Add Skill Loss Over Time

[Zbuciorn]

Fortunately SV has more important stuff to work on than scaring players away from the game by adding this sort of systems.

 

[Zbuciorn]

And once you hit 100 the grind is over and the amount of crafting a PvP centric player does is a fraction of what he did when he was grinding it up. By your logic, skill loss over time would be great to stimulate more diverse activities if someone wants to keep all the skills they don't use too frequently.

It is ok for training to take some time.
Skill systems for pvp and crafting allow players to change their skills but prevent them from abusing the system by slowing down the whole process and that is the purpose of necessity to take time to skill things up-exploit protection.
Punishing players for not having time to log in is unfair.

 

[Valoran]

I vehemently oppose skill loss in any game, it's just a really, really bad idea.

There aren't many things more annoying than losing hard earned progress in a game where it can take weeks or even months to max a skill.


Like others have said, you don't punish your players for no reason. That's not hardcore, it's just bad game design.


I want to work towards goals in the games I play, in the order I want to, in the time it takes me. I don't want to be constantly paranoid about using every skill I have to avoid them decaying.

In practical reality, a system like this would simply result in people having what are essentially daily quests, to use all their skills at least once to avoid the decay. But instead of being rewarded for playing the game you get nothing and it's just house keeping.


I'm against it.

 

[Rhias]

Maybe it would be fine with a skill system that allows "overskilling".
Once you reach your skill point cap you can mark some skills for "overskilling". Those ones increase over the cap.
You could use that for skills like woodcutting or mining, that you need sometimes, but you wouldn't care if they drop down again.
And depending by how many skill points you "overskilled" the points will go faster or slower down again.

 

[Cintraom]

I vehemently oppose skill loss in any game, it's just a really, really bad idea.

There aren't many things more annoying than losing hard earned progress in a game where it can take weeks or even months to max a skill.


Like others have said, you don't punish your players for no reason. That's not hardcore, it's just bad game design.


I want to work towards goals in the games I play, in the order I want to, in the time it takes me. I don't want to be constantly paranoid about using every skill I have to avoid them decaying.

In practical reality, a system like this would simply result in people having what are essentially daily quests, to use all their skills at least once to avoid the decay. But instead of being rewarded for playing the game you get nothing and it's just house keeping.


I'm against it.

I do agree with this. A "simple" loss over time would punish casual player without really punishing players how can play every day as they could simply "check" each of their skill by doing something simple that resets the "skill loss timer".

That said, I do believe that this system could actually be a good implement with a few alterations:
1) The skill loss timer should only be counted in "in game" time. This way it will specifically punish you for diversifying too much in the game (which is the same as rewarding specialization), without punishing you for not playing.

2) The skill loss should have a "bottom" that keeps the skill useful. I would personally suggest 80% of the maximum level the character ever had at that skill. That means that if u have reached 100 skill points, no matter how long it stays unused it wouldn't go below 80 (if you have reached 70, you wouldn't drop below 56 - 70*0.8). That is both realistic (as there is always a part of anything we learn that we keep for a long time) and respectful to the player, for the effort put on leveling that skill.

3) The loss rate should be logarithmic, which means that the closer you are from the skill bottom, the slower the skill loss will be (and of course the opposite would be true), this means that keeping that 100 level skill would be quite hard, again rewarding specialization. But below 90 points the loss could get really slow, so keeping a high skill wouldn't be that hard nor time-consuming. Again this is both realistic (been the best at something require constant practice) and efficient in rewarding specialization without punishing too much.

4) The loss stop should be applied to very similar skills, for example, refining bron should stop the loss of all cuprum based alloys (besides all the parent skills of Bron, of course). Getting the Canidae skill up should stop the loss of every skill related to Pegasoferae, and so on. In such a way that using a skill would stop the loss of a whole tree of skills that lead to the skill used and also of a bunch of similar skills, which means means that the punishment would be applied for really losing focus, not for doing different parts of the same job. Again: realistic and rewarding...

With these changes I do believe that a skill loss system could actually be something beneficial to the game, adding difficulty, realism and rewarding character focus. Furthermore, this would allow for a less time-consuming leveling system, having a skill loss system could let the skill leveling be faster, without making the game easier.

So, I believe that there could be a skill loss system that would really benefit the game for every one. But only if done correctly. A poor made one would be "really, really bad".