The Grind

So that I understand you more clearly, what part of raising skills is a "grind" for you?

 

The part where I'm required to stand in the same scene for hours and hours endlessly doing the same thing over and over again.

I love the use based system, and I have no problem with simulating getting better by repetition. What I have a problem with is you have to do that to such a high degree that it becomes boring and stupid - it's a game, it's not a 2nd life. I come here to escape doing things I hate.

So I believe we should be attempting to SIMULATE that a little more, by removing the "grind" part of it. Which is to say that we should not be rewarding people that hit gust balls all day or script repetitive motion. We should just say:

Hey great, today on Tuesday night you spent 3 hours in our game, wonderful!
You get one more adventure level, congrats!
What's that? You played 18 straight hours? Ok, good for you.
Wait, you want 30 levels?
Why? All you did was kill the same thing over and over again...
Because you played more than seems healthy or reasonable? We don't care. Go roleplay. Go craft something. Go PVP. Go outside and smell flowers. But don't expect to get a cookie because you devoted your life to something that we literally can program machines to do.


That's what I think we should do. @DarkStarr @Chris

I love this game, but OMG am I bored out of my mind grinding. It's horrible. I get almost nothing out of it and it makes me wonder why I'm doing it at all. @DarkStarr @Chris @RichardGarriott @Chaox are you tell me that you can see yourself playing this game as a fan for this many hours in an effort to be "pvp ready?" Are you telling me you have this kind of time to just sit around killing the same stuff forever? Come on. Seriously put yourself in the shoes of people that just want to have fun and don't think grinding is any more fun than you guys do.

 

With all the scenes we now have - why would you feel that you were "required" to stand in the same scene for hours and hours doing the same thing?

A sentiment most likely shared by most of us, so you're certainly not alone in that regard.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Baron, but hitting a gust ball does nothing for you without XP's to distribute - and, as we all know, one must go out and kill things in order to have any XP "currency" to spend on a gust ball to begin with.

It seems to me that - that, in itself, is what you seem to detest.
You simply have no desire to go out and do any PvE in order to raise your fighting skills to use for PvP.
You do not enjoy any PvE and it irks you that are required to do that in order to raise your XP pool.
I'm sure you must seriously hate harvesting the cotton, leather or ore required for what you wear and what you fight with.

I'm amazed that you have been here as long as you have, but somehow missed the fact that SotA is - most of all - geared toward long term enjoyment.
None of us particularly enjoy starting out from scratch with every wipe here in Pre-Alpha, but the majority are here for the long hall - and those "wipes" are a necessary part of building the SotA world as Richard and Starr envision it - and we are helping build that world. It is not meant to be a quick road to the "top", but rather - slow and steady - wins the race.

Sorry, but you seem to want some sort of instant gratification (ie all the XP's you want without the "grind" necessary to get them).

Sadly, I think you've chosen the wrong game......

 

We shall see.

 

Indeed we shall....

 

... It feels like we're getting a little worked up about a tuning issue; I was of the impression that with flags and zoning PvP would get balanced into relatively equal match-ups, at least in terms of big level differences, but that's something I'm also pretty confident isn't on the dev's priority list yet. "More Data first!" would generally be the argument towards delaying this kind of tuning.

If you were to limit the level caps to a zone you were PvPing in what would you optimally set them to (especially trying to account for pre-alpha builds and difficulties matching 'exact' same levels)?

 

Thanks Traveller13! I'll add a couple of columns to that table that use the +10% per level assumption when I have time (will need to use an actual spreadsheet or script instead of just calculating in my head). But generally speaking, instead of requiring roughly 2x the amount for every 10 levels more, it would require roughly 2.6x more. So xp difference between level 40 and levels 70 and 90 (in comparison to what I mentioned earlier as an example) would be, rounding down, 15x and 116x, respectively (instead of 7x and 33x).

 

@FrostII, I do not usually comment on the behavioral aspects of folks on the forums, but...
You started out nicely enough, asking and apparently innocent, "I seek to understand" -looking question:

However, what follows constitutes a rather pure personal attack, based on nothing but personal interpretation:

Spoiler: quoted personal rant

(funny thing though, "seeming" "instant gratification" anyone? lol)

I mention this, not because I want to attack you in any way, but because in my opinion this kind of bait-and-switch style tactics is precisely what is poisoning the atmospere and driving folks from the forums.

Especially I want to bring out one particularly telling "quote". What was actually written:

And how it was "quoted":

Now I wonder, where on good green earth did the "script repetitive motion" part disappear from that quote, and why? And replaced by a full stop? Because technically, not only is this deliberate construction of a straw man, but total mispresentation of what was actually written.

OK, enough of that, and back to the subject matter.

Bashing gustball bashing is easy. Perhaps you would then care to explain if and why scripting repetitive motion should be rewarded?

 

i cant remember what the numbers were for each but this pic may help. Level 90 was less than half way to 100.

 

Thanks @Themo Lock and @Traveller13! Now what confuses me a little bit is that using the +10% per level rule, I seem to get numbers very very close to what you have mentioned, but only if using 10k xp as a starting value. If I use 1000xp as Level 1 starting point, the numbers are off by one order of magnitude, yet I agree that 1000xp is probably the correct starting value. I'm travelling so I can't really concentrate on this enough, probably some stupid mistake from my part.
I get:
Level 10: 33000
Level 30: 168000
Level 50: 1077000
Level 74: 10521000
Level 75: 11572000 (note 11572000-10521000=1051000 which is very close to 1,050,983 mentioned by Traveller13)
Level 90: 48310000
Level 99: 113899000
Level 100: 125288000

Spoiler: Calculation details

I just used some quick & dirty calculations with bc calculator, using the formula
FirstLevelXP + FirstLevelXP * 1.1^(level-1)
The above result can be obtained with bash one-liner

Code:

for level in 10 30 50 74 75 90 99 100 ; do echo "Level $level: $(echo "scale=0  ; level=$level ; firstlvlxp=10000 ; firstlvlxp + firstlvlxp * (1.1^(level-1))/1" | bc)" ; done

 

Here's my spreadsheet for SotA experience and levels. Values for levels 0-75, and level 100 are based upon my recording them as I went along, and Themo's level 100 screenshot. Values from level 75-99 are calculated at the roughly 10% increase per level. I think rounding method creates the small discrepancies.

 

Thanks! I took the liberty to use your numbers in a slightly modified spreadsheet. Its purpose is simply to transform some rather obscure feeling statistics into something at least a bit easier to understand. I'm not making any value judgements (e.g. regarding whether something can be regarded as grinding or not), just presenting the numbers as they are.
The first two columns use the amount of XP required to reach level 40 as the basic unit, expressed as percentages of this value.

1. The first column shows the amount required to reach next level (so for example, assuming the numbers are more or less correct, it takes about the same amount of xp to proceed from level 64 to 65, as it takes to proceed from level 1 to level 40).
2. The second is the total required xp (again expressed as a percentage relative to total amount of xp required for level 40).
3. The third column is simply the raw amount of xp, taken from your spreadsheet.
4. The fourth column is the level. Why fourth and not the first column? Because the columns on the left side of this column are about character levels, which are currently simply an indication of the size of accumulated total xp pool (well, mostly, apparently the level is still used in some places). And the column on the right hand side is about skills, which is a different animal (even though character levels and skill levels are different things, they share some similarities, for example the relative amount of xp required is somewhat similar).
5. The fifth column is skill relative effectiveness, again taking level 40 as the baseline. This is based on the statement already quoted by @Wilfred but I repeat it here: "Most skills increase in effectiveness based on square root curve. So a 100 vs a 50 is not 100% more effective but rather 41% more effective.". This column simply shows the effectiveness relative to level 40. Note that the "Level" column is used in different context in here, indicating the level of individual skill instead of character level.

Again this is just data and everyone is free to draw their own interpretations.

 

I was looking through the Sota data folder the other day and saw this, does this mean currently there are 191 levels til level cap?

 

I have been looking at that also, could be for skills.. is somebody elses turn to test adv level lol.

 

I have heard in the past that the developers have wanted to have unlimited levels. So I assume that this will never actually "end".

 

Ack, as much as I loved Asheron's Call, I don't want to have to keep reaching for levels I'll never get to again, lol.

I'd love to have the time to do that. Maybe next year sometime, hehe.

 

That's how I feel right now... The highest I've ever gotten in levels has been something like 46 I think. To me, reaching 70 to 80 (let alone 100) is like outer space.

 

You got me beat, I haven't had the motivation to level much lately, the thought of logging in just to grind out levels doesn't seem very fun to me atm since they'll just be wiped later. Once the game is live, I'll have motivation to do so since I won't lose the levels, heh.

 

Only games will spend countless hours trying to figure out how to min/max the system. I prefer to enjoy the game. In real life there with always be someone who is has more experience or knowledge in something. A grandmaster in chess will be better than me because I don't play as much or I might not be able to visualize future moves as well. One MMA fighter may beat another one because they trained harder or were just better. All of RG's games try to put some reality in a fantasy role, so the grind to me is part of the training.

Even if we started at max level, people who play more will be better at PvP because they will have superior mechanics than some one who plays casually (think of league of legends).

Just my Monday morning thought.

 

I totally agree with this statement. Practice makes perfect.

What I think is missing here is that right now it's levels make perfect, and that's not right. If someone is better than me at PVP because they are just better, ok fine. But don't make me lose every fight because I'm not high enough level, I'll always lose every fight then - so why would I fight?

See that's the difference, we need to have a level playing field so people can find out who's actually better and people that are more casual can atleast feel like they lost for a reason that is within their control.