Experience point loss has removed the incentive to adventure and explore.

Just a quick throw in. You dont have to wear full enchanted obsidian armor to do stuff. I get my first 2 GMs while wearing a plate from the npc merchant and could also clear the monkey room with one. Much harder and a higher risk to die, but i could. Every vendor is full of armor that never gets sold and nobody needs cause everyone crafts his own stuff. They are so cheap you could easy replace your whole gear 2 times a day.

 

heh.. Truth!. and no I don't wear, or even own any obs gear.. but in referring to "full loot" I have to count my accessory stuff
heh I too craft my stuff mostly. but sometimes I think it's cheaper to buy than to burn through all the stuff we blow up lol

 

As far as equipment goes just wear your nice stuff to dance parties so it doesn't get ruined.
Use rusty daggers and rusty leather armor when out adventuring. That stuff is free and easy to loot from corpses. Plus saves time on crafting!

 

Seems like that only works for those who wish to play PvP

 

I die at least once every game session lately (or I'm not fighting interesting enough mobs for my level).

I look at my xp at the start of my gameplay and at the end. Im always in the positive even if I die 3x which nears max decay for 24 hrs (not quite since decay uses an exponential decay formula).

High 90s advent level.

I find decay adds to my gameplay as I do try to not die if at all possible (turned on low life indicator recently as I dont look to my health bar enough. That thing should be moveable. I dislike the nameplate/healthbar substitute).

I don't understand how decay and specialization can ever coexist. Perhaps you can have a few skills advent/crafting that are decay immune? 3?

 

The goal was achieving a soft cap, to limit the extreme grinders... as you can see it didn't work.

I'm around lvl 50... dosen't affect me much but I definately don't adventure to half the places because it might slow me down quite significatively (just losing my xp pool is bad enough). Also I might not join my friends all the time in some crazy places because I tend to lag and die alot.

Of course I could ignore it, at one point when I become high level where the decay should affect me more, then as you say I'll make 200k xp an hour and it won't affect me anymore...

 

Soft cap was already achieved prior to decay. Each level requires 10% more xp than the last level. Skills give diminishing returns.

Decay is more of a hard cap. People level up to what they are willing to pay for in decay. 101-120 being 2x decay.

So you had a soft cap and then it was ruined (along with the concept of specialization) with a hard cap that is based solely on grinding/time.

 

Exactly... it was a nice experiment honestly the bell curve and math are good and well thought. But people have gamed and min maxed it (which it was supposed to prevent compared to a regular hard cap).

Some people even say that having all skills in the 80s is superior if you know how to switch decks etc... Others have almost all skills in the 100-120.

All it does it a bigger gap between the extreme grinder and the casual player.

 

Well. Some are pushing high 130 snd 140s now heheh.

 

Ouch! That is just self-inflicted misery for really no benefit.

 

There are a couple other things which cause vendors to be full of unsold stuff; much of it is just crap. With the way crafting works currently (a system that has gotten ZERO love in ages) things are SO incredibly random.
The crafter has no control over what MW"s or Enchants come up.. it's a roll of the dice. Many people try to recoup $ by trying to sell the junk they made as they go for an item that has stats they really want. This mean vendors filled up with junk.
We also have a low server population.. so there is nobody to buy the items.. even if they needed them. We also have the fact that an item can last sooo long there is little need for replacing. And then there is the (IMO) stupid COTO repairs...
you don't even need any skill to restore and item to it's full durability.

You should get out more My alt is in the low 60's. I don't stay in my town with him just because I worry I might die. I KNOW I'll die.. it's part of the learning process. As for lag.. that's an equal opportunity malady... the great equalizer.. attacking all levels in the same way. As to all the worry about gaps...the simple fact is that the person who puts in more time will always make more progress. I think we should put away our tin foil hats and stop worrying about Chicken Little.

 

Except for a base weapon skill. After a while it's the only way to increase your damage.

 

Been a very long time since I played Gemstone. A very, very long time. But as I recall and one of the reasons I ended up leaving was that they had a Level System. At the time, I believe the highest level was 25. They then institiuted a system that you lose points toward a level. Took forever to get them back. (Sound familiar) In other words you lost levels. I do not think that lasted long since it sounded like today they just had raised the levels over 100. In addition you gain levels even when you do not play. Sounds a little like your level is based on how long you have been with the game. Not 100% sure all this, been a lot of years since I left.

By the way this game has been around for for 30 or more years. It is text based and still has a good following. People used to pay $30.00 per month to play this game. I think the price is down to like $10.00 per month.

Interesting thing about this game, a text based MMORPG was that it was open PvP with an arena for settling disputes. Even being open PvP there was very little of it. Reason was 1. Everyone had a unique name. 2. You could have up to 7 characters. 3. No one knew how powerful your characters were. 4. One of the skills available to the Cleric Class was the ability to Teleport directly to any player in the system. 5The system notified you anytime anyone logged in or out. 4. The difference between a level 1 and level 25 was like night and day, the higher your level the higher your skill exponentially.

So what would happen is if someone got on and killed your character is that it would be broadcast throughout the chat system. At that moment the character who was killed would either switch characters or call in friends who would teleport to the killer and first silence him (another skill) and then wipe him out. Every time he logged in from then on he would be treated the same way, Eventually he got the point and in most cases did not log on again, deleted his character and started over, this time thinking twice.

 

Yah, I know... thats what happens when "end game" is directly tied to skills. They have nothing else to do... its such a disaster.

Believe me I tried, this is my third BIG guild I join... all of them are completely gone, I have to make new friends every time I join. Those that are left aren't even posting on the forums anymore because they have been bullied badly in all impunity.

Also with my 8 FPS in adventurer scenes, and 3-4 fps in POTs and towns... I can only do so much before I freakin fall asleep with a bad case of motion sickness. So yah, most of the time its not network lag its just my machine that can run the heaviest benchmarks I can find at 30+fps and can't run SOTA in Fastest settings with all options turned off.

Time = progress... that sounds like a grindy sims and not a RPG in my book... but thats a debate for another thread.

 

Priceless.. I love it

 

Exactly what would have happened here with our tight knit community, and that I've seen happen in the forums more than once. But people were so intent on disproving any negative alignment characters that they just ignored that argument, now I feel much less alone since you seem to understand it.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now we're stucked with that mindless Oracle and its arbitrary dictatorship...

 

Everyone should know that this level of advancement is beyond the game design. Eventually it is going to hurt so bad that some will rage quit. Moreover, it is entirely possible that the higher levels will be stripped away, directly or indirectly.

I often wondered if soft caps were the cause of some of the grinding complaints because some people cannot help themselves but to try to break the limits at their own peril.

 

There's a few more than just the base weapon skill. Zerker stance, Crit (sword is by far the easiest), and casted Stat buffs (when stacking them, higher starting number will equate to a larger absolute # increase 5 stacked). Crit honestly is probably more important than the base weapon skill.

Defensively... the avoidance buffs/passive are most definitely a noticeable winner that have no "I could level X Y Z instead and see similar benefit." Someone (god have mercy on their grinding soul) having 140 in all the avoidance skills would have 14-15% more avoidance than someone with 100 in the same skills, which is very clearly noticeable.

The problem is that these skills now that you'd want above 100 not only cost waaaaaaaaay more experience to level, they also have such crazy decay amounts that you probably quite literally couldn't afford to die, ever. This is how decay kills specialization IMO. You just can't afford to ever die and plan to take skills above 100, maybe 120 depending.

Edit: I understand the argument of advancement limits and all that. I don't agree, but I understand it. The problem I have is these things are achievable. That being the case these players naturally are NOT going to do anything that might cause them the pain and misery of death to recoup that loss. That IMO is a serious problem and is the current impasse we're facing: It is currently too costly to do anything dangerous for a growing # of players. If you're not there yet, like myself and a lot of others, how about 6 months from now? A year? Eventually we're going to hit that wall. Why set the game up for failure like this?

 

Point is that system worked because of all the parts of the game that made it possible. Leave out just one of those pieces and it does not work.

 

Beleive it or not I have been petitioning for this for 3 years now... all that did for me is attract me tons of hate mail, threats and being bullied to tears here on the forums, I have no shame.

We want to create a RPG but take all negative alignments out of the game. Being "evil" now is just a cosmetic choice.