Skill degen alternative

I have a great idea on an alternative to skill degen!! Why not create a death timer that lasts 10-15 minutes, so that you won't be able to resurrect at an Ankh until that timer is over? That would waste an equivalent amount of time as having to grind the lost XP back up, but without the reagent cost or armor/weapon damage! It would also fall more in line with the overall developer goals of wasting our time, similar to the new focus regen, or the ability to only craft 20 bulk items, or only crafting one item at a time trying to get exceptional items, or the proposed loot one item at a time nerf, or the overland map in general. What do you all think? Brilliant, right?? Implement at once!

 

Game mechanics that force a player to sit at the pc twiddling their thumbs for 10-15 minutes unable to do anything will drive players to leave the game in throves.

 

It's called crafting.

 

how do you craft when you are dead and can't ressurect at an ankh for 10-15 minutes?

 

Or just learn how to pick your fights and stop dying. Considering there is no skill cap, this really isn't so bad.

I would have personally just preferred a system with limited total skills you can train similar to UO. But that's not what we got.

 

Skill decay has been a major part of the design for this game since before I started actually following the development. It's the only way to cap progression so that there actually is different builds. If you never lose any skill then eventually everyone is everything. We may as well gain the ability to instantly set skills and do away with the skill gain system all together.

 

The skill decay in adventure skills isn't quite a bit deal since there are mobs scaled to your overall level. In theory, you should be able to sustain several GM skills by killing the mobs from 5-skull zones.

For those who used some questionable methods to get XP that have been fixed may have some difficulty unless they find another way to obtain the same amount of XP. This is one of the balance mechanism that come with skill decay.

The decay for crafting skills is a bit different. At some point, the only way to get a large amount of XP to cover the decay is to go mine some ores. It becomes very awkward for those who don't want to deal with mining and blacksmithing to be forced to go into a mine and strike some nodes in order to sustain their other crafting skills.

 

How about we let the system actually get placed and work from there.

It is so sad that players have been given so much and every release the dev team give more and more and when they try and take it back and make it the way it should be they get so much push back because players got used to "having it all"

The devs really need to start giving things out so low and not desirable that players work on it, and complain they cant make it work or death costs "TOO" much and then dial it back. . . .

they have screwed themselves in so many ways that they are going to have (and are) a hard time going the way they actually intended - combat, taming, damage, resistance, focus, . . . . GOLD the list is too large.

I am sure I will e able to say the exact same thing in 5 more releases, like I did before persistence even hit, but what do I know.

Goes back to beating head against wall.

 

No, I meant that crafting is a game mechanic that forces you to twiddle your thumbs for 10-15 minutes instead of doing anything. There is no interaction.

 

The simple fact is that skill decay in SOTA is a bad plan. The dev's are going to have an utter explosion of complaints when this goes live with the usual 5% of the population (like usual) saying they will quit and the game isnt fun to play like any change. Any MMO I have ever played (first was EQ as I recall) that takes something away from you if you die is always one of the biggest complaints of the game. Many games have actually put in mechanisms to avoid just taking skill away.

The key is they have to limit skills in a way that people cant just GM everything. They have to limit this and allow people who put the heavy time in to be better then those that dont but not make it to great (lets say a 10% better player in skills) so that a good casual player may have a shot at killing a poor hard core player.

Our Devs could do a few things to help, these are just ideas:

1) just go to max skill points like UO, people have a total of say 1000 points and they just distribute as needed.
2) upon death you get a 1 hour timer of half exp gain on crafting and adv exp.
3) Create a power hour and then cut exp gains in half for the rest of the time.
4) etc....

 

I find crafting oddly soothing like this... crafting doesn't need to be interactive like combat.

 

Great for you, I suppose. I actually want to do something while I'm playing a game. I have Netflix if I want to watch something.

It doesn't need to be "like combat", although that would be the easiest place to start. Combat can be done entirely by auto-attack, so crafting can be click-and-forget. Glyphs add a lot to combat, however, and would add much to crafting.