Topic

Learning Dilemma: Advice Please

Okay, so I'm pretty far up each of the skills trees.

I just signed up for Teleportation V. Despite donating 1396 (deliberately just 4 skinny points shy of an emblem worth only 1000) favor from Lem, the learning time stands at a crushing 10 days, 15 hours, and 44 minutes!

If I spend an emblem of Lem, learning time will only be reduced by a pathetic 2 hours and 46 minutes. It hardly seems worth it. (I have two Lem emblems—hah, trying saying that ten times fast!—that I could use toward an icon OR towards faster learning.)

So, what to do? Donating favor seems like spitting in the wind. Is it worth it?

Of course this is just the beginning of a disastrously long slog: All the other substantial skills I might want to learn take equally long: 8 days, 13 days, and so on. Even the few "beginner" ones have now ballooned to day-long undertakings. I foresee long periods of time where I won't be playing because nothing will have changed for my glitch. (And there haven't been any street projects to keep me occupied in quite awhile. Nor have I seen any rook attacks while I was in world.)

I love learning, but this is very discouraging. The slower I learn, the fewer quests I have. That leaves me with the tedium of mining and harvesting and tending but no novelty or adventure.

Oh, and if I want to "speed things up" by doing Better Learning V: yeah, that'll take 13 days. Which makes no sense at all.

I welcome advice from others who've made there way through this morass successfully. What should I do?

Posted 14 months ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Pascale, there are more than 300 badges you can earn.  Have you earned all of them yet?
    Posted 14 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Learning definitely slows down once you overflow the maximum as modified by Better Learning. I overflowed before I got an Emblem of Lem so my Better Learning V stood at 7 days, I'm now at 4 days left.

    Fortunately (though for me it's unfortunate -- I wanna play) I can barely get 1-2 hours of game time during the weekdays due to work so I have less tedium while I'm in the game.

    My suggestion though is to go the social route. Perhaps volunteering for the Greeter Program?
    Posted 14 months ago by Mal'akh Subscriber! | Permalink
  • You can also slog away each game day obtaining items to donate to increase your learning speed.  Every four RL hours, you can donate again to all 11 giants to help speed up your learning.  You can grind off 1/2 the time through repeated donations.
    Posted 14 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I really get no pleasure from going through essentially the same motions over and over and over. If I want to do that, I could clean my house and do dishes and laundry even more than I already do. Having my virtual world duplicate my least favorite, most humdrum, rat-racey parts of real life seems disappointing.

    I'd really like to be doing collaborative quests, or binding a glitchy book of short stories and offering it for sale, or any number of other potentially interesting and creative things.

    I'm hopeful that eventually TS will make such things possible. I suppose in the meantime I'll just do the minimum to keep the learning going and coast into the new year as well-educated and prepared as possible!

    (My active imagination can see such potential with this game. But I'm well-aware from my own experience in software development how hard it is to implement meaningful interactivity with a delightful user experience. So I don't expect wonders over night, or indeed any time soon. If I didn't see the potential, though, I wouldn't merely be frustrated: I'd just give up and walk away.)
    Posted 14 months ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I started in to Mining IV with 9 days and a few hours on Sunday evening. It would be 7 days now, but I've got it down to 3 days 17 hours from shrine donations.  I have Zille's shrine up to 1600 capacity and secondary giants up to 1400.  Filling all three shrines to a few points shy of getting an emblem, I knock over 8 hours learning time off every Glitch day. It is not spitting into the wind by any means and I'm enjoying watching the learning time fall.  With RHK and lots of cooking skills I'm not finding filling three shrines too much work.

    I'm figuring on getting the icons next, and hopefully by then there will be a street project or something else interesting to do.
    Posted 14 months ago by Lucille Ball Subscriber! | Permalink
  • What's the hurry?
    Posted 14 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @WallruZ Obviously there's no external pressure to hurry. But I won't play if I'm bored. So that would mean long periods of absence from the game, which would mean that I would question why I bother with a subscription.

    I'm assuming that TS and the Giants would both prefer that I stay engaged. :)
    Posted 14 months ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If you don't play for a while, your next skill will be ready by the time you come back!

    Plus, I like your two example ideas. Have you posted to the Ideas forum?
    Posted 14 months ago by Spong Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Getting Better Learning as soon as possible is really the best way to go, but obviously it's a bit late for that. I would still get it as soon as you can though because it can nibble off a bit of time on those ever lengthening skills.

    If I were you I would try and get any quests done. If you've finished them all, maybe try getting all the area completion achievements - I know I found it a lot more enjoyable to roam around all the different areas, and there tools that can help you pin down streets you haven't found yet too. If you've already done that... 

    You could try the same thing I'm currently doing, choosing a different skillset (like gardening/animals, cooking, mining/refining) to focus on each day (or switching between them), then working away and either selling stuff (auction or vendor) to buy stuff to donate, or donating it directly. I'm doing this to collect emblems for icons and it passes the time while waiting for skills. And the bonus is that once you have enough emblems for an icon I'm guessing that should also give you enough to speed up your learning by a decent amount (if it works the way I think it works?). I haven't spent mine speeding up because I can't be bothered (I find my time spent at work and sleeping eat into the skill times the most), but it might help with super long skills a bit.
    Posted 14 months ago by Serilyn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Take 2 weeks off and come back problem solved. or do like WindBorn said and grind to take 1/2 the time away.
    Posted 14 months ago by Mister RE Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Go take a look at the achievement page and work towards getting some badges - anything from visiting every street in a region to cooking which might unlock new recipes, join a group - many exist for many different purposes from repopulating Ur with animals to chatting about films. Discover the off topic section of the forums, arrange a party on your house street or get friends together to fund a party pack. Use dice/cubimals or your imagination to create fun games to play (i recall a talking tree game someone else mentioned on the forums that sounded fun, re-enacte your favourite book scene, make an art installation in plexus using game items, write a stories or a poem on a note to  leave in random places for people to find. Just a few of the many things you could do with your time whilst your waiting on skill completion. The only limit is your imagination. Have fun.
    Posted 14 months ago by DramaticHamster Subscriber! | Permalink
  • What is probably going to happen here is that TS is going to deepen the skills tree.   They've said as much. 

    Because of the compounding penalty for having many skills mastered, people who have attempted to learn the entire tree will then find themselves staring at new skills that will take them a long time (and/or a lot of grinding) to learn.  

    Thus, the unlearning skill.   I predict that many people who are grinding and rushing to complete the skills tree will be gnashing their teeth and wailing in the forums because they will be faced with the seductive proposition to turn right around and UNLEARN some of those hard-won skills just so they can speed up the learning of a skill in a preferred branch of the skill tree. 

    So I've come to the conclusion that the best thing to do fttb is to invest in the better learning skills, max out the skill tree along your favorite line of development, and perhaps NOT learn some skills that you might consider uninteresting, all in order to be prepared for new ones that will be added.  

    There's been talk about a lack of need for specialization in other threads.   If you take a long view of the compounding learning penalty, it could effectively enforce specialization, provided that the skills tree continues to deepen more or less evenly. 

    As far as what that leaves you to do in the game, well, one thing is that you're treating the game like a static entity.  Consider that the game is growing in ways that we can't entirely anticipate beforehand.  What might you do now to prepare your character for those possibilities?  
    Posted 14 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink