Game system changes for R35

Didn't read all the replies, so maybe someone replied already:

On the topic of decay, 4 hours is the maximum penalty you can incur if you have not died within that much time.

You acrue a death tax at a rate of 0.01% applied adv xp per hour up to a maximum of 4 hours worth. Craft xp and pooled adv xp are not taxed. PvP does not trigger death tax.

If you log in and die, you pay 0.04% (400 on the million). If you die again 1 hour later, you pay 0.01%. If you then die again 8 hours later, you pay 0.04%. You can currently never pay more than a 4-hour tax.

It's like proprty tax, not income tax. You are taxed based on what you have in this case, not what you are earning.

Practical application example:

I am now lvl 93 (leveled up while dying in fact), and I was messing around with one of the dragons last night to test different decks and such. I would lose about 20-30k xp for a full death tax, maybe more..? If I kill 1 dragon for 20k in 4 hours, that pays for the entire tax. At most, I could die immediately, pay ~20k, farm for 4 hours and die repeatedly, paying another combined ~20k, and as long as I managed to kill 2 dragons in 4 hours no matter how many times I died, my death taxes were covered by my gains and I still keep the 5k craft xp and loot per dragon killed.

I can kill 2 dragons typically in less than 10 minutes on my home machine, maybe a little more on my laptop at work. While this may not be the best xp or way to go about getting xp in the the game, the point is the same:

Death is no longer trivial, but neither is the death tax too overbearring, especially at lower lvls.

The system is intended to work as a soft-cap for adv skills/accumulated xp such that you reach some oscillating equillibrium point based on how much you are gaining per hour, how much you have, and how frequently you die.

Currently, some players are able to gain appx. 2M xp/hour (maybe not anymore after update).

Doing a little 'maths' here, to LOSE 2M xp per hour from 0.01% tax (assuming you die constantly), that would back-calculate your applied xp to all adv skills to be 20B.

2M/0.0001 = 20B (0.0001 = 0.01%) maximum sustained applied xp at given maximum decay rate based on upper-limit earning potential of the best players. You may not earn this much yet, but you quite possibly will in the future.

Please keep in mind this is a simplified scenario and my understanding of how it works, I may be inaccurate. There are ways to incur more taxes such as intermittent gameplay concerning combat/adv xp gain and around our daily lives and 2M xp is likely an over-estimate (but not by all that much).

 

Anyone know? I'm not about to test this on my character.. decay could potentially be a lot worse if you somehow die often. And does this affect pvp, anyone try yet? I haven't found info about that yet...

 

Thanks for the feedback!
Some thoughts:

I would prefer a skill gain rate increase than skill decay. Something like:

0-30 skill lvl: skill rate x
31-50 skill: skill rate x + y
51-60: skill rate x + z

I really feel bad about losing skills, its like losing time of my life...
And for death be meaninful, maybe a death debuff for some minutes or something like that

 

@Chris What about it the time is less than one hour....like 20 minutes? I died several times last night in under one hour. each time I died I was dealt a hit to my xp pool. so....are you rounding up to a one hour penalty if it has only been 10 minutes since my last death or is that a bug?

 

While I generally agree that this is Early Access and we aren't going to like every change (because players never do), I think even "I don't like it" statements are important at this point. It's cool if the community can come up with good ideas and I'm totally for posting constructive criticism and ideas. But even a statement that something isn't enjoyable can provide valuable feedback.

Now on the decay topic: It depends on what's the goal here. Is it to implement a skillcap mechanic in a game that's (also) supposed to be played in multiplayer? Then the decay mechanic is a bad idea imho. It encourages avoiding risk or grinding XP pool before you do anything challenging. It disencourages helping ppl if there's any risk involved.
Players who already struggle, because they aren't that "good" at fighting (player skills, not character skills) now get punished for not being good by taking away XP from them.

This isn't about finding the correct numbers either. Either the decay is meaningless or it is punishing. And if it is punishing it affects not-so-high-skilled players more than those who already know how to avoid dying.

Maybe if the decay became inactive until you have earned the XP back that you lost at your last death it would be better? Dunno.
If there's supposed to be some kind of skill-cap then why not just implement a cap and not some strange mechanic that seems rather unpredictable?

 

From my "testing", you lose experience each time you die, even if it has only been a few minutes. so it seems that they are drastically rounding up to each hour.

 

Well I'm not sure we are in disagreement at all. I really think we need skill caps not decay and then after that we can concentrate on more interesting things about making the game more interesting and fun, just cap us I know I know not that simple

 

Perhaps not really disagreement, I just wanted to provide my view on the feedback part and then provide my own feedback :->

 

Does decay amount keep going up even while logged off? I know, the max is 4 hours.. so if I die, then log off, go to sleep and wake up, die right away again lol, is that the full 4 hours of decay? I assume so.

 

My understanding was it was game time not real world time.

 

Death:

Im not sure if some dev was messing with me but I actually died last night in my normal PvE farm. This is so rare I have to call conspiracy theory. I had 3 cultist archers literally spawn on me when fighting 2 already in an area where that many cultists dont even spawn lol. They of course all slowed me even as I saw it fast and tired to run but dropped 400 hp in 3 seconds for a death. Thanks to the dev who did that lol.

any ways.. conspiracy theory off...

At adv lvl 81 after farming hard for around 2 hours I died. I had about 110K exp in my pool (normal since they made the changes is R34). I lost around 20K exp in the pool so it sat at around 90K exp.

I dont know if I had reached my full potential degradation by then.

I dont consider that bad at all, I can get that 20K back on the cultists (3K each) in a few minutes even with skills turned on.

 

I understand all that ive been here since 2013 too.

Game Changes are ok, More crit less crit, More skills less skills.

What i dont understand is who tough death Penalty was a good idea. Where were they the last 17 years, Even UO took that away when they start scaring players away. There is not a successful MMO with that. I dont have a problem with changes i know the game is not done.

I have the same feeling when they mess with gold. The problem is that really bad ideas are getting into releases someone in the development team should know this is a bad idea and stop it but they keep coming.

People dont like to feel their are wasting time. Even less if they are not getting paid for. Thats a fact.

 

Yeah, I really think death decay is pretty bad. Prefer my idea posted before, even if the penalty is not big.
Please, consider my idea.

 

The way it is *supposed* to work is that the time since last death determines how much you lose. This time is capped at four hours. If you die twice in a row quickly, the second should be almost zero loss.

The other part of how it is supposed to work is that the higher your skill, the more you lose. If you have a skill at level 40 that can't be de-leveled, you will lose zero. If you have a skill at 80, you might lose a hundred (guessing) for each skill at that level. If you have skills at 100+, you will lose more, multiple hundreds, each. That is because decay is based on a fraction of the raw XP that went into the skill. At higher levels, it takes much more XP to gain a skill level, and the decay scales to that.

The important part is if you have multiple GM or higher skills, you will lose a decent chunk of each of them. If you only have one GM skill, it won't be so bad, but if you have ten of them, that's ten "decent chunks". The purpose is to make it harder to maintain a large number of skills at GM level, yet be little more than noise at normal (60-80 or less) levels.

And if you die multiple times quickly and you see a lot of skill loss each time, that is probably a bug and you should report it.

 

I don't believe it is a bug, as Chris' description sounds exactly like it will hit you with 1 hour decay every death, even if you die every minute. Seems to be working as designed. But that is not good at all!

 

Thank you for sharing all the nitty-gritties, @Chris it's always fun to peek behind the curtain of your mind!

Sadly for Jaan she had not opened up Tier 3 spells and so may never get to know the joys of shield stacking. Unless you would consider adding a Tactical skill that would once again allow magic users to stack shields. It would keep with the tradition of offsetting limitations with skills.

Otherwise glad to see the strong focus this release on stopping botters and reducing the ease of exploit-y character development.

 

I believe it says in the Instructions that decay accumulates in Earth time, whether logged in or out.

I wouldn't be too scared about experimenting though. Devs have been pretty good about easing things in.

Based on my initial assessment it sounds like they are trying to target about an actual hour of adventuring for the "average" player per max loss.

Another way to look at it is that regularly dying will probably set you back about 15-30 minutes per hour of adventuring time. So even if you are somewhere getting creamed, you should still get some net gain.

Of course a player finding themselves in such a situation would be remiss not to try and recruit some help at that point.

 

Whazzat?

 

I thought there was a skill decay round up to 1 hour every time I died after the firs time in 4 h ours until I realize, I've been gaining like +10 on redirection and shield preservation skills.. So false alarm It was the skills that had been pulling the XP from the XP pool in my case.

 

Truth be told I don't think any amount of decay can offset exploit-y levels of gains. I recently paid $60 for 1mil xp, and AFAIK those gains were legit. So i can only imagine what exploiters were pulling in....

PvP needs to have a fuller consideration of the risk vs reward equation, and my understanding is we should see meaningful changes next release.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is the deck system. With unlocked skills flapping around there is heavier reliance on RNG, not to mention the loss of IRL focus having to keep an eye on the hotbar along with the status indicators along wthe the actual battle actions, and possibly the chatbox. That's 3-4 points of attention which is sure enough to foil even the most "godlike" of chars.

Now the question is... will it be extremely difficult or even impossible for PvPer to win with a bunch of locked skills in their hotbar. This is where I see more of a meaningful counterbalance for PvP.