Shroud of the Avatar VS UO skill system

I asked this in another thread, I think on Steam, but didn't get a response. Yes, there was unattended skill advancement in UO, but I really don't understand how skill based progression promotes this activity any more than level based progression. I'd love to hear how this is the case. My knee jerk reaction is that there is nothing about skill based progression that makes it more prone to unattended playing. My thoughts are that it was other aspects of UO game play that promoted unattended game play, and skill based progression was the result, not the cause.

 

The unattended skill based gains in UO where do to the use of macros which alot of thing were text based "typing to talk, such as vendor look allowed you to view a vendors inventory" macros allowed players to type actions and repeat them over and over while they were not at their computers to gain skills. Macros made performing certain actions to be easier for players in UO but in return allowed some to take advantage of them. Macros are not needed to have a skill based usage system so that isn't even an issue now

 

Agreed.. And even then, that has nothing to do with skill based progression, except that players were using macros as a means to facilitate unattended skill based progression. The problem of unattended progression had little to do with whether or not it was skill based or level based progression.

 

Exactly

 

Everyone is against unattended skill progression. We all know that. But I got to thinking, exactly why am I against it? Not really sure anymore, can someone help me out here? What is the logical argument?

 

The biggest argument against it, that I can think of, is it provides an unfair advantage to players that use tools outside of mechanics built in to the game. If it were apart of the game, I would probably not have negative feelings about it, but I suppose it depends on how it's implemented.

 

To me it cheapens it for those that actually do the work.

Just leave the game on and come back tomorrow. Congrats! What an accomplishment. You mastered the skill while asleep without even doing it. You might as well not even have skills at that point.

Also it looks like crap in the game when people are actually doing these loops. I think about other games where I see players running into walls, teleporting to the same place over and over, repetitively casting a spell on themselves. Ect...

 

I've never had issues with people macroing skills....hell I've done it myself enough....I remember 8x8 boat macroer on UO lol. And everyone used to use a pre-patch golem with 100% poison wep lol

Other players wouldn't even see it in Shroud because people would do in single player online. Only things I object to are real hacks such as duping and manipulating data to your advantage.

 

Yeah... dont get me wrong. I did some too. It was accepted as the norm. But I still would not want that to be a norm in Sota. It just seems like a waste.

 

I think the thing people have to think about is "why do players do afk macroing to level?"

For me it's because I'm normally bored out of my skull doing the same thing such as killing mobs over and over again. In UO I trained my first character the proper way (took 6 months).... All others I macroed to some extent.

 

Thanks for the comments. I am leaning towards "more power to them", especially because SPO keeps me from having to look at em. I guess I may not respect someone who gains skills without really earning it at the keyboard, but "unfair" seems a bit much.

 

Personally I have never afk'd a character to completion in any game. On the other hand, I have NO PROBLEM with people doing so. It's a goram video game. If you paid your ticket at the door and you hate leveling, or despise what has to happen to max out a skill, and you've found some way of gaming the game to reach completion, I'm all for it, it makes your GAME experience more FUN.

When people start complaining and whinging about this or that exploit of skill progression, I have to wonder if they even know what an cheating an exploit IS.

I've been in Call of Duty battles where people with hacked accounts headshotted me through two concrete walls the second I zoned in. Even spawning in a room with no windows, you had perhaps three breaths before a bullet would come through a supposedly solid wall and kak you. This ruined that game experience because I could not PLAY. I have fought people in World of Warcraft open world PvP who had a hack that froze your view of your own lifebar, so that it LOOKED like they weren't hurting you, until you fell down dead, unconsumed potions and defensive abilities sitting unused on your bar because you couldn't see how messed up you were. That hurt my play experience because I couldn't even adventure into open PvP areas to seek their rewards while those cheaters were present, or I'd get eaten alive for their amusement. I've played a self propelled gun in World of Tanks against people running a hack that allows them to see when they are being targeted, and given that it takes between 3 and 10 seconds to zero in a target with an arty, up to three seconds for the fired round to hit, and up to 30 seconds to reload, having someone able to feel the crosshairs on them makes for an impossible shot. This ruined the game experience by turning what should have been a glass cannon into a helpless pinata, futilely firing shots that never land and waiting for some enemy to come put a round through my paper thin chassis.

When people complain about AFK levelling, or using macros to arrange their ability rotations, I don't hear how their game experience was ruined. I don't hear about how they were unable to play the game because of that horrible macro using cheater. I just hear jealousy, bile, and spite because they have a pseudo-moralistic belief that modding your UI to do what you want even with minimal keystrokes is lazy and skips over all that character building suffering that "real" players go through.

I just cannot sympathize with that.

As for responding to it, if I had to allocate Portalarium's programmer hours to fixing all the various problems this game has and fine tuning it to satisfy the community, I would not spend one billable MINUTE on trying to restrict players from getting control over their character's actions or finding ways to speed level. I think making the graphics smoother or the attack animations more interesting is of significantly greater import.

 

I'm entirely against the use of external macroing tools to perform unattended game advancement. In the ideal sense, games should provide more enriching advancement opportunities. For veteran players that have been around the block, maybe some in game mechanism can be available to help speed up the advancement process. Short of that, if boredom is still a problem, maybe it's time to find a new game.

To be honest, in the same way that skill/level advancement slows (probably near exponentially) the more experienced you become, I think there should be diminishing returns as you're advancing the more often you do the exact same thing over and over while advancing from one skill level to the next. This would naturally discourage grinding the same mob over and over as a means to advance to the next level.

Regarding attended macroing by using external software; I'm also entirely against this. It's my opinion that the game should provide an equal playing field, and game experience for all players. Allowing an external Easy Button speaks volumes about a possible poor UI design, and in situations where the UI is good, it speaks volumes about the players that still feel they need a leg-up. And, yes, I have similar feelings about fancy gaming keyboards and mice.

Hopefully Portalarium will be able to put some resources into discouraging any kind of external macroing.

 

Sure it is not an exploite but it does effect game play. Think of all the resources that are gathered with macros as well.

But I am far from being jelouse of anyone that macos or even disliking the people. That would just be silly. I just would rather have actuall game play that people want to do to get levels. If the game is not enjoyable to level then that is a problem in the game itself or the player playing.

 

The resources gathered by macro... you refer to the digital plant stacks that come from endlessly respawning plants? I don't mind other people harvesting them and putting them on the market. I don't mind them harvesting them on a plane, I don't mind it on a train. I don't care if they are controlling the character via keyboard, macro, or with their toes. I DO endorse them using my specially prepared hamster control units (patent pending).

 

But isnt that the reason why we want to play this game? I want to play it cause i thought it is like the good old UO. We dont need something new, we want the old stuff back.

Many games failed on that part (FFXI to FFXIV, GW1 to GW2) people wanna play the next gen games cause they loved the last one, then they change everything and drive them against a "Wall of Casual/Mainstream"

The most ppl always go the fastest way of progress. When ppl say grinding mobs for skill based is boring, i say grinding mobs or quests for level based is the same. Also if you go quest grind, it will kill the game cause if you add 1000 boring quests ppl stop reading there stuff and miss the 100 rly good quests. There is no perfect solution but there is the "Build a Game for the Fans" or a "Build a Game for the Mainstream" way.

Sorry for the bad english

 

No matter what kind of system is used, its still going to be automatized somehow. I don't care about skill leveling, even unattended, but i care about resource gathering unattended. That ruined UO economy. I remember times when i went to felucca, with 2 pack horses, mined like there's no tomorrow. Managed to get something like 5k ingots in hour. No external macros, just use last object, last target macro. I had to do all the work manually anyways. I could sell those for quite a lot of money back then.
Now, there's highly efficient mining scripts, that recall around, gathering stuff for you, when you sleep. You can get tons of ore in one day, without doing anything. Developers did not care about it. That was the problem.
UO made mistake, by doing quest's that require same task done repetitively, over and over again. Like, creating 200k buckler shields to get the best glasses. What kind of player, would be able to create those by hand, without external softwares? None.

Someone here mentioned diminishing returns to skill gains, if doing same monsters all the time. Now, who would this hurt most? Scripters? Those who leave script do the job over night? They still get their gains, but the manually playing, hard core player, who is just looking for a way to maximize skill gain, will get punished by this. That is certainly not a way to do it.
NEVER EVER do anything like that. That just calls for automatization.

I am software developer, hobbyist game dev and i have keen interest in game networking and databases and server side coding. You just have to admit, that scripters will come to this game, like they come to all games. Don't waste time, trying to cover up all the holes.

Instead, setup good monitoring for admins and GM's, by using triggers and trends. If person has played 2 months, averaging 50k a day, suddenly he gets 5M for few days, thats something that someone could check. Automated trigger, that sets a flag. Once there's enough flags, send a real life person to check that character and his actions.

LOG LOG LOG. Log all the trades. I mean everything that gets involves inventory of somekind. If yesterday system had 500M money in it and suddenly today it has 750M ( from trends we can see that average income of money to system is 50M/day), then we can make a conclusion that something fishy happened. From logs, this can be discovered and traces show every transaction done, so money can be deleted away ( NOTE: yes, in diablo 2 duped items get deleted, no matter how honest you have been, you still lose your items ). Wow logs all the transactions, so that they can recover user stuff, if they get hacked or something glichy happens ).

Trends. By setting up trends, from logging, you can visualise data. Imagine trend of ore/ingots income to system compared to time spent mining / or successfull mining actions. This kind of stuff point out the truth and i'm sure, Blizzard uses stuff like this to monitor the world.

You need these, to profile players, to discover duping, to discover behavior that is weird. If planned early on, they can be injected so deep to system, that it barely eats any performance.

Again, don't use expoitability as argument when designing the game. No matter how you do it, someone cheats. Harder you make it for user to level or gather something, the more you get lazy programmers to develop automatization.

/endrant.

I have mixed feelings about skill system. While i love UO system i think this discourages macroing, BUT if you can just swap your skills to from blacksmith to tailor, how can we build economy? Everyone can be anything. Everyone is self sustained crafter fighter mage healer tank tailor...

 

http://www.uoforever.com/
That's the best place to play advanced UO, that hasn't advanced too far from it
Many of us here play on that "free shard" and even Lord British aka Richard himself has fairly recently visited there.
I hope that helps the UO want... I still play there also
~Time Lord~

 

I mentioned the diminishing returns suggestion. My suggestion is not intended to 'hurt' a specific group if players. It's intended to break up the monotony of grinding the same mob by encouraging the player to go to a different zone, with a different biome, with different mobs, with different abilities, and different sounds and visuals. I certainly do not view this as a punishment, instead I view it very positively; for me doing the same thing over and over is boring. A game system that encourages me to break out of grinding the same mob over and over is a welcome feature.

If this happened to be implemented, it would also have the side effect that macro scripting would be a bit harder to accomplish since standing in one spot waiting for mob respawns to hack at would have less and less of and impact on level advancement the more and more the same mob is attacked.

Scripts written to get around my diminishing returns idea would have to account for traveling to new zones, and potentially dealing with random encounters where dynamic content (maps) are generated, where exits may not always be in static locations. This is a much harder problem to solve with external scripting tools, and it would discourage all but a very few from using external macroing tools.

I mentioned this earlier; if people are too bored or lazy and don't want to level, but instead want to jump to the end-game experience that's probably fine by me, but SotA should provide an in-game means of accomplishing it.

 

i'm kinda coming in late here - do you mean giving less experience on a mob, that isn't in a dungeon, each time you kill it..due to the skill on killing that TYPE of mob has gone up by killing it in the past?
(to prevent dungeon grinding, i'd lower the xp given for all mobs, based on how many times the dungeon itself is run/completed by the character)

so if you kill a baby spider 10000 times. then you go to killing a giant spider later on - your skill at killing spiders is better/faster/etc, but the experience gain you get is lower because you are a master at it already - and once you become a grandmaster at killing them, you gain no more experience with them?

i could get behind that. skills in all things set that way would make the game more fun..think about it, hundreds of skills/actions all "needing" to be leveled up - but if your toon is level 100 it is still difficult when using a new weapon type because your character doesn't have experience with war axes, for example.

The Repopulation has that system in place already, no toon levels whatsoever.. i liked the skill system but not the lack of character levels, when i played it early on. they had something crazy like 100 different things you could skill-up on. - i'd like to see both systems. character level and skill level with an item/action. the character level could just add hitpoints, magic points and dexterity at a unified rate, based on total experience gained in the skills that you've leveled up, where the skills leveled would also add those stats, but specific to the skill itself.

example: dual wielding would raise dexterity, sword/shield would raise dex/str but both at a slower rate, wielding bows woudl do the same as sword and board for longbows, but dexterity for shortbows, 2h weapons add strength. staffs add magic, while wands add intelligence.