Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

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Ranwyln
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Ranwyln »

For my char it was like: alright you have to max a gather skill before you do anything else unless you want to idle when no one is around cause you can't do anything else without getting mc (plucking fruits all day sucks).

After maximizing mining it was like alright now mine the next days/weeks when no one is around to minimize your mc or you will need tons of resources to get a skill point (did once over 1000 goblets for 1 skill point and that was at a pretty low skill).

Going for fighting skill i was training a lot with others, and when no one was around or no one I would train with (due to rp reasons) in the spider cave killing soulpains (the only way to get rich/coins as a fighter without a craft, cause all other "fighting" ways suck (treasure maps not really rewarding and so on but thats a different topic))

For new players it really sucks cause when doing all the quests you can do in the city you have rised your mc with tons of different crafts and than you stand there and wonder why you dont learn as fast as before anymore.

The MC as it is at the moment, does not reward people doing a lot of rp, it rewards the one beeing online most (and maybe having a maxed out skill so he/she can do something in the online time or just idle and run around like stupid) it prevents me from having fun cause i always think twice if i do some actions or not cause it could rise my mc. So help someone gathering herbs (my skill is pretty low there) no sorry dont want to rise my mc with a craft i dont use normally...do some quest where you have to gather grain/whatever no i dont, could rise my mc, so i bring in ooc knowledge that influences my ingame actions. I know it shouldnt be like that, but if i only have a few hours a week/day, i could be online, i have to rethink what i will do for actions. And i really dont care bout the maths behind that. MC High i need 1000 gold ingots to get a skill point, mc low i need 100 (just as example) thats what i see and what influences how i work. I dont want to get an easy way to a max skill, but that MC crap should be reworked and there were several ideas named already (like lower it in offline time too and so on).
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Velisai
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Velisai »

I see a few problems with skillgain, that people have. I like the general idea of our MC system and have supported it on several occasions, but if this topic comes up every couple months from different players, there is undeniably an issue here that should be addressed.

1. Playing several characters can be frustrating skill wise, because somebody who only plays 1 gets to the higher skill levels a lot faster. This is bad for the hardcore RP crowd, because players who are mostly interested in RP are those who are more inclined to create many characters.

2. Skillgain is perceived as much too slow by casual players who simply don't have more time to play, even though they'd like to. This has always been the case as far as I remember and it has always driven the casual gamers away from Illa, because they don't want to wait a couple years until their char is somewhat useful.

3. The MC system may do exactly what you designed it for, but the subjective feeling of players is what decides whether people stay or leave.


In the end, it is a matter of target audience. Is it more important to keep those with lots of time to play from reaching level 100 in a couple weeks or giving the casual players a chance to have a high level char in a timeframe they feel comfortable with?



I'd also like to bring up an example that is a very different concept from that of Illa, simply to see whether someone can use it for inspiration to make this game a better one for the intended target audience.
I've been playing a game on and off, that is unique in many regards. It is very faction oriented and supports this by giving factions several perks over individuals beyond strength in numbers and extensive management tools to allow them to build their own hierarchy without a predefined rank system, which is one reason why I don't propose to simply copy this system for Illa. The second reason is that it has a traditional leveling system with XP and not one like Illa, where you learn what you actually use most. It does work extremely well in regards to satisfying all kinds of players though and maybe we can learn something from it.

You only get to play a single character at a time, but that character can be very useful right from the start. There is no difference between skills and attributes and everything you can raise over time is called a skill. The skills are grouped in categories called general, social, science, ground and space. At character creation, you can order these categories as you like and the one on top gets more skill points than the next and so on. This allows you to max out a single skill in your most important category. The least important still gets enough points to have a single medium skill there. At character creation you get 14, 10, 8, 6 and 4 points to spend in each category according to the order of importance. Each XP level you reach while playing, gives you a single point to spend wherever you like and a few additional HP, which encourages active leveling without making it absolutely neccessary to have fun using the game's engine side. Another notable feature is that skill levels cost more points to raise the higher you get, which encourages players to spread their points out a little and not only raising very few select skills. Some skills are only really useful when maxed out, but the majority has a positive effect from the first level.

That game sure has it's flaws and isn't finished, but it's skill system is very good at many things it is supposed to accomplish. A faction's most valuable assets are it's members and newbies/new chars get lots of attention and are included in the gameplay right from the start. It is almost impossible to create a useless char, because there is always a job they are suitable for even if they don't read up on what skill does what exactly before distribution. Newbies are allowed one full skill reset, so even if they aren't content with what they have after familiarizing themselves with the game they don't have to commit suicide and start over or pay for newbie mistakes with hard earned money. Despite all this newbie and casual player friendliness, powergamers can enjoy skilling their chars as long as they like, because there is no XP level cap. The XP needed for any given level is =n/2*(n-1)*1000, which means that you need 1000 XP more to reach the next level than you needed to reach your current one.

The result is a game that has been running unfinished, without anything you'd call graphics or even a working combat system for 16 years, with 2500 active players (you count as inactive after a week, not a month like here). In my opinion it is mainly because the game is a true sandbox, not even having quest GMs or quests at all, and because of it's very well thought out skill system that doesn't force you to do stuff you don't want to do, ever, in order to have fun. If that crap game, in it's half non-functional state and not nearly as good quality of RP as in Illa can keep that many players, you should be seriously asking yourself why we are so very few here.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Many points are indeed true, I will mention a few and add some:
  • Playing several characters and expecting to raise them all to a decent skill level, compared to focussing on one character, takes more time.
  • Raising many different skills "consumes" time one might want to use to focus on one skill
  • Subjectively, skillgain/time becomes slower and slower with increased MC while in fact, it does not in a long term observation
  • The order of learning skills matters - mining first and smithing afterwards results in less smithing skill than smithing first and mining later. Overall, the same skillgain is achieved, though.
  • Many actions generate skillgain without the player really wanting to train that skill - such as getting attacked against one's will or picking fruits for nurishment
  • If no other players are around, there is not much to do besides skill related actions such as fighting or crafting
  • Players who invest less time will have less skill, no matter what they do
  • Players "feel" the result of their skill related actions and idling quite fast on reduced/increased skillgain per action
  • Those who do many actions need more material than those who don't for the same skillgain
Most of them are either very minor issues or, with the current system(s), not fixable or just fine. So far, I saw no concrete proposal that really addresses the core and promises an overall improvement. The reduction of MC while being offline is an "idea", taken from the former system that will not improve the overall situation, at least not in the way it was proposed. A certain gaming pattern would be "better" than another, this is just what the MC system prevents. I need to stress this; the MC system works just like intended in its core, so undermining the core is not reasonable - a removal of MC is much more easy and reasonable than some pfusch.

I can imagine two changes that might improve the situation: First, a much more complex control circuit compared to the current one. We even had a Mantis task (http://illarion.org/mantis/view.php?id=7203) for this, but there is no one within the team that has the necessary skills or knowledge to implement this - also, simplicity is one of our design goals and the current MC system is extremely simple, code wise. But if anyone has a deep knowledge in control theory, I am open for any proposal or hint!

Secondly, we could simplify the system even more and count the overall online time and the overall generated MC, without any reduction and scale skillgain accordingly. For old players, this would mean that the system becomes less and less jerky and you basically end up with one rate of skillgain per action, taking into account the whole gaming history of your character. The problem I faced while experimentating with this was how to handle new players. For them, the system would react rather jerky. But with some effort, we could turn the current system into a more stable version. This would mean, however, that the system will react differently on changed player behaviour, depending on overall online time. Old players would feel no difference if they change their behaviour while new players could find the game to behave unstable.

As I share the point that the subjective impression counts a lot, I will take the following actions:
  1. Evaluate the use of a control circuit that takes overall online time into account and reacts less jerky
  2. Draft "rewards" for gamers that log in frequently but not necessarily for an extended time such as quests with realtime cooldown or "products" that can only be generated with a realtime cooldown (special items, enchanting,...)
  3. Generate comparison diagram for different playing styles and the resulting skillgain for public review to prove the theoretical claims of the system
  4. Hold a staff poll for revision of the general learning speed by presentation of the master learning curve and its dependency on the general scaling factor
  5. Consider the introduction of a general learning bonus by the attribute intelligence
All who seriously want to help in this, I recommend to read and understand the code of the system first. It is rather well commented and the math is trivial: https://github.com/Illarion-eV/Illarion ... /learn.lua

SCNR:
IsisV wrote:Maybe it isn't wrong, but it's aimed at giving results that act poorly towards a larger playing audience of a certain playing style and capability, which is what we are seeing now.
This playing style? http://illarion.org/community/forums/vi ... =1&t=39565
IsisV
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by IsisV »

I'd like to point out a few things:
Estralis Seborian wrote:
  • Playing several characters and expecting to raise them all to a decent skill level, compared to focussing on one character, takes more time.
Quite true
Estralis Seborian wrote:
[*]Raising many different skills "consumes" time one might want to use to focus on one skill
Quite true again.
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Subjectively, skillgain becomes slower and slower while in fact, it does not in a long term observation
Quite Untrue. Try lvling a skill from 95+ and come talk to me. I've been at 96 ha for over 3 weeks, and killing lvl 7-8 monsters.
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]The order of using skills matters - mining first and smithing afterwards results in less smithing skill than smithing first and mining later. Overall, the same skillgain is achieved, though.
Quite untrue again. The order doesn't matter if you are 100 in a certain skill or high enough to where you won't gain from using that skill, such as picking fruit at lvl 20 farming.
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Many actions generate skillgain without the player really wanting to train that skill - such as getting attacked against one's will or picking fruits for nurishment
Yet again untrue. You think someone is going to raise say parry if it's at 90 and a hornet or a fox is attacking them? Nope. And yet again, if farming is higher then 20, picking fruits won't either.
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]If no other players are around, there is not much to do besides skill related actions such as fighting or crafting
Honestly, that doesn't matter to some people because even with 20+ people on, sometimes they'd just like to work on skilling, not rping. Big shock, I know!
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Players who invest less time will have less skill
True in a sense, but you should add "with a higher mc will have less skill"
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Players "feel" the result of their skill related actions and idling quite fast on reduced/increased skillgain per action
Quite true, because many players do certain things just to reduce their mc so they can gain faster.
Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Those who do many actions need more material than those who don't[/list]
Quite true, because of your current mc system.
Estralis Seborian wrote:We even had a Mantis task (http://illarion.org/mantis/view.php?id=7203) for this, but there is no one within the team that has the necessary skills or knowledge to implement this
Really? It seems like Alexrose, who was replying to that task seemed fairly knowledgeable on the subject. Maybe he needed to study a little more, but he seems like the best candidate for the task.


Estralis Seborian wrote: [*]Hold a staff poll for revision of the general learning speed by presentation of the master learning curve and its dependency on the general scaling factor
That should be a player poll, not staff poll. After all, such changes will effect the players more, not the staff.
Estralis Seborian wrote: SCNR:
IsisV wrote:Maybe it isn't wrong, but it's aimed at giving results that act poorly towards a larger playing audience of a certain playing style and capability, which is what we are seeing now.
This playing style? http://illarion.org/community/forums/vi ... =1&t=39565
What's wrong with looking for a training partner eh? I'm sorry, I guess you feel I should be out rping more or doing more meaningless tasks to "enjoy the game"? Everyone enjoys it differently, and until I am happy or have grown quite bored with my current fighting skills and training, I do not wish to do other things. So please do not "force" me to do so with your system.
Ragorn
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Ragorn »

Ranwyln wrote:For my char it was like: alright you have to max a gather skill before you do anything else unless you want to idle when no one is around cause you can't do anything else without getting mc (plucking fruits all day sucks).

After maximizing mining it was like alright now mine the next days/weeks when no one is around to minimize your mc or you will need tons of resources to get a skill point (did once over 1000 goblets for 1 skill point and that was at a pretty low skill).

Going for fighting skill i was training a lot with others, and when no one was around or no one I would train with (due to rp reasons) in the spider cave killing soulpains (the only way to get rich/coins as a fighter without a craft, cause all other "fighting" ways suck (treasure maps not really rewarding and so on but thats a different topic))

For new players it really sucks cause when doing all the quests you can do in the city you have rised your mc with tons of different crafts and than you stand there and wonder why you dont learn as fast as before anymore.

The MC as it is at the moment, does not reward people doing a lot of rp, it rewards the one beeing online most (and maybe having a maxed out skill so he/she can do something in the online time or just idle and run around like stupid) it prevents me from having fun cause i always think twice if i do some actions or not cause it could rise my mc. So help someone gathering herbs (my skill is pretty low there) no sorry dont want to rise my mc with a craft i dont use normally...do some quest where you have to gather grain/whatever no i dont, could rise my mc, so i bring in ooc knowledge that influences my ingame actions. I know it shouldnt be like that, but if i only have a few hours a week/day, i could be online, i have to rethink what i will do for actions. And i really dont care bout the maths behind that. MC High i need 1000 gold ingots to get a skill point, mc low i need 100 (just as example) thats what i see and what influences how i work. I dont want to get an easy way to a max skill, but that MC crap should be reworked and there were several ideas named already (like lower it in offline time too and so on).
Signed.

It took me MONTHS to max a first gathering skill, since RP wise I could not 100% concentrate on that alone
(20 points in free food gathering, some more points in fighting, silly quests to get higher town rank, etc.)
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Estralis Seborian »

I added some words to the points to make them more clear for your convenience. I know the system pretty well (I wrote it), so I sometimes do not give every detail. For me, it's just obvious that some actions do not generate skill and that it takes more effort to raise a high skill than a low one - something that has not changed since 2001. But thanks for pointing out the need to give some more details!

Alexrose is not with the team anymore. What he linked are basics of control theory, yes. We'd need someone with advanced skills in that. Anyone around?
Ragorn wrote:It took me MONTHS to max a first gathering skill
How many ingame hours?
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Ragorn »

Estralis Seborian wrote:I added some words to the points to make them more clear for your convenience. I know the system pretty well (I wrote it), so I sometimes do not give every detail. For me, it's just obvious that some actions do not generate skill and that it takes more effort to raise a high skill than a low one - something that has not changed since 2001. But thanks for pointing out the need to give some more details!

Alexrose is not with the team anymore. What he linked are basics of control theory, yes. We'd need someone with advanced skills in that. Anyone around?
Ragorn wrote:It took me MONTHS to max a first gathering skill
How many ingame hours?
I run a stop watch only to mesure the idling timeout ... ;-) Maybe you can check the statistics/logs?
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Ragorn »

Estralis Seborian wrote:We even had a Mantis task (http://illarion.org/mantis/view.php?id=7203) for this, but there is no one within the team that has the necessary skills or knowledge to implement this
Can you describe the wanted function in a "business manner", instead a technical description (fachliche Anforderung statt technische Anforderung)?
Terms like P-controller, PID-controller, etc. anticipate possible completely different technical solutions.
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Ragorn »

Estralis Seborian wrote:I added some words to the points to make them more clear for your convenience. I know the system pretty well (I wrote it), so I sometimes do not give every detail. For me, it's just obvious that some actions do not generate skill and that it takes more effort to raise a high skill than a low one - something that has not changed since 2001. But thanks for pointing out the need to give some more details!

Alexrose is not with the team anymore. What he linked are basics of control theory, yes. We'd need someone with advanced skills in that. Anyone around?
Ragorn wrote:It took me MONTHS to max a first gathering skill
How many ingame hours?
Estralis, I can't tell exact hours.

But I can give you following information:
- I restarted to play again in the late august 2014
- Skills per 01-sep-2014: mining 57, slashing 51, parry 68, armor 61
- Skills per 28-dec-2014: mining 100, slashing 81, parry 87, armor 87 (only 1 of 3 ...)
- Current MC is 3.447.000 .... :(

I've been regularily playing for about 4 months now, only 1 single character!
The skilling result is quite small compared to 4 months regular playing I think. Or what do you think?
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by GolfLima »

Ragorn wrote:- Current MC is 3.447.000 ....
:arrow:
i never find out the value of my char MC´s --> did i make something wrong?
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Uhuru »

Ragorn wrote: Estralis, I can't tell exact hours.

But I can give you following information:
- I restarted to play again in the late august 2014
- Skills per 01-sep-2014: mining 57, slashing 51, parry 68, armor 61
- Skills per 28-dec-2014: mining 100, slashing 81, parry 87, armor 87 (only 1 of 3 ...)
- Current MC is 3.447.000 .... :(

I've been regularily playing for about 4 months now, only 1 single character!
The skilling result is quite small compared to 4 months regular playing I think. Or what do you think?
Wow, 3.4 mill MC, when was the last time you can remember you learned a level in a skill?
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Starting out a new skill from 0, it should not take more than three minutes of constant working to get a swirly at that MC level...
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Uhuru »

Sure estralis, but the skills that are important to ragorn are in the 80's, which will take considerably longer than a few minutes to level at that MC level.
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Kamilar »

The MC system works fine except that it demands online time. When no one is around to play with, that means engaging in tasks that would raise MC further (clearly undesirable) or idling. Idling is stupid and no one should have to do it. Games that require boring activities don't get played with.

I'll reintroduce the idea of giving players the ability to simply turn off some skills so that they can do them but achieve no skill gain in those areas and have an opportunity to log in and lower rather than raise MC as a result. Rather than forcing characters to idle or max skills so that they have something to do, just turn those skills off. You then have people online actively playing and ready to RP because they're doing something that they aren't really working on. That seems much more favorable to the current situation where most people online are actually watching TV and just engaging the game every few minutes to keep MC lowering.

As an example, I have a pile of rocks waiting to be cut into ammunition but I don't cut them because I don't want the mining skill to eat up my MC. Players are making decisions based on the skills they want to work on and mostly idling as a result. I don't think this is achieving what was intended as far as player behavior.
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Re: Illarion skilling vs traditional rpg skilling

Post by Mephistopheles »

I think this idea is good as well and it seems it is widely liked so it should definitly be considered.

I think it was uhuru who mentioned that not every char as per rp should master some basic necessities like fishing or farming. Crafters may not want to gain exp when they get randomly attacked by monsters during gathering, etc.

We'd be able to keep this well working system but give players more control on how they gain their skills.
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