Please balance skills progression

[Gilrond]

In response to the quote below, I thought it's good to start a new topic:

weapon/shield/armor making takes ridiculous amounts of time. It took me 7 hours one time to get one low level of shield making (8-9) compare that to 10 minutes to get one level in the 60-70 range in two armor types at the same time.  Crafting is a waste of time.

Yes, I agree, current crafting progression (except may be for metallurgy where parallelism helps) is very unbalanced and is simply horrible. Please correct me if my calculations below are wrong. For example, let's say it takes 14 practice points multiplied by skill level to level up the blacksmith skill to that level (from the previous one). Since now there is still no graded practice gain (see proposal to implement it on the bug tracker), character can only get 1 practice point for some action (not even for every action). Therefore blacksmith training can be reduced for example to rehammering heated sword handles (since there is no benefit in points in any of the other actions now). Hammering one heated sword handle takes 1 minute.

Therefore to level up from (N-1) to level N, it takes 14 * N minutes (and I'm not even counting heating time for simplicity). So, for example getting from lvl 29 to lvl 30 will take you 30 * 14 = 420 minutes (7 hours). Sounds hard enough? Let's take a more distant look. Since some managed to max other skills, why not to max blacksmith with some effort? How long do you think it'll take? Let's see. You have the following sum:

14 + 28 + … + 14 *200 = 14 * (1 + 2 + 3 + … + 200) = 14 * (200 * (200 + 1) / 2) = 14 *20100 = 281400 minutes = 4690 hours = 195.41(6) days...
Hm, more than half a year of real time hammering? No wonder you don't see many maxed blacksmiths around. So what about adding graded practice to reduce the crazy grinding?

[bilbous]

One minorly mitigating factor in regards to blacksmithing is that generally speaking the activity that gives the practice also gives practice in some other skill. In your example you would likely also get sword making practice. Still this does very little to improve the situation or answer your argument. I can wear two pieces of each type of armor and dazzle 10 tlokes and their attacks will level all three skill types quite quickly. This is the flip side of the problem.

How much weapon practice can you get if you stab a critter for that same minute wielding two knives? 

One wonders why there is a master crafted hammer if you cannot make simple jobs go quicker.

[Gilrond]

Swordsmaking, shieldmaking etc. skills aren't progressing much faster, so even if you gain two skills at once, the problem of very slow progess still remains.

[Bonifarzia]

Yes, this has been serious problem from the beginning, and it got much worse the day practice was restricted to the skill ranges we have for each crafting process (see bug tracker link above). As Gilrond stated, this does not seem to be a simple matter of tuning a few numbers, but a fundamental flaw in the current set of rules (fiddling around with those ranges will probably affect other things). On the other side, practicing certain other skills does not only take orders of magnitude less time, but really also implies much less human effort (mob auto-bashing while having a chat, training magic while earning some money etc.)

I think the natural solution to this problem is to penalize endlessly repetitive training sessions. The amount of practice awarded should not only depend on the difficulty or time requirements of an action, but rather on its learning value for the character to experience something new and hone his skills. Okay, this sounds abstract and hopelessly difficult to implement. Well, you could think of a finite history of recent practice activities for each character. Beating up the same type of NPC, spamming one spell all over or repeating the very same crafting process would fill up the list with patterns of repeated action IDs. This could be interpreted as an effect of exhaustion or boredom that will drastically lower the gain of any following practice, unless you clean up your history by doing other things, which will discard the older entries. I think with such a system, the complex and tedious crafting patterns will have a natural advantage, because in order to produce something reasonable, you will use many different processes. The times of endless handle hammering would be over. Limiting skill ranges for practice could be dropped entirely and the gap between casual practice and stubborn grinding could be narrowed down a little, too.
 

[Chessire]

I have a suggestion on all this. Aside unbalanced exp from diferent crafts or spells, its a fact that training is long and very very boring. Being long is acceptable, since we don't want skills to be trainable overnight. But as for boring, something needs to be done.
So, how about implementing quests as a way of training skills? It could be repeatable quests given by the master of the skill every 24h or even every 6h (that's one ingame day i think). Examples:

-Harnquist asks for help with and order he has from Hydlaa's guard. The player needs to prepare 12 shortswords. The quest gives swordsmithing and blacksmithing exp.
-The player's magic master sends them on a quest to kill a certain monster by magical means, or solve a mystery or magic nature (or a riddle). The quest gives magic exp.
-The music teacher sends the player to play for the visitiors of Amdeneir's tavern for 10 min. The quest gives musical instrument exp.
-Jomed (in Kada El's) asks the player to prepare some dishes for him. The player gains cooking exp (and some tips ).

I think such quests can add a lot of variety on the training of a skill while also helping the player keep the feeling of roleplaying. Today we have lots of smiths that don't get to smith anything for anyone aside training, and lots of cooks that produce ridiculous amounts of food just for healing, just the same recipe over and over. And soo many mages that do no research or study on magic, instead wait for the first fight to put their magic skills to use. So something like that may help in lots of ways, even a little.

[Gilrond]

"Long" should have limits too. Unachievable half a year of hammering for maxing the skill (not half a year of playing, but just hammering in pure time) can't be called acceptable, while other skills (like combat) can be maxed in reasonable time.

[Chessire]

To be fair, as in all other mmos, it seems that most people in the game feel obliged to max everything. If you want to roleplay you don't need to max all the skills you choose and your stats, you need just enough to reflect your charater's abilities. Otherwise you get in situations where you try to roleplay with people that say things like "I'm master in Crystal, Red,and Dark Way of magic, and also max armor and swords , and bows, and cooking and... so on. That's why i say its not so bad to have skills hard to max... as long as the process of leveling is fun enough.
In short, my idea was that what we primarily need is not everyone to be a master smith, its all smiths to have fun playing the game. But the fact that in MMOs gaining levels and skills is fun remains. I haven't trained smithing skills so I don't know how hard it is, still I agree the exp you get from different crafts should be balanced (see discussion on the bugtracker on the link above), its not nice to have everyone smith shortswords to lvl up.

[Gilrond]

I didn't say you need to max any skill, I said that atm progression is unbalanced, which can be demonstrated with maxing time which differs greatly for combat and crafting for example.

[Phantomboy86]

I have a suggestion on all this. Aside unbalanced exp from diferent crafts or spells, its a fact that training is long and very very boring. Being long is acceptable, since we don't want skills to be trainable overnight. But as for boring, something needs to be done.
So, how about implementing quests as a way of training skills? It could be repeatable quests given by the master of the skill every 24h or even every 6h (that's one ingame day i think). Examples:

-Harnquist asks for help with and order he has from Hydlaa's guard. The player needs to prepare 12 shortswords. The quest gives swordsmithing and blacksmithing exp.
-The player's magic master sends them on a quest to kill a certain monster by magical means, or solve a mystery or magic nature (or a riddle). The quest gives magic exp.
-The music teacher sends the player to play for the visitiors of Amdeneir's tavern for 10 min. The quest gives musical instrument exp.
-Jomed (in Kada El's) asks the player to prepare some dishes for him. The player gains cooking exp (and some tips ).

I think such quests can add a lot of variety on the training of a skill while also helping the player keep the feeling of roleplaying. Today we have lots of smiths that don't get to smith anything for anyone aside training, and lots of cooks that produce ridiculous amounts of food just for healing, just the same recipe over and over. And soo many mages that do no research or study on magic, instead wait for the first fight to put their magic skills to use. So something like that may help in lots of ways, even a little.

This seems like the best idea on here. Its not hyper complicated (I don't know alot of programming, but I can say it seems like something that could make use of systems already in place, like say... taking the exp you get from 10 spellcasts, bundling it together, and replacing what it is that gives you PP as a reward with it.)

[MishkaL1138]

It's pretty easy with the current quest mechanics. You only have to figure out a way of modifying the player's skills using an NPC in the same way Game Masters do. I hope someone keeps this in mind.

EDIT: Also, it's very well justified ICly:
"Hey [random char], are you busy?"
"By the gods, Trasok asked me to help him with an order and I have to make thirty axes before he smashes my head with his hammer!"

[Sadie]

   What Gilrond said, re "Long...." (agreed)

This is /should be a fun game, not quite so "real life" as the crafting / grinding puts us through. I like to make axes, but it is become tedious. Plus the problem of delta blades disappearing... (thanks, but I won't go into files, and 'simply' change this to that).

The literal amount of time it takes is astonishing.

Sanrai 

[Gilrond]

Having random quests to improve the skill is a good and welcome addition to break the routine of skill practicing (and they should appear once in a while, so it shouldn't be a one time thing, otherwise it's pointless). But it doesn't change the problem of disbalance and overly slow progress. Crafting progress rules need to be changed significantly to make the game enjoyable. See linked bug for other arguments, like encouraging crafting diversity and advanced items crafting (which are not encouraged by the current system).

[novacadian]

Any system in development is bound to need some balancing so some of the comments on this thread should be looked at within the scope of balancing in my opinion. Yet that does not mean that it is my feeling that advancement needs to be adjusted in any way to make advancement quicker.

My main character has been in play for over a year now and is a little less than mid-range. That seems fine by me. She has a lot more growth as a character in my opinion and it would not make sense that she be maxed in anything at this time.

She has never held a pick axe in her hand, so when my interest grew about the forge it made no sense to me that she would study in that area, Instead an alt was created to explore that aspect of the game. My main has a history of being a wine broker; so she started up her brokerage business again to trade in the products of my alt.

In the short time that the alt has been created he is now creating good quality steel stock and is now beginning to craft mid range sabres. There is no intent to power level at the furnace. He creates products to fill the needs of my main. It is approached via RP and his progression is based on the needs of my main.

It is fun to have the alt being played as an up and coming crafter. It would not be as much fun to me if by supplying my main he suddenly became a master at the forge. Some day he may; yet he still holds in high esteem such masters as Hangatyr. For him to be on the same scale as Hangatyr would take away from who he is at the moment as well as who Hangatyr is.

The short and long of it is that it is my feeling that the progression rate of most skills is perfect for RP at the moment. To make progression any faster would diminish character development in terms of RP.

It was always my thought that development is the way it is on PS so that players would think in the very long term in terms of their character development. A master in any trade takes decades. Even at the 6:1 ratio of time in PS that would mean 4 or 5 years of real time for a PS character to be maxed. Without power levelling that works about just right in my opinion.

- Nova

[Phantomboy86]

It was always my thought that development is the way it is on PS so that players would think in the very long term in terms of their character development. A master in any trade takes decades. Even at the 6:1 ratio of time in PS that would mean 4 or 5 years of real time for a PS character to be maxed. Without power levelling that works about just right in my opinion.

- Nova

Planeshift will never have any players at all if people expect to have to take YEARS to max a few things. I'm quite against powerleveling, ask anyone, but literal yearS? Not many people are going to want to deal with that.

[Sarva]

In real life all skills are not learned at the same speed. I think it is reasonable to say it takes less time to learn how to use a weapon well to kill things than it does to learn how to make a weapon well. It takes a lot less time to take many swings at a practice dummy with a sword than it takes to make a single blade. Also if practice is made to simple then we are simply going to end up with a lot of people running around who have maxed everything and well that is going to be rather boring.