The calm before the storm: Skill degrade

I posted this in another thread, it deserves its own. We are in the calm before the storm, in 24 hours the forums are going to be absolutely crammed with complaints. I will probably fight the complaints since this system of degradation has been talked about forever and never been set which is how we had people with 60 GM's last wipe.



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 like (1) and (2), not a fan of (3).

I'd love to see a "max skill points like UO", and have those max skill points be a single pool for both crafting and adventuring.

 

I have been thinking for a while that a skill cap is required here. I understand that with diminishing gains it should theoretically be possible to close the gap on players that are far advanced, however, it all depends if you are using the same build as them. AOE mages and the like who can earn 1.8 million xp an hours as has been stated will never be caught up by the normal gamer especially if they not using the same high xp earning build as theses players. A skill cap is the only way i think that can keep the player base within sight of each other and the chance for slower or more casual players, or players without optimal grinding builds to stand a chance of competing.

 

I have a question about 'competing'. What does that mean to people? Casual players will never be able to keep up with hardcore gamers and seeing that this is a Single-player game with Multiplayer elements (and I admit I and most of my guild mates play only in Friends Mode), why is 'competing' even an issue, if PVP isn't considered? I'm curious. To me, 'competing' is a non-starter.

 

I did some work taking a closer look at the "logarithmic growth" model for skills. From what I calculated (which could be totally wrong but appears to be congruent with what I've heard about skill gain elsewhere):

A player gets a 10% gain in skill effectiveness for every 5 skill levels up to 30.

After that it takes 10 skill levels to get a 10% gain, up to level 60.

After that, it takes 20 skill levels to get a 10% gain, up to level 120.

After that, it takes 40 skill levels to get a 10% gain, up to level 200.

The point being that, after level 60, the gains in the effectiveness of a skill are so marginal that it causes me to question whether the effort to GM a skill is really worth it. Eespecially considering exponentially increasing skill point needs on the other side of the equation.

An example:

I currently have 50 skill points in flame fist (on the regular server). The tooltip says it currently hits for 4-11 damage and at level 70 would hit for 5-12. This is consistent with the 15% gain predicted by the model above. Extrapolating from there, it predicts that at level 100 flame fist would be hitting for a max of 14...

So all that work to "GM" a skill, for what? A MAX of 2 more damage points per hit? The only benefit that I can see is that it helps others around you to level their own skill more quickly.

Otherwise... maybe it's kind of a LULZ thing... sure fine let all those people go ahead and try to GM a bunch of skills... it's a marginal benefit with a huge price to pay to maintain.

Meanwhile, a player that GMs one or two skills, but then gets a bunch of other ones up to 80, learns how to use them very well, can swap decks out etc, would actually have the advantage in a PvP situation.

At least... that's what I would hope...

 

For you competing might be a non-starter, but for others it might be a big issue, especially in PvP, which this game is meant to have. Competing is not just about winning its about being at about the same level as someone without being at a distinct disadvantage, being on a somewhat level playing field.

I would guess more people would be put off with the idea that they can never catch up with players who use certain builds or they have started late in the game and would see no chance ever of catching/competing/being on level playing field with the older players. With a skill cap they can eventually catch up with hard core gamers with regards skills and levels and abilities in the game. It also allows content to be more easily produced for certain levels of players. At the moment there are players complaining these nothing for them to do at XX level, and with this skill system with no cap that will always be the case, if there was a skill cap then scenes and content could be much more easily produced to keep the various levels entertained.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...worst-mechanic-ever.42017/page-20#post-469553

 

I agree on your post and there are a number of other concerns and peculiarities as well with regard the skill system as i see it.

Its always advantageous to have more damage/better hp/faster this/faster that of course, but as you say is it worth all the work to get those skills that much higher, costing all that xp for a few measly points extra in this or that. I think i can see where they were going with the present idea's of skill growth and xp needed, to keep higher level players in check with marginal gains for massive work, but i don't think it is working especially well as there are quite a few 'abnormal players'. I'm even quite abnormal but I'm not super abnormal!

Also with these limited gains in a skill for taking it higher in most cases there is an increase cost in focus etc, which does make it also less attractive to raise. The way around this with magic schools especially is to raise attunement in that field which works as a multiplier to a degree. All good in theory, but in practise the skill system encourages you to RAISE skills in that school as high as you can with no intention of ever using in combat in order to get a 'free multiplier' for the skills you want to use but keep at a lower level to negate extra focus costs. It seems to me to be all back to front, we should be raising the skills we want to use, and getting benefits for, and not raising other skills we wont be using in order to get a benefit on the one or two in that field we will be.

 

I thought that the skill point penalty was only executed upon death, and that moreover that the penalty caps 72 hours after the last death.

Maybe that has changed since the post that you linked to?

 

This is indeed the main reason that I was turned off to PvP way back when. It reminds me of being a kid playing Nintendo with my friend where he knew the "secret code" and would just mash it over and over again, beating me and then laughing at me for it. His "winning" really didn't have anything to do with skill, it had to do with knowing a stupid little trick that he refused to share.

I would be much more interested in PvP if I knew there was some kind of strong disincentive for the "strong" to simply prey upon the "weak"... some sort of counterbalance wherein if I am "green" to you, let's say, and YOU attack ME, then I get a "random chance" at landing a critical hit that wipes you out. Or something like that.

I don't see how skill capping or not skill capping really addresses the issue one way or another. Rather than trying to use the game mechanics to STOP people a few people from becoming "super abnormal" instead just make it super NOT FUN to be abnormal in the first place.

 

You forgot to mention that power hour was a failed UO mechanic that did not last. This will ensure (like it did in UO) that the first hour of each day will be grinding to the max.

I hope the deva come up with something different than to just copy what UO has/had.

 

I have pushed skill caps for a long time. It wpuld be way better than the current system.

 

One thing skill caps does is increase the likelihood you create Alts. Not necessarily a bad thing.

 

I've said it for a long while.

PvP is basically "who has the highest adv rank". While I really love our tournaments, its really just a measure of who grind the game more and gets the most GM's. We try to tier people up but that only helps a little.

The best fights are with people around the same adv level where skill and build really helps.

 

We have a game touting virtues and 'sandbox gameplay' as part of its core thus as i see it players should be free to follow their own paths, whether good or bad but their choices matter, and there should be repercussions for their actions, especially the bad ones.

I think that skill capping gives hope to the more casual player that their abilities and skills will eventually over time match those of the hard core player. Granted it is likely their personal skills in combat and game mechanics will never match those players , but having at least a level'ish playing field encourages them to continue or even start the game in the first place.

 

From my perspective, the combat hot-bar already limits you. It doesn't matter if you GM every skill in the tree; you only have a maximum of ten available to you at a time and adding too many skills to those ten slots only waters it down and makes you less effective.

 

I see what you are saying, but I think the logarithmic growth curve allows for the same effect, while still being able to advertise "no skill caps". Level 200 skill is only 30% more effective than level 100. Considering the obscene amount of time it would take to get there... why not let people get there? Let them think they are gaming the system, but really the system is gaming them.

Personally, I find it extremely humorous that some players are willing to spend countless hours of their time in-game grinding it out for some perceived advantage, but don't want to spend 15 minutes doing some maths that would demonstrate what a waste of time the whole thing is. (Or even spend 5 minutes reading a thread in the forum where somebody else has already done the maths for them.)



Currently... I've just now opened up my Tier 2 spells, and I have several of them locked at Level 1 because I can't even see why to raise them 20, considering the tradeoff in a LOT of extra focus for a minimal increase in effect.

The only real advantage is the increased numbers of glyphs. For example, at level 1 Strength of Earth I get +5 to STR. At level 10 it is only +7, and it obviously gets worse from there. Why bother?

I think a lot of players are just "going with what they know" and not really stopping to realize that some of the dynamics are not at all what they are used to, and will not really create the same kind of advantage here as it did for them in other games.

 

This is also true. My impression is that the devs are really pushing for mastery of the deck system to be the differentiating factor in PvP. But I could be off.

I have a hard time believing that the plan is to make a game that they, themselves, would hate to play...

Maybe I'm being super-naive but I kind of thought the whole point of crowdfunding the project would be so that the devs could make the game they wanted to make in the first place...?

 

Agree with the OP 100% that taking away skill points upon death is a bad idea. However I don't think we need a skill cap if, as Chris has already described many times, it's exponentially harder to gain skills the higher up you go, and the difference between 80 skill and 100 skill isn't all that significant. If people really are GM'ing 60 skills in a few weeks, then clearly skill advancement at upper levels needs to be even harder. I can't pretend to know what math would work best. I do know that decay and skill LOSS is a horrible idea.

If people want to grind 100 hours to take them from level 99 to level 100, let them. Why should I care? For most people, this would effectively be a skill cap anyway. 99, 100, 101, who cares other than uber-grinders?

 

So you want unlimited skill gain and no loss?