I get this feeling that like, most knowledgeable people know how fucking retarded it is, but they kind of keep it under wraps or deny it because it makes it easier to git gud relative to all the scrubs out there who have no idea what they're doing.
It really doesn't occur to you that your opinion on the matter could just be different than others who think it's fine and doing what we'd like it to do? That your endless pursuit of (master) is just completely altogether contrary to mine, where I don't want you to hit (master) by spending time in a safe environment, or that I disagree that it should take less time altogether?
I think that's kind of speaking more out of your ego, to the point that you're casually tossing out a statement that says anyone who disagrees with you is, more than likely, blatantly trying to fuck people over. I think that's pretty rude on your part.
If you are making those arguments, you obviously aren't who I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the people who just blatantly deny that things work the way they clearly do, when they obviously know better. E.g. "I made it worked under exceptional circumstances, so everything's fine!"
Wisdom doesn't matter if you aren't getting fails.
The crux of the problem is generating failures on the high end.
In the Byn, or most other clans that aren't stacked with critter-grinders, once you get to high jman in a weapon skill, you can literally go RL weeks without ever getting a fail in sparring.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to get your clannies to go along with the training regimen you need to use to artificially generate those failures by creating the perfect set of circumstances. I know what it is, trust me. But everyone a) thinks they know better or b) needs to train different things, so they don't want to waste their time with training -your- skills properly. Also, you cannot coordinate that IC without essentially blowing your cover as one of several knowledgeable GDB personas, and you can't honestly roleplay being a combat-training-master-personal-trainer if your PC is a lousy piece of shit. I mean, seriously...trying to play that scenario out in my head as a 'rinther just seems ludicrous to me. Even then...once you get not very far beyond high jman, generating failures by the "optimal sparring method," even with a reasonably good partner, starts becoming very rare...and that's just with a single weapon/style, mind you.
I get this feeling that like, most knowledgeable people know how fucking retarded it is, but they kind of keep it under wraps or deny it because it makes it easier to git gud relative to all the scrubs out there who have no idea what they're doing.
It might behoove you to check out the changes posted above made by Nergal. They threw off our crotchety jaded vet calculations a bit. And yes, drastic changes in the 6 months you were gone Synth. Git Gud Bra.
I doubt those changes have anything to do with fail generation. I suspect it's all changes in how large the skill-bump is from a failure for a combat skill. That's the easiest explanation for "easier to skill up early on, still hard to skill up later on."
It occurs to me that that's an exceptional scenario, Synthesis, usually arising after a total party wipe with only a few survivors. I'd say more on the matter but I can't, unfortunately, so I apologize for having to use the line find out IC, if you can. There's been a LOT of tweaks lately and most of us don't really know what half of them are, only hints, and just have to feel it out. The changes as of late have been of staggering proportions, not to mention that there's now a building team and so browsing the markets or typing craft useless.thing is actually an exciting grab bag of results as of late. There's calls going out for submissions of new crafts all the time, so that thing you set a trigger to auto-junk might just be something wickedly cool.
... and there's likely to be more tweaks if the momentum keeps up. For a few years things felt kind of stagnant and bits of code that seemed to be counter-intuitive were just "how it is" and you had to "deal with it". I'm enjoying the changes immensely and perhaps over time these issues that are had with certain skills and guild balance will be adjusted in favorable ways.
No, it's not an exceptional scenario. It's -the- common scenario. Nobody in city-based clans is "good." PCs with good stats and decent skills look good to scrubs, but they really aren't. For example...when I was playing Giuseppe, that Byn Sarge with nearly the same sdesc was already in-game. I went through the Byn and was competent. I went to Northern Salarr and branched my first weapon skills before I got exiled from Tuluk. Then I joined Oash and power-grinded on Ultimate Mobs while "patrolling."
That Byn Sarge made lieutenant in the Byn and later invited me to come back and spar with him. I fucking pulverized him. Like had him half-dead with sparring weapons while he barely grazed me a single time. Giuseppe's stats were about average for the current game: good strength, egood agility. Nothing to write home about.
I had a dwarf ranger join the Tulki Legions after I had spent a lot of time power-grinding, and I straight-up fucking embarrassed a Jihaen Templar in sparring. Like lit his ass up and nearly killed him with sparring weapons.
That's the difference, folks. It is -enormous-.
My argument is that honestly, there is NO REASON why a Jihaen templar or a Byn Lieutenant, who have spent their entire careers training to fight other people, who have been sparring and sparring and sparring religiously, should get their asses handed to them by a guy who just started wrassling stilt lizards (may they RIP) once he mastered disarm.
Yes, it should be difficult to "git gud," but the difficulty shouldn't be based on code knowledge and willingness to risk your ass fighting Epic Mobs (or knowing the extra-special mobs that you can literally grind to mastery on with zero risk, but only if you have 'scan' mastered).
Edited to add: and I feel like I should point out that I'm not that guy who's running around trying to murder your ass. I think all of my few recent PKs or attempts have been straight-up filthy peasant-on-peasant action. In fact...I think I might've only actually attacked one other PC in the last
year, and it was solely motivated by the fact that it was a semi-noob trying to take advantage of a completely clueless nub in like...the worst, most ridiculous possible way, and I almost died keeping it from happening. My memory could be failing me, though. I've been taking long breaks of late.
