I think the xp decay thing is a really dumb idea

And this is your choice but it also means you cannot complain that you lose a ton of points upon death.

Skill management is paramount to training especially if you maintain a less than huge pool and train to many skills.

 

You agian..
Awesome okay so in that sense it makes more sense.. im several gms in just havn seen an increade in demand to maintain skills...
But yea exactly encourages safe play.. and not sure how it effects pvp.

They should make my pvp death penalty in xp be the reward to person who kills me.
Pvp would be waaay more exciting then.
Also then if theres a super high level multi gm ganker in pvp.. makes hunting him down lucrative. ? thoughts? lol

 

Could not agree more.

 

Ahhh my exact play style. 8^)

 

Nope. They already discussed this. The reason why PVP has no affect is they didn't want farming of alts... not a bad idea, but the "fear of exploits" killed that option.

 

Ahhh... i never even thought of that. bah they should just hard cap a skill total and done n done.

 

Glad to have another hard cap convert. now if only we could convince the devs...

 

they are in denial lol

 

I still don't understand why it's a necessity to have caps or skill decay when you already have a system with steep enough diminishing returns that training any skill becomes completely impractical at a certain point anyway. I also think that if you're going to have skill decay, it would make a lot more sense for it to be somehow related to skill use. i.e. If I haven't been chopping down many trees lately, it would make sense for me to get worse at forestry more than it would make sense for me to get worse at something I've been practicing frequently.

 

The pointlessness of the decay system is evidenced by its trivial, completely ignorable effects to lvl 100 players who have no problem grinding for hours.
Its more daunting for those of us who really don't want to have to grind MORE just to keep what we've earned.

The current skill system FORCES players, particularly mages, to level up all sorts of crap they have no need for except for attunement. And now we have to pay to maintain these skills we never use but have to level anyway. Pretty horrible system imo.

All decay is doing for me at the moment:

1. I turned safe fall back on to 'active' training since there have been...mishaps.
2. I will not go help anyone do anything remotely dangerous because there's now a risk to my basic progress? Ugh
3. I wont try anything new or hard, as there's no incentive whatsoever to do so, the best money over time remains the grinding of trivial mobs ad infinitium and if I was after mass grinding of XP, well, I'd be one of the really high lvl folks who barely notice the decay happen.

 

Decay means most players will end up avoiding the boss mobs which are among the most interesting features in the game. Think I'm gonna go try my luck against an ogre, Phoenix or dragon now? Don't think so. Which means the game gets boring and repetitive with lower-level mobs. And the goal of defeating higher-level mobs is set aside. Which means less play time. Which means an overall weaker player fabric. Etc. BAD FOR THE GAME. BEGONE YOU UNHOLY ABOMINATION!

 

Great explanation, NRaas. I was a little confused before too.

To the OP, I think it's a good system. I do however believe it's not enough of a penalty. Although I wouldn't suggest increasing the rate of decay, I think there has to be something more meaningful in the moment when you die (especially for pvp). I'm hoping that the devs think about pvp death more and focus on ways to make people "go away" once they've been killed. There's nothing worse than killing someone in pvp only to see them pop back up again moments later at full health looking for revenge.

 

any decay implemented this way, that would even be a slight inconvenience to the power gamer would cripple the casual players. So in turn making it a lot more difficult for a causal player to get to competitive levels and compete. This method is going to push people to micro manage there EXP pools and limit what they do, because of the death cost vs Exp gain ratio. One death on a troll sucks all gains that troll will give, and I only have 1 GM.

I wish they thought this through and been a little more creative in how to implement this. We have a use based gain, why not a use based decay? Can't work everything all the time.

 

I die so often, perhaps I'll start going backwards in levels - now that would be a "feature" and a half LOL

 

Just in case anyone hasn't noticed or forgotten, 4 hours is much less than what devs want, it's only going to get worse over time is what had been said is true. For single player gamers, even hardcore titles like the Dark Souls series don't hit you for permanent stats.

As I commented in another, now missing, thread, getting setback because I attempted to advance before the devs thought I was ready is one of the only reasons I've permanently quit MMOs, so I hope the devs know what they're doing, because I doubt I'm alone in this.

 

Dark Souls just simplify the death penalty. If you die, you lose all the XP in the "pool" equivalent. If you don't claim it before you die again, it's gone for good.

 

But most MMORPGS do deduct stuff for death, EQ you lost xp, to the point you could (if you were painfully determined) go back many many levels.. I do feel death should have a penalty, other than just a bit of armor/weapon decay. However, Im also half with others, by the time you get to 80 getting to 100 or more, was like an eternity and took a lot of xp, for a lot less reward than the effort took. At the same time we shouldnt be trying to solo dragons with puny skills and dying 1000 times and not having something to show for it.

 

That's a controllable resource though, you can spend souls to reduce the risk or hoard more to buy more and risk it. SotA's version is like a cargo cult imitation of a system like that.

 

As a casual gamer, I am nonplussed by the decay. I think 4200 per million is,, frankly, negligible. I'm not going to stop trying to kill the demon with friends. I'm not going to be afraid of dying 10 times for an hour and losing a grand total of 30k exp, which takes me about 15 minutes to get back.

I'm all for a death penalty. I played UO and EQ back in the day. I remember freaking out when I was near death and being exhilarated by that. I'm tired of MMOs that punish death with, at worse, a corpse run and extra notch on their death counter.

That said, I would like to see a hybrid system, perhaps, that allows you to select up to 25-30 million XP in skills chosen by the player that gets ignored in the penalty. That way players never worry that their base build is diminished, power players still face decay, and there can still be a deep impact in death.

 

Yes, but it doesn't just affect that one GM skill. It affects EVERY skill you have regardless of level.

Hate decay completely and utterly, very pro hard cap with retraining options. Having said that, getting decay on a skill you aren't using makes more sense. The only problem is it then forces everyone into a state of random grinding of everything to not lose anything. So end result winds up being the same one way or the other typically.