Just noticed Decay for the first time

In other words, it probably happened previous times, but didn't pop up on my side bar of tracked skills as a loss, so I had never noticed before.

Last night I died and two skills lost a level at once.

My thoughts were something like "Oh, wow, that just happened, don't die!"

That was about it. It didn't make me punch my monitor or anything. Seems legit, kind of nice to have a bit of punishment to avoid.

The only thing I feel is like it should be more obvious and player measurable.

With gaining we often don't know what all is going up if we have more leveling than can be pinned to the side bar.

But with LOSING, it should be in our face and easily measured by the players. If it has to be a bunch of skills that get hit, show them all in the middle of the screen in a popup that slowly fades out.

Or pile it all on one skill, but again, make that a big obvious icon in the middle of the screen.

And rub it in, with sound and graphics.

"Hahahahahaha!" (Giant skull laughing)

 

It should probably tell you somewhere in the game how much XP you're going to lose if you die. I think they were even going to do just that, but for some reason it was not implemented. I would highly recommend having an XP pool of at least 100k at all times, just to be sure you're not going to lose skill anywhere. It is dangerous to run around with a few hundred points in the adventurer pool.

 

Thing is it feels like punishment. Would you rather have ur skills de-level on death or just lose -10% xp for next hour? One feels like punishment and one doesn't.

 

How do you determine what "the next hour" is though? Time spent in an Adventurer Zone with mobs? Well, then I have my character just sit there in a zone and I go eat a pizza for an hour... This would be hard to implement, I think. I like where you're going with it though.

 

Well, I was fine with it, a little excited actually.

But there is this. Give a monkey an apple, he'll be happy. Give a monkey two apples, then take one away, and he'll freak out.

 

I would use 1 earth hour. Die within the hour and the timer resets and it -20% xp. Why would you stop playing and go eat pizza if you could still gain 90% xp on 1st death?

 

I mean... if I'm hungry... lol You're right though. I'm sure I wouldn't stop unless there truly was something else I NEEDED to do. It is conceivable that I might choose to go eat after a death just because I know the next hour will be less XP gain.

 

Imagine how hard your heart would be racing if we had permadeath!!! Now that would make it exciting!

 

The base problem with decay is NOT what it looks like now, but what it looks like after 6 months, a year, etc. from now. You might find it exciting now... Well what happens in 6 months or a year when there's a significant time dump associated with that death? Do you just decide to not progress any skills further with this character because it's met *it's cap*? At some point the best experience in the game isn't enough to combat a death without spending at least an hour just grinding at that spot. And that's assuming a *good player* skill level.

The problem is this: You can't have this *limitless* skill system for some and not all. Whatever is implemented needs to insure that the guy playing 10 hours a month can eventually catch the guy playing 10 hours a day (like catch the snap shot in time place of the other guy, not actually catch up to his real-time progress), in the distant future. Currently decay doesn't provide that future as the guy with 10 hours a month caps out in terms of what they can do, and that guy will basically then probably quit because he can't do anything anymore.

 

With myself being one of the highest levels or thee highest level in the game... I find myself no motivation to continue to play anymore.. I have 271 million exp pooled and don't feel the need to put that exp into anything due to it being so punishing. I would love to continue playing and raising my skills but its just not worth the time or effort for the minimal gains and heavy punishment for doing so.. Since this release i have dropped all my skills that were over 100 back down to 100.. Skills i don't use that often or don't even use at all (Heavy armor skills, some focus tree, and Swords)... I netted about 60 mil or so back into my pool. I feel that the game is already enough punishing on the "grind" and the amount of exp it takes to raise skills passed 100.. Now we have a even more punishing system to where we get 2x the punishment for wanting to "play more".. This basically means people will tend to stop playing at about level 100-110 cause its way to punishing and such a mindless grind. We want to be rewarded and have fun!!! It's a game!

My char i wanted to play was a mage! It was fun but now with all the heavy resistances to all schools of magic its just a watered down system that is just another punishment. They wanted to get people to play melee classes so instead they put in ridiculous resistances to really make it so you must use some sort of melee. Don't get me wrong resistances are cool when done right.. But they need a system that makes a creature highly resistant to one element (or a few) and non resistant to the opposite. The Fire Chicken is a perfect example of how stupid it is.. First off you need to do it for a quest!! Nothing like hitting it for 10-15 dmg with all schools of magic. It should be highly resistible to Fire and Sun! Then it should be non resistant to Water and Moon! Derp! Anyway i think its time to rethink all these ridiculous punishments and bring back the fun.

 

Amen!

 

I totally understand what you're saying, but what about the fact that in UO, we all reached the 7 grand masters (or later, the 4 or 5 legendaries) within a few months of starting out the characters? That was it. You were done with that character getting stronger. What do you think people did after that? The game had a healthy following for more than a decade. It seems to me that you reached that place that you're supposed to reach at some point. You just got there a lot faster than most will. You found that place where it is best to just leave the skills locked, and just do some small changes to "refine" here and there. I am pretty sure what happened to you is exactly what is supposed to happen when you have one billion XP in the character. We're simply not meant to reach 200 in everything. That was never intended. I know some people want to get skills near there. It's time for you to take this awesome character you built with all those hours and have some fun with it. If you are bored of the current state, then come back soon to see the new things that will be coming. There will be a lot of that.

I am not trying to attack you, by any means. I am just trying to point out that you probably arrived (quite a bit earlier than most will) at that place where they *meant* for us to all see at some point. That place in which you realize that you need to stay where you are with those skills and just work on gear, gathering with people to go have some fun, and the occasional refining of this skill or that skill. Crafting has no decay. You could focus a bit on becoming the best craftsman in the game at one particular thing or perhaps two!

Please don't take this the wrong way. I have respect for what you were able to accomplish in such a short period of time. I hope that you keep checking on this game as the OTHER reasons for playing start getting really good in the coming years. There will be plenty of really nice new things coming, friend.

 

@Nikko

The UO comparison here is really apples to oranges, not to mention 20 goddamn years, god I feel old. In UO, as a tamer, with my 7x GM skills and my swarm of dragons I could solo anything in the game. As a 7x GM bard, same thing as long as they came in pairs =P. Granted they nerfed my happiness to the ground later, but that took YEARS. AND I had purpose/point to going around playing still, let me list a few:

Now here's the primary difference (namely things lacking): Loot was a thing. Random property loot, magic items, rares, the list goes on. I had legitimate reason to keep trying to kill those dragons, accumulate wealth, etc. Where do you see any of that here? I would M^F'ing LOVE to have an alternate source of goddamned gear than this fucking *oops all yo **** busted* MW/Enchanting system.

Let's also touch on a couple fundamental differences between the two games...
1) UO was designed around the idea of specialization and the *class* system those caps brought about. As you've stated and I alluded to, having high skills was in actuality all that mattered. We have this horrendous adventure level statistic that is ultimately more important than what your skill levels are; this game is nothing more than a level based system with some skills as a frosting layer.

2) This game has no hard caps; that's the fundamental creed of the game. We're all, assuming we keep playing, going to hit the point @mikedeathdealer is at, and we're going to hit it FAR sooner than you think because experience availability keeps getting nerfed. The only thing I suppose you could say positively about it is that the hardcore will actually reach this cap later than the casuals, which is basically a first lol... cutting edge actually runs out of meaningful things to do AFTER the casual does simply because the hardcore is far more resilient to the exp hits.

I am completely sincere in my question to you... What then? We don't have magic armor/weapons to pursue (artifacts are NOT in line with UO magic armor/weapons, they're more like Doom's gauntlet as far as rarity), housing is a wallet warrior's game and is a black mark on the game as a whole (pay to decorate? You fucking kidding me?), there is no crafting in this game as it's a series of menus, then a pray to raptor jesus completion bar... that was ok in 1998; it's not ok now. I can't muster any defense for this side effect of decay. None. There's a tipping point at which everyone simply can't viably improve any more and for what? To stop people from reaching the already impossible hard caps..? Keep playing to increase the invisible stat that is adventure level while banking all your experience..? That's not even considering this tipping point happens MUCH sooner for people with less time to play.

It's a bad system. The sooner the community can have an attention span longer than *squirrel* and look long term... the game's days are #'d before they've even begun... and that's by DESIGN. I want something that's built to last for years to come. This current system isn't.

 

All of that is well and good except SotA is played in an "earned xp" context/ environment, which UO was not. If we wanted such hard caps, why was earning xp ever part of the design? To look forward to the day such content is meaningless?

I used to play a game called The Infinite Black which is remarkably like SotA in its avatar design and interplay (tiny, incremental and non linear gains at higher levels; gains in level were also attached to hit and crit chance; again, similar to SotA design [though SotA has since tempered/ tamped this down]). The limiter in this game is the number of gears one can fit on ones ship (similar to how SotA uses a combat bar and deck as a bottleneck/ limiter). It is an open PVP (and PVE) game designed by an old school UO player (Ozymandias) and, surprisingly, in my years playing this game I heard no complaints re the open ended growth that one can achieve. It was designed this way (on a steep exponential curve) and it proved to be a successful model.

I've seen this work well, up close and personal; I've seen this excel as a platform/ incentive for continuing growth in a PVE (and open PVP) game. I see a lot of promise for what we have w/ SotA working along the same lines (it already mirrors this well), but death decay is the monkey wrench that throws it all off.

 

What they have done unfortunately is to try and make content from previous content when people managed to complete areas/mobs easily due to their own progression. Instead of doing the sensible thing, and make new content ( add to areas on map lots room for new areas) and leave that older content for those that hadn't as yet managed to complete. What they have actually achieved is to pee of new/less skilled players by upping the difficulty to stop more higher skilled players completing it, and pee'd them off as well as now they cant do it without changing builds to usually the complete opposite of what they are etc.

With regard decay.... I went and visited a new scene other day, i managed to traverse the lava pit and all the traps, much fun, although i was scared of dying as i don't play as much as i once did and a death is expensive. I got to the other side unscathed, however once there my foot accidently touched a corner of some lava, not the glowing stuff, just a little coloured....i died a horrible death as wasn't expecting it and the damage was insane if not equipped for it, if that even helps much...Lesson from this for me, is not to risk any of the new content which looks fun as the risk of dying due to falling, traps, unbalance, unsure of surroundings...If i play now i just do the same old scenes where i know i will not die and be put back 2 hours play time, when i only have an hour or so to play.

 

Wow, I couldn't agree with you less.

271 million pool XP you say? Don't cry for me Argentina.

I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but the fact that you have so much more XP than just about anyone else is not a reason to "bring back the fun" it's a reason to examine how you got to that point in the first place. The game is not supposed to be wtfopwned by a handful of players that only want to grind out levels for infinity, there's more to do here than level and if you're already maxed out on every skill and every spell then what exactly did you think this game was about? Getting all the skills and spells to level 1000?

I too find the Phoenix to be annoyingly resistant to magic. But I understand why it's like that. Because if all a player had to do is GM a few water skills to kill it, then players would farm the hell out of that thing all day long. That's not good for the short term or long term health of the game. The real problem is that most of these monsters don't require any player skill to defeat, you just walk up and DPS them to death (because the whole combat system is based on DPS) and then you get loot.

But beyond that at some level you must understand that any game that allows infinite levels to be acquired by players is also a game that will run out of content very fast. That's why you don't feel like playing anymore. Because you've min/maxed your way right out of the game.

 

A lot of people confuse the hard cap in UO as a hard cap and also only take a snapshot in time of the long running game, while leaving out the enhancements/changes they made as they learned what worked and did not work.

The cap did balance individual characters by limiting the total amount of points they could spread to useable skills, but that did not stop player development. When that player hit it's cap you started working on the next with a different set of skills, and then the next, etc. when they realized people were leaving because of cost of having multiple accounts, they started soul stones where one account could then have 120 in every skill stored on stones and you could use them to adjust your character instantly. I had accounts with 7 character slots and multiple accounts.

So after 20 years UO got to a point through trial and error and stayed around because they adjusted and learned what the players wanted. Now this system puts this game back to worse then 1996 UO as if they haven't learned from history about what works and what doesn't.

The deck system was good for balancing combat as even if you are 200 in every skill you could still only pick 10 to use. Still needed tweaking on inate skills and player stats. And the time it takes to gain high levels would keep people interested both hard core and casual for a long time. This decay system is a bad design decision that really adds nothing to the game (as death punishments can be done differently) and alienates a good size group of the population.

 

Great attitude and post, salute!

 

Well, I must say... Toadster, Trihugger and some others have certainly made some great points.

 

we need more decay, and much harder death penalties. ENTERTAIN ME!