No projected timeline, just "when it feels ready." Still a good ways out at the moment because it's still more of a background project than a primary focus and not feeling ready enough to have it player tested. The closer to completion it gets the more I want to focus on it though!
There won't be a reset. If we do end up with individual weapon skills and occult -urgy/mancy skills (which I hope to), we can give people the choice of which they want to get some instant points into based on their base melee/ranged/arcana skill. Other than that, I don't think anyone's skills need to be changed. Keep finding ways to utilize your skills and practice them up as currently done with combat, climbing, lockpicking, etc.
If we can get everything on a challenge-based practice system, everything will have a natural cap. Once you skill up to the highest challenge available, you're done (until something potentially new comes out that presents an even higher challenge). If there are some skills that don't feel right with the seek-a-challenge system and they're studied up or use some other means of increase, we'll of course throw a cap on them that we feel is reasonable. Perhaps raised by ability point investment rather than skill practice.
I know you've expressed similar thoughts in the past when these things have been brought up. I hope you'll give it a try and I'm hoping it'll feel better in practice than on paper to you, and either way I do sincerely appreciate your consideration of the impact on staff and development. If you have more specific concerns I'd love to try and address them.
I do too! It's being put together with that in mind. A skill being uncapped doesn't equate to everyone being able to do it to its fullest. If I only spent an ability point or two on blacksmithing, I'm not going to be able to make very much, and won't have unlocked the higher recipes so won't have the skill challenge opportunities to skill it up very high. And if I do spend a bunch of points on blacksmithing and get those high skill numbers and recipe unlocks, I no longer have those points to spend on as much other stuff.
It's a bit different with combat in that anyone can just walk into a tougher zone and get those skill challenges, but those with little investment in combat-related abilities are going to have an increasingly bad time as they get into tougher areas with tougher mobs that do have abilities. Some determination could still earn them a high combat skill, though. And I think that's okay, considering how much of the game's area content is combat zones.
This is something we'll have to keep an eye on, for sure. We don't want exploits to exist at all, and very much appreciate them being reported. That's not always going to happen though, so we'll try to figure out a way to better watch for them. I imagine our resident mathemagician, Shewel, could do a lot with a daily report of how much skills increased that day, and a per-character section, and some other stuff like that.
The tutor system has been often requested to make a return and I think we can find a way to make it work well!
Once we're a bit closer we do intend to reach out to some players to test things out on the test server, so I'll keep that in mind!
Yep!
I think one thing that might help mitigate this is that the lower-skill crafters can be producing a lot of the base components required for higher-level stuff. But the overall concern is definitely one to keep in mind not just for crafters but all aspects of having a potentially ever-growing skill gap.
Yeah, this is another handy aspect of the individual weapon skills. It won't last forever, but it's a fun way to extend that feeling of progression and get a lot more mileage out of combat zones, for people who want to train up multiple weapons or, like you said, accompany lower-skilled buddies and still want to get some gains out of the trip.adresin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 12:40 pm Alia wants to join a newer character in the graveyard, but she's so good with her warhammer she'd get little out of it. Well, on one hand there's the roleplay aspect and not *every* action needs to have gains, but maybe she might want to take advantage of the trip out there to practice a bit with a sword.
This makes me very happy to hear! That's the kind of balance I'm always hoping to achieve.
It's a valid concern and one that we have as well. We're confident that the combination of ability point limits and increased focus on challenge-based skill progression will be sufficient to prevent this from getting out of hand, and we'll remain ready to tweak as necessary to prevent do-everything characters. If it comes down to it (though I hope it won't), there could be penalties for too much skill variety width and not enough focus depth.
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All the feedback is appreciated! It's very helpful to know how people feel about these ideas and to have potential issues and concerns pointed out so they can be considered going forward rather than being blindsided by them later.
