Just noticed Decay for the first time

Man, I get moderated if I say anything pretty much. @mikedeathdealer , I understand your frustration, I do. I want you to understand something. I am one of the most hated people on these forums because I pull no punches and I say exactly what is on my mind. I get moderated alot. Now it does not happen often and I think there are much more worthy people but I have to step up and defend drocis. Any attack on the right to post ones thoughts or wishing for the game direction should be allowed. YOU do not need to be the censor of ideas. You have multiple ways to avoid such arguments if you are sick of seeing posts that upset you. Its called the ignore button. Also there is a thing called restraint when you do not like something you just ignore it. You are actually being your own worst enemy now. Let people talk, let them say what they have to say, even if you do not want to hear it.

 

Sure i bottle up and not respond to the 1 to 10 posts that drocis responds to. He just caters to himself and repeatedtly posts constantly making the dev's keep reading his "rants" and brain washing them to think that he is right! Gosh i wish that they had a High level "more active player base" Like Scrum that gave valid input that they actually listened to. Trust me i only want the best for Sota to grow and be popular.. If i didn't think so i would have not dropped 10k+ into this game.. But at times i wonder i had.. I'm holding out for the best and i wish that it does turn around. - Dingle

 

well for money dropped I was around 20k, so I know your dilemma. What you are doing though is the same is what your accusing drocis of doing. I just want as much open discussion as possible. Trust me, I know the redundancy of drocis, and that is why he is on ignore for me. There are a few others also, that make my life better not responding to what they post. Listen, I am not telling you what to say or do, I am just suggesting that your actions directly counter your statements.

 

If you limited it to one death penalty a day for one hour, ok I guess. Although that means on a work/school night 50% of my play time is penilized. That may frustrate a lot of players.

I still think a skill cap is the way to go, something like the equivalent of 30gms worth of skills. And as a death penalty a 15% drop in all skills for ten minutes after death, this could be reoccurring but never penalizing more then 15% (death penalty should never stack, but time would reset.)

 

The problem with decay, aside from casual players not wanting to lose progress for any reason (we know this because VERY few games feature actual progress loss), is how it's been introduced to the community. Constant meandering on the forums and zero control of the misinformation surrounding this mechanic (and many others) coupled with the UI being barely functional and woefully inadequate for a video game of any kind in 2017 just compounds the problem.

If there was a clear, direct number on your character sheet, with a concise and direct explanation of what this system is, literally 1/3rd of all the threads on this forum could be locked and life would go on. Instead, we're left to guess work, anecdotal testimony, and the occasional dissertation by a dev about their thinking on the changes to decay this go-around.

 

My basic, fundamental, most singular problem with decay is that it is infinite in scope. As I progress it infinitely grows with me and my ability to gain experience doesn't infinitely follow. Eventually decay will simply be too much to want to deal with as it already is for some players. Any penalty that simply grows and grows as you play and progress more inevitably HAS to lead to not wanting to take any risks because you'll just lose far more than you'll potentially gain, at some point.

 

I think that's a valid concern and a clear flaw in the decay system.

However, simply removing decay without a better system in place to accomplish the goals of why decay was put into the game is not something I'm personally interested in seeing the devs do.

 

That's *exactly* the goal of the system. To limit your character cap to whatever level you deem appropriate. The higher you want to be, the harder it is to maintain. That's the whole purpose of the system! Plus, you can always unlearn skills you don't want anymore so if you do get to a level you feel is too hard to maintain, you can simply get that XP back into your pool, which then serves as buffer for many, many deaths to come. Seems perfectly balanced to me.

Also a system that's infinitely better than a hard cap because the soft cap is entirely determined by you, the player, and the point at which you want to stop. Not only that, but it also rewards skilled players since they die less often overall. Beautiful design IMO

 

The problem with this is you'll never have any semblance of balance. When different players have truly different absolute potentials anything competitive, both PvE and PvP for that matter, is gone. When I'll have ended up spending the same amount of time overall, but how I spent it, IE smaller intervals over much longer time, has a direct correlation to my* achievable* ceiling assuming I do things that involve the potential to die... we've got a problem. At this point you have an insurmountable rift between the hardcore and the casual and for what? For this system that really isn't reigning anyone in...? But instead just eventually forcing them to constantly play safe or just not play...?

Right now the ONLY thing to really focus on and do is to work your skills up ever so marginally and "better" yourself by fractions of a % at a time. Loot isn't a thing. Gear is crafted ONLY (Why the hell is this? Why is this OK?!) with rare artifact exceptions... I'm at a loss really.

With the absolute caps taking people over a decade for a single skill... Enlighten me lol... why do we need this progress neutralizer? It's not insuring competition as is or in any incarnation of it tbqh. Find a different death penalty and insure competition by EQUALLY regulating (like any competitive sport/industry/frankly anything that matters) just what is applicable at the highest (or whatever deemed necessary) level of PvE and PvP in general. There are many ways that could be accomplished; I merely outlined one such path earlier. The problem is we're never going to get anywhere if we don't actually TRY other things.

 

Maybe i'm seeing this wrong, but it seems to me that the current system actually FAVORS the mid-to-high level player that doesn't play 70 hours a week. Without it, the very hardcore will climb to levels you'll never be able to achieve given lower playtime, but with decay in, most of them will softcap themselves somewhere along the way, much closer to you, who will not be affected at all, or minimally, by decay. Plus, if you're a skilled player, you will actually catch up and cap far higher than a hardcore player playing 70 hours a week but that dies constantly. Seems to me like its working in favor of a more balanced playing field, not the other way around, no?

 

Maybe?

No, w/ time, all can achieve. Moreover, it is not difficult to get to a general effective level in game and the combat bar and deck limits the uber players so their contribution to any given situation is not so different to what the average player contributes.

Really? They will soft cap themselves much closer to me? And I won't be affected at all? I will share w/ you where this dream sequence you call an argument does not occur: in the actual game where we are all shooting ourselves in the collective foot of future progress. Please read below...

No, that is not what happens at all. The hardcore player (or better said, the player who devotes 16 hours a day to the game), will play through the xp loss of death decay. How? By investing so much more time into xp production in a given 24 hour period and being that death decay caps (or can only affect a player once in its total amount) in a 24 hour period, the hardcore has a much greater total return on investment versus total potential loss.

Because of this greater investment in growth per 24 hour period, a "hardcore" players ability to gain and push through existing game limitations will always be much higher than a casuals, no matter how skilled the casual or how brute the "hardcore"; this is why the above concept is referred to as playing through the xp loss.

If catching up or closing the gap is your goal, good luck w/ that one.

Sometimes, the truth hurts.

 

You missed the point. If we both gain, for example, 200k XP an hour, and I play 50 hours a week and you play 10, you will never ever catch up. However, since decay is % based and even heavier past 100, my progress curve will be severely limited compared to yours. Thus, even if we both die, say once every 5 hours, decay will hit you far, far less than me. The "play through decay" just doesn't hold water unless you die each and every single day you play, which given that you play 10 hrs vs my 50 hrs, if we both die at the same frequency you will go many days without dying whereas I will take the full penalty far more often. Throw the daily free XP bonus and the casual player will gain a bigger edge by doing litterally nothing.

The fact that it also makes the point you softcap yourself a personal choice and also based on player skill only makes it an even better system. For example, if I die often, maybe 200k XP per death is the highest I can maintain. But for a skilled player who dies far less, maybe 1M XP per death will be his soft cap. Personal choice & personal skill determines your "cap", not some arbitrary in-game system. Plus, it's fluid because you can always untrain your skills and get the XP back in your pool to lower your death penalty. Exactly how an open-ended skill tree system ought to be.

No matter how you spin it, without decay, the gap between the truly hardcore and the mid to high level will be wider than with it, that's simple math.

 

I think the fact that it takes 30 minutes of Tech Talk explanation or 6 pages of a forum conversation for current players to even grasp the system and (maybe) accept the reasoning behind it ... is reason enough to at least look into possible alternatives.

I fear many new potential players will just see it as "lose XP on death" and move on to try another game.

 

With a proper UI and explanation screen, it would actually be pretty simple. Perhaps UI changes are just further up the development timeline.

 

They can't even get tool tips right...

 

It may be simple to display how much XP you'll lose or something like that. But "losing XP" is a very unpopular idea among gamers in general, and it would still take a lot of convincing and explaining to make new players understand the Devs' reasoning for the loss and its role in the whole skill "cap" thing.

That's the kind of dedication we backers and testers may be willing to put the effort to understand and accept, but I fear many new potential players will still just see it as "lose XP on death" and it will push them away from the game.

By the way, I'm not even arguing whether it's a good or bad system... just stating that fact, which I think we all can agree is very likely to happen and wouldn't be good for the future of the game.

 

Maybe, but from day 1, in 2013, the game was never advertised as a hand-holding WoW clone either. Those looking specifically for that kind of experience are not at the right place to begin with.

 

Theres also a difference between annoying, and counter productive, and complex / sophisticated.

Decay doesnt make the game more *difficult*, it makes it more annoying and more grindy. If anything it encourages safer playstyles = less difficulty.

Repetitive + time consuming doesnt mean *difficult/complex/extensive *

This is something the Dev's seem to forget sometimes.

 

@Zapatos80

Let me give you a hypothetical to illustrate my point that small intervals of play over a long time isn't the equal of large chunks of play in any interval.

Let's establish some assumptions. Let's assume this particular player will, on average, die once every couple hours (yea this guy is awful!). The time can be tweaked, it doesn't really matter much but the end result is the guy needs to be doing something with the 100% chance of eventual death because spawn rate, RNGesus hated you, etc.

Let's assume that something with a chance of death is me just saying we're not stomping the stereotypical "green" mob into dirt. Everyone's idea of *meaningful* content will differ, and for these purposes lets just assume the mobs pose some sort of substantial risk to our well-being.

Let's assume we're at some level where decay actually hurts, sets us back 2+ hours of grind time.

Now lets compare a 2 hour chunk of time vs a 4 hour, 6, and for shits 12 hour chunk of time doing the same thing. The *base level* 2 hours is actually hit the hardest because he's slapped with the largest portion of the decay curve and he's basically gotta log off not long after. As we progress upwards to 4, 6, and 12 hours of play time, each death hurts less and less relative to those previous and his ability to recoup or even possibly have a surplus of experience becomes that much more likely just on the simple basis of time spent.

In essence, someone playing in smaller chunks of time that is doing things where they are at risk of death will fundamentally hit their ceiling far faster than anyone who can play for longer periods of time and the differential grows the longer people are able to devote to a single "session". Even if we tweak the "how often you die" hourly rate upwards, there's still a distinct advantage to playing more in one sitting.

Now lets add in the disclaimer that this death rate is entirely too damn high for someone with a 2+ hour grind for a single first death. However, we can also argue that you're more likely to die just getting back into the feel of things your first couple hours of playing. Or even simpler, just doing something new that you naturally have to learn the mechanics and need to pay the piper with a few deaths before you get it. Or hell, just going out to help some people learn some content that takes a team effort and dying along with them. The shorter amount of time you have to play per sitting the larger the impact of all these activities.

I hope this at least illustrates my earlier point that the way you put in time in the game is actually going to determine your ceiling assuming you're doing things that can actually and will eventually kill you.

Quick Ninja Edit: I by no means begrudge anyone that can and are willing to play for a long period of time. Hell I was able to for a few days over the weekend while I was sick. I don't think this play-style is deserving of any "extra" hate just because they can play more, just wanted to draw a contrast showing that 2+2+2+2 =/= 8 with this decay system.

 

The person only playing a couple hours will also spend a larger percentage of their play time preparing to farm XP (meeting up with friends, buying reagents, selling, crafting, etc...). The only disadvantage the 12 hour player has is that he will probably suffer from hitching which might result in a death. The majority of my deaths are from hitching or lag, which is one of the reason I dislike this system.