Portalarium, please don't cave in to the loud noise. Keep decay in!

Completely agree with thread title! Keep decay! Make decay worse, increase the penalty by like 150% pls! Dieing many times in a row right now is still not even that big of a deal. Evading death is quite easy (pls dont make that harder tho, tactical withdrawls need to be a viable tactic).

Im not down with permadeath. Black Tortoise is an immortal being traveling through worlds such as Sosaria and Novia, and can't actually be "killed" permanently, so meh!

I am in favor of all of your non add-on, non pledge gear remaining on your corpse until you go back and get it though . I also advocate money/gold being a real item that has weight, which also remains on your corpse when you die, so you better stick it in a chest in your house or bank! Note: only if add-on store gear remains lowest tier stuff though, no p2w!

 

So whats your point? How is this related to needing skill decay?

Im in agreement that decay makes sense with the current system of wide open possibilities and I agree with Onyx's comment about it not being painful enough for higher level toons currently, but if controls existed which forced specialization without adding top end skill caps, the need for decay would be lessened drastically.

Right now, you have maybe 3 truely successful, money making crafters per profession in the entire game, but about 1000 resource salesmen. Thats because everyone can put skills into any profession they want to craft the things they need dfor themselves.

Dont try to say specialization is too hard, because in most cases, what a blacksmith needs from the tanning tree is lower level like components for armor. Specialization would force them to the open market to buy things they arent able to craft themselves which would keep all professions viable in the open economy.

The current model doesnt promote an active economy where players buy, barter and trade for services or goods.

Anyone can be a GM of all trades even if it takes a while to achieve and as a result, you dont see the active finished goods market portalarium expressed they wanted for the game.

 

The problem we are seeing with decay right now is it accumulating while offline. A casual player who can only play an hour a day or so losing all gains on death for the day is hurt by this. I personally just adapt and go to easier mobs or raise up defenses, but for some this does not feel like an option. Now I am not casual and do feel the same way, I have no problem with decay the way it is. However, I have had guildies and friends quit because of this, as they were casual. If it only accumulated while online, I think this would solve that problem.

 

There's no market for low/mid goods because they're simply not worth the materials cost. Forcing you to have alts to craft different trees would change nothing to that. The real specialized market is at the high-tiers, and that budding market is currently growing as people level up/get more spare gold/want higher level goods since their looted/self-crafted gear is becoming obsolete.

 

Like I said many times before, if you look on the vendors, 99.9% of the gear being sold is trash, stuff the person leveled their skills with, or stuff that did not come out the way they wanted. I am a pretty good crafter myself, and I have bought 3 pieces of gear as it was actually good stuff for a price I could not even make it for, unless I got lucky. I think the definition of specialized come when one starts to go beyond gm, and push the skills up to like 120. This is why in the guild I am in, we have a person on enchants ( simizu ) a person on blacksmithing (scoffer) a person on carpentry (quark) and I am on tailoring.

 

Why buy though? Just grab 15 gold, 15 silver, some mandrake, craft a +1 version of your weapon and put out a shout for a guildmate with high enchanement/masterworking. Plenty of high level crafters in my guild will slap a fist full of bonuses down for you gratis, if you supply the materials. What you get might not be PVP grade, but it will be plenty good enough for PVE.

 

+100

 

By high-tier I mean more than 2/2 with actual good upgrades on them, IE not dex/minor HP on a death wand for example. Even if you craft the base version and have a buddy enchant it, it will take a lot of materials (you'll break quite a few) and luck to get there, not to mention the time spent refining, crafting all this and applying/choosing upgrades. As I said, random mish-mash is fine for most of the content right now, so the market is budding but it's growing and demand will only go up as people level up & have more spare gold.

 

I wish I could get half the carapacian cloth back if I decide to scrap a piece after a few bad enchants.. Having salvage actually worth a damn would go a long way toward cleaning the crap.

 

Even without caps people will creat other characters for role play, PVP vs PVE builds, etc. just from the sheer time commitment required to make a universal build.

1. Specialization will happen even without decay. Horrible argument saying people losing hard earned skills will specialize in just a few. That's bull you know as well as I they will just create more characters in order to make anything they need in the game. There will never be a market for anything outside of resources, and extremely high end.

2. Your right the current model does not support an active economy because it does nothing to keep or bring in more population. People buying make the economy, new people coming in will buy before they learn. The population we have now are all the players that will make and provide what the new player base needs. Stop making changes based on now and look long term.

 

Yes it would help but, eventually they would need to get to a point where decay stops growth even for someone making 600k xp an hour in order to soft cap (crap on) advancement. So now on the high end decay would need to be 600k an hour. Great, unless you want to go mining for a few hours, or just walk around town, every hour your not grinding is another hour lost. Really seems rediculous.

Also, different character templates can make different exp gains based on strengths and weaknesses. Doesn't this now require everyone to chase the EXP build of the release in order to stay current? Again seems rediculous.

 

In r41, I was losing 1.3+ mil on death, now that skills 101-120 get 2x decay, its even more, but its less because not a full application of 24 hour decay hits at once.

 

Since I'm too lazy to quote, this was Chris' line about decay in his blog:

• Changed it so each death applies half the accumulated decay. That will soften the blow for the first death and make deaths after the first one in a playsession somewhat more meaningful.

Now to me, that means the first death is actually NOT the most painful death, it is the one with cushion and it gets worse from there. Whole thing is confusing AF. I know that it feels like my later deaths hurt more, but I rarely have every skill turned off when I'm grinding just because I can't function that way (I need progress in some form that isn't the pooled experience going up) so it's hard to say if I just happened to go down swinging that death or the "out of range" mage that I was trying and not killing (and obviously not paying much attention either) got me so I didn't get any experience from the group of mobs that killed me kind of deal.

If anyone wants to confirm that later deaths AREN'T as meaningful, be my guest. It naturally changes many things depending on this being true or not. The casual is far more likely to die multiple times and get crapped on is the primary one.

 

Youre forgetting that all crafting XP comes from harvesting, so you cant just create an overnight alt to craft to GM without leveling the toons adventuring experience so they can kill the mobs necessary to skin the animals or harvest the nodes to earn the crafting XP. Thats not easy.

This is why people will take the path of least resistance if they were limited to one production skill by going to the market and buying component materials from another player of that other respective profession.

 

You're forgetting about agriculture, I'm fairly certain that 90% of the XP earned from farming in greenhouses is getting turned into masterworking and enchanement levels

 

Im not, the foraging skill is the gathering profession for agriculture so once implemented, the act of agriculture will net you a whopping 20 xp per planting. Thats not going to be enough to support/sustain a gm crafting alt with no adventuring skills.

Agriculture is a refining skill and earns you nothing in the way of XP. Im also betting once seed drops are implemented they will nolonger be available via vendor.

 

It takes a week or two to build an adventurer that can mine in five skill caves if you know where to go and what to build. So someone mining 500xp a pop in five skulls will be common with a minimum build. Again adds nothing to the game and prevents nothing... decay is s a waste of dev time.

 

I never said it was impossible to do or that it would totally prevent players from leveling a second toon. I'm implying that it would make it less likely than players buying stuff off the market. Which is completely plausible and probable.

There is also a factor of when they will implement multiple characters on the same account, if ever. They said a long time ago they would, but I don't see it in the cards for episode one and that means to have an alt you're looking at a minimum of 3-4 weeks of work and $40.00 for the second account.

The fact is, people will go to the market more if we restrict players to a single production crafting tree.

 

First world 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% xp problems

 

It's actually pretty straightforward once you get your head around it, and quite a clever system IMO. Took me a while to get it though!

Your "decay" accumulates over 24hrs. Once you have 24hrs of decay built up, you're at the maximum % death penalty. Let's say an hour of decay is 1% XP loss, so at max decay you get 24% XP loss applied on death (for simplicity's sake, in reality full decay is a fraction of 1%). Let's say you have 1M XP invested in various skills :

Pre R42 :
Let's say you haven't died in 24+ hours and now you die. You lose 24% of 1,000,000 XP, so 240k XP. Your "decay counter" is reset from 24hrs to 0hrs. You play for 2 hours, then die again. Your decay had built up 2 hours worth, so 2% in our example. On that second death, you'd lose 2% of your invested XP, so assuming you again had 1M XP at time of death, you would only lose 20k XP. Your decay counter is again reset to 0, and so on.

Post R42 :
Is basically the same thing but a straight upgrade. Now only half your current decay counter is applied on death. Let's take the above example again :

Let's say you haven't died in 24+ hours and now you die. You lose 12% of 1,000,000 XP, so 120k XP. Your "decay counter" is cut in half from 24hrs to 12hrs. You play for 2 hours, then die again. Your decay had built up 2 hours worth, so a total of 14hrs worth of decay, and half of that is applied, so 7% in our example. On that second death, you'd lose 7% of your invested XP, so assuming you again had 1M XP at time of death, you would only lose 70k XP. Your decay counter is again cut in half, this time to 7hrs worth and so on.


Hope that make sense