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

Not worst idea ever at all. In fact its a good thing, Teaches us to Manage our skills responsibly, and maintain A healthy Exp pool.... Im sure there was talk of Something to do with the oracle Wiping Decay.. i could be wrong but was something similar to that i believe

 

Be careful what you wish for...

 

I just did some more test on the QA. While the adventure skills are not a big deal to gain since we could just go kill mobs to replenish the XP to fill up the progress again.

The crafting skills are in a different situation when the producer XP pool is at 0 (zero). Since most of the harvest and crafting actions barely yield any XP, that would already make it very difficult to bring the refining skills (milling, smelting, etc) back to the original state. The production ones (smithing, carpentry, etc) only yield big XP if an item is crafted for the first time. It seems the only viable option to quickly go back to the original skill level is to go get XP from mining, which yield 500 xp per hit.

It is doable and not hard. However, it is kinda awkward that I need to go mine in order to efficiently retain my skill levels for textile, fishing, milling, etc. Perhaps increasing the XP yields from all harvesting/refining/producing activities may help making the skill decay retention for crafting skills more sustainable.

Well... unless if we can go talk to the oracle to wipe off the skill decay for crafting, then that is something I can work with (most crafters will craft in town anyway).

 

This will be a huge step in the right direction. We have nearly unlimited sources of ADV XP, and the ADV XP is scaled well, 1850 from a bear, great! Getting 500 Prod XP from a node in the same area as 1850 for a bear seems off to me. Either more nodes, or better XP gains per node would help.

 

The XP required at level 100 is what is scary. It takes that much to raise the skills at that level. You were seeing people with GM level skills de-level. Themo was probably the most extreme case possible, since he collects GM skills like the rest of us collect maple wood.

If your skills are in the 40-60 range, or even 80, it won't be nearly that bad. Also, the decay accumulates, so dying a lot in a short period of time has little extra effect after the first time.

EDIT: it's not just because they had GM skills, it's because they had a lot of them.

 

+ how much I am allowed to give. Please don't touch my skills or XP; I need to build up ADV XP as it is. Take my gold, give me a horrible debuff that stings for a while so that I will be more careful, something else that stings besides taking the XP I have earned. I know this game appeals for a particular group of people, but don't turn those away. This game should be fun, not work. Like what was said: decay discourages exploration and taking challenges. I don't want to play it safe, but I feel that this forces me to unless I enjoy the suck.
EDIT:
At the very least, don't let a skill fall below the already achieved level. That is the main thing. I am never going to fight a battle that I knowingly have a good chance to die.

 

That is or at one point was in the plan.

 

I have all 3 melee passive skills and the heavy armor passive all GM'd (on live, the armor one I GM'd accidentally) one of them did delevel in that death.

At 100, its not really that bad. at 110 or 150 it might be crazy.

 

I thought this had been expanded on, but possibly it was in a Postmortem or Telethon.

The idea was that visiting the Oracle would be a way to "reset" skill decay, so as long as you were visiting her regularly then you would only be subject to a very small period of decay (basically, what you had accumulated since you last visited). It would be limited to some period (once per day, possibly?), but it didn't sound like it would have a significant cost (i.e. CotOs).

Is this still in the cards?

 

I lost a skill point in foraging meticulous, which has been set to green arrow for a long time now. This will drive a LOT of the crafting community not to leave town and do any kind of resouce gathering for fear they loose their skills.

 

Im not sure how the complainers here can justify their complaint. Pol has clearly allowed unlimited XP and skill up to this point which is why we saw people with 60 GM's. Now they are finally implementing skill cap which has been talked about constantly since I have played the game.

You cannot justify the ability to have every skill GM in this game. there has to be restrictions and now they are in place finally.

In the end, epic uber 24 hour a day players will still be better then people like me who are hard core casual so nothing is lost here, every one suffers it the same and all is still pretty much equal.

 

I died with maximum decay accrued, and lost a little over 1k XP on the QA server. None of my skills dropped. I lost no XP in crafting... so I'm assuming that I didn't have enough skills acrued?
I had some crafting skills at 60 and on the QA server I had an 87 in carpentry.

That is actually a lot better than I would have thought. I don't think I have any issue going beyond GM in a crafting skill especially if I'm planning on specializing in something. a 120 or even higher in a profession might actually be something worth working towards over time (not the first month of the game). so basically GM could be just the starting point of my crafting career if I'm serious about a particular profession.

So in that case being able to GM every crafting skill might not be as good as getting level 150 in one crafting skill depending upon the goals of the player. seems reasonable.

 

I have a great idea on an alternative to skill degen!! Why not create a death timer that lasts 10-15 minutes, so that you won't be able to resurrect at an Ankh until that timer is over? That would waste an equivalent amount of time as having to grind the lost XP back up, but without the reagent cost or armor/weapon damage! It would also fall more in line with the overall developer goals of wasting our time, similar to the new focus regen, or the ability to only craft 20 bulk items, or only crafting one item at a time trying to get exceptional items, or the proposed loot one item at a time nerf, or the overland map in general. What do you all think? Brilliant, right?? Implement at once!

 

Love that it finally hit and we can finally really learn how to manage what skills are super important to each player. And now rather then charging into area's I don't really belong in, I'll have to think twice about how I'm going to go about it.

love it.

 

I don't mind this design so much once I learned how it worked. But the learning curve is extremely steep... the game does not really explain this extremely complex skill system at all. Most players who just go out and use all the skills they want not thinking about locking and what not will have a harder time.

 

Well, skill decay sounds fun! Another feature that brings even more meta to Skill Micromanagement of the Avatar!
/sarcasm off

I can't wait to see how much xp I lose from my meager pool that I can barely maintain at 5k with 1 skill turned on. Hopefully they analyze metrics closer with skill decay than they did with gold distribution.

 

This.
For the love of (insert diety), this is am RPG and not a friggin survival game.
If I want a survival game i play project zomboid. It dose the Job much better than SotA and even has the Retro uo Style of Graphics.
Can we please go back to making an RPG?
Still Decay when not Training, Skill Decay when dieing, Food. It's a bit much.
I really Start to get affraid of the things that will come up with the weather System!

 

I did some dying on QA now after having set my skills to either maintain or gain, and I didn't de-level in anything. My adventuring XP pool was a tiny 8 or 9k as well. I don't see any reason to be worried about this, plus this isn't new, it has always been known that there would be skill decay. It's in place to prevent people from getting 100-200 in every skill.

Besides that, to have some thrill and excitement in place while adventuring there needs to be some kind of consequence or reason you don't want to die. If there's no reason to fear dying, then there is no thrill either.

 

Skil

Skill Decay != Skill loss death penalty.
To me those are two different kind of beasts.

 

Maybe you guys who aren't sitting on 15 gm skills should actually check to see what your decay is now. I have a number of skills I'm either training or maintaining at around 45-50 skill and a few up to the 70-80 range. When I logged in to the QA server this morning I had 74353 pooled xp. I promptly ran out and died first thing. Anyone want to guess my xp loss?

385 xp points and 0 lost skills. I'm not sure that's worth complaining about. It's like 1 kill while I'm training something. Won't stop me from running head first into danger or make me rage quit the game.

So then just for fun I started trying to run out of focus. I guess I should admit I had ate a pumpkin pie which I crafted some time ago as it was cheap and easy... long story short I had a hard time dropping down 100 points using mostly tier 2 and 3 spells and it only took about 5 seconds to gain it all back.

All in all I'm not concerned about either of these things as it will apparently have very little impact on my play.