After I died, 7 skills were reduced by 1 point, 1 was a GM skill!!

9/25/2016 6:02 PM
Title: Seven skills were lowered by one point when I died.
Reproduction Rate: I only died once, I do not know how many skills will be reduced the next time.
Blocker? no
Details: When I died in deep ravenswood I saw on the icons that 7 skills were lowered by 1 point.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go hunting.
2. Die
3. See that some skill icons on the right side of the screen report that you lost one point in some skills.

User Specs:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8) System RAM: 12213
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 GPU RAM: 2017
SotA.EarlyAccess.Win.64.397.Date.09.22.16
Area: HiddenVale_Forest02_Tier5
Loc: (-192.1, 32.0, 6.2)


I died in deep ravenswood. I immediately saw 7 icons on the screen showing that 7 skills had been reduced by 1 point! I have not been able to tell if any more skills have also been reduced by 1 point because I did not have a log of what my skill values were before I died.

This seems like too much. I mean, one of these was a GM skill! That will take quite a lot of experience points to go back up from 99 to 100!

Was this intentional? Is there a writeup on this somewhere? What is the logic you used to determine which skills were lowered? How many skills were lowered? Did the skills go back to 0 experience in the icon skill point accumulator?

Seven skills going down by one point is way too much. And, I cant even tell without keeping a log of my current skill points how many other skills were also dropped.

 

What you encountered was skill decay. Every one of your skills would have been reduced by a certain amount when you perished.

The ones you noticed must have been sitting right on the skill-level line, such that when they decayed they dropped below to the lower level.

Looking at your screenshot, they are all still *very* close to the next level, so a little bit of work should push them back up.


I also see that those skills were set to "Not Train". That means the game is not allowed to put more experience into them under any circumstances.

You should also also consider setting your skills to "Maintain" in the future. Doing so will allow the game to transfer new experience to that skill to offset decay.

----

There was an error in previous releases where certain skills would not decay properly. Appears that has been resolved in QA.

 

So, @Kelly O\'Shay experienced what has been explained in the past is the way the system is designed to work. The - does not allow any skills points to go into a skill. The upward brown arrow puts just enough points into skills to keep them where they were at. That said with the - set on a skill it will not fall below the current level "unless" you die which is why he experienced what he did. Seems rather odd that someone would decide to quit playing because the game works as designed and as they told us it would, but oh well it could happen I guess.

 

Nice to see Decay work now !

 

Fantastic! Now we can grind slower due to super-slow regen (exhilarating!), spend more time with less money scrounging around for food via the now-slower overland map (exciting!), and when we die this ever-loving decay sets us back so we have to re-grind (electrifying!). Rinse, lather, repeat. Yay SOTA.

I love this game but the love is now much less like young-head-over-heels love and more like, my-marriage-sucks-and-I'm-here-out-of-loyalty-and-habit love, and I know a good divorce lawyer.

*weeps* do they not like us? When will the beatings stop?

I don't have much available time to play. These things are collectively just killing my experience.

 

That sounds really rough.

Also, good to know not to lock the skills right when they ding but get a bit into them for some padding.

 

or, y'know, set them to maintain.

 

lol I said this in another thread too. This is logical though. If we stop playing we a guaranteed not to experience skill decay. lol

 

How much xp was in your pool? Isn't it supposed to pull from that pool before taking from skills?

This really bothers me too. They have forced me to go into many different trees to play my mage because there is not 1 tree I can use that has my basic needs. I am dreading to see what the general population does when this happens...

Again, I'd rather have skill caps than decay. I don't want to redo what I've already done with my character, that is not good game design.

 

Has anybody been able to determine at what point skill decay becomes impossible for them to push beyond their current skill levels?

What I mean is, that at some point I'm assuming that we would amasss too much decay that we can never keep a large enough skill pool to continue to increase skills because once decay sets in (after death or skill gain) the decay offsets any gains we could make.

However I wonder if anybody has reached that high of a level of decay yet unless they had a few months off of work and now they can only play a few hours per week (some sort of dramatic cutback on play time).

However if we don't have a skill pool at all then decay is guaranteed right?

EDIT: I'm a little nervous about decay too, but I wouldn't want them to rush to skill caps just because of nervousness on our part. Chris is a math genius. He said it works.

 

it does that for skills set to maintain. none of these were.

 

I have lots and lots of skills and they are all on maintain...I wonder how much of my pool will be absorbed when I die...

 

I'm not entirely sure, but I'm guessing we need to know how many skill points we have directly attributed to skill gains. If we know how much skill points we have in our skills then we should be able to determine the ammount of decay per day/hour/or whatever... I suppose we would have to keep excellent records, or simply just test it out by going three days without playing and dying to see how big the drain is (which I sort of plan on doing tomorrow or whatever) lol

Although I have no clue when I stopped playing the other day so I probably won't have a full three days, but I'll definitely have more than two days accumulated when I croak tomorrow morning which should give me a rough estimate which is ok for now.

 

Okay I just tested this on QA. I had nearly every skill on maintain (except I forgot a few dashes and those 3 things went down 1 point)

I had 521,625 points in adventuring. After death I had 470,770 xp left. A net loss of 50,855 xp after 1 death
I had 884,163 points in crafting. After death I had 855,867 xp left. A net loss of 28,296.

I die alot, so this wasn't a big accumulation of deaths, just normal gameplay.

I have alot more on real since my QA character was saved so it's gonna hurt a lot more once it goes live for me.

I don't like this one bit.

**edit

Okay, just out of curiosity, I went and died a 2nd time to see how much xp I lose.

I had 470,770 adventuring points. After 2nd death I had 470,649. A net loss of 121 xp
I had 855,867, crafting points. After 2nd death I had 855,800. A net loss of 67 xp

Not nearly as punishing on the 2nd death. I would assume my first death was after a day or so of not dying. Not sure how long it had been on this iteration of my character tho...Still very painful.

Not dying will be vital in this game haha..

 

This is, as has been stated already, exactly what is supposed to happen when you have your skills set to drop.

This is not a case of decay out of control, or anything alarming to me at all, but rather a case of a player not understanding that when you set skills to advance, they advance, but when you set them to decrease or to "not train", they decrease. Do this by clicking through the little arrow to the left of the skill. There's a fourth setting, maintain, that probably would have prevented all of that loss if there was xp in the pool.

A few moments of interaction with the skill UI menu and all of this could have been avoided.

Here is a shot of my air tree, showing the 4 settings:


My discharge will pull xp from the pool/use to advance itself while my lightning will not pull xp to advance, but will only take xp to prevent decay upon death. My chain lightning will not pull any xp at all for any reason, meaning that it will decay eventually. My summon, however is set to actively reduce with each use and will decay at a much faster rate.

If we as a playerbase can really take anything from this, I think it should be to ALWAYS have skills we don't want to lose set to maintain and to not train skills to the point that we do not have an adequate buffer in our pooled xp to offset decay from inevitable death. Judging from Lord Baldrith's excellent observations, maybe keep at least 50 to 100k in there to offset the worst of it.

 

It would however be a good idea to include this in the patch notes. I tested this as well and had almost 20 skills drop by a point on my first death, multiple deaths didn't seem to have much of an effect.

 

As Chris stated earlier in the year, skill decay is capped after two days. I assume that is still the case. So it slowly builds during that time if you don't die or gain any skill. So if you die after two days and had no skill ups during that time, you should see the maximum amount of decay. But if you then die a few times in a row, or skill up, you won't see as much decay since it hadn't built up yet. So everything I read above seems to say it's working as designed.

 

Some skills barely dropped by .05 because they weren't set to maintain their current level... that's as intended. I'm not sure why anyone would make this seem out of the ordinary or out of control.

I'm high level with many GMs and my skills are always either increasing or switched to maintain so I never see them drop... once it hits 100 it's there to stay.

Good to know decay is working as I personally haven't witnessed any sign of it and was starting to get worried.

 

I really don't like the idea of linking decay to 'death'
All this does is:
Discourage exploration
Discourage pvp
Discourage attempting anything challenging
Once again we are pushed toward grinding trivial no-risk content for yet another reason.

I kinda have to agree with the above post that between this and the focus regen nerf it may be time to stop playing =/