(Spin off of recent thread specifically on safe-fall, but this is to address the larger topic of all skills not just one)
I don't have a suggestion for this but it is a concern I have:
Think about the skills your character had in Everquest. I'll use safe-fall as an example, but you can use the same argument for swimming, sense heading, abjuration, bash, 1HS, languages, pick-pocket, etcetera.
In the beginning, these things MEANT something. If you tumbled down a hill you took damage. If you fell off Kelethin's walkways, you died. Over time you skilled-up and mastered these things and then they were no laonger an issue. You never fell again, you never took damage (you rarely fizzled, you swam at full speed, you knew all languages, etc.).
And, knowing they mattered, increasing this skill became part of the game. I remember running up and down dunes in Northern Ro to increase safe fall. I remember swimming across an ocean to max out swimming.
These mattered so people worked on increasing their skill.
But that led to almost-exploits like swimming in a fountain or macro-spamming language text.
And soon enough, anyway, these things stopped mattering. The whole game played as if you were max in everything.
How will you make these things not become trivial and matter forEVER? How will you make it so they can't be max-ed out exploitively?
The "best" time in EQ's legacy was back when we were all low level and every skill made a difference in our experience. It mattered to have skills in things. There were dozens and dozens of skills and every one mattered. By level 30-ish, everyone was maxed out in everything and skills made no difference
Wasn't there a 5 points per level skill up cap? So essentially it was 40 levels to get it to 200. Although I think once you hit 100 you were pretty much a master. I don't recall what the 100-200 advantage was.
So maybe one could make it like alcohol proof. Every 2 points is 1% gain in that skill. /shrug
I know at some point, I don't want to be worrying about skilling up something I have been doing for 40 levels. By then you're either good at it or not. I recall I decided to skill up my 2HB skill late in my characters life. It took special groups that understood and were able and willing to let me swing and miss until I got proficient at it.
For one, you could cap almost all skill increases with level. That would keep a lot of the exploit stuff in check. For failing you could greatly increase the damage based on distance so that certain falls would kill any character, no matter the distance.
Adding skill increases to max level shouldn't be a problem either.
I do enjoy the way a character grows and that some things don't pose as much of a problem anymore as they did at first. But I do think you have a very good point, it would be better if they continued to matter somehow. Maybe it should be more difficult to level things. I loved the concept of languages in EQ for example but the way one could learn them by being spammed was silly. It should be more intricate and demand far more from the player so it'd be a real achievement when you learn a language.
I hope things will take time and patience.
I love the concept of in game languages and would further love if they remained useful over time. I think it is really a two step process though. First, there is the difficulty in acquiring the skill or learning the language. If a macro can be spammed or a character left overnight on autorun in the water, the skill becomes meaningless because every character is constantly maxed. My suggestion would be to lock languages behind quests that can only be obtained with sufficient faction. Want to learn dwarvish? You need max faction with dwarves to get max language. What's that? You're an ogre and are KOS to dwarves? Too bad, start killing goblins! The sheer amount of effort required to max faction and complete language quests with all relevant races would prevent folks commoditization of language skills.
The next step would be to make all of that effort worthwhile. I would envision having innate bonuses tied to the completion of each race's language arc. Spend two weeks maxing your ogre faction and language quests? Congrats, permanent +3% max health. The objective would be to require TONS of gameplay hours to secure each of these benefits. And an added feature: languages are passed down from parent to child so progeny characters don't need to repeat the grind.
Finally, to make them useful on a sustained basis, implement the equivalent of new quests with the launch of future expansions. Similar to the Everquest coldain prayer shawl. It required maximum skill in every crafting method in order to request the quests. The item remained useful throughout expansions as new quests were implemented to augment its power each expansion.
Fulton said:I know at some point, I don't want to be worrying about skilling up something I have been doing for 40 levels. By then you're either good at it or not.
This.
I think the idea of the skill system in EQ is quite good. You start out with low skills (and caps!), and experience a lot of skill failures. Over time (and more levels) you get more proficient, and don't notice your skill level that much anymore...you become "confident" and just use it :)
I'm somewhat uncertain how I think about having to "keep up" with skills however. "Out of combat" skills like swimming or foraging are such a set where you regularly have to stop grouping and skill them up on your own ("urgh, 25 points of swimming to catch up. fun...not"). Is that something we/the devs want? As for combat skills, some (most?) casters had to take a break from leveling every now and then and cast low level spells over and over to level up rarely used skills. In contrast, other classes spells (for example enchanter) were laid out so that every casting skill was used, and so you could level up all casting skills through simply playing your character.
What I'm hoping for for Pantheon: That abilities/spells are set up reasonably so that they will train up every skill through normal play (with maybe "some" extra leveling up outside of groups). For melees we know that different weapons will have different effectiveness against some opponents. So again, if the design is well done, a melee class may automatically gain all required skills because they have to switch weapons against different opponents anyway.
Sarim said:Fulton said:I know at some point, I don't want to be worrying about skilling up something I have been doing for 40 levels. By then you're either good at it or not.
This.
I think the idea of the skill system in EQ is quite good. You start out with low skills (and caps!), and experience a lot of skill failures. Over time (and more levels) you get more proficient, and don't notice your skill level that much anymore...you become "confident" and just use it :)
I'm somewhat uncertain how I think about having to "keep up" with skills however. "Out of combat" skills like swimming or foraging are such a set where you regularly have to stop grouping and skill them up on your own ("urgh, 25 points of swimming to catch up. fun...not"). Is that something we/the devs want? As for combat skills, some (most?) casters had to take a break from leveling every now and then and cast low level spells over and over to level up rarely used skills. In contrast, other classes spells (for example enchanter) were laid out so that every casting skill was used, and so you could level up all casting skills through simply playing your character.
What I'm hoping for for Pantheon: That abilities/spells are set up reasonably so that they will train up every skill through normal play (with maybe "some" extra leveling up outside of groups). For melees we know that different weapons will have different effectiveness against some opponents. So again, if the design is well done, a melee class may automatically gain all required skills because they have to switch weapons against different opponents anyway.
For the most part I thnk most "needed" skills were easily advanced through normal gameplay. It was usually someones lack of keeping up with skills that caused themto fall behind, like my example of my 2HB skill. I didn't use it until I was in my mid 30's or early 40's so I had to work it up. No different than someone taking up martial arts late in life, you're going to have to start on the basics and practice to get proficient.
Now swimming and such, were a little different. I think the thing here was that there really wasn't a purpose for swimming until you adventured to Kedge Keep which was what 30's, 40's??? If they included some small lakes, rivers etc that we had to cross during our earlier adventures which would help build up the skill, and a low level dungeon that was either in water or you had to traverse water to enter, this would help as well.
Those of us that started in Freeport were probably a little luckier than some others, as for me at least when adventuring in Ro and oasis, I would often swim the shoreline rather than run, while passing through, which helped keep my skill up. Swimming to Spectre island in Oasis, Innothule swamp required swimming, and even the river crossing in Nektulos, good races would swim across away from the bridge guarded by the DE.
Then of course we had the boat waits, that many of us swam around the docs to kill time and skill up.
Safefall, when I made a monk, was basically raised just by running around the Desert of Ro with SoW. Coming over the top of a dune often skilled up.
Beg - think I tried it a couple times but still nevrr saw the purpose.
Pickpocket - Again, played with it, but it didn't seem worth it being that the character was not ever going to be my main, was just an alt to test the playstyle.
Sense Heading - Was annoying but most of us assigned it to a macro and for something we used often like attack or bash, etc. So it essentially skilled up by itself :P
I do agree they can be annoying to keep them all up or try to rasie them later in the characters life, but they do add a little something extra the the game, minor as it is, they can become helpful or a hinderance later on.