Just to make sure : if you don't die, you never get hit with decay, right?

I have never lost any skill points on decay, just pooled exp.

So i guess since i maintain it just pulls from pool based off the skill levels maintained?

 

I have no problem with some sort of death penalty. I have no problem with preventing players from GM'ing every skill. But these are 2 separate issues and I don't believe that skill decay is a good solution for either one, let alone both.

 

I fear that this game is putting far too many reasons into it that make a person decide not to play much or leave all together. One of the things that bothers me most so far has been the skill xp pool. This is far too farmville an idea. Leveling up takes a ghastly amount of time. I can love the idea of SoTA, admire the landscape and some of the music. But if I spend most of my time in a game struggling to attain 2 skill points, then I tend to feel it is a pass time best suited to occasional mining in the wee hours.

 

We have three caps at the moment:

a) a vertical growth cap which is the monumental amounts of time necessary to level skills into the upper regions which in turn yield tiny gains for the effort
b) a movable horizontal cap which is the combat bar, limiting what amount of skills can be brought to the table for a given situation
c) a fixed horizontal cap being death decay, which limits how much one invests in skills and how many skills one invests in virtue of the costs associated w/ death

Cap (a) by itself would allow for persons to be jack of all trades should they care to make the strenuous effort, w/ a ceiling where things would settle. Cap (b) added to this ensures that for all ones masteries, their effective use is limited and only a handful of skills can be brought to bear at a time. Bringing cap (c) into the picture, players will now have to specialize or bust.

Caps (a) and (b) allow for a level of classlessness, tempered by ones own desire to grow and achieve as well as the situationally limiting deck/ combat bar; one can be as classless as they wanna be. Cap (c) takes away this liberty of potential classlessness and ushers in classes.

Without cap (c), we can switch out parts; it's the equivalent of having Soulstones in UO or being able to piece together different gears in a mech, robot or ship. With cap (c), not so much; we can only switch from what our death tax imposed class has afforded us.

If the type of limitations cap (c) brings us to is so important, perhaps we can achieve something similar via rewards and tradeoffs rather than with a death tax that has us chasing our own tails to re-earn the xp we have lost. Some ideas...

a) access to unique, higher tier glyphs for those that do not grow rival skill trees past a certain point
b) attunement bonuses in the trees one favors for specialization
c) effectiveness percentage increase for skills within specialization
d) greater group play (party) xp bonus for specialists
e) a bonus on skill gaining within ones specialization, similar to GM mentoring
f) a Suck It, Death Tax! (ooOOo OooOo) T-Shirt as a deliverable

There is room for further skill specific benefit, moderate but worthwhile as an incentive for specialization. To all this one can add aesthetic benefits such as unique titles, emotes, weapon, clothing and armor patterns activated and useful only when certain skill level thresholds are reached. I prefer no classes at all, but the above may be a better alternative to a death tax.

 

Sadly, with the changes to the system creating an even higher penalty for skills greater than level 100, its no longer specialize or bust.
Its accept that your character will be mediocre and not advance beyond a certain point.

If that's the case, personally I'd prefer a hard cap instead of having to grind out xp tax just to keep what I've already earned. Every time I step out of town headed for something non-trivial I have to pretty much accept that I will "pay" for this adventure with hours of grind later to make up losses for any accident.

This is seriously killing the game.

As @fonsvitae has mentioned, the vertical cap due to exponentially increasing costs already serves as an extremely effective soft cap.
The horizontal cap by limiting you to 10 skills at a time already serves as a limit to player power and creates the strategic/deckbuilding element.
What's left? Passives? Millions of experience to get 0.1% bonus? A player who has levelled one of these to GM and a player who has put 10x as much xp into it are going to have very, very little difference. If someone's going to invest 1000% of the time, I think they deserve to have a slight (SLIGHT) edge. Otherwise they have no reason to invest the time.

Do you want a playerbase that measures their time /played in years, or not?

 

...and most of the criticisms revolve around the idea that "its not fun if youre not grandmaster of many things", and the resounding logical fallacy that "most people think this way"

what does the superficial title do for you, really? why does it matter if youre level 97 vs 101? why does the sticker next to your name matter more than the experience you have playing?

do you know why they provide the means of turning off and abstracting away most of the game metadata? do you know why your avatar's adventurer level is not displayed to you by default? because its a huge distraction that makes the game less fun, turns it into work, and less enjoyable. let go of all of it! dont even bother looking at your skills (or better yet, set them to maintain at about 97 or 98, GM is a huge burden!). You will rock most of the game at lvl 80 in a lot of skills anyways, the diff between GM and 80 is not worth the EXP. let go! stop caring about being seen as some kind of master, and instead just enjoy mastering the game. your adventurer level is mostly irrelevant, as is the discrete value of your skill. instead, just adventure!

usually what most people consider fun I consider miserable. usually it seems "just playing the game" isnt fun to most other people. tortoise always confused!

1) practice not dying, and get good at it, and make death penalty a non event like most people are saying
2) realize that people with many GMs are people who have high skill at playing the game, and that the GM title doesnt merely mean you clicked a button a lot of times. it means a lot more. it means it isnt free. it means you have serious skills - skills as a human being thats able to cognitively process game events in such a way as to avoid death entirely (or most of the time, anyway).
3) realize that the whole term GM is pointless if its easily accessible by everyone. accept your status as "above average" or "adept" and understand that GMs are reserved for the best players.
4) free your mind to enjoy the game!

i proudly bear zero GMs, and only intend to GM some skills incidentally for roleplaying purposes (and it is irrelevant to me if those skills are useful in the game). I have no ambitions about reaching GM before the game is "released"/mass-marketed. I have zero interest in the number next to my skill other than what is necessary to freely explore lots of the gameworld (and even with that, I expect a significant portion to be inaccessible to me solo due to difficulty).

I concern myself with having actual fun and not work, playfulness, and avoiding death. I have no interest in being the top player in the game, if it happens incidentally, cool! but if not, I really couldnt care. I dont even care if im the lowest player in the game. I care about playing the game!

i almost died today, mostly cuz I was typing in here. I heard the sound of more than 2 arrows slamming into my avatar. I diddnt even bother looking at the health meter, i flipped on Sprint and ran towards less/no spawn. i survived. Ive played enough to know how much damage archers do to me, how quickly they hurt, my odds of survival, and also how much damage they will do to my back in the first few moments I turn and run. this is called a tactical withdrawl. you can not begin to comprehend the art of combat if you can not comprehend the necessity of a tactical withdrawl. learn the limitations of your avatar (which is very easy), and learn to withdraw and regroup when those limits are reached. FTW!

I would also reccomend reading Sun Tzu's Art of War and The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, and apply their philosophies to your everyday life (its all mostly about learning to chill out and be cool ). Then these sort of things will become second nature to you, and it will be a no-mind effort to not-die in SotA :-D

 

Funny, everything you have said, is exactly how I feel.... unfortunately my brother and some of my RL friends refuse to play a game that punishes you for" growing " that's how they put it. No one likes losing what they earned, if they do, they need to see a shrink .

 

Black Tortoise, I really like your intent to enjoy the game over the drive for mad skills.
As a long time RPer, interaction with others has always been my driving force in any game I play. In this game however, the dragging nature of skill gain seems to drown out or at the very least tamp down most of the enjoyment I can find.

 

I want to GM all air skills. Why? I am an air guy, and I want to be the best I can be at air spells. Is it the best tree? Not close; but I love the spells and I love playing as an air mage. I hate that I cannot risk death or else I will lose what little xp I have in my pool (despite setting many unused skills to unlearn) and regress. I wish they would kill skill loss, so I would keep what I earned. I thought after persistence we would always have what we earned, unless we risked items with (voluntary) PvP. The game should not require work to maintain what I payed to earn; that is what addictive games do (and why the makers are being sued by evil lawyers) and I think it a poor business model anyhow. Smart people will just stop playing. I have significant time and money invested in my avatar, I wish I would be able to just enjoy him. Please.

 

Last night I went from getting the dragon 3% down, to 40% down, to 80% down.

It took about 5 hours, countless wipes, multiple repairs, and no loot. Between my two characters I lost about 100k XP and gained 0.

Perhaps I'm not smart because I didn't quit the game. It is also possible that I am wasting my investment.

It sure felt like I was just having fun though.

 

You win the forums today, Sir.

 

To be honest, I think that's exactly the point of the decay system. It's a softcap system. If you're level 90+ and dying so often you can't progress anymore, that means you've achieved the soft cap of your character, your equilibrium point. I would also say that at lvl 90+ you're already easily in the highest level players of the server and can do pretty much anything in the game fairly easily, barring the most intense bosses. So for one you should not be dying often because of your power level, and death for such a powerful character should be meaningful. In my opinion, 45 minutes is significant enough a penalty, but still not a big deal for how often I die (next to never) farming 1k+ mobs, several at a time. If you're level 90+ and not able to do that, then the problem is on the player side, not the system. Of course, opinions will vary

 

Couldn't agree more, well said

 

Exactly. In cash terms :

Your invested XP in skills = bank account
Your pooled XP = cash in wallet

And when you die you have to pay a penalty of X$ depending on various factors (total xp invested, time since last death). If you have enough cash in your wallet, your bank account will not be touched. If you don't have enough, it'll come out of your bank account. Pretty simple.

 

Death doesn't have to be a regression of progress. That is the ultimate reason many are so dissatisfied with it.

Why play then? If they're apparently at their *soft cap* and can't proceed any further, yet there is indeed still farther to go, why play? Your time is simply wasted, you've no hope of advancing, why bother? I'll say it again, death doesn't need to directly negate my time played. Death should be punitive, yes, with something else that I SHOULD be able to alleviate actually playing the game in a side-by-side fashion and not all or nothing. What I mean is that my 2+ hours I spent adventuring should not be what is taxed on death, but something else I actually gained during this period. My wealth, my gear's life-span, etc. Stuff that embellishes my character and not the character progress itself.

 

if you can't make skill progress, you can still advance your adventurer level, which has some effect.

 

If you're losing 2 hours of adventuring on a death and dying every play session, there's a big problem with how/what you're hunting. If you're losing that much time on a death, that means you're hunting WAY below your skill level since your XP/hour is so low compared to your adventurer level, which in turn means you should pretty much never die. Alternatively, you're hunting way above your skill level and things pretty much work as they should : more XP from higher level mobs, but higher risk of dying. Finding the sweet spot is what good play is all about. Plus, i'm not sure where those numbers even come from. Even at lvl 90+, a full death is not even 30 minutes of XP at pretty average spots.

 

Im instantly assuming the people claiming decay is a good mechanic plays mostly solo or only with people putting in 3-4 hours per session.

You have a cap system in the unreachable max skills. Due to exp cost increase.
Why is decay there at all? Theres other penalties.

You died to a dragon and lost 100k? So we assume at your peak exp gain thats 20 min of grinding.

Sweet. Die once every farm, and do 2 hour grind sessions. Everytime you sit down try to do new content. Push ure limit.
Around the 3rd or 4th day you will be turning down group invites becsuse your literall going backwards.

Deaths ignorable for me as i play 3-4 h sessions. A buddy jumps on and we try ans do harder content, can set him back easily 45 m or so of his own solo grinding time. ( something that is already boring enough ). So now how long does it take before hes making a profit in exp with me? Not everyone plays 2 or 3 hours min at a time.

Its a stupid mechanic that even if its ignorable for you, is just turning more people off. Everytime he works on it, its wasted dev time that can go into making the game better and actually appealing for people who cant play like its a part time job.

Mix this in with load times. The fact everything is instanced. Sieged. Random encounters? That 20 min to recoup is more like 45 min in reality.
Not to mention how buggy everything still is and the amount of times leashing, spawning, and skills **** up.
**** i still lloose all combat skills permenently when i come out of water.( till i relog they sray grey ). Thats always a fun time recouping exp loss to that.
Now mix all that with less play time per session? The game is a big turn off for non hardcores.

Decay discourages group play. Discourages exploration and discourages the appeal of playing the game in small dosses.
Its a bad mechanic on that alone.

 

I know how to fix this one! Take your camera and try to get a close up of your avatar's butt and your abilities will un-grey. Not zooming in, but dragging the camera along the ground so it's looking up the butt. @Alley Oop for that amazing tip.

 

...really, it's just tilting it below ground level, but the other description is more amusing