Decay .... Revisited .... Again

You keep assuming these two go together, why? Their stated plan for expansions is MORE SKILLS not raising skill caps, be they hard or soft. They could go another direction but so far have not indicated this. If you remove this baseless assumption then your whole argument falls apart. Even games that do raise their caps do it VERY rarely, usually well over a year passes before it happens.

Skill decay is a stick you get hit with for not playing. There is zero way around this. You can only play on weekends? BAM, max stick, every time. Go on vacation, it's stick time when you get back. Do you wanna git hit or do you want to try a different game?

Other games give you a carrot for coming back in the form of rest bonuses and other incentives to come back. They do this because it makes their retention numbers better. SotA needs to add a carrot, and ditch the stick.

 

Or we could replace the way the stick hits so there's room for some carrots as well

 

Sticks AND Carrots.... might work....

 

Fastest donkey EVER

 

Will skills decay when you don't play, or will they decay when you play but don't use them?

 

From Player Instructions

So Decay is built up since your last death, period. Upon death, decay is applied to all your skills, then starts being built up again. If you don't die after 72 hours (whether you're playing or not) decay is capped and it won't build beyond that (unless you die, then it starts over again).

Looking at it, it seems more reasonable now than before (last implementation decay was applied at the first use of a skill after logging in)... on the other hand you're tying progression limits exclusively to death... maybe a too soft softcap?

Worth saying this is a stick that allows carrots as well (Rested XP bonus for low level players after being offline for too long, for quoting a well known example)

 

@KuBaTRiZeS yes, the player instructions are still a tad bit vague, but my point was that it doesn't punish you for not playing.
It punishes you for not playing a certain way.

 

Oh, i see... missed the rethorics After thinking about what's stated in the player guide, it's true that "Decay punishes you for not playing" seems invalid in it's current form, since decay is built regardless of you playing or not, so i'm with you on this one. And i assume that the "certain way" you're talking about is playing risky and dying a lot... Play safe and you shouldn't need to worry about decay.

 

I actually like the fact that we need to be more careful and value our character's life, and not just throw ourselves down buildings for kicks (you still can if you want, but there have to be consequences).
What I still don't like is that this seems to compel you to perform a series of actions just to prevent the accumulation of decay.

Imagine this: you log in to join an online event. It could be a theatre troupe performing live, a dungeon run, PvP or whatever.

But wait! You can't just log in and join your friends: you have to first craft a table that you don't need, then a sword that you don't need, and then you have to hit a random animal with a halberd, then with a sword, and then cast a few spells that you don't need, and make some bread that you won't eat.
All of this just to prevent the accumulation of decay on the involved skills.

And then you can go to the event you logged in for, if you are still in time for that.
Or you could just never die -- but I am afraid we will see people performing a long series of seemingly random and useless tasks nonetheless.

 

So i guess the lesson here is, stop dying no decay!

And it is really the only thing to deter constant death to traverse a difficult area (you know we all have done it!). I think decay will work out in the long run. And today we can look at the changes.

 

Now we're getting somewhere

This is just my interpretation, but because the way it's worded ("Skill decay accumulates whether you are logged in or not"), i think now Decay builts up regardless of what you're doing... Is it stated somewhere that you stop building up decay for certain skills if you use them? in the previous implementation we were forced to keep doing what we wanted to prevent from decay, that's for sure, but assuming my interpretation is correct and i'm not missing any piece of information (if i am, please point me to it!), that shouldn't happen now.

I'm also thinking about how Decay on Death impact on players that plan to be crafters only... And it seems the answer is that it doesn't. It is me or are that kind of players immune to decay?

 

They won't matter to the ppl who wanna pvp and are worried that their lack of irl time affects their ability to enjoy a game.

But VERY valid point, crafters won't be subject to death as often! Hmm...

 

Yeah, that's what I meant when I said it's still a bit vague. In fact, that above was my interpretation as well, and wildly speculative.
The only way to find out is this evening when I log in to R26

 

Well, I tried to play a crafter in R25, and I found out that I was subject to death more often.

That's because in order to craft you are forced to gather, and every single resource node has so far been guarded by a swarm of hostiles.
My very new character with very little fighting abilities was slain by spiders countless times while trying to simply gather some cotton in "easy" areas.

Later I discovered a (very) few places where I could gather (a miserable amount of) resources without too many enemies around; but in order to get there I had to run through extremely dangerous (for me) areas first, anyway.

 

Exactly! I won't be able to come online for 10 days so i can't figure it out by myself... I'm following this thread so i'll appreciate if you post any of your discoveries here! It's concerning because i think that if your interpretation is right, next to nothing has been fixed, but if i'm right, it can be quite neat.

Regarding this... yeah i was talking about dedicated crafters. Because how progression works (worked?) for crafters you'd need to gather to refill your crafting XP pool. Also because the amount of raw materials required to raise depending on others to get the raw materials was unthinkable, but it seems lots of things around this were worked out as well! Besides, there are people that wants to play that way, and be tailors or carpenters, worrying about their shops and not fighting at all, and i think it should be viable. Because of that, i consider that playstyle something to be taken in consideration regarding decay, and wonder if decay upon death is appropiate for crafting.

 

They are going to have to switch from Hats to diapers!

 

The more I read about it, the more it tells me that it's specifically there to replace the old "lose XP upon death" mechanic that a LOT of games used to have before World of Warcraft showed up. You know, the exact same thing I told you in page2 of this thread. It didn't stop people from enjoying those games back then and I doubt it'll discourage people from PvPing or PvEing either.

Before you start saying that we need to shed away old school sensitivities to draw in the younger crowd, might I remind you of the mission statement that this game has and why a good portion of us backed this game in the first place. Otherwise, we might as well start putting exclamation points over NPCs heads.

 

The fact that there continues to be so much confusion is yet another reason, on a long list of reasons, to jettison decay. I think I half understand how it works. And I don't like that half at all. Maybe the other half is all rainbows and unicorns. But so far the feature is an F-.

That we're even considering a feature that's triggered upon death in an ADVENTURING GAME is insane. It's a huge deterrent to active gameplay, in a game that's already scared off tons of potential players because of a weak combat/PvP system (although I know those are improving).

Should rename Shroud of the Avatar to Brave Sir Robin's Crafting Game.

 

The XP Hole was *always* accompanied by hard XP cap, tho.

 

A classic hero in Spanish literature, Don Quixote, once charge to a mill, thinking it was an evil giant.



I don´t think decay is an evil giant, and anyway another approach to the issue might be better. I wonder if, instead of charging against a (still in development) feature, we better don´t ask for a new feature?

Like having an option to switch to hard capped characters.

This way people liking the hard cap could opt for it, removing all decay from their characters. The option might be somewhat restricted, e.g. once per week and paying for it. And the hard capped char might be somewhat weak (since it will play outside of the main quest and the dev team would like to be safe on don´t allowing exploits). Still playable for RP, but not for PvP.

I won´t pick it; once we hit the cap, every XP we should receive is silently wasted. But perhaps is a way to ease the concerns about this feature.