SO a change was made making it harder to gain skills???

You just need to farm a load of crafting xp. 4x the amount you were going to use with that phat stack of ingots.

I find skinning / aoe farming quite quick gains for both pools. Get 83/x/0 for skill. Quicker to not have meticulous

 

I vote they only wipe your skill and leave mine alone.

 

Wipe your mouth first

 

An announcement for another wipe = admittance to complete fail. That will NEVER happen now, it's just not an option anymore. I'm so sick of people crying about things that happened because the game mechanics changed... it's not a big deal. We have only been persistent for a short time.

"Oh no that guy got GMed enchanting/taming, but now if I try it will cost more!" Oh well, get over it. The game hasn't launched yet, this is suppose to be fun, but we are still balancing and testing. Some things won't be fair. This is not your second life, its a game. Enjoy it, and if you don't, move on to something you do enjoy...

It doesn't matter if your adv level 20, 100, or 200.... when it really comes down to it nobody cares. Just have fun and enjoy your gaming experience, don't worry about everyone else.

This game is what you make of it, the game doesn't make you.

 

Getting over it is a lazy solution my friend!
I want this game to be better just like rest of us do. Maybe wipe is not an option anymore, but in this case let's try to find better solution for problems that r34 brought.

 

I still vote for skill caps so that people have a choice to make. Plus they could easily sell extra characters in the add-on store. I see that as a win win for the game.

 

I agree with the person above but I think it should be implemented with decay.

It should add up all the skill points you have above 40. Up to when that number reaches 1000 you get no decay at all. Decay gets worse and worse after 1000 though, and when you reach 2000 or above it becomes almost impossible to fight against.

This way people can experiment and get any amount of skills to 40, and it wouldn't interfere with unlocking skills.

People who want no decay can stop at 1000 skill points above 40. The rest can choose their level of tolerance.

 

Yes, skill cap is way to go, but I would prefer to stay away from decay system. Just make it 1000 or 1200 skillpoints. People will specialise and PVP will be way more interesting.

 

Skill cap would be okay, if you didn't have to waste hundreds of points on skills you will never use because of the tree system and because of attunement.
Or in crafting, where if you make it either/or between 'gathering skills' and 'crafting skills you're just frustrating the resource gathering capabilities of crafters even further, which will do nothing to improve the game whatsoever.
The whole 'free skill buildling /no limits' thing was the biggest selling point on the game for me. Not happy about potentially losing progress I've already ground out or having an arbitrary limit imposed; the diminishing returns of going higher than 100 is already pretty punitive and costly. I still strongly feel that gm should be 'safe' - if you want to implement decay on skills higher than that, I think that'd be a reasonable compromise, as it only affects high lvl players and not the casual, but decay should be due to attrition/non use of skills rather than something arbitrary like adventure death.

 

For the folks who had natural skill gain as they played before, they wont notice much of a difference until decay comes online and thier gains are slowed down for a brief time after death. (for the newbies and lower level folks they wont notice anything). People jump to lvl 90 and over are going to be hit hardest. 100+ People will likely be upset, because people pushing beyond 100 have essentially outleveled the game so theres no harder monsters worth more xp to grind on. they will be stuck with a flat rate of xp gain that does not increase as they need more, which is kinda the nature of a soft ccap.

the xp consumption rate i think was slowed down by 4x

 

Current free skill system has it's pros and cons, but I dont like the direction where it goes. People are self sufficent with crafting and gathering. PVP is awful, decay system is punitive and again those who play less will suffer most.
If GM skills would be safe in free skill system scenario economy would be screwed up even more and there would be almost no demand for crafters.

Many things would need adjustment if SOTA would go skill cap scenario. Skill tree system definately would need some love . Perhaps we could get skill upgrades through interesting and hard to acompish quests?

 

Yeah, there's problems both ways, to be sure.
There is already no demand for crafters and the economy is already screwed up with the current system. Adding a decay mechanic and making crafters lose their levels isn't going to increase the demand for crafters, unless all the crafters say screw it and leave the game, which while quite likely for some shouldn't be part of the "plan" to balance things!

The best way to increase the demand for crafters is to let crafters actually craft things people want at reasonable prices, so they can do work for hire and/or sell things. If crafters could do that, people who aren't bothered about crafting wouldn't feel the need to grind up millions of producer xp, they'd just go to their local crafter.

You are always going to have people who play 24 hours a day and want to max everything. Decay isn't going to change that, and its not going to slow those people down, the only way you'll slow them down is with a hard cap or punitive decay at high, high skill levels. I draw a line at GM because its where most casual players will stop, its high enough to get things done but certainly not as high as you can go.

 

At least we agree that decay is bad for everyone
And yes crafters should be able to craft good stuff without enormous failure ratio.

 

I'm sorry but you will never slow down players that play 10+ hours a day... they will always find a way

 

That's where the natural attrition comes in to play. When people go and reach the numbers that they want and become bored because there is nothing left to do then they will move on and be replaced. If you are here simply to see large numbers on a score sheet, then this will probably be a fleeting affair anyways. I recommend Yahtzee's approach to Diablo 3 as a solution.

 

I think skill caps would be a bad thing to introduce at the moment... Would of been cool at the start to have a system if you could reach every skill to 100 then past 100 you would need a "scroll" to raise it past 100. Like UO with power scrolls. So lets say if you were doing a control point for 1 hour without losing the point. After 1 hour of without losing the point it would spawn a "boss" Monster that would be difficult. Once defeating this boss it would drop randomized scrolls to advance your character. Just like how UO would with champion spawns. You would have a random chance with the multiple skills within the game.. 120 scroll of chain lightning, 120 scroll of taming, 120 scroll of blades... You could even continue the theme of how ultima had, Once you defeated a certain control point champion spawn "boss" you could get a skull. Once you collect all the skulls from every control point you would get to advance to a higher control point. After an hour you would spawn a "ultimate" champion "boss" monster that would give you stats scrolls of 120 stats or even have higher skill scrolls of 150.

This would give higher level players something to look forward to "end game". Also it would give a bit of a goal to "end game" or advancing your char to the next level. Also with Advancing your char above adventure level 100 or even leveling skills past 100. With obtaining these scrolls it would be nice to have these skills increase in damage value to make it "worth while" advancing them. The current state of the game it seems to not reward players investing the time and effort into even leveling past level 80 in a skill. The time and effort raising a skill past 80 doesn't seem all that must better. Congrats i gained 1 low end and 3 high end damage for reaching level 120 in a skill. It seems like the millions of exp and hours to obtain that exp at the moment is not worth the increase.

I know its a bit late to implement some kind of thing to leveling and skills... But would of been a nice end game goal or even an expansion thing to achieve.
I could go on about it.. But i will stop for now...

 

Well, that's why focus should be on diverse and interesting content. It seem like now whole focus is on the grind and different pointless time sinks
I do understand that content needs more work and money, but thats the only thing that will make this game last.

I also think that people should compete with their IQ's not with adventure levels, but this is achievable only when you have same amount of skill points (maxed out).

Back in the UO days real gaming and PVP started when you have finally GM'ed your desirable skill sets.

 

This is always an interesting conversation.

My two cents....
Don't do decay... If I want to take a break from the game to go on vacation or even have IRL issues prevent me from playing I do not want to come back worse then when I left. I believe the reminder that if I go back I am going to have to earn X that I already did prior to leaving will prevent people from coming back.

No cap is really needed on skills as to what you can train. The deck system really puts your cap in for you. Yes, I can raise all my skills. Woohoo... But if I put all my skills in a deck I would be utterly useless in a fight waiting for the right things to come up. So capping it at 1200 then having people build custom decks just double dipping. Deck building should be the cap as there are efficient ways to build decks for specific scenarios that limit what you use and when.

I believe they just need a better system of deminishing returns and spread out what can be crafted at certain levels. Yes, eventually over a long time someone would reach 200 in all skills but for what gain, if they are diminishing? Give crafters with more skill better control of what they make so they are sought after and it is difficult to obtain. People who want to craft will craft and the casual crafter can still get there eventually.

 

I still think decay is good. Decay is not unlimited and its just a small hit. I am for less decay over short periods so a vacation in RL is not a bad thing. If I had designed it, I would make decay happen all the time while you play, not when you don't play. This makes it impact everyone equally.

Casual players should not be penalized for being casual and other players should not be penalized for living at their PC.

Let me ask a simple question, what is the benefit of being in god mode? When it comes down to it, grinding skills to obscene levels is an attempt to give the avatar a statistical advantage over other avatars, instead of a skill advantage. Does that not diminish the value of a win? Our goal should be a happy median.

 

God mode should be avoided by any means.
Sadly, I see decay as another pointless time sink.
I don't want to work to maintain skills that I already have.