Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

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Rias
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Rias »

nobody wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 4:20 pm I can think of exactly one particularly compelling reason: you would be trading one problem (how to pace levels) for a larger set of problems, namely how to pace melee, and artifice, and mining, and...
Different activities already grant differing amounts of experience/practice though (practice amount is based on experience amount), so that has already been a consideration in the existing system.

@Irylia Not intending to leave your post unanswered, it's just a lot more to respond to.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Heron »

I can see where you're coming from with that. It did feel strange to me that practice and the skill increase from levels existed under the same roof. I imagine it was implemented because it was just neater to think about, though.

Right now, we gain a certain decimal quantity on skill practice, and it has an immediate and direct effect. If the bucket applied directly to practice, then we'd have a nebulous quantity of 'something.' Which skill will the bucket improve? What if I want to improve my skills simultaneously? If all skill practices feed into a global bucket, could I improve something without practicing it? If I can, then the biggest and fastest source of EXP is best and everything else can be ignored. If I can't, then will each skill have its own bucket? If a bucket for one skill is full, does it discourage nonstop grinding or encourage you to grind something else? If it just encourages you to grind something else, then is there a point to the whole thing to begin with? If we implement a global skill training cap to band-aid that, and you have to wait x minutes to process 10 points of melee training before you can practice your woodcutting, then isn't that even more restrictive?

It's something of a logistical mess. Nobody has beaten me to it though because I'm terminally long-winded.

I actually really love Irylia's suggestion for newbie starter packs, and I'm in universal agreement with the rest of the post as well. My concerns are very similar, though not based in Clok. My home mud at the time reworked EXP, and suddenly max level was easily attainable for everyone. This was ultimately not good for its health. Muds are things you get through slowly and put love into, and that takes time. Systematically-enforced time if need be.

I think a level 1 combatant could fight birds with some sponsored armor enough to grind, and the starting/task money is easily enough to get a half-decent weapon without being onerous. If infirmary costs were cheaper, they could practice up easily enough. Likewise to baby-crafters. It solves a very significant portion of being newbie-stuck.

Money for bird kills, while nice, is not something I really want to do. It's another form of mucking the stables. Combat was the least fun at this stage in the game, since I was eking out what little skillgains I could to move up to something better. Task rewards for killing some of the bigger nethrim I could see working out, although skeletons and laborers are actually pretty profitable once you can reliably kill them.

If a newbie wants to play a combatant, I'd suggest prompting them to visit the guild ASAP and maybe recommending a few good starter abilities, since they make a world of difference.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

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I was thinking a simpler approach. Rather than a bucket, think of a meter instead. For now I'll call it the uh ... Limit Meter. Not a great name, but works for now.

So: Skill practice is immediately applied to your skill. No need to put it in a bucket and wait for it to go from the bucket to your actual skill. But whenever you earn some skill practice, regardless of which skill it is, your Limit Meter goes up by an amount equal to the practice gained. When your Limit Meter is at 100% or more, you can no longer gain practice for any skill and you have to wait for the Limit Meter to tick back down below 100% before you can start gaining practice again.

I think it'd be conceptually a lot easier for people to understand - skill practice is applied immediately and causes the Limit Meter to go up, and when the meter's full, wait for it to go back down before you get back to grinding skill practice again. Easy-peasy. I think I also like that concept better than how the Experience Bucket puts people into the mindset of "I need to have something in my bucket at all times or I'm technically wasting time". Having your Limit Meter empty would feel more like a positive thing, where having the Experience Bucket empty feels like a bad thing. It's kind of an "all in your head" thing, but the perception and feel of the concept are still important. Irylia's quote,
I agree with Heron that I see the bucket as always needing to have something in it and I only want to idle or RP when it's not at 0%.
definitely made me feel like this perception is important. Thinking "I don't want to stop and RP because my bucket's empty" is not what I want, and while people could still think "I don't want to stop and RP because my Limit Meter is empty and I've got all this potential skillgain I could be getting before I max it out again", I think it's at least a small mental perception/presentiation step in the right direction.

And hopefully this addresses some of Irylia's concerns - the pacing isn't being removed, it's just being tweaked in its presentation and implementation. I don't want a powergrinder to come in and pass by my oldbie-but-relaxed-RP-pace character in a matter of days any more than you do. The thing about treating current character experience as sunset points was meant to treat that experience earned in the old system as a booster applicable to this new system, so people who earned old-system experienec can feel all that earned experience is still doing them some good in the new system (in addition to all the money and skill practice that was received with the experience-gaining activities initially).

I'm all for the starter gear packs and for making starting riln more reasonable. Starter gear packs could even just be based on a character creation option. "Based on your character's history, which themed starter set of gear would be most applicable for your character to start the game with?: Woodcutter, Miner, Explorer, Blacksmith, Forager, Light Fighter, Medium Fighter, Heavy Fighter" and so on.

I do like the idea of having enough starter tasks to zip someone pretty quickly through the first level or two, so they have the skill and ability points to spend in order to do more than dip a toe into the water.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Heron »

I think I'm being won over to the limit meter side. Not because of the mental effects, mind: I fully intend to view my limit meter the same way I view the bucket, but it does make a layer of abstraction redundant. This does leave the question of what happens to the things EXP and level do track, though.

Would this effectively un-cap all our skills and ability points? If I wanted to, could I ride the limit meter up to 700 in my preferred combat skill without hitting any other ceiling on the way?

Would ability points become a function of spent skillpoints, or some other metric, like riln?

I do feel like the meter rewards specialization if level caps are no longer going to be a thing. Since I raise melee, ranged, dodge and block, I'd advance at 1/2 the rate of someone doing melee/dodge, and 1/4th the rate of the rare exclusive career lumberjack. Right now, that's not really a thing, as you can raise whatever you like in tandem with anything else up to your current ceiling. As long as you have the points.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by nobody »

I like that the proposed skill meter system emphasizes doing what you want to do (skills), not just doing what fills your bucket. It also resolves the closely related issue of warriors crafting for exp and crafters fighting for exp. Before I jump in with both feet though, I have a pair of proposals, a thought, a pair of questions, and a pair of concerns.

Proposals:
Ability meter: Call the limit meter a skill meter, and add an ability meter. Have the ability meter tick up, but only when the skill meter is empty. This would allow people to RP without worry or feeling unproductive for the amount of time the skill meter is ticking down, and then for the time the ability meter is ticking up. However, the ability meter is only useful to encourage people to chill and RP if they cannot use up all that idle at once, so the ability meter should stop filling after it's been filling for an hour*. Skill prerequisites on abilities would become more important, though they still shouldn't be too onerous. Tactical Dodge for example might require Dodge 100 OR Melee 150 OR Ranged 150.

Nominations and sunset points: Nominations should give an option of how to spend the benefit: (1) drain the skill meter faster (2) overfill the skill meter a set amount (3) fill the ability meter for more time and (4) fill the ability meter faster. Options 1 and 4 allow for more optimal grinding, while options 2 and 3 allow for more downtime. Giving the option to the player gives them the freedom to choose how they want to play at a given time. For sunset points, rather than EXP, have them based off of all the spent skill points of retired characters and all the unspent skill points of all characters (active/shelved/retired) at the time of conversion over to the new system. Those sunset skill points can be used for (1) and (2) above. Sunset ability points should only be based on spent ability points of all retired characters. Unspent ability points on each character should remain there as already unlocked ability points.

Thought:
Skill unlearning should halve the rate of the skill meter ticking down (and similarly halve the ability meter ticking up).

Questions:
Skill caps?: Will there be an aggregate cap on current vs practice? For example, at level 1, could I put 25 points into everything? OR would I be able to put 25 points into 4 skills and then need to practice before I can buy more skills? The former seems a little problematic, but the latter suggests that this system wouldn't immediately solve the low level skill cap issue as such.

Exp tasks: For skill tasks, very little would need to change (locksmithing and cooking tasks for example would function perfectly well to give skill practice and riln), but what is the secondary benefit of non-skill tasks like those in the town hall? Would they just be for riln?

Concerns:
Pacing under the new system: What is the analogue of going from rank 0 to rank 100 vs rank 600 to rank 700? Currently that is the difference of 1 level vs 7 levels (a much longer 7 levels based on the growth of exp per level and the necessary 21 levels to get to 600 ranks). I imagine the skill point cost will remain the same, but how do you maintain the increasing time cost? Will the rate of practice drop over time, or will practicing higher level skills fill the skill meter faster, or will the meter fill faster based on the number of skill points spent, or will that marginal time cost be gotten rid of?

Inability to progress: Sometimes your character cannot progress right now in a way you would like them to. My arcanist has unspent skill points because I didn't want to commit until I could see what the future of arcana holds. Irylia's crafter probably has unspent skill points, because as mentioned that character has hit a temporary ceiling. When that happens, you either stop playing the character or you try to find some other way to progress. For a while I grinded for riln, and then when I was comfortably wealthy I grinded for exp, and then when I was uncomfortably wealthy I started grinding exp in ways that would get as little riln as possible. I did this because I like the character, or the character concept, or the character potential. It's hard to describe and probably overly dramatic to put it this way, but grasping desperately for another way to make meaningful progress is a way to keep the character alive a while longer. With the skill limit system, there doesn't appear to be a way to to keep grinding skill once you hit such a wall. There is no analogous grinding for exp, there is only the grinding for riln, and I would ask, how can we keep these characters who have arrived at an impasse going?

* I thought about having it based on having another character in the room, or not having the [afk] flag, or a number of other things, but in the end only the time limit made sense to me as fair and equitable. I don't know what to do in the above impasse situation though, because when you cannot gain any more skill practice how do you re-jump-start your ability meter? I don't know. You could instead have it cap out at the "level" that would be equivalent to your current skill points (+1?), or as another way to think about it, the ability meter can only tick up as far as the skill meter has cumulatively ticked down but without the time limit it'd be easy to idle overnight because I forgot to log out (as I did last night) and then lose all that lovely idle buffer.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Rias »

First, just clarifying that a character's Limit Meter would be universal (not per-skill) and would be intended to be similar to the experience bucket concept in in concept and pacing times. I'm mostly trying to just trim out the fat (the extra experience/level layer that could potentially be done without), reduce potentially confusing yet redundant mechanics concepts, and change the presentation and perception of the progress pacing concept. "I'm good as long as my Limit Meter isn't full" is, to me, better than "I'm not good unless I have some experience sitting in my bucket."

The 10k skillpoint cap would also remain. It'd just be a skillpoint cap rather than a level cap with related skillpoint cap.
Heron wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 6:17 pmWould this effectively un-cap all our skills and ability points? If I wanted to, could I ride the limit meter up to 700 in my preferred combat skill without hitting any other ceiling on the way?
I'd want to keep the 10k overall skill point cap. One thing that I was increasingly frustrated with in The Other Game was the phenomenon of "I skilled up skill X, because I had no reason not to" and the eventuality of longer-term characters having virtually every skill just because.
Would ability points become a function of spent skillpoints, or some other metric, like riln?
My first instinct is to say based on total practiced skill, maybe? I was already fiddling with the character level function on a test server to determine level based on this rather than experience, just to see what it'd be like.
I do feel like the meter rewards specialization if level caps are no longer going to be a thing. Since I raise melee, ranged, dodge and block, I'd advance at 1/2 the rate of someone doing melee/dodge, and 1/4th the rate of the rare exclusive career lumberjack. Right now, that's not really a thing, as you can raise whatever you like in tandem with anything else up to your current ceiling. As long as you have the points.
I think we're at a disconnect here. Can you explain more what you're seeing with this example vs the current experience bucket system?
nobody wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 9:34 pmCall the limit meter a skill meter, and add an ability meter.
Interesting idea. Part of me is thinking the game shouldn't need to start bending over backwards to make people feel they're always progressing in some way no matter what, though. Idle time when the limit meter is full can still be filled by activities that don't require skillgain to be achieved - RP, earning riln, exploring areas, gathering resources, etc.
Nominations and sunset points
I was thinking they'd just increase the rate of skillgain instead of experience absorption.
Will there be an aggregate cap on current vs practice? For example, at level 1, could I put 25 points into everything? OR would I be able to put 25 points into 4 skills and then need to practice before I can buy more skills?
Hmmm. Would it help to base skill rolls on practice levels instead? So you could put 25 points into everything, but you're still going to have to practice those all up before you get any actual benefit from them, rather than instantly. This idea was played with a few times before, and I think I like it.
what is the secondary benefit of non-skill tasks like those in the town hall? Would they just be for riln?
Just riln, yeah.
What is the analogue of going from rank 0 to rank 100 vs rank 600 to rank 700?
I think might be the biggest snag. One idea was to have practice increase rates adjusted based on current skill, so it takes longer to practice each skillpoint from 600-700 than it would from 0-100. Another temptation is to remove the increasing cost per 100 skill and instead just raise the cap per individual skill to 2800, which I imagine a lot of people would probably feel better about with the perceived value per skill point spent at any level of skill. But then we get into a lot more number tweaking and adjusting of existing mechanics for that new number scale. It would be one less thing to confuse people about numbers-wise, though. I know the increasing cost per 100 skill is something that a fair number of people are confused or even discouraged by.
Inability to progress
This is always going to be a thing eventually though, right? Getting rid of generic experience does remove one thing for people to strive to increase to cap, but they're going to hit that cap eventually and be in the same spot in the current system. That said, some other things would be Guild and Society merit points, which currently are set up to have an increasing cost per rank similar to the level system. That's one number people can grind higher just to see the number go higher even once they've gotten well past any appreciable rewards of doing so, and I don't think it needs to be capped, though the increases will start to get pretty insane eventually. There's something to be said for bragging rights, though.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Irylia »

This all sounds like way too much work detracting from societies, and conflict-hubs, and not-Shadgard to me ;)

And the current system is not broken. I think some of the little helpful things that have been suggested to work within the current system could be a good way to start and if Rias still feels like he needs to totally overhaul experience down the line, maybe that's something that can come back up. I'm not saying this as like my voice has any more weight than anyone else's, but there has been a lot of flip-floppery to mechanics, to starting area, to other aspects of the game. I feel like while discussion is great, maybe give it a week or two before making any decisions on this. I still feel strongly that the current system is fine. The start is a little slow, but it's not unmanageable.

One thing I was thinking about that might also help the current system (granted I'm not a math person so this may be completely off), would be to just enable a slow-bucket, bucket, and fast-bucket toggle. In my mind it would work like - when players want to take a break from grinding and they have a full bucket and they don't want to worry about missing progress by sitting out to RP for a while, they turn on the slow bucket. The bucket goes down twice as slow and maybe the experience is at 1.5x the gain to encourage people who do this to be available for RP. Opposite for fast bucket. If someone really needs the bucket to go down so they can work on a skill that requires it to not be full in order to gain practice, they can sacrifice xp for the bucket emptying at a greater speed to facilitate the practicing. This cold stack with therapy boosts and nominations. It wouldn't be a 1:1 ratio because it's essentially free xp or free time back. And maybe the slow bucket isn't a toggle, but rather activates automatically in gathering spots or uses some other system to make sure people don't turn it off on their farms and hermit it out. I have absolutely no idea if something like that would work or even be necessary, but to me it would help with the potential nerves of seeing a low-fill bucket so soon after it was first filled, even if it does nothing for the level 1 progression rate issue.

Regardless, I don't think the whole system needs to be reworked over the possible negative thoughts associated with the bucket system. Not even everyone has that issue anyway. And eventually, even I got over it for the most part. Seeing a 0% bucket is not the end of the world. For me, changing it to a limit meter wouldn't make a difference. And as I said, since my "guild" isn't being worked on and the game has zero way to advance past 400 skill in anything I would need - my character is completely and prematurely stuck. Changing nominations to skill wouldn't help someone in my shoes at all. At least not for now. And that's not very encouraging.

I would personally much rather see development time spent on making higher level content, evening out and adding to lower-level content, adding more viability for those who want to explore and don't yet have horses, adding the societies, working on conflict, and events, and things to motivate players to stick around and recruit, instead of overhauling something that works. And I realize too that sometimes it's easier to make big changes before the population gets too big and that may be where Rias is coming from, but to me, as a player, this feels like it should be less of a priority.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Heron »

Regarding the responses to my post:

I meant uncap as in combat skills, and maybe others, are currently levelcapped (10*level) so since I'm at 14, I can raise my skills to 140, tops. Under the new system, would this still be a thing, or could someone spend all their points constantly to take combat as high as possible?

Under the current system, you gain a level and can, between this level and the next, raise the skills you want to their cap and rest on your laurels for a while. If levels go the way of the dinosaur, then presumably you can spend your meter however you like, whenever you like as long as it's not full (or empty?). Doesn't this discourage raising multiple skills in tandem? You're 'wasting' gains when you could be pushing to new heights. That's what I meant to ask.

The bucket is admittedly something of a nonissue to me as well, but reskinning it probably wouldn't take too long or hurt too much? I think newbie starter packs would be an excellent and sufficient addition for easing beginners, and I'm tentatively for some form of low-level acceleration but I think just having the gear to participate might be enough. I'm enjoying the discussion, at any rate.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by nobody »

Rias wrote: Sat May 22, 2021 9:21 am Part of me is thinking the game shouldn't need to start bending over backwards to make people feel they're always progressing in some way no matter what, though.

It's definitely not a necessity, but it is an opportunity. The game doesn't need a task to nominate a character, but I would bet that if you added a 50 xp task that had a 50% chance of popping up everytime a character logged in for the first time in a day you would see more nominations and behind that you would see more deliberate interactions between characters. The way you choose to reward gameplay will not determine how people play, but it will shape it.

Rias wrote: Sat May 22, 2021 9:21 amGetting rid of generic experience does remove one thing for people to strive to increase to cap, but they're going to hit that cap eventually and be in the same spot in the current system.  That said, some other things would be Guild and Society merit points, which currently are set up to have an increasing cost per rank similar to the level system.

The exp is kind of secondary, at least to me, but it's a reason to get started, to login in the first place. After I'm logged in, and especially once my bucket is full, it invites the question, "What else would my character do with their time?" Though it's likely you and Irylia are both correct - societies will provide more help there than exp can.
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Re: Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

Post by Rias »

A lot of this is just concept discussion. Nothing's currently broken and needs an immediate overhaul, but it's fun to think about and theorize.

Overhauls aside, I think starter packs and additional tasks for getting past the first level or two with more speed and guidance are good shorter term goals.

@Nobody My comment about "always progressing no matter what" was aimed at the ability points for playing with an empty meter thing specifically.

On a similar note though, I do now recall that part of the appeal of the bucket system is that feeling of still progressing while you're resting and waiting for it to empty. Those experience points are going from the bucket to your actual character's experience. Again, a mental thing, but it does help some people feel better about doing non-stat-gaining activities, knowing they're passively gaining something in the form of absorbing that experience from the bucket while doing so. I'd kind of forgotten about that aspect of the bucket system, but it's probably the primary appeal of using it as a pacing mechanism. I still think the overall concept could use some kind of terminology change to make it a bit more clear, though. It's definitely not obvious in any way what the "bucket" is and how it might work upon first hearing about it.
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