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Jondok

Skill Decay To Keep Wurm Social !

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I know this was tried and have been controversial but the skill decay mechanism needs adjustements. Please read until the end before shouting at this idea :)

Wurm is a social game with a lot of different skills increasing while doing an incredible amount of different actions. Currently, the more you do something, the better you are. But you can do everything you want. And this is perfect. You can see carpenters, diggers, miners, tailors, blacksmithes ... To build a decent boat, you need a good tailor and a good blacksmith. To build a decent house, you need a paving specialist, a carpenter, a mason, a gardener. This is really wonderful to live in a village with these different jobs working together, or to build a house with the help of close (or far) neighbours coming to help. It is marvelous to discuss about trade, exchanging bricks for planks, boat for services. There are some known blacksmithes on the island, some famous hunters, and some ship builders.

But when the land and landers become older and older, skills are higher and higher. A shipbuilder needed a tailor to make the sail, he don't need him anymore, he can make it himself. On the contrary, the tailor is now able to make a Knarr alone because he was bored and tried to make some boat for personal pleasure. On the markets, tools with 50QL are almost given as everybody can make 80QL in their home forge. Houses are castle, no more unique wild animals, tower guards everywhere, terrain looks like Balinese rice field, all leveled and there is as much blacksmithes and ship builders than players.

From my point of view, such a world is already dead. The game become a solo game in a easily terraformed land (remembers you some other game ?). That's why we have Pristine/Release separated from the other island. The real Wurm game is this newland/newbie feeling, where you ask others to help you in domains you suck at.

What I propose is to keep the social aspect of the game : the more OFTEN you do something, the better you are. You still can do everything you want. If you want to make a boat, as you wish. You'll finish your frigate and become a real decent ship builder. But now you want to be a hunter and kill this famous dragon. So be it. You'll gain very high sword skills and you are now able to kill a dragon by spitting at him. BUT, you have lost some skills in ship building and this is normal because you don't made one for ages. This is the basic idea. Skills you don't use should decay.

I have no really full technical proposal to do but I heard and understand the first reactions I read in another thread. They all have a solution.

Proposal : I tried to keep the concept simple, precisions will follow : every time you gain X skill points, you lost X/nb of skills available in all other skills. The main objective is to having the possibility to specialize but not in every domain at the same time.

- Skills do not decay while disconnected ! Real life calling or school period is not a problem. If you are not connected, you don't lose skills because you are not gaining skills either.

- The loss can be determined by category : if you gain in a sub-carpentry skills, you don't lose points in other carpentry related skills.

- We can imagine to "protect" the top 3 skills from this loss. Thus, the 3 higher skills you have won't be affected if you decide to search for flowers to seduce girls or try to make healing covers.

- The global amount of skillpoints always increases. When you gain X skillpoints, you lose X/n skills points elsewhere even where you have already 0, and can't go lower. n can be the number of different skills or another factor.

- The only advantage of old players is experience. I mean real experience of the game, no XP. A new player can still imagine to be the best blacksmith on the island. Currently, the only way is to create a new island separated from others and to arrive with the first settlers.

- Skills could not decay lower than 20.

I'm ready to hear critics and I'll try to answer or propose a decent solution.

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So in other words, make 10 alts, each can only do 3 skills. Way to make the game more social, by making it mandatory to have a billion alts to get anything done. HUGE -1

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I understand what you're driving at but here's the thing. Not everybody in a game wants to be social. I am not even sure if its a decent percentage of people in this game that want to be social or if some overwhelming majority would be incredibly happy to never have to talk to a living soul the entire time.

What you're going for with the forced skill loss is invalidating the time spent to level the skill in the first place, adding a frustration in what is already a slow, incremental climb to mastery. If I need four skills to build that house and can only really be decent in one of them, what happens when there is no other person in my local to help? What if I am not in the least interested in spamming Freedom chat for a week trying to find those other skills? I would like marble floors, so now I have to decide if I'm willing to lose my place in, say, Weaponsmithing while I grind Paving up to 40 or spend valuable and precious time to locate the one guy in my time zone who has marble and the skill to install it for me. And decide if I can pay his price to travel to my deed to do the work.

I think you're trying to achieve synergy and cooperation between players that they may not be in the least interested in having. One of the core ideas behind Wurm is, to me at least, the idea of utter self-sufficiency given enough time and effort. Trying to move it in a direction where you absolutely need many legs to support the table just makes it more likely the table won't be able to stand at all.

Edited by Chiclet

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NO FOR THE LOVE OF FO NO SKILL DECAY.

  • Like 7

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NO FOR THE LOVE OF FO NO SKILL DECAY.

I missed that Xallo, did you mean to say NO?

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It can be adjusted, for example, no lower than 40. Look at your skills : if you take the skills above 40 and remove the 3 highest, which skills will be so horrible to see decay to 40 ???

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Your reasoning is reasonable (and Rolf thought exactly like you I'd think) but it won't make people appreciate it because no one wants to see their hard earned skillpoints being taken away by an arbitrary balancing system even if it aims to improve the game. I've been having similar ideas myself, but I can't think of any way to implement them that would in any way make it feel acceptable to players and this certainly isn't the way.

It's like with automatic team-balance systems; It may be active with the best intention of making the game fair to play for everyone, but being subjected to it makes players want to quit the game.

Furthermore, the social aspect of Wurm does exist and I like to think of citizenship as the standard/encouraged way of playing, but relying on the help of other players simply isn't something we can expect everyone to do.

Edited by EliasTheCrimson

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It can be adjusted, for example, no lower than 40. Look at your skills : if you take the skills above 40 and remove the 3 highest, which skills will be so horrible to see decay to 40 ???

All of them.

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I get your points :)

As I can see, I don't want to connect new servers to olders one, ever.

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It can be adjusted, for example, no lower than 40. Look at your skills : if you take the skills above 40 and remove the 3 highest, which skills will be so horrible to see decay to 40 ???

Try grinding -any- crafting skill to 70 or 80+ (not even mentioning 90 here) and then come back here. You're not talking a couple hours work, you're talking weeks if not months of work that would be gone becuase you want to force people to be more social (which really means to have more alts)

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I like the skill decay idea, but not as you mentioned.

Damn, now the CA's gonna ban me for going against their ideas and power, damn.

Edited by Selva

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I mean it's awesome to see that someone is taking something seriously and really investigating this sort of mechanic, but just isn't a good way to do things I don't think :P

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I understand what your trying to do, but it would never work as people would make alts.

Take WoW for example, people can have 2 main craft skills, I think theres 10 or something in the game so people would make 5 alts and have all the skills covered, the same would happen here.

Now I think an idea that could be used would be to become a specialist in your choosen skill, you could level all the skills to max but could only become a specialist in one. Maybe could add crafting quest ( something simple like handing in your finished work to a master craftsman to unlock your specialist skill, maybe could bring some new items in game thats only crafted by a specialist, something along those lines would open up a market for trade for the specialist items and give people something to strive for as end game.

You should beable to change your specialist skill if you decide without losing your work in that skill.

So for example you want to be a specialist mason, you start to level it up and decide thats not for you, and choose another skill your specialist mason skill would be frozen but you would lose the ablity to use it. Then you could try something else, so you wouldnt lose your skill, but could only ever have one specialist skill at a time.

Now what the specialist skill could bring to the game i dont know, maybe something more fun and wacky I have no idea, but I can see why something for end game would be nice, even if it takes a long time to get there. You should at least get a cool title, maybe a specialist could craft for the king ( a way for maybe once a month to earn a silver or so instead of draining traders ? ) I am sure clever people would beable to come up with ideas for it.

Just a thought.

Edited by chrismisterx
  • Like 1

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NO FOR THE LOVE OF FO NO SKILL DECAY.

We're going to need a bigger font.

-1, you don't know what you're talking about. It was abandoned for a reason and those reasons haven't changed, your lack of familiarity with those reasons doesn't mean it's a now a good idea.

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