Experience point loss has removed the incentive to adventure and explore.

What would keep me playing years from now?
The ability to keep progressing my character and getting better.
Unlikely to happen unless current "death tax" situation is rectified, as the current system is unsustainable. Imagine how many weeks/months of XP a single death will start costing, when you've spent 10+ years levelling your character? Its already pretty painful after <1 year.

Sota is not a "grind to the cap then pvp and raid" type game, and I love it for that - but imposing needless caps on player progession is a way for players to essentially "finish" everything and when that happens, they likely move on. Without decay, it would take hundreds upon hundreds of years to max every skill due to the curve. Decay is not necessary. As I've said again and again if a player wants to invest 3 months into getting 1% better at something, then I say they've earned it.

 

No risk, no reward!

I like that about Shroud!

 

Risk vs. Reward should not mean "risk losing days of progress" to "kill something that drops 3 obsidian chips."
That's a fallacy. There is no single fight in the game that gives rewards worth hours, days, or weeks of a player's time needing to be dedicated to re-earning already earned xp.
I am so sick and tired of this phrase being thrown around as an excuse for this system when it is not applicable at all.
Risk vs. Reward is NOT applicable if the reward is not worth more than you're risking.
Would you spend £10,000 on lottery tickets for a £100 jackpot? Of course not.

There are ways to add risk without halting player progression.

This thread asked about "years from now."
The current unsustainable decay system punishes players the more they play.
If we assume that my total experience after 10 years is 10x what I've achieved in 1 year, I'd be losing millions from a single death.
As someone who gets a couple hundred k a night, that's just completely unacceptable.

Of course I suppose I could just not level any more skills so my decay doesn't go up.
But if you can't progress your character, whats the point?
Will I still play in 10 years with nearly a billion unspent xp in my pool?
That makes no sense either :X

The solution is -
Don't explore
Don't group
Don't die
Don't do anything non-trivial

And honestly, while I'll do that for a while, I don't think I've got the stomach to do it for "years."

 

Just don't die and play well and it's a total non-issue. Not sure these are valid complaints. Just be happy to stay in the 80's if you're concerned about it. There should definitely be "elite" folks. Not everyone can be at the top!

 

So your solution is to just ...not level up.
Yeah ok you completely missed the point.
Having no viable progression method without absurd penalties does not keep players around for "years."

 

Well, it's pretty much my suggestion... if you can't handle the heat...

We will be playing for decades!

 

@Sempiternal Dragon
Given your recent posts here, I'm really interested in your perspective and would love to know more about how you've come to your conclusions.
Would you mind sharing with us how you spend your time in SotA ?
Do you solo or group play ?
What AdvLvl are you ?
I've explained in my OP my background and playstyle.
Tell us about yourself so we can better understand where you are coming from.

 

I love attending dance parties and grinding of all kind. Mostly do group play with my buddies! Never really cared about my "advlvl" but I have over a dozen GMs. Does that sate your curiosity?

 

Somewhat.
However, do you actually know how many xp's you lose when you die ?
When you said:

What challenging content do you do daily where you don't die ?

 

Would you be okay with the decay if the reward were something great that you really wanted?

 

Unless I'm mistaken, you've completely missed @kaeshiva 's point.
What reward would you @Magnus Zarwaddim consider worth losing days of progress ?

 

Some things re decay that are often overlooked...

a) the inordinate cost in time for skill progression, coupled w/ the tiny, non linear gains are cap enough
b) the combat bar/ deck is cap enough, insofar as it limits what an avatar can effectively bring to the table, i.e., any given scenario
c) an avatar reaches a level of effectiveness fairly easily and quickly and, for all the gains ones neighbor may achieve, the floor is level enough once this state is reached being that further gains are so small; this makes for a relatively even playing field (persons who PVP competitively attest to this; who better would know?)

All of the above points to the reality that death decay is unnecessary and its removal would not be unhealthy to the game. I would be thrilled for @Chris @DarkStarr and/ or @Lord British to answer how, in spite of the above three simple points, decay is necessary. Heck, I double dog dare them: make a case for decay taking into consideration the above three points.

Decay is probably the biggest turn off in game for me and the thing most preventing me from considering seriously a long run in SotA.

 

Well stated, @fonsvitae , well stated....

Everyone I know ingame agrees with you on this point.

 

@Lord British @DarkStarr @Chris , My input here. I personally think the death penalty is stupid and should be removed! It keeps us from adventuring in fear of losing XP. Its enough of a punishment just to get killed, and now we have the loss of XP. All the time I've been grinding is now worthless! I don't have 24/7 gaming schedule so it does effect me!

the other thing is the customization is pretty bad especially if you put it up against UO, In UO i could spend hours building a house from ground up, in this game i have a small area to work with and not a lot of customization! My house looks just like every other persons. I enjoy creating in games and there is nothing to create, everything is just as is, standard! I hate that the most about this game!

The combat is not that great, the PVP is horrible both of these need more work! I'm tired of hearing "next release. next episode" etc.. A lot of fixes should have been implemented by this time!
It seems that you guys spend more time creating emotes, this is great for those that like to RP and dance around, but a waste of time for those of us that would rather just play the game and kill stuff.
The loot tree is terrible (ill leave it at that)
The repetitiveness of monsters and NPCS are sickening. UO had a wider variety of creatures! it is the same ole grind day after day in SOTA! I honestly get bored of it!
back to creativeness real fast here. Why is it such a chore to dye things in the game from your end at Port? You've done it with cloth! Use the same process with everything else! Im not a technical wizard or anything but isn't it just about laying a colored mesh over an item???? There's no reason why we cant dye other things in the game!
You have all this water, but not boats, or sea creatures to fight or treasure chests in the water to fish up! Come on, guys you can do better than this!

Above are just a few of the things that should be fixed before release of Ep1! Those are the things that are going to attract other people to the game, and increase your profits!
At this rate i don't see this game lasting more than 5 years, i can see it dragging out for 10 with empty promises! This game may be good for your small group of fanboys, but it is definitely under par for the rest of us! Like the OP mentioned i too have watched people walk away from this game disappointed, I can name at least 10 people i know that have moved on, not to mention the many others i did not know, but knew of. Something is definitely wrong here.

People will blame it on lack of Designers or money etc..., it seems we are investing in things that take the money like bit coin type thing and publisher rights, all this cost money. I wish you would focus on the game first then when it starts making money invest in other stuff! I have spent well over 1200$ on this game and frankly i feel ripped off! Never in my life have i dropped a sum like that within a couple months for any game out there! I feel at this point i too, soon will walk away from this game disappointed.

Listen to ideas from the people that play this game and not the few that totally agree with you for whatever reasons they may have, there are many people with great ideas you should be capitalizing on, in the end it will make this game what it should be and also make more money for Portalarium.

These are my heartfelt concerns and opinions, i know not all may agree, but there is definitely something wrong with the whole set up. I tried to be as nice as i could, so if anyone takes anything the wrong way, Im sorry. It wasn't meant to be taken in that light.

 

Decay and punishment for dying are sort of needed in a game such as this. I would honestly just trust the Portalarium team on this one. You think you want it, but you don't!

 

Rare mats to make gear (that's a stretch, I know). Lots of Obsidian Chips or other existing mats that we need. Lots of Gold. Maybe if the dang artifacts were truly rare (they are not, people have dozens each).

 

Well, take boss farming for example. This is the problem.

If they make killing bosses more rewarding, then the people who are at the point where killing said bosses is now a trivial exercise in which they can kill a boss 15 times per hour while modeswapping for maximum efficiency, then it is giving far, far too much benefit to the top 1%. So the rewards have to be crap, the drop rates have to be low, otherwise the hardcore farmer population will flood the game with things that are supposed to be "rare". Whereas someone who gets a group together and struggles to take it down, potentially with deaths along the way to get a handful of curing salt and a couple obsidian chips off a boss, is quickly discouraged. Point in fact, any content that you can't steamroll, just isn't worth doing. Even though I can kill it solo with fairly low risk of death, the amount of time it takes me and the fact that there is still risk involved puts me off from doing it as I know nothing I potentially loot will be worth losing all that xp, and the xp gained for killing it is a drop in the bucket.

If it weren't for XP decay, and constantly going backwards while trying to do harder content, then players could at least attempt such things and hope maybe to get a nice drop.
Decay completely cripples the whole concept of partying up to take something down big. Nothing you get for doing so is worth the losses.
We used to have LOAD of fun, before decay, grouping up and challenging ourselves to new areas. But now this has a "you must grind trivial content for xx hours to get your xp back" price tag. And it isn't worth it.

Decay also cripples grouping for any other purpose; you'll almost always get xp faster on your own (unless you're being dragged by a higher level), so unless someone's feeling generous and trying to help you out the current system discourages grouping. If someone's trying to grind back lost xp it makes sense they want to get it over with as quickly as possible, because they've already earned this xp once and having to do it again is just an insult.

The bottom reward is, Risk vs. Reward is not an appropriate response anymore. It falls apart, because risk of death for one group of players is not even an annoying mosquito bite to others. And that's always going to be the case. The "rewards" are balanced against what the top1% can achieve, and as a result, become meaningless to anyone else.

So, one solution would be putting limits on how many times you get loot off of a particular boss per day or per week utilizing quest flags, which would allow the loot to be improved for individual kills but would remove the benefit of repeat farming. Say, balance what someone killing it 15 times per hour gets in an 8 hour period, and use that as a baseline for what value of items it should drop. Yes, the top1% would then have their daily or weekly "rotation" but that's still better than now, where they can sit there and kill it allday everyday. An example would be killing the dragon the first time would give you artifacts and glorious shinies, but repeat kills beyond that (until your quest flag resets) would only give the other crap- fragments, fuels, haunches, bones. etc.

Of course the easier, more obvious solution, would be to GET RID OF XP DECAY. Its the simpler solution, requires very little development effort, and would make exploring, trying new things, and grouping viable activities again.

I know I'm de-railing from the original question, "what would keep you playing years from now" - but its still right on point.

I'll keep playing years from now if I can actually play and move forward. That's the bottom line.
"Hours of grinding" as an entry fee to try anything new is not sustainable and is only going to get worse as the average player level rises.

STOP punishing people for investing more time in the game, or they will quit investing more time.
DECAY is NOT slowing down the hardcore, who have 20 hours a day to play. Its just discouraging everyone else.

Punishment for dying should not be going backwards. I agree dying needs to sting, but the current system is brutal to some and a bump in the road to others, and that's a problem.

And as Sempiternal said glibly above, "If you can't take the heat...." ...well, the rest of that if I recall goes "...get out of the kitchen." Right? And that's exactly what players will do. Quit.

 

I am the OP of this thread and feel I owe it to those who've responded here and explanation why I just changed the title from "What will keep you playing Shroud years from now".

I chose that original title simply because I truly believe that our death penalty has taken all the fun out of group adventuring, and the current title would have delved into an area that Chris has said he doesn't want to hear about a while back, and with moderation being what it is - I didn't want to risk having it locked before it had a chance to get people thinking about the insanity of our current system of "decay" upon death, and how it was really killing group play - the real "staple" of all games like this.

It wasn't long before I realized that many people were not reading the "Spoiler" in the OP before responding.
If you had not read my "Spoiler", I would greatly appreciate it if you did read it before responding here.

Finally.......... Dying had "consequences" prior to Chris imposing this "game killing" loss of already earned xp's. The consequence to death was sufficient.... you were taken out of the fight to trek to an ankh or you took a healer out of the fight to rez and then heal you. When you fight the "big bosses" with a group (which most of us do with the exception of those dozen or so avatars who managed "godly status" before the CP exploits were removed - too late), when one of the tanks in a group dies it means that the time to run to an ankh or pull a healer back from healing to rezing/healing means losing ground on the objective - which is sufficient "consequence".

If death simply MUST have "meaning", then it needs to be SOMETHING OTHER THAN TIME LOST RE-DOING WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE. That concept in itself is so self-defeating as to be ludicrous .

So, let's find a way for death to have "meaning" without it being about wasting our valuable GAME time, and before we lose what is left of our player base.

 

I agree with both @kaeshiva and @FrostII on the decay front and have echoed these exact sentiments in previous posts. Decay is terrible. It is a lazy game mechanic implemented to give some "meaning" to an avatar's death. Which it doesn't do. What it has done, is caused people to not want to party up and take on boss level monsters. Or explore really tough dungeons/areas together. This is really disheartening to me because people (myself included) literally don't play anymore because of this mechanic.

Portalarium did a really great job with the last release and getting the main story line in place. I grouped with my guildies and some others to complete it and had a blast! It was terrific. Now what? I'd love to still explore and hunt with folks but people are reticent to do so because they can grind better xp and gold on their own. Decay literally disincentives grouping and exploring. It's sad really, because I don't understand why we can't simply implement a timed xp debuff.

The debuff could work in any number of ways, such as a 10:00 minute 10% xp reduction for the first death. You die a second time within that 10:00 minute timer you get another xp reduction of 15% (25% overall now) and the timer resets to 15:00 minutes. Die a third time and it's a 20:00 minute timer with 40% xp reduction. If you were to keep dying at this point it would just reset the timer but the xp reduction would cap at 40%. This way there is still consequence but your not literally going backwards and having to make up your losses. Plus it would encourage players to group and explore harder areas.

Sure, you could wait out the timer doing nothing, but why would you? You're still gaining xp, albiet at a reduction, and you're learning how to be a better player by not repeating the same mistakes. Anyway, just a thought but I've always believed an xp debuff was a better way to go than just a massive vampiric xp drain.

 

You have to have this mechanic, otherwise a lot of folks will hit "max level" and leave/complain about nothing to do. It was a great system in Everquest and it's a great system here as well, since it's actually improved.