I personally have maxed maybe close to a dozen skills or so amongst several characters.
You've never maxed a magic skill. Don't lie by omission.
It's impossible to make everyone happy.
Using an idiom to support your argument when your argument did not depend on a premise involving 'everyone' is underhanded. What you should have said is this: either the developers or players are happy. And that leads me to believe you either don't play very many other games or you know absolutely nothing about game development. If both are not happy, the game invariably fails. If one of either is not happy, the game suffers and eventually dies.
Especially if players are unhappy.
But I am guessing with it also being a PvP game that there has to be some work into getting skilled otherwise what's the point?
Um... The most popular PVP games do not involve a ton of grinding. Or any at all. In fighting games, you unlock characters. In online FPS, the most that's expected is unlocking new weapons and gear. MMOs with PVP have to make grinding fun or part of the PVP so the player is entertained. But your skill is entirely dependent on twitch, aim, and strategy. It's dependent on you. In fact, most PVP games try to match players of similar skill or rank so that you don't get a ridiculous situation like PS has where noob characters are vastly underpowered. A noob can hardly kill a diseased rat. My character can force choke hundreds of mobs within a ~50 foot radius with hardly any effort.
Other games with PVP recognize that grinding takes away from time spent getting into the meat of the game. So they have grinding as part of the PVP or make it fun enough to retain players. This is the same concept I've been trying to explain when it comes to roleplay and grinding. Grinding takes away from time spent roleplaying. In PVP games, people want to get the edge on other players, so they grind. In this game, people want to be able to mechanically match the IC capabilities of their characters, so they grind. You can't stop people from grinding alone without stopping them from playing. (In PS's case, it used to be that serious roleplayers would just ignore mechanics, thus a huge portion of the game, but now they tend to leave the whole game.)
And remember Devs make the game and rules, the GM's just enforce them. If you want a change you need to appeal to them. I really don't care
If you're just a GM and don't really care, don't share your opinion? This thread should be seen as an appeal to the developers.
I've heard the devs have said in the past it might just be easier to remove the dummies altogether
Remove training.
Ideally I think the idea (again I don't know here this is just my opinion, nothing official) was if you train using mobs that are your level or just slightly above it, you gain skill in your weapon, and your armor, pps all equally at the same time so they progress together at the same rate and you are interacting with the world.
Yep, that's totally how that works in real life. No one uses bags. No one uses targets. No one uses literal training dummies that are shaped like humans so they can actually practice aiming strikes to parts of the body. Instead, you go out and murder people who are your skill level. You don't need sparring partners. All you need is to kill wildlife and other people down on their luck.
So much for 'realism in training'. We have to spend hundreds of hours training but we can't use the same means to train that we would in real life.
Sorry, but I'd rather not have my characters turn into bloodthirsty killers that can't sleep at night due to the number of people they've had to kill just to become master swordsmen or whatever. Killing people is not good for your psyche, even if they are criminals.
