Decay

How decay is implemented in the upcoming release is one of the most important decisions the developers will make. It has to be lenient on early players but also force higher level players to make decisions.

Originally it sounded like all skills would decay if they weren't set to up arrow or maintain. This system would limit players to a certain number of really high skills because players would only be able to afford to maintain so many skills.

Skills that weren't set to maintain would be reduced after a certain time frame or upon death. The non maintained skills would de-level also. This would force people to make choices and would prevent characters from getting every skill in the game.

I've recently read that they are thinking of just taking the experience out of the pool? This system would not force players to make decisions and would do nothing to prevent players from GM'ING dozens if not hundreds of skills.

Does anyone know what their real intentions are for decay?

 

They definitely plan to have decay de-level skills that aren't set to maintain, at least based on previous forum threads. There either needs to be skill decay or hard caps on skills. I'm assuming they do not want to go with hard caps on skills. So unless they've come up with something completely new since R34, the plan is just as it has always been. The higher your skill level and the more high level skills you have, the more XP your skills will consume upon dying. I think they've been working on balancing the time that decay builds up over though. It was 3 days originally, but I heard it was reduced to 6 hours. Regardless of what time they choose, the intent is to make it so dying multiple times in succession doesn't cause massive skill loss. PvP also will have no decay on death.

To be honest though, I don't think this will really affect high level players anyway. I very rarely die first of all. Secondly, I can easily build up a few million XP in my XP pool to more than cover a bunch of deaths. Third, the decay doesn't knock you down a full level. If you were at level 100 in a skill, the decay might take you down to level 99.9 or so. Basically, you lose about 15 minutes of gameplay trying to get that back up to where you were.

That said, all of this could change. This is just based off of what I've heard and threads in past releases regarding this.

 

I say as Adventure level 81 (or so) that your pool and gain rate doesn't reflect mine. I know the numbers that were thrown around on QA+ when someone died and took the 3 day death and they weren't pretty. It would be more on the order of 30-45min for me with nothing set to drain(the recent skill train change does have mine over 100k, something that never happened on its own), and from my own experience dieing with a zero XP pool (not sure how that happened but it did), some skills just didn't want to go back up quickly that deleveled when I died so yeah...it sucked even when they went to 98% of the next level.

Yes the max was changed after that and then the whole thing disabled for this release, meaning giving any actual values is moot and misleading because we have no idea where it will end up at in R35.

 

When I need XP, I farm either Crag Foothills (easy but slow) which is somewhere around 100-200K XP per hour depending on if your ignoring harvesting nodes, the Rise which can net around 500k XP per hour but is a little more involved, or Control Points which can easily net 1 million XP per hour but require the most careful involvement of the three. So XP pool isn't really an issue unless you've got tons of GMs.

I'm pretty certain they reduced the decay build up time from 3 days down to 6 hours though. Which would make a significantly smaller impact on your skills. Whether they change that number again or not, we'll just have to wait and see.

I think decay is needed regardless. Without it, everyone will eventually have everything GMed and we'll all be basically the same. Personally, I prefer a total skill points allocated cap. I think it creates much more build diversity rather than everyone being a jack of all trades.

 

I don't quite agree. Althrough everyone can have everithing GMed, we won't be the same. Some will probaly prefer to train a few skills beyond GM whereas other will want to be versatile but less good specialists. For me, the point of a good decay system is the growing gap between experienced avatars and new ones.

 

Seems like the devs want you to pay in tax or time to play SotA. And since the top players in dev+ are well aware that this change will help create a wall blocking casual players from getting their grubby mitts on those neat end game toys the devs keep promising, I'm sure it will be in place shortly.

Yeah, I mean if we had a system where you were given skill points when you reach specific XP milestones which you could freely allocate and there was a mild penalty for respeccing, then we wouldn't even need skill decay, just slap players with a flat XP penalty for dying and call it a day. It's a shame the devs never thought of that.

 

For decay to truly work how it needs to, I think a lot of us are going to be carved up into specific builds nomatter the level.. if decay works how it should......
I have a sort-of balanced mage build.. I wonder how that will hurt my attempt to keep that?

 

I always love this perception that dev+ is some cabal of whales laughing about keeping the little man with his paltry $45 pledge down and that the devs do everything that we say. I can tell you this much, thats not how the conversation went down when this was tested for R34..far from it.

Spending money to have Dev+ access and being a casual player arent the same thing. I would be about right where i am now if I still had my original pledge (might have different property, thats about it, but I would have property)

 

I agree Fister. A successful decay system would make us make choices and design our characters. It would prevent someone from being the best at everything.

 

I'm not judging, just observing, I mean the dev+ folks are paying to keep the lights on after all. I've been around long enough to see several significant design-changing desicions and the introduction of each to the player base in general was prefixed with "There was a discussion on dev+ and we decided", or words to that effect.

Decay caps the progress of casual players because any meaningful level of decay will eventually require more time than the player is willing to commit to counter.

 

This. Interactions in dev+ are essentially the same outside of dev+. We just get more info ahead of time. The hardest part is not sharing that info with the rest of the community. Trust me, I'd love to let everyone know what's going on. And I'm sure many of the other people in dev+ would as well.

 

That's one of the reasons why I'm sticking to Subterfuge, Light Armour a few Blade skills and not practicing much of anything else... and who knows how that's going to be kept.

 

Essentially all decay is going to do is:

• Force people to grind more

(Because game isn' t grindy enough already!)

• Cause people to not do anything that has a risk of death

(Need help with that boss? Sorry, I don't wanna regrind all my crap.)

• Make crafting even MORE of a time and money sink

(Died doing something that had nothing to do with crafting, so now need to farm more materials and more producer xp and spend a fortune on fuels *again* to level up my crafting *again*)

Really? Crafting skills? Absolutely ludicrous. Unless my adventuring xp pool is going to maintain my crafting skills, my adventuring death should be completely irrelevant.

The hard core grinders that everyone's saying this decay system is supposed to limit? Not going to be limited. They'll just grind right through it.
The people with less playtime are going to have to work a lot harder to keep the high levels that they have earned by already spending 99% of their playtime grinding.
Overall, I'm terribly terribly disappointed in this decision which is only going to increase the gap between the serious players and the casuals, and between the rich and poor.

What happened to casual friendly / social game?
Patch after patch makes you more and more dependent on cash-grinding to do absolutely anything else, and now you're going to be punished for exploring or trying anything remotely challenging. Great plan!

 

Everyone seems to be talking about how to implement decay rather than why it should be implemented.

For the most part, people want it so that someone doesn't go and get 500 skills to level 200....so what happens if they do?
With diminishing returns something at level 150 will only become maybe 2% more effective getting it to 160. 10 levels at that xp cost will take a while for very little benefit, almost to the point of it either not being worth it or at least a pat on the back for those that have spent the xp to get something that high.

So what happens in a years time when everyone has level 300 in every skill? Not much. PvE will be easier meaning port will have to keep introducing new content (which they plan to do anyway), pvp will be unaffected since everyone else can get exactly the same skills without fear of losing their xp (it will just take time) and it will simply come down to skills chosen in your deck and gear.

If decay is linked to death? People will just kill lower level, no risk stuff to get the same benefits over a longer period of time. People may not want to get 200k an hour xp with a risk of losing it all, instead they may well go for the 100k an hour xp one shotting bandits and rabbits. People will become too afraid to go try something adventurous due to losing their hard work getting the levels they have and trying to maintain them.

So what if everyone can get level 900 in chain lightning, congratulations you now do 50 more damage than someone who has it level 100.

 

Well said, and I agree completely; particularly with the casual/social aspect. It's disheartening how much nonsensical grinding I have to do to even have a chance at being successful at anything worth doing.

For example: If I want to be a GM cook, what cooking related things would I grind to get producer pool to spend on cooking? Well, logically, I would pick the most lucrative thing: mining. But, why should mining give me more producer xp then cooking related tasks (gathering veg growing in my garden -- oh, wait, we can't do that yet).

Forget decay!!! If your goal is to stop people from having too many GMs, go with a temporary solution similar to UO. Separate combat versus crafting, and let players figure out what they'll focus on. But don't punish people who craft as a primary focus.

Focus on more beneficial things! Like filling out the agriculture line. Like making planting beds easier to use. Like adding more seeds for more crops. We have food now that benefits people, but I can't grow carrots? Huh? I have to steal them and lower my Oracle relationship to make food? Seriously?!?

Sigh.

 

Well said. Agree fully.

 

So many games have been ruined by people that just complain until things are made easier and easier. They don't want any risks, they don't want any consequences, and they want to be the best at everything.

Imagine new players coming into the game trying to find their niche, only to see other players with hundreds of GM skills. To allow unlimited advancement without any chance of caps or decay would completely ruin the launch of this game. Imagine what UO would be like right now if there was no cap of 700 skill points? Basically everyone would be exactly the same, with every skill at max. Where's the choice in character development there? Where is your individuality?

If this game is released a year from now, and no working decay system is introduced, there won't be any influx of new players. Most new players would be chased off once they realized they have no role or place in this world.

Decay should be set up not to limit newer players, but to create artificial limits for older players so they have to make choices about who they actually are, and what they're good at. If the decay system is set up right, people should struggle to maintain much more than a dozen GM skills. I don't think people should be punished for having really high skills, but they should see incredible decay if they try to raise too many skills.

To save this game in the long term, a working decay system is a necessity.

 

I seriously hate the idea of decay. The thing that bothers me most about it is that you have to worry about losing skills that you've worked hard to achieve. I was focusing on 1 or 2 trees when I first started, but then found out that I couldn't survive without diversifying into a good number of different trees. I do not GM many skills, since the bang for the buck is pretty slight. The little arrow by your name is pretty cool tho

I do not think we should get decay for skills under 100. It is punishing for no reason. I wouldn't mind a limit of 100's that you can achieve without decay just to make it so you can't level everything to 100 and be safe from decay.

Hopefully it isn't as ugly as I fear it is going to be...and will only lose a few XP from my pool. I have a mage, so obviously I die alot. I spec to have fun not to be king of the world, so my death while playing can get out of hand at times.

 

I could say the opposite to everything you said, and I suspect there are many more people who don't want a punishing game than those who like to get slapped around all day by their GAME (a game is supposed to be a fun activity, not a job).

 

Its not that we want the game to be easier; we just want to keep what we've worked for.
I'd much prefer a hard cap than a constant uphill battle to struggle to keep what I have. That is not in any way shape or form, fun.
HOWEVER, a hard cap would necessitate rethinking the lvl 40 useless skill prereqs in the trees!

The diminishing returns on XP investment is a pretty big blocker to taking anything that high, anyway.
And if someone's been playing the game for years? Then they deserve those GMs that they've grinded and grinded for. The whole point is that there's progression. If I can no longer make any progress on my character, if there's nothing new to do or discover or no way to get better, why keep playing?

The open ended skill system without artifically imposed limits is, for me, SotA's biggest selling point and the best thing its got going for it. Decay is going to kill it.

Personally, I'm much more likely to leave the game if every day logging in is a 'job' just to keep yourself where you are, when there is zero incentive to do anything remotely dangerous since you know its going to set you back several hours of grind to (and thousands in material / fuel / reagent costs ) if you have a mishap. Just to get back to where you were when you logged in? Ugh, no thanks.

I think the adventuring XP penalty I could just about stomach, since it just means you need to kill more stuff.
The crafting decay? Still think its outrageous because a setback here is much more time consuming to recover from, producer xp is already a horrible slog. I've mined thousands of ores I have zero use for just to get xp to level up other stuff and I really don't fancy having to do that forever just to maintain it.