mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,699
|
Post by mehtastic on Oct 24, 2019 5:49:03 GMT -5
An offline skill gain system that complements an action-based progression system (which Armageddon already has) would be balanced by virtue of the offline system being significantly slower than the action-based progression. Take how many skill points someone who plays for 8 hours in a day could feasibly gain under the current system, cut it down to a quarter, and award that many points to characters a day to distribute freely, and you'd have a more equitable system than the one you already have. And people who are logging in to play every day still will, but the game will also attract more casual players.
But it's not a hill I'm willing to die on either. If Armageddon staff want the game to die, they're doing a great job so far. The game's losing old players faster than it's gaining new ones, and people who play games tend to be casual players.
|
|
sneazy
Clueless newb
Posts: 115
|
Post by sneazy on Oct 24, 2019 7:46:11 GMT -5
A lot of good ideas here.
delerak - multiple ways to advance skills
mehtastic - get teach off of skill timers
lechuck - wall of progress/skill failure problem
lechuck/shakes - don't like xp for rp (I agree)
signifyinmonkey - start 1 utility/1craft skill at highest level, a favored skill that advances faster(?) but slows down others
Prime Minister Sinister - age based up to high J
signifyinmonkey - concerns about offline skill based causing people to just sit out their advancement
So why not do all of them? None pose a serious coding challenge.
1. Give teach it's own skill timer say 1 teach per RL day. Require a master to teach(?) but give a nice skill bump of 5-10 points and allow skill ups to just shy of master. Maybe magic shouldn't be teachable? This is going to favor peak players. Off-peak will have a difficult time finding a master to study under.
Scenario - a master stonemason could have students gathered around to carve rocks once a game week. They could RP out a lesson, individual assignments (students could also advance through making a mistake in class - teach has it's own timer now). Seems like a RP win to me. This could also take care of the wall of progress problem. Now seeking out a master swordsman would be more beneficial at a high level rather than fighting stilt lizards until they are nerfed.
2. Allow char-gen to pick a couple of skills to max out. This could be skill restricted but would allow pc's to not be so damn useless out of char-gen. This does not favor any type of player.
3. Pick a favored skill (I liked the favored enemy for rangers in AD&D, would be nice to come out of char-gen a carru killer). This one does not favor any type of player, just let's you get your favorite skill out of the way quickly. Can have skill restrictions so some can't be picked.
4. Age based skill increase - I haven't played an old pc so I don't know how quickly age changes a character's stats. But it is interesting to have an older pc with all high j-man skills but giving up the possibility of certain maxxed stats (no AI agility 4 you). Trade-offs are good.
5. Advancement offline - can prevent abuse by only allowing it to go to a certain level, restricted to certain skills, or make it slow enough to only benefit weekend players (you haven't played in a week, bump skills up a few points on login).
I don't see any of these ideas as game breaking.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,699
|
Post by mehtastic on Oct 24, 2019 9:14:36 GMT -5
You could also implement offline advancement where it's conditional on logging in to advance a skill normally. An example of a game that does this is Final Fantasy 14. You accumulate bonus exp over time which doesn't count as actual exp until you gain exp. Then the exp you gain is equal to the exp you'd gain normally plus some of your bonus exp, which goes down.
Applying this to Armageddon:
1) You gain 2 points on a woodcrafting fail and log out.
2) You build up some "bonus skill points" over time. Let's say 1 per 6 hours. So you gain 4 bonus skill points.
3) You log in the next day and fail woodcrafting again, and this time, you gain 3 points on the fail. Your bonus skill points goes down to 3.
Although at this point I feel suspiciously like I'm doing work for the Arm staff. If they were interested in improving the game they could play some modern games and study game design themselves, imo.
|
|
|
|
Post by lechuck on Oct 24, 2019 12:56:06 GMT -5
That sort of happens already anyway. People go solo twinking on npcs, until their defense/offense is high enough to their liking. At least this way, they get to stay around people if they want to and participate in plots that are no life threatening, until their they're confident enough in their skills. There's a huge difference. If you can skill up via bar-sitting then, first of all, noone dies unless PKed, leading to skill inflation. Secondly, the game world becomes even more empty aside from wherever people choose to sit and jerk off for XP. Thirdly, there's something inherently unpalatable about the idea of skilling up without any effort or challenge. That's why people always hated the fact that mages could sit in temples or caves and become powerful in total safety. You shouldn't be able to get good at something without doing it. When people go and twink out on NPCs, they're still present in the gameworld. They can be interacted with, confronted, thwarted, spied on, etc. If you can skill up from a barstool, you'd keep seeing powerful characters appear out of nowhere and do controversial shit without anyone ever having had the opportunity to find out what they're about. It'll be a new Brother Mouzone showing up every other day, which would be really jarring and stupid. People you've never seen outside the tavern suddenly turn out to be combat powerhouses when it suits them. It's pretty uncommon (and generally ineffective) to plant your character in some totally remote location where noone can run into you. Even solo-twinking requires activities that put you out there for others to find, to notice what kind of character you are, and to assess your potential threat level. You practically never see someone appear out of thin air with high skills and surprise everyone, and that's a good thing. Raising combat skills comes with the burden of either risking the life of a lone ranger or taking part in clan play. That's important to the game, both because it keeps things grounded in some sense of realism and because it teaches players to appreciate their skills. If you can get to meaningful levels of competence without going through that process, you'll get a constant cavalcade of shit players who sit around and talk about the weather for two weeks before going berserk on the thinnest possible pretense of roleplay. When they have to train skills the traditional way, they're more careful about the fate of their characters. It's a trend I've seen across many games. |
|
vex
Clueless newb
Posts: 133
|
Post by vex on Oct 24, 2019 15:33:12 GMT -5
People go solo twinking on npcs Specific to the quote, and not necessarily related to the topic, currently at hand.
Why is going out solo to level skills 'twinking'? It's always seen as such a negative, shady thing, to raise your skills, or even take an interest in how advancing your skills works.
People go out solo and raise their skills, usually because there are no other alternatives that don't involve lengthy clan commitments (how many 'mainstream' clans don't have a 'stay in the city for X years' newbie rule?) and being at least competent in your given skillset, is rather vital to being relevant in virtually any aspect of the game. This is even more true for combat skillsets, and ESPECIALLY true for stealthy/thiefy skillsets, where failure usually = global kill initiative from the playerbase.
It's a bit GDB to call playing the game as it's been designed, as 'twinking', imo.
Nobody calls the Byn or AoD sparring every in game day twinking, even though both encourage the defender/attacker grinding strat to maximize misses and speed up progress, so why is going out to hunt npcs every day for the same purpose, with the inclusion of actual risk, such a negative thing? I mean, I COULD go raise my skills attacking and killing pcs non-stop... would that be more appropriate? Or is that twinky, too? Only clan players are allowed to 'twink out' skills?
The mind of the average Arm poster, is an unfathomably stupid thing, imo.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2019 16:41:40 GMT -5
People go solo twinking on npcs Specific to the quote, and not necessarily related to the topic, currently at hand.
Why is going out solo to level skills 'twinking'? It's always seen as such a negative, shady thing, to raise your skills, or even take an interest in how advancing your skills works.
People go out solo and raise their skills, usually because there are no other alternatives that don't involve lengthy clan commitments (how many 'mainstream' clans don't have a 'stay in the city for X years' newbie rule?) and being at least competent in your given skillset, is rather vital to being relevant in virtually any aspect of the game. This is even more true for combat skillsets, and ESPECIALLY true for stealthy/thiefy skillsets, where failure usually = global kill initiative from the playerbase.
It's a bit GDB to call playing the game as it's been designed, as 'twinking', imo.
Nobody calls the Byn or AoD sparring every in game day twinking, even though both encourage the defender/attacker grinding strat to maximize misses and speed up progress, so why is going out to hunt npcs every day for the same purpose, with the inclusion of actual risk, such a negative thing? I mean, I COULD go raise my skills attacking and killing pcs non-stop... would that be more appropriate? Or is that twinky, too? Only clan players are allowed to 'twink out' skills?
The mind of the average Arm poster, is an unfathomably stupid thing, imo.
In reality the word "twinking" lost the edge it used to have. It has became a term that describes the things people need to do to be able to learn, everyone else know they have to do it, nobody truly judges them, but everyone know it's lame. But as far as differences between sparring and hunting. It's a matter of what makes sense. Going defensive during sparing makes sense. Every boxing training has this. Hunting stilt lizards to skin their hides off and sell them off makes sense. Sheathing the weapons against stilt lizards, until finally KOing them and then walking away ... Might make sense if your character is a weirdo. But usually not. Entering a dark cave and purposefully extinguishing the torch, would not make sense. That kind of stuff But the word "twinking" itself sort of lost its meaning these days and began being used tongue in cheek. |
|
|
|
Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Oct 24, 2019 16:41:44 GMT -5
People go solo twinking on npcs Specific to the quote, and not necessarily related to the topic, currently at hand.
Why is going out solo to level skills 'twinking'? It's always seen as such a negative, shady thing, to raise your skills, or even take an interest in how advancing your skills works.
People go out solo and raise their skills, usually because there are no other alternatives that don't involve lengthy clan commitments (how many 'mainstream' clans don't have a 'stay in the city for X years' newbie rule?) and being at least competent in your given skillset, is rather vital to being relevant in virtually any aspect of the game. This is even more true for combat skillsets, and ESPECIALLY true for stealthy/thiefy skillsets, where failure usually = global kill initiative from the playerbase.
It's a bit GDB to call playing the game as it's been designed, as 'twinking', imo.
Nobody calls the Byn or AoD sparring every in game day twinking, even though both encourage the defender/attacker grinding strat to maximize misses and speed up progress, so why is going out to hunt npcs every day for the same purpose, with the inclusion of actual risk, such a negative thing? I mean, I COULD go raise my skills attacking and killing pcs non-stop... would that be more appropriate? Or is that twinky, too? Only clan players are allowed to 'twink out' skills?
The mind of the average Arm poster, is an unfathomably stupid thing, imo.
i don't think anyone, at least anyone here, seriously refers to skill grinding as twinking in a pejorative sense anymore
at least i would hope not
f'ckin' nerds
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2019 21:10:03 GMT -5
I see this as a three part problem.
I dont see any reason not to just give some subguilds a master level craft skill. Craft skills take 31-42 skillups to go from novice to master depending on wisdom, and many start at apprentice. Using some of the skills are more laborious than leveling them, like being a forester in the south. Giving a master skill in a craft isnt a big economic swing.
Giving a character a master level sneaky skill is not something I would ever do. I am glad pickers, poisoners, and thieves have some ramp-up time and some investment in character.
Giving a pc combat skill is pointless. The whole point is comparison. If you want to move the average or require more grinding to seem cool by comparison, okay. If you raise the floor to being able to survive raptors or gith, all you do is remove barriers between socialization on different stages.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2019 9:21:48 GMT -5
I would suggest solving this issue by adding a third choice to a pc, in addition to guild and subguild. For lack of a more creative name, lets call this third selection a "narrative".
A narrative would be a combination of social position, character age, and starting "story" position.
Social position is easy. It probably includes mods to starting equipment and starting funds. In a perfect world it might include access to more starting merchants.
Character age would fuel a set of skill bonuses based on character age and access to teaching. These should probably group the skills into eight or ten groups. Utility B skills would be things like listen, watch, and cooking. Utility A skills are (maybe) hunt, ride, climb. Make one or two sneaky groups. Combat B would be kick, bash, disarm, riposte. Combat A would be the weapon skills, or two handed.
All starting skill mods would have a skill debt attached. It would take 150% (or whatever) as many skillups to work off your debt, and no skill on your pc would rise until you had. While your pc had a skill debt, the teach command would not work. While your pc had a skill debt, they would give less sparring skillups if they exceeded another pc in skill. Most of this is to prevent a role from inflating a clan without someone earning the skill boosts.
A starting story position is a narrative role as you might see in a book. Sometimes you just want to play a background pc. Sometimes you do want to try to play the hero. These would be used as balancing elements to the first two, possible with skill gain penalties, bonuses, or skill debts attached.
Example: Experienced craftsman - age at least 31, karma 1, 1 craft A skill at max, 3 craft B skills at advanced, 3 utility B skills at jman, 1 utility A skill at jman. No skillgain mods, roughly 180 failures of skillup debt to balance 120 free skillups. Starts with 3k in coin.
Aging mentor - age at least 51, karma 2, whole pile of skillups across the board, including 2 melee weapon skills and a missile skill at advanced, -20% skill growth, roughly 1200 skillups of debt to counter 800 skillups in gains. Would be one of the options to include base O and D growth.
Gifted kid from a desert backwater - age no more than 21, karma 2, no skillups, starts with a +30% skill growth mod to two skills of any group.
Part of my point here is that the potential power of a role is not the only "reward" that can be given for karma.
|
|
|
|
Post by shakes on Oct 25, 2019 13:08:56 GMT -5
Siggy's idea there has a lot of merit.
Let you trade 'age' for some skills at start.
Instead of everyone being farmboy Luke Skywalker right out of chargen.
|
|
sneazy
Clueless newb
Posts: 115
|
Post by sneazy on Oct 26, 2019 9:33:50 GMT -5
You could also implement offline advancement where it's conditional on logging in to advance a skill normally. An example of a game that does this is Final Fantasy 14. You accumulate bonus exp over time which doesn't count as actual exp until you gain exp. Then the exp you gain is equal to the exp you'd gain normally plus some of your bonus exp, which goes down. Applying this to Armageddon: 1) You gain 2 points on a woodcrafting fail and log out. 2) You build up some "bonus skill points" over time. Let's say 1 per 6 hours. So you gain 4 bonus skill points. 3) You log in the next day and fail woodcrafting again, and this time, you gain 3 points on the fail. Your bonus skill points goes down to 3. Although at this point I feel suspiciously like I'm doing work for the Arm staff. If they were interested in improving the game they could play some modern games and study game design themselves, imo. Pick the one game whose grind I detest more than arm's. They are sort of opposite in play experience though. FF14 starts out fun, a lot of story interludes and one time dungeons then as the levels spread out it becomes a pure shit grind. I gave up years ago and never went back. Arm starts out as a pure shit grind. The only challenge (for a solo player) is do I fall asleep failing to find a rock walking over rocks in a rocky canyon with rocks falling down the sides and the word "rock" in the room desc 14 times. If you can stomach it long enough to get through that then the game gets interesting.
But I didn't start down this path for arm but more for whatever comes next. I hope apocalypse (or whatever they are calling themselves now) will be a bit more rp oriented than arm and picks up an idea or two.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,699
|
Post by mehtastic on Oct 26, 2019 18:29:28 GMT -5
Yeah, I picked FF14 not because it's a good game (I personally dislike it), but because it implements that bonus XP system I was talking about, so that advancement isn't 100% directly related to time spent on the game.
Honestly, any game that implements even one of the ideas proposed in this thread will have a massively better time than Armageddon. Armageddon's skill advancement is modeled after games that came around Armageddon's time - games that often had subscription models, and a monetary reason to keep people playing for long amounts of time to get those skills up. Armageddon intended to be a vastly different game and needs vastly different things, as does any free-to-play roleplay-focused game. It's fairly clear that Armageddon can't be as roleplay-focused as it claims to be with the hindrances in character progression that currently exist, such as the arbitrary failure system, the cultural stigma that generally exists against skill advancement, and the penalty of the teach command having a high chance of being ineffective after a coded training session like sparring or target practice. It's really no wonder fewer people are playing the game - because fewer people have the time to play it.
|
|
nergal
staff puppet account
Noted Liar
Posts: 46
|
Post by nergal on Jan 17, 2020 14:51:24 GMT -5
I realize this thread is mostly about skill progression, but I see progression in Armageddon and in most multiplayer RPGs as something you can split into four parts.
1) Skill progression: Already thoroughly talked about here.
2) Economic progression: The amount of money, resources, equipment, and items your character has.
3) Social progression: The amount of friends, enemies, connections, and influence your character has, and what group(s) your character is a part of.
4) Project progression: Your character's ability to engage in and advance long-term projects. The other forms of progression influence this a lot. Examples of this could be setting up an RPT or creating a new structure somewhere.
You can encourage players to focus on certain forms of progression by providing some kind of reward for that progression or by making other forms of progression less necessary to actively pursue. For example, if skill progression was automated to at least some extent, more players would spend more time on average pursuing the other three forms of progression. So I think for an RPI, that's a good route to take if you want to encourage more interaction, since skill progression tends to be very grindy.
Economic progression is semi-automatic if you're in a clan, since you will never run out of food or water in most clans, and you take a regular salary. You can grind for (quite a lot more) economic resources if you were so inclined, but it does require extra work and often also requires either not being in a clan, or breaking your clan's rules.
You can't readily automate social progression or project progression, and arguably even if you somehow could automate interaction between human players, you wouldn't want to, because it's a roleplaying game. So if the goal you want to achieve in modernizing Armageddon's progression is improving access and ability to roleplay, then skill and economic progression should be automated as much as possible so that players don't have to spend time on those things, and can instead focus on roleplaying.
|
|
Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516 
|
Post by Jeshin on Jan 17, 2020 14:58:18 GMT -5
You can automate the red headed stepchild of human interaction which is NPC/world response reaction. You see the bastardized version of this in MMOs as faction relation scores or reputation. This would give players a firmer understanding of where they stood with say the Garrison NPCs or the Allanak NPCs etc etc. This reputation could further be tied to the crime code in a very simple. If X rep > Y, subdue do not kill. Then you can prevent abuse by having some kind ifcheck on combat against the faction which lowers X rep so if someone doesn't surrender fast enough they get set to instakill as per normal.
Helps people feel established and like maybe their coming and going are at least noticed.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jan 18, 2020 3:04:38 GMT -5
You can automate the red headed stepchild of human interaction which is NPC/world response reaction. You see the bastardized version of this in MMOs as faction relation scores or reputation. This would give players a firmer understanding of where they stood with say the Garrison NPCs or the Allanak NPCs etc etc. This reputation could further be tied to the crime code in a very simple. If X rep > Y, subdue do not kill. Then you can prevent abuse by having some kind ifcheck on combat against the faction which lowers X rep so if someone doesn't surrender fast enough they get set to instakill as per normal. Helps people feel established and like maybe their coming and going are at least noticed. This system could also easily gate skill progression. What if invisible Oashi mage or archers occasionally wandered the area around the Vineyard and shot or cursed interlopers who didnt have rep with Oash? Similarly, have hidden elven scouts in the Pah. If your pc isnt a friendly, every time they see your pc, a minor rep hit is given. Similary for non allies, every time they see your pc kill an animal, a large rep hit is given.
This would also allow the Sun Runners, the Arm, etc to take bribes to "speak well" of a pc and adjust negative rep up. In this way there is an economy for pickpockets who dont really annoy people to stay out of jail even if they screw up.
Were I a designer, I would make these scouts at "killable" levels of skill. If you attacked one and it got away, a timer would start before your rep with that group got decremented. There is no reason, even with the way, instant KOS messages need to be a part of this game.
Incidentally, this system would also make it easy for GMH groups to stake claims on rare resource nodes when they generate. If the GMH is willing to assign guards at some cost, or hire the Byn, there is suddenly an automated way for people to fight over shifting resources in the wilderness, and attempts at monopoly to control them. Wouldnt it be cool if a Salarr agent got 20 troops they could assign, and part of their promotions or loadable materials were gauged on the successful use of these troops?
|
|
