CLOK BBS

After the sneaky addition of Class Specialization: Rook to our known ability list, Rooks now have a whopping 19 abilities available, which is frighteningly close to the cap. I imagine elemancers are going to be creeping up there as well. I think it's time we discussed getting the option to unlearn abilities.

• We are disincintivized from exploring general abilities because new class-specific things might be released
• As more abilities are released, there will be fewer and fewer people with the points to spend on them, resulting in them being less thoroughly tested, and most likely by new players, since veterans are unlikely to roll an alt of the same class/guild.
• There are going to end up being a lot of characters with builds defined by whatever was available at the time
• There are always questions in chat like "does ability x interact with ability y?" Which are nearly unanswerable, because no one is going to permanently spend a precious ability point just to test something
• Ability Regret is real. Either abilities taken when nothing else was available, abilities that didn't do what you thought they did, or things you don't use as much as you thought you would.

I get that the hope is that with a low ability point cap, ability choice will be difficult and impactful. But when new abilities are being added/restored, which I imagine they will be for the entire life of the MUD, that's a very different choice than if everything were available up-front. Especially during this alpha/beta/whatever testing phase, we should be encouraged to kick the tires and experiment with things, but the immutability of abilities keeps us from really doing so.

Don't really have anything additional to add, beyond the fact I'm in agreement with all of the above.

Dorn wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 1:21 am Don't really have anything additional to add, beyond the fact I'm in agreement with all of the above.

Same, mostly. My only tack-on is that other games (in general) assign a cost to this on-release, but during testing, make swapping things around free.

If we want every ability to be rigorously tested with a relatively low sample-size to work with, people need to be able to mix and match. I certainly have some ability regret here and there myself.

Yep, just need to figure out how exactly to implement it (and then do it).

jerc wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 1:05 amAfter the sneaky addition of Class Specialization: Rook to our known ability list

That was necessary to prevent people from double-classing as a Rook. It'll probably end up replacing the initial sorcery ability, or something like that, but for now I quickly threw some duct tape on it after setting up Elemancers with their own Class Specialization ability requirement and realizing Rooks didn't have one.

Rooks now have a whopping 19 abilities available, which is frighteningly close to the cap.

And here's to it going well over the cap, so we have a variety of Rooks with differing loadouts of chosen abilities!

Rias wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 12:01 pm Yep, just need to figure out how exactly to implement it (and then do it).

jerc wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 1:05 amAfter the sneaky addition of Class Specialization: Rook to our known ability list

That was necessary to prevent people from double-classing as a Rook. It'll probably end up replacing the initial sorcery ability, or something like that, but for now I quickly threw some duct tape on it after setting up Elemancers with their own Class Specialization ability requirement and realizing Rooks didn't have one.

Rooks now have a whopping 19 abilities available, which is frighteningly close to the cap.

And here's to it going well over the cap, so we have a variety of Rooks with differing loadouts of chosen abilities!

All of this excites me! Looking forward to having and getting to make some hard decisions, even if it requires me to make a deal with Malfant.

Maybe the vestigial Exp system could be repurposed for the purchasing/refunding of ability points? With some appropriate cooldowns as well probably. It always felt weird to me that we got all of the points up-front unlike in COGG where they were level-based.

Brings up the idea I have of keeping experience, but making it a sort of out of character progression thing, more about the skills you already have than gaining more:

- Set prefered skills, learn them faster at the cost of XP from your global, or even XP from your bucket.
- Spend XP while crafting to increase rolls, or likelyhood for something, or spend a huge amount for a restring (big, not crazy).
- Spend it on lowering skills to feed into others, or on unlearning abilities without any upside, because the upside is having abilities.

Down with this experience stuff. I'd rather it be the old way, 30 days for an ability unlearn and a yearly reset done manually by gms where you're given the ability to reset your abilities if you want to. The experience stuff was confusing and felt a bit weird to me.

So, I like the 30 days to unlearn an ability thing. When the game is further progressed and out of a testing phase, I think that'd be great. but I would probably suggest either instant, or maybe 1 day to unlearn an ability for right now, to encourage characters to test things out as they come, so people are less afraid to learn now things and get stuck with them for long periods of time.

I'm admittedly sleep deprived, so if any of this comes across confrontational, I promise it isn't meant to.

I completely, totally understand wanting to come up with a system for unlearning abilities that you're happy with before implementing it. In most cases, that makes a lot of sense because walking back on something tends to confuse or irritate players, and who wants to deal with that, right?

However, in the case of where clok is now, and specifically with abilities, we've been told multiple times that we're basically beta testers, if not alpha testers. Things will bug, break, be changed, removed, what have you. I like to think that most of us have gladly accepted this as the price of getting to play with stuff now, rather than when you've got it all smoothed out. For those who forget or aren't aware, they get reminded pretty quick.

I love testing. But as testers, we're currently at a serious disadvantage if we can't juggle things around to, well, test. I'm not suggesting gm powers to swap things around on a whim. That would be a bit ridiculous on an active game that isn't just a sandbox. You would have no sense of balance if characters could take and drop abilities without hesitation. But the other extreme of literally no way to do this creates the kind of stuff mentioned in the original post and, therefore, means a much smaller testing sample for new things like the new guardian stuff. I know I was hesitant to grab the new ability because of the current problem with armor use, but did anyway because how can it be checked out otherwise?

What I'd like to suggest is a temporary solution, with warnings that it is just that, temporary. Still limited, perhaps the cogg system where you drop an ability and don't get that slot for a month. Given the testing mentioned above I'd even suggest shortening that time, maybe a week or two, but I'd settle for the 30 day thing if that's what it took. You could add a warning any time someone drops an ability about the wait time but also that the way ability changes will work long term is still under consideration, so don't get used to this. I'm sure that code still exists somewhere, and that would give you a chance to plan out the real solution without feeling pressured by your playerbase going, but but we wanna test the stuff you just gave us! Or the other scenario of, hey cool, tailoring is in! But if I get that then I'm maxed on points because I can't drop metalworking that I took when it came in because it was the only thing around. No, my char isn't actually maxed but getting close to it and I want to keep slots open in case other things happen that might open up new abilities to her. So I might as well be.

So basically, can we get a temporary, stop gap solution until you're awesome plan is ready to roll out? Please? I'll send you lots of butterflies, or something. :)

Adresin wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 2:16 pmSo basically, can we get a temporary, stop gap solution

I figured that was what we've been talking about!

It's not going to be immediate though, because I don't want people just poking at an ability once, thinking "nah," and moving on to something else without giving it more of a shot. That wouldn't be good for testing either. I also know from experience (both on the developer side and the player side in other games I've played) that the easier and more convenient something is, the more outrage will be generated when it's taken away. Even if multiple giant blinking neon warning signs are frequently given reminding people that the convenience is only a temporary measure for testing purposes.

Oh yeah, totally agree. Apologies, then. I thought what you were saying is that you didn't want to put anything in for this at all until you knew exactly how you want it to go for the future. So, appreciate the clarification that this isn't necessarily the case.

I also do want to emphasize that I, for one, appreciate the chance to play with things as they're ready. It is a lot of fun to see what new toys come out next, and sometimes maybe even break them a bit.

Oh, while we're at the subject of abilities, may I request that block proficiency is looked into? It was there before cryo/elemency blocking stuff were in, so the only way to get it now is to get one of the two combat styles, all of which require melee focus. For some ranged users who want to go shield for any reason, there's no way to do anything with this. I assume that the ability was possibly released without magical blocking in mind. But now that it's in, is there a posibility of prereqs reconsideration on this one?

Rias wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 2:27 pm It's not going to be immediate though, because I don't want people just poking at an ability once, thinking "nah," and moving on to something else without giving it more of a shot. That wouldn't be good for testing either.

While I agree with this sentiment, I also feel like abilities should be harder to unlearn the longer they're held to avoid gamey weirdness like taking Block Proficiency just until Shield Use is capped, then switching to Dodge Proficiency, and likewise with ranged/melee. But maybe a baseline unlearning period sufficiently solves both problems. Something like a month for each month it's held with a minimum of one month? This would also make juggling crafting abilities less viable since you'd spend just as long unlearning one as you spent with it.

Usually when people learn stuff, they learn the set of abilities that come with it too though. If they, say, want to juggle dodge and block, it's very likely that they'll have not just one but loads of block related abilities to unlearn. Those cooldowns are probably enough for people to not meta just because they can.
I'm not sure how stackables are supposed to be unlearned though. Perhaps you get cooldown for it as long as the ability points spent, like if you stack 3 then 3 months for this slot etc. This is speaking for when the game is more ability ready and can be sort of safely out of ability testing phase.

artus wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:21 am Usually when people learn stuff, they learn the set of abilities that come with it too though. If they, say, want to juggle dodge and block, it's very likely that they'll have not just one but loads of block related abilities to unlearn. Those cooldowns are probably enough for people to not meta just because they can.
I'm not sure how stackables are supposed to be unlearned though. Perhaps you get cooldown for it as long as the ability points spent, like if you stack 3 then 3 months for this slot etc. This is speaking for when the game is more ability ready and can be sort of safely out of ability testing phase.

I guess that's fair. I would expect that you'd be unable to unlearn a prereq until you finish unlearning all abilities that depend on it.

But that only really applies to dodge/block proficiency if the change you've suggested isn't implemented to allow Block Proficiency without Melee Proficiency.

Oo I just thought of an idea that may help with insane ability unlearn. Perhaps something like you can't unlearn more than x abilities at a time may help with the case of someone unlearning 14 abilities in one month to juggle around. Wanna unlearn a whole block set? Good luck. You can't have more than 2 abilities unlearned at the same time so now you have to wait for as long as at least a slot is done unlearning to unlearn another one. And good luck if you have a three month worth of stacked ability as one of the unlearning.