proficiency overhaul and experience decay

[cairde]

I think that the introduction of a version of experience decay would acctually be beneficial to this game. Normally I hate it but Salem could make it work.

I have been playing on and off for two months and have by now mastered every skill save three. Those are comming around too. Never have I had to have a strategy for getting there, apparently I never needed one. This means I can now do every task, build every machine in the game, on my own. No need to interact with other players. Good? Bad!

We want people to interact and do stuff together or form reliable trade pacts. Preferably both. We want the loss of a character to be a loss not only to the player but to his or her friends as well.

What we want is specialization and the best way to get there is to impeed generalization. This is my proposed way to do that, it involves some changes to how profs and skills work.

Proposed change below:

Every time you study an inspirational you add points to profs much like today. The only purpose of adding these points however is to raise your proficiency, no need to "pay" for skills.

Skills are not learnt but rather active or not active. That is, you can activate a skill you want to use or choose to deactivate a skill you no longer want to use.

You can choose to have active any skills that you are eligible for in accordance with the skill tree as long as the total amount of proficiencies required does not exceed your maximum proficiency for any proficiency.

Every 24 hours you lose 1% of points invested in proficiencies. This can lower your maximum proficiency. If your maximum proficiency is insufficient to keep all your skills active, some might be deactivated.

As a token of achievement and as a way to promote long term play and truly powerfull characters though, as proficiencies are lost some are becoming second nature. This could be implemented either by a nondecaying part of proficiencies or as a lowered cost of activating skills that have been active for a long time, preferably the latter. I suggest lowering skill prof reqs by 1% of profs lost. This would prolly save us much hate from xp decay haters while not having a huge impact on gameplay.

I also propose adding or rasing time and humor cost to alot of activites and new skills to lower them. This is to add more skills to the game, more ways to build your character and greater benefit to specialization. This, along with continual lowering of skill cost and better infrastructure/purity/covillagers is the way to break the steady state that might result after a while.

Hopefully this means that in a village of three people there will only be one farmer, one miner and one forager/fisher and everything else will be traded for. You can of course change your job but that will come at a cost as you have to raise new profs and old skills might be unsuited for your new job.

This also means rading now has a greater detrimental effect on villages as profs will be lost while rebuilding machines and defenses. The kind of systematic damage you can see in shocks to complex systems like societies. The level of player organization and time played per day will now cap player proficiencies.

The decay should be low enough not to bother new players. 1% per day would hardly be noticable i think.

I know this is a pretty big change to the game and could not be done without a sever reset but i still wanna hear what you think. Also, this is a pretty big mass of text, dont hate on me before asking me about specifics.

[Dallane]

*Forum post skill on*

Sounds terrible in many different ways. I make the game more of a grind. No thanks.

Edit: Alting harder then ever with this update

[martinuzz]

some idea to cause even more grind

I want to hear you say that again after you realize you want 500+ stocks and cultivars.
In other words: No, please, no.

[cairde]

I agree that this would not be easy to implement but the game is still in beta and looking at the player base I don't think we should so categorically rule out any change. We think the game is good enough to play as it is, otherwise we wouldn't. However we are a precious few, not that many people agree with us. Changes will be necessary and we might not always like them. It is important that those changes are the right changes and your input is appreciated.

Yes, making it harder to alt or boost other characters is another benefit of this setup. As it is right now you can take a character reasonably high and use that one character to power other characters at very little effort . This way, if you die your friends will actually have to take some loss to their own profs to get you back to where you were. As it is right now it takes some time but does not weaken them in any way in the process. Also this could make it harder to use alts for raiding and raiding players would have to either invest more in their raiding characters or raid with their mains. A lot of the current exploits in the game involves alts.

All of this would cause more grind if you by grind mean doing more of a smaller segment of the game. Yet we all do just that every day in RL since our economies are built around the concept of specialization. The trick here would be to expand the game through more skills and make every aspect of the game interesting enough so that even after choosing a subset of roles in the game to specialize in that subset feels like enough of a game to enjoy it. Not being able to do everything is what makes you rely on other people.

One benefit to this setup would be that you could tweak the game to let players advance in one area early on since any progress is only temporary unless kept up. That would mean less grind in the early game before you can contribute back to your community. Another would be that the fleeting nature of things would facilitate game balancing without resets.

[Eniac]

Mart and dallane are right NO

[bocage]

No. This would be another reason for persons who have taken some time off from the game to not return. Getting your base raided and destroyed is bad enough. Getting a character killed is bad enough. Losing a village or claim due to not paying upkeep is bad enough. Losing a village because all your friends quit the game is bad enough. Don't add to that devolving character progression to further eliminate any progress that was made, and further eliminate the possibility of a casual player getting anywhere in the game.

I really want this game to succeed. I really like this game. I think it has to be more friendly to casual players. People need to be able to go play the next big thing for a few weeks or a few months and then be able to come back and not be starting completely over again.

[Kdense]

No. This would be another reason for persons who have taken some time off from the game to not return. Getting your base raided and destroyed is bad enough. Getting a character killed is bad enough. Losing a village or claim due to not paying upkeep is bad enough. Losing a village because all your friends quit the game is bad enough. Don't add to that devolving character progression to further eliminate any progress that was made, and further eliminate the possibility of a casual player getting anywhere in the game.

I really want this game to succeed. I really like this game. I think it has to be more friendly to casual players. People need to be able to go play the next big thing for a few weeks or a few months and then be able to come back and not be starting completely over again.

This... after having to take 6 months off and returning I would have logged on laughed and then deleted salem if that toon had devolved too.

[Darwoth]

i would like to kill you in game and punch you in the face irl this idea is so horrible.

[TeckXKnight]

While everyone else has put it in very harsh terms, the primary point of interest to take away from this is that stat decay is a pain, no matter how you spin it. You are putting maintenance on the very basic development of a character and characters are the primary focus of Salem. This maintenance would not only mean expending valuable and time intensive resources on just keeping what you have, it would also mean that any time away from the game is the same as being raided. When you come back you've been robbed of what you worked so hard to earn without anyone ever touching you.

Being raided is harsh enough, we don't need to be passively raided by the game too. =)

[cairde]

Thanks for all the constructive criticism. Everyones input is vaulable.

Like I said before decay is not easy and I generally dislike it becuase of bad implementations. Also it generates alot of hate in forums.

My point would be to prolong the midgame, reserve the end game for those worthy and, most of all, create incetives for specialization in this game where there currently are none. Now, decay can be implemented in various ways. Such as over RL time, time played, RL time plus some downtime or not even over time at all. It is very possible to maintain the incentive to specialize by decaying points earned by points earned. This could be done by absolute numbers or by relative numbers where decay by absolute numbers let players progress indefinitly and relative numbers generates a soft cap.

Decay by absolut numbers could mean that for every two points you earn you lose one. If you stay in one single field of work all this does is slow you down a bit but if you try to be a generalist you need a broader continious supply of inspirationals to maintain all skills. This is harder, thus promoting specialization and trade.

Decay by relative numbers means a softcap on proficiencis. Lets say that for every point earned you lose 1/10^6 of all points. That means that when you are at 500 000 points total you only earn them half as fast as you lose 0.5 points for every one earned. At 750 000 you earn them 1/4 the normal speed. And so on. However, with the discount to skills held for a long time there is still significant progress to be made but in the form of lower allocations made to skills in use. Essentially you would have to choose to either be a jack of all trades or a specialist. Since specialists generates more wealth then jack of all trades specialization would be encouraged.

None of these have the added benefit of reserving the end game for the best though. Decay over time requries you to put in effort and play smart. Good algorithms and a nice setup means you dont come back to nothing after being away but rather give you the oppurtunity to relive the experience at an increased pace taking you further every day.

There are other ways to achieve specializations, but they are generally worse. Like asking the player to choose stats or a class or locking out skills after other skills are chosen. Does anyone know any good ways to promote specialization?