Illarion.org

What?
Lower the costs of an attribute change at the trainer at regular intervals by one level. I'll randomly pick one irl-month as a reasonable timeframe.

Why?
It should be relatively easy to implement.

New players have no clue what attributes do and the starting presets are frankly terrible. Once these people did stick around for long enough to have figured out that their character can not quite stand up to the rest due to bad attributes, they either have to spend horrendous sums of gold to fix their initial character of make a new one from scratch. This is very frustrating and needlessly punishing.

With an reset on regular intervals would it still be barely feasible to do an instant rebuilt from one pure 'class' to another, due to exploding costs.
The proposed reduction of attribute change costs would allow players to gradually change towards an aspired built, adding long-term motivation on a technical level and softening the initial blow the game throws at new players.

Q-wert wrote:the starting presets are frankly terrible

Can you point out what presets are not good and how you would improve them? Instead of making "fixing" the presets cheaper, I would rather let people start with proper builds from the beginning...

@Presets
At some point I wanted to work out do a new set of presets, kinda got stuck at reading code and moved to do something else a couple of times. So I'll just roughly go over what I find not too great with the presets, according to my limited knowledge of the mechanics:

• The sentence "Hover your mouse of an attribute to get a tool tip." might be better off with an own paragraph, just to be highlighted. This is mightily important information. But it gets kinda drowned by the wall of text in front (and not related to) it.
  
  The fithting preset (Knight) is not close to competitive with any custom build maxing Agility, and more importantly, Strength.
  
  The 'Hunter' preset has a terribly low Strength, not doing quite the damage one might want to do as a ranged fighter. Agility could be a bit higher, primary attribute could be maxed out.
  
  The 'Rouge' preset is misleading, there are no engine-supported roughish actions. Even fighters 'quick on their feet' are better off with generally maxing Strength and Agility.
  
  Crafter and Worker presets are allright, the secondary attribute (Constitution/Dexterity) could be a little higher, primary could be maxed out.
  
  Did not take a look on the Druid/Potion stuff yet, so I do not know if that built is good or not.

@Proposal in general
Even with the starting presets changed to accommodate the state of the game, I would want to hold on to this proposal. Many pre-VBU-people have missed out on the free attribute reset and and have to pay terribly high prices to change to an efficient or even competitive build. The same goes for anyone who made a mistake during character creation.

Also, sooner or later the use of attributes will be changed once, and again at some point. Each time long time player deeply invested in the game will have to change their attributes to stay efficient or even competitive with their old characters. With exponentially growing costs, I do not see playing the same character over a long term to be a viable option. Which at least I do not find quite encouraging to stick around once such a change hits.

Can you give exact numbers for the presets, using humans as example?

One comment: To simply max out agility and strength for all fighting builds currently might be "most competitive", but it is not in our interest to recommend maxing to the max to new players. To see that some attributes are more important than others for certain styles of playing should be the goal of the presets. Illarion is class free and I do not want to recommend to players to e.g. minimise dexterity to limit their characters to non crafting actions.

Also: In future, attributes that seem to be meaningless now will get a real use. I will not nurse all whiners that get pwned by mages with a blink because they all minimised willpower...

Edit: But I see the point of 16-14-12 maybe not being the best values for preferred attributes. So I am looking forward to the concrete numbers.

If maxing out is not what is wanted for new players, I'll give this another nudge.

I think when starting the game new players go about and try out anything they can find, eventually settling with a few options they like best. Something they hopefully can do well with the chosen attribute set. If not, they either have to ditch the character (which is rather discouraging) or spend amounts of gold unobtainable for new players to change their attribute set to a build of their liking. This will be even more relevant for activities demanding a certain minimum set, as Alchemy and maybe other 'mystic' systems in the future. I can very well remember quite some people being not all that positively exited of their characters inability to learn magic with the chosen attributes in the past.

I know I am kinda repeating myself, but in short the pros of the idea:
The proposal would allow a slow change of built for players for affordable prices and leave large or sudden changes to the attribute set as expensive as they are now. Long term activity and keeping characters would be encouraged while the problems of choosing 'the wrong' attributes would be smoothed.

1) i never changed the attributes of my charakter (my char has the coins to do that but why should he do?)
2) lower costs in intervalls would support changing attributes to maximize all skills
3) i did not see any support - keep in mind this is a RPG