool to level up skills in town to see how it went. With the actual release, I deleted my character and started over to get an idea of how the leveling would work from the beginning. Some skills seem to level quicker than others and some seem to level without any effort at all but I am very pleased with the idea of having to go out and actually fight and use the skills to get the gain related to those skills. Same with crafting...

Yea, tweaking is needed but I am very happy with how things are progressing in the use system.

 

I think it is all a matter of picking your battles. When going in with the new character, I didn't hit the forest right off the bat but the clearing right outside of Owl's Head. Sure enough, I got 3 or 4 spiders which promptly killed me before I could get even one dead. I rezed and came back and worked to get just one, watching until they were either far enough apart or one was facing away from me. At that point I was able to kill it using my single polearm skill (I wasn't using the default blade skills) and after healing managed to get the next. I certainly died more than once in this process but eventually got enough gold to add more skills and armor.

I do think a better starting area, something designated as such, would help. This is something I think I read they were working on or at least planning?

 

@Chris

Here's all I need to make me happy. Show me a visual that I have EXP in the tank. I don't know what this purple stuff is on my character, it's probably a left over animation? But I like it as an indicator that I have exp on my character that can be applied to "something". So if everything else but whatever I want to train is turned off, I know that's where the exp is going. Make sense?

 

If they do this, SOTA will be off line within a year. Modern gamers have choices and if a game developer refuses to respect their player's time by implementing massive grinds, they will quickly find themselves bereft of paying customers.

I understand that some folks absolutely love getting a "kill ten rats" mission, but the mainstream moved away from the "20 hours investment before the game actually starts" mindset years ago, just look at the hue and cry over Diablo 3.

 

Well since u pay up front, staying online really isn't to much a problem, as for the kill ten rats, there are MANY ways to get exp that is the lure, and the MAJOR problem out there now is we all got handed an EASY game in Development and are a lot are going to cry FOUL when the game launches and has to PLAY tehe game :-(

 

First, I HATE the "kill ten rats" quest. No, strike that, I LOATH them.

Not really sure what grind you are running into but going with a new character that I created yesterday, what I have done I wouldn't really consider grinding. I haven't actually done any quests other than the Tour quest but have just ran around harvesting, killing things, crafting, exploring, and just playing the game. This is exactly what I would want in a sandbox game. Yea, I think if you try and get your skills to 100 as quickly as possible then grinding is an option and there will be those who do that. I tend to play a lot (I work full time but have no life outside of work) but do it casually, out to have fun and explore and enjoy things. If I go a day or even a week without fighting a single mob but had a good time, it was worth it.

SOTA and D3 are two completely different games and I would think they would have different target audiences who most likely have different play styles. I am not sure you can really compare the two.

I haven't tried D3 lately but got it when it first came out and hated it. It was a very simplified and dumbed down game. Not sure if it is better now or not but it wasn't for me. I am playing PoE, another ARPG which at least has the complexity of the passive skill tree but it is an equipment grinding game very much in the mindset of most of those types of games. Shoot, most people you listen to in chat or who stream know very little about the lore behind PoE because they are just playing to kill the same mobs over and over to get more and better gear. Yea, they may know a ton about the mechanics and how to min/max a build but lore? Not so much.

SOTA isn't that type of game and never was meant to be. It wasn't meant to be simple and easy and uncomplicated and have a bunch of hand-holding. At least that is what I thought the plan was. It is a full blown sandbox with the fun and flexibility and difficulty that comes along with that type of game. It was meant to be more like old school UO and Ultima, not D3.

Will SOTA have a huge audience like other Blizzard games? I don't think so but then I don't think anyone ever expected it to.

If the problem is that you are not getting experience to add to your pool until you kill something, thus making it slower to level skills because of the lack of experience in your pool, hopefully the new starting zones or new beginner experience will help get people up and running efficiently. Even with that, there will be some who won't have the patience. I know in PoE, there are some who start and don't do any research in their builds and think it is the worse game ever because they came with the D3 mindset. Although it is at least an ARPG, it isn't D3 either.

I guess as the new user content gets in, we can see how things go.

 

No, since you pay up front, keeping the servers online is a huge problem. You need some mix of new characters buying in and existing characters buying premiums or else the money runs out and the servers go down. If SOTA were subscription or *shudder* F2P, I'd understand the "kill 10 rats" missions as you need to convince the player to stay invested so they don't wander off or are will to pay their way "over the river", but in an up front payment, there's really no reason to hide the fun stuff behind a time wall unless you don't have much fun stuff or you are serving the "If I don't have to denude the world of small furry critters, I haven't earned the right to fight goblins" crew.

I've played every release since the hat quests were introduced and a few before. Every "improvement" seems to have increased the amount of busy work needed to achieve the same amount as before the improvement.

 

Easy Mode OFF !
Welcome in Real Game All

 

Just have to comment on this..

This kind of behavior begets itself. You kill an enemy.. your XP pool gets XP.. now if you just sit there and drain that pool before going off to kill the next enemy of course you're going to end up with the situation described. This is your own fault for sitting there draining your XP pool before moving on. Instead.. go kill your next enemy and use those skills you want to train to do it and you won't have this problem since you'd constantly be replenishing your XP pool.

 

Your suggestion won't work, because the next enemy may be just a minute after "leveling mode on" window closed and you will not get any XP from it.
That stupid repetitive grind described by me is the only effective way to level your skills after the last patch. If you play as you suggested, you won't get XP from killed enemies in 70% of times.

This is a couple of examples to help you understand the problem:
1. Once I killed 8 targets around me with area spells and didn't get any XP because they died almost simultaneously and the "leveling window" opened only after their death and then closed in a couple of minutes so I get nothing.
2. Another time I killed one single enemy and there were no more enemies around, so I just stood still and repetitively pressed on skills buttons and got plenty of XP for these perks.

The purpose of this thread is to fix leveling mechanics in order to reward player for spent time without the need of using dumb exploits described by me.