The reason I think the MC system needs to be changed, is, that to me it feels very slow to learn things and it can get frustrating very quickly, especially when you reach a skill level above 70 or 80. I understand that the MC was put in, to ensure that powergamers and those who prefer to roleplay for most of their ig time develop skills at an equal speed, which I think is good. However, I still see some issues. Please keep in mind, that all of this is my personal experience and how learning skills feels to me when playing the game. I don't mean to undermine anybody's hard work or cause a flame war.
Some of the major issues I feel are there:
1. There is no way for the players to know, when they can "learn efficiently" and when they need to take a break. This is especially true now, that the possibility to look up your character's MC has been removed. I understand why this was done, but I still think we should have some way of knowing, when our character is mentally exhausted and when they aren't.
2. The MC doesn't go down when the character is logged off. Why not? Most people rp logging off as taking a nap or sleeping, so why does their character's brain not recover during this time? Furthermore, doesn't this hurt the people whom the system is supposed to be helping? If you want to make sure that casual players can learn at the same rate as people who have time to run around ig all day long, why force people to stay ig for insane amounts of time to get rid of MC? And it won't make the powergamers start roleplaying either. If somebody doesn't want to rp but they want to skill effectively, they'll just idle and move an item every couple of minutes or so, to get rid of MC.
3. Almost everything you do ig requires skill. This puts new characters at an insane disadvantage for several reasons. Newbies generally won't know about the MC system and they'll run around trying everything to find out what they enjoy doing most. Normally, by the time they have tried everything, their MC will be so high, that trying to improve a certain skill will take so long, that there might as well be no skill gain at all. This will certainly confuse new players or even frustrate them enough so that they will quit. The next problem with this is, that you can't do anything except what your character is supposed to be good in. If you are rping e.g. a smith, you will try to avoid doing anything other than smithing, even if it means missing out on a nice treasure hunt with the character's friends or refusing to help somebody with their wood cutting, grinding flour, etc. The more skills a character has maxed out, the more he can do to fill the time in between training sessions, especially if there is nobody else around to rp with. So it's extremely easy for people with characters who have been around for years to find something fun to do, while people with newer characters will be forced to idle if they can't find anybody to rp with.
4. The MC has no upper limit. Let's say my town has a large building project and I want to help by getting them big amounts of rocks or lumber. If I don't have mining and woodcutting maxed out already, I might end up with an MC that is so high, that I'll have to spend days or even weeks ig before I can learn anything at a rate again, that doesn't make me question the meaning of life. And if it wasn't for a skill my character can actually use, that's even more frustrating.
5. Learning a skill generally feels too slow. I understand that the goal is long-term motivation, but to me it just ends up being the opposite: Long-term frustration. Again, I think that this is especially true for Newbies. Nobody wants to have to spend a year in a game before their smith can finally call himself that without being laughed at and without every second, older character being able to out-craft him, even though that character isn't even rped as an actual smith and just happens to have accumulated the skills over time.
Those are the main problems I see with the current learning system. Now, these are some ways I think they could be fixed:
1. Give players some way of looking up their current MC. It doesn't have to be the actual numbers, since most players won't know what those mean anyway. I see two possible ways to solve this. First, add a little "exhaustion bar" in the skills menu or some other place, that goes from green (you can learn really fast right now) to dark red (if you do any more your head will explode). The alternative would be a message similar to what we used to have. If a character's MC reaches a certain threshold, send them an automated message saying they need to rest or something similar or that they feel well rested again if the MC has gone down again far enough.
2. Make it possible for players to assign "main skills" during character creation. I don't know how hard this would be to script, but let's say a warrior can pick one weapon type, one armor type and parry as his main skills and he'll be able to learn them without accumulating any MC, or accumulate significantly less MC than while using other skills OR learn them a lot faster than other skills. For crafters, this could be one craft and two gathering skills, aso.
3. Give players the option to "lock" skill gain. This has been suggested very often. Just give us a little feature we can turn on and off. While learning is turned on, you can increase your skills regularly and you'll accumulate MC. While it's off, you don't learn anything from doing things that would normally improve your skills, but your MC will go down as if not doing anything. Again, I do not know how hard this would be to implement, but I think it's a really nice idea.
4. Have MC decay over time while a character is logged off. Somebody in another topic suggested, that this could be limited to a certain amount of MC during one "log out session". Meaning, after e.g. 3 days, the MC will no longer decay. Also, it shouldn't go down as fast as if your character was logged in, so that the system still encourages rp. Maybe 1/3 or 1/4 the rate at which it currently decays while ig.
That's all I could come up with for now. Please keep the discussion civil and let me know what you think.