A progression system, or what Decay could achieve in a (very) big picture

I was reluctant to post this because i tend to believe massive walls of text about pure mechanics are not quite welcome... and that's exactly what it is; a complete description of the progression system the way i'd like it to be. But it was already written and this keeps being a hot topic so here it is for what is worth. I've trying to keep the concepts that we're currently handling, but i propose different implementations that may create an enjoyable progression for all playtime. I honestly think there are some good ideas here, so i hope it's useful for somebody.

If you came here following the trail of Decay threads and don't care about the big picture, just want to know about my suggestion about it, you can find it in the The "how" section, waaaay down the thread.

Walking along the progression road​

So... there we go! Because how progression is handled in the game we need to differentiate between two layers; general progression and individual skill progression.

General Progression
For this we need a value to measure how far we travelled through the progression road, so i'll use Level since it's something we have in game already (even when there are better, and more use-based options). I should highlight that current implementation of level doesn't serve this purpose because it's an indicator of the amount of XP you've earned, not of the amount of XP you've spent, so for the rest of the document, let's think it is the latter.

The main point of "level" is to serve as factor to handle the harshness of the elements that slows progression (As player level increases, so it does the slope of "progression road", basically).

1. First tier (1-40): Nothing strange here! The player progress very fast at first and fairly fast at the end of the tier while making his early choices of what kind of character he wants to be. First tier should end at the point where the character has enough power to start enjoying the game. You can go to many places atm with a level 40 character, but i'd like to go way beyond that. Ways of boosting the progression so level 40 characters are more are:
   1. Separate stats from skills and make those "reach the cap" at the end of this tier.
   2. Increasing the health & focus bonus granted to character for raising a level of this tier (instead of making it a constant bonus, as i think it works now)
   3. Increasing the XP sources; exploring the point of interest could grant XP, and placing random events with some questgivers couldn't hurt.
   4. Some sort of "rested" bonus that allows you to increase the max amount of XP you can spend in skill gains per skill use
2. Second tier (40-60): This is the tier where competitive characters should belong. A level 50-60 character should be able to participate (from the math point of view) in all content, meaning no monster one-shot him, he has a decent chance of hit against almost all monsters, and that kind of stuff. Best way to achieve it is that from the end of this tier onward no passive benefits are granted just by "leveling". (no more health and focus per level, whatever penalty to chance of hit doesn't apply from now on, etc). That means that even when you still have skills to GM, you completed like 4/5 of the progression.
3. Third tier (60-80): From this point onward things gets though; first thing is that the sources of XP are reduced to random events and the monsters you kill (you should've cleared the story at this point) so you should be killing the second while looking for the first. Also, here's where Decay starts to show up, so the already inclined progression road you were travelling now becomes a bit slippery. The goal of this is to make people focus on the skills that defines their character. Now players need to have special care with where you spend your skills into because the more xp you spend the harder decay hits you (factored by level).
4. End tier (80 - beyond): This is the point where players should reach the end of the "progression road" but at the end, instead of having a wall, we have a rubber band. They can keep pushing forward but the more they manage to advance, the harder they need to keep pushing to stay there thanks to the hardest form of Decay (meaning if you raise some skills above the established "limit" you need to keep playing daily to mantain it). This has two main goals.
   1. To deter players from working in other skills but the ones they raised high. Those raises only increases decay of the skills where they're really proficent, the ones that they want to keep and raise (promoting specialization).
   2. The "rubber band" effect allow top level player to test themselves and to keep the sense of progression. Also, training the day after a big guild battle or the big PVE encounter could be a good way to "buff" yourself. Basically this is the point where you "decide" how much you're willing to commit to the game.

To help players tune their character a "forget" mechanic should be placed, where you make a skill go down as affected by Hard Decay (see below) until it reaches 0. That's helpful because it reduces your "level", hence reducing the effect of decay in the rest of skills.

Skill progression
Or how and when skill decay is applied. It's worth remembering that all individual skill progression are influenced by the level tier the player is in, so the general progression influences all this.

Tiny disclaimer: Of course this should be applied to both kind of skills (actives and innates) but i must say innates are ones of the elements i hate the most. From my point of view they should disappear and make innate benefits granted in some other way, so this works best if we have only active skills in mind... but i'd say it's functional with the current skill tree structure.

The "when"

1. Apprentice (from 0 to 49): Raising a skill up to this level should be easy. Mostly because their output shouldn't be high enough to be a problem; they're mainly support and utility skills. Nonetheless they do count towards the amount of experience our character has spent so players should avoid having lots of these.
2. Journeyman (from 50 to 79): Skill raising becomes slightly more hard because you're entering in the field of expertise of the skill. Skill gain in this range is also inversely factored by level, meaning that when you're way down the second tier you may spend 10 but only gain as you spent 9, and when reaching the end of the third tier you may spend 10 but only gain as you spent 6. That works towards preventing all Journeyman characters.
3. Master (from 80 to 99): only skills in this range are vulnerable to decay, but since Decay is only "activated" when the character is already in the third tier, if the player knows the drill, he should be able to GM a couple of skills without suffering decay.
4. Grandmaster (100 and beyond): When you reach 100 you're one of the best in that skill, and once you get there you keep it. However, You can try to push your ability beyond those limits, but a skill over 100 means you're "keeping your shape as a master", and that requires daily training; going beyond 100 make decay specially hard on this skill. Here's where the rubber band effect kicks in; for skills you Grandmastered that you bring above 100 decay hits them by lowering its value on time (and harder for each point you raised it above 100) down to 100 again. Some sort of Hard Decay, so to speak.

The "how"
This is one of the hardest parts, because Decay is a punishing mechanic, and it's not easy to make this mechanic avoid punishing casual players more than the most.

The above proposed "progression road" is designed so decay only appears in the higher tiers so the casual playerbase doesn't face it up front, but if we let it being applied the way it is now (tied to the offline time and applied upon deaths/skill use) we're just delaying the unavoidable. I think it could improve somehow if decay is tied to activity on other things instead of just offline time. The basic concept is twofold.

1. Everytime you do something, you're "distracted" from the rest of your abilities that doesn't include that something.
2. Everytime you do something, you're reinforcing your knowledge and expertise over that something.

One of the ways to implement that, is making that using a certain skill gives it a certain amount of of "decay shield" (apart from skill gain) but at the same time applies decay to the rest, all those factored by the elements described above. Some bullet points to explain it further:

• After reaching the third level tier, using a skill spend xp on that skill as it should be, and also "protect" the skill against decay by the same amount it was gained.
• Using a skill make the rest of skills that are elegible for decay (above 80) to suffer from it.
• If a skill is "shielded", the reduction is applied to the shield instead of the current progress of the skill toward the next increase.
• Each succesive aplication of decay to a skill increases the reduction applied next time.
• If you use a skill that has been taking hits of decay, you reduce the impact decay has in it, apart from applying the "shield" to it. The amount you reduce decay impact is also factored by level (the lower level you have the more you reduce next decay effect).
• When a skill loses all its progress towards the next point because of decay, it stops affecting that skill and the increased amount of decay dissappears.
• While inactive (logged off), shields applied to skills diminish, so it does increased amount of decay.
• HARD DECAY CASE: if a skill is subdued to hard decay because it is raised above 100 and the character belongs to the third level tier (you should be able to raise a skill above 100 before that but it'll need focused preparation), then it can reduce the actual value of the skill and the increased amount of decay don't dissappear until it reaches 100. Hard decay also builds up the increased amount of decay applied while offline, so it demands constant (daily) attention.

Practical examples
Nothing exposes a concept better than some practical examples!

• For a player that just entered in the third level tier, the amount decay applied should be negligible compared to the "decay shield" applied, so if your character skills are adequately distributed you'll be raising and safeguarding them against skill decay at the same time. Decay is there and its presence should be notified, but the player shouldn't worry about it much at this point because it's automatically compensated.
• For a player that's midway through the third level tier, decay should be felt in the long run, but not short term, so you can log in, play an hour, log out and not having noticeable losses. It is felt in the long rung since everytime you use another skill the amount decayed increases, so after many hours (10? 20?) of actively using skills you may start noticing how the skills you havent used had reduced their progress towards the next point. Raising lots of skill at the same time should be very difficult at this point.
• For players starting in the end tier, decay should be something to take in consideration. You can lose progress in your important skills if you focus too much in raising a skill with a lower value. Also you're increasing your effective level and thus increasing how hard decay hits you, making it hard for you to raise.
• Players settled in the end tier should manage carefully their skills, because decay is a problem, but still not hard enough to completely prevent any gains thanks to the rubber band effect. Raising up a lot of skills to GM will eventually block the character from overtaining his skills, and eventually decay will hit him so hard that he wouldn't be able to raise anything else (because the gain in a skill is surpassed by the first hit of decay).

Conclusions and what's intended
Some general consecuences of all this wall of text... mainly highlighting the things that can be achieved thanks to the presence of decay.

• Because decay only affects advanced players, low level players are able to learn and enjoy without worrying about anything. If focused, they should be able to GM a couple of skills (a basic form of combat, maybe also a basic offensive or defensive move) before being affected by decay.
• Decay is introduced gradually, and even when the way it works it's complicated, it could achieve what current implementation doesn't but inteded to; just play and everything will be ok.
• Advanced players need to worry about specializing a bit, keeping only the low level skills that are necessary. Two interesting cases:
  • Instead of specializing, you can GM more skills than the average, but that will make your effective level higher, thus decay and the skill gain reduction will be harder on you, so you cant keep skills "overbuffed" as higher as the average.
  • You could chose to specialize a lot, GMing just some skills you'd like to use. That reduces the scope of the character, but since you're in the opposite case than before your "overbuff" can be higher. That way you favor
• The rubber band effect allow hardcore players to push beyond their limits, keeping the sense of progression and making them worry long term about their playtime (if you grind for 24 hours but you won't be able to play in two days, better to just play instead of massively grinding).

I hope that somebody have something to say about all this... and i expect that at least some of the ideas exposed here are worth the reading.

 

I really like the ideas of

• restricting decay to high levels only
• granting health and focus bonuses only in lower levels (they might be modestly increased at later levels by other means like raising some innates).
• factoring decay also by character level (maybe not too much though, skill levels should play a far greater role in this)

Not so sure about (or perhaps I didn't understand everything properly)

• factoring skill gains by character levels (it feels a bit unfair, adding complexity that feels superfluous, as skill progress requirements already follow an exponential curve)
• Spoiler: just a rant about "wall of text" apologies :)

  Eric Blair was quite an imaginative writer, but even he was not able to anticipate the quick proliferation of NewRead in the 21st century, by then more commonly known as the "tl;dr" culture; the general reluctance (and sometimes inability) to read groups of sentences totalling more than three lines of text. NewRead also gave a new meaning to what used to be previously known as a "screenful of text", redefining it as the notorious, insurmountable "wall of text" - creating one became a cardinal sin that needed to be apologized in advance. Decades later, creating a "wall of text" was established as a ReadCrime; perpetrators were often burned at a stake on top of book piles.
• the "distraction" mechanism - this might become tricky to balance. I think I understand in principle what you mean, but various skills might be interrelated in ways that might make this unintuitive (and therefore one might get feelings of unfairness - translating to not fun). For example (taking a RL example), if you worked for days with a large pneumatic drill, your archery scores might take a serious hit because your fine motor skills might be out of whack due to extensive drilling. If you played chess instead [of using the pneumatic drill], your archery might actually improve, due to concentration related carryover effect. So perhaps it would be better by stating simply that spending focus on anything triggers decay (not time in any big way, like time spent offline, or time spent online chatting with friends), and those skills that have not been exercised in some way (and are of high enough level) get targeted. Time could of course still be a factor but preferably a small one (relatively small base level of decay).
• the "shield" -- maybe I didn't quite understand it, but it sounds like maintenance of skills could be almost as laborious (grindy) as obtaining them? In my opinion maintaining a few high level skills shouldn't require constant grinding (even though obtaining them certainly does). The shield concept might achieve that with good tuning (for example adjusting the "shield xp" multiplier upwards while putting a time-based limit to shield duration), but it is really hard for me to get a good grasp of it without hard numbers.

All in all I like the approach of trying to look at the big picture - the complex whole with all its interrelated quirks. In my opinion it is the only way to achieve good understanding of just about anything. Long live walls of text!

 

Those were basically the main points i was trying to bring up (along with tying decay to actual actions, but reading your decay proposal i know we already agree on that), so i'm glad you liked them! i call it a success . Higher health and focus bonuses tags along with capping the stats (Strength, Dexterity and Focus) at lower levels but you didn't comment about that. Not so sure about that one maybe? Or is it that you just don't like it at all?

I still think that some kind of enforcement is needed to prevent people getting all skills to Master. Maybe i went too far putting it at the start of the second tier... but if you don't have something like that in place, you could GM all skills one by one since you don't lose points and decay only affects the "other" skills you're using.

Yeah, i could see the problems with interrelated skills... that's why i mentioned this could work better if we only have actives in mind and make innate bonuses to be granted in another form (something i also think is needed). Nonetheless your clarification

is spot on, but i'll go a bit further... what triggers decay is not focus being spent, but XP being spent (in the example below i'll explain why i think that's appropiate). Not sure how innates currently work though... if i recall correctly all innates gain upon any skill use (other reason why they feel so out of place) so that should change as well for this to work properly. Better if we get rid of them anyway

I don't like time factoring in standard decay mostly because that's regarded as "being punished for not playing" whatever the way you look at it, no matter how little the penalty is, and it's more attractive for everyone if we change it to "being rewarded for playing". I do think it's fair to include time here

to reflect your "brain" is getting back to a starting point (much like sleeping) and also in hard decay situations; I justify time on that because that's a byproduct of players choices. If they go beyond what's established, demanding compromise in exchange seems fair.

That should happen only way in the end tier. Let's delve a bit on that; the idea is that the "Decay Shield" is applied while you're using skills, and the same goes for decay so they sorts of overlap. We should also take in consideration that you never lose points unless you want to (via the "Forget" mechanic proposed) so if you focus on a skill for a while, the rest of skills will go back to 0 progress towards the next point, but you'll never lose skill points. (unless Hard Decay situation).

Ok! let's see if some numbers clears this up. For the sake of clarity let's forget about innates for a while (it's easier that way) and imagine that the only skill that gains is the one you use.

Now let's picture the situation of a character In the top half of the 3rd tier with 3 skills above 80 (A B and C) and he also uses four more skills that doesn't are subjected to decay (D E F and G). It is intended that decay is something to be worried about, but

• Everytime he uses any skill, 30xp are substracted from the XP pool and contribute towards the progress of that skill.
• At the same time, decay substract the equivalent to 1xp from the progress of the skills that are subjected to it. If the used skill is one of the three, it doesn't suffer decay, but also its gains a 20xp shield (should be proportional to the value of the skill).
• If you keep using other skills than the ones elegible for decay, decay will go up on those; so second time they're not used they lose 2xp, next time 3xp, next time 4xp and so on (should be proportional to the total xp the guy spent, AKA "level" here).
• Using a skill that decayed recently reduces significantly the impact it has on the skill; for the sake of the example, using a skill will reset decay to zero.
• A reminder; if a skill hit by decay is shielded, decay hits the shield instead of the progress.

Now let's picture a skill sequence while playing for this guy, assuming its the first time he uses his skills after coming online: B G E E A C D A B F E A. After using that, he spent 330 xp amongst all skills. Some more numbers that adequately shows how this skill chain affects the xp of the three mastered skills (assuming i wasn't a klutz and miscounted):

• A progressed 84xp (lost 6 in the first three uses but after its first use it was shielded so it doesn't lose more; in fact after being used three times and accounting the impact decay has on the shield, it still has the equivalent to 51xp left).
• We could see how B gained 52xp (it started shielded but in the end it wasnt enough to sustain the gain, so it took a hit before being re-shielded. After three other gains in different skills, still has 14xp shield left)
  
• C wasn't almost used, but still is in positive, gaining 19xp (lost 10 at first because of decay, and its shield ran out after last use hitting it for another xp loss).

Now let's outline some conclusions:

• We can see here how this guy can progress just by playing even when decay had hit him harder than what i was implying. To improve his Master skills further he could consider stop being interested in raising E, locking it and worrying about it later (here's where the clarification about decay being triggered by gains enter; if he locks that skill he'd be preventing it from generating decay, and reducing the impact it has on the three skills he's focused on).
• Since the shield applied is only related to the xp spent on the skill, and the impact decay has is related to the total xp spent on all the skill trees, we can picture the earlier 3rd tier cases where the player level is lower, suffering an initial decay of maybe tenths of xp against 2 figures shield. Making something barely noticeable ("just play the game" situation).
• For the very same reason, those that went high in the end tier (softcapped) have the GM's they have, and should be able to push forward between 2 to 6 skills above 100 (see the generalist - specialist example) by specifically training those at the same time (by locking the rest of skills, or by locking all of them and then training against a training dummy, like martial artist masters do).

Doesn't hurt to state that i'm aware that skill gains varies regarding how full is the XP Pool and how high the skill value is. That's not a problem, this example was done that way to have easy numbers. The decay progression per use is explained that way also for easy numbers' (should be waaay smoother at first, allowing much more uses before losing a perceptible amount).

Hope it is clearer now! also, walls of text FTW!

Spoiler

(Internet in its current form and most of its consequences weren't really predicted by any of the great sci-fi writers of the middle of the last century. Another proof that reality overcomes fiction ^^)

 

Comment on the decay stuff.

I see where your coming from. I think its basically that way now.

When you are levels 1-49 decay really isn't a factor. You don't have enough skills to worry about decay until you get situational stuff in your decks. At least in my case anyway.
In those early Adv levels you basically use everything everyday (or every time you play), so there wouldn't be decay on them anyway. Plus decay on a Skill that's level 1-49 in pretty minimal.
Later levels, when you have a deck built that's basically 5 glyphs stacked 5 times (total of 25), then you really gotta pay attention. If I have 40 diff situational offensive powers and 30 buffs that I don't pay attention to, and just use my Blades decks without training those other skills on the reg then they will decay an incredible amount in the higher levels.

What I'm saying is I didn't worry about decay until about level 60 as it is. Just don't get too spread out early on, or try and do everything, then decay isn't that bad.

 

From my perspective, it's considerably simpler if implemented thusly:
Skill Decay (whatever/however it's done) only affects any skill above level 100. If you get all your skills to 100 and lock them there, you never have to even consider, worry about, nor will you ever see skill decay.
Try that and watch all the complaints about skill decay disappear instantly.

 

That's the perception from decay got by players that play constantly, and precisely that's one of the current problems about decay. Decay is supposed to work against progression, so what seems logical is to impact higher on the people that is higher in level, whatever their playtime may be. Currently the decayed amount is directly tied to the amount of time you don't play, so it hurts casual players more than hardcore players... and that doesn't seem nice. It also works with a punishment philosophy, "you lost because you don't play", and that's deterrent for many people.

What i'm trying to pull here is to achieve the same effects Decay intends to fulfill but avoiding the negative elements perceived by the community. So i agree with you, it kinds of works that way... but with some nasty side effects. That's what all the fuss about decay is atm.

That's certainly a way to put it. It still leave some issues open, so it's not one i'd like, but it could work.

 

Totally agree. I though there was a 48hr cap on decay for those folks that aren't the 'hardcore' type.

We cant be punishing the casual player, and if decay is doing that then It needs reworking totally. From my perspective all is "fine" (kinda, decay needs work there too) because I play daily and pay attention to that stuff, I could see how a casual player could get really frustrated if every time they log in they're basically re-training the skills up where they were the last time they saw them!

 

Chris reported yesterday on the telethon that decay wasn't even near of working as intended. The cap wasn't being applied and some more stuff was off, so we'll see some improvements on that. Also we'll have the option (i think it will be in for R26) to remove decay by talking to the oracle.

Nonetheless something critical will remain unchanged; it still will be tied to offline time, which i believe it's a mistake because i expect decay to "balance the scales" between hardcore and casual players, and by punishing the one that can't play the game is actually doing the opposite. And even when it is mathematically balanced it has many negative impacts on almost everyone on the playerbase:

• No matter the workaround or the cap or the penalty, it's punishing players for not playing. That's a fact, and i fail to see how that's desirable. Why not rewarding players for playing?
• What's even worse, if you're trying to be fairly efficent you should forget about going online, kill two wolves and log out, because decay will be applied to all your skills and if you don't recover that in a play session, you actually logged in to lose progression.
• Also, since decay it's applied just while not adventuring, the vibe it gives is "be earning or be losing" so even for hardcore gamers it's a race; if you stop, you're letting the others take advantage. How is that helping everybody "to make their own path and leave a trail?" if you want to keep up you need to make a constant path through an army of enemies and leave a trail of corpses.

Because of all that i proposed this "shielded against decay" thing which (as Oba pointed out) doesn't have a much different outcome than the one we have now, but it has more potential to avoid all the above. Want to log in and just socialize? no problem, decay stays still because it's only applied when you actually do stuff (adventure to combat xp and crafting to producer xp). You can adventure/craft only 10 minutes today? Then decay will hit you for 10 minutes. You're still "losing" but the penalty is a byproduct of what you're doing, which i think is more elegant.

I'm very happy with the implementation i came up with but i'm not saying it's perfect... for sure it has flaws i'm not seeing, but so it does current decay implementation, but we've already seen those. And i'm a bit annoyed after knowing we're letting those flaws stay.

 

Best news yet. At least they know, and are working on it.

Most folks do a lot of their gaming on the weekends, maybe an hour or two during the week (and maybe not even that). There shouldn't be a penalty for someone who might not have the time to game as often as they would probably like to.

 

Oh yes they are. They acknowledged there are problems and i have no doubt they won't stop working on it until it achieves the expected results... but i keep thinking they should consider exactly what you said, because there are options and alternate perspectives (as i showed in the OP).

Let's see what changes are in for R26 I just hope they'll consider the kind of approach i'm making here (not the exact same mechanic, just the approach). I also hope some "Decayers of Decay" come here and check what can be achieved with decay properly implemented, so they build up some faith to help developing something new into something new & awesome.

 

@KuBaTRiZeS, yes I'd also like to see the offline/idle time decay mostly gone (though it probably won't be that bad when it works properly as intended) and having it tied to some activity related factor - most preferably spending of focus. Yes I'm still a bit reluctant to accept the "decay from xp" idea, at least when it comes to adventuring (with crafting there is not much choice because none of the crafting is set up to consume focus). There are several reasons for this, I mention two of them.

• Firstly, XP can be (actually should be much more than now, at least in the released game) granted also by something else than just killing monsters: for instance you can get xp simply by talking to someone, or visiting some place, and I see no point whatsoever in having decay triggered by such an event.
  
• The second reason is roleplay/intuitiveness/realism related: the very definition of distraction is a misdirection of focus, and focus itself can be defined as directing one's attention [energy] towards something, and away from something else. All active skills spend focus when they are being used, and so do innates (indirectly from using certain actives).

Well, it's a bit complicated.
I'll try to elaborate a bit how I think:

I hate the very concepts of "DPS" and "hit points" (yes they are "hit points" even if one tries to euphemize them by calling them, say, "health") with all my heart, guts, liver and spleen. The whole idea of someone dying from a single arrow (that someone had 70 hit points) while someone else needs at least 10 arrows (one who has 700 hit points) and can be guaranteed to not ever die from, say, 3 perfectly shot arrows (as even "criticals" merely translate to "DPS bonuses"), is well beyond ridiculous. Alas, it has been the norm since the days of D&D. With hit p...health, I don't see any good reason for considerable advances in base health level past, say, level 50-60. Perhaps I should emphasize that having health temporarily boosted by e.g. doping/buffs/magic/techniques is an entirely different thing from base health level.

Focus, on the other hand, as a concept, is a stroke of genius. Simple, easy to understand, well grounded in reality, yet able to accommodate things like magic and directing companion pets in battle. Focus can be improved with practice, so is quite conceivable that there could be such a thing as "GM level focus" which can be quite different from common adventurer (lvl 50-60) focus. So in the context of your character progression framework, I'd probably allow focus to be not capped until after lvl 80-90-ish.

Now to the stats (str, dex, int) - they are, of course, simplifications just like health, though far less annoying I'm a fan of RP justifications and things being at least somehow grounded in reality. I probably wouldn't cap them too eagerly, because advances can be made even at high levels. But they should be more "dynamic" - if there are caps, they should be soft, and all of them, especially str and dex, should be subject to considerable spontaneous decaying effects if left without exercise or abused. Activities should have positive or negative effects to them; for example, if you swing your pickaxe all day long, your str might improve (to a point) but your dex should take a hit in the form of abuse-induced decay and perhaps a temporary debuff (go hitting a rock for a few hours with a pickaxe or similar, and immediately afterwards go try doing something with your hands that require fine motor skills). If you drink alcoholic beverages, your strength might get a temporary buff, but at the same time it would (briefly) subject your base strength to abuse-induced decay. Likewise, those ales might get your dex and int get debuffed instead of buffed and also get them briefly subjected to decay (like, say, for half a day). So it should, for instance, be possible to get all your stats considerably decayed by spending too much time in the tavern drinking ales.

 

Oh, i meant to tie Decay not to xp earn (kill a monster) but to XP spend (skill gain). It is still an indication of activity and mostly tied to focus... but that way you avoid locked skills to generate decay.

Just for fun, i'll try to roughly put it as an RP justification... the premise is You do automatically what you're not interested into improving so it doesn't specially distract you; for example some people lose their keys at home often but since they're not interested in stop losing them (they're at home for sure! i entered here with them) they don't focus on dropping them in the same place. So they'll keep leaving the keys in the fridge, or under the bed, or maybe even over the typical cabinet at the entrance (last place they look), but that way ChannelSwapping and FoodOrdering are safe from decay.

Some of my organs feel the same way regarding hit points but mostly because the RP justification doesn't seem more believable (Maybe you already know it but just for the record, "Hit points" are supposed to represent the amount of superficial wounds your character before receiving a fatal one), because as game mechanic... they're just too convenient . But bottom line is, i'm with you regarding health increases; i'd keep those way low and focus more on active "health" increases (adrenaline rush).

We agree here as well. Focus could steadily improve as the character levels up and learns more things. I have this "feeling" in my head that tells me combat could be more interesting if focus, instead of working like mana (slowly depleting until nothing's left) worked like energy (you'd go out of focus after using 4-5 skills but then it quickly regenerates) with a wear-off element that reduces your maximum focus until you "rest" for a while. That way you're representing both attention (short term) and concentration (long term) in the same mechanic. Focus increase will be more representative since it could allow you to chain more skills one after another, and combat would be made more turn based; people would need to choose if they'll spend all focus on an all out attack or if they'll save something to defend themselves...

Hey look at me derailing my own thread I lost focus talking about focus! Oh, the irony...

We're quite the happy couple on this topic! I agree here as well I'd love to have a separated progression for stats that works the way you described. What i meant with "capped" is to reach its ideal state; once there they could be affected by all those. A more complicated progression (with more things that makes it go up and down) but with less elements. Simply beautiful. You know what i don't like? the perspective of seeing 80 str 80 dex 80 int wizards warriors and mages in the very distant future (meant to happen with the current stat layout... Stats are too juicy not to being leveled up.

 

my first thought: jesus that was a lot to take in folks. damn fine read, that.

my second thought: wait for it...

 

Wall of text?? Maze is more like it.. but I like these ideas.. it is interesting to think of a shielded decay mechanism.. but I have to agree with Thuri, we will have to wait a week and see what changes are made.. and then we can see decay as Chris meant it to be.. and hopefully sets a lot of us at ease! Or sends a lot of us back here to talk about the new problems with decay!

I really look forward to seeing decay work as intended.. still unsure if I will like it

 

just remember it won't be a FINAL release, we'll just see the direction they want to go with it, and we should keep giving feedback with that solidly in mind.

 

It's good there's some work on decay. I think it MUST be there, someway, but acting very slowly, so the penalty would be for people really playing few hours per week. In that case, why buying a game? So would be reasonable as well. But a faster decay would just punish casual players.