Skill gains are WAY too fast.

While it's nice unlocking an entire tree quickly and being able to make anything in crafting right away. It really worries me for the long haul though.

In a themepark game I'd expect this quick of leveling, but in a sandbox I'd expect it to be MUCH slower. You can salvage your way to being able to craft anything you need. What happened to the days of needing to make hundreds of plate arms before you were able to make a plate chest? I want that sense of accomplishment in a sandbox, not a fast track to the top like a themepark.

I know this is still early development, but it's now persistent. After I found silver ore, it literally took less an hour to get to 40+ in every taming skill (I locked them at that point) except for res. Being able to tame something like a ferocious wolf spider should take weeks/months to accomplish, not the day of launch =/

Okay, I'll stop ranting. I just worry about boredom setting in quickly.


Seriously, remember when you got your first GM? Yeeeaaah, you do and that was 20 years ago. We humans never forget our hard fought accomplishments.

 

Agree completely!

 

I agree with this, plus it also seems like you don't have to make choices for specialization as I thought was planned. I haven't gotten lots of things to very high levels yet so I don't know if things change later on, but so far it seems like you can easily skill up everything rather quickly with just your own loot from adventuring.

 

You may be right, but the cynic in me believes now that you got yours everyone else should be slow.

I think the leveling is just about right, perhaps even on a slow side. I've not done much crafting yet, but those I spoke with sure are needing a lot of materials and time to level up.

Am I wrong?

 

I would say it depends on the skill tree really.

Blades for example, once you get past 38 points in a given skill it starts to slow down considerably.

 

I leveled to 41 in fishing with 56 casts of a pole. I could have probably GM's the skill in a few hours. I quit fishing after that because it was not challenging at all.

 

I think the devs said if they change skill-up trees they'll roll back skill and give us tokens to regain what we spent so things stay fair.

You might be right as far as pure crafters go. My point of view is as a harvester who was expecting to not be able to go high in crafting skills in exchange for gathering specialties. What turned out to happen is that I am easily skilling with my own produce, so now I am getting crafting and harvesting skills without seeing limitation, plus I have more incentive to keep my own harvested stuff to craft for myself now instead of releasing them to the market for the pure crafters to get what they need.

 

Where is everyone getting the skill points they need for leveling? If I want to keep my glyphs fed, I gotta grind in the Shardfalls. Maybe I'm just doing it all wrong... Anyway - most of the time I'm doing anything, I have zero skill points available... congrats to everyone that broke the code - please feel free to share

 

I would agree fishing seems to go fast. I think Krissa has a valid point the pure gathering skills seem to go up really quickly. Mining as well.

 

Additionally, we have folks playing who have been playing consistently, wipe-to-wipe, for over two years....like me.

Through all the changes, updates, refactors, and balances.

We are VERY good at getting back up to speed, because we know this game better than most.

They slowed us from 4x XP to 2x...we adapted.

They removed bonus XP altogether...we adapted.

New players may not be in the same groove as we are, but we can take them along for the ride in many cases.

Once the bulk of players get to that 'sweet spot' of progression, things will likely begin to be retuned.

It will be harder for newer players to advance, and harder for older players to advance beyond their normal skill use.

UO skill gain wasn't set in stone from day 1, was it?

 

All I'm doing is grinding East Perennial Trail to level harvesting and adventuring skills. My crafting is just going up as a byproduct of this, hence why I think there's a problem. Granted, it's a problem that's great for me, but I'm not playing just for me.

 

You don't need a lot of materials to level up any crafting skill. You just need producer xp. The fastest way to level up any crafting skill is lot of mining followed by a little bit of the actual skill.

 

I haven't noticed much in the way of crafting because I don't craft much. I have seen some quick skilling in abilities but that seems to start to slow down in the mid 30's. I would agree with gathering skills lvling quickly as I hit pretty high on most of mine with out noticing. However there are some skills that do take a bit to lvl. (looking at you stat skills)

 

Respectfully, there's a few things at play here..
1) Getting to silver ore requires adventure level 60 to do comfortably, unless you exploit your way to the ore. (The guardians of the silver ore nodes are all yellow at 55)
2) The only way what you describe is possible is if you have an adventure pool in the hundreds of thousands, or more.

Having said that, if you've a) found an extraordinarily accessible and plentiful source of silver that doesn't require (1) and you were able to accomplish your taming gains with an adventure pool under 5k, then you get a big /salute.
Why? Because you're playing the game far better than I can, after 32 releases.

 

i doubt that.... it seems to be an exponential curve.

i dont remember any "grinding" involved, getting any skill to 40 in uo tbh, and there aint been the exp pool restriction. most remember the old days, when you started to get a grasp of the game after 1/2 year of devoted playing. thats been before wikis and tutorial videos though. when you once made that experience, you could easily 7x gm any char in about a week. i doubt this is possible here without extensive aid of a whole lot of people.

i agree that some points aint fleshed out as needed yet, but id really like to see you reaching gm mastercraft whatever as fast as you could in uo (refering to crafting). or gm tactics within an hour of beating cows at jhelom farms...

 

No exploit, but you can run dead to the first floor silver spawns on in Elysium mines, res behind in the tunnels, lure the three mobs that stand in your way down the tunnel a bit, pick up a few silver nodes. Then go taming, attempt to only tame mobs with a SUPER low chance, this way you gain in taming without losing a collar. Then get healed by a buddy, tame an obsidian wolf, now the wolf can solo anything on the first level the silver ore spawns in, you can go to the bottom level where the earth elemental are and the wolf can 1v1 them easily, if a second one gets on him if you join in the wolf will survive. Now you're farming diamonds, silver and onyx while gaining around 1,100 EXP per kill that your wolf does while you're mining. Spend a few hours doing that and you'll have a 100k EXP pool to use on all the skills you can use in the safety of town. Build a pally character, make equipment easily because you gained in smithy from salvaging, now you and a few buddies set off to get a ferocious wolf spider. Then it's off to Deep Ravenswood, set the spider on aggressive in the area with the bears. Now you can make a full lap getting ore, cotton, wood and nightshade while the spider picks you up 2,000+ per kill while you were gathering. Before the night is over you'll have 300,000 in your EXP pool. Now you can level up whatever build you want on the bears while the spider holds aggro.

 

I'm with ^

 

if thats not the spirit of uo, i dont know what it would be... try to pull that off in any other mmorpg.

uo has always been about knowledge, so far (few days into it) this seems to resemble it quite well.

 

That's fair, but also UO (and any other sandbox) always required a grind. like I mentioned, you were not making plate chests until you made a house full of plate arms. Here you just salvage rusty swords for ten minutes now you are making plate chests (at least able to skill wise). So even if you min/maxed in UO, it still took you weeks to GM something. I can't remember how many times I sat at the bone wall. And once you said "power hour" and you noticed it was active, it was go time. Granted here was have MANY more skills we can pick up, they just seem to level really quickly.

 

you actually cant compare that to uo... given the resources you could easily gm anything within at most 5 hours. yet there aint been no armor stats and me playing a mage, all i needed was a newbified skirt, halfapron and strawhat. in uo armor (imo) was just a burden, something youd lose when dying. here its different. different time. mmos and our expectations changed dramatically.

ive never seen any vet in uo complaining that its too easy tbh, they just went with it and exploited the knowledge as best as they could. noone complained about dupes, neverending resources, skill gain hacks etc. except if they missed it and thought everybody else got an advantage...