Just to make sure : if you don't die, you never get hit with decay, right?

Decay is a percentage across the board already described by cris with math especially for R42.

Skills set to maintain will eat up that % to maintain them at the level they are.

Skills set to gain will eat up points as they gain and should not actually decay, but my guess is they do.

Skills set to lower will just go down that percentage and with R42 that Is scaled so at 100+ there is a higher percentage than at 80 so it will appear decay will slow as you go lower.

Again if you do not have enough points to offset the decay on a skill set to maintain then it will go down.

Now as for which skill are hit first when the pints hit 0 ??? that is a good question.

But the question asked is actually simple if you do NOT die you skill will not decay and the decay has a MAX % which will sit there forever until you die once.

 

From my understanding, the decay % penalty (whatever you're at depending on time since last death) is applied to ALL skills, regardless of arrows up or down. If it's ' - ' or 'down', the XP is taken from the skill. If it's maintain or up, the XP is instead taken from your pool, assuming you have enough. If you don't, the XP is taken from the skill.

Basically, just set to maintain/up the skills you want to keep and make sure you have enough pooled for your next death and you're good to go.

 

A few days ago in @Chris 's blog, he stated that:

This does not appear in the Release 42 Instructions.
Could Chris or someone who knows please tell me exactly what "Experience in your adventurer pool does NOT decay" means.

 

To answer the op's question. yes your right. I was always under the impression from 3 years ago that decay would not be like this, I thought it was going to be usage thing, if you didnt use a skill for X amount of time it would start to decay. My thinking was it was going to keep people from from having mass amount of Gms/or plus 80 in all schools of magic and melee. I even remember Chris saying good luck keep all them skills at GM. Guess my thinking was wrong. So just dont die.

 

Don't fight mages in the current iteration lol. More than one mage is almost assured death unless you've got A LOT of magic resistance. The bastards buff themselves to have more HP than the melee mobs, better ranged damage than archers, stuns, AND THEY TELEPORT. They're like the perfect mob lol. I wish I was 1/2 as good as they were!

 

Yipp even random encounter mages are a pain in the backside now.
I admit I laughed my ass of when the bandit mages started to face melt me.

 

Here's what you're missing.
You say you're low 90s, and you lose maybe 2-300k xp on death which is 45 minutes of your time that you must spend to re-grind experience you already earned once.. This you feel is not a big deal.

The issue is, as was mentioned, casual players can do math. Someone who got to adventure level 90 in two months because they regularly make 300k xp an hour, yeah, this is a small issue. Someone who has taken 10 months to get to the same lvl, because they play less frequently or earn significantly less xp an hour (for whatever reason, player skill, distaste for hardcore grinding, etc), its a much bigger deal.

Regularly during the week I make <300k in an entire evening, because I'll be mining, or harvesting, or helping out a guildmember (guess we wont waste our time doing THAT anymore, since we need to grind grind grind back our xp!), etc. If I happen to get killed, thats easily setting back all my gains for a full day or more. If I spend a few evenings in town refining/decorating whatever and then get invited somewhere and die, well, I'm set back to 3 days ago. This is not sustainable. The average player level is rising over time. Decay system is NOT looking at long term, where will we be in 5 years? When someone has taken 5 years to get to the level that I am now, loses that amount of exp? Its a month's worth of progress. Good luck putting that on the marketing and see how many players you attract.

I still think it is absolutely absurd that I must ever under any circumstance earn again something I've earned once. In a game so heavily grind focused like Sota, telling me I've got to grind twice OR play it safe all the time and never try new content, group, explore, or do anything with any danger whatsoever, is pretty stupid. I'm all for slowing players down but making us go backwards is just insulting. The existing xp curve system is already curbing players power in that millions and millions are needed for the most minimal of benefit, a natural soft cap already exist. Stop with the xp loss, pls.

 

Honestly, all I can read here in this topic is: I am not able to evaluate risks so remove decay on death!

I can't remember when I died last time. It is ages ago. And I really don't care about the decay. So I am not overly careful.

 

So what do you do for excitement ?

 

Beside restraining myself from falmeing people?
The same as everybody else, farm, kill, loot, craft.

 

So you never push the envelope, is that why you're not "overly careful" ?

 

Well, seems like i am just better at realizing when it's time to turn tail and run. It usually helps with not dieing.
If i read this forum i get the feeling this is an art in itself.

 

I haven't died in a lllooooonnnggg time. Because I don't play anymore. In large part due to the decay system, which as a casual player, helped wreck the experience.

Portalarium has either never understood or never sufficiently cared about how the time sucks that plague this game, by deliberate design choices, negatively affect the user experience for people who have relatively less time to play.

If you have an hour to play, a significant percentage of your time is wasted in at least three unavoidable ways:

1) game launch and screen loading times
2) slow travel system
3) XP grind following death

Not to mention occasional pointless time sucks like random encounters which are in theory avoidable but in fact are not. Also control points (where are the promised regional economies which is the whole justification for control points?)

So a large percentage of my precious hour was spent twiddling my thumbs or mindlessly grinding mobs to make up for lost XP or running through scenes that were annoying and truly pointless.

But, instead of just bitching, I have solutions! Behold the simplicity:

1) For the love of Pete decrease load times.
2) Allow recall and gating
3) Eliminate decay (and Chris should do time in jail for inventing it)
4) Eliminate RE's or making them interesting (as we've been saying since 30 releases ago)
5) Eliminate control points

You're welcome.

 

Ah ah ah... You just described what most people do in reality. Bravo !

 

+1

 

Well spoken and completely accurate, @Budner
Almost everyone that I know in this game feels exactly the same as you, myself included.

 

What that means is if decay was 1%, and you have spent 100k XP total, but have a pool of 500M, your decay penalty is only 1k, not 5M

 

take

Sounds totally right to me. I will point out two things that truly seem to be forgotten for the casual player. We are hear to have FUN not get bogged down in time penalties and decay losses, death time losses, etc, etc, etc, Time adds up. Eventually you lose enough time and you have an hour wasted.

In these last Decay changes, that were supposed to be as stated in the last Hangout, are now totally different. Now we are told that the numbers add up so there is no need to change it to what was stated. The numbers add up? If someone gives me $100.00 that was a good thing. In fact that would be FUN. The number adds up. It is $100.00. If then I am surprised by an unanticipated bill of $100.00 the number still adds up, $100.00 - $100.00 = 0. The numbers still add up but to me it is not a good thing, in fact it is NOT FUN. Point is sometimes things may add up but when they take away the FUN of the game the fact that they add up is totally useless.

Second, Everyone remember the movie "War Games" Watch this ending where Joshua says, "Stange Game, The only way to Win is not to Play." That seems like we are headed that way in SOTA.

 

without a death penalty to fear, playstyle becomes mostly irrelevant, tactics matter much less, strategy doesnt matter much at all, and most of the combat becomes nearly mindless. esp when considering what it was like pre death penalty - you could die and rez (even with the timer) near a very hard opponent, then rush back to fight it with full health and it having reduced health, allowing you to kill things that should be too hard to kill.

so are people really just begging for e-z mode? cuz the neg towards death penalty sounds awfully click to win. i like playing garriot games because choices and actions have consequences. if there is no / little penalty for dying, then SotA takes one more step towards "yet another mmo" and one step away from the breakway experience most of us are funding the project for.

i mean, you can always go to the Staples store, and buy one of those "That was Easy!" buttons, and press that a lot of times instead. Its a lot cheaper than funding SotA - and even better - you cant possibly lose! Its like pressing a button and becoming instant GM forever!

Seriously now, without any real consequences to your interaction with the game world, the game is reduced to watching a really slowly developing tv show that you click buttons on now and then. It wont be fun, youll get bored easily, and there essentially is no mystery to the game world - everything is within your grasp since dying is basically a free tunnel to a place you can afk for a while. The game world commands a lot more respect, mystery, and intrigue if you actually have to prepare for prevention of death.

Also, not-dying is very easy. If you die before you have time to check your health bar, thats a great sign that youre way too low level to be in that scene. If you die because you never look at your health bar, then its time to step up your game. Otherwise, just flee when you start getting pounded, and be careful near cliffs.

Personally, i advocate at least doing UO/EQ style, where you have to go get your corpse and stuff as well. This style gives the game world so much more significance, and encourages a lot deeper player collaboration.

Yanno, I feel 100% exactly the opposite. :-/

1) is a bummer, though i think this is true for any big title game. SotA is still in early access though, and optimizations are a final-phase thing. i expect this to get better, though doubt itl end up loading faster than any big title game (or 3d game, really).

2) i think this will be rectified as more scenes are uncloned and each region has more "stuff to do" in it. though right now most people just play in the same 3-4 scenes, and it sucks if you dont "live" right next to them.

3) i think this gets less of an issue the more everyone learns not to die. like said above, i usually duck out of a fight long before i might die. there are many ways to predict the outcome, but basically if i drop to around 50% of my health, and havent done significant damage to my opponents, i use the "Sprint" glyph and run in the general direction of scene exit / lack of spawn. they even have a feature (that i have turned off) which turns your screen red at a desired "low health" point - use it if you dont like looking at your health bar every few seconds, and discipline your play style to immediately run as soon as that threshold is reached. if you hit that threshhold before winning a few times in a row, then fight a new spawn to fight .

How does everyone keep repeating this subjective, rhetorical, logical fallacy as truth? Your fun sounds mind numbingly boring to me, no thanks. While I agree there needs to be a lot of fine tuning around certain game mechanics, and that REs add more annoyance than value, death penalty is not a time sink. What would be the point of going to vegas and playing any game at all if there was a safety net to make sure you actually never lost any money? What thrill would there be?

Plus people tend to always use this "we" term so much, like you represent the whole community or something. Im under the impression that most people backed SotA as theyre bored of all the "yet another mmo..." experiences. I certainly am. I see no point to this game at all if its just ultra safe and there is no challenge.

The difference between your analogy and the loss of exp in the game is - you can just dodge the loss of exp in the game. You only die if you basically fight hard stuff without looking at your health bar.

I have no idea what this means. Are you sugesting you cant play, cuz if you do, you might die, and lose some exp? Let me repeat again that not-dying is as simple as watching your health bar and knowing which way behind you is the safe way. You could also just craft or group with people that can fight while you harvest.