Decay .... Revisited .... Again

I imagine that the penalty is more severe if you have a lot of high level skills. Having a large death penalty for low-level characters doesn't make sense.

 

Sounds like a high level character needs to jump off a very tall building, in the name of science!

 

The mention of the oracle was in this post
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/decay-worst-mechanic-ever.42017/page-5

The mention of the sheep to wolves I'd have to do a ton of digging to find the videos in which they talked about it, but in one video (if I remember correctly) there was mention of maybe some sort of quest from the Oracle to go out into a pvp area which made me wonder if the quest Chris is talking about in that thread from the Oracle that might be that quest..... (who knows...I am just wondering)

On the decay, I'll play the wait and see approach, if it's not to bad I'll just grit my teeth and deal with it, even if I don't like it. I will play a lot so I'm not really sure how much it will effect me. If it ends up unbearable and/or like a second job or chore to do it, I'll do what I've done in the past and move on to a new game. I dislike having to do daily chore quests just to get to start my gaming session each time I log in. At this point it's still being tweaked and nothing set in stone yet, so who knows how it will be, might not be too bad. Just have to wait and see.

 

So the way I read this is that decay is capped at 72 hours, whether you play or not, but if you are playing and have skills set to maintain then you will not notice decay hitting because you are constantly offsetting the decay with gained experience.

I may be wrong but i'm still reading the maintain as an offset for decay because your putting a small amount of xp into the skill. I'm not a very high level yet but I think I can test this theory out in a few days. I think i'll set all my skills to maintain and go fighting to see how much xp i'm losing per fight for maintaining them, and then die at the end of 3 days to see if I take a hit. If anyone else can think of something else I can do during this test let me know.

 

I would really like a Developer to rewrite the manual correctly to explain better how decay works (and another to ensure it works AS DESCRIBED). I can't read 7+ pages (from one thread, and who knows how many other threads exist on this topic) to figure out how decay works. Among many other things... decay needs to be put to rest.

It is clear we don't exactly know!

 

Here's something anecdotal. I decided for this release to cap my skills at 80, because continuing to GM seems counter productive.

I forgot to check my progress, however, and a couple of days after release my Bladed Combat skill had reached 88. Being slightly OCD this annoyed me, so I set it to "Not Training", hoping that skill decay would whittle it back to 80. It has been several days since I did that, and despite being killed multiple times it is still sitting at 88 with the green bar about 90% of the way across.

What does it mean? To me it means that I'm not going to worry about skill decay.

 

Or, at least, that it doesn't work as they told us it should

Have you died recently after setting bladed combat to 88? If you havent then it's working as intended. maybe you could perform an angel jump into solid ground (you know, for science) and see how much progress you lose in Bladed Combat?

 

I usually die several times a day because I try to kill everything I see. More specifically, I have spent every day mining in Etceter Crag Mines, and every time I make the journey I arrive at the mine in ghost form.

(As an aside, my pooled adventurer XP is currently sitting at 1,216,309 and my adventurer level is 59. I have no idea why people are so keen to avoid death - it has worked out fine for me.)

 

Good news everyone! Decay is not working at all!

I think you should report a bug then

 

What bug? Seems to me it is working perfectly.

 

ROFL With decay... unintended is the new intended

 

Geez, does anything in this game work as intended? Ay yi yi.

Thanks for the info, Womby.

 

I honestly don't have a problem with the decay at all, the amount is so little that it makes hardly any impact at all. Just play more

 

To me it's like, "Hey we're gonna poison your water. Just a little though and you probably won't notice it much unless you drink a lot of water. If it does start to affect you, just drink even more water. So yeah don't worry about it."

How about we just don't poison the water?

 

Is this opinion from practical experience with the system or is this merely a matter of principle? To me, comparing game-play mechanics to herpes and poison doesn't seem like a productive mindset to have especially since we haven't done that much field testing.

Innocent until proven guilty, right? Well, none of us have sufficient data to prove that the concept of Decay is bad. We know what they're trying to do with it (you may disagree to your hearts content), now we just need to test if it's got secondary effects while they're looking at the numbers.

 

Fact: Skills will decay. See: Chris.
Fact: The higher the skill, the longer it will take to rebuild what you've lost. So the players who play the most, are the most penalized. See: Chris.
Fact: Any skill above level 20 is subject to decay. See: Chris.
Fact: The community is VERY confused about how decay works. See: this thread and many others.
Fact: The majority of polled players do not want decay in the game. See: Decay poll.
Fact: Death triggers decay. See: Chris.
Fact: Decay is punitive. It takes away skill level you have already earned. See: Chris.
Fact: We do have data on decay. Most startlingly Frostll's data that one of his 101-level skills required 350 uses of the skill and 123,191 XP to regain lost ground. Unacceptable.
Logical conclusion: People will take steps to avoid death, to avoid decay. Inhibits game play in an adventuring game.
Logical conclusion: A complex, punitive and confusing mechanic will frighten away at least some existing (e.g. Themolock) and new players, and annoy countless others.
Logical conclusion: If decay is truly minimal, why bother having it? If decay isn't minimal, it's punitive. Either way it's bad.

I believe that decay has been a well-intentioned, theoretically helpful idea but in reality and execution an utterly poor mechanic. I've listened to every word of the telethon on this subject, and read every word of the debate, and I just don't see a fix for the underlying fundamental issues with this mechanic. It doesn't really matter how it works or the decay levels that are established. It's broken from the start.

OK no more bitching about decay from me. I'm starting to bore even myself.

 

Do i have to say something to get myself moderated before we get a Dev in here to clear this up????? !!!!

 

Hey Budner, your shoelace is untied, and I don't like your hat.

 

No no no. You gotta make it much more personal. Like this:

Hey @Budner if I were you I'd skip the red and take the blue pill. They say you need it.

See?

 

If you really want to do real harm, you need to go straight to his weakness.

Hey @Budner i haxx0red your game and put you in Massive Men Only mode (MMOMMORPG).