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

What's done is done. It is still easy to get a skil up to 40-50. Just get what you want to 50, then lock everything down and focus on one at a time. I keep a pool of no lower than 500-1mil, and try to stay above 500k. I don't have an issue personally.

 

Really, not that much changes. The impact on skill gain is simply slowed until your pool is larger. However, it doesn't take long for your pool to grow larger because you consume less of it per use. Once your pool is 4X greater, the change becomes invisible. If you are mismanaging your skill training or simply trying to train too much at once then yes you will see a problem.

 

Decay should be active always, but only for skills you aren't using.

That way, you can have 50 GM and 6 decks of cool builds, but if you roll as a fire mage for 95% of the time, upon death you will take a hit to GM blade/archery/healing or whatever your off-sets are.

One should not be punished for vacations, work trips, or needing a hiatus from gaming. Perhaps a gold or CoTO cost to park your avatar at a training centre (or take a trainer job while away to polish certain skills)

 

Decay only accumulates for three days (and on QA they cut that down to 6 hours) and it's only applied when you die, so you won't get punished for taking a vacation.

 

I like your idea of decay only when logged into the game. That would minimize the impact on casual players. If they chose a decay system to finally implement, I would hope they go this way.

But, their are two other systems already in place that work to keep player levels within a reach so that skill can overcome grinding. I would rather they work on refining these systems more than just adding a decay or cap.

1. Diminishing returns keep the higher levels costing more and the benefits not as great. So if done right, a level 80-100 with good skills should be able to compete with someone much higher.

2. The deck system limits what you take into combat. So even if someone has 200 in every skill they are still building a deck on what is useful and trying to make it as efficient as possible by limiting the glyphs in the deck. A new player would be focusing on just that first set of glyphs for his deck and balance it should balance out.