Learn By Doing Skills

[novacadian]

A recent thread has brought up the issue of boredom of the grinding for skills. It occurred to me that if Learn by Doing were introduced for some skills this would go a long way to help that.

My character(s) have no mount(s). The amount of distance that they have jogged from Oja to the BD would have made them marathon runners by now IC. Why not reward that. Not a huge amount, yet running around doing quests could at least show some improvement in STRENGTH, ENDURANCE and AGILITY. It is very IC that it should do so. It could be made to be ever so gradual. If mounts are used then maybe only AGILITY would increase. This may help to balance against the moaning about winch access which has also been noted on another thread.

Scrolling down through books could add to INT and perhaps the amount of /smile <your character name> that happens by others could increase CHR.

These increases should be at the nano factor; yet over a year or two of regular game play they would be notice-able.

This appears to be painless to introduce and would have little negative affect to game play while rewarding players for all the running around that is needed in game and is generally seen as a negative. Why not turn it into a positive?

Unless the skill values are held as real numbers (sorry too lazy to check) another counter would be needed for each skill to count up the Learn by Doing points up to the amount that is required to tick over a particular skill one point.

- Nova

[Caraick]

I've addressed this topic before, in regards to the combat system.  If, for instance, a level has not been "bought" yet, and a player's sword skill is, say 80, it would be entirely IC for the skill to increase, albeit much more slowly than if the next level had been "purchased" from the trainer.  Not that the levels of weapons can get much slower to grind But still, I think Nova's suggestion is entirely reasonable, and could be applied to a multitude of different areas. 

[Earowo]

There are a lot of ways stats increasing from activity could go way wrong, for your idea of CHA people would probably go to a secluded area and spam that /smile command you mentioned, it could be worked around, if you could only get 1-2 cha points per person, ever. For INT and the books, people could write a book of gibberish, or scroll up and down the book, you dont even have to pay attention to get that one up, with your theory. For the other three, auto-run, others might make a bot to jump up and down, or run in a circle, or some nonsense..Anyways, its to exploitable for it to be implemented without being perfected in every way..which I have no idea how the devs could ever do...

A [IMO] better way to get stats up than activity, is still activity But you still have to train, if the various skills had a parental stat, aka Axe - Strength Dagger- Agility. HA - ENdurance, Magic skills already have a parental atribute which would be applied to those magic skills.
Anyways the point of that, is every time you train a skill in combat or magic, or job or whatever, you would get an associated stat point(s.) This way its not exploitable, but its also not limited, You wouldnt have to hassle for winch quests, to get your stats over 150-200 You could train your way to 400, in any hobby you might have. Things like crafting would do strength and intelligence, cooking might be intelligence and agility, via slicing things, you get fast at it with practice. So the stats could be raised from all around, The other plus from this is that new players wouldnt have to save money for both stats and skills the could focus on just skills, it saves time, and gives them more time to do what they want, be it train or rp,

[Catlemur]

The same idea was used in TES.
Kudos for novacadian.

[novacadian]

....for your idea of CHA people would probably go to a secluded area and spam that /smile command you mentioned, it could be worked around, if you could only get 1-2 cha points per person, ever.

That works for me.

For INT and the books, people could write a book of gibberish, or scroll up and down the book, you dont even have to pay attention to get that one up, with your theory.

Perhaps the technique could only be made to work when scrolling Library books?

For the other three, auto-run, others might make a bot to jump up and down, or run in a circle, or some nonsense..Anyways, its to exploitable for it to be implemented without being perfected in every way..which I have no idea how the devs could ever do...

One can make a bot to do anything; so that does not seem an issue. If you choose to run in circles.... well people do that all the time at the track. There does not seem to be any conflict with the things which you have suggested.

Keep in mind that it was my suggestion that any improvement by this learn by doing would happen at a fraction of the amount of improvement that it would take you to collect tria to do the training as it is now. So in that regard, if cheating was the intent then it would be better to use existing mining bots and buy the stats. Creating a bot to exploit my suggestions may work well as a programming exercise yet would not give any improvement than bots that already exist.

A [IMO] better way to get stats up than activity, is still activity....

Your other suggestions seem sound yet both your and my suggestions do not seem to have to be mutually exclusive.

- Nova

[Bonifarzia]

I would say Nova's suggestions are nice concepts, but none of these ideas is really new.
The typical problem is how it should work in detail with limited potential of abuse.
A good example for progression gone wrong is the old "training" of empathy using shortcuts that spam dozens of /pet commands per keypress.
I perfectly agree that activities which are not related to mindless grinding should help players in some way with character progression,
but this is probably one of the most difficult things to work out in PlaneShfit rules.
A direct impact on stats (str, agi etc.) does not seem the right strategy to me, even though it looks simple at first glance.
Concerning the development of those stats, I still think it would make sense to link them to skill training.

[novacadian]

Thanks for that input Boni! It's given great room for thought!

- Nova