Topic

Skill Decay

Once the game goes live I could see the potential for people to get bored once they have acquired all the skills and no longer have the ability to improve their character. Perhaps having a skill decay that goes into effect if you don't use that particular skills for a certain period of time. If you were to stop playing for a while then came back you would need to re-learn some skills (perhaps at a quicker rate due to the "muscle memory"). This way you are somewhat forced to be a more balanced player and do many things as opposed to just doing the same things all the time.

Maybe activities could prevent skill decay in all skills but have a bigger effect on the skills they specifically relate to. For example, mining everyday would mean your mining skills would not decay AND it would also slow down the decay of all other types of skills (although specific skill related activities would still need to be done in order to fully prevent/reverse the decay in the non-mining skills).

Maybe this has already been discussed. Maybe there is a better solution out there, other than an infinite skill tree.

Posted 19 months ago by Roger Sterling Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Here's what staff have said
    http://beta.glitch.com/forum/general/1973/#reply-17808

    And soon we'll be adding "unlearning" skills, so you can once unlearn skills you don't want any more as you move up.

    edited to fix broken link
    Posted 19 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sorry, Roger, but -1. What happens if I am unable to play the game for a couple months, just to come back and find all my skills gone? Or, if you just want to include actual playing time in this: I might be really addicted to one particular aspect of the game for a stretch of time, but will get bored with it and go back to another aspect later--having to relearn the skills will likely discourage me from going back to it and irritate the heck out of me.

    In the future we will be able to delete skills that we previously learned. There is already a deterrent for learning skills that we don't use since they drastically increase the amount of time it takes to learn new skills. Thus, there will be incentive for players to manually delete unused skills, without it being forced on them by the game mechanics.
    Posted 19 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @WindBorn - That is a private page :/

    @ShepherdMoon - I think increasing the amount of time it takes to learn skills is a very good thing, however, a player will eventually learn all the skills and then it will no longer matter. I can see your point with regard to not playing for a couple months. In fact, I could envision losing all your skills as possibly being a deterrent to picking the game back up (which is counter to the spirit of my original suggestion). Perhaps only the last level of a skill will decay, e.g., if you are at Mining III you can only decay to mining II and no further. I doubt my initial suggestion is the right solution but I thought it would be constructive to the community.
    Posted 19 months ago by Roger Sterling Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Roger: Any ideas are good ideas because they encourage brain-storming, which can lead to improvement! So, thank you so much for your suggestions regardless of my thoughts on them :)
    Posted 19 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink