Decay Removed

Given we haven't heard a peep I'd say don't hold your breath on that. I can't imagine Chris so stupid to replace it with something before talking to us first. If we had a market in this stuff I'd have this as my "LEAD PIPE LOCK" that its replaced with NOTHING at this point. Been wrong before thou.

 

I really think people who keep saying that decay sets a person back hours is flat out wrong. You take your biggest hit when you die the first time. I can recover that in 15 mins of game play. This is another example of people staring at their Xperia pool constantly. I look when I log in and again when I log out. I have always ended up with way more XP then when I started and that includes the Xp used to level my skills.

I can live with any change that is made but there is zero sense of challenge in SotA for me, I do enjoy the game but I have zero concern with dying because there is nothing to fear.

 

I am not wrong at all, i know the numbers. I lose 500k XP at first death and my usual playing gives me 100-200k per hour back.
So it takes hours to regain that 500k. It's simple math that proves i am right.

 

I, however (after years of following what he's given us), can imagine Chris talking TO a few, select people (most likely in the PvP discord channel) - then making a decision - and then talking AT us about "his" decision.

 

All too often that's what it feels like tbh

 

I just died and lost 300K and 40 mins later I was 200K over which means I had a 500K gain. So I am not finding the same results as you are. The only difference could be where your fighting I was in Deep Ravenwood.

Also are you farming mobs of casually running around or primarily farming matrs. I wanted to test the numbers on a lover level toon. I was on an adventure level 80 avatar farming the kobold camp. I went in and killed myself on purpose and received a 34K XP love but 30 mins of farming I was +100,000 XP. So I can see how a casual gamer who logs on does a combination of killing a mob in order to mat farm the or complete some quest might died and the XP loss could be rough. But if you go to a high response location and there are some at most tiers it is not hard to recoup the loss.

 

Except that's exactly what Chris said on two separate livestreams.

 

What scene contains this kobold camp that you speak of ?

 

Naryad Woods.
There you can make like 700k XP per hour. It's the location where i go for 1 hour to collect my weekly tax money

That is right, Its just not what i usually do while playing SotA. If i *would* go to Ravensmoor right after i died, i *could* regain the lost 500k XP in like 30 minutes. But there i could die again and thats the whole point of that silly decay mechanism. To regain the lost XP i have to go to locations i usually avoid because theres a risk of losing XP.
That mechanism is a simple fun-killer for me.

 

Well spoken and no sh*t.... for me as well.

 

And it's being removed in R59, so why are you all still debating it?

 

I am truly sorry if my conversation with others is bothering you. I promise i will be quiet about this topic.

 

It seems my feelings on a mechanic like decay is slightly unpopular amongst the forum crowd, but I kind of see it as a "you have to work to stay on top" mechanic, which I approve of, becuase it creates a struggle and allows outliers. I don't know if the implementation was correct as it didn't really limit anyone to any sort of soft cap, and I think they just should have had automatic decay that wasn't tied to death at all but just gradually happened. Or a hard cap. I don't know how anything like that could possibly be implemented now without pissing people off.

If it is as some people have said, and the soft cap is by definition just a korean grind fest to 200 skill level then that is pretty disappointing, becuase at AL 100 with 2 skills above GM I can basically solo any content except a few of the rediculously high level aether things. Not saying I can solo things quickly, but my death penalty right now is a whopping 150k on first death, which I usually get back in 10 minutes in any place I might die.

I guess my question for the prodigal developers is what is the intended soft cap? Many seem to believe that with the increased cost and lowered effect of skills past 100 this creates a soft cap, but from my experiences this is not the case, as the diminishing returns are far outweighed by how skills build off of each other. So what is the soft cap supposed to be? What skill/adv level did the content creators have in mind when they created the content? What was the expected level that death decay was supposed to keep us hovering at?

I have heard rumblings of possibly scaling down characters per the instance they are in, and if that's true I can see some positives and negatives to this. It seems like a very complicated task when you factor in all of the variables; gear, skill level, how skills interact, fizzle rates if you lower skill levels, exp gains and what they even do if you are higher level than all the content in the game. Some people are frankly just going to hate it. The same mindset that says "I don't want to lose exp when I die becuase it's work", is the same mindset that will say, "I dont want to be level 40 in a teir 4 zone becuase then material gathering is work".

It's a really sticky situation, to be sure, and one that will determine the trajectory of the game going forward.

 

Looking over my post, I forgot to mention balancing instances to cater for solo and group play, under difficulties in regards to scaling players per instance. This in itself creates a whole bunch of difficulties that no easy solutions exist for, unless you seperate some instances for group play and some for solo play and scale accordingly.

 

I really hope that they add some sort of timer limit on the res spell along with the removal of decay. If you combine no real death penalty and the current ability to res endlessly it will allow high end group content to degrade into "just res everyone until we kill it..."

 

My other real concern about the removal of decay is that it will allow all players to level all skills which could result in all characters being pretty much the same (Everyone in the game has 100 in pretty much every skill after a certain point).

Currently the fact that the decay penalty is .25% in my two specialized skill trees means that I have dumped tons of points into those two trees. Hopefully we will still get some sort of benefit for dumping tons of points into our areas of specialization. Otherwise just leveling everything to 100, then everything to 110, then everything to 120 becomes the best use of points, and characters become very vanilla copies of each other.

 

It's kind of like that already, everything to 100 outside of your spec trees is the most efficient thing you can do. You aquire very little decay at those levels. I'm pretty sure the only people reporting 4mil+ 1st deaths have a bunch of skills (especially expensive passives) outside their spec in the 120+ range.

 

Lol This debate on death pentalfy has been around forever in games. As I mentioned earlier I will roll with the changes. I still find the community fun along with some of the systems but I kind of given up on the risk/reward experience years ago in SotA. There is very little challenge or group content. This game has very little appeal to the under 30 crowd. I have been trying to sell my guild members on the game for years and although many have tried the free trial the lack of group mechanics or lack of organized PvP like aguild war system or faction system has kept them away. Surprising they did enjoy the combat system and crafting but was not enough to make them stay. I like the fishing system coming up but when I mentioned that to them they were not as thrilled. It must be a generational thing.

 

ALL OF THIS! ALL OF IT! Thank you Sir Reis, THANK YOU!

 

I don't think this works, as someone will die in your UT group and then just leave becuase they can't get exp for X amount of time. Maybe if it was a negative balance of exp you had to get before you could get exp again, but that would effectively be the exact same thing as the current system.