Does or Will Skill Advancement take into account an expected rate of use?

Have you played any new games in recent times that take years to fully explore? I am curious to know which games you are modelling your expectations from.

 

Hail Lifedagn. Good some points there but I was not thinking about slow them down, I was thinking about possibilities for the rest of the players.

What about add more gameplay mechanics with xp rewards? like @PrimeRib said, via quests is one of those options (a bit more love compared with current rewards). More examples;

- Archivements with xp rewards?
- xp rewards for finding rare items around the world (*treasure maps system). UO had a simple system really
- xp rewards linked to dungeon's puzzles.


There are tons of good ideas. If you add to the game more options to get same things/goals (xp, gold, etc), those hardcore grinders will be kept doing the same, just grind xp killing mobs 24/7, but the rest of the community (RPs, crafters, gatherers, etc) will be able to get the same but doing what they like, without forcing them to grind xp farming mobs.

 

Okay, that is much more clear to me. Though I believe these would be value adds to the game, I do not think it would do much at all to close the gap between the grinders and the rest of the community. If anything, it simply adds to the menu of things for grinders to grind through.

Now some constructive criticism.

Achievements - Sure, go ahead. Grinders are going to get these too. Probably much more quickly than the rest of us.

XP Rewards for finding rare items around the world: This tends to become a different form of grind. At the end of the day, the sustainable way to implement this is for the "rare items" and "locations" to be procedurally generated. Instead of grinding kills, you start grinding maps and locations. That isn't bad, it is a separate path, but it isn't something that will allow the rest of the community to keep up with grinders. If the reward is that good, grinders will just start grinding this. Same problem, different activity, really.

Dungeon Puzzles: Cool. XP once per puzzle or once per solve? Once per solve turns this into another grinder activity, as per above. Also, solving the same puzzle twenty times might get old fast. Once per puzzle would require a lot of development time to keep injecting new puzzles into the system.

Again, not saying these are bad ideas. Just saying they do not address the problem of grinders being so far ahead of everyone else.

 

Since no one seemed to answer his actually question:
Yes, there are skills that gain at a different advancement rate than others. Current multipliers range from 0.5 (half the number of uses per level of gain as a normal 1x skill), to 4+(4x more uses per level compared to a 1x skill)
However I doubt they've done a real balance pass yet, considering that some trees have skills that cost almost nothing (air tree) in total exp and in uses to gm, compared to other trees (fire is roughly 4x or more to gm everything compared to air for instance).

 

Most games of this type have multiple classes each with several build options to explore. As it stands you can cover 90% of character content in under a month.

 

The truth is (well one truth atleast) that most players don't want to play for years to make progress an master a skill on their characters. Beside that, imagine SotA would be that way, that you truely need years to be lets say a tailormaster like in real life... What do you think would you do most of that playing time? As I said earlier: I don't like grinding either. I too would prefer a world, that large and with so much stuff to explore and see and play with, that it will never get boring for years! But who would be creating such a world? Where would it came from? Someone needs to create that world first. And you know what? Richard Garriot, Darkstarr and their team are truely on it. I believe they really want to creat that world. But it's not there yet and getting there will take years or hard work. They don't have the resources or budget that Blizzard got and creating worlds isn't that easy as it might seem... It's already difficult to create a world purely on paper for lets say a series of books and stories. And there you simply need to write things down for them to be true inside your story... now imagine you also need to code all that, too...
No, New Brittania is far from being perfect. Living in this world can be a pain in the a** right now. Mastering skills currently means doing alot of tedious stuff over an over again... one might call it grinding, other call it practicing, but it will not go away... The devs now need to take care, that this part of the game will be more rewarding and fun to do and I'm sure, they want that as much as we do.