If Leveling....

[Pizik]

....was made easier, would you prefer it? Being able to max everything in a couple of weeks for example.

If yes, would it not mean that everyone was, rather quickly, equally leet and defeat the object of you levelling up in the first place?

If no, should levelling take even longer than it does now?

If niether, is the system perfect as it is?

[Parallo]

I think, though I don't know much about the upper echelons of the skills, it should be much easier. Like in Morrowind one should be able to advance through just playing the game rather than having to go through the highly ludicrous act of grinding.

[Kaityra]

Well, I think that if you make leveling faster the people will just get bored faster, too, especially if not into roleplaying.

[Mythryndel]

I'm gonna have to say that things need to be tweaked to be a little easier. It seems to be almost an exponential leap to advance in skills. Skills start off about right... probably even for the first 10 levels... but after 10 levels it is so expensive or so time consuming that it ceases to be of any benefit to the casual player. I was training sword making on Laanx... I was able to watch a 1.5 hour movie while training level 14 in sword making... that was for 1 level... 13 -> 14... using the least time consuming method available to advance. This is excessive, and if you were actually making weapons to sell while training... you would require a huge investment to train because nobody wants to buy low-grade weapons on laanx... but you also have to have raw materials... etc. Magic is much the same way... lots of time and money to train beyond level 10 or so... with only minimal effect on skill or ability. To be honest... and I know this would require a lot of work on the dev's part... but I would like a system to where you could either "grind" or perform a duty/quest for the trainer to earn the next level. For example, you want to make swords... you gain your first 10 levels and want to go for level 11... buy your training... but instead of just grinding, you might be offered a quest to make 10 swords (that you would get some compensation for, and MUST be crafted by you), and that would count as your "practice". This is just a rough concept though... so don't nitpick my example too much please.

Stats seem fine as is... but wouldn't mind being able to do activities to boost stats instead of just paying a trainer. That is a bit off-topic though.

[Caarrie]

keep in mind that the current lvling system was made with some skills having a max around 10, 20-30 and 120 depending on the skill the equation for exp per lvl has not changed since the increase in max. It might be nice to make it "easier" to lvl up to max, but what impact will that have on people actually staying around and testing and playing the game after the reach the max lvl?

[Prolix]

I kind of agree with Myth however I would suggest that the way to go would be to make the tasks gained at a particular level give more practice. For example At level 0-5 metallurgy you can smelt some base metals and it appears that you only get practice for actually casting them into ingots/stock. At level 5 you get the ability to make steel, this ought to get you twice as much practice as the level one abilities. At level ten you get a new ability and it should get you three times the amount of practice as the base abilities. This could be modified for lower skill abilities so that casting superior grade or exceptional or whatever gains extra practice so that someone who wants to be a weaponsmith can still gain effective metallurgy practice in the course of his work. If I am not mistaken, the quality of your product is dependent on your level anyway.

To me it is all about getting rewarded for doing useful things rather than useless things. What is useful is relative to level.

You might see a broader range of characters if you made it easier for the role players to mold their creation to their will. the powerlevellers will reach max and get bored and start over or leave, the roleplayers will achieve their character and play with him finding other things to do within the community.

[Mythryndel]

I am certainly not asking for max stats in a week across the board... but I do not see the problem with tweaking things to the point that a reasonably dedicated player (read: plays about 5 - 10 hours a week) could max 1-2 skills in a month. 10 dedicated hours of training a skill may be a good target. There are tons of skills to train... and even if you were bankrolled by someone else... you could still not max everything in under a year. The real benefit here isn't that people can max... but that people get a reasonable amount of benefit from training in a reasonable amount of time. If I want to make Q200 swords, I could do so in a reasonable amount of time. My sword making skill on laanx... I have spent more than 10 hours of dedicated training... and cannot tell a difference (maybe 10 points average) in quality between the first blades I made and the ones I make now. I have made less than 5k trias from the weapons I have made because nobody will buy them. It is not worth my time/effort to continue training this skill further...

This, in my opinion, would also negate the appeal of bots... if things weren't so incredibly time consuming...

I also agree with prolix about how it should work... higher skill required items... give higher levels of practice points. If someone wants to make tin ingots forever... it will take forever to train high levels... but someone that smelts gold ingots would advance much quicker. However, in-game now... the mining skill does not do this. I have seen a fairly regular progression for number of ore required to level... lots and lots of tally marks... but I did one level as all coal... one level with mixes of tin/coal/gold/plat/etc... and the levels required the same steady progression of ores. I have also not noticed a difference if I train meta with gold/silver/steel... same number of ore smelted/cast for each level with steady increase based on level. I am fairly certain most skills are like this right now, but I could be wrong.

[verden]

I'd like to see this for purposes of just seeing how the numbers played out. I say make it extremely easy to level. Then wipe the database to default skills and stats each month. Wipe the quests to. This would speed up testing, changes could be implemented and observed in a shorter timeframe before finalizing them.

[Prolix]

If the server was being reset every month I would not bother with the quests, some of them just take too long. Possibly on a three month schedule they would be more viable. Then again if the quest goes into the tree-like dialogue structure as I saw intimated elsewhere that would go a long way to making them easier. Right now I have plenty of time later on maybe not.

[zanzibar]

This is the wrong forum for this discussion ; this should be in the general discussion forum for PlaneShift.

....was made easier, would you prefer it? Being able to max everything in a couple of weeks for example.

Even before that, the leveling system needs to be redone to make sense.  The Progression Point system is horrible.  You can't level without training, and you can get better at music by killing rats.

Leveling should be easier and more limited.  Maxing out should be easier, but the max must also be redefined.  New measures of power must be introduced.

If yes, would it not mean that everyone was, rather quickly, equally leet and defeat the object of you levelling up in the first place?

It would depend on how you did it.  If you did it the wrong way, I can see that happening.  However, you're begging the question - what is the "object" of leveling?  Do you level because you want to be better than everyone else?  Or do you level because it's what your character would do?

If no, should levelling take even longer than it does now?

Is that even possible?

If niether, is the system perfect as it is?

Is that a joke?

I'd like to see this for purposes of just seeing how the numbers played out. I say make it extremely easy to level. Then wipe the database to default skills and stats each month. Wipe the quests to. This would speed up testing, changes could be implemented and observed in a shorter timeframe before finalizing them.

This is a good suggestion.  I think you should max out everyone's stats on the test server for a week and see what happens.

Well, I think that if you make leveling faster the people will just get bored faster, too, especially if not into roleplaying.

People get bored of grinding long before they max out.

[khoridor]

The idea of maxing is alien to me, and I think that learning should become exponential after you reach a certain "master" level. I'd see:
- Getting your first levels in a skill quick and cheap.
- Progressing your "professional" levels in a faster way than currently, or at least a more entertaining way. Maybe 40 hours of game play would do to become a master in a skill. Choices between questing and grinding are definitely welcome.
- Once a master, that is, when you can do all that can be done with the skill (craft/smelt anything for example), you can still progress, but additional levels are longer and longer to reach; that allows competition to keep going between masters, and is shown for example in the quality of their production.

Balancing the progression speed is of course only part of the issue. That's always the problem with balance.
- Money is a major concern for many players. Training is indeed way too expensive. Several NPCs are billions of trias rich already.
- Learning skills should often increase your way of life, not cost you. The cost of products should be exponential, not the cost of training. With a good balance, all crafted products should find a buyer, and average products at average prices should be the most common ones.
- There shouldn't be so much randomness in quality. There should never be maxed quality objects either. On the other hand, a crafter should have more control on the quality of his production, simply by choosing the amount of time he spends on an object. A master crafting a masterpiece would take a long time to do so, and possibly a long time to sell it. For a living, he would still make good products at a more reasonable price, and do so much faster.
- Quality of a product should also depend on the quality of the resources. No q200 steel from q50 iron.
- As said by people above, there are more levels than level benefits. Reducing quality randomness would also improve that.

As a side note, I also think that estimation of a Quality should depend on a skill level. Currently, a cook can recognise a q50 steel lingot from a q200 one. I've always said that I'd be happy to see the quality numbers not appear at all. Yet, skilled people could see them to a degree. Maybe with an /estimate command.

I've focused on crafting skills here, to follow the track of the previous posts. One question I would ask is why skills don't have the same numbers of levels? 20 here, 60 there, 150 there. Have these numbers been raised/adapted because of the actual speed progression? Because it was easier to raise a cap than to tweak formulas or lower XP rewards? Obviously, it's not easy to treat crafting skills and combat skills in a same way; and there are other types of skills as well.
You may need a discussion on each category of skills.

[Bamko]

I must admit I did not read all the replies. Read enough to know a lot of "lets wipe every month" as well as lets make it so can advance faster.

Um, I started over on EZPCUSA, and that is fine.  I think having to have a lil life experence to start training is fine.  I also think having to have a "day job" to pay for training that MAY pay off later is also fine. (killing rats to be able to get training in music)

the only aspect that seems out of balance is repair armor.  You can make a perfect sword with about 10,000 hours or real life time practice (it should be rare to make prefect swords....) but you can not repair Plate Mail torso unless you have at least that much practice time?  To repair it?  Not even perfect repair.. just repair it at all.

Now, if you want to get picky, you could integrate the blacksmith skill into repair armor formula, so that for every 5 lvls of BS you get 3 appearent (not shown in stats) lvl bonus for repairing chain, and 2 for plate.  I think this tweak would enable people to repair platemail armor with a more reasonabloe amount of training.  If you can make a perfect AXE or Sword, and have also spent 1000 hours working on repairing armor, I find it hard to believe that you can not still repair Platemail armor at all.  (1000 hours IRL = 6000 hours ingame.  Most training programs have you become a journeyman with 2000-4000 hours.  A journeyman Armor repairperson with decent Blacksmithing skills SHOULD be able to reapir platemail, even if they lose a point of Q with each repair.

other than that, I think it is pretty fair and balanced.

Make it easier so the lazy can level up to max faster?  I played Bamko for a whole year on fragnetics server, and while he maxed Light armor, and almost maxed swordfighting, he still had room to grow.  if you make it easy to level, might as well, just make everyone maxed from day one and forget any kind of reward for playing (training). 

Oh, and if you want to wipe yourself, just start a new character.  Geez, they just started a new server, so you are at same level as everyone else.  Go train and enjoy.  I sure hope these whining threats of wipes on EZPCusa do not take hold.  I will ask around.  If you guys are gong to wipe, I will stop training.  heck, why even play at all if y ou are going to threaten a wipe every time someone else trains harder than you?  I came to ezpcusa to get away from this.  I can tell you right now, I wont stick around here to help out if the threats continue.

Realize this.  Those of us who have the discipline to train hour after hour resent those who want to rob us of our efforts.  I look forward to thing s being tried on ezpcusa, things that may not stay, things that may not work, and things that some devs want to try out but can not get on main server without "proving" that it can work. 

I am not here to be screwed with.  I did thousands of hours on training on fragnetics and left because of this "make my character better by stealing time and effort from others" talk.

I am listening and waiting..

about a week into the server and talking abotu a wipe?   freaking stupid.

[Donari Tyndale]

Levelling needs to be fun instead of grinding. Your character should learn through interaction with other players, the environment and practice, this not only encourages interaction but is also fun. Plus all roleplayers would end up training because they like to interact with others. Plus those that prefer grinding instead of roleplay would have fun through levelling and roleplay.

[Irgendwer]

I'd like to see this for purposes of just seeing how the numbers played out. I say make it extremely easy to level. Then wipe the database to default skills and stats each month. Wipe the quests to. This would speed up testing, changes could be implemented and observed in a shorter timeframe before finalizing them.

Are you crazy?! This would slow down testing to a crawl. Getting Winch access alone (the government way) requires you to do about two days of solid questing and this on the premise, that you have a fairly leveled character, who does not have to rest twice per map.

Leveling as it is currently is fairly ok, except for magic, which just takes ridiculous amounts of time to aquire money, PP and training. Reducing the cost here by lets say 25% would really be appreciated.

[khoridor]

Donari, how would you implement leveling through roleplay? Do you have any practical idea?