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

That's not the point.
The point is that there is just no need for the next punitive 'feature'.
It might escalte pretty fast into much more Skill loss if Port decides it's time.

 

If you play casually and gain the XP at the constant or gradual increase rate, the amount of the XP from skill decay will be casually applied as well. The skill decay will only be a big issue if you had someone powerleveling you all the way with the large XP amount that you cannot obtain by yourself from day-to-day activities.

I did the edge case test in the QA where I have about 200 GM adventuring skills (requested the staff set them for testing purposes), the XP I lost after 3 day accrued (it will be reduced to up to 6 hours soon) is only 4 mil. While it seemed to be a lot, but if you consider how many XP would it take to gain those 200 GM skills (I would say more than 400 mil), 4 mil XP is relatively a tiny amount.

I'm not concerned with skill decay in adventure skills at all since I don't hunt in control points using LoS tricks. However, I'm more concerned about skill decay in crafting skill, so I don't really feel like having to mine some ores in order to keep my carpentry (any other gathering/refining/producing acitvities have way to low xp yield for the time it takes).

 

There is absolutely a need for decay. Otherwise there is no diversity after a while as everyone has forever gm in everything and there are no new players as they can never catch up to the established minimum skill levels of everyone else. Without a skill cap you need decay.

 

I usualy don't quote myself but:

 

@Chris @DarkStarr How do others get special testing privledges? If someone has the ability to request these customized test routines from the dev team, everyone should know how to request it. I'd love to be able to test crafting and deco on QA but I was unaware I could ask for special considerations. I'm pretty sure I could find some bugs if someone was to gift me a few thousand mats. I could also test part of the economy with a few hundred thousand gold.

If crafting and deco is not what you need tested...why not tell us what you need tested and then grant everyone on QA the resources to test said features?

 

Attenwood mentioned that a few months back regarding request to set specific attribute in QA.

Just nag Attenwood or Chris until they're available to do it.

I didn't ask for the mats, though. Just the skills to test with the decay and new skills.

 

This is not going to go well, when this hits live. This is by far the largest negative change players will experience since persistence.

And as others have pointed out, such a massive loss (like 7 skills, really?) is overly punitive. Dozens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of XP loss in one death? That's dozens or hundreds of kills to recover, solo, with all skills locked. You're talking about one death potentially negating an entire days worth of progression/xp/time for the "average" player.

 

I don't think the "average" player will ignore the section of the player instruction guide to maintain an XP pool and setting skills to maintain vs dropping.

Perhaps the solid line for "not maintain" should be changed to indicate this skill is in a degrading state. It should have a down arrow, and the double down arrow is for skills set to drop to pull xp out of. Maybe the line should simply replace the amber up arrow (maintaining) to avoid confusion, and the green up arrow is only for those set to gain.

 

Skill decay is applied on death; so yes, it is a component of the penalty for dying.

 

So the planned decay finally works and now is question how much or how little it should be.

 

The xp loss from death is sooo small. youd have to die like 25 times to lose a lvl

 

Ever better :

Skill decay is accrued over time... So you can die repeatedly in short succession with only the first death applying any serious loss.

One would have to wait six hours between deaths to observe the maximum skill decay effect on each death.

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Honestly, the existing death penalties in this game were a joke.

I'm all for a need to actually fear dying.