Idea: Decay Avoid Option...

It does really come down to how much playing time is lost to make up the xp. I just think it is important that we talk about what it really is, and not make it out to be a bigger deal than it is.

Personally, I think setting a player back by about an hour of adventuring time for dying sounds reasonable. And of course- that is for solo adventure. I can easily get 5-10x the xp adventuring with a group than I would ever get alone. What would take me a whole hour to make up solo, might only take 10 minutes with a group.

I'm still not sure that we are talking about the same thing. But yes- if you re-applied those skill points to other skills then you would have the same penalty as before. If you took them out and left them in your pool, then there would be a reduction.

It is intentional for there to be a point where it no longer makes sense for players to keep leveling their skills. This system was chosen instead of having a hard skill cap. But I think you already know this..?

I think you may not be considering that it takes casual players much longer to level those skills. There is still a minimum amount of times that a skill has to be used in order to raise the level, no matter how much xp is being earned. This is what keeps the decay from outpacing the skill growth.

A mostly solo player who only has 10 hours a week is going to be a solid year into this game before hitting GM skills. I should know because that describes myself.

Yes, I would just leave it in the pool at some point. You are right- there comes a point where I won't really be adventuring for xp anymore. It will just be a byproduct of whatever other reason I might be adventuring. I don't understand why this is a problem.

I'm currently having a hell of a time getting through Malice, much less beating the boss. We shall see- as I've resolved to determine the lowest skill levels necessary to get through the content. At my current trajectory, I am going to guess that I will have 1-3 skills at GM, 3-5 skills at 80, and everything else between 60-70. But no worries, I will be sure to report what I find out so that we no longer have to speculate!

If those people have skills at 110... 120... 150 that could happen very easily.

I went back and checked again. There were a couple of trees left out of the total. I will adjust the numbers but I don't think it will make a huge difference.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet. You're more than welcome to check for yourself. Or maybe have your friends check who said it was so high. Maybe there's a bug..?

 

I think the worst thing about decay is how opaque the process is.

You have to either keep your skills locked, or keep a menu that covers half the screen open in order to even know if/how much it is affecting you. Even if you do pay 100% attention (while trying to stay alive lol), you have to guess at it based upon how many skills you have set to - and what size your pool is. You also have no idea at what point you have overcome the deficit unless you keep all of your skills locked and do math.

This should be an obvious thing, like a line in logs that says "you have decayed (x) experience" at the very minimum. It would also make a lot of sense and reduce a lot of the anxiety causing threads like this if there were an indication of when you've overcome your deficit and also how long/how much skill has accrued since last decay.

I get that they don't want us to focus on numbers... they are just doing the opposite of what they should do in order to accomplish that. We are human, and we will always have self-preservation instincts and anxiety that we cannot get rid of. They are just pushing the numbers into speadsheets, napkin calculations, and gossip.. not eliminating them. In the very least there could be a red -> green indicator that says "your behavior over the last hour is going to leave you going backwards" for red and to "you are accumulating xp more than you are losing it" for green

 

I think i'm less phased by xp loss because I am coming from WoW ranked pvp, where a few bad matches in a row can set you back days or even weeks of progress when trying to push to a higher rank.. and there's no equivalent to grinding a couple hours of DR to make up for that loss... it's just gone.

 

I think they should plainly indicate the accumulated xp decay in the skills popup. That way there are no surprises.

 

I agree that I do not like the decay much (am not at the level where it would bother me yet but from what i have seen and heared it is quiet an issue). But please no running back to body... I hate that mechanic and think it is horrible.

 

I quite like the idea of passive Decay, especially from an Immersion/RP perspective. I'm also okay with the XP penalty upon death as it makes it so that dying has a penalty, and is not meaningless. I do support the idea that you should be able to recover the lost XP by finding your body. I think it would be awesome if there were a system similar to the way that the retrieving souls in the Dark Souls series is handled, where you would have the opportunity to retrieve your XP, but if you die before recovering it, the XP would be lost to you.

 

I thought at one time @Chris had told us that we would be able to visit the Oracle to clear our decay daily? Is that no longer the plan?