Feedback on new progression system

[Celroc Amaul]

I certainly can see the convenience of no longer having to find a trainer for skills, but to be honest I think I would like a compromise between the old and the new system.  Perhaps something like only needing to see a trainer every 10 levels, or something similar.  To me, it seems like our characters may be self-teaching themselves a bit too much in some cases, and it would seem reasonable to have the trainer be more involved in teaching them. 

Also, there is somewhat of a side-effect of this new system, whereas the players can't "freeze" their character's skills to a certain level anymore.  That is, if we do an action, we automatically level the associated skill, whether we wanted to or not.  If I may, I would like to request the ability to slow down (or perhaps even stop) the leveling of a given skill for players that don't feel as though they are ready to level up for a given reason.  I would also understand and accept if there was a reasonable penalty to progression points gained if you slow down/turn off leveling.

That would be my two trias worth. ;-)

Celroc Amaul

[Bonifarzia]

[...]Currently, these are the most efficient methods of training the basic combat skills:

• Armor: Gather 20+ mobs and go afk [...]
• Weapon: Attack a training dummy [...]and go afk [...]

[...] some changes could be made to prevent excessive afking and make the game play more interesting.

Agreed, but that problem is not really new. Also note:

Hi,
   Due to the new training system and to the number of players being caught in the act of botting [...]
   Any players caught botting or AFK training their alts by the GMs will have those botted or AFK trained skills reduced by -30 and be banned for 3 days for the first offense. [...]

On topic:
I think the rules change is a courageous and constructive step in the right direction. However, it strongly enhances imbalances in practice gain per time unit, as pointed out earlier in this topic. It is a pity that the population of maxed out characters for a wide variety of skills will raise significantly in just a few days, while future rules adjustments will make it near impossible for newer players to catch up. We experienced this with body development earlier, and I fear it will be the same for many crafts and all defensive combat skills.

[MishkaL1138]

Hi,
   Due to the new training system and to the number of players being caught in the act of botting [...]
   Any players caught botting or AFK training their alts by the GMs will have those botted or AFK trained skills reduced by -30 and be banned for 3 days for the first offense. [...]

"Hi, we created this system so you can go AFK while training and max your skills completely, but if we catch you, it won't matter because we're bringing the banhammer down on you."

Good Lord.

[Eonwind]

Hi,
I would like to point out a few things that are being looked at:

• armour skills: have always been too easily exploitable to train, the new system is making things even worse, however we are
• training dummies: we created them to make your life easier while testing various skills, spell and effects, we think they are useful for you in various way and they fits nicely in the arena pit meant for you to train. Don't force us to remove them becuase you abuse this feature.
• economy: of course we knew beforehand removing money expenditure for training will result in the loss of one of the major trias sink in game, however before taking further steps to balance this (and that's something we already have plans for) we wanted to make sure the current training system will stay and we have to go back to the previous system; also increasing a bit the equipment decay is being considered even if won't go back to previous decaying rate (as of 3 years ago) which was a bit too overhead.
• NPC trainers: a known problem as well, however you can expect in the future to have to rely on your trainer if you want to acquire some "special ability" instead of having to rely on them to acquire skill ranks. This already happens for crafting where you need to acquire more advanced recipe books or for magic where you need to visit your trainer to gain further advancement in the training circle of your choice. Also some special abilities or equipment will be expensive in term of trias to purchase.

[redhound]

Allow me summarize my thoughts about new training system:

• New system encourages botting and AFK training. It contradicts RP principles, that distinguish PlaneShift from many others MMORPG's - so it is really bad move.
• New system removes trainers. It devalues players / characters knowledge about trainer's location and level, making game less interesting - read "boring". Leading simplifications in a quest system should also raise level of boredom.
• New system devalues tria. No big deal, IMHO - just need more things to spend tria for. Sadly, there is no such things yet.
• New system more natural?? But learning things first is also natural to all people! There are things that can be studied by raw practice, but there also things that require some reading, consulting, etc. - and some kicking from a teacher also!
• With new system, you can stay in the wilderness as long as you wish. But towns is social places, hubs of communication. Making towns less important could have negative effect on social aspects of the game.

My conclusion:

New training system is boring regression!
Please return old system while you still can.

My suggestion:

If you want to combine traninig with trainers with trainerless training - then just allow both! But make trainerless training more difficult. So, by example, if skill theory was trained to next level, it should take 30 min practice to raise it to that level. But in case skill theory is untrained, it just takes 1 hour practice to raise skill.

In this case, training can go by itself, trainers and towns are still valued, no changes in a quest system are needed, botting and AFK training is less rewarding, tria can be spend (or not spend) to training process.

[ecirtaeB]

I certainly can see the convenience of no longer having to find a trainer for skills, but to be honest I think I would like a compromise between the old and the new system.  Perhaps something like only needing to see a trainer every 10 levels, or something similar.  To me, it seems like our characters may be self-teaching themselves a bit too much in some cases, and it would seem reasonable to have the trainer be more involved in teaching them. 

My thoughts too. I liked it that we could seek out training from NPCs. What I didn't like was having to grind all the PPs especially for it. Personally, I would be content with spending Tria alone as training fee. And adding to what Celroc suggested, perhaps even have special names designated for the Rank ranges; for e.g. "Beginner"(Combat), "Initiate"(Magic), "Apprentice"(Crafting) Level that would be equivalent to Rank 0-30. A trainer would offer the whole "Beginner Level" training from one visit. Then, you pratice from what you learnt and after having completed it, the trainer would tell you which NPCs you could go to to receive the next Level training. Something like it with trainers makes sense to me.

redhound's suggestion sounds appealing too if for one reason or other, a character wouldn't want to train under someone. But at least, keep trainers around for those who would normally have their characters receive training from someone right from the start.

Armor levelling is ofc looking more silly atm. And Body Development too, unless the two ways that I've noticed that give points each time are meant to be fixed.

[LigH]

... the new system is making things even worse, however we are

Inattentive?
__

P.S.:

Like your sig, negative Beatrice. 

[Volki]

To make it natural, allow players to learn from consumable books or trainers (meaning this should be a choice). But this should only occur every 5 or 10 levels.

If you don't want players to bot, make it easier for them not to bot. In other words, don't let players believe it is necessary to bot. Ranking up in this game is very hard, and it becomes ridiculous at higher levels. It would be fine if grinding was fun, but it isn't. I never grind unless I am doing something else, like reading or watching a show.

Personally, I don't see how AFK grinding is a problem. Your system allows it, even forces it. I don't think armor skills should exist, as it only seems to create complications, and I don't see it being realistic. I also don't see how it is possible to abuse the training dummies. It's the same as training on a punching bag. Do you really have to be at your keyboard, mindlessly staring at your screen, while your character trains his skills?

A final thing, which I think everyone has overlooked. When you are grinding, you are wasting time. You are training an imaginary character and spending more time on his skills than your own. You could be outside training your own skills. You could be learning something. Instead, you are focusing your time on a character that does not exist. This is why I completely support AFK grinding and don't care if another player is botting.

[jowifi]

I certainly can see the convenience of no longer having to find a trainer for skills, but to be honest I think I would like a compromise between the old and the new system.  Perhaps something like only needing to see a trainer every 10 levels, or something similar.  To me, it seems like our characters may be self-teaching themselves a bit too much in some cases, and it would seem reasonable to have the trainer be more involved in teaching them. 

Also, there is somewhat of a side-effect of this new system, whereas the players can't "freeze" their character's skills to a certain level anymore.  That is, if we do an action, we automatically level the associated skill, whether we wanted to or not.  If I may, I would like to request the ability to slow down (or perhaps even stop) the leveling of a given skill for players that don't feel as though they are ready to level up for a given reason.  I would also understand and accept if there was a reasonable penalty to progression points gained if you slow down/turn off leveling.

That would be my two trias worth. ;-)

Celroc Amaul

I agree with both of Celroc's points. 

Needing to periodically visit a trainer, especially at lower levels (<50?  <100?), to learn new skills makes sense.  Maybe the spacing could increase as you advance beyond this threshold.  This exists to some extent with some of the crafting skills already since you need to do a quest to get the next crafting book.  Cooking, baking, herbalism, and alchemy are all like this. 

This would also give player a chance to stop leveling a skill.  The most IC reason I can think of is a mage not wanting to get too advanced in the opposing Way (since all the archmasters say this can be dangerous) but still wanting to be able to use a few low level spells. 

Regarding the armor training issue, maybe give the mobs a physical stamina drain when they attack just like players have.  After a period of time (less for weaker mobs, more for stronger mobs), they get tired and stop attacking.  This would at least require the player to periodically attack the mobs to get them moving again.  If the mob hadn't fully recovered, the time until it got tired and stopped attacking would be shorter.

[bilbous]

When you are grinding, you are wasting time.

Anything you do that doesn't improve your life in some way is a waste of time. So why do anything to improve your character? You can role play in the game without ever using the skill system, you don't even have to honor the limitations of your starting stats if you find people who will go along with it.

[Volki]

When you are grinding, you are wasting time.

Anything you do that doesn't improve your life in some way is a waste of time. So why do anything to improve your character?

Because dueling is fun and I want my stats/skills to reflect my roleplay.

[verden]

This is a pretty interesting change to the game, should try to keep the discussion on point if possible. Everyone knew that the armor situation would go like this, so no big surprise there. But I can't really answer the question if this change is generally good or not until it is shown how the trainers will be used eventually. If it is some sort of intricate skills tree type system, that allows for high variance in builds, then fantastic! But for right now, I do think that the tiers should be enabled with the trainers, the straight-up thing is not good. So, if an NPC trained to level X before, then the player now should be able to level through to X, and then visit the trainer, on up through the levels. Straight up does not make much sense, and I would like to be able to choose if the characters could develop a skill further or not.

[Jawir]

Hi, first of all I want to praise the Dev Team because they put a lot of work, hours and efforts into an experimental system that possibly it could be reverted to the old one.

Then I would like to share some of my thoughts:
1) The new system highlights a previous flaw when training the Light Armour skill: since to level up you don't need to wear any piece of armour it means this is the only totally free skill. Since this is unfair in regards to other skills it needs to be fixed. To fix it is simple: if you are not wearing some piece of light armour you don't progress in that skill;
2) This system could work if applied to stats (it's more natural that if you repeatedly perform some tasks you raise the stat involved) and not to skills. In my opinion when training a skill it's natural to have "some checkpoints" with the trainer, so for example could be better each 10(or so) levels to meet the trainer to advance further and to get special abilities. Since Eonwind has already spoken about a similar system is being developed here we just need to wait and see!
3) If you think the current system is impossible to be applied to stats rather than skills (we all know as buying stats is all but realistic), well... think to Body Development. BD it's referred to be a skill, but in my opinion it's a stat: after all you get 4 health points each BD level... and it doesn't fit the definition of "skill". So if BD can be raised without a trainer, all the stats can do the same.
4) I would like to remind to everyone that this system was developed because almost everyone were complaining because training is boring/time consuming/hard: now you can't counterweight the simplification brought by this new system with more complex systems aimed to discourage botting/levelling afk and so on. After all who it's quite silly saying that this system encourage botting and afk levelling stealing time to a role play: who is the guy that think "I would like to RP but this system encourages me to leveling so I'll go to grind"? The power levellers will grind with a system or the other and RPers will RP with a system or the other... And you can't say there are less and less RP going because the system encourage grinding: the power levellers will spend more time grinding other than RPing indipendently from everything because they have fun in that way, as an RPer will spend more time RPing because he have fun in that way!

[Bonifarzia]

I don't think armor-less practice gain is a real advantage for LA, because armor training works just fine with a single set of q1/50 armor. On the other hand, I would have liked to keep my LA skill at zero as during all the years, but accidentally maxed it in rather short time  (I'm not complaining here.)
I agree that passive progression on stats would be more natural than for skills, but i bet it is really hard to balance - also since some players don't want to have all base attributes raised to the maximum. Bodydev is not the best example, because i think practice gain does not work in a natural way at all (you need to lose a few ten-thousand percent of your max health for a rankup).
Otherwise, I agree with Jawir.

[Eonwind]

... the new system is making things even worse, however we are

Inattentive?

... we are working on a fix.

1) The new system highlights a previous flaw when training the Light Armour skill: since to level up you don't need to wear any piece of armour it means this is the only totally free skill. Since this is unfair in regards to other skills it needs to be fixed. To fix it is simple: if you are not wearing some piece of light armour you don't progress in that skill;

we knew that and it was done on purpose, even if you don't wear any armor at all the system considers the char to wear the "baseclothes" item by default (and it counts as LA on purpose as of now). Without this defensive bonuses from weapons and spells won't work.

2) This system could work if applied to stats (it's more natural that if you repeatedly perform some tasks you raise the stat involved) and not to skills. In my opinion when training a skill it's natural to have "some checkpoints" with the trainer, so for example could be better each 10(or so) levels to meet the trainer to advance further and to get special abilities. Since Eonwind has already spoken about a similar system is being developed here we just need to wait and see!

not exactly... we're going to develop a system that will allow to access more advanced feats/skill uses/special powers (without stopping the skill rank advancement) from a trainer (through quests or buying, ...).

3) If you think the current system is impossible to be applied to stats rather than skills (we all know as buying stats is all but realistic), well... think to Body Development. BD it's referred to be a skill, but in my opinion it's a stat: after all you get 4 health points each BD level... and it doesn't fit the definition of "skill". So if BD can be raised without a trainer, all the stats can do the same.

Current system can possibly be applied to stats as well, however for a lot of technical reasons enabling it for skills is a lot easier than stats and we would like to test the system a little bit before going through a change that will be even bigger than this one.