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It is just too hard to gain any skill for mages and actually affects RP though it probably shouldn't. Mages tend to react to protect themselves rather then RP...and yes, I know this is not proper for game atmosphere but as a fighter I have seen it time and time again. You can fuss and fume at the PO of the mages but looking beyond that, why is this happening? The skill loss, and hard to learn skills of mages, are so time consuming most PO's do all they can to avoid being ghosted.


((btw, my char was NOT going to ghost that mage tonight so you didn't have to jump in the portal so quickly * g* ))

I didn't jump in the portal to avoid ghosting, if you know Mel's story you would know this i guess.

Skill gain is very tiring as a mage... Without powergaming, there's really no hope of getting good. The main place I see this is teachers... Now that there's a skill requirement on rune teaching... uh... yeh.

However... whether or not the skillgain is lowered, mages will still powergame. And considering the "complexity" of magic... Maybe the slow skillgain's appropriate?

For me, the problem isn't so much the skillgain as the skill requirement for teaching. Any spell without QWAN or other third level rune is pretty much useless... And since some teachers can't teach higher level runes, they have to powergame. And that leads the student to powergaming, because they want their spell to be as powerful as it can be without higher level runes... And no matter how hard they powergame, they're still pretty much defenseless when it comes to a fight.

Olive wrote:I didn't jump in the portal to avoid ghosting, if you know Mel's story you would know this i guess.

Good to know anyway, not just you however.. possibly though the new update will address some needed mage changes and this proposal will be a mote point.

I love how much faith everyone has in the VBU

"Don't worry, this crappy part of the game might get changed in the VBU"

Skillgain needs a complete overhaul, not just a candy for mages/fighters/cooks. There are fundamental flaws that determine the current speed of skillgain, those have to be adressed first.

Do not exspect any change anytime soon, we are aware of the problem, but we have to find a real solution!

Estralis Seborian wrote:Skillgain needs a complete overhaul, not just a candy for mages/fighters/cooks. There are fundamental flaws that lead the current speed of skillgain, those have to be adressed first.

Do not exspect any change anytime soon, we are aware of the problem, but we have to find a real solution!

Can I ask what these fundamental flaws are that have come to your attention? Not only would this help to prevent lots of repeat threads bringing up problems that you are already aware of but it might allow for suggestions that more completely deal with these known flaws.

Thanks.

The values of first divider and second divider are not in agreement with the common movepoint requirement of different actions... I doubt you can help with this, honestly.

Estralis Seborian wrote:The values of first divider and second divider are not in agreement with the common movepoint requirement of different actions... I doubt you can help with this, honestly.

So, basically, some skills are too hard to learn and stuff gets wonkey depending on how much you have trained compared to something else (that I don't know, possibily the difficulty of the skill)? I may have completely FUBARed that guess, but your point has been made. Even if my explanation is wrong, the number of values that would need to be changed across the board does sound like a problem that would require a complete reworking of the skill system, though you are right in the fact that I don't have enough programing skill to do anything about it.

Oh well, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask.

The skill loss, and hard to learn skills of mages, are so time consuming most PO's do all they can to avoid being ghosted.

This sounds a bit like a wild generalization to me, but then again I'm not sure what you're basing this on other than observed behaviour. If it is actually a player fear of death, I think it could be attributed more to the fear of losing all the very expensive items that mages need to use to be effective. More likely, as attested to by the person involved in this incident, it's simply how the character behaves.

In terms of defending themselves, the greater difficulty is that low constitution/little armour/low fighting skills give the player very little time to react to a threat before it's too late, especially when most spells can't be used when you're actively being attacked by something with decent speed.

The values of first divider and second divider are not in agreement with the common movepoint requirement of different actions... I doubt you can help with this, honestly.

Considering the amount of engineers, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and otherwise clever and skilled people who play this game, I'm not sure what leads you to believe that no one can help set a problem with the skill system right. If it's because the developers aren't prepared to disclose the workings of the skill system, just say that, rather than posting an extremely focused explanation of the problem that uses undefined jargon.

I am a engineer, working as scientist, and it took me two days just to understand how the system works in detail and to realize that its complexity is so high that I could not make up a reasonable algorithm to simulate it, except using the code itself and simulate a high number of character life cycles to answer the simple question how fast skillgain is. Call me arrogant, but currently, I think only two staff members can give an answer to how the learning curve (skill over actions) basically looks like with a mathematical approximation (it is a ln(ln)-beast with a chunk of a random deviation).

If anyone really wants to help with this, we can stick our heads together one day. But trust me, we have no lever "skillgain slow->fast", we have a vast number of variables involved and the outcome of changing any variable is not as clear as one might think. And all what one makes up has to be translated to C++ code, tested, debugged and compiled.

PS: One could, of course, lower the "first divider" anytime to make skillgain faster for certain groups of skills, like magic, but this is like spraying massive amounts of nitrous oxide into a tanks engine; you just know power output is increased, but in worst case, your engine explodes or your tank causes quite a rampage in the area.

i like fiddling with math numbers can i see the current code/equation/whatever that is in use right now?

I don't presume anyone to have more mathematical aptitude than Martin.However, I think the problem could benefit from having people with different backgrounds and methods approach the problem. If it's true that only 2 staff members really have the familiarity with mathematical modelling to understand how the skill system functions, it seems pretty likely that the problem is a lack of input. I'm sure you accept that no matter how much of a genius someone might be, progess is made through collaboration.

I'm an electrical-turned-civil engineering undergrad, so I accept that I probably don't have as much aptitude as you and Martin may have, but I assume I can probably still grasp the problem, and maybe suggest things you haven't thought of yet. Maybe if there's a willingness to actually tackle the problem, it will be enough to draw others out as well.

That said, I'm interested in trying to help.

PMed .