I was asked to write down my opinion about the skill gain and the economy. I am just writing down my ver personal current mood, not representing the staff. Here we go:
Skill gain
The current skill system is great. Before you lynch me, I am referring to the system itself, its code and its features. The system offers many ways to tweak it, to change the speed and amount of skill gain and so on. But all those levers are currently switched to "piss off the casual players". I have read (and understood
) the description of the system and I can say, it offers all possibilities to make the game satisfying for everybody, the casual gamer, the hardcore "powergamer" and the "roleplayer", too. Little to no server changes are necessary, it can be tweaked by exchanging some values in the database. But this is not trivial - the values have to be changed in a very clever way, there is no "make skillgain 10% faster"-switch. The system is rather complex, but not too complex. But I better stick to the current way of skill gain before I go into details what I would do.
Skillgain is out of balance right now. One can level up in the beginning in no time, up to around 10-20% of the maximum skill. During some actions, the swirlies come so fast that one can see two of them, short after another. That is rather stupid. I like fast skill gain in the beginning, but this spoils all the fun and when the speed gets slow like hell after that, one is spoiled already and exspects that the fast skill gain goes on. But it does not - skill gain goes down to almost zero. I have calculated that one needs serveral ten-thousands of actions to master a skill, around 70.000 for a magic skill and 40.000 for a crafting skill. These are just average values, there is still lots of random in the calculation. The total values are maybe OK, what is not OK for me is that you can reach level 50 by 10% of the values given above - or better, what I critize is that you spend 90% of the actions for the levels 50-100. And for the levels 1-10, you need only 0.1%.
Enough numbers, compared to the pre-charwipe state, skillgain was made slower by factors, depending on the type of action. For crafting, the factor is around 2, for magic it is around 4, I haven't calculated the factor for fighting, exspect it to be much more than 4. It is possible to adjust the speed of skillgain and the learning curve for the various types of actions, like changing the ratio of skillgain for low levels and high levels. And... we have this nifty anti-everything-and-everyone system called MC-system which slows down skillgain for those who do more than 2 actions in a row in a given time ("skill cap"). The original intention of this system was to make it possible that a "roleplayer" can gain the same amount of skill in some RL-weeks than a "powergamer", for the "powergamer" gets less skill for the numerous actions he does. But the system, as it is tweaked now, hits the casual gamer most.
So, what to do? Our developers are planning to abandon the current system and replace it with a well sounding system. In this system, not the amount of performed actions matters, but the online time spend ingame. So, one who spends 10 hours a day ingame and does few actions gains more skill than somebody who spends 1 hour and clicks all the time. This favours "roleplayers" and encourages to stay ingame, laudable goals. Personally, I would like to play a game with such a skill system, even though I have some concerns about some details of the presented concept and those concerns were not cleaned out by the devs until now. But... do we really need yet another skill system? Is it worth the effort? Will the pros overrule the contras? What I fear, with such a system, the motivation to play this game will decrease. The generation of the good old days, that made this game so unique, liked lvls, phat loot and bashing monsters, but most of all, they liked the RP. Skills and stuff should be a sidenote, that is what Illarion was all about. Or in other words, this would be a system, designed for those who do not care about it, but might demotivate those who made this game so unique and entertaining.
I think we can reach alot by changing the current skillgain system with comparable low effort. Learning by doing was always the concept of Illarion, skillgain through related actions was always motivating and entertaining for me. The motivation decreased when skillgain became slower, the reward for the actions done decreased. Now, when the reward for an action gets ruled out completely by only counting the online time spend ingame, something "big" has to replace the motivation, taken away. Maybe it is the more wise decision not to copy skill systems of hardcore RP-shards but to go the "Illarion-way". With the current skillgain system and slight modifications on the MC-system, I am sure one can accomplish that somebody who clicks all the time and somebody who clicks less and RPs more can get around the same amount of skill in the same time, but does not get nerved by anti-powergaming measures. Also, the shape of the learning curve can be adjusted in any way, so we can speed up the skill gain of e.g. fighters of high levels while we decrease the skill gain of crafters in low levels (just an example).
The problem is: Somebody has to do it. Somebody who has a very good idea how to satisfy the intended audience without spoiling those who care more about skills. Somebody with balls and brains. Somebody with knowledge in C++ to fully understand and modify the server code of the MC-system. Volunteers, step forward...
Economy
On the internal board, I have written dozends of posts and essays, created lots of lists and concepts and still, I am not satisfied with what I was doing. Tweaking the economy is very hard, but again, let me have a look at the current Illaconomy first.
It is not working. We have serveral influences, to name a few, the wear-system, the crafting system, the monster drops and the NPCs. While I think the crafting system itself is great and can also be adjusted in any wanted way (as long as somebody
does it), the NPCs are totally out of it / screwed. Only very few items can be sold to NPCs, there seems to be no greater concept behind where you can buy and sell items, the prices the NPCs pay do not even slightly orientate on the value of the items (e.g. leather armor) and quality does not matter for the NPCs while for fighting, quality matters alot. The NPCs demand very high prices for goods that influence the market, the gap between price (sold) and price (bought) is huge. A crafter, who spends many actions and ressources to craft an average sword and gets 5cp for it
has to get pissed off, no? Also, as a sidenote, the traders are very complicated to operate, the voice commands are not working properly or are just annoying. We had a graphical menu to buy things with before the charwipe, this was removed and never recovered. Now you open doors far away when you click on something in the trader menu
Voice commands are fine and nice and I'd like to keep them, but a graphical menu is common standard in computer games and should at least be an alternative. In other words: I want menus instead of flus and wildfires and diet systems and cows. And chocolate. Apart from these technical details, I think we can make the economy working without having to change too much on the crafting system, the monster drops and other systems by redoing the NPCs alone. Anybody who wants to work out a good concept (not: erm, Eliza should pay 10 cp for serinjahs... and Sam should buy helmets... and let Gambi sells moulds) can count on my support in terms of providing what I made up in the past. But this is not a trivial task, completed in some hours. An economy task force of motivated players and developers would be the best thing to do, but I am not sure wether this will work out or not.
All in all, Illarion offers all the options to make it a great game. But as the original author of the topic mentioned, not all changes done improved the game and some make it even worse. In fact, changes with the intention to make the game better turned out to achieve the opposite, as well as some totally unnecessary changes caused new problems without old problems being solved. And we have the term "kaputtreparieren", meaning, that somebody wants to fix a system that does not work perfectly and implements a state that works even worse than the original system. Maybe problem A was solved, but problem B and C arose.
OK, this post isn't the big essay I wanted to write, but some points were expressed (note that english is not my native language). I want to close with the good old "car analogy" as martin introduced it: We have a very nice car, even tough it is stuck in the mud. Instead of adding cup holders, a sat nav with a manual of 200 pages and a CD player, we should pull the car out of the mud, all together and bring it back on the road.
Anybody else get a similar impression?