Game system changes for R35

So is Shield of Air ever going to become useful? Because right now all it is is a suicide button. Even at GM levels, the focus transfer ratio is too high to be worth ever using this skill. It would be better if this skill was completely redesigned. Instead of the whole focus transfer ratio nonsense that leaves you left with zero focus in a couple of seconds, replace it with a buff to your combat dodge modifier. Buffing dodge makes sense for Air, a magic type that gains effectiveness based on your DEX.

It's sad that the Air Attunement buff is on one of the worst skills in the game that ends up being more of a detriment than a benefit to use.

 

Thanks @Chris for the skill decay explanation. It seems very reasonable and I think people will see it as a non-event until they get way, way up there in skill XP. Let's all give it a shot and come back in three weeks if any of you still hate it.

Thanks @Berek for redirecting us here from the other threads.

Thanks @Roycestein-Kaelstrom for testing your death and proving the math is as Chris said. Especially with you at my same adv level.

If you had 150 skills at GM (level 100) then you would lose about 75k XP for a full accumulation death, according to @Chris. So roughly 75 "normal" 5 skull yellow mobs to get it back. This is so gentle it's like the No More Tears shampoo of controversial game mechanics. 150 skills at GM would require you to have earned 187,500,000 adventurer points according to Chris' math.

And according to Roycestein's test, at adventurer level 67 he has accumulated around 7,500,000 total adventurer points.

Also I did catch Chris' math that it takes 1.25 million adventurer xp points to get a single adventure skill to 100 (and about 207.5k to get one to 80). Useful stuff!

@Chris, the one additional thing I'd like to see is an explanation of how it decides where to take how many of those points from. I know it's "lose xp" skills first, "off" next, "maintain" next, and then learn last (as far as the four settings we have control of). And I had assumed it would take as many points as possible within each of those four groups and only move on to the next group if there are still points to remove. And within a group, let's say "maintain current level", I think you're saying it's automatically proportional across that group? But the part I'm confused about is this...I think you're saying it will go into the "lose points" group, take 0.004% from each skill in that group until it either did it to all of them or ran out of points to take? Then it would move on to the next group ("skill turned off") and do the same thing?

Meaning what it would actually apply to any given skill would never be more or less than an 0.0004% loss on a fully accumulated single death.

Except my brain is saying that can't be true, it has to take more than 0.0004% from some skills or it will have no choice but to take that much from all skills, because that's how much it needs to remove in total.

So, @Chris please give us the basic math for how it removes how much from which skills? Let's say I had 3000 xp points in loss and 0 in my pool, and I have 5 skills set to "lose XP" - one is level 10, one is 20, one is 40, one is 60, one is 80. What's it going to take from each of those 5 skills? And would it clear the whole 3k from those 5 or would it move on to the "off" skills with some automatic portion of that 3k loss?

 

Good question. My impression was that the loss would be proportional to the level of each individual skill, rather than distributed evenly over all skills that are set to be vulnerablt to a loss.

It wouldn't really make sense for a level 40 skill to lose the same points as lvl 80 or lvl 120.

 

That part I get from what Chris said (83 points into the pool for a level 80 skill, 500 points off a level 100 skill). Im my example though, let's say it takes 83 points from the 80 skill, 40 points off the 60 skill, 28 from the 40 skill, 8 from the 20 skill and 2 from the 10 skill (I'm just throwing out numbers, don't know the total xp for each level to do the math). So yes, proportional like that. And Chris specifically said it would be about 83 points off a level 80 skill that goes into the loss calculation.

But that's only 161 of the 3000 points it needs to remove so far that I lost. So does it just keep repeating that among those 5 skills that I set to "lose exp"? I think it would, and if they all went to 0 (or were not allowed to go below a point where they were needed for the skill tree to stay open) and there were still points left to be lost from the 3000, then it moves on to the "off" group of skills? Then does the same thing there?

So I think what it would do is take about 2200 points from my level 80 skill, 500 from my level 50, 220 from my level 40, 70 from the level 20, and 10 from the level 10. And stop there, only affecting those 5 that I had set to lose exp.

Truth is, I did Roycestein's death test this morning also and lost the same roughly 3k points. My xp pool is never below 3k exp or anywhere nearly unless I stand around tapping a non-combat skill and intentionally drain my pool to nothing (which gets really boring by the time my pool is down to around 10k, I tried that too this morning but it literally was taking me forever to get it to 0 so I gave up).

So the truth is, my xp pool is never going to be low enough that any skills get points taken away from them, at least not anywhere around my current adv level of 67. Still want to know how it does the math though.

I think my mistake is that I'm trying to use the math @Chris gave about how the pool gets calculated to also apply to how it gets subtracted from my skills.

 

@Chris I've read through your post here and your answers and there is no answer still to how a penalty on death limits anyone from having 150 GM skills.

Please explain how someone who doesn't die often or at all is even remotely limited by this mechanic?

In my opinion a penalty for death should never be something permanent and punitive, as others have pointed out, there is no successful MMO game today that uses this mechanic. Temporary debuffs or durability hits or stat reduction or whatever.. these are all good ways to penalize death. Make death debuffs last 30 minutes and stack even, that would discourage people from throwing their lives away willy nilly, but to take away character progress as a punishment for dying is a terrible mechanic.

Regardless of my thoughts on it though, like I said, please explain how this in any way provides a limitation to maxing out all skills.

thanks

 

@Preachyr I personally find death debuffs super annoying. If I'm just solo playing I can park my butt for 30 minutes and go watch TV or something. But if it's your tank and you're trying to do something fun in a group, we all get to stand around for 30 minutes or find another tank (or healer or dps or crowd control or rogue). Have dealt with that in the past and it's really disappointing to game play when it happens.

Here's how I think this does what's intended. Getting 150 skills to GM would take 187,500,000 adventure points. That's 187,500 1k xp mob kills (typical 5 skull area mob). Getting that many points doesn't come even relatively quickly without either doing high risk/high xp reward things (i.e. risking death) or botting or exploiting. If you're botting or exploiting you hopefully get stopped. Otherwise it would take you years and years not dying to get all those points accrued and take no death risks.

I think they may very well have to scale it higher at the high end of skills (like maybe the calculation is actually .0016 on skills over 100 instead of .0004) to make it more punitive the higher you go. The point is to effectively have a skill cap without actually having one. Chris did say they rolled it in gently, so I would expect the penalty will get worse once they have good feedback numbers to figure out how to scale it appropriately.

Also, this penalty for death is not "permanent" at all, and I would say that all death penalties in games are by their nature "punitive."

I understand your feelings about it and viewpoint though, and respect your opinion and thoughts. Just wanted to explain how I think they mean for this to work.

 

Good idea, but I think maybe they want to keep Air shield to be usefull only for some situations. Did you try it in pvp? maybe can be useful to avoid dmg and run. I guess it depends on the situation, but I'm agree with you that a shield only for ...run, sounds "empty". The dodge bonus sounds good enough.

 

@Senjut while I appreciate your interpretation of what they are going for, I'd really like to hear it straight from them, because based on what they have stated their goals are and the mechanic they put in place to reach it, this just makes absolutely no sense.

In your example of the amount of XP needed to gm 150 skills... that's really not that much grinding over a period of months, my guild is by no means powergamers and I see this as easily accomplished by most of our players.

Even if someone goes to a higher risk/reward type situation and dies every now and then... as long as they are not dying often, they will still gain xp faster than losing it.

More importantly, someone who wants to get to max level in all skills will simply not go to the high risk areas, and will grind safely and rarely die.

So to reiterate, having a decay mechanic based on death does absolutely nothing to limit the total skills of a character. There just has to be more to it, but i'm not seeing anything implemented nor planned to actually accomplish the goal of limiting players to a reasonable amount of skills.

 

@Chris: Thank you very much for your explanations. Being a developer myself I absolutely appreciate when you let us have a look behind the scenes. I love hearing about bear hours, seeing funny placeholder functions for interruption and such.
Also, I am a big fan of skill decay. Limiting skills by the time you play and the effectiveness you play instead of hard caps is the right way in my opinion.
I, as a casual player, am aware that I will never be as good as our hardcore players. And that is the way it should be. In real life, training 4 times a week will also get you better results than training once a month. And when the "4 times a week guy" stops training he will lose his skill after a while.

And that is how I always understood skill decay: A certain percentage of your skill decays over time
But that's the point: TIME. And I mean playtime. The skill decay should be applied regularly after a certain amount of playtime. A seemless decay would be nice. Whenever a full skillpoint / experiencepoint of decay is reached, apply it. Or do it once an hour, day, week...

Anyway. Playtime should trigger decay not death.
You want a death penalty? No problem. Lets have both: Death penalty and skill decay. But both mechanisms should not be mixed.

 

Wait, what? You want me to be punished for participating or hosting community events since when I am not actively using my skills they should decay just because I am in game? For obvious reasons I am totally against this.

 

i am appalled at the thought that i LOSE SKILLS when i dont play.
I HAVE NEVER PLAYED A GAME THAT DID THIS before, and i go back to the 80's in gaming. (actually 70's, but games sucked back then.)
now as for bob brave here: guy, please tell me what games you develop so that i can very much avoid them. not you. your opinion about losing skills when not playing.
you are SCREWING the casual player by making him lose skills for not playing.
PENALIZE DEATH, NOT INACTIVITY.
NO skill decay when you dont die.
I HAVE NEVER EVER EVER SEEN THIS anywhere else.
also, does this decay apply to crafting skills too?
now i am not a casual player, i put in 135 hours the past 2 weeks and 60 plus hours per week is normal for me since i only do one game at a time, but decay due to inactivity is KILLER for me.
something that would make me go elsewhere. DO NOT DO IT.
make me pay for dieing. NOT FOR TAKING A VACATION.
and dont go hammering about the fact that its so slow. its 1% of ALL skills every 4 days.
i do alot of low level mobs and such when i am not grinding the crafting stuff and my adventure pool rarely gets above 10k, so i could LOSE SKILLS if am on a hunting trip or something for a week or 10 days. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. losing skills for not playing.
its the worst form of coercion. its like paying the mob to NOT burn your house down.
PLAY OR LOSE YOUR SKILLS. NEVER EVER SEEN THAT BEFORE.
really a bad idea.
@Chris, please tell us if this applies to crafting xp as well.
one last thing. i have blade 83 and many associated skills in the 60's and 50's and i dont know how to grind 500k xp per hour. i just cant do it, AND MANY PLAYERS HERE ARE LIKE ME!

 

You are absolutely right. The same thing came into my mind after I posted that statement. I do not want anyone to leave a dancing party earlier because she doesn't want to lose skill.

However I did not come up with a solution to that. I was thinking about adventuring time (however that could be measured), time spent in PVE/ PVP zones, real time and so on. Everything has disadvantages and issues.
It shows me once again how hard these kind of design decisions are and what a great job Portalarium does.
I just still dislike the fact that death applies the dacay. This can be circumvented so I think it has to be applied continuously and not by an unpredictable trigger.

 

bob, why do you want skill decay at all?
frankly, suffering adventure xp loss on death should be it. period.
i dont see any reason to lose your skills upon death, or way worse, upon inactivity.

 

@Randbo: I explicitly said playtime to make sure I am not talking about the time you are not online.

But as @moko pointed out it not sufficient to use the online time either. And I agree.

 

ok but the game makes you lose skills while not playing because the decay is always there.
most folks here were talking about the death decay. im mostly talking about the general decay whether you are in game or not.

in my opinion, no skills should be lost, unless you turn one down.
if you die, you lose your adventure xp pool. now you can die many times with your pool near zero, BUT you wont gain anything either.
the first time someone loses a point in a major combat skill, they will LEAVE the game, and i wouldnt blame them.

one way to control high level skills would be to seriously ramp up the requirements above gm. make it really hard to get to 150.

 

@ Randbo: you need some kind of logic to limit skills. And I absolutely like the idea of letting player who invest more time and play more effectively be better (have higher skills) than others (like me).
In UO the hard caps lead to the fact that the first players were capped after some months. When I had my first GM skills they already got bored and complained that their playtime did not bring them further advantages rather than making more money.
After a while everyone reached the cap and there was nothing more to do regarding skill. You created more characters and did the same again...

Some people want to invest more than others. Why shouldn't we let them. However you need to limit them anyway. And skill decay makes your personal investment, your time the limit.

 

skill decay is an extremely bad idea. the hard core players will grow more rapidly. thats fair enough.
but to penalize a casual player for being casual?
its the worst idea since perma death.

also, who said anything about hard caps? make it harder to get to 150, but no hard caps.

 

Folks... perhaps you would do better to read what was written before jumping to conclusions, and getting angry in the thread.

If all you do is stand around at a dance party you will NOT lose any xp, whatsoever. You WILL begin to accrue an xp "death tax" the which is nicknamed so because it does NOT get applied until you die.

In fact, others were previously complaining that it is too EASY to avoid skill decay by simply never taking enough risk that would put one in danger of dying.

I repeat: No death = no skill decay.

It is totally possible for a player to COMPLETELY avoid skill decay by not dying. However, as explained earlier you would still have a net gain of xp if you were out adventuring in an area that was way too hard, so long as you were actually killing some things.

 

150 is already very hard to get to, and is actually not that much more powerful than 100, or 80 for that matter.

Why is it that people are so quick to pitch a fit in the forums and declare what is a "horrible" idea when they clearly haven't bothered to even read enough to fully understand what they are commenting on?

Randbo.. that was your 5th message here. Why not actually read the instructions, known issues, and release notes, and then actually go play the game for a month or two before tearing into the forums declaring how this game should work?

There is no penalty for being a casual player. There is a penalty for dying... which means a player must have been taking on a bigger risk than they could handle in the first place. Skill decay is totally avoidable.

 

jaanelle, that is not what i was reading @Chris saying.
he was saying .01% decay per hour. i understand the death tax thing and the accume in 4 hours to max .04%
he still said .01% decay per hour. it was not just applied to a death tax.
i also was concerned that the death tax applied to crafting skills too.