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

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Time Lord, Mar 7, 2022.

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  1. Enfo

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    So is the overall consensus "No" to passives with combat benefits?
     
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  2. Adam Crow

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    That's not how I feel at all. We could definitely use some well thought out passives for a lot of skill trees. My point was that its not as easy to implement positive/negative passives that won't cause a need for adjustments elsewhere. So in my opinion, it is a lot of work to get it right.

    And like @Burzmali pointed out, the devs have a track record of always implementing things way to strong at first and having to dial them back. Pet gear being just the latest example. It would cause much less annoyance to players, if new things were added slowly and much weaker and then dialed up if needed.

    Giving players more power, (sometimes for months at a time) and then taking it away has lost more players than probably any other single thing in this development process. That is what I don't want to see anymore, but I've been saying this for years to no avail.

    100% untrain doesn't help at all with all the gear you have to replace, every time you want to change builds. Many players have rage quit for being "nerfed" over the years.
     
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  3. kaeshiva

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    The original premise of this post which has now kinda gone around to touch on several other subjects was, where do we go from here? What's the next goalpost for players now that softcaps are curbing further character development and growth?

    As I see it, there's a few ways this can go:

    1. Advancement stops. Your character is effectively done, you are (effectively) hardcapped. There is no further reason to accumulate experience.
    At this point, you can log in and play, and do stuff, but with no further character growth/development there's a lot of activities that are diminished. You either need an alternative progression path or set of goals (either part of the game itself, like achievements or whatever, or personal goalsetting) to keep you logged in and playing. Else, your only real progression at this point is in wealth generation or social engagement.

    2. Continued incremental forward advancement (such as the suggestion of passive benefits obtained from further experience gain or some other methodology, such as achievement system etc)
    This is probably the easiest option from a tech point of view as it doesn't require new artwork/animations or fundamental changes to things or new systems building from scratch.

    3. Lateral advancement / expansion of generalist capability across other skills/trees.
    We'd have to rethink specialization and attunement limitations (single-element gearing) and all the mutual exclusivity between "same-type-of-buff-different-tree" that's been put in to try and prevent player generalism, but its possible. Just a more complicated choice with likely more new systems/tech work to pull off.

    So, regarding option 2, the forward advancement via small incremental passives -

    @Adam Crow you make an excellent point about the high level player finding loopholes when new things are added and/or using things in unintended ways or discovering nuanced synergies between new and existing skills/gear/etc. that result in unintended outcomes. I could rattle off dozens of examples of this but I think most of us are familiar with enough of them to understand the context. There's a few reasons for this, and that is 1) It is often evident that the devs do not understand the game at nearly the same level that the players do. This is just the reality we deal with, it is a small team, of people who do not play the game as players and in streams often mix skills up, or get names/effects wrong and just don't have that day to day indepth familiarity with what's happening. I'm not saying this to be criticising, its a complicated game with a lot of moving parts and things that have been implemented over years often in inconsistent ways. Users will find use-cases that devs never even dreamed of - we see this every day in the software industry, its not unique to sota or even to gaming. We have been particularly poor, here, in not heeding the knowledge of players who have warned exactly why certain things were bad ideas, who used to go on qa and demonstrate why it was bad idea, and it gets implemented anyway, or rushed through, etc. etc. Over years it gets exhausting to see some of the decision-making and the subsequent back-peddling that results, and all of that wastes a lot of time and effort. We CAN have nice things, but we have to do things in a more sensible way, and USE your subject matter experts. From what I've seen (at least, since the management change) this is something we are getting much better at overall. But there's always going to be people who find the overpowered thing and ride it till the wheels fall off and it gets nerfed.

    Fire magic has been ridiculously OP compared to all other magic and its been that way for years, its been communicated for years and nothing has fundamentally changed that. So you can either wait around for something to get balanced or you can just get on board and ride it. We're seeing the same thing now with taming being the only real way to effectively defeat high tier content now, as only a pet has the health, mitigation, and aggro power, and damage output to deal with monsters that are being added with more and more health who can now faceroll/1-shot end-game-geared players. Either stay out of its way (kte it, spin the dragon, jump the trollstomp, etc) try to keep it cc/knockdown/stunned, or, stick a pet in its face. Now I know I'll get a load of people saying that my this-or-that build does just fine end game, please consider this sincere acknowledgement that edge cases exist, that player button-mash skill and tenacity in grinding and gearing can and does overcome quite a bit. That doesn't mean that there isn't an underlying problem.

    But the point I'm trying to make is that we have NEVER lived in a state of "balance." Sota goes through phases where certain builds are the favorites, then they get nerfed to obscurity and something else gets buffed or added causing a new synergy to emerge and we have that one for a while. The Age of the Fire Mage is slowly moving on to the Age of the Tamer/Bard. And
    the folks quoted above are absolutely right that how we get here is a whole bunch of bonuses stack up, and an end game player wearing a bunch of gear in combination to grant particular bonuses, using a pet with certain stats, combining that with certain bardsongs, with certain buffs, with certain debuffs on the mob (such as fireflies, etc.) results in pets that can deal hits in excess of 10,000 damage. And you don't even need to be super-high-level or geared to do it. So this is a problem. But its a problem that is separate from the issue of character progression, and one that needs to be addressed regardless of whether we decide to add more passive benefits or not.

    Shall we put a pin in the progression issue until such time as other things get sorted? We could do. I just fear that lack of progression directly leads to lack of player retention, people need to have goals to work for if we want them to keep logging in day after day, year after year. Especially since we've cranked the advancement rate up so high that people are hitting the softcap in weeks rather than years.
     
  4. Burzmali

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    The issue is that other games found the answer to this decades ago, the timing can vary some but, you set a hard cap on character progression that takes a year to hit, then you allow additional progression in gear that takes another year to hit but takes cooperation with other players to reach and then you count on the community folks build up to max out phase 2 to retain players along with cosmetic rewards, events, and "end game content" if you are feeling spicy. This team even knew this is the answer, UO used it and it was a hit for more than a decade. The problem is that if they apply this answer, they are going to end up in direct competition with companies that are a lot bigger and entrenched. So instead, SOTA goes with Unlimited* progression to draw in the folks that like phase 1 of the MMO road map, but then SOTA can't have a proper phase 2 since you can't design it around players having a nominally similar power level, and since phase 2 is the key to long term retention, folks walk out the door at the "end" of phase 1 if they don't bounce off the game's other rough edges.
     
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  5. Adam Crow

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    That is true for sure. Even the pet gear I used as an example was nerfed very quickly once it hit live. They're doing better, I'll give them that. :D

    But if it was never added at all, or maybe added only for summons, I think we'd be better off overall.
     
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  6. Enfo

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    I personally like the answer to the original question of "where do we go?" To an achievement style horizontal progression.

    I think I'd prefer the rewards as bonuses to str/dex/int, hp/mp, % increase in xp gained per tree, decoy, estroma skulls, and not sure what else. Attunements or resistances I am not sure on.
     
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  7. kaeshiva

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    I don't disagree with any of this - except perhaps to say that I don't think that this formula is the "only true way". I've seen successful lateral advancement systems, usually based on something other than experience gain (although not always), add long term retention benefits that take months/years to achieve. For forward advancement - (Look at ESO's champion level system that gives a single point into a small passive tree for each "level's worth of xp" gained beyond the level cap). In some context, a level 50 is a level 50, in terms of stat growth, gear requirements, skill levels, etc. But a level 50 who has been playing for say, 5 years and has ticked every box, done every achieve, and grinded thousands of hours beyond, will have accumulated a significant amount of incremental additional capability *(as well as in other areas such as gear progression, etc.)

    If you want people to play a game for years, you have to make those years matter for something. Over the past two decades the main reason I walk away from almost every game out there is because I hit the cap, I get all the gear, and then its like, well now what do I do? Why do I log in? I beat this game. Sota has kept my attention for longer than any MMO ever precisely because of the endless "phase 1" - there's always something to work toward and when it starts to slow down, they crank the advancement rate again and we push a bit further. But now even with the months of double exp most players are getting to that point where another billion (billion!!!) experience is not going to make a meaningful difference with our current skill model. Thus I think prompting this thread and discussion of what else can be done.
     
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  8. Ancev

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    In addition to the skill system, there needs to be a focus on end-game content. From a PvP perspective there's not much for guilds to do. Just keep grinding I guess. We have this feudal title system going on, but no feudal strife. Need something to spice things up.. guilds vs guild conflicts in PvP and Trade Wars!
     
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  9. Time Lord

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    Let me say firstly, that I am a huge believer in "Rhetoric" :D
    Brain Banking always makes for many better ways forward.

    Yes, yes and yes :rolleyes: exactly! :thumbs up:


    :eek: Wave Boosts and Getting Pumped Up :confused::thumbs up:
    [​IMG]


    Our's is still a very stagnate, dry and dull data game where players can predict the stagnate place of power they want their character to get to, with hunting trips success based on clearly rutted well worn paths they grind. There's little to no change planning in plans they implement, other than changing card decks ro suite the grinding pathways and areas they enjoy best to hunt in.

    Planetary Waves...
    Two of the finest things that our game did was our planetary effects on "Light & Moon" magic. We often hear our players mention these effected skills as needing to test things in both their strongest as well as weakest points in order to understand how they are effecting any situation. It's these effects which do actually "nudge" our players to plan according to our "planetary weather of light or light of the moon". If all other skill trees were linked to a single planet's apearance in the sky, then this would increase interest through adding additional considerations into their planning. If all the planets of partictual trees they were using in such a situation, then they would be more motivated to engage in Frost Giant or higher content than they would normally.
    (There could even be a double exp planet).

    Pumped Up...
    If our players who play allot could be effected by the amount they play, "in a stat way as @Enfo mentions", a stat boost which can be grown, yet when a player does not play, deminishes back to normal stat levels, this could increase a game player's bias to choose to play our game rather than choosing another. These motives then translating into good sota gaming habbits and thus leading to more player addiction.

    Trade Wars I believe is something we need to address in personal marketing before any guild marketing, due to guilds abilities to "end game win at the monopoly game and then sit on it never endingly".

    Planetary Wave Functions... effecting all maner of crops, crop prices, individual fishing instances/areas, all crafting skill's success or fails would set the stage for individual townie life planning, which are a few of the most sideline occupations which add to or from player everyday enjoyment through contentment.

    In these ways, it's my contention that our dry predictable data combat and crafting could then become a weather which encourages more possibilities of player involvement in our game through opening possibilities, without the need of adding to our trees.

    It's timers we need and timers we have, which cost a great deal to have developed and yet have not been attached to our game in the many meaningful ways as they could be.

    Ours is a stagnate data planet, instead of the magical world it could easily be.
    [​IMG]
    ~Time Lord~
     
  10. Burzmali

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    As I said, that is the crowd SOTA targets, specifically because other MMOs don't. Conversely, they don't target that demographic because it is small and its requirements conflict with the road map the majority of MMO players seem to prefer and results in a game that, well, never really hit its stride, to put it kindly.
     
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  11. kaeshiva

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    Well it is also less practical - far easier to get a bunch of players to come play a game, consume all the content, spend some money, and leave - whilst attracting a constant wave of new players to rinse repeat over the game's lifecycle - than to try and keep the SAME players motivated and interested year after year after year. That's certainly a harder ask, from a development perspective, especially with a small team. Many of the reasons why we see these "flash in the plan" progress-grind-gear-quit type games is because its just a whole lot less work to make a game like that, and get paid, than it is to build and maintain something long term. The more successful (and better funded) ones are those that can churn out content / expansions quicker than the playerbase loses interest.
     
  12. Yumorist

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    Absolutely agree. Not enough community conflict - it's a high-level content base. After all, in the game all systems are already ready for this. Guilds have their own land (city), the crafting system allows you to build fortifications (castles) - and you don’t need more, here you have the siege of castles built by players.
    the siege of the castle with the highest building rating by the rest of the server. defenders with a successful defense receive buffs for experience / craft for a week. When the castle is destroyed, the winner receives resources, gold, experience. And a week later, the entire server will again attack the castle with the highest building rate.
    so much for the guild's constant desire to collect resources to improve the castle and hone defense skills. P.S. but we all know that at the present time the game engine does not allow to realize this joy, we are sad and wait further...
     
  13. Burzmali

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    Or, as I commented initially, they use the community aspect of phase II to hold players. Eve barely ever releases new content and it's player count has been stable for years, folks are still playing Runescape Classic in massive numbers, even WoW isn't releasing expansions that frequently these days. SOTA had that for a maybe half a year near release, but it became obvious to me, and probably a lot of other players, that catching up with the "try hards" wasn't going to be possible. As those players continued to grow more powerful, they could easily carry an entire party of beginners through end game content, such as there was at the time, single-handedly, so no need for groups. On top of that, the true end game content was mostly unlocked through the mystic art of opening your wallet, which is also not great for player retention. SOTA had some many chances to choose a course that would be more attractive to a wider segment of the public and has pretty much always chosen to focus on a fairly slim subset for reasons only known to LB and Darkstarr.
     
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