Skill Tree and Usage Based Progression

I don't see it as a can of worms. I see it as an opportunity to come up with a mathematical model for combat. It's engineering at its core. Your comment on balance is too general for me to respond to. It is trivial, with the caveat being that it's trivial for an individual who fancies himself a veteran software engineer in the game industry. I'd venture to say SotA has more than one who would claim this. These guys have been around the block, give them some credit. I offered exactly two solutions, along with a statement that I claim no combat system concept is any more or less inherently susceptible to macroing.

 

While I believe the system you propose can be made, you really must admit how complex it will be. What is my participation score for running out where the monsters can see me and then kiting them back around the corner to my group, who lock them down and demolish them? How will the system track my communicating with my team over skype, as I call out the patterns and responses needed to win a complex battle? It would be a monumental piece of programming. Worth it, but extremely difficult.

 

The value of those new diverse abilities will need to be equal to the value of the upgraded skill, or else a preferred play style will emerge and there won't be much customization and depth. A lot of games struggle with the "jack of all trades, master of none" characters that find themselves unable to main tank, unable to heal a party, and unable to dish out competitive damage. Ideally, a level 20 fire wizard who specialized entirely on fire magic should be more or less equal with a level 20 fire/earth wizard who split his skills evenly. If the fire wizard is doing double damage compared to the hybrid, then the system breaks as the only viable builds are going for the power instead of diversity.

I don't see how that is any different than collecting experience points by standing in a low-level spawn area macroing an aoe spells or skills. All systems are going to have abuse, and there are ways to curtail alot of the abuse in any system.

Well, no, your proposal doesn't. It requires you to use offensive damaging magic in order to get better at all other types of magic. If I play a full time healer, I will end up with no progression at the end of that session while my damage dealing teammates have gained a few levels. Tying experience gain ONLY to damage creates a system that has a preference for a particular style of play, which leaves tanks, healers, buffers, and other low dps roles at a major disadvantage.

 

I suppose trivial may be a bit of a leap. But, honestly this one of those interesting problems, that any self respecting engineer would want to tackle. SotA's dev leadership have been around for awhile, so I have to believe they are well aware of different ways to tackle this, and ways to avoid some of the common ways people abuse it. I trust this is the case, and whatever is implemented as far as balance will be a decent 80% solution, and the remainder will be fixed after release.

Your kiting example is interesting. If kiting is an active skill it could be added as a factor in the participation score. Using the skill in itself should merit some kind of participation, and perhaps a duration of how long the player held the kite. If it's not an active skill, and all the person did was literally aggro a mob and run away, I'm not sure it's deserving of any advancement... Yeah, OK, they helped, but you'd have a difficult time distinguishing between when this was done as part of strategy and when it was just some dude running for his life.

These strategy /communication type things you bring up are interesting. Clearly that is a part of a successful encounter. The problem with my system is how do you measure this? The scoring system I proposed will has its drawbacks, and they all will. My idea requires some way to quantify what it means to participate as a means to prevent undeserving player advancement; it's the "you gotta show up and so something, this isn't a charity" approach. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution. People will learn to work within the system given to them... And, the question should probably is it a good enough solution that it can be enjoyable even when corner cases like the ones you bring up may mean less advancement than others in those scenarios. My personal thought, is that it should still be enjoyable since SotA claims to focus less on grinding.

In any case I'm not a game developer, so as interesting as it is to hash out combat skill/level advancement I trust @Chris has good ideas here regardless of what system they chose. It just so happens I would have much preferred a skill based, no tree, and no trainer system.

 

I have been contemplating on this possibility as well.

 

I completely agree.

 

To make a hybrid of the current system and a usage based system.
As before you can put skill points in the skill trees but for active skills you can only place 1 rank.

It seems like they keeps track of how much each skill is used to determine popularity and what's need to be adjusted.
Now if they for you keeps track of what active skills you used since last level.
When you level you get first some normal skill points that you can use in skill trees but for active skills only to rank 1
Beside that they could give out some skill points that would be distributed depending on the propotion's you has used the active skills.

So if you since last level used skill A 20% skill B 30% and skill C 40%
could be so 20% of the points goes to A and so on
or could be for each skill point you roll random so its 20% chance it goes to A and 30% it goes to B

 

Very exciting Chris! Can't wait to see the details on this awesome-sounding system!

 

Thank you Chris for listening to us to make things more fun in the skill department. Im still crossing my fingers for interesting reasoning behind getting the skills, perhaps later, but please keep in mind. My little firestarter might burn her fingers or set the house on fire if there isn't proper training into handling fire, plus who can enchant with fire or wield fire or resist fire without it. Ok just to keep in mind ok. Not trying to nag. I so appreciate all the hard work you put in for us and for the game.

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Thank you , very excited for this.........

 

I hope that post is up soon going mad wondering what it's all about lol.

 

Yeah I'm excited for taming and vendors I hope that I get my pledge reward taming calls though because I have no crafting skills right now

 

Fantastic! Taming, skills updates, big changes in R20 AND R21. Very exciting.

 

I would love to see a system where your skills for a particular tree increase only by using that tree.