How is Decay Implemented this release?

@DarkStarr suggested in the main R35 thread that a new post be created for decay so @Chris can comment on its mechanics separately. We have a few questions, and when you have the time in your busy schedule, could you please help us get a better understanding of how it works?

The release notes says the following "Adventuring Skill Decay: Skills will now decay. This is triggered when you die. Right now this accumulates a maximum of 4 hours worth of decay. NOTE: For now this only applies to Adventuring Skills, Crafting Skills do not yet decay. Skills set to train or maintain will spend XPs out of your experience pool before actually removing experience from the skill."

@Koldar has a great first question when he asked, "can you explain how this works? 4 hours of decay seems pretty ambiguous to me. How much xp decays in four hours? How many levels decay in four hours? Is the decay calculated based on a portion of the xp I have earned over the last four hours? I'm very confused by what "accumulates a maximum of 4 hours worth of decay.".

@Roycestein Kaelstrom wrote this in the R35 thread which he pulled from a previous post, "The current max accumulated loss is 0.04166% of the total experience in the school. So if you have 100,000 xps applied to a skill, dying will lose at most 42 xps. This gets applied to all skills on death though so if you have 10 skills with 1 million xps applied, a death will cost you at most 4200 xps."

The above quote seems very strange to me though, it seems to suggest that there's some kind of change to your decay depending on which set of skills you choose (such as having many in the same school) but then the math it examples afterwards doesn't support that hypothesis. It almost sounds like it's punitive if you have too much skill in one school which sounds like the opposite of what one would expect. [See next post where I correct this misunderstanding but ask for more details]

On a separate note it seems that if a skill is set to maintain or up arrow, upon death the losses will come from your pool, not the skills themselves. Is it the exact same amount of experience you would of lost from the skills anyhow? Is there some kind of discount from loss from maintaining the skills, or is it all a wash anyhow? Why not just set everything to maintain and just take all losses from your pool then? How will this system prevent people from raising 100's of skills?

Is there anything that makes it so there's reason to focus on fewer skills over dozens? I was hoping that the decay mechanic would force players to make choices about their development. If one person has only worked on Archery and has 130 in every archery skill would he be penalized the same as another player who has GM'd 150 different skills if the total experience is the same?

A deeper understanding of this mechanic would really help ease people's minds Chris. It's a very important mechanic, and I hope the nuances of the system have been thoroughly thought through.

Thanks for your time,

Salubrious

 

Sorry after reading this more closely I realize that it suggests something different than I originally thought.

If I'm reading this correctly it suggests that it will take the highest skill in each school, and apply .04166% losses to all the skills in that school? In this way it will promote having more of your skills in fewer schools? Does this also apply to non magic schools, such as light armor, blades, shields or focus?

In the example above, if you had 1 million exp in healing touch, but only 100,000 in all other life spells would all 11 life spells take a loss based on your highest skill in the school?

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I don't understand why there would be so much complexity built into the decay system if the above is true.

IF decay is maximum 0.04166% why didn't you just set this up as a variable based on total skill points?

You could of easily just made it so for the first 2000 skill points the maximum was 0, and then as a characters total skill points increased beyond 2000, that maximum got higher and higher.

Now new players aren't exposed to decay, and old players have an incentive to raise fewer skills higher.

In the example above an archer with 10 archery skills at 150 and 20 skills at 50 would have 2500 total skill points. Which is 500 over 2000, and might apply 0.02% exp loss.

Now another character with 100 GM skills would have 10,000 total skill points, which is 8000 over 2000, and it might apply a .15% exp loss for example.

Both these characters above might have the same total experience, but the game has made the players make choices about what they focus on. Not only that it wouldn't be punitive towards newer players.

Mathematically this system is less complex and it solves almost all the issues people are describing below.

 

After I re-read what I copied and pasted, I started to get confused as well. However, I think what Starr really meant on his comment was that the maximum XP that you would ever lose from the "up-to-4-hour" accrued skill decay upon death would be the 0.04166% of the total ADV xp your avatar gained from the started.

@Chris, when you have a moment, would you please confirm the calculation for skill decay?

P.S. On my latest QA test, at around level 67, I lost about ~3k XP at the first death (so it was the decay was capped at 4 hours accrued at the time), which was insignificant for me. Generally, if you gain XP by killing mobs at your appropriate levels, the 4-hour skill decay would be much less than actual 4-hour grinding for XP.

 

More importantly, how is this 4 hours calculated? Is it based on what xp I have personally gained over 4 hours? Average of all players across 4 hours? Based on the maximum you can gain in 4 hours grinding the best xp a 5 skull zone has to offer?

 

Doesnt decay based on death seem silly to anyone else?
Doesnt that mean i can stll max every single skill with no consequence by simply playing it safe or having a rezzer?

Im at point most 5 skull stuff is green.. i can farm a million exp wothout too much hassle..
So.. i can still GM everything ? and then just do more dangerous stuff when i have maxed everything and am pretty much invulnerable?
Even then i can pvp with just maxed of evrry key skill with no comsequence providing i grab a few hours of grinding pvp before hand?
If this is the system.. thats stupid. but least we will never need multiple characters.

Also props to all the exploiters who have gm everything already, now they get to keep it.

 

One big question; will decay activate upon dying in PvP at the hands of players?

 

Here's my understanding :

Upon death, ALL your skills take a decay hit. The amount of that decay hit depends on the number of hours you played since your last death (up to 4 hours at the moment). Right now that decay hit is 0.04166% of the total experience in the skill (the 4 hours equivalent). So if it has been more than 4 hours since your last death, ALL your skills take a XP hit of 0.04166% of the total experience in the skill.

Now, you can prevent that skill loss by setting a skill to "maintain" or "increase", which means your skill will stay the same and the XP hit of 0.04166% will be taken out of your XP pool instead (if you have enough).


In all examples, i'll assume it's been more than 4 hours since my last death, so my decay hit is the highest it can be as of R35 (0,04166% per skill right now).


Example 1 :

I have trained a single skill and put 100,000 XP in it. I have it set to maintain or increase.
When I die, my pooled XP will drop by 42XP.

Example 2 :

I have trained 10 skills and put 100,000 XP in each of them. I have them all set to maintain or increase.
When I die, my pooled XP will drop by 420XP.

Example 3 :

I have put 1,000,000 XP in 50 skills. I have them all set to maintain or increase.

I have put 1,000,000 in 10 other skills. They are all set to "neutral" or down"

When I die, my pooled XP will drop by 21,000 XP (the amount it costs to "protect" my 50 skills at maintain/increase)
AND the 10 skills I have set to "neutral" or "down" will all decrease by 420XP each (0,04166% of 1,000,000 = 420).


Hope this helps

 

I don't believe rezzing will prevent decay, is it decay on death. But you can play it safe! That's my plan, should last about an hour lol!

 

If that's all there is to it though Zapatos80, why was the phrase "total experience in the school", used at all? I have a suspicion there's more to it than that. At least I hope there is, since many of us were hoping that decay would help solve the problem of people having hundreds of GM skills, and the system as you described would not.

 

My understanding if you get hit with decay on death, no matter the rez method.

Also remember this is a deck-based system. Even if you're GM everything, you can only use so many skills at once, another way the game "soft-caps" your power at any given point. The high XP price you pay on death is the "price" of having versatility, the option to choose your playstyle/deck depending on the situation. Seems all right to me.

 

IMO the ambiguity is on the word school. I think they meant skill, which if I read the rest of the sentence correctly, is the interpretation that seems to make the most sense.

 

I like to PvP and I die.

I am adv lvl 80 and I have died I think twice since persistence during PvE and that was only because I went afk and a mob agro'ed me.

So with "death decay", I seriously dont think I will PvP since I will die and I will get hit with decay.

I fundamentally believe in decay however Portalarium using DEATH to push the decay is a really terrible (and honestly hoki) system to deal with it.

Think about the negatives of this system to PvP already


You get no exp for PvP but you actually burn your exp pool. This leads to having an empty pool so at some point, decay is going to hit you and start subtracting your skills if you PvP a lot over a long period of time.

 

Yeah... I'm not logging in until things are well explained! Maybe even wait till a few patches roll through... hope others are testing!

 

@DarkStarr can you confirm the math in your post, it appears you meant 0.4166% not 0.04166%

 

Yea exactly tho thats the point.

Why would i PVP?
And yea decks are limited.. but this lets me solo ANY PVE in the game by GM ing everything, and just adjusting accordingly? OHhh im doing dragon right now ? Guess ill go Heavy plate , self healing tank.
Oh im farming 100 little guys? Better whip out the old bow. Ice elementals? Good thing im a GM fire mage.

Either hard cap the characters, or add a meaningfull way to make spec ing actually important.
If this is the only decay, in 3 weeks every single character will be gods and able to play any role.

Oh look my group needs a tank good thing im GM heavy and shield. No healer? Its okay ill switch to cloth and play pure healer as well as anyone else.
Even Skyrim had some kinda cap.. and thats MENT to be a solo game with 0 need for other player interaction.

Also eliminates the need to have multiple characters in the game.

I REALLY hope thats not how they are leaving it, or you can basically play like theres no cap.
(Even that EXP loss on death) .. the only time im dieing in PVE is when i go AFK or do something blatently stupid. I guarentee i can die less then 1 time a week. This completly eliminates the whole point of having any kinda role in groups. Or any real character devotion. Jack of all trades. Master of all.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/game-system-changes-for-r35.68930/

 

So first up, Decay has now been enabled but with tighter limits on how much it can accumulate. I’ve written many pages on the why and how of decay in the past but since there are probably some new readers out there, I’ll give a shorter summary.

What is decay? When players die they will lose a tiny fraction of the experience off of all their skills. The current maximum that can be lost in a single death is 0.04% of the experience applied. Not 4% but 0.04% or 0.0004 times the amount that has been applied to the pool. So if you had a skill that was at 80, you would lose around 82 experience points off the skill. If the skill was at 100, you would lose around 500 experience points. Doesn’t sound like much but that amount is lost off every adventurer skill. Also, the penalty is roughly 0.0001 per hour so dying multiple times in rapid succession isn’t extremely punishing. Currently we have the max accumulation set at 0.0004

If you have the skill set to maintain or train then the experience will be pulled from your pooled experience assuming you have any. This is part of why last release, the application rate of experience from the pool was reduced. That change made it so players would generally have more experience in their pools to help buffer versus decay so they would be less likely see skills lose levels on a death.

Why have decay? There are several reasons to have decay. First, death should not feel trivial, even for an avatar. Second, when we decided to switch to a use based skill system we had to make some decisions on how to limit players. We could have gone with hard cap for max number of skill points like UO but few people were fond of hard caps and it didn’t really make sense with our larger skill sets and more complex combat systems. We had to have someway to limit players progress so everyone doesn’t end up with 150 skills at GM.

So instead of just making so players couldn’t progress any more as they banged against hard caps, we chose to go with a system of gentle decay. The decay is small but, since it is based on a percentage of a player’s total experience, over time they will get to a point where they are earning and losing roughly the same amount.


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So basically death is the only penalty. Meaning you can exactly do what i said, and theres going to be a TON of 150 GM skilled people in a short time.

Edit * Altho maybe the exp cost to maintain skills is massive and im completly wrong in the skill gain and cost? Tho ive never seen a skill actually USE exp to maintain? I could just be a rambling noob.

 

The ability to fill every role in a group is a great reward for the heavy dedication it takes to GM everything. The fact is that a GM everything character won't be able to heal better than a dedicated, GM in all Life skills.

A massively higher XP/time investment + a very high penalty on death + having to carry around multiple sets of gear for different attunement to only gain the ability to play multiple roles in a group and/or better solo abilities? Why not?

 

Also I might have understood the system wrong, but according to Chris' post, 4 hours decay (0,04% decay) is 500 XP on a GM skill. This is obviously nominal, but I remember Darkstar mentionning the original plan of 72hrs cap decay (mentionned in R34 notes I think). Obviously, they're easing players in the system incrementally, which is a great thing.

But if the end goal of 72hrs worth of decay stay with the system as is, that means a single GM skill will take away 9 000 XP. Still pretty low for players who specialize in a "class" but now a whooping 1,350,000 XP on death for 150x GM. This will probably be a lot more since passives take a lot more XP to raise than normal skills. Given how the only "advantage" of this is the ability to play any role (but not better than a specialized player) in a group and/or a more flexible solo playstyle, i'd say that's a pretty reasonable system.

Always logging in and having something to progress in is a huge plus for me and death having actual meaning is something very important in a game IMO. Then again, one of the thing I like most about this game is how hard it is, so maybe i'm in the minority in this.

BTW all this assuming I understood the post correctly. If anyone spots bad math please tell.

 

GM Strength , GM Intell, GM Dex, GM Crit.
I dunno , i feel like if thats the ONLY penalty.. PVP is going to take a hit hard.

There are some PVP specific skills that surpass ther skills in effectiveness against players.. so i see long term if thats the only penalty.. going into any PVP zone without max intell, max dex, max strength, max stealth, and max lets say.. Obsid arrow, Chain lightning, etc etc .. doesnt make sense.
And PVE .. i mean agian. im Not crazy about anyone being able to play any role needed. I could play mage roll, or the tanking roll by switching decks?
Im all for progression.. but there has to be a cap. Wish they woulda just done a hard cap and kept it simple.