Improving Skill Decay

To start off, I'm not a huge fan of decay mechanics. From decay on weapons that is so severe that swords that historically saw us for centuries break in hours, to death decay being used like a baton to keep players from straying out of line and quietly grinding instead of burning through content too quickly, generally I think they're rubish.

That said, I've heard that the stated goal of the skill decay system in SotA is 1:"to prevent players from GMing all the things" or words to that effect, I've also heard that it 2:"makes death (more) meaningful".

Now @Chris or @Berek can let me know if I am forgetting any other stated goals of the skill decay system, but I think that 1 should be rephrased to 1a:"prevent players from being a GM in all the things at the same time" because as stated I don't think any ssystem of decay will stop grinders from simply pouring more and more time into GMing skills meaning that hard caps are the only way to stop them.

Now assuming we want 1a and 2, I would like to suggest using "decay ticks". A decay tick would represent that a skill is in danger of decaying. The number of ticks needed to trigger decay would vary by skill and skill level, high level skills might only need two ticks to trigger decay, while low level skills may never decay.

Decay ticks would be gained in two ways, first if a skill hasn't been exercised* in 24 hrs it would gain a decay ticks, second when a player dies a number of ticks would be randomly applied to skills.

Decay ticks would be removed by exercising the skill or triggering decay. When triggered decay would reduce the effective amount of XP applied to the skill, say between 0.1 and 0.5%. While a skill is decayed, each additional decay tick applied would reduce the effective XP by an additional 0.05 - 0.25%.

Decay would not be lost XP, only a reduction in effective XP, exercising the skill would reduce the penalty at no XP cost, at some increased rate.

Example: A player hits GM in Blades and then switches to Bows for a month. Depending on which the settings, they'd get some where between 3 to 15% XP penalty which would figure into between 1 and 5 levels. If they start using Blades again, they'd start working off the decay with spending XP with one month of decay taking between a day and a week to eliminate at GM level.

I think this is a better choice than an XP reduction because it addresses both concerns, getting and maintaing lots of GMs in this system is hard, but if you want to respec between two GMs you've already earned, it isn't prohibitively difficult.

* What constitutes "exercise" is an open question. I'd say it is 1/100 of the XP to reach the next skill level, but I'm not sure how that would play with skills set to maintain only.

 

Tbh I did not read this whole post, but decay is not a fun system its a punishment based system and punishment systems are well punishing .But either hardcaps or decay are needed because everyone being gm at every thing makes for a bad game in the long run, heck there are people with over 30 gms kinda game breaking imop.

Hardcaps (way to late I know) woulda been cool because it would have made that 4th or 5h character slot more desirable.

I would have paid for additional slots if they had real value.

 

Exactly how i feel.
Death is not enough to limit people, it only prevents going into danger.

He had me till decay ticks.
If im offline i shouldnt be getting *decay ticks*. going from 50 to 51 in a skill might take 50k exp. ( no statistical accuracy just examplr ). but going from 120 to 121 takes 5 million.
A decay based on time would absolutly destroy high level skills anytime i decide to not play for few days. They need a beter system, or a lot of people will be at 50 gms before christmas. Defeating first goal* i suppose which is that they didnt want that do able.
I ve kinda beaten the issue to death in other forums, im against god characters as if they dont change it, 0 reason to ever run more then1 char.. no replay value of playing once as a fire mage. once as a tamer. once as a fighter etc. its just, oh i wanna do fire mage? ill quickly grind a mil exp today and suddnely im a gm fire mage in 2 days instead of playing it start to finish. i also feel when skills are balanced, this way will lead to a *standard * deck for most things including pvp.
Heres the 7 skills you have to run or you get wrecked by everyone elsse who does!
(Current system made stealth completly universal )
Oh ure running skeli control point? heres the 5 skills everyone has to at least 100 that are skeli specific.
Just dont like it. Think it makes it a 6month to 1 year max mmo.
They can make exp demand more for each skill but that only slows the problem with same end result.
They can crank the death penalty, and it just increases problem of everyone playing it super safe.
*smacks horse 1 more time *
They had to do an increase in skill cost based on ure total exp not just level ( to eventually if ure 50 gms, taking a skill to even 40 would take 10 million instead of 10k .) or a full blown hard cap. too easy to work around, and havnt seen anything auggesting they have a better route planned.
*shoots horse in head *
Lol.

 

That's why I say I don't see the progress blocks in place working as intended.
Maybe I am missing some pieces in the puzzle but with what I know I can't see it working any time soon.

 

Fundementally, reducing skills that aren't used is the only way for decay to prevent a 100% GM. Other than that, caps or blocks are needed.

I recommend a system like this, which is used in many Single player RPGs to some extent, because it creates some leeway before the penalty applies, it provides a simple method to prevent the penalty as long as you don't have too many GM skills, and it let's you reverse the penalty without affecting other skills.

 

This is the part I don't understand about this entire issue. Seems like this game is doubling down on game mechanics that kill the player experience.

Why do we need any sort of soft/Hard cap?

Deminishing returns...
Deck building....
And now Decay...

Bear with me... But whatever cap or barrier you put in people are going to find a way around it. The people that want to have every skill at 100 or even 200 will eventually do that with either multiple characters or accounts or hard core grinding. Why not just focus on balancing the skills we have, tweaking the deck builder for balancing combat. and adding additional skills to grind? Stop wasting time on this mechanic.

As for the reason for multiple characters. People will still make them for other roles instead of other skills. PVP characters, RP Characters, PVM, etc.

Diminishing returns and deck building should balance long vs short term players in combat. Tweak and balance what we have before adding another imbalanced system to manage.

 

And your thoughts on crafting line not having a cap?

The economy is supposed to be based on player to player right? no cap on crafting means i can use 1 character to gather any and evrrything, and make ever peice and assemble. whats left to buy / trade?

Id counter argue rest but yea...
Crafting thoughts tho as i feel this is overlooked aswell.

 

With the above, a player could GM as many as they want, but they'd decay unless they exercise them regularly. I'm not opposed to hard caps, but without them there is no way to prevent a player from GMing all the crafting skills, the best I can come up with is make it harder and harder to maintain them at GM levels as more and more skills are GMed.

 

keep in mind that right now decay caps at 4 hours instead of the intended 4 days.

 

Problem with a sever death penalty is that it will encourage very safe grinding. People will just grind on whatever they know, and it kills any sort of encouragement to go explore if you will loose so much exp (as I heard people did when they first launched it). This is what we can call a band aid solution. It doesn't really solve the issue, it doesn't really fix the core problem that something is broken, it just covers it up a little bit, makes it obvious it's an issue, and addresses it to some extent.

There are some good ideas above, but I think the best one, or at least the one i like the most, is that there should be a curve on the number of skills you level, and that should increase the starting point of the exp curve, so that you can either diversify deeply to a certain level, or raise a very specific character to a very high levle (White Mage, Black Mage, Beserker, etc.)

Death penalties that slap you down for dying don't encourage fun and exciting play. I know someone who played Tibia for a long time, to a high level, when they took your gold, your exp, your everything if you died. It just encouraged turtling, not sticking out your neck and going "I wonder if i can kill that" or "I wonder if I can do that." It really just kills any sort of adventuring mentality because if you miscalculated, well, goodluck sunshine with retrieving 2 days worth of exp. It will also alienate more casual players because they can't afford to loose exp in such huge chunks.

in short, there are better ways to do this.

 

I would suggest spreading out the available crafted items better so that you need GM or higher to create better quality deco items. As it stands right now I can create everything in game. Again if someone wants to create everything in game they will get accounts or character slots in order to do it, no matter the cap or limitations you add. If someone is going to try to get to 130 in every crafting skill it will take years so let them try.

Also remove the dice roll for masterwork and enchanting. Make your skill give better propertities or higher values as you work a piece. The limiter here is going to be in the max dexterity dropping below a usable level. This will create the rare and exceptional pieces that only someone focused on that area can make.

 

I definitly agree with bottom half. Even if they leave it no cap.. without focusing 1 thing for a LONG time, you cant get certain bonuses.
Your right, 3 months in, most people can do just about any bonuse by themselves...

 

If there would be decay on non skill use, this would then become even more grindy game. Every hard core player then would have to start every day by using every single skill on training dummy before going to normal grind. Completely and utterly pointless time sink.

Now if the decay / cap would make skill cost more and more (the more skills you have), this would make mages highly non playable since you need 6 skills that you dont use to get the one that you would use, couple this with current affinity and even decent mage would be mega grind.

I am completely fine with this mechanic. Atleast after they make more changes to control points so that they cant be runned by single player. As of now they are now clearly more harder (mobs capture points alot easier back, resetting it(+bugs)). And like superstition canyon dind give us much more exp than we could get other means in the same time (not to mention a lot more gold).

All in all, I'm not game designer and I dont have good suggestions for better system that would not be exploitable or just plain stupid timesink.

 

No reason you couldn't use those skills as part of your grind, but yes such a system requires you to pay time to possess skills you don't use on a regular basis.

As I said, the decay system has two goals, prevent players from having all the skills GMed (at the same time) and punish the player for dying. At the same time, I think it is important that progress never be erased, but extracting a price in time or gold for maintaining "too many" skills is the best way to meet those goals.

 

What's wrong with having many skills GM? For one you can't use them all at once hence the deck system. The increase in damage and effectiveness is only like 5% from 80-100.. Once you go beyond 100 the amount of exp to obtain 120 or even 140 takes an insane amount of exp. lets take an example of a really low exp skill like blades to get to GM. At 100 it takes roughly 1.2 million exp to GM. To take that skill to 120 it will need about 7 mil more. Take that to 150 and you will need 134 million exp. That's like getting to adventure level 100 worth of xp for just one skill to hit 150 and that's a "cheap xp" skill. People see a lot of GM's on a char and freak out thinking that they are in some god like mode and untouchable... It's clearly not that way... At the rate the exp jumps up past 100 it will take years to obtain many skills past 150... For what tho a 15% increase in damage? If someone does obtain such a level should they not deserve that increase over someone who is just at 100?

 

My issue with everyone being able to max out every skill is that it eliminates any sort of uniqueness in character builds. There would be cookie cutter deck builds for each different task, be it a PvP deck, Control Point Deck, etc. It would allow any player to easily switch between playing as healer, tank, crowd control or damage as needed.

To me, have all characters eventually the exact same is a turn off to a game like this.

 

Regardless of how many skills you have GM'd, you only have ten slots on your combat bar.

 

at a time, yes.

You can easily switch decks to fill any role if you have all the skills, meaning there will be nothing unique about your character, and there will be standardized cookie cutter 'best' builds for different situations.

 

With a 4 second delay, yes. However, it won't do you any good in the middle of a fight, so that ten slots is the real limitation.

 

I still don't see why there's the need for limitation - the main appeal of this game over other alternatives was being able to, eventually, level everything.
Currently while there are not 'hard caps' everyone draws a line at GM - because going beyond it is minimal increase for experience invested and the curve just keeps getting harsher.
Who cares if someone has 100 GMs? It doesn't mean they're the best at everything, a pure specialist would be better.
And if someone wants to play 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to level everything to 150, guess what, they still can put the same number of skils on the bar, and the what...5%? More effectiveness they get from those 50 levels that cost them months of tedious grinding? I'd say they earned it no?

Hard caps and decay systems where people lose what they've earned are not going to help with player retention.
If someone who has played for years is no better than someone who has played for a couple of months, what incentive is there to play for years?

Linking this to the death mechanic just stifles exploration, adventure, attempting challenging content etc. Its a horrible implementation.