My Experience as a Returning Player

I haven't played hardly at all since last October (almost 11 months away). When I left I had over a million XP in each pool.

So today I decide that I want to start playing again. I log in, full of anticipation to pick up right where I left off. The first thing I do is click on my recall scroll to return to Owl's Head so that I can begin my questing and.... fall through the floor and die, losing a few hours worth of XP.

Then I come to the forums to report the bug and notice that in the past few months the forum is practically nothing but players saying that skill decay is a stupid system and the devs effectively saying "too bad". Yeah... at least I only wasted five minutes before realizing how horrible of a place this game is right now. See you guys in another 11 months.

 

I agree death needs to be meaningful. And the only way it can be meaningful is for the players to be hit with their time.

Lost exp? Takes time to get that back.
Less exp until you earn it back, instead of losing? Takes more time to get the same amount of exp.
Gear damage with easy gold repairs? Takes time to get that gold back.
Stat damage for a certain amount of time? For that certain amount of time it takes you more time to do stuff.

I don't know how death can be meaningful and also not get hit with a time penalty in the end.

 

Punishing the causal player will never be a successful business model.
Casual players login to make INCREMENTAL progress and have a little fun.
The current decay system effectively defeats this goal.
Decay should be based on number of hours in game play (combat).
This way power levelers pay the bulk of the decay 'tax'.

 

That truly bites it. I'm not adverse to decay per se', but I can't think of a lot that will peeve me more than losing my time due to a dumb assed bug. Idk.. I hear these things and I look at the calendar and I seriously doubt a rabbit can be pulled out of a hat in 3 months which is all we have left in the year. What we need here is a little magic (and another 3 months)

 

Falling through the world is really rare, I think I have done it once in 2 years (and thousands of hours of play). Sad to see it happen to someone just starting again.

 

Yeah it's pretty rare but I think he would have had the same bad experience with decay after dying in combat. He might have been even more angry after spending and hour grinding just to lose it all and then some after dying.

 

@Demoyn

Welcome back! If you've been gone a year, it might help to understand context which Port has addressed a few times. Some of us ground out very high XP early on, benefitting from less-than-desirably balanced aspects of previous game builds. But with a more-intended balance in place, we are learning that this cannot be now be sustained. The result, for some of us, is that it can appear that decay outpaces XP gains. Indeed, on the surface, misapprehension about has seems justified. But we have to see it in the context of intended game design. Consider that if someone got a character to Level 200 in another MMO where the hard cap was only 50! I think we'd recognize that would need a big fix. Its not that much different here with some of the soft cap dialog you may have seen. We all complain because we are gamers. But don't take it too hard. People here paying close attention to development knew that the soft cap would eventually come into play like this. Besides, its no big surprise that things change in a pre-released game. Its the old rule of betas: Don't play them unless you can stomach change and are ok losing everything.

Beyond this, I'd encourage you to give the soft cap some more thought. I know there are many who disagree, but to me its 'bark is worse than the bite.' By that I mean the community perception of XP loss in any amount seems worse than any horrors in game. Honestly, if we look past the XP perception issue and just look at the 'end-game' condition (what happens after we've played for years), I don't see much downside difference between: 1) A hard cap on leveling that once hit allows no other skill leveling ever (leveling game over), vs. 2) a soft cap that one simply iterates around, a little up some days, a little down on others. The end result is about the same thing. We end up 'stuck' around some maximum level attainable, regardless of how we calculate it. The biggest downside of the soft cap (at the end game) is continued perceived XP loss. But in a hard capped game, we would have never got the added gain to lose anyway.

But I do think there are some upsides of the soft cap system that outweigh the hard cap that you might consider if you want to explore the game more. Whereas maybe the hard cap approach can give you the comfort of no experience loss as its big benefit, that's about all it has to offer at the end game condition. The soft cap's benefits are different and several. First, that you might lose a little some days has a way of keeping you on the edge of your seat a bit differently. Maybe you disagree, but in my book games that keep us on the edge of our seat (vs.allowing us to macro and go multitask in Youtube while we play) are actually a good thing. Second, it gives gamers that want to work harder the opportunity for more risk/reward for that. For those pushing the adventure XP envelope, they have a chance to earn peak skills above the typically 'maxed' 'end game' player. But maybe only for a time. If they mess up, they have a little more to lose than the average Joe. Is that bad? Well, to each their own, but I'd ask how many hard core gamers have advocated for 'permadeath' systems because they found there to be no more risk left once they hit level hard caps. The soft cap enables the casual gamer to somewhat get to a max level that they will iterate a little around. While giving hard core players a continuing risk to go beyond that. Not a bad thing, IMHO.

I offered this as hopefully helpful thoughts (not arguing) for your consideration, before you leave us for another year. Come back, we'd love to have you in the game.

 

I'm a pretty casual player and I don't feel like I've ever been "punished" by skill decay.

 

I've done it like 3 times I think. Fortunately pre decay.

What adv lvl are you?

 

I thought that they changed it so that there was no decay in towns?

 

They did.

 

84.

 

So why is the OP complaining about decay when he shouldn't have had any from that death? I assume he fell through the world *after* using the scoll, not on the activation of using the scroll.

 

Ya know...I was thinking that as well..*shrug*

 

Guy gives honest feedback, gets badgered. Exactly what I've come to expect here. Forsaken Virtues. 

 

I know man, it bums me out. Maybe if he gave "actionable feedback" things would have been better, right Drocis? (kidding)

Seriously though, we all have heard this feedback (either actionable or unactionable...couldn't resist) too often from folks and instead of jumping all over them, let's LISTEN and offer some constructive insight like @Beaumaris did.

 

I know right!? Feedback about how the game is perceived is valuable and actionable. If decay is perceived as more punishing than it is, that's a game UI feedback issue.

 

Posted on the topic of XP decay elsewhere recently but it was in the middle of a big thread so it kind of got buried:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...venture-and-explore.98128/page-22#post-873019

Upshot was to ask what if instead of an XP loss, a death created an XP debt, and your future XP gains went partly to pay off the debt and partly to advancement? Have seen this in other games, curious whether those who hate decay in its current form feel the same way about an XP debt upon death? Considered posting it as a poll, but I suspect feelings would be the same so I'd like to see some responses as a quick gauge.

P.S. to OP: Since you lost XP falling through the world while in town, you definitely should report that as a bug.

 

Here let me try.
I love funny, it gives meaning to Budner...

Think I did it wrong, but I stand by it. Thanks for the laughs. 8^D

 

I fell through after the scroll went off, yes. I died after falling through the floor, though, so I was no longer in the city when I died apparently. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I know what XP I had before the fall and I know what XP I had after the fall. The two are not the same.