Skill Decay

[Dorn]

This might have been brought up before, I really can't remember but here goes.

I know skill decay isn't in the plans, fair do.

Has selective, toggle, skill decay been considered? Or selective skill freeze?

[Skah]

Is this a balance thing, or for people who don't want to see Swords: 0.0065? If the latter, you can always gag the line. If the former, I'm not convinced skill decay would help balance the game, and it certainly wouldn't if it was opt-in.

[Dorn]

For balance, it would need a lot more thought put into it. I'd love to see a skill cap pool, so you can't have someone who is the bee's knees for everything.

For roleplay, I think it would be useful just because some people never get good at something no matter how much they dabble at something.

In regards to gagging, I'd say if people are utilizing gagging on any output from a game then you've got an irritation.

Mostly though, the suggestion was just throwing something out and seeing how people would want to take it.

[Skah]

I hadn't thought about it, but it might be interesting for roleplay, if you wanted to do something frequently but be terrible at it, like a truly awful violinist who is booed out of taverns, or a fisherman who never catches any fish but loves it anyway.

I'd be a touch worried people would exploit it by capping guild skills to get easy profitable tasks or something, but maybe that could be dealt with. Still, toggleable skill caps wouldn't be at the top of my list for new features.

[Rias]

I do want to figure out a way to have some kind of cap or other moderating method, somewhere, so as was said people can't be super awesome at everything just because they have all the time in the world to grind stuff with a "why not?" attitude that a limitless system promotes. As I'm fond of saying lately, "Just because you can be good at anything in CLOK doesn't mean you should feel the need to be good at everything." It's one of the things about the current setup that bothers me most.

A way to set a skill back to 0 and/or prevent gains would be easy enough to implement.

[Dorn]

Well, that's an interesting reply to read Rias. I hope at some point you manage to figure out the issues around it to make it work.

I didn't even consider the possible problem of tasking that Skah pointed out in his post.

[Avedri]

Just popping in to say I am glad to see you around Dorn. Hope you stay a spell.

-Octavia/Avedri

[Dorn]

Well thanks for the welcome. I've had a couple now. Makes me think the game is lacking disgruntled people with all the manners and politeness of a rusty spoon to the eye.

[qinweiqi]

TLDR - I have some theories on the matter, but any limiting system will have trade offs. The best solution is for everyone to roleplay well, but what that means is different for different people.

I've thought about this as well. I really like the open-ended-ness of skills as they currently exist, so I'm definitely against a total skill cap or individual hard skill caps. That's just how I'm biased.
Anyway, here is my thinking thus far:

• A total skill cap changes grinding from a 'means to an end' to a goal all its own, and one where people get bored when they've hit the ceiling.
  • This could be made better with an ability to raise the total cap somehow.
  • You could pay out RP points for good roleplaying that could be exchanged to raise the cap
  • You could opt to pay skill points to raise the cap, though that is really just equivalent to raising the cost of gaining in any given skill/slowing the rate of skill gains.
• Skill decay has several possible outcomes depending on how it is established, but none of them quite meet the goal of preventing master-of-all-trades issues.
  • If the decay is kept at bay by performing the skill every so often on an in-game time basis (say, 24 in game hours), then a person could spend an hour or so maintaining their extensive skill list. The amount of time required would increase with the number of skills a person has at high levels, but I imagine it would be fairly easy to maintain a somewhat large set of skills.
  • If the decay is constant then the effect would either be too small (in which case the effect is identical to the above) or effectively establish a hard cap for skills that are difficult to gain. I think it is possible to find an optimal solution here, but it would be very difficult and vary from skill to skill.
  • Voluntary decay helps people manage their skills against a cap, but could also be used to game the system.
• A dynamic capping system might be viable, though it would not necessarily accomplish the goal well, and if done poorly would be quite unpopular.
  • Capping skills based on other skills, without regard to category, so say N uncapped skills (selected automatically based on highest skill levels), the next N skills being capped at X% of those, and so on.
  • Capping skills based on category. The idea here is that you have an uncapped category and the next most skill-heavy category is capped at X% of the uncapped, etc.
  • Capping categories and skills. Probably my worst idea, use the category wide capping above, but within each category cap skills at X% of the highest skill in that category similar to the above ideas.
• Create dynamic costs of learning (ie, the more skills you have, the slower every other skill gains).
  • I believe this idea has been discussed before and it has been disliked for being unrealistic (as typically learning a new thing reinforces other skills).
  • I think it might be cool to implement this with categories, so that the more skill points in a category you have, the easier it is to gain in-category skills, and the more skill points you have in other categories the harder it is to gain in-category skills.
  • Perhaps set a floor level where skills below Z are ignored, so a person doesn't get burned for trying out several weapons before sticking with one, or needing to start the occasional lantern.
• Use guild membership to limit skills.
  • Before a character joins a guild, let all skills be uncapped, a nice consolation for not having access to guild abilities and perks.
  • When a person joins a guild, all "non guild" skills get a cap and all guild skills remain uncapped. Any capped skills could either slowly decay or instantly get lowered to the cap.
  • Perhaps allow some small N number of non guild skills to remain uncapped, selected automatically based on how high they are. If you throw in a way to lower or reset skills people could change their alternate skills over time.

There are lots of trade offs with trying to limit skill growth. I like the idea of using categories (obviously), but that also encourages rather linear characters who focus on a small, predefined subset of skills. It also penalizes players who want characters that are rounded out with hobby skills.

If a system provides a hard limit that cannot be surpassed, character skill sets tend toward being more similar and players will likely tend toward having more alternate characters. On the other hand a system that permits learning everything, even it if is very, very difficult to do so, will reward those players willing to grind out tons of skills endlessly and you will have players who maintain one character that is a near master at many, many skills.

I think, after all of this brainstorming, my leanings would be toward dynamic costs of skill gains and allowing players to enable decaying of skills. I feel that game coding is just a check to assist players in properly roleplaying their characters, and a master of all trades is sufficiently possible, but like channeling thaumatergy without a guild, should be rare enough that it is going to require lots and lots of work or be altogether impossible.

[Dorn]

I was actually thinking, if there was a skill cap or something put in place to represent a Master of all Trades, it would actually breath life into some very generic Abilities and could help with others.

One that immediately springs to mind is a Mercenaries "Basic Weapon Training". Because by following that ability line Mercenaries could not only eventually get Specialization in a specific style but they could also freely keep the weapon styles of equal skill levels unlike other people.

[Rias]

I certainly don't want it to be over time, because I don't want people to feel like they're being penalized when they stop grinding. ("I'd RP with you, but I don't want my skills to decay, gonna go beat up some more critters.")

One idea I had in mind was getting "rusty" at skills as you focus on others, and having skillgains start low but increase over time as you focus on X skill. So if you constantly jump between a million different skills to try and keep them all form getting rusty, your skillgains are going to be nil due to not taking the time to focus on any one thing.

So let's say you've been training swords like crazy and get it to 500. Then you decide hafted weapons could be cool, so you put your swords away and start focusing on hafted weapons. As you do so your swords skill gets rusty, and your skill rolls with swords would be reduced the rustier it got. Later, you decide to go back to swords. The "rustiness" will wear away relatively quickly as you use the swords, and you'll be able to get back to your full roll potential in a fairly short amount of time, but it's still going to take time to work off that rustiness (and doing so will cause rustiness in other skills). So you're not going to be able to be awesome at everything all at once. "Oh yeah, I did a lot of blacksmithing a while back but there hasn't been much demand in a while now. Give me a little time to work the rust off, and I can start working on setting you up with some quality armor."

Of course there's complications in setting the rates, and what will cause this "rustiness" and how to determine which skills get rusty in which situations and so on, but that's the general idea. Possibly have a certain point at which rustiness would start causing actual skill loss, too, if you neglect a skill for too long.

There would be options to select skills as "do not gain", so you wouldn't get rusty at other skills just for doing activities that raise skills you don't necessarily want to train up. So if you're happy with your armor use skill, set it to "do not gain" and you won't be getting more gains in that skill during combat, but it also won't be contributing to the rust factor.

[Kerrida]

I am glad to see this sort of thread. I know Dorn knows my feelings on the matter as we've discussed it recently. I do like the "rusty" idea and I think it would go a good ways toward making things seem more approachable if that makes sense.

When I was contemplating a skill leveling system like you have here for own general designing fun I had thought of having the 'triggers' for decay/rusty be based on groups of skills. For example, magic and melee fighting. You could be good at both but you had to work harder to raise them and keep them there as opposed to someone who only did one or the other, and in general might not be able to reach the highest echelons of either while trying to be good at both. One would easily be able to keep several things like this balanced, but they'd hit a point where something's gotta give if they want to exceed a threshold.

Either way, it is nice to see it at least being considered!

[Dorn]

So let's say you've been training swords like crazy and get it to 500. Then you decide hafted weapons could be cool, so you put your swords away and start focusing on hafted weapons. As you do so your swords skill gets rusty, and your skill rolls with swords would be reduced the rustier it got. Later, you decide to go back to swords. The "rustiness" will wear away relatively quickly as you use the swords, and you'll be able to get back to your full roll potential in a fairly short amount of time, but it's still going to take time to work off that rustiness (and doing so will cause rustiness in other skills). So you're not going to be able to be awesome at everything all at once. "Oh yeah, I did a lot of blacksmithing a while back but there hasn't been much demand in a while now. Give me a little time to work the rust off, and I can start working on setting you up with some quality armor."

Liking the idea, but looking at the blacksmithing comment... if the player's blacksmithing is already that high, they'd probably not have to work off the rustiness to actually make a quality set unless you intended to include some other sort of penalty beyond skill growth.

Not saying I'm suggesting that or anything, merely pointing it out!

I like the whole rustiness and zero gains thing though.

Any thoughts on how you'd tackle issue with people trying to manipulate the system for tasking? I suppose something to look at would be Zero Gain on certain skills being removed during certain tasks. Doing a combat task, any weapon/defensive skill has Zero Gains removed?

Could also do a cooldown on decaying/resetting skills to zero, and being unable to do it after a certain skill threshold. Not to mention removing abilities if done?

[Rias]

I'm not overly worried about task mechanics. They mostly just give people something to do, and abilities will be generalized fairly soon so guild points won't be quite as important.

[Dorn]

Generalized? Horrible to deride the thread, but I'm curious what you mean by that.

[jilliana]

I'm not overly worried about task mechanics. They mostly just give people something to do, and abilities will be generalized fairly soon so guild points won't be quite as important.

Maybe on another thread you can give us an update on this? I know for a while there it was a hot topic.

[Sneaky]

I really really don't like the rusty skill decay, especially for skills like climb, the magics, perception, and stealth. I'd go with the categorical system, and I'd also say that skills related to a specific guild shouldn't be penalized. I.E. Udemi being allowed to train archery and staves as much as they want.

[Skah]

The idea of skill decay to moderate grinding everything is promising, but I do have some concerns. Sorry for the wall of text!

1) Retro-active
What happens to people who are already in the situation where they have high levels in a large number of skills? Would they have the option to give up skills? I mean, if "John Smith" really liked woodworking and had got up to 3000 in it while ignoring his primary skills, this might put him at a major disadvantage.

2) Reducing RP Options
Over-grinding can be bad for RP and lead to silly jack-of-all trades characters. I'm not disputing that! I am worried that players would be afraid to branch out and try new things if they felt it'd penalize their character, and this might stop their characters from developing naturally. You might not try out cooking when Althea offers to help you make a pie or help dig that tunnel that your guild is working on, or try out that new weapon a friend gave you. Just a thought.

3) Min/Maxing
The point of these caps would be to avoid silly OOC grinding. It might reduce grinding, but I'd be concerned that it'd lead to more OOC behavior as people tried to optimize exactly what skills fit into their cap or should be prioritized for easier leveling. It might not happen, but it certainly does in every MUD/RPG I've seen that has training caps, or attribute caps, or even leveling speed caps...

4) Players stopping playing
It's really fun to try something new. I think the open skill format of Clok adds a great deal of replayability for players, and helps keeps them playing. I'm sure most would still play under a cap system, or roll alts, but I'd think some would not, especially if they felt their character really couldn't advance their core skills (possibly due to high skill level) or any others for fear of skill decay.

5) Unnecessary?
I'm not sure that overleveling is a huge problem, and I think some of the in-game mechanics help limit it.
- Abilities: There's a lot of guild-specific abilities that limit who can learn skills, or be really good a them. I think guild-specific abilities are an awesome mechanic (discussion for another thread I guess), and the effect is that a dilettante with a lot of time will probably never be as good with a bow as a Udemi with rapid shot, or beat a mercenary with a weapon specialization, or out-steal a thief and so on!

Anyways, tldr: I think soft skill caps are a good idea, but I have some concerns about their implementation with regards to balance and RP!

[Skah]

Alternative Suggestion:

Never lower skills, but slow down leveling for non-guild skills past some number once they reach some point.
Example: Your skillgains in your third trade skill over 1000 gets halved, and does your fourth, fifth, and so on (for non-Artisans)

I think people would prefer slowed leveling to losing points here and there, and the minimum skill point means it wouldn't effect new players, players who have IC reasons to do something a short while (help dig that tunnel, bake that pie), or players who are trying out new things. It would still deal with the massive generic grinding of all available skills though!

[Sadi]

For whatever solution ends up being implemented, it's important to remember that there's nothing more discouraging for a newbie than to hear that there are old characters on the game who have achieved heights of power that are codedly no longer possible to get. I left my last MUD when the admins set up a skillcap on all characters but grandfathered in skills that were above that cap-- we ended up with a clique of high-powered people with rank-20 skills absolutely stomping the crap out of everyone else who was code-locked at 12 maximum for their skills.

[Jirato]

For whatever solution ends up being implemented, it's important to remember that there's nothing more discouraging for a newbie than to hear that there are old characters on the game who have achieved heights of power that are codedly no longer possible to get. I left my last MUD when the admins set up a skillcap on all characters but grandfathered in skills that were above that cap-- we ended up with a clique of high-powered people with rank-20 skills absolutely stomping the crap out of everyone else who was code-locked at 12 maximum for their skills.

Noted and agreed. Situations like that stink, I think so far we've been pretty good at trying to avoid them. I don't want to see what you described happen in CLOK and will do my best to avoid it.

[jilliana]

Alternative Suggestion:

Never lower skills, but slow down leveling for non-guild skills past some number once they reach some point.
Example: Your skillgains in your third trade skill over 1000 gets halved, and does your fourth, fifth, and so on (for non-Artisans)

I think people would prefer slowed leveling to losing points here and there, and the minimum skill point means it wouldn't effect new players, players who have IC reasons to do something a short while (help dig that tunnel, bake that pie), or players who are trying out new things. It would still deal with the massive generic grinding of all available skills though!

Dig this suggestion,a lot!

For whatever solution ends up being implemented, it's important to remember that there's nothing more discouraging for a newbie than to hear that there are old characters on the game who have achieved heights of power that are codedly no longer possible to get. I left my last MUD when the admins set up a skillcap on all characters but grandfathered in skills that were above that cap-- we ended up with a clique of high-powered people with rank-20 skills absolutely stomping the crap out of everyone else who was code-locked at 12 maximum for their skills.

Unfortunately, that's the result of a game that has been around a few years and has gone through a large amount of changes. Some of us will never get that 800 riding with the current system like old players would, or other really high gains in other assorted things because things aren't so easy anymore.

[Dorn]

For whatever solution ends up being implemented, it's important to remember that there's nothing more discouraging for a newbie than to hear that there are old characters on the game who have achieved heights of power that are codedly no longer possible to get. I left my last MUD when the admins set up a skillcap on all characters but grandfathered in skills that were above that cap-- we ended up with a clique of high-powered people with rank-20 skills absolutely stomping the crap out of everyone else who was code-locked at 12 maximum for their skills.

Funnily enough this was a topic of conversation I had recently with a couple of other players who used to be round. It's one issue with a small playerbase as well, because grandfathering then becomes really obvious.

Nice to see there is no desire for it.

[Skah]

I hadn't thought about it, but you're both right that grandfathering is another issue skill decay would have (unless some players just had tons of skill points slashed away), since any system that made it hard to level up everything would make it harder for newer players to reach the skill level of some past players. That seems like a pretty compelling reason not to implement it, in my mind.

[Dorn]

I think you're looking at it in a narrow way, Skah. Depending on implementation, it could also *ensure* that grandfathering never became an issue.