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[Nikodemus]

It doesn't matter what other games use. We play PS. Besides, if somebody don't want to distinguish two different things, then Asia may be the same thing as Africa, or RPer same as PLer. And claim, there is no difference, why would we need it, no big deal

oooo, new post..
Seytra, your health drop, when you are hit directly. Health in this way drops in 1-2 steps, because if you are hit directly in vital body part, you will be most likely unable to fight anymore.
Hit ponts drop while fightng and before the direct hit happens, and in case of hit points the direct hit is always the last, deadly. Hit points decrease because of all kinds of hits. They are to alter more feelings which one would feel during a real life fight.

Do you remember all the complaints about fight not being right, as you wasn't killed after 1, 2 max hits? Such complaints are valid for system with health points, but invalid for system with hit points, because health points may decrease only by hits directly in body and hit points decrease because of all kinds of hits.
I think i have repeated myself 3 times now ;P
In system with hit points you have fight, which may last longer than 5 seconds (this is unrealistic) and people can't complain about 1-2 hits in body not being deadly, because such hits are deadly.

[Seytra]

Sounds much like stamina to me, then. So having stamina not drop more or less at a constant rate while fighting, but also depending on how hard the hit you have parried / blocked was to parry /block would have the same effect without adding yet another stat?

[Nikodemus]

Sounds like a good point. The current hit points function could be merged with stamina and hit points bar altered with health bar.
Before we are able to damage health, we must first reduce stamina of the opponent to zero, while the damage to stamina should be probably calculated in the same way as damage to health, but 1/2-1/4 of it, to make he fights last longer for the sake of realism.
Small problems appear what if your stamina is near zero? you can't ran away? I think currently you can't move at all if you have too low stamina.

A) Maybe make the stamina bar two in one? eg. you start fight with stamina 70%, as you was running and the stamina for running stays 70% for duration of the battle (or drops a bit too, as swinging with the weapon, and moving around is tiring too) but as you are inflicted damage, another bar is decreasing (visible as intense green... hmmm. In the middle of fight, the bar, from left to right, is intense green, then weak green, (complete end of stamina) and empty bar, its lack till the 100%. The intense green bar can't be longer than weak green bar as it is inside of the weak green bar (as another clue for the understanding).
All this bars play in order to allow desperate run away, in case of you realising, that you are gonna die, if you won't try to run away ;P As long as the weak green bar is still visible, you can run, but if the fight will last too long, you may be too tired for that. But if the weak green bar is long and the intense green has just dropped to zero, this means that you have strenghts to ran away, but not enough of them to sucessfully defend yourself against health drop due to undefended enemy hits.

B) Maybe, no matter in what condition is your stamina, you should be always able to run ??

Furher, What about poisons and potions stuff? (Of course, they should increase or decrease, in the few points every 1 sec, for some time fashion.) I suppose some of them which was planed, should increase/decrease the stamina, instead of hit points, which are now part of stamina. Some would still decrease health, but probably in reduced number. Stamina potions make much more sense in such system and health potions could be much more rare, as i believe that healing with a potion isn't that extremaly easy and should take longer time.

And with all this, there is the future body development skill. As the hit points aren't anymore. What should that skill increase. I believe that stamina and maybe in the same time 10% health.
Really, i can't image any skill, which would make somebody 2 or 4 times more healthy than somebody else. What we can train is our form, toughtness on extreme strain and pains.
I had to write about it, because the explanation in guide is kind of bad.

And so we have another theory, hopefully good and worth enough so that rules devs will try to modify current game system.

[Birk]

I must say, I like the initial post, but I am somewhat disappointed with the rest of this thread.

Why is there an immediate connection between the suggestions of "not allowing players to obtain maximum skill level in all skills" and "skills decay over time"?

As I see it, there is no need for such a connection. If each player got a certain number of skill points, which may be distributed over various skills, then this would allow players to design a particular player, e.g. a fighter, or a magician, or a miner. The choices made about which skills to train would create the character. Now, if a player has used all the skill points, then in order to train something, e.g. become a better in Crystal Way, you would have to surrender some of your other skills. Which skills to surrender could be optional, and would allow the character to grow in a preferred way.

Sure, decaying skills would be one way to keep players from having max skills in everything, but it would be a poor implementation. However, distributing a given numver of skill points *would* advocate a society with diverse skills, and with cooperation/RP.

As an example: the new release supposedly has decaying weapons (I have not played it yet, as the OSX client is not ready...). This means that the weapons must be repaired. So: most people would naturally train weapons repair, and go by playing the same character as before -- without much impact of weapons repair on the society. However, decaying weapons would add a whole new dimenstion if only some people trained that way. Others, perhaps more interested in healing than repairing swords, would have to go to a player with the correct skills when the sword got damaged. It would create a market for skilled labour.

Now, please keep posting, but first I encourage you to re-read the initial post, and try to see how this could work *without* skills that decay over time!

[Zan]

*shrugs*

Why is there a connection to not allowing someone to max out all skills and a permanent restriction and separation of players in classes? Personally I just think a skill decay over time is a lot less restricting than a permanent "You know skill so and so, so you cannot learn any other skills."

Everyone seems to be deathly afraid of losing a wee bit of their skills though so I guess that won't happen but I still don't wish to see any absolute restrictions. Then another suggestion is to use the system Star Wars Galaxies used to handle ... a system where you only have X number of skill points to divide as you wish. You can max out in a few skills or learn the basics of them all, but you can't spend more than a certain number of skill points. What you can do is max out in one skill and when you're thinking of heading in another direction just remove the skill points to use them somewhere else. So this basically means you'll lose skill points in one area when you gain them in another.

[Birk]

My point was simply that there are multiple ways of implementing this. Time-decaying skills is just one of them. As to what system Starwars Galaxies uses, I would not know.

[getstoopid]

hm, i can't remember any time where some player wanted to change the primary-goal/profession/class (whatever you call it) in a characters lifetime. but i do agree that restrictions are necessary... because noone wants to see the ultimate-sewingmaster-tank-death-mage at least me not!

[newance]

i am more about the 'max number of skill points' as compared to the 'skill degeneration'.  i do see both making sense though.  would it be too complex or hokey to try to meld the two?  they do seem to be the 2 main systems that people keep bringing up.

[Kerol]

I find that an interesting thread although this topic was discussed already in other threads.
I see skill decay related with aging.
I was in favor of a continous aging for a long while, but the two major problems coming with it are not satisfyingly solvable:
What time is aging linked to? RL time or ingame time?
People only "live" a little window of their characters lives. One cannot play from birth to death with all details. It is also impossible to fix a reasonable "deadline" satisfying everyone.

Skill decay over time has the same problems. But the initial post indeed has some points on that.
My thoughts on that (also on how to implement it):

The main idea is to forget skills that aren't as trained as much as other skills so you can max out one or two things, but not everything.

The idea I came up with is to sort all level-up events in a last-in-last-out (LILO) queue. Once an item (a lvl-up event for a certain skill) comes out of the queue, it removes a point from that skill, as long as there are no other items of the same skill in the loop (meaning that the skill was trained further in the meantime).
[possible implementation: all level-ups get a counter and are being sorted on one side in a LILO queue Q1 and on the other in a open hashing table HT, linked to each other]

With that you could train a certain number of different skills without penalty, but no more. Once you try to expand further, the skill that was trained the longest ago ceases.
It also would provide a stable skill niveau, once reached, without the must to keep training.
Because it is unrealistic that a mage who wants to learn how to craft after mastering crystal way forgets everything about crystal way, I like to make it possible to keep basic knowledge once reached.

This can be done by introducing border levels. As long as the level is under the border, the training event isn't sorted in the loop. Once the border is overstepped, the sorting into the loop starts and with that the possibility that the skill decreases again.

The problem in that system lies in the condition that the training event gets out of the queue and only has effect as long as there are no other events of the same sort (skill training in that case) are in the loop. If the item just falls out of the queue and if the condition doesn't apply, the item just gets lost, one could max out a skill and only get one point minus in the end (and the penalty for not training doesn't apply anymore).
I think one could solve this by putting the items coming out of the queue into another LILO Q2 and when a item comes out of the Q1 , check the first inserted item in Q2 whether there is an item of the same sort in HT. If there isn't, remove the item from the Q2 and with that lower the skill. If there is another item of the same sort in the HT, check the next item in Q2 and so forth.

The advantage of this system is that it is independant of time, it makes it possible to max a few skills but not by far as many as it is possible today. If you concentrate on one side, you forget the other.
With the border lvls it's very easy to tweak the balance while it is possible to modify the treatment of skills depending on the level you have in by adding a condition like "if the skill is over 100, ignore 10 entries in the HT for this skill" so the skill gets more sensitive on forgetting if you didn't level for a shorter time.

Sorry for the lengthy post. Hope I made myself clear enough without a lot of pseudocode despite the late hour