Crafting skills do not YET decay?

Lets say you have spent months working on a crafting skill, then for some reason don't play for several days and when you get back you die, and lose a bunch of crafting skill points. Would you find that encouraging gameplay? Would it make you want to go out an work on your crafting skill some more?

 

No, it would be extremely frustrating.

I'd rather have caps before ever having crafting decay...surely they'll come up with a better system.

 

Crafting should just have a hard cap. That way there would actually be diversity in the types of crafters out there. Which, imo, would help with some of the economy issues where base items have basically no value since literally everyone can just craft them themselves. You shouldn't be able to be a master blacksmith, master tailor, master alchemist, master carpenter, etc. all at once. As it is now, many players have no reason to go to other crafters for gear when they can just do it themselves.

I think without a hard skill cap on crafting skills, this game will never have a good craft driven economy. The only buyers will be those who don't want to bother with crafting at all, which seemingly isn't too many players right now.

 

I agree whole heartedly about having a hard cap on creating despite my opinion that decay is fine for adventure.

I'm a GM enchanter and GM Blacksmith. As it stands, I plan on GMing everything I can. I don't think the .004 bit will stop me, either. However, if I have a hard card of, say 700 skill levels, then not only do I choose which, but also how far into crafting I go. It also gives more meaning to those that get 150+ in a single skill. God help those poor souls should decay land in crafting.

 

I don't think a crafting skill cap would give base equipment any value. As it stands, base skill (tailoring/smith/carpentry) is basically useless and trivial to raise to 80+. The real crafting skills are Masterworking, and those require heavy specialization due to the insane cost in mats and time. The real market for crafting goods will come from dedicated, highly specialized crafters that can make high-end equipment.

 

I mainly play these games for the crafting and gathering aspects. I personally would love to be a master of all trades but I do agree with your idea of a hard cap. Would be better overall.

 

Have you guys actually died in game and lost some Adventurer xp? It's really not that bad; like literally a few swings of the pole arm to get it back. As long as you are not dying all the time, it should be easy to manage. As far as I know, it is a flat amount, not an adjusted percent. I personally like the fact that I can potentially be self sufficient if I manage my character properly. As higher end crafting fleshes out, and you actually need a 150 - 200 level to do something, people will specialize.

 

It is computed in compound up to 4 hours. The most bonehead math would be for every 1 million xp you put in any skills, there will be 400xp added to the decay.

In a nutshell, if someone is capable of obtaining 1 mil xp, getting 400 xp shouldn't be a problem.

 

If you don't have some kind of function to limit players everyone will max out at the highest stats/skills that a hard-cap would allow. I don't know about everyone else, but a game where everyone has the exact same abilities/clothes etc., is no fun and becomes very monotonous. It's just like how the experience pools work; if you focus on too many skills all at once you will gain skills slowly, if you focus on a handful, then you will gain much faster.

Same applies to decay. If you focus on a smaller set of skills, you can easily keep them GM'd. If you try to keep all skills maxed out you might not have any skills GM'd. With crafting, maybe it should just be a time-based decay, rather than attaching it to combat. By the way, the same thing applies to crafting skills; focus on a particular subset of crafting to maintain at the highest levels rather than all the skills. This is my opinion on it and I believe, in this manner, the game can maintain a broadly diverse group of players with varying degrees of skills that keep the game interesting.

 

I'm fine with having crafting skills decay, and I think death is as good a time as any to trigger it. The other issues with crafting (expense of training and so on) will need to be sorted out anyway so to my mind are not a convincing argument against decay.

I'm definitely not a fan of the hard caps proposal, would rather see a purpose to pushing skills ever higher, with diminishing returns as you do. I expect that will come in time. Hard caps always seem too artificial to me, like the universe is somehow actively preventing me getting the most from my efforts. If I keep working at something, I expect it will get harder and harder to improve further, but the potential should still be there.

 

I agree that using diminished returns is the best way to handle the situation. The higher your skills get, the harder it is to progress further. But, at least you are still progressing. I still like the idea of a mechanism to decay skills though. Artificial, to me, is pretending that in real life, skills that you rarely use don't lose their edge. As the saying goes 'Use it or lose it.' This will help keep the game more interesting because you won't have every player with all their skills maxed out. Exact same stats, exact same armor/weapons, and all the same attributes as every other player. Also, I would think that having it like this will promote more multiplayer activity. For instance, if you have a crafter who focuses on leather armor, he or she would be able to produce a better product than others because that is what they are best at. Or, if you have a player that is best at healing spells, you would want them in your party to heal. Say you have a creature that has a great weakness to water damage but is nearly indestructible with concern to other damage types. You would need to work with that player to defeat the mob. Anyway, those are my thoughts on the benefits of decay, while using diminished returns.

 

This is via the Player Guide(Character Progression section):

"Known skills are vulnerable to decay. Decay accumulates over time, triggering on death. Death inflicts all accumulated decay, consuming pooled EXP for skills set to “Training” or “Maintain” and lowering skills set to “Not Training.” Attempting to train and maintain a great many skills at once can make death very expensive for your pooled EXP. Skill decay accumulates whether you are logged in or not, but maxes out at 72 hours after your last death."

Yes, skills decay accumulates offline but it caps at 72hrs from your last death. In addition, skills will not decay below 20 in any skill. So, basically, even if you don't play for a month, the amount of decay you suffer is limited.

 

To retiterate, I love the decay system for adventuring. It makes sense from a character progression point of view and since adventuring/player strength/death are all closely tied, it makes sense for them to be linked.

However, I don't think crafting decay, if any, should be linked to death, as it makes so sense to penalize a crafter for going out adventuring (no one is dying in town crafting). The sheer cost of materials and time required to get to GM in a single masterworking profession is deterent enough for someone to become "GM everything"... and if they do, kudos to them. It still won't be possible for 99,999% of the playerbase (myself included, and I consider myself a crafter first... maybe that makes me biased toward this but whatever ). Plus it doesn't affect other players (PvP) or content difficulty/scaling (PvE).