Our Soft Ceiling Exp Quagmire "where do we go from here?"

Our Thirsty Exp Quagmire ...

Skill tree branches requiring 120 to unlock? With our soft caps reached and 2xp a thing many over developed characters are hungering for, we have a direct pressure to either increase tree banches or need incentives to build new characters.

In building new characters, then those face the same things as old characters, unless some new trees come availible that are very difficult to raise and/or cannot be trained with certain other trees, or exclusive to the point of not having the ability to be mixed at all within a character's skills.

There is only up, sideways or exclusive to consider developing in when it comes to our current situation in player's desires for more exp (x2-exp).

Into content that requires too much of everything is another solution, and new playable races are another.

Grinding exp (double, tripple or not) to get 1 billion exp, to gain 1 point in str, does not seem sustainable to me.

I'm sure there's more directions, yet we have lost RP, which means just changing into a new character by adding a new slot to our account hasn't enough apeal for most players.

How could we make building new additional characters more apealing?

There's allot of questions here with few answers of where we want to go if we can go further.

I do really enjoy that we now have people designing or modifying some things they want to work on in our game, "our programing players that is". I think that was a really great step in a right direction.


~Time Lord~

 

The tolerable soft cap has extended over time in direct proportion to the rate of xp gain (which has more than quadrupled original rates since persistence plus with the addition of so many high tier scenes achievable hourly exp is over 10x what it was, and that's without double!). GM used to be something to be proud of and now you can literally get enough experience to grandmaster a skill in 5 minutes of play or less. Then 120s, and now even newer players are pushing things to 140s after a month or two. Its disheartening in a lot of ways, but it is the way of progress. However after years building your character, staring up at the sheer cliff face of "ok, I can get max 15 million an hour, and I need 500 million to raise this one more point, which wont even nudge the damage on the tooltip since the benefit is so small its a rounding error" - well, it can be hard to motivate to continue.

What we really need is alternative/lateral advancement, which has been frustrated by specialisations.
I'm not suggesting we allow people to actively use more than one specialization at a time, but being able to dump exp into them and have them disabled, and then go to the able to "swap your build" would save a lot of hassling about unlearning/relearning when you want to try something new, and would "bank" quite a bit of exp in inactive skills and allow switch-on-the-fly if the party needs a _____. If I want to throw 100 million in fire specialization for that odd night when we don't have a fire mage, and carry around an extra set of gear to swap to...who cares? (Again, I'm not talking about having all the bonsues active at once...although, if you think about it...would it matter? You still can only gear for a single element at a time, or hold a single weapon type, so...would it really be that terrible? ) But there's certainly no downside to letting people level up multiple things and swap more easily, even if you put a cooldown on swapping.

As Timelord has said, the next thing we need are more advanced skills, or more passives that only unlock once you reach a certain level of competence in a particular tree. I appreciate that active skills require artwork, animations, and balance, and more technical work - but small passives shouldn't be too onerous and could give people something to work for. We've had a few of these with the mount speed and elixir potency and such. You could look into passives that incremented base move speed, jump height, but also things to be added to high level trees to increase resistance penetration, skill range/radius - a few skills have these but its something that could use a pass/review. Some of the specialisation bonuses are pretty underwhelming and could pick some of this up, but new passives (even generic global ones that were quite expensive) would be great. You could even quest gate things or make them like, different tree archetypes of which only one could be active if we felt the need for more arbitrary limitations.

-- for example ---
Lifebringer/Healy archetype -
passive skills increase all healing done and received (separate check from attunement, applicable to all incoming heals from life, sun, water, death, whatever). passive skill adds a heal over time lingering effect to heal skills . I'm talking small, small small bonuses.
Spellslinger archetype -
passive that increase ability to overcome magic resist, increases base combat focus regen, flat spell damage bonuses (since no real passives or gear exist for this other than...constantan weapons? which aren't spellcasting implements so pointless)
Summoner archetype -
more bonuses to elemental summons, giving them higher health, taunt, etc. could eventually use it for multiple pet control
Berseker archetype-
physical damage bonuses,add small bleed to critical hits, that sort of thing
Acrobat archetype -
jump higher and further, run faster, carry more, take less fall damage, etc.
Beastmaster archetype -
Could do more passive bonuses with this, but eventually use it for multiple pet control

and so on. Have these skills cost like a flat 5 million xp per level and have 100 ranks max or something and either limit it to 1 archetype or allow all to be levelled but only one to be 'active'. Would give us all another outlet for all the exp. instead of seriously sinking a billion into a skill to level it a few points. For laughs, unlock titles on maxing an archetype. Just spitballing here really, but it would be nice to have alternatives other than "Okay, its at 150, and I could grind for 5 days and push it to 153, but...why?"

And I know, I know, the hardcore grinders will max these out pretty fast - that's just the way things are and you're not going to stop it. But it would be something that would take the rest of us a considerable amount of time.

 

@kaeshiva makes very good points and I was hoping on such sugestions because I always find that sugestions made, even bad ones or good ones, both always lead to other ideas.

I would welcome all or any of the sugestions mentioned above if they were implemented.

Many of our forums posting members know that I play very oddly skilled characters and mostly due to my physical inabilities (I have very bad dex in my real fingers). So, I use fixed decks with few operating skills requiring very few buttons to be mashed.

What our friend @kaeshiva has said here caused me to think of the other direction "downward development" through passives. If there were a skill that increased "auto swing damage" yet took away from active card attack damage, I would invest exp in that skill... I would be willing to invest 500 million exp points just to raise that skill to 100 (GM).

For instance: "Elder Knowledge" (passive skill placed in all melee skill trees as an alternative to specialization)

If a player GMed the entire tree in any weapon, then there would be an alternative branch next to specialization called "Elder Knowledge", a hard cap passive skill tree.
The moment Elder Knowledge is chosen by the player, then all damage in all the active skills in the entire tree becomes nil, zero, zilch, nada, to never effect battle again.
Each weapon skill tree then would have branches coming from Elder Knowledge for each weapon's special effects, yet all in passives, with all having a 100(GM) hard cap.
Bludgeon Elder Knowledge branches into passive stun effect chances called "Brain Damage", which could take another 500 million to raise to 100(GM) hard cap
Blade Elder Knowledge branches into passive rend effect chances called "Bloody Mess", which could take another 5oo million to raise to 100(GM) hard cap.
Polearm Elder Knowledge branches into passive ignore armor chances called "Poking", which could take as much as 500 million to raise to 100(GM) hard cap.

The reasons I think a hard cap is required in these alternative branches, is to never be more powerful than any 100(GM) skill level character's ability in damage output.
Ranged skill tree, all Magic trees and all other trees for the exception of Tactics and Focus are hard capped in the skill abilities to 100(GM) levels of effectiveness when any Elder Knowledge branch is chosen, then all skills have their damage values reduced to 100(GM) levels. This means that the player can chose to keep any skill's current level of development, yet the damage of those skills will be caped at 100(GM) level.

Tactics and Focus skill trees remain totally uneffected by any Elder Knowledge.

This leaves only specialization skills in any tree open to raise above the 100 skill cap, becoming the sump for all exp thereafter.

There are differences in wants and desires depending on a player's whim or disposition, which only from those vantage points can be best understood.

I am a physically handicaped player, and as well all age there will be many more just the dame as me, unable to enjoy the same content in the same way as other more physically able players. Sure, players as I can be invited into a party that could enter such higher content, yet when hunting alone, such play style limits a players ability and thus limits the content availible to solo enjoy.

This spit ball suggestion is from my vantage point, but it's not the point of the thread. The point of the thread is to explore "any and all" ideas anyone may have from their own vantage point of view. Certainly there's more "passive skills" that can be thought of to enhance our play, requiring no added animations as active skills would.

I think searching for more (passive) innate skills to help braoden our game as @kaeshiva suggests seems the most proper way in proposing any new skill changes.

The suggestion I made here, would also appeal to those new players who may otherwise leave our game due to not liking our card combat ways.

There's no leading this thread, there's only suggesting anything that anyone could see to better our game for their own liking, without disrupting or being more powerful and without being as powerful as our card combat and current ways can be.

Any more ideas? @kaeshiva I think had some great ones.
Ideas bring more ideas and refine ideas, and that's what this thread is all about.
~TL~

 

Just to your point Timelord -
I find the manual dynamic card stacking to require impossible levels of pretzel-finger dexterity as well.

As such, playing a bard for example, is actually impossible for me, since the "hold down button to stack" on those skills takes far too long to be viable.
Not talking about the cast time, which I get why it is long, but the charge time, its just not reasonable to try and hold down a button for 15 seconds while also trying to move, not get interrupted, or not need to cast any other skills. Manual stacking is so much more powerful because you can carry on doing other things while you're building up the glyphs but it requires a lot more fiddling and attention. The hold-to-stack alternative works reasonably well for most things, but is never -quite- as effective as the stacking it by hand. Except for bard, where hold-to-stack is 100% unviable, thus making that tree completely unplayable unless you can finger-dance. That probably just needs fixing on general principle but it helps to illustrate the point.

I love your idea of being able to spend exp on skills that would actually downgrade some things to upgrade others, for example, reduce dynamic glyph potential while increasing hold-down-stacks so you could tailor your character to your playstyle. For example, a passive skill that increased "hold to stack" charge speed while reducing effectiveness of manual stacked glyphs, would suit me just fine. You could also have the reverse, for people who DO finger dance, to increase that potency at the cost of the other. And for folks who mix a bit of both, they could use these skills, or not, based on their own personal preference to move the slider where they saw fit.

In general, we have a lot of skills that do utility things, like reduced focus costs, reduced fizzle chance, etc. but because of the experience to benefit scaling once these skills get beyond a certain point it just becomes absurd to spend 500 million experience to reduce fizzle chance by half a percent. I think this is an area where those other sorts of passive bonuses that are more linear in cost to effectiveness would have a key role. Whereas our current skill trees are all heavily front loaded with cost-per-benefit ramping up very very steeply post level 100 (and getting even steeper at 120). Look at something like the "healthy" skill which gives 1 HP per level. So for level 100, you get 100 health points for 6 million experience, costing you overall, 600k experience for each 1 permanent HP (obviously, frontloaded but at level 100, that's what you've paid for. To get 20 more HP by taking this skill to 120, the cost of those next 20 hit points is 34 million - nearly triple the cost at 1.7million per single hit point. And at 140? 11.7 million per hit point. This is already absurd but beyond this point it gets bizarrely absurd. And all the skills work this way, with costs basically scaling a steeper and steeper cliff that we know as "softcap" and we just get a bit further up that cliff as the advancement rate continues to be accelerated. By the time you look at a skill level of 200, which for even the cheapest skills in the game are costing in excess of 16 billion - I shudder to think what our exp rate would need to be to make these feasibly reachable. You'd need to be allowing like 100 million experience an hour, and still grinding for days/weeks to max a single skill and to do that, you're basically embracing a progression rate that makes all existing content trivial. But if you don't do it, then people stagnate and can't advance.

For me the "endless progression" of Sota is one of its greatest strengths, in that your character is never done, and its probably the biggest contributor to my many years here. Most MMOs, I level cap and get max gear in a few months tops, and then there's no reason to keep playing unless its a game that has enough diversity of activities or alternative progression paths. In many of these games you make "alts" - but Sota is a bit too grindy to do it on more than a couple characters.

Its definitely an interesting quandary. I'd also propose alternative advancement systems to unlock things that had nothing to do with adventure experience, but things that were unlocked through persistent activities, alternative progression, faction systems, economic initiatives (buy permanent upgrade for your character with gold) or guild based bonuses that work similarly but could be done as a collectdive.

 

Yes, and just to add to that, do it while trying to stay away from the melee mobs.

I feel that it's intensely unfair for those with physical disabilities. They really should try to even the playing field a bit. Maybe the idea of having an instrument out could be used here.

 

Sort of dovetailing with this is a lack of anything else to do, after a point. People grind out more xp because, with new content coming so slowly, the only things to do at a high level are the really hard things, and that requires more xp.

I don't particularly care where my skill levels are or how powerful I am. The main question for me is, "What can I do that I haven't done yet?" And if the answer is "nothing," then, "what does it take to get strong enough to do something new?" And since the answer is, "Run the Rise/Tartarus/Spindelskog another five thousand times... Eh.

 

This is definitely why more horizontal progression and branching out to do new activities appeals to me. We just need to be creative with how we approach the game. Sometimes I feel like grinding in the mines for silver and I do that probably 50% of the time. However that is really more of a horizontal progression activity that has "some" vertical progression as well. Fishing, spending time buying/selling at the various markets, real estate deco and procuring for shops and fun is also activities worthwhile that doesn't push you into some grindfests. I actually went back and did the quests for Love recently and it was fun. Can always take up farming as well if you have some real estate. The key is to vary it up...go somewhere new and explore. Try a new deck build...and yes make a new toon and experiment. And as always help out the new players. Every new player in the game could benefit from teleport to zone scrolls and some advice or questions answered. We can do anything we want here. Just have to get the mindset to try it out. That is what makes our game so great.

 

A method for horizontal progression are stat attributes associated with both alts and main that are account wide.

Certain milestones in X activity, such as GM or higher in a particular skill tree, give an overall account wide benefit.

Creative methods could be +% increased XP gain. +stats, or access to areas with certain triggers.

Activities could be hunting, quests, finding stuff in the world, gathering, crafting, ect.

Even small increases in unrelated activities are still an increase.

Examples:
1. Harvesting x amount ( like 100, 5000, 10000) of skins from bear based mobs gives +1, +3, +5 strength account wide.

2. Slaying x amount of earth elementals [ 100, 1000, 10000 ] gives 1%, 2%, 3% bonus experienced gained from mining.

3. Finding x amount of hidden kobold etchings in various scenes [5 10 15] gives exp gain modifier for bludgeoning skill.

 

+1

 

The multiple times the game has been broken over the knees of players using those "small passives" to achieve perfect crits or godlike fire magic doesn't suggest to you that the team might not be particularly suited to balancing additional passive upgrades?

 

When all skills can be had by any and all players, then "balanced against what?" becomes the question ???
Balance in our game has sucked up much of our development budget, just to balance everything time and again, for the sake of those who wish not to get certain skills, or to have their pvp "something or another" (pvp being a very small to tiny amount of even our most dedicated pvp player's play time) balanced, just to have the other opponents then demand even more development time be dedicated to this brief and seldom encountered activity because the other opponent got what balance they wanted.

Balance is a bottomless pit which can never be filled and is the paracital bane which holds back all forward development through sucking the lifes blood out of our game expanding development's budget.

But that's just my opinion based on how stifled our game expanding development has been diminished due to deminishing funding.

We can't continue doing all the same things we've done in our past and expect different results. Our game is headed forward as long as we expand without stagnation, which balance is an element of.

Growing or dying all depends on our budget and where it gets aimed at, irregardless of where past funds have been allocated. Expanding our skill trees has been one of those things that get's directly stifled through what some call "balance" ... which is a totally silly thing in a game where all skills can be had.

There's always a new thing and all new things cause some players to scream for balance, until the next new thing comes along so they can scream about it again.

'Balance" is not a good argument for not introducing "new things" ~TL~

 

This may have been true before specialization skills were added, but it is no longer the case. You cannot train everything with one character anymore.

Pvp has never been a big reason for balance, it has almost always been due to pve. The majority of all balance passes that have been done in the past were because skills were too powerful in PvE. In some cases the damage we could do was just way too high. Other times it was because when you all had defenses stacked it made you invulnerable. But these changes were needed for pve. You can try to blame pvp all you want, but that's not what happened.

Sure a few things were balanced because of pvp in the past. But that is a tiny fraction of changes, compared to the amount that have been done to balance pve.

 

Yet no matter the what for, balance holds back new player's options in play through taking development time away from expanding what play options we could have.

I only use pvp as an example, but yet there is a deep bottomless pit, in every effort put into balance while our game could be expanding more than it is already doing in that regard.

Currently, the majority of new play involves our new cats. Some would say that other skill sets are out of balance with those and thus needing to balance our new cat content with other skill sets or other pet powers. After any balancing is done for those conserns, something else will be introduced, thus also calling our development to balance and re-balance, thus ever falling deeper into the black hole of balance funding, while our game's activity expansions (which have direct impact on any hopeful funding increase) are left without as much funds as they should have.

Expanding our game's activities or abilities should get more, while balance development funding, should need only to justify itself to any funding it would directly increase before being aproached for consideration.



(PS): I'm not a game designer and I'm also not a programer. I'm just a player with no direct effect on whatever our developers do or don't do. I've seen those excusses of why players leave our game and a large part is due to lack of passive townie skill activities and lack of further skills within our trees.

The easiest way we could expand our skill trees is through adding more passives and the most development funding impact that could be made is through our agriculture being able to stand alone. Our fishing is a great example of how side activities help in players interest and player retention, while our player base's rising concerns in the amount of hunt-skill button mashing demonstrates that expanding through adding passives would serve a double purpose,

• 1) to help the less button skilled find a way to continue playing our game and
• 2) help those at the top find new ways through new passive skills being added.

~TL~

 

How about we just give our small team sufficient time to correct all current bugs and imbalances as they exist now - before we send them on new complex tasks ?

 

Yes, we can always continue piddling while Rome burns, which has lead us to our deminishing funding levels.

Small team getting smaller with the distance to our future getting further away as our funding to get there gets ever smaller.
Our star is dimming as our development time slows.

In regard to this, it will be our side activities which will (hopefully) sustain us, until our game's backer's ages, ends their quest to ever see our future.

It is for thus, we need to program our ways for our contentment.

It is also for thus and the state of our deminishing ways, that I have begun my indevors into offline play, as that is my own lifeboat if and ever when our game's lights go out. I don't think they ever will, but I do think our development will increasingly become a "volunteer service" unless we end some of our past ways which have lead us to our current funding conditions ~TL~

 

I disagree, most changes are hardly noticeable to new players, they usually hit the highest level players.

You're just speculating. You have no actual numbers to go by, you aren't the accountant for the game.

Balance and polish is what is really needed right now in my opinion. There are so many good systems in this game that just need some polish to make them great. And certain skill trees and builds could use some help as well. Offline is not part of the development process at the moment, and if anything, private online servers would prob be the future if the game ever actually died, which i don't see happening. Offline just isn't going to cut it, the developers realized that a while back and aren't planning on updating it further.

 

I've been keeping count of developers a long time, so our trajectory in that regard is a matter of how long a time any graph of that would cover. Yet on that same point, no one else has those actual numbers either to show any different. We have a thrifty frugal budget which is also not breaking any industry records or moving it's possition within it's field of competition.

That's such a missunderstood subject by many. Each release that happens online, also happens offline and in that way, they share in parallel development. The water turned just as green as the online water did for St.Patty.

Offline is just as much developed as online, while "unique or exclusive offline" development for offline hasn't been touched and not very needed with a few exceptions (example: improved monitization).
~TL~

 

I'm not sure what the best method would be but I'd prefer a hard capped adv level, skill and stat cap for PvP across the board. I'd also like accelerated skill gain for PvP. The focus shouldn't be on constantly grinding mobs for PvPers. Capping all the PvP zones would help, but there's only like 10 (?) pvp zones in the game.. so everywhere else it would be imbalanced if you're flagged. I understand endless progression is fun for PvE focused players, but fighting against players in PvP with 30 billion+ xp is not fun.

I PvP'd for ages in UO, WoW and Shadowbane and they were all level and skill capped. It's easier to balance, easier to understand and more familiar to fans of UO imo. I'll always want UO fans to come play this game.

Shadowbane was successful to a point but eventually did not survive because of it's own design issues and also there wasn't much of an answer for the zerg problem (what happens when guilds form an alliance of 70% of the players on the server and they decide to never fight against each other? I guess they win.) ...but Shadowbane had by far the most advanced group based PvP that I've come across. It's why I constantly refer to the design.. a game where dozens of players would regularly fight against each other in smaller skirmishes daily, and hundreds of players would war against each other in castle sieges.

My Skill Glyphs proposal was a compromise so that PvPers could have a capped skill system (a focus on balanced combat) and PvE would stay as it is...kill 10 million hp mobs in PvE if you like, but PvP shouldn't be about that. There is still mob grinding in my proposal but it would be designed for accelerated skill gain, increased player traffic/conflict and provide some purpose in PvP.

 

Some solutions or goals in developing pvp come from games which actually have a large player base and also have the ability to have a mess of players in the same instance. In comparison, we are compelled to make an apointment with everyone in order to have any small band get together for pvp activities.

It's because of such issues that I think we would need an NPC mob instance where a united faction of PVP could PVE fight to take the instance, causing all further NPC spawn to be of their faction. This would also cause the ability of PVP to defend the control point along side the faction NPCs.

Our current skill point system does suffer under the "million/billion more points needed for single point gains at the top". Further fracturing of the "end all be all/every chr learns everything" seems the only solution for diversity.

With the above in regard, I would like to point out the over all design theme throughout our game is to "design your world your way with the tools provided and developed for that purpose". It's for this that skill style or in other words, the magic that you enjoy wearing and playing with seems most important. Yet it's when we insist that PVP be balanced in abilities that then adds compounded costs far exceeding what was needed to expand any of the skill styles, which then becomes the bottonless pit... bottomless largely due to the re-balancing needed for any additions to what there is, which then henders our game's ability to add any new skills.

Personally, I am all in favor of adding new skills to all trees in both advanture & crafting, yet it's when considering competition between players, where then new skills are then ground, to disintegrate in a crucible for the sake that PVP using them needs balance. If it were not for the balance issues, we could further our over-all game design which as described above "design your world and game play your chosen style in play".

Our PVP game attracts the few and even fewer within those few remain in our game for very long.

Our game must design toward player contentment in all things, yet forgo those which would cause our funds to head into whirlpools of balancing issues, which mostly revolve around competitive activities in skills and not around contentment activities in skills of both adventuring & crafting.

We cannot dictate what our developers choose to develop, yet what we can do, is more refine our desires & wishes in developing to better fit into our budget while aiming them to generate more funding and pacified activities:

• Keep players occupied after chr maxing while encouraging alt/character through design.
• Achieve more, normal daily activity development other than adventuring.

I too came from UO's PVP.... where we had the numbers of players to make player on player competition something more than single instances where only a few players can be.

Catnip saved us, saved what we had help make through our player funding with Portalarium and continue to in that regard, but we are not gaining ground by leaps and bounds.

• Adding passive skills costs far less than adding active skills.
• Our fishing game is becoming competitive compared with other fishing games.
• Our agriculture should too, yet thus far has yet to be developed as a stand alone game as our fishing is.
• Any PvP enhancing or encouraging needs to be designed so that the few can have NPC minions protecting control points.

From top to the bottom, I think the list is in order, least to most development expensive.
~TL~

 

I love the idea of adding passive skills that both create positives and negatives. But it will create imbalance with pve, every time something is added we get more powerful. Even if a passive adds negatives, adding the smallest positives to a already very high player will cause combat to become so trivial to them. Players are very good at figuring out the loopholes and ways to set up their builds to minimize negatives and amplify positives. Even the smallest addition usually sends certain things over the edge for a adventure level 150+ player. It has happened over and over and they're constantly backtracking and trying to fix values to make them work. This has nothing to do with pvp.

They've already introduced scaled scenes and gear scaling for pvp, so these types of things won't effect pvp much if they ever implement any kind of faction combat or castle seige type combat. Most balance work is done for pve.

Yes in that aspect it's being developed. But they gave up on trying to sell the single player game long ago. They've allowed us to easily edit the files so we can use it to test things out. Thinking they will ever change their stance on it at this point, is being a bit naive.