Decay: Worst Mechanic Ever

Well said, there's no good reason for it. It adds nothing to the game but frustration and wasted playtime.

 

Very good point.

 

Perhaps this knowledge of Chris wanting feedback should have been the focus of the thread then and perhaps stated in the OP. By giving us this information 14 pages into the thread is kind of pointless. And we have different opinions on the hard caps. I like the ability for people to have to make choices with limited skill points.

 

Port wanting feedback is why there is a forum, i don't see the need to point it out in every feedback thread.

 

I see it differently than you. I played UO for years and never had a problem with the skill cap. In fact what it did is make a fair playing field for everyone and if you start the game you know that at some time you will be able to compete. What your suggesting is more of a progression which I think is just more grinding. Look at WoW. The progression in WoW made everyone constantly grind to compete. After each new expansion everyone just played catch up. You had to do dailys for rep, dailys for arena, dailys for quests, daily's dailys dailys..........It turns you into a robot rinsing and repeating, and not playing for enjoyment, you just play to keep up with the status quo. Now I have offered a hybrid solution a couple times in this thread that would unite the two camps. Have a hard cap but then have a quest to unlock it into a soft cap. You would not decay until you unlocked it. This would allow the hard core players to advance but would have to keep playing to keep the advancement.

 

I was just refering to Violations statement. I meant no harm

 

I'm not saying UO had a problem because of the skill cap, I'm just saying that because it had a strict skill cap the most powerful characters in UO always had to be planned out around a specific set of skills and ignoring all other skills completely.

I don't think the game should have infinite progression, because it does mean that people who play a ton eventually are just impossible to catch up to, however, I do think that if there is a skill cap it should be a lot softer than it was in UO, and it shouldn't require you to minmax your character so much by having low skillpoints in things you use occasionally or for fun interfere with high skillpoints in your primary abilities.

 

Aye, I understand. I guess another point is that we will be having new expansions once a yr so there will be new things happening. In fact they talk about keeping new content every month or 3 months, (not sure) after release. I see the hardest part of the decay system and penalties are the casual player, and the pvp player. It just seems like so much is required to do just to play.

 

Well I would be hoping that if they bring out expansions it would not be in the form of increasing the levelcap and relative power of characters, but instead in the form of introducing new skill trees and equipment. For example they could add a "Gadgeteering" skill tree, a "Technomancy" skill tree, and a "Firearms" skill tree and have an expansion that adds more steampunk fighting styles and equipment. All the existing character builds would still be perfectly viable, the expansion just adds more possible builds that are equally good.

 

right, I agree, they should not increase the level cap be it hard or soft. Now one thing I heard Chris mention in the hangout (i think it was Chris) the the soft cap would be different for different people and it is not set. This worries me also because of game balance for pvp especially.

 

OK Themo I am going to ask since it is such a big deal when you lost you level what did it actually affect? 1 - 2 % change (IF THAT).

People are so up I arms over something that actually does almost nothing but possibly take away the word Grandmaster, but really doesn't affect anything.

I still agree it needs work, but 19 pages over something that dos almost 0 to how effective you are it . . . . . .

If the whole point is - "I worked for it, I should not lose it......" sorry but get over it. That is life and how it works.'

They have stated they are working on solutions wait for them.

 

I think its been a pretty decent and civil conversation. Please allow us to speak our minds M'lord Weins

 

Stop reading it then Weins, since you missed the entire point.

 

LMAO, really how much did you lose when you lost 3 points? I cant look at the video, anymore so I couldn't tell But I KNOW that a level or two hardly make any difference.

Yeah it sucks and my taming is gonna take a hit which SUCKS but until a fix is in no point in crying over it.

this is now, a dead horse, 19 pages of it, the point is surly received.

 

IF you want the thread to die quit bumping it. If it offends you do not read it.

 

In Ultima Online after a year I got bored and purchased a second account... I had maxed my skills and felt like the people with 3+ accounts had cornered the economy to the point that I couldn't compete. So I did what they did... got more accounts. After Maxing three accounts I felt like I wasn't enjoying the game so I dropped one account and kept 2.

I never felt like there was a consequence for any choice I made in that game because I always tried things I didn't understand on an alternate account. I never felt like there was a penalty that mattered on that alternate account. I played with honesty and virtue on my main but I was a murderer and a thief on my alt. I would pickpocket and steal artifacts and do all the things I couldn't do on my main and I just didn't care. I detached myself from how I wanted to play the game to min-max my opportunity by playing two different styles. One of the coolest things about this game is they're basically building the framework against min-max capacities. I really hope that continues.

More to the point: if I only had one character at uncapped skills I would never had made a second and I would have been forced to purchase the rares I stole on my alts... either from players pockets, chests, or dungeons.

I've seen Indiana Jones... I know you're not supposed to take the big rupee at the end of the tunnel in the jar... it's only because of Link that we think it's okay! So wrapping this up to a single point.

UO was a great sandbox but it sucked as an RPG. The reason it sucked is because the common thread was missing. The princess in Mario... she's stupid but she's the common thread. The princess Zelda... she's stupid but everyone think's Link is Zelda and Link and Zelda are the common thread even though you're playing Link... come on people! I'd say something about Final Fantasy but most of their games are like crack for those who don't take it... chaos! I love Final Fantasy. The Elder Scrolls games actually have an entire metaverse that you can look up the lore and history around each game and what happened before and after the story you played through... really cool because you can play the stories like 50 different ways! (I only played Oblivion and Skyrim and haven't read much of the story around them... only enough to understand what I felt was missing from Skyrim). So the common threads are gained by the storyline. UO had no Storyline.

This game isn't UO... it's something better... it's not Ultima... it's something better. What we have is the chance to have a game where a savior, the Avatar, is able to play through the storyline and save New Britannia while interacting with the sandbox environment. It's going to be amazing and LotRO screwed it up. I was stoked for LotRO thinking it would be like this and it wasn't. Instead it was like GW meets the Middle Earth with a flavor of the month club installed. There hasn't been a game released to date that has the potential that this game has... a rich and well known storyline that has affected thousands of people and boasts unlimited game time due to its seamless integration between the sandbox and storyline environments where you play a single shared character between the MMO and single player parts that I know of... that's all pretty pointless if you can just easily switch accounts and have something else to do.

We need to have a dependency on each other in the sandbox world... we need to feel like there is a strong penalty for starting over (that grind that everyone hates is it right now... that's my two cents... I just hate that it's here for pre-alpha ... "it SUCKS"-spoony soundclip voice)

I actually posted that to get people off Themo's back for why he did what he did and if you noticed I said I don't listen anyway. I love giving suggestions non stop even though most of them are ignored lol... I don't think they mind. The reason that happened in private is likely because they don't mind and they are letting us enjoy this process of development how we want to. Themo is just min-maxing it like usual and doing it optimally. I'm just having fun. Most areas in my life I'm like Themo but this one is going to be my vice of enjoyment So on that note...

I think we should all have the option to get a skill point by donating money (minimum $1) to a charity irl... it would be a great fundraising effort and allow us to do some good to skip grinding. At minimum you'd make $100 for a charity per GM skill ^.^ and since decay is decay then decay is like the endless loop of fundraising shenanigans (seriously bad idea here that no one will agree with but I do think an in-game advertisement for charities would be... oh alright I'll stop).

 

Weins stop typing for a minute and think please. For a start, this has nothing to do with how much i lost in that video (which btw is more than most people have total). Second, people are going to discuss things that you personally don't have an interest in on a forum, you do it all the time. Third, decay is not even working as intended and Chris was not aware of this before this thread. Fourth, it is something that clearly many people don't like.. and unlike some people..we are restricting all discussion on the topic to a single thread.

 

I appreciate your response but wish it was more to the point and less verbose lol . People are going to min max this system just like they would the hard cap system though IMO. People already have multiple accounts and some guilds have already postured themselves to take over the economy and be the defacto rulers of us all by private conversations with those in powerful places. I am not trying to belittle your statement at all but if we play the game as intended, as a role play game and not a game that has to use mechanics that do not make it fun to role play or even pvp for that matter, who is going to stick around and play? Some of us will because we feel the need to play because we have invested so much into it, but many new players IMO will see this as a negative. I am all for new systems and trying out new Ideas. If they can make the decay fun and not a chore then I will be all for it. I would love to see balance also as I mentioned in a previous post. How can you balance a soft cap if it changes for each individual?

 

The devs clearly asked for this thread. They said clearly in a dev hangout "show us when you notice decay effecting you because so far we don't think you can see it" and put a challenge out so... Themo was just accepting the challenge like a boss

*inserts troll boss face* <-- how themo looked when posting this thread's OP

 

I have an idea on that... pm incoming ^.^