What do you think about showing skill level?

[Bogre]

We should keep skill levels. It's a good split between perfect knowledge (#/cap) and imperfect knowledge (nothing). Progression/achievements are long standing devices that do keep interest in a game, which is important for logins and player #s. It's not like we are playing a Mush.


I both enjoy character progression, playing the game parts of Armageddon, and like knowing where the character is at, and like Kavrick, I tend to slow down once I've gotten the character to a point where I don't have to worry about basic needs / instant death to minor things.

The old way was not some golden age where people didn't grind or chase skills - all it meant was that the people in the know on how to gain skills and test levels through experience or being told OOCly were at an advantage to those people who didn't know. Plenty of people grinded until something branched. The other problem is that there is no end in sight. People will continue grinding despite having no benefit or being maxed.

[Agent_137]

I was here before skill levels were visible.  Now people obsess about getting to master and we have all these complex classes that have high advanced low advanced and it's all very gamey and not RP focused. Before you only worried about branching, and then you relaxed. You measured your progress against IC things. Adding public skill trees was great. Showing skill levels was not. But now we can't undo it and the game is poorer for it. It's not the worst thing though.

[Agent_137]

all it meant was that the people in the know on how to gain skills and test levels through experience or being told OOCly were at an advantage to those people who didn't know.

Keep in mind those days were before a lot of learning nerfs so you could generally just fight and get better.  And there were no subguild mages so combat masters were fully mundane.

There's no way to reliably test your combat skills other than "can I handle two scrabs usually." That's good. That's realistic and IC.

Being told oocly your skill level is a silly breach of rules.  If a staffer is doing that they're probably doing worse. It would be rare for any combat pro to know their skill beyond "I branched 10 days ago so it's probably high"

The golden days were golden.  Not just because of hidden skill levels of course. I don't remember any long lived non-sorc PvP masters like we've had multiple of lately. So whatever lopsided twinky imagination you have of how it was I don't think is accurate.

[Nao]

I remember far, far less twinking from those days. Seeing 'apprentice' on your skill list makes you think 'oh, I suck, I need to work on that', even if you're able to kill a black mantis and nearly everything you run into with these apprentice weapon skills. With the new classes, apprentice is even higher than it was before, so you can really be quite skilled and still get stuck at apprentice or journeyman.

Then there's the 'achievement' effect. Seeing your skill level increase is satisfying the same way that steam achievements are nice, and people will always chase them if they're achievable.

This is also why we need sparring NPCs in combat clans now - yes, they're very effective, but they're so effective that indies and everyone in a clan without one of those has no chance whatsoever to catch up. And even if you don't really care what your skill list says, even a minority who does care and keeps training these skills create pressure on everyone else to grind more and spar more in order to keep up. I don't think any of this is good for the game.

One thing that might help a bit without removing levels altogether is to condense the scale and massively lower the skill level that's needed for 'master'. Maybe even cut it in a half. We could also branch whatever still branches from weapon skills off some other skill to remove that part of the grind.

Edit: I'm really only concerned about weapon skills here. Nothing else is really causing an 'endless grind' problem because all other skills go up at a reasonable rate. Let's hide or adjust skill levels for weapon skills, and keep the rest.