Skill progression seems unaddressed (Adventure Pool)

After a quick play it seems like not much has been done to skills progression and that the stratus of pooled XP to your skill being used is just too simple to provide interest in playing.
I mean that skill progression seems so linked to doing a-typical tasks, such as kill the skeleton or spiders. This is just feedback from the entry level experience. I don't want to have to play like that, there has to be a better way to do things. Why can't combat be more like crafting skills progression ??

 

Crafting skills progression is even worse. You earn xp by gathering ( usually mining ) and then spend your xp pool on other crafting skills that are unrelated to what you have done previous.

 

Yeah mining in Elysium, then scraping weapons to work up to GM in smithing and carpentry.

 

This has always irked me as well. We have a "use-based" system but that's not really accurate. We have a earn-xp-to-pay-for-skills system, its just you can't actually assign xp to the skill at will, instead you must spam buttons. This used to be less tedious but the transfer rate was reduced significantly some months ago. However I don't really see a solution; if we got rid of xp and went pure use-based, you'd have people stood at training dummies 20 hrs a day or worse using macro programs. If we got rid of the use-based and just let people assign xp to skills, it would trivialize efforts specifically in crafting which requires huge cash/material sink. I'd love to see crafting actually give xp proportional to gathering (aside from the 1-off first time bonus) but I doubt we'll ever see it. For crafting at least, there is a material cost. For adventuring though, I don't see a way around the kill-monster-get-xp grind without completely reinventing the wheel which at this stage is a bit unlikely.

 

The only way I've seen use-based systems not become spammy is to only assign XP when the usage is "contested", and immediately allocate xp to that skill.

Thus, swinging a sword at a training dummy may help you improve until you have 40 it so skill, but it's never challenging. In SotA, this means you might get quest XP into your pool, and can advance to skill 40 on a training dummy, but you don't earn XP for it. If you go out and fight a bandit with your sword, you might earn xp, but it also challenges you until the bandit is so weak it is no longer a threat. As you fight, a portion (maybe even all) of the xp you earn defeating that bandit is immediately allocated to the skills you used to defeat it.

The current system is too exploitable, and allows nonsensical learning. I'd live to see it change, but I don't expect it at this point.