Skill Progression and Starting Levels

[LauraMars]

Once upon a time, Arm had a system in which the skill levels attained by one character were transferred in part to the next upon death.

And you could play a mul sorcerer for no karma!

[Eyeball]

Once upon a time, Arm had a system in which the skill levels attained by one character were transferred in part to the next upon death.

And you could play a mul sorcerer for no karma!

By which I'm guessing you mean that everything which has been removed from the game over the years must have just been horrible and absolutely deserving of it. And must never be spoken of again. Like halflings and Blackwing and Red Storm East. Just awful.

[LauraMars]

Uh...No? I thought we were just reminiscing. Ok then.

[Mordiggian]

Some people in this thread should take a chill pill because it would be a shame for a potentially helpful discussion to get bogged down in personal attacks and snark that result in a locked thread.

[Armaddict]

Starting everyone at "competent" skill levels just raises the bar of competency and makes the game much less "scary" if you get wtfpwn'd by a scrab.

Starting everyone at higher levels as far as -combat- is concerned does nothing.  The people who were in game longer are still better than you.  You can say it allows you to be a competent hunter straight out of the gate, but when the wilderness was already pretty drastically altered from what it was at times where it was actually dangerous, this is just another step towards what is in my opinion that very dangerous shift that gets brought up now and again which is the aversion of risk.

Right out of chargen, it is fairly easy to survive. Right out of the gates.  There are mobs of creatures immediately around the city to support you, and that area was made much safer from wandering baddies as well.  Scrab -is- the big danger there.  So let's say we do raise it then.  Yay, everyone can now hunt scrab.  Move the edge out to the territory of the next thing you don't want to have to 'grind' to kill.  That's...how this seems to be talked about, and yes I realize that's a slippery slope argument, but over the course of time, this has indeed been a slope that is slipping.  I put 'grind' in those little quotees because with my characters, it's not really grinding so much as doing what they do.  My hunters are out hunting.  My soldiers hunt a lot less, but spar more.  My assassins hardly ever train at all, unless they're a psychopath (which I haven't played for a long time, thus my assassins tend to be rather low skill in comparison), but they are some -stealthy- sumbitches!

Generally speaking, playing in this way results in my branching the skills that I actually need in a pretty reasonable amount of time, and I do relatively safely improve, but with some of those random risks that I take in the interim.  This grind mentality is...really only there because it's put there in the pursuit of skill branches, really.  I pretty naturally swing out of the 'need a skill failure to improve' to 'The success rate is high enough to just go about my business' within around two days of playing time.  Granted, I have done most of the classes several times and know, but the point is that it's very -early- that you can stop what you're calling the 'grind' and just live the character's profession and have them naturally improve, assuming your skillset is involved in your profression.

So, two things:
1) Rather than just do a universal bump across all skills with the possible detriments that come with such a thing, as well as removing the progression involved in such and development forced -by- such...if this is considered a must have by so many people other than me, could it not be something similar to certain classes that need to (or once needed to) appeal to staff for their branch due to it being a fighting style?  More directly, if someone is in need/thinks they should have a skill they know they should have later, they can have that branch given 'early' through request?  Maybe set some time period that it's allowed to be asked, or show they've progressed in some way that warrants it?

2) The exception to this is weapon skills, but when this was discussed I was with Synthesis in basically being against making those skills go up faster or easier due to the huge amount of impact those skills actually have on a combat scene.  Getting that good more easily does not appeal to me.  However, that doesn't mean I'm against lowering the point that those weapon skills branched, which seemed to be  a major frustration of those wanting the change.

[HavokBlue]

My last skill-bumped PC hit advanced in their primary weapon skill in the first month of play.

[Lizzie]

As much as I get a kick out of seeing my skill level advance on the skill list, I'm starting to think that the ability to see it is what's causing this particular complaint. If you don't know that you're at 32% skill, you wouldn't know to complain that you're not at 50% yet.

Maybe we should just remove the advance/jman/master stuff entirely so people don't have to constantly obsess and compare theirs with the other guy's, or theirs with their previous character with similar stats...

Or perhaps we could go a different route - the MOO/H&S route: remove those adv/jman/etc. designations..and replace it with unlock echoes. Every single time your character experiences an improvement in a skill - even if it's just 1% improvement - you get an echo letting you know it happened.

>You feel a brief sense of accomplishment.

I think y'all need to stop setting your sights so high as well. What you consider to be "competent," it sounds like I consider to be "good." For me, competent means - I'm capable of making use of this skill. I have no particular proficiency in it, but I'm not likely to blow the wagon up if I try doing it in the store-room. On occasion, I might actually succeed, and I know enough about it that I have a chance to improve if I pay attention to what I'm doing. That- to me - is competent.

Being able to PK or kill a scrab or make 5000 sids crafting nothing but sandcloth stuff and selling them in RSV in a RL week - is not competent to me. That's good, to me.

Being able to "not die and manage to flee without falling off my mount" is competent. Being able to defend the leader of the unit by killing the gith is good - or lucky.

So maybe re-evaluate what you consider to be competent. I think that would go a long way to improving things. I don't think the starting levels are all that great, and I can understand and agree that it'd be great to improve the starting levels. But I don't think they should be replaced with higher levels, because that won't solve anything at all and will make things even harder for people who want to earn their way up the skill tree.

Having it be a player option won't work either. There are players who want to be good in order to PK. There are brand new players who want that too, because they come from PK-H&S games and that's what they know. You give that to them, and characters played by people who want to earn their way through will no longer have a chance to survive.

Remember the game is only as good as its worst player. Just like a business is only as good as its worst employee, and a classroom is only as good as its worst student. Dumbing down the game will just make this a dumb game.

[MeTekillot]

Lower your standards, everybody!

[Inks]

IKR.

[Lizzie]

Lower your standards, everybody!

In a sense, yes. But there's more to it. Standards have gone UP since the addition to the code that lets us see our skill levels. We expect more. We expect to *see* those improvements on our skills lists, instead of merely experiencing "wow - I actually hit that guy, I never hit him."

So not exactly lower your standards - but instead, return them to what they were before you raised them. The game play hasn't changed. Only what you are able to see of the code. I think it's spoiled people into expecting more than they realistically should be expecting.

[MeTekillot]

Returning my standards to what they were before I raised them is called "lowering". Realistic is an arbitrary qualifier for expectation when the subject of my expectations is an arbitrary exchange of integers and code variables. Put a 5 instead of a 1 in the wizbangdoodle and it's diamond season for me. I know it's not that simple, but it's not an insurmountable task either.

[Narf]

As much as I get a kick out of seeing my skill level advance on the skill list, I'm starting to think that the ability to see it is what's causing this particular complaint. If you don't know that you're at 32% skill, you wouldn't know to complain that you're not at 50% yet.

Maybe we should just remove the advance/jman/master stuff entirely so people don't have to constantly obsess and compare theirs with the other guy's, or theirs with their previous character with similar stats...

As a counterexample, I usually grind solely to branch a skill. I like having a reasonable sized toolkit for my characters to try things with or even just to dink around with. Whether it says master or journeyman next to the skill is usually beside the point. I'm playing a character now that's over 60 days played and still has skills they could have at master sitting at novice just because I don't care about what they branch to. Other skills that I actually use are at journeyman still because they don't branch at all and I never focus my grinding on them.

I played for many years before they started showing rough skill levels and honestly I did about the same amount of grinding. It had little to do with the skill level and everything to do with the branching system.

[Molten Heart]

I'm not really sure why it's believed that being maxed out or pretty highly skilled is a requirement for competence when soft skills are important and all clans I've been in always had leaders who managed the risks around skill levels of its members well, without concern for being super expert.

Those people with soft skills can't do much without people with the hard skills (or some other form of power).

[Narf]

I'm not really sure why it's believed that being maxed out or pretty highly skilled is a requirement for competence when soft skills are important and all clans I've been in always had leaders who managed the risks around skill levels of its members well, without concern for being super expert.

Those people with soft skills can't do much without people with the hard skills (or some other form of power).

This is the case often but not always.

Conversely though people often drastically overestimate what they can accomplish with just hard skills and no soft ones.

[Molten Heart]

I'm not really sure why it's believed that being maxed out or pretty highly skilled is a requirement for competence when soft skills are important and all clans I've been in always had leaders who managed the risks around skill levels of its members well, without concern for being super expert.

Those people with soft skills can't do much without people with the hard skills (or some other form of power).

This is the case often but not always.

Conversely though people often drastically overestimate what they can accomplish with just hard skills and no soft ones.

It's certainly a balance where both are required (unless someone like staff steps in to make up the difference.)

[nauta]

Hi,

Just to pitch in here, here are a few cases where making skill gains easier or more reasonable and realistic would be helpful:

Bad Guys If you want to play a bad guy, it'd be nice to be able to skill up on something other than skeet or whatever that twink animal is.

Flavour Combat Roles If you aren't in the Byn, then it's hard to skill up, e.g., AoD, an Oash Elite, or a Tor whatever they are, or a Borsail Wyvern, or, to a lesser extent, GMH combat characters.

Suggestions:

o Perhaps make dummies useful again.  If I recall correctly, staff gets notified when you do some twink actions (e.g., trying to sneak past guards).  You could rectify the twink situation by either making the dummies available only at certain hours or putting it in the twink notification list.

o Tweak the skillgain system a little, for people that want to play bad guys and who have some amount of karma (probably just one is sufficient, really), but don't have the time to invest hours into skilling up.

In some places, PCs with powerful combat skills tend to 'rule the roost', and it's very annoying, so we want to avoid that.  But I think with Arm's rich documentation about how the virtual world works, it'd be implausible to think that a PC with a lot of combat skills could 'rule the roost', that is, there'd be a balance to that worry.

[Narf]

Having it be a player option won't work either. There are players who want to be good in order to PK. There are brand new players who want that too, because they come from PK-H&S games and that's what they know. You give that to them, and characters played by people who want to earn their way through will no longer have a chance to survive.

If players can ruin the game for you with competent characters that can never become excellent, then they can ruin the game for you with competent character that can become excellent.

That said, if the player option was frequently abused by new players (and I don't think most new players would have the wherewhithal to abuse it the way you're thinking) then staff could simply make it a karma option. There's plenty of solutions to these supposed and hypothetical problems and the payoff for attracting casual players could be enormous.

You would have an entirely new niche of players with kids and players with hectic work schedules and players with other games they want to play sometimes. That's more than worth the occasional jackoff making and harassing folks with his brand new character with starting journeyman weapon skills or whatever it is you're worried about.

[Armaddict]

I'm starting to think that the ability to see it is what's causing this particular complaint.

You are absolutely correct, Lizzy, and I've had this point several times.  Seeing the skill levels has made a very noticeable shift in behavior for me, and it was not a good shift, and the discussions on skills on the boards have shifted accordingly.

Returning my standards to what they were before I raised them is called "lowering". Realistic is an arbitrary qualifier for expectation when the subject of my expectations is an arbitrary exchange of integers and code variables. Put a 5 instead of a 1 in the wizbangdoodle and it's diamond season for me. I know it's not that simple, but it's not an insurmountable task either.

This is actually raising expectations, not lowering them.  The expectation raised is for you to use your skills to dictate how good you are at them, not for the skills list to dictate when you try things.  So yes, I agree, lowering the expectation of players to roleplay their skillset is a bad thing.  If you'd care to argue with me further on what the behavior shift was and why it's detrimental and not good, just let me know and we'll get into it.

However, that was also not the point of the discussion.  On topic, raising skill levels is an ineffective gesture.  While there are perhaps valid points for why it -could- be changed, there are also valid points for why it should -not- be changed, and in the end this degrades to people who want to play it and people who don't want to play it.  In the end, the change is an imposition on the other 'group' of players, while keeping it the same is just keeping things as they are and no one imposing anything on anyone.

It should be noted that there seems to be discrepancy between what people think and what people are affirming here...someone asserts CGP skill bumps are useless, only to have people counteract it with personal experience.  It makes me think there is some misinformation floating around (imagine that) that is making some people not even bother trying the things that already counteract this perceived problem.

[Beethoven]

I hope this isn't getting too code-specific, but I would imagine CGP weapon skill bumps would be very nice for cutting away at the grind because you are boosting your weapon skills and nothing else, so you will fail more often than someone who has worked hard to get to the level you're at. My understanding is that a lot of the twinky stuff combat PCs do at journeyman is because they can't miss anymore unless they fight ridiculously agile creatures. So in that way it's quite effective indeed. It's just kind of a rare treat because it takes up a spec app slot.

[Old Kank]

I'm starting to think that the ability to see it is what's causing this particular complaint.

You are absolutely correct, Lizzy, and I've had this point several times.  Seeing the skill levels has made a very noticeable shift in behavior for me, and it was not a good shift, and the discussions on skills on the boards have shifted accordingly.

Thank you.

My play has suffered dramatically since the introduction of skill levels.  I never used to give a shit about my skills until it became a quantifiable objective that I could actively work on.

Also:  I think a lot of these complains point to just how rotten the combat code is.  I know it's a monster task that underpins the whole game, but maybe it's time to take a stab at updating it?

[seidhr]

As long as there is a gaining skills component of the game, it seems like some people will obsess over it and others will not care.  I'm not sure what simply raising the starting line to a higher level will really do.

[BadSkeelz]

The ability to turn off the >Skills command?

[Molten Heart]

The focus on coded skills is great because the game world and those in it respond primarily to the code. If the game world and those in it responded more realistically to simple roleplay, there'd be more desire to use simple roleplay to manipulate the game world and the other characters in it.

[CodeMaster]

There is an existing balance, but I wouldn't mind additions like these:

- lower the caps for mundane skills to branch in most cases (make it more exciting to have a new character)

- speed up the time to low journeyman competency in most cases

- encourage the use of 'teach' by giving it a small chance of improving the teacher's skill, too, as a reward for RPing about the skill

- give old characters boosts up to apprentice across a randomized subset of their starting skills (the older you are, the larger the subset becomes)

The ability to turn off the >Skills command?

brief skills gets you halfway there, but you probably already knew about that one.

[Dresan]

The problem is that whenever there are discussions about raising starting skills, everyone immediately thinks of combat at its peak level.

Stop thinking of combat and think about this:

An assassin that is stealthy and deadly without having to put in 5-10 days of playing time.
A pickpocket that can actually pickpockets without having to branch
30 year old rangers that can travel between luirs and redstorm and be the life blood of these places.

We aren't talking about players that can concur the corners of the known, we are just talking about players that can do a bit more without having to grind as much from the beginning. I find it funny people would suddenly think the game would become risk free, especially when it might mean we actually have more competant assassin walking the street willing to take work. Remember, there are no more invinsible sorcerers anymore, this is a game where any 100 day characters can die.

The other thing I never quite understood is why people feel the need to make something so utterly boring an 'accomplishment', thats really old fashion, low standard thinking this day and age. As if grinding for 5 days just to get to luirs safetly in order to be able to open up RP there is such a wonderful thing. It ain't, there are better things people can do with thier lives.

And thats what the divide is...

In the time it takes for people to accomplish something so trivial in this game, a person can accomplish so much more rewarding things elsewhere. Instead of getting to the meat of this game, getting to the betrayal, corruption, and murder...no...we need to train/grind for several days before we can travel to lurs, yes LUIRS not the Valley or deep into the grey forest. Or grind several days before we are even considering attempting an assassination or theft. I guess thats not too big of a deal if you are playing a sponsored role where the staff is willing to boost you up to those social/coded levels but when you start a game from scratch over and over, it is just tedius and not worth anyone's time.

This game can be so much more interesting but we have these coded roadblocks called grind in this game. Right now people are dependant on clans, staff and sponsored roles to accomplish anything in the game, which puts a bigger strain on those things to deliver more content that the average player could be creating instead.

The biggest difference from what the game was then, and what the game is now is that I and so many others have less time to play due to RL responsibilities and just the fact that there are other enjoyable ways I can be investing my free time in. Not to mention that now, unlike in the past when I began playing this game,  I also have to grind defence skill (defense fix/nerf)  

Oh and for those people that think seeing skill progression is such a bad thing, back in the day your skill progression was based on whether or not you branched yet and by what you could kill. Not really that much different then it is today if you ask me.