Death Decay Poll

LOOT!!! Damn I think it's fun to earn me some loot... yessiree rewards iz da shizit

 

Earl, I am very much against decay and I have outlined my reasons several times. The main ones are that we already have sufficient limiters (caps) in place and do not need more...

a) we have a tiny growth at the higher skill levels earned via inordinate amounts of time and given on an exponential curve; it takes decades of playing 15+ hours a day to level a single skill to 200

b) the combat bar and deck make it so no matter how uber a player is, his/ her contribution is limited and on par to what anyone else can reasonably contribute to a given situation

We play in an xp earning context/ environment. What happens when earning xp is no longer viable due to death decay (i.e., when growth is no longer cost effective)? What happens to xp content then?

With unlimited potential growth we always have something to branch into, we always have room to grow into new areas. The above mentioned limiters are enough; this growth is nothing to be afraid of. Death decay does away w/ this potential growth and, for those to whom such a future matters, it does away w/ considering this game at all.

I used to play an MMO called The Infinite Black (TIB) which is very similar in its design to SotA...

a) gains are tiny and incremental at higher levels, earned on a steep exponential curve

b) the game has gears fitted on a ship which mirror the combat bar and deck on SotA, both acting as bottlenecks/ limiters

Interestingly, TIB also ties hit points, hit and crit chance to level, as does SotA. Even more interesting is the fact that TIB is a successful open PVP game that doesn't just incentivize group play, it demands it (TIB has a system of corp [or guild] garrisons that one can group w/ 9 others to "pop" and earn combat points; also, due to the dangers in the open PVP environment, many often travel in packs to farm PVE content, hunt PVP content or just survive).

In my years playing TIB (I was a lead in the Hitsquad [HS] corporation), I do not recall ever hearing any issues w/ the open ended xp growth; it was clear to all playing that the above mentioned limiters in place made us all reasonably equal and effective in game and whatever tiny differences continued to exist needed to be chalked up to something earned and deserved, within reach to all willing to put the time in and nothing destabilizing or worth crying about.

The point of all this re TIB is that I have seen this model (without decay) and it works fine.

Based on my reasons outlined in points (a) and (b) above, I would remain against decay even if nobody cared to agree or understand; pointing out the dysfunctions of current design and areas where remedies do not need to be applied is not a domain where popularity or pageantry hold sway for me. I only point to the popular sentiment (the poll) re the issues because it holds a better chance of getting the designers of this games attention where (so far) reasoning has not. If you genuinely feel that any approach of mine is hurting the game, feel free to pm me w/ why and how you feel this is; perhaps I will learn something from you in this area and conduct myself that much better for it.

Btw, I paid all of $40 to get access to SotA and this is the only account I have. I get one vote and that is all the vote I need; that said, I consider the opportunity to capture the matter w/ words and share it w/ my neighbor of much higher import than any vote.

 

Do we?
What is it, i hope you now wont tell me it's the diminishing returns after i leveld everything to 100 and specialization begins after being the Grandmaster of everything!?

What's about the advantage of having high resistance by attunement for people who just are privileged (or doomed) to put more time into the game than others and skil everything up?

I do not for the first.
I could play and have fun if you remove all skilling, leveling and progressing.
Gimme x points to spread out over some Trees and Skills and i roleplay the whole day with my set character, go exploring, hunting, killing Mobs for gold and crap or maybe sometimes an artifact only.
Wouldn't care about any progress.
Oh that would be the best RPG ever where i can RP instead of being forced to progress something.

How long does it take to be at that level if someone begins from scratch?
How long does it take in SotA?

2000hrs effectively grinding, using a fotm build to raise all magic schools?
Or even more?
Tell someone who want to join and participate in SotA open world PvP that he has to grind 2000+ hours with a fotm Build to be pvp ready?
Good luck to get more in

I dont want to sound accusing.

I am vaguely realising that death decay does not grant me to be the limiting factor i want to see in this game.

But anyway i still think that a death decay is a good thing to have to make dying
significantly.

 

Pay the accusations no heed, it's par for the course for the guardians of the forum to cry "sock puppets!" or "conspiracy!" when the they are out numbered on an issue. Keep it up and you'll achieve the rank of "Shill for EA" or whoever soon enough.

The poll implies a roughly 40/60 split between folks that think the decay system is developing in the right direction to those that don't, and that's after the 1/2 split was introduced.

Frankly, if the system was doing what the devs implied it does, I'd be okay with keeping it despite the split, but since none of the stated goals of the system seem to be achieved by it, i.e. limit hard grinders, reduce exploiters and make death "meaningful", I think the system needs to be retooled, removed or replaced.

 

This is just not the reality of how the system is working right now. Not everyone in the game is maintaining a 3+ Million experience pool, so your analysis of it taking months to drain your pool is just silly. Most players are constantly training skills and generally sit at maybe a few hundred thousand XP at any given time.

Also, If you set all skills youre using to maintain, you only lose XP from your pool, which would be fine and dandy if the maintenance feature didnt suck five times the required XP to actually maintain the skill. Most players set their skills to the minus sign - or what people refer to as locked, because they know it takes less XP to bring a skill back to GM after they die and decay hits than it is to set a skill to maintenance and let it actively drain XP with every use.

 

I think we need additional limiters because death now is meaningfull and significant!

 

I agree with @Stundorn, the point of decay has been the fear of death for me. Everything else is a happy side-effect. It is definitely working.

 

But we have statements in the thread that there are players having 241 million XP stored.
One is enough! And i don't doubt that there are a lot of people having dozens of GM's and millions of pool and are quite - lurking for the sheeps to come back into PvP Scenes or flag themself and get killed by someone who is 1000 times stronger than they are.

 

This is why our recommendation for skill tree limitations or exclusivity would work. You wouldn't have players running around who could do anything and kill 12-20 mobs at a time racking up insanely OP toons. I don't think having players who can solo any content in the game was the intention.

 

Death system is still insignificant. Ive been dying a lot of careless deaths lately, the exp is so easy to get right back. I dont find dying to be that big of a deal, but it could become more significant with a slight increase in the amt of exp lost.

Its not "punishing" at all. I also like the system how it is, having no exp loss or other significant fear of death is no fun for a game like this.

 

So, As this thread continues I see it coming back full circle in debates, but I think we have missed the fact that there is one common consensus here. The one thing that everyone seems to agree upon is that the currently achievable capability of characters is far out of balance with the content of the game, IE players soloing all content of the game. So I think our time in this thread would be better spent on coming up with an outside the box method of preventing the uber toons, then worry about the existence of skill decay at a later time.

So how do we achieve that?

I will do a formal write up when I get time on how I think it should work, but im interested in hearing other peoples ideas. I will say that I think the root cause is a result of allowing players to take on skills from any tree simultaneously. I don't think there is any one specific skill tree other than maybe Focus and Tactics that are critical to all builds in the game, so my idea would involve restricting access to opposing magic trees, limiting the number of combat trees available at one time and forcing specialization in the production crafting skill trees.

Maybe this is best in a different thread, you tell me.

 

maybe here or something like this - https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...equest-a-working-type-of-a-soft-cap-to.93166/
but feel free to setup a new one about that "issue" and better explanations than i am able to spell in english

 

Sure "fear". I just quit (after rezzing of course to avoid the devs little middle finger to those that die). Eventually I won't come back, I don't fear dying, I don't have so much invested in the game that I can't walk way to a better game once SotA sufficently annoys me.

 

Lets just be honest here. At lv 69 I lose 20k xp or so. That's about 20 kills. If you're getting wrecked by death decay you are probably one of the super strong people.

If you want to avoid death, get a healer. Also avoiding things like liches, dragons, and the like will improve your chances of living longer.

 

Join the crowd. When RMT and gold selling became a thing I was seriously out the door. But there was just barely enough other things to keep me around to see how it all turns out in the end. Since you are still here, we probably are not all that different.

 

Speaking for myself- I don't think it is the "long term" view that is missing here, it is more of a persistent- almost seemingly willful- ignorance about how the maths really work.

For example- people are still writing as if decay is based on AL when it is not. It applied on a skill-by-skill basis according to how you have distributed the points. Hence- there can be a very wide variance between max decay for two players both at AL 100.

BUT... I think I do finally get what the main problem really is here.

It is the difference in how long it actually takes a player to recover the xp lost. I think it's worth mentioning that I was under the wrong impression that anybody at AL 100+ would be able to recover 200K xp in fairly short order.

However, if that isn't the case, then I do see a big problem. I certainly don't think it is fair to set players back days or potentially weeks because they died.

I think it should set them back about an hour or so. Maybe 1/2 hour if they are really good at recovering xp.

In which case, I would propose that the total decay be based upon some sort of "moving average" of xp gained in adventure zones per unit of time.

So- a player who has been pulling 1 million xp per hour... maybe they should lose 1 million xp.. yes?

A player who can only pull 100K an hour... just that 100K.

This would level the playing field between the "slow and steady" players and the "mainline caffeine" players who just so happen to be at the same AL at the same time.

Still- as a big picture item- I don't think the system should be removed entirely. XP is just another resource, and I believe it should be able to be lost just like anything else. I don't see why we should treat xp any different from gold, gear, or even lot ownership which will "decay" if taxes are not paid. Having some kind of "real" risk for loss in the game is one of the most basic, fundamental design choices for which I sincerely believe a good chunk of the backers came for, myself included.

(I put "real" in quotes there, because of course the real real risk is that we all piss our lives away playing games and collecting electronic "things" instead of making something meaningful out of our lives.)

 

Please recheck that.
At 70 i loose 6k ^^

 

You are spread thin then, you probably have no skills over 80. Since you probably don't have hundreds of thousands in the XP bank, you are becoming a genaralist, not only is it the best option for building an effective character, but it also minimizes decay.

 

I have some at 80 locked working at innates to 80.

I am no generalist and i hate it that this is the best you can do, i am for more "spacialized classes" build free from the classless system.

I use Air, Moon, Water, Life, no weapon, no 2 wands, just one staff, no chainmail chest shield wizard, but "authentic" wizard in cloth with a witchhat

 

Well you are right, it is not justified to guess that everyone will have a large pool. I was too simply trapped by guessing everyone will have it like me as I would need maybe 10 full decays to empty my pool.
But the rest remains it is not that reasonable to lose a GM if you still play the game.

And that maintain is bugged…well it is a bug that will be fixed someday and nothing that should dominate your opinion about decay.

Do not take offense but it looked quite suspicious. (By the way nice remark about the reasons why you are against decay.)

Well I would think that limiting our avatars skills is “normal” for a game that will expand its story in additional episodes. This will give in each episode everyone a reason to continue and let them get stronger as they were before but if you maxed all skills already in ep1 you may take a look at new mechanics or try the (for you) incredible simple quests or solo some world bosses but I do not think this would be for such an avatar an interesting game…maybe I’m wrong but that’s what I would guess.