2 Big Picture Questions

The ol' wall o' pain technique, put all the fun stuff behind a huge wall of boredom and grinding to keep all the casuals out. It's a bit of a bold strategy at this point in the game though.

 

Boredom and grinding is all we got atm Although R41 is best release so far

 

It is a valid technique, just check with anyone that is a fan of the X series of games.

 

X series?

 

X2 and X3, recentry rebooted rather poorly. The game is famous for often acting like a single player Eve. One of the qusers can take up to a month of in game time if you are decently skilled at the game and that quest gates some of the coolest toys in the game. SotA seems to be following a similar path at time.

 

@MrBlight

300-500k an hour killing what ?

What things ?

 

I pull in about 300K xp and 6K xp in an hour doing my normal farm route as seen here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/138444735

Nothing special, this shows you the entire farm including selling the items for gold. Normal 5 skull zone.

 

Actually the question was meant for MrBlight directly following his post, but thanks for the info and video.
Oh, and did you mean to say 600k there where you said 6k ?

 

? 300-600k exp. /h

I can do just under 400k/h solo in wyrmsands. I can do over that in sequanna collosus.
I have guildies that duo and clear well over a mill each an hour.

Hell even just running sieges i can clear 300k +.

As for most things i guess every skill that is 1.2 mil to gm is easily done in just a few hours?


Hope that answers the question?

 

In an hour ?

 

Yes. Sorry all those are /h. Edited post.

 

Another argument against the idea of a cap system. Every game that has caps has multiple characters. So all a cap does is make you have to have multiple characters to do all the trades. Even if they put caps in on the current system nearly everyone can have multiple accounts. So what you are saying when you ask for caps is to charge more RLT to have all the trade skills. There won't be any less supply or demand everyone will still be able to do everything. So anyone that thinks caps on trade skills will limit or change supply and thus improve the value of goods are ignoring the reality of gaming. Caps on adventuring have a similar effect except the only thing they will limit is access to content as you will not be able to clear content with a certain type of skill sets. So when you argue for caps what you are arguing is limiting content on players and making the game more expensive for them.

 

This game does have multiple characters. Its just not implemented yet. I do not mind if you have to level second and third level characters for gameplay reasons. I am a huge RP person and had different characters for different roles. I am not worried about the supply and the demand, I am worried about game balance per individual characters vs other individual characters. UO has hard caps and has been going for 20 years, and people are paying the subscription on the official servers even. So to say hard caps do not work is very disingenuous.

 

Did you not read what I said. Hard caps do work for limiting content so if you are after that I can see where you are coming from. They don't limit anything in trading since you can always have multiple accounts to have all the trade skills so nothing will change in trading.

 

who are you replying to?

 

I think i have to disagree with you here and use actual examples.

You have said previously how its not possible for everyone to be a master of everything. So that caps dont really matter when it comes to Adv level. This missed the premise of my post, which was that any / ever skill your raising, (especially magic) is actually increasing your base resist / general strength. Meaning that new person to play catchup to be even remotely comepetitive, is hundreds and hundreds of hours. I think this leads to a weak PVP game, and and increasing level gap. Your doing 1.2 mil an hour? How many hours till you reached that point? How long would it take someone from scratch, to get on par with where your at? How long to be able to realisticly be a match in PVP against you? My opinion is not only that is that amount of time increasing every day, its already to large to have a succesful PVP in SoTA unless they have an alternative mechanic.

Secondly regarding more on the post im quoting, i disagree once again.
Although Craft/Adv trees are 2 seperate things, one ties into the other pretty massivly. Lets use mining as an example.
Can you start a brand new player and go right into farming non stop silver? No. It takes a good chunk of time to get your ADV level up to match this.
With the uncloning of the mines, and the general feel they want to add dificulty to gathering materials, it is a MUCH more timely manner to make an alt, level him up to par to handle the mines, then continue mining for the exp to do another craft skill, as opposed to taking an ALREADY leveled up character, and walking in an starting a new crafting tree without any hesitation.

Using myself as an example? Theres no way in hell i would be power leveling another character anytime soon, just to do another crafting tree to stay self sufficient. But right now i can do it on my main, because the zones are so blatently easy to them.

Example - Someone skinning the dragon every 2 minutes to mass millions of crafting EXP, and suddenly GMing every crafting tree.
A lot easier to GM everything with 1 character, then having to start from scratch in order to max the other 4 crafts on a new character ( untill youve also got 1500 hours of adv grinding into that character as well )
This isnt saying that its not a massive time sink either way, but i think your wrong in the idea that it wouldnt help the general problem im talking about.

But that being said, im not sure how you would add exp / skill gain towards purely crafting skills/refining skills, and not have the issue of just trading off your main account, bypassing my solution. Would need to think on it some more. (tho im not sure you can really limit someone willing to max everything, i just think even crafting caps / specilization might add actual future to a lot of less-hardcore players, and to players who arnt going to put thousands of hours into each character, but one main.)

 

Haven't read all posts, but this!!!

I elswhere posted that we should have decay for skills not beeing used and not just for death.
And at an amount of making it impossible to have more than let's say 10 GM adventuring and crafting together if you play hardcore 24/7.
Some desired people then can hold on their 10 GM and became epic, some have around 5-8, casuals end up with 3-5 GM.
Specialisation over Grandmaster of Everything.
Skills should decay down to 80, nevertheless and then need to save the further decay by setting it on maintain.
If you decide to GM something else you can always start from there .

No Maintaining of skills above 80!

 

I believe I am in the minority here but none of what I am reading sounds like it would make for a fun game. It sounds like more work more time and more people quitting.

I think they should take it the other way. Remove decay, spread the power curve on skills out a little more and let people get everything to 200 over a long time. Focus on the deck system to balance PVP so that it is quick to get a usable deck for PVP that is utilitarian but, takes time to specialize and add flexibility to your character. If someone wants to spend the next 20 years getting every skill to 200 then great we all win because there is a player base. Have people grind so they can grind more then grind some more to grind more just to keep up with DECAY is a poor game choice that will just annoy the casual player and result in people quitting.

 

I agree in the part that decay is stupid. Especially death decay.. which just makes people not take risks and hurts the game.

 

I think a lot of people arent self-sufficient (cozy) enough to withstand falling into the race of keeping up and will burnout on the way when the realize what huge amount of XP and time that is to get to that. Either because most people won't always want to seriously only work on process , but have other priorities.
And if this would be implemented , then some hardcores will set the measurement of 200 soon and to get new people into PvP will take them a lot of time, to long i guess and only achievable to very patient or very ambitious players.

Having a natural decay to non or less used skills and per death is a good way to softcap skills.
Also, to allow everybody to work on every skill and master it will end in less variety .
If they design it like this i am done with PvP . My authenticity as a Healer, Moon, Storm and Icemage is more important to me as to level the fire, death and sun tree for example. I just accepted to need to skill the innates from Sun and Earth to get my HP and Int higher.

We really need to go away from the Master of Everything concept or we will be all the same in th end, the one Uber Avatar in just different cloth.