XP & Soft Caps.. "Camp #4"

@DarkStarr @Chris

So I'm sitting here watching the R45 Post Mortem and they get to a point were they're talking about why we have skill decay.. and how the ONLY options decay and hard caps.. ||PAUSE|| Right! This I have to respond to..

I'm having a hard time fathoming the notion that decay is the ONLY mechanism for creating a soft cap on skill advancement.

For example:

Let's say that if your total adventuring skill is beyond X, then each new skill level has a small but increasing multiplier. Such that every time you gain a skill, the next skill (ANY adventuring skill) becomes harder to achieve.

You would set X to say.. 1500 skill points.. anything beyond that becomes increasingly harder.. if a new skill level required 100 before.. it requires 110 now.. if you achieve that then another skill level for another skill that required the same 110.. now requires 111.. and so on.

Obviously you would fiddle with the numbers but it is a means of achieving a soft cap without the need of any decay at all.

In principle the math might look something like this..

if Totalskill > X, Skilltolevel = Skilltolevel * (Y + (Totalskill - X / Z)) Where Y is a constant multiplier.. dividing by Z is for balancing purposes otherwise the increase in difficulty might be too much.. and X is the max number of trained skills where you want the soft cap to start kicking in.

If there some reasonable excuse why this wouldn't work? And one thing I like best about this is you can chose where the soft cap starts kicking in. So your average player might never really notice but it can keep the hardcore players in check. Plus.. no one would feel the need to complain about XP decay.

Another potential option though perhaps not quite as efficient..

Reduce the XP granted by kills or quests if total XP + Skills > X.. same basic principle math wise.. the higher your total XP + Skills the less and less XP you get for anything.. making it harder and harder to advance.

In both scenarios if you want to make it easier to learn new skills you'll need to reduce / unlearn existing ones but it will still be possible.

Though I don't particularly care for the 2nd option personally it still provides a non-decay based soft cap (albeit a more indirect one).

SO.. I am not buying the line that decay is our only soft cap option. The easiest one to implement perhaps.. but not the only one and probably not the best since it doesn't seem to be stopping hardcore players at all, only slowing them down a little.

Ok.. on to the rest of the telethon... |>

 

Yupp.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...hts-on-death-penalty-skill-progression.99443/

No.

However the reason given by the devs is that it doesn't remove XP gained from exploits, while the decay system somehow magically does.

Decay is actually really hard to program and implement. We can see this just by going on all the exceptions that they have already have to add and all the exceptions that they are planning to add.
Then all the hidden cost of trying to explain it in tutorials and manuals plus all the false positive bug reports when people still don't understand.

 

A moot point I think. All things considered..

Yupp.. I believe diminishing skill progression has been brought up off and on a few times.. including as part of use-based skill progression discussions. Which is one of the reasons why I'm having a hard time being told it's decay or hard cap. Did we just not push the idea enough to get the attention it needs the last couple of years?? Did the devs not even consider it as an option?

It may not 'remove XP' from exploits but a lot of folks "suffering" from decay didn't get their XP from exploits. It removes XP from everyone equally.. just as diminishing progression slows everyone equally. So I'm not really seeing much of a case there.

Personally, I don't have a vested interest in decay. It doesn't bother me. I do however understand the emotional aspects and why it feels frustrating. I think diminishing progression past X skills would solve the soft cap without the grief.

 

Tl:dr - Decay actually is a hard cap, just a hidden one. Without some form of hard cap, no matter the system, players who have played 10 years will have a potentially insurmountable advantage over players who have only played for 3.

Actual post:

While I like the idea, the reason this is different/not the same as hard caps/decay is because it does not converge towards a value.
Converge meaning that it approaches a max value but never achieves it. Decay is, in essence, a hard cap that uses your exp/hour and playtime as the variables.

With hard caps, and the current decay system, characters eventually converge towards a max value.
What i mean is, for any given exp/hour rate, decay hits a point where you can no longer effectively gain skill, and instead just break-even. This period (at last calculation) comes in about 5 years, no matter what your exp/hour rate is. A higher exp/hour gives you a higher convergence, but that's about it. Source to check for yourself- Decay Tool
The exception above is if you literally never die. Now, do i feel decay should be triggered to something other than death? YES YES YES YES. Right now, a player reaches a higher "hard" cap by farming non-risky stuff and avoiding death/exploration. If instead, they put decay as just a linear function of time online actively playing, it'd work so much better, and more evenly affect all players. I still don't understand the argument for not having decay only accumulate/process in adventure scenes.

With a soft cap, while the slope of the growth line would slow, it would never converge (at least not using the system you've provided). People will still slowly advance (and some not so slowly). So it's effectively unlimited. In addition, people would no longer fear death, so more aggressive bots can be used to further accelerate this growth (high reward with no real risk).

So, with that in mind, how could we adjust this "soft" skill cap to make it converge, yet not be a hard skill cap?
You can't, a cap is either hard (converges) or soft.

Now, how could you make it soft, yet not allow infinite growth but still allow some players who work really hard to be sligthly better?

You'd have to change up the formula for new skills cost to be both a function of average exp earned over the last 90 days and relative to total existing skills, with the condition that this limit only raises when it recalculates, never lowers (or people could take time off then come back with a vengeance).
So, for example: Two people at 100 skills. One farms 100k/hour on average, one farms 20k/hour on average. If you used the above method, each would take the same total time (lets say 40 hours) to farm their next skill. However, the one who farms 100k an hour would have gotten a few more skills as he got up to that 100k farm rate, even though now he's leveled off. He still has to farm his hardest to keep up his 100k/hour farm rate, but so does the person who farms 20k/hour.

 

We did. It got attention. It was considered briefly. It was dismissed.

The biggest opponent of decay we had was Themo and he had several dialogs with Chris. During those several different ways to soft cap came up.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/decay-worst-mechanic-ever.42017/

Edit:


Also wanted to add that originally we didn't have decay when it was a level based point system - instead decay was introduced along with the use based system. So we only had 2015 really to complain. By 2016 it was obvious that the sunk cost thinking had set in and there was no longer any possibility of a change.
Back when it was introduced they said that the player base would get used to it because they had some nifty ideas on how to incorporate decay avoidance with lore and game play. However like @Umuri points out (in reverse) the only way for decay to work properly is if we cannot avoid it at all. Which would effectively stop all progression after a certain point.

 

The way that skill progression works there is already a soft cap with diminishing returns without decay.
The higher a skill the more xp it needs for the next level and the less benefit you get each level.

 

This. This x10000. There are VERY few skills where the benefit provided is even linear among skill points added so not only are we typically gaining a lesser % of benefit per skill point at the high end, it costs many many times more for the next 5 points than it did for the previous 5. This IMO is a brilliantly thought out system where specialization is now in *this* realm of gameplay and decay is like the brick that they've dropped on their own foot that penalizes it.

 

You're making some assumptions here. First, you seem to be assuming a static slow down in growth rather than an increasingly slope. If you get to a point where it takes you 5 years to raise 1 skill.. it's technically still a soft cap where progress can technically be made but no bot use is going to help. You could argue a soft cap eventually reaches a point where it's just as effective as a hard cap. Secondly you're assuming no alternative ways to make death meaningful would be implemented. Which is another subject for another discussion.

But this is only on a per skill basis and has absolutely no effect on developing additional skills. Maxing out skill A has absolutely no effect on skill B.. so it is in effect not a soft cap at all since people can still reach the individual skill's hard capped limit. If it was an effective soft cap then we wouldn't need decay at all right now.

The soft cap we're talking about here is one that applies to ALL adventure skills collectively.. or ALL crafting skills collectively.. not just each skill individually.

 

I think I like the decay being per individual skill, allowing a diverse array for creative deck building and use. I wouldn't enjoy being stuck in a certain min/maxed specialized build.

 

+1 to "link cost to total XP"

Reason: supports specialisation vs. generalism

 

I think that this method has a chance to work in a game that's alt friendly. A game where you realistically could create different characters for different situations/skillsets and keep them in line with the softcaps you mentioned. As it stands with this game, if we move in this direction... we're basically talking about a complete gutting of the system.
Let me explain my primary problems:

1) Adventurer/Producer level matter. These two things are miserable grinds and completely nix any and all "alt friendliness" about shroud.

2) Crafting really needs to be revamped to a "functional" state, whatever that means, before we're even able to consider how decay "should" look. As is adding decay to crafting would probably drive half the already small population to something else.

3) This system would totally grandfather anyone already deemed as an experience outlier in permanent untouchable land (while also really killing any incentive for them to play because they truly now can't progress). As an aside, I personally don't really see these guys as a problem. There's plenty of dev. choices/tools/other game examples as ways to make content where grouping is required. Shroud simply hasn't utilized any of it and the people that enjoy playing the most and also have the time to do so have become public targets as a result.

4) This basically makes the already miserable grind even worse. We're talking about making it take exponentially more experience to do the same things.... that already take exponentially more experience to specialize as a result of the natural curve... That's ... yea I don't really have a good term for it, but I'm not a drinker of this Kool-Aid.

5) Too many things in shroud require interdependence. Take magic for example: most summons are totally useless, but for skill trees with only 10 abilities in them you're still leveling that crappy summon for the attunement. Similar cases for the other spells that aren't ever used, but you still level them. Worse yet, attunement is also related to resistance so even if you use zero skills in the magic tree, it is highly likely you've invested significant experience into it just to not get destroyed by it. With required interdependence possibly being dumped on by making it take more experience as a result... yea... The proposed system doesn't really allow for leveling of "useless" skills.

6) This really isn't any different than decay. Instead of losing experience equal to what you gain, you're not just effectively not gaining experience at all anymore and stagnating. While this does fix the problem that decay has of being able to be avoided, it has other problems.

It's not a terrible idea, but it definitely could not be implemented in an "as is" system. Tweaks would definitely need to be made to how many systems work and many systems simply need to work before we can really have a conversation.

 

Well ok let's see..

#1 I'm not sure where you're going at this point but you were never supposed to feel it necessary to have alts. You s

#2 I'm not sure decay is even planned for crafting at all?

#3 Ok so you're basically saying anyone it'd be near impossible for anyone who isn't already super duper uber to catch up to those folks who are.. and those who are there will basically hit a wall. I agree I don't really see these players as a problem per say.. but it's a question of what the design goals for long term play are in the context of how far can players expect to level up..

To this I suggest it's mostly a matter of balance. A> Where do you set the bar where diminishing progression kicks in? B> How do you balance the 'slope' ? Such that high level folks aren't just hitting a wall? Perhaps the goal is to make sure that getting that next GM was about as difficult as getting your first one? Instead of GMing 5 skills in a day. So perhaps the slope levels off at a high point?

The thing we DON'T want to see.. is players GMing nearly every skill and the way things are going now that's exactly what's going to happen. Decay doesn't seem to be preventing that at all.. it's only slowing it down a little when losing a few million XP only costs the hardcore player a couple hours of play.

#4 You seem to be making the assumption here that lower level players will be affected by this at all.. which it totally dependent upon where you set 'X' in the above example. The number I've been using elsewhere is 1500.. which is the equivalent of 15 GM'd skills.. but you could set it as high as you like so your average player wouldn't be hit by this at all. This concern is totally balance dependent and can be avoided entirely for most players depending on where you set the starting point of the curve. And then of course the curve can be adjusted however the devs like.

$5 Perfectly valid concern.. but See #4.

#6 First, it solves problems that decay has. Decay is supposed to be an effective soft cap for overall skills. It's not. Simply by virtue of being avoidable. The only thing this suggestion really has in common with decay is the concept of slowing a player down.. which only works with decay IF and when you die.. Decay will not effectively stop the hardcore for maxing everything which is a desired goal.. diminishing skill progression will be effective as it's not avoidable.. BUT.. it won't take away your progress either. That make be talking semantics to a point but perception matters.

Secondly.. See #4. If you start the curve high enough this is a non-issue.

It is worth pointing out also that diminishing skill progression can be adjusted as new skills are added. Just like a hard cap would be raised when new skills are added. As far back as the kickstarter devs have talked about the plan to continually add new skills and that any limitation like a hard cap (if there was one) would be increased as new skills were added.

Your concerns seem to based on if the diminishing progression kicks in too low.. and if it did you'd have some good points. However, I would suggest having it kick in fairly high. No player should be raking in so much XP they're GMing multiple skills every few hours. That's a serious design issue.. but at the same time your average player who will never reach that point in years of play shouldn't have to worry about it.

If our choice is a soft cap or a hard cap.. I'd prefer a soft cap that actually does the job it's intended to do without feeling painful.

 

Make Adventurer level matter a lot less, and I think most of the rest of the argument you're making goes away. The game design shouldn't prevent someone from being a jack-of-all-trades if they want, just prevent them from being a GM of all trades.

Also, I think none of this talk about decay really has any bearing on the grindiness in the game, except in the fact that the game is set up so you have to grind if you're in a hurry to move to the next tier of zone level. But the grindiness of the game really just comes from the fact that there isn't much gameplay except grinding. Whether you're adventuring in a tier-1 zone, or a tier-5 zone, you're just going around in circles killing things or harvesting things repetitively.

However, what makes some people frustrated with decay is the feeling they can't play more casually without worrying about regaining losses in later play sessions.

But lets say we solve that by having a soft cap without decay, use a different sort of death penalty, making Adventurer level matter less, make the world less level-gated, and add gameplay that doesn't center around grinding in circles...

 

TBH, I am so tired of hearing people complain about this. At least this thread is more thoughtful about it. I surrender. @DarkStarr , please do something to stop the constant bickering making the forums a most unpleasant place to be. Of all the threads, this one seems the most level set. Ignore the ones wanting infinite progression.

 

In all the discussions about death decay, I wondered first time, only a few persons were concerned about how it works.
And I think a lot of (new) players don't understand it - yet, like me before ...
But at one point a player recognizes: I loose(!) XP, and also Skills lvl down if dying. What is this?

I. Before the death decay ...
First time I wondered about the system of an XP pool, which confused me so much at the beginning:
I fought and died, and fought and died, and gained not only one % of experience.
Very unlogical: The time, I made the hardest(!) experience with enemies, I received - nothing!
And this said: At this time, death decay wasn't inside the game! So, if it were, I think, I gave up very early, missunderstanding, what happens to me:
Making experience, fighting brave, I receive not one skill lvl up - I also loose(!) first XP points, after having none: Skills!

How shall a new player understand this?

For the reasons:
Ok, I was told: the system was implemented to prevent the using of macros and other things to play unfair ...
As Darkstarr warned in a thread:

These days September 2017, I read about banned players:
Chris wrote:

Well, as I asked before: how do other games handle this?
AND: If the system of XP pool was a decision to prevent botters and macro users - it seems, this doesn't work ...

So why do we need an xp pool system for a reason, which can't prevent it?
May be I missunderstood something - please tell me

II. As I posted actual: I am not against a kind of death decay, only the kind of system and how it works now:
I spend GAME TIME to EARN XP points.
Wouldn't it be fair to loose XP points in the same way?
If a death decay is calculated, it should be done in GAME TIME.
Not in the way, as it is: after 24 hours it starts again at 100% !
That's okay, but the view is wrong: 24 hours of life time, not game time
I could live with the amount of decay, with regard to the time, a player spend inside the game ...


III. Alternatives
There are a lot of REALLY GOOD alternates for the decay thing, also above, @Bowen Bloodgood described.
[What about this one I just thought of: TWO XP possibilities:
first way: using skills raises skills.
second way: receiving XP points from quests or big bosses for the XP pool, to lvl up FASTER.
And only THIS pool can be affected by death decay - not the skills lvled by using skills ...]

So much death ... pardon ... so much time was taken for programming things taking fun from playing ...
Just to prevent - what?
Prevent players to have fun playing further?

So much players have to pay for a few botters and macro users?
Well, who cares about? Don't waste your time for a small group of players
Take the time to provide positive things, the game needs:
a (funny and challenging) reason to play - and to come back.
Well, consider this: 1000 players in a game.
20 lvled up 100 GM.
Well, what will they do with all the GM?
And what is the meaning of all the GM they received not on their own ability and with fair play?
Well, that's not my problem - they made their decision and have to live with.
And the only reason to make a cut was the PvP-thing: And Chris found a way just to limit the highest skills - done

It shouldn't bring us to a point we focus on ways to prevent, what a minor group is doing, instead of building things, the major group needs ...

 

... it would be great if it uses PLAYtime to count ...