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

They 'fixed' it. Wasnt working properly in earlier releases.
Needs to tested and re-tested, but seems like its finally starting to work as intended.

 

Cool, thanks. I haven't been able to get onto the QA server lately so I only know what I read in here.

 

I think there may be some misreading of this part.

It is not that a skill under 40 doesn't decay, it is that a skill that has reached a minimum level (typically 40) and has a dependent skill below it will not decay below the level required to satisfy that dependency.

So skills below 40 can and do suffer decay, but once you unlock a dependent skill it locks it's parents minimum level at the level required for the unlock and decay will not take it lower than that point.

 

Oh well, already figured out a way to game this.

 

Seriously?
What in the hell does dying adventuring have to do with your crafting levels and why in the world is it affecting them??
Crafters are already forced to go adventuring to even get materials in the first place. They have to deal with fuel costs forcing them to grind for money (since there is no money to be made crafting). They have to deal with crappy success rates, exploding gear, random exceptional chance, random enchants, random masterworks, and now this too? Now you can LOSE your crafting skills by dying adventuring?

Boy, if the goal was to make it so I never, ever pvp or do anything riskier than grind greens, well, congratulations, because that's what its going to be now.
Want to explore new areas? See whats at the bottom of this dungeon? Try to kill this thing you've never killed? NOPE, sorry, your hard earned (and often excpensive to level) skills are forfeit.
What a horrible horrible implementation.
Linking this to death is just an awful idea. I somewhat get it with adventuring skills, but crafting? Seriously?

I don't have a problem losing pooled xp or even having some sort of debt system if it came to it, but the whole point of locking skills is so that they don't move.
This is bs.

 

Just the smallest possible hint of over-reaction in some of these replies...

Death needs consequences and compared to most other similar games, so far, death has been pretty much free of any real penalty.

As long as it stays at a capped amount of decay I really don't see the problem. If you die a lot on a particular day then each death isn't going to be costing you much after the first one.

Having a skill de-level is going to happen, but re-leveling them isn't going to take a lot of effort in most cases and seem like a pretty reasonable level of loss.

We need to keep in mind that when you take part in 'Early Access' you are not playing a finished and balanced game, things will change and they will not always be positive as we've not yet reached a point where rates of progression have been locked down.

A consequence free, fast leveling game is is going to leave people maxed out and wondering what to do next in a far too short space of time.

This is not a 'nerf' this is a step towards normality and a step back from 'easy mode'

 

Yikes the numbers posted earlier are scary.

I did die and lose some levels but I just assumed I had no pool (everything is set to maintain). At best I'm floating pool at 20k. There is no way I can take a 50k point loss without deleveling skills some of which I don't actively use.

This probably needs to be tuned down a little.

 

"Not a grinding game" - devs at the R33 post-mortem

LOL

 

That's amazing Themo! Also makes my heart sink.

 

I like that death has an actual penalty to it now. Reward without any risk is boring. That said, I don't think this decay should apply when your death was at the hands of another player in PvP. Losing your items is already enough of a penalty for PvP. Add decay to that as well, and hardly anyone will want to do PvP anymore.

 

I don't have an issue with death having a penalty. I don't even have an issue with an XP penalty. I don't think your earned, locked, skill levels, should go down. You grinded for that, you worked for that.
I think losing a % of one's pooled xp would be an equally significant deterrent.
People who have less pool would have less of a penalty, and would encourage people to train skills instead of carrying huge pools around.
Or a temporary timeout/stat debuff. Or brainstorm 100 different ideas here.

And not losing it in PvP makes sense - there's already enough things stopping people from PvPing and this would probably kill it outright.

Not losing crafting XP also makes sense, since its a separate pool and has nothing to do with adventuring.

 

So slow down the levelling. I personally don't think its fast, compared to other games on the market, but fast is a relative concept.
The thing is with SOTA you have your consequences up front - cost of gear, cost of regs, cost of kits, cost of consumables etc. - before you even get to the grinding bit.
You're fighting against efficiency.

Currently death is an inconvenience - you go find the ankh, you rez, you run back, and in about a minute or so depending on distance to ankh, you're back to what you were doing.
I don't object to death being made into more of an inconvenience -like say, returning you to your bind point or giving you a longer 'time out' via debuff.
I dont' even object to pooled, unassigned XP being lost.

I object to crafting skills being affected by adventuring death, and I object to losing hard earned, hard grinded skills having to be re-earned and re-grinded due to the implementation of a decay system that just isn't necessary.
Grinding takes a long time. There's always going to be a handful of folks who play 24/7 and level too fast. You're not going to slow them down relative to everyone else. They'll just grind it back. You punish the middling players and the casual players more. If people are levelling too fast, the solution is not to make us grind crappy green mobs MORE to afford MORE costs to go and get xp, or to make us have to get that XP multiple times, incurring even MORE costs...just adjust the mob xp rate to whatever is deemed acceptable. That seems far simpler.

 

Just to play devils advocate here.
What would stop someone from going out GM'ing 15 skills then keeping their pool empty to avoid decay?

 

An excellent point.
If you want to keep your pool empty, you're going to have to have things turned on and use that XP up - use it or lose it.
If you've earned the XP and put it into your skills I can't see a single way in which it makes the game better to have you "lose" the levels you've ground out.
Even if you 'lost' progress toward the next level but didn't de-level, I could deal with that.

It takes a long time to build up pool - especially for crafting. > it takes days to build up pool to start getting things in the GM range. You're not going to risk it till you've assigned it somewhere.
If you're grinding with things turned off, and pooling up xp ( to take advantage of the faster % transfer rate) then you're risking that XP.

At worst, you'll lose what you've been grinding this play session - IE I spent 4 hours mining and die before I could go back to town to craft and use the xp.
I think this would make people think a bit more about what they are doing.

That's far better than the alternative, of never risking anything because you're going to get set back days of grinding if you die.

 

I am not convinced Crafting decay should be tied to this.
Chris suggested a trigger of Item Failure for the trigger, but that wont work either. Item failure is way too common, and not every crafter is skilled in things that destroy upon failure or they could tie it to that.

My pespective on this is skewed for sure.
I am not concerned with decay. It's really a non-issue at a certian level you rarely die and you are no longer training skills full time. Your pool builds and builds.
I could just take my millions and dump it into GM'ng skills, and die even less than I do now.

 

And that there is the problem.
The high level players with the millions of pool? This doesn't really bother at all.
People still trying to actively level things are the ones who are going to suffer.

I'd be fine with a decay system that say - affected skills levelled up 'above' grandmaster, but would never reduce them below level 100.
That would make it more difficult for people to specialise in 'everything' to absurd levels but not punish the little guy.

 

Completely agree on this!!!

again, my skills are all at 80, it still wouldnt affect me.

 

Nor should it. All skills at 80 is I think a reasonable place to be and I think too low to for the game to start 'pushing back'.
Getting things to 110, 120 - takes absurd amounts of experience and people at these levels clearly have the time and/or pool to grind - if you need to add risk/decay to someone, add it to these folks rather than the people just trying to round out their adventuring.

 

The problem is we may all agree with that but Port doesn't. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I keep remembering Chris saying how keeping skills in the 40's was great and you'd only have a couple skills you'd take to GM (100's). So I don't think Port wants everyone really running around with lot's of skills in the 80-100 ranges. But Port's problem is that they are looking at the diehards who are willing to grind it out 24/7 to get those high scores.

Everything they put in place in an attempt to slow them down really only hurts the causal player. Almost all the nerf's to everything in game so far have been because of the hard core players, gold, ores, xp, spawn rates, etc... all nerfed because someone did something too fast for their liking... so what if it screwed the casual player too.

Port needs to start looking at ways to nerf things that don't cripple the casual player at the same time. (By casual I'm talking about those that play only a few hours a week or spend lots of time in game but don't spend it all grinding.)

 

That's a bit comforting actually. 5 million XP for 2 days of pooled XP for a GM in all combat skills. So basically if we play this game for a number of years we will likely find a comfortable place well below GMing every single skill.

Personally I don't want to have to keep an 800mil xp pool, but even if they add more skills I know I will never have a 5mil XP decay in two days. At the most it could be a few hundred thousand... Although I suppose that gming an ability score like DEX that would be roughly eqivilant to GMing about 10 active skills on average.

So I guess we still ought to be selective with our skills, but it sounds like Chris' system is good for keeping players unique in the skills they choose based upon the type of player they are. That is better than no cap or having a skill cap. If it works like this then I cannot think of any better possible way of creating a skill based classless system that allows for the ability to create uniquenss based upon a player's playing style (since it doesn't punish the player).

*diminishing returns
*decay requiring power gamer extreemists to make a decsion as to how much work they want to keep up to mainatain their high level
*creates an incentive for players to just hang out and be social for long periods of time (maxing out decay to 2 days)


Sounds like this is a great system. When they said there was a bug and decay wasn't working I thought it meant it wasn't in effect at all, but I guess it was working (according to that screenshot) except for a bug that someone submitted recently.