Decay: Worst Mechanic Ever

I think there will be much more dislikes for decay onces people play more to notice how much they are loosing....Playtime, Materials,Gold and finaly fun.

 

I can't see many good reasons not to allow you to lose skills you no longer use in favour of other skills you now want to gain - the idea of everyone eventually being expert in everything is not appealing, and rather 'unbalancing' for any world ( game or real) but the concept of someone changing roles and careers over their lifetime is reasonable enough, and core of many stories anyway. I should be able to be a miner who loses his home and family to raiders, and becomes a warrior to get revenge or protect other people from that fate, and maybe after a time spent in that role choose to retire and run his farm, maybe an inn, cook the produce to make food and supply the drinks. Seems only reasonable that through that lifetime, some neglected skills deteriorate in favour of the specialities currently needed, and although you remember some of the basics of being a miner (in that scenario) you're not practiced enough now to go back to being near the top of that profession unless you choose to put the time in to rebuilding the skills.

I can see this is maybe a potential hitch for game revenues when people have one character per account, since if there was no skill decay at all, anyone wanting to play in a different role, or just reflect their character aging/maturing/making new choices would be pushed into looking at a new account to build up their 'reborn' avatar, since even if the new avatar looks just like the old one, it won't have any skills, abilities or even basic survivability (I never found changing my career reduced my strength, intelligence or dexterity to almost nothing, or made me forget everything I knew overnight!) but I honestly don't think the design philosophy for SotA is to 'nickel and dime' people to such a level, they would prefer we play characters who adapt and change over time as part of their 'story' - or at least I hope, think and trust that's their plan

It's losing in-game skills because real life time can't be spent maintaining them that bothers me. It's purely 'system mechanical', anti-immersion, and not an integrated part of the role you're playing or the world your avatar inhabits, as well as being a definite negative on the fun element of playing the game. I honestly can't see any positives to it at all...

 

Skill decay should be based on an "in-game timer" decay not an external one. Or maybe if you go to a special logout area and get cryogenically frozen you won't have skill decay?

 

I agree that losing skills that you have gained is a pain. I like the idea of a tradeoff, but like was mentioned above, a skill debt would be better. Especially if this was per skill, and capped at something like 75% of your current skill. For example, if I level up to 100 in Carpentry, then stop, I slowly gain skill debt in it until that equals a skill of 75. If something gets added later that can only be made with a skill of 110, I basically have to regain levels 76-100 before I can get 101-110, but I don't lose the skill I actually have. This is basically the same penalty as now, but without the harsh edge.

 

Even ingame-timer is bad...I want to decide times I want to craft,to fight,to just meet and talk,visiting events, make decorations, play music and not be told by any game.
Not worth to put so many nice things in a game or have such a great and creative community when I'll be forced to stick with crafting/fighting/gathering for my skills.

 

I tend to agree that the loss of skill is painful. It is why in my opinion maybe there should be hard caps in game to solve this. It would allow everyone to compete once gained max cap. It prevents skill loss. It would make a person think and choose skills instead of leveling everything up. I do like port trying something different. I am a bit biased though because I want a class system and it would work in my favor to have only a certain amount of skill points to spend

 

While I fail to see the "danger" of characters having many skills (would them be able to cast 2 spells at the same time; wield swords, axes, bows an halberds all at once? Surely not) a sensible approach may require to define some areas of expertise. Say: armor. The caracter is GM on both heavy and light armor, it will better if the decay is on ONE of the skills (the least used) and not on both.

The caracter is GM on Swords, Bludgeon, Pole and Archery? Ok, lets save one of them from decay, and perhaps a secondary set at 50% of decay.

Also, on skills that *do have* decay, it's not the same to GM it the first time than to GM it the seventh time. I would like the more times we gain the same still, the slower would be the decay (if any, in RL once you master something seven times, it's unlikely you forget it, for life).

How about some decay per death, saving us from the "just in case" decay we have now? It would make more sense from the inmersion point of view.

 

Would it help the situation if we were able to pick one or two skills that never decayed? So you could mark that skill as specialized and it would not decay at all under any circumstances. That way it would still be very hard to master everything, but at least you wouldn't have to worry about the skill or skills you are most concerned with.

 

I'd prefer a hard cap on a non-linear scale.

Level 120 takes 2,000,000 exp
Level 100 takes 1,000,000 exp
Level 80 takes 500,000 exp

I'd rather choose my GMs carefully and master a bunch of others that are less important.

 

There is such a system planned. But calculate that you can save 5 skills for money. What about the other 35 you regulary use. Decay happens on all level. So even keeping up 10 more skills on lvl 80 is more work than an everage player has time. On the other hand i can keep all skills on lvl 20. Nothing prevents that. I find that even worse that i can learn all skills.

 

I'm really sorry to hear about your illness.

And yours is just one of a number of cases that can pull people away from the game.

Decay is a system that makes the game less fun.

It also discourages casual play.

"I could log in and play today, but my decay is already maxxed. If I play a bit today and don't have enough time to grind, then I'm just going to kick off even more decay. I'm better off not playing the game at all."

When your systems create that thinking, you really need to rethink your systems.

 

I'll be brief:

@Chris, would there be any harm in turning off decay for crafting skills, and refactoring the XP curve so that it's insanely difficult to GM more than six crafting skills?

Why six, you say?

Everyone should be able to have fishing, and to be a self-sufficient tailor, you have to have five skills: foraging, field dressing, tanning, textiles, and tailoring.

This would allow alchemists to have whatever combo of skills suited their speciality, and would allow some folks to have two skill sets of other streamlined crafting trees: mining/smelting/smithing, forestry/milling/carpentry, field dressing/butchery/cooking, or fishing/butchery/cooking, or fishing/tanning/carpentry, or whatever.

Also, each tree has five skills except fishing. A gatherer could be a GM in each gathering tree plus fishing. A refiner could be a GM in each tree, and such. Where it gets sticky is when we factor in the Survey/Timely Gathering/Meticulous Collection for gathering skills, as these take enormously more XP than refining and production skills. Sure, production skills have three factors (main skill, salvage, repair), but you can train them independently without impacting the main skill.



Ultimately [pun not intended...kinda], we're not really going to get good solid data on progression until we have a long run without wipes, and (here's where the butthurt comes in) without XP boosts.

We're not going to have the XP boost at launch, so we should really get off of the teat when we move to alpha.

I am completely 100% speculating that there will be no wipes during the alpha phase. It would make sense, as all frameworks would be in place at that point, and all patching would be for bug fixing and adding new content into the game loop. I'd love to have alpha be a close representation of what the final game state will be in terms of movement speeds on the overland map, XP gains vs. XP used, and realistic travel expectations (removing the /zone command except to zone to your own property, and refactoring the /stuck command in terms of how it works on the overland map).


I now return you to your stream of rabble.

 

That's exactly what has made me leave games in the past. If it feels like a second job, I move on. I hope they can get it sorted out by release so gathering, crafting, combat is actually fun instead of a chore

 

I'd like to think that at some point we're picking a lane. I see no reason to have unlimited mastery of skills any more than I see a reason to have "most" of the skills. I'd love to see a skill system that just stops you from taking on more skills, period. I'm not sure what the number is, but I would have to think that it makes sense to have about 15 to 20 skills in this system as it's currently designed.

 

This is worse than a 2nd job. 2nd jobs pay you. This is more like an added responsibility or a chore.

 

Aye, you have a point there. Along with decay, the grind for leveling up combat/gathering is brutal.

 

When i heard about decay I like the concept because it generates a softcap; i think it's cool to reward more dedicated players because it makes sense to allow them to go beyond the rest. Since my playtime is scarce I havent leveled high enough to notice skill decay, but even when i like the objective (generate a softcap to limit progression) i agree with fellow Avatars that something felt as punishment not for bad decisions or as part as an intrincate set of options, but just for not being able to keep up our playtime.

What i mean is even when skill decay may not be deemed as appropiate, i'd like to keep the softcap concept. Why not trying to achieve the same with a different approach? I can come up with some ideas but don't think they'll address the issue since i haven't suffered it :/

 

I would be ok with that number if it was per-facet, i.e., 15-20 adventuring skills, and 15-20 crafting skills.

 

I honestly have to say, the idea of losing character progress is one of those things that completely turns me off from playing an MMO. I already hate it enough if I have to spend my time in a game constantly replacing items, but having to also replace skillpoints is just a bridge too far for me.

 

You don't need to be at highlvl to notice, just watch your skills
I was logged in every day but did not used fishing a while.