Decay .... Revisited .... Again

Thanks, if it works even though you're using your skills I dislike it even more than I did before. That's extremely off putting if that's how it works, and is a game changer for me as well and to those I would try to get to play the game once it's released. I know I won't be able to pull them from their current games if that's how it works. They're already telling me it doesn't sound fun losing all your hard work. Ugh...

 

Do you think so? i think it's a change for the best.
- You only lose skill if you die, so not losing is just matter of being careful and not getting into trouble. Also, that removes the problem of you not being able to come in, kill two wolves, log out, because decay will start building up again.
- It affects everybody at the same pace, so you're not compelled to endless grind to avoid it.
- I went back to the instructions and noticed this Training: The skill will advance each time a relevant skill is used, consuming EXP from the appropriate pool. It will also consume pooled EXP on death to maintain it’s current level and negate decay. That means that you won't lose any progress at all in any of the skills you're raising; you'll just get some xp taken from your xp pool. Same thing happens with skills set to Mantain, just that those doesn't take XP when you use them. So your progress is kept as long as you have XP in the pool! That's helpful towards making decay affecting only the top levels.

I still stand regarding decay being a punishing mechanic, but i'd say they removed most of the very nasty cases previous implementation had. So i could agree about decay being "not good", but i think it got better U^^.

 

Death is inevitable, so I'll just be waiting til I have to take the hit with decay once I die. So my choices are waiting to get hit by decay by dying, don't go out and do any real adventuring that could get me killed by taking risks, or go to the Oracle every few days and get rid of it by doing a quest which sounds like a chore we're made to do (it may or may not be the quest they were talking about in hangouts last year that is to bring sheep to the wolves) which doesn't sit well with me. Don't get me wrong, I like pvp, but pvp in this game isn't that great yet, and really isn't the type of pvp I like. It needs content that can drag in pvp people, not try and drag pve people into it just for our entertainment. I too don't understand how punishing people is an appealing selling point when we're trying to get people we've played past games with to try this one out. The game is starting to come together nicely and I'm starting to enjoy it, but decay is one thing that I just cannot put good light on no matter how I look at it. It could be a deal breaker for me, depending on how it turns out in the end. I'm not seeing how punishing people with decay makes sense. We play games for enjoyment, not for punishment.

 

Not that simple, I like the reward but don't like when it is too easy, or free. On arcade games you should to just a couple of things (very fast and very well, agree) to won them, RP games usually have some combat but also quests and puzzles. If they are too easy I lost interest, like many others.

I usually don't cheat, if I get the option "Click here to win the game!" I don't click on it; the fun to me is in the journey while the end is in fact that, the end of the fun.

Most, if not all, games out there use hard cap. Once we max it, we are stuck there, losing all potential grow. We don't loose XP but don't gain either. Decay should accomplish the same thing (set up a cap) but we will be able to forever gain XP, with is rewarding.

 

Allow me some off topic comments before answering Didn't know they talked about the quest that allow us to remove decay, so can't comment about that. Where did they talk about it? Also... excellent insight about PVP! It currently seems it is all about "the gentle sport of killing other players" but that's not meaningful at all. Hope they change their minds about it...

Back with decay. Sorry but i got overly motivated analyzing everything at it ended being a bit long... hope it's worth the reading and make people understand decay a bit more .

Let me say I agree with your points (everyone dies eventually, decay is a punishment), but i don't think that makes my comments invalid. What i was trying to say is that now is a punishment that makes sense. A punishment nonetheless, but now it seems to "fit" (we'll see if it fulfills its purpose). I want to highlight that i like decay for what it tries to achieve, not for its current implementation; believe me when i say that i'd be the first in line for a decay system that doesn't feel as a punishment, but this is what we have now... and even when it is a punishment, i prefer some punishment while i level up against the dullness of hard caps. I'm crystal clear about my preferences (i don't want hard caps, and the unlimited progression proposal is just an utopia that could work for single player, but not in a competitive multiplayer environment.), and because of that i'm glad decay is here to stay. If it's changed into something that doesn't feel as punishment, good! but if not... I trust the devs will tune it to achieve its purpose with minimal annoyance, as they are already doing with this iteration.

While it's true that the main goal to play games is enjoyment, that enjoyment is granted (As Krohon said above) through challenge; in the same way you won't play a game that's too difficult, or too complicated for you because you feel you're wasting your time, you won't play a game that's too easy for you because it's simply boring. That's why challenge is measured by the difficulty, taught to the player by a system that rewards you when you do it good, and punishes you when you do it bad (good ol' pavlovian stuff). Most actual games focuses more in the carrot than in the stick... but i think there's balance in having both. We have some rewards around, we'll see some more come in and we should push for some more (rested xp gain is almost mandatory), but some punishments to keep up the challenge are needed.

So, since punishments have indeed a place in the gaming world, the real questions we should be answering is "how much" and "how often" decay punish us. According to what i've read, currently decay works as some sort of Death penalty (like the XP loss in Diablo II) but compared to it is quite forgiving (a "bad day" on diablo 2 dying 3 times in a row could cost you half a level... at high level that was a quite a bunch of hours playing!), since you only suffer it at full power once every three days. Even so, that's assuming you don't die during another three days, because if you do, you won't notice decay because it hadn't had time to build up. If we assume that decay cap is the same as in previous releases (the equivalent of 1/6 of the total progress towards the next point, 17% rounding up) the first time you die after three days without dying you'll notice your XP pool going down, because all your skills set to be trained or mantained took the hit. But what if you played without problems and after 6 hours of playing you die again? Decay hits you again, but it only built up for 6 hours, so the penalty is roughly an 1,5% (assuming decay stack is linear).

Percentages are nice but they don't add the appropiate perspective. What's important is that those % are translated into the amount of experience substracted from your XP pool to keep your skills at the same level, and that's where the "how much" comes in. I don't have actual numbers so i'll go with rough comparisons. We've been told that to get from 90% to 100% you need the same amount of experience than the required to get from 0% to 90%. That means that the xp penalty is significantly higher regarding the amount of skills you have above 80 (the value Chris has set as "affordable"). In an attempt to translate this to player hours, let's assume you have a steady XP gain ratio (another rough estimation, sorry!). Going with that let's say you're focused into raising only a skill, and you needed 10 hours to get it 90%, now you need another 10 to reach 100%. But unfortunately you die... that means you lost 1,7 hours worth of experience! That's quite the loss... but since the amount of xp needed to get there increases exponentially, the losses increases also exponentially, which means that they're can tune it so decay only becomes a hard thing when you have a certain amount of skills above the "affordable" level. If i remember well Chris said he's expecting progression focused players to be GM in 20 skills... I'm sure they'll be interested in that "oracle quest" that removes decay lol.

The answer to "how often" is easier, since its already there; it's applied everytime you die. But let's look a bit beyond that... Decay is not only for you, it's for everyone in game. And what's even better is that there's a bottom limit to the amount of xp you can lose, and it's related to the amount of time you can play (what i think it's fair, personally). Let's assume we have two players... they play the same amount of time, and gain the same experience during that time. Now, both of them are not too skilled, so they die quite often... even so there's a gap of skills between both of them. Player one dies an average of 3 times per day, but Player two dies three times more! Nonetheless, because the way decay builts up, they'll lose the exact same amount of experience. Now let's focus on the other side of the coin. Skilled competitive players that want to be the best of the best will do its best not to die, just because every day above the third they manage to play without dying they're getting an xp advantage above those that didn't manage to play and stay alive for that long! That's the hidden reward on this punishment system, and it's a reward earned by the ones that deserve it, the most skilled.

Ok, i went way over the length we were keeping (that scalated quickly right?), and i apologize for not using accurate numbers; I did my best to base all that in quotes from Chris, so i think all the above are not so far from reality. To sum it up, current form of skill decay is a punishment and that's undeniable, but the "how often" is reasonable because is tied to a failure, and the "how much" can be effectively tuned to be a nuisance to leveling and casuals and a real bother to the hardcore players. And all this... for what?

• The cost of death: Decay reinforces this, which currently was next to nothing (equipment damaged and the death penalty if you're unable to reach an ankh), and it was something claimed by many and acknowledged by the Devs.
• The living progression: One of the things i enjoyed a lot in UO was to raise skills. Just because progressing is an inherent reward! Decay allow me to keep progressing, never taking away from me that feeling in the way hard caps does.
• The reward of improving: Decay can work as a softcap tied to the player's current game mastery. Even as a casual, if you get better and die less you'll notice how your skills raise, and that's an reward for being able to avoid punishment.
• The endless ladder system: A common practice in aRPG games (solely based on progression) is to have seasonal ladders where you get a reward regarding how high in the ladder you are. Thanks to decay, hardcore players will never stop competing between them because they'll need to put the most of them to die less than the rest and stay above their enemies/rivals.

So... Am i willing to be punished in the adequate amount and the appropiate number of times for all that? You can be sure i am. And i trust devs to set that adequate amount, and i can't wait till next week when i can come online to level up and start gathering real data to look at the bad and worse of decay so they can fix that

 

Besides increasing difficulty, there is already another limit in place to keep people from being ultra powerful: your quick bar is LIMITED TO TEN ICONS!

 

One punishment at a time please

 

Let me also add that punishing me for not logging in is not making the game more "challenging", it's simply punishing me.

 

So, does anyone actually have any numbers of how much they've lost?

 

Just intentionally died to test this, didn't lose any pooled XP, didn't lose any progress per skill that I can see, and definitely have played more than 3 days, so... /shrug

Sorry, my bad. I had 50464 before and 50430 after. So.. I lost 34 XP, I guess?

 

That statement is simply not true. First, what actually deals the punishment is death, so you're punished by dying, not anything else. Second, currently decay builds up over time whether you're online or not up to three days cap, so "the offline player is punished over the online player" and "the non-grinding player is punished over the grinding player" are statements of the past. Third, even if the magnitude of the punishment is deemed as "too much" it can be mathematically tuned.

So it's more accurate to say "Die once every three days (or more) and you'll be punished like everyone else. Stay alive for more than three days and you'll be above the rest". How's that not a challenge?

 

Decay is also applied as soon as you gain in that skill.

 

If that's happening to you, report a bug, because that's not currently intended. By searching "Decay" on the player instructions you can find this

 

OK, I guess that changed for R26. That's good because it was miserable before. I'm not sure how I feel about the current rules. I'll have to play a while and see.

 

You're guessing right, and that's the point i'm trying to make here, but it's hard if people doesn't know what changed

There are some problems regarding the current implementation as well but previous was wrong in so many aspects (both intended and not intended). The way it is now, sounds like something that could achieve what it intends to... that's what i intended to expose in the wall of text above but... well, we know what happens with walls of text

 

Well you kind of need more information before calling it a bust. What level were the skills at? Were they set to maintain? Did you fight at all during those 3 days to where you may have offset the decay? Skills below 20, as far as I can tell, are not subject to decay. Setting skills to maintain is supposed to stop decay from hitting too hard. So either it still needs adjusted or its working as intended based on the answers.

 

If the penalty is too low -> not meaningful.
If the penalty is too high -> punishing.
Then
too low < penalty < too high -> adequate

Values can always be adjusted. If you really want to bring down decay it's better to bring down specific flaws, because no matter how it's worded or presented, decay has a purpose that can (and will) be achieved through it. People seem just too focused on "please don't hit me" to see the reasons behind it.

Exactly.

I haven't found any information that may confirm the idea that using skills somehow prevent decay from being built up. This happened in the previous implementation because decay was consumed on skill use, but that doesn't happen atm.

Sort of. Decay now only substract progress from the skills setting to "not training". If you have a skill set to Mantain or Training, upon death you'll be taken away from your XP pool the amount of experience needed to "compensate" the loss from decay, so "mantain" doesn't make decay to hit less, it only allows you to not lose progress on that skill.

 

Everything below was set to Train. (green up arrow)
Skills above 20:
Train Strength was at 33
Fire Fist was at 24
Body Slam was at 25
Bludgeon was at 66

Decay accumulates regardless of being logged in or not, regardless of fighting or not. As long as 3 days passes, you're maxxed out.

And as far as getting more data, that's easy:
Set your skills to whatever you want (Maintain, Training, Not Training).
Hover over your adventure pool.
Take a screenshot (F11).
Die, intentionally.
Resurrect.
Hover over your adventure pool, again.
Take a second screenshot (F11).
Compare both screenshots.

If you want to compare before & after progression per skill, which should NOT be affected anymore (for maintain/training), according to R26/Chris, then take screenshots of each Skill tree before and after, for comparison.
I've done my part so.. if you want more data you just have to convince everyone to die, at least once.

 

Be sure, when trying to die intentionally, and be sure that certain skills aren't set to train, as even taking damage can level up some skills (taking xp from the pool, thereby skewing your results)... watch those innates. I would recommend turning everything to maintain. Or off.. or I don't know.. still confused.

It would be useful and proper to give us information on decay in the skills while we are trying to decide if decay is working well. A lot of these obfuscated mechanics are beaten to death on the forums, simply because we have to guess if it's working correctly. We are testers after all.. how do we know if something is working as intended? We DONT. We can only hope a dev steps in to enlighten us with the very simple data we are needing.

Show us the decay values that are accrued on each skill.. or these threads will continue to come up! I believe a lot of people just perceive decay as an issue now, and I can't be bothered to guess at the black box that is decay. Good luck ppl!

 

I'm in for hardcap for 5-7 GM skills and others could be trained to 55 or 60.