Topic

Skills changes?

Has anyone else looked at the skill tree since the reset? It looks like all of the skills have had their learning times SIGNIFICANTLY lowered - is this a permanent change, or are things just being reworked? If anything, I personally expected the times to be INCREASED to keep people playing for longer (making them work for/toward it)...

Posted 15 months ago by Sir Poox Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I thought the more skills you learned the longer the learning time got for the remaining ones.
    Posted 15 months ago by Saraphim Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh I thought it was static, barring the Better Learning reductions. My bad? >>
    Posted 15 months ago by Sir Poox Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm just making a guess...but the more I procrastinated on Mining IV while I learned other stuff it eventually went to 14 days.
    Posted 15 months ago by Saraphim Subscriber! | Permalink
  • WOW! 12hrs only for 'Tinkering V'? it took me forever to finish this, i even still need 5 more days (if there's no reset) to finish this skill. :/
    Posted 15 months ago by jenderal.cilik Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I finished Mining IV in 6 days. Well a little shorter than that w/ donations.
    Posted 15 months ago by Eye Wonder Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think the devs have cranked down the time for skills while doing internal testing.

    Previously, they did the same thing for cranking down crop times, which was accidentally sped up for all beta testers, if you recall.
    Posted 15 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • In other words, you should expect the skill times to go back up to normal before the testing begins.
    Posted 15 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Damn, got my hopes up a little! HAHA
    Posted 15 months ago by Sir Poox Subscriber! | Permalink
  • That's just my theory anyway. I could be wrong.
    Posted 15 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • As far as I could tell, the skill times increased with the number of skills you have. I think I read somewhere that the first increase was when you got to 10 skills (and I do seem to recall some skills only taking minutes like they do now when I started at level 1 before).

    Aha, quoting from the wiki "After a player's twentieth skill is learned, each additional skill you learn will cause a compounding 3% increase in the length of time to learn another. The Better Learning skills can delay these increases, and do not themselves add 3% to learning times."
    Posted 15 months ago by Serilyn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, Serilyn's right. And that can be an reason, why one could want to have the "unlearning" skill: Because when you unlearn enough of the skills you aren't interested in anymore, the learning times for other skills go down again. (See also here)
    Posted 15 months ago by Kuki, very sad. Subscriber! | Permalink
  • That will be especially interesting, when - in some future time - the skill tree will be even bigger than it is now.
    Posted 15 months ago by Kuki, very sad. Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Kuki wrote: in some future time - the skill tree will be even bigger than it is now.
    Definitely. I'm betting that in the future we won't be able to have every skill available in the game as we do now, and will have to choose which ones we want to specialize in. At which point being able to unlearn skills will be necessary in the event that you choose the wrong skills or simply get bored.
    Posted 15 months ago by Skwid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Guys, I tested this a couple of weeks ago. For your very first skill, these are the listed times. After you get your first skill, it switches to the very- basics taking 10 minutes each etc etc.

    We took notes too.

    Do people want me to post the updated post-skill-number-one times? I've got 'em all.
    Posted 15 months ago by Biohazard Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'd love to see the times you have, Biohazard :)
    Posted 15 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh gosh it's long!
    TIMES AFTER 1ST SKILL QUEST

    Animal Kinship I: 10min
    Animal Kinship II: 30min
    Animal Kinship III: 1hr 30min
    Animal Kinship IV: 4hr
    Animal Kinship V: 8hr
    Animal Kinship VI: 16hr
    Animal Kinship VII: 1day 12hr
    Herdkeeping: 2hr
    Animal Husbandry: 2hr 30min
    Remote Herdkeeping: 8hr

    Soil Appreciation I: 10min
    Soil Appreciation II: 40min
    Soil Appreciation III: 2hr
    Soil Appreciation IV: 6hr
    Soil Appreciation V: 16hr
    Bog Specialization: 45min
    Jellisac Hands: 2hr 30min
    Light Green Thumb I: 10min
    Light Green Thumb II: 1hr
    Light Green Thumb III: 3hr
    Gardening I: 30min
    Gardening II: 1hr 30min
    Gardening III: 4hr
    Gardening IV: 12hr
    Gardening V: 2days 12hr
    Croppery I: 40min
    Croppery II: 2hr 30min
    Croppery III: 8hr
    Botany: 30min

    Herbalism I: 1hr
    Herbalism II: 4hr

    Gasmogrification: 20min
    Spice Milling: 20min
    Fruit Changing: 30min
    Bubble Tuning: 20min

    EZ Cooking I: 10min
    EZ Cooking II: 40min
    Cheffery I: 30min
    Cheffery II: 1hr 30min
    Cheffery III: 60min
    Grilling I: 1hr 30min
    Grilling II: 3hr
    Blending I: 30min
    Blending II: 1hr 30min
    Saucery I: 45min
    Saucery II: 1hr 30min
    Blending I: 30min
    Blending II: 1hr 30min
    Cocktail Crafting I: 1hr 20min
    Cocktail Crafting II: 4hr
    Master Chef I: 6hr
    Master Chef II: 16hr

    Element Handling: 10min
    Alchemy I: 1hr 30min
    Alchemy II: 10hr
    Intermediate Admixing: 4hr
    Crystallography: 2hr

    Smelting: 2hr 30min
    Refining I: 1hr
    Refining II: 12hr
    Mining I: 30min
    Mining II: 2hr 30min
    Mining III: 16hr
    Mining IV: 4days

    Meditative Arts I: 40min
    Meditative Arts II: 2hr 30min
    Meditative Arts III: 16hr
    Focused Meditation: 4hr
    Transcendental Radiation: 6hr
    Martial Imagination: 4hr

    Levitation: 2hr 30min

    Piety: 4hr

    Better Learning I: 15min
    Better Learning II: 1hr 30min
    Better Learning III: 8hr
    Better Learning IV: 24hr
    Better Learning V: 4days

    Bureaucratic Arts I: 10min
    Bureaucratic Arts II: 2hr 30min
    Bureaucratic Arts III: 6days

    Unlearning I: 4hr
    Unlearning II: 8hr
    Unlearning III: 16hr

    Teleportation I: 1hr 20min
    Teleportation II: 5hr
    Teleportation III: 12hr
    Teleportation IV: 24hr
    Teleportation V: 3days

    Tinkering I: 15min
    Tinkering II: 1hr 30min
    Tinkering III: 6hr
    Tinkering IV: 24hr
    Tinkering V: 3days 12hr

    Penpersonship I: 3hr

    Engineering: 5hr
    Blockmaking: 10hr
    Fuelmaking: 10hr

    These were what the skill times were after learning one random starter skill on a brand new account a couple of weeks ago. Every skill time changed after that first skill (from the smaller amounts you see now to these times), we think it is because of the learn-a-skill quest somehow.
    Posted 15 months ago by Biohazard Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Biohazard: Weird how the times don't display properly until you learn the first skill. Unless someone has a better explanation, that sounds like a bug to me.

    Thanks for the info!
    Posted 15 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, technically the times there for the "first" skills are actually how long those take if you start it right away (AK1 WILL take 1m30s, but once you learn it, all the other times will change)
    Posted 15 months ago by Biohazard Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Exactly, my bet is that they want to demonstrate how learning skills works for new players so they made the first skill very fast.
    Posted 15 months ago by Skwid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I suppose. But I find it misleading that the system shows you times for, say, Mining IV that are so far off of what anyone will ever see.

    But whatever. It's not like anyone who is not a tester would ever notice the times for the later skills when first starting out in the game!
    Posted 15 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • So umm...how long do you think it's gonna take to acquire the emblems you'll need to spend to get past the second skill in most of the branches of the tree? 10,000 currants worth of energy per emblem, more if you decide to spend some favor to speed up learning.

    I picture everyone flattening out their plans and changing to a horizontal approach once the need for immediate gratification kicks in.

    edit:posted in the wrong thread. today is not my day. the question is still valid, though
    Posted 15 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Technically you only need to earn one emblem and then you'll have days of learning to do before you need the next - if you're going from top to bottom on one skill.
    Posted 15 months ago by Biohazard Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's very interesting to know that the times all go up after the first skill, thanks for doing all that research Biohazard!

    And I never thought of using the Unlearning skill on lower versions of something. But if you got rid of a lower version that let you do something specific, like one of the AK ones lets you hatch eggs, would you still be able to do that? I'm just wondering if the higher levels of a skill will give you everything that the lower levels did, or if you actually do need all of them to be able to do everything.
    Posted 15 months ago by Serilyn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Actually, you can't get rid of the lower level skills and keep the higher level skills. If you get rid of Mining 1, you can't have Mining 2, 3, or 4 for example.
    Posted 15 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's because you do not have any skills yet. Whenever you learn a skill, the time goes up.
    Posted 15 months ago by Chemisie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • True Chemisie, after the first 20.
    Posted 15 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm pretty sure that the time to completion for new skills (not current learning) change as you increase levels... so, Level 1 has those times while at Level 2 they are something different. Perhaps, as Chrmisie said, they change with the number of skills you have too, but as of before the reset, times changed when you gained levels.
    Posted 15 months ago by c0mad0r Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not entirely sure that we're all talking about the same thing here.

    Here is a quote from stoot: "The base times have not been changed, but, as discussed in some other forum thread a very long time ago, we finally switched to a system where there are "decreasing returns" — the more skills you learn, the longer it will take to learn further ones.

    Right now it is set up such that, starting with your 10th skill, each additional skill you learn will cause a (compounding) 5% increase in the length of time to learn another. So, skill #20 will take 63% longer than the base time and skill #40 will take 432% longer.

    The better learning skills also now have an additional benefit: starting with BL II, the increase the number of skills you can learn before that 5% increase starts ticking in."

    (Sorry that I'm currently unable to post a link. That ability has stopped functioning for me.)
    Posted 15 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm bumping this because of a long, tl;dr debate over in a thread I started about planning for new skills when the game opens up for real. 

    Link: http://beta.glitch.com/forum/general/7299/

    I listed some times for skill completion, but Biohazard pointed me over here, where I noticed Better Learning I goes from a 90 second skill (when it's your first one) to a 15 minute skill. What causes the massive increase? If you have less than 10 skills, shouldn't the learning times still be what they are originally? 

    I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, so I don't have hard numbers here. I'm just going on what Biohazard has posted in several places as well as what Audaria quoted Stoot as saying about percentages. 

    How can a 90 second quickie skill increase to a 15 minute one if it's still one of your first nine skills learned?
    Posted 15 months ago by Tonya Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Actually, it's more the other way.  The very first skill has a massive discount in skill learning time which is what we're seeing in the skill table/encyclopedia at the moment.  For whatever reason, rather than showing the actual  base learning time, the encyclopedia either shows how much time it will take for you to learn a skill *at the moment* or the actual base learning time if you've already learned the skill.  

    Otherwise, it's the first *20 skills* that you can learn without getting hit by the 3% compounding increase in skill learning times.  Audaria has been quoting a post that was made prior to the actual implementation (let alone the tweaked version) of the current learning skills system, so that post is no longer completely accurate.  The original thread where Stoot originally made that comment can be found here (very much tl;dr, but...  *shrug*):

    http://beta.glitch.com/forum/general/1973/
    Posted 15 months ago by Marebito Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Apparently, the game is set up like this:

    1) Before you learn any skills, the time to learn a skill is very very short.  No matter which skill you choose during your quest, it will not take you very long to learn it.

    2) After you have learned your "freebie" skill, the skill tree shows the real time to learn all of the skills you can choose from.  Those times are dependent on you only having one skill learned. 

    3) After you learn your 19th skill, penalties keep getting applied and each skill you learn adds to the penalties.

    4) Better Learning changes two things:  1st, the number of skills you can learn before the penalties start, and 2nd lowers the penalties when they are applied. 
    Posted 15 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This thread has some great information, thanks!  
    Posted 15 months ago by Reba Subscriber! | Permalink
  • So, this is purely hypothetical for me.. and maybe should go elsewhere, but from what I can tell there would seem to be a potential cheat to a lot of these timings.  What if you start, but don't complete a skill?  Does simply starting a skill automatically slow down the speed of the other skills?  My thought was if it were possible to jump from one skill to another before finishing (assuming the increased times only went into affect after the skill was learned) it would be possible to learn a ton of the really long skills really fast... as the penalties for learning skills wouldn't have kicked in... I have a feeling this would work, but if anyone knows the answer, I'd like to hear.
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I didn't start testing terribly long ago, but I regularly would just start really long tests at night or at work when I wasn't actively playing and then switch to shorter timed skills when I was in game and regularly could keep an eye on when skills finished.
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Pima, you could do that, but there are several throttles to your plan:

    a) you cannot move up a skill tree until you have actually completed a previous skill.  So, theoretically you could partially learn every first level skill without incurring any penalty.  But, in order to learn a 2nd level skill you would have to complete the 1st level one.  Each time you wanted to learn a 2nd level skill you'd add to your total completed skill list. 

    b) If you learn skills across the board, level by level, you will be investing hours and hours into learning skills that you can't use.  Each pending skill would be hours of time invested with no game advantage. 

    c) There's no way to learn "really long skills" without completing the skills they are based on.  Again, you'd be adding to the number of completed skills. 
    Posted 15 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Pima
    Actually, this is one method of cutting down on *overall* skill learning time.  Generally speaking, you can't use it for reducing learning times for prerequisite skills since the skills will need to be completed at one point or another (although you might be able to use it to a degree).  Since the 3% compounding increase is for # of completed skills, you could potentially learn non-essential skills to within 10-20s of completion and then switch to the next skill, learn, switch etc.  (This is best done with end of the line skills.)  Then, once all skills have been learned to that point you can then complete learning the remaining skill table (that were not prerequisite skills) in very short order.   The increase in skill learning as you increase # of skills learned is based on how long you have remaining left on the skill, so if you have ~20s left on a skill, after learning a different skill this might increase to ~21s to 22s etc.  This is actually not bad for a mule account or for when the game was still in beta with testing being periodic, but it probably wouldn't be much fun for a main account especially once the game goes live.
    Posted 15 months ago by Marebito Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not sure this is actually what I'll do. I'm mostly just pondering. I'm thinking I'll probably do BL and Mining skills fairly early, but if I get to those higher learning skills (or animal kinship or whatever track) it seems like it would be possible to knock off days or at least hours by getting them started.while I skip back and learn the occasional fast low level cooking skills here and there.  

    I guess what I'm trying to figure out is if I learn 90% of skill 1 at certain speed, finish learning a skill 2, does the total time to learn skill 1 jump up to the total it would have taken, or would I just have to learn the remaining 10% at the slower rate?  Seems like there could be ways to speed learning up dramatically as one gets closer to learning the max number of skills before the 3% penalties start accruing.. 
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I did the lower-skills thing last time, with skills that I didn't necessarily want right away, and when I had enough donateable items to shrink them down quite nicely (but not put a dent in my longer skills). I had quite a few skills at ~30 seconds left. They never raised by more than a second when I finished learning a new skill, because the additional time is (should say was, they could have "fixed" it if it was a bug) added to how much time you have left.

    I did this with things like Smelting and Jellisac hands which I knew I had no reason to use yet, but that I knew I would want eventually, and which were not required for the skills I really wanted to learn at the time.
    Posted 15 months ago by Biohazard Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Marebito and WinBorn Thanks for the clarification.  I could still see myself using this for the odd skill here and there as I start moving towards the end of skill lines. I found it helped me make progress on the longer skills, while still picking up new skills (and missions) which seemed to make the game more fun.  Of course I never completed any of the skill lines so the wasted skill time wasn't such a big deal.. and now I also have the skill learning cue... May still try it out hardcore if I make a second account.
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Biohazard, Thanks that makes sense. Although I'm inclined to want to exploit it if this still works the same way when we restart, I almost prefer it wasn't possible.  It seems like an almost unfair exploit for newbies that wouldn't have figured this out.
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This has been changed from what I can tell. Times for all other skills appear to increase once you start learning a skill. Thus the advantage is removed from learning a skill most of the way through and not completing it and moving on to another skill. From what I can tell the times do not increase when you complete learning the skill, only when you start learning a skill.
    Posted 15 months ago by Pima Subscriber! | Permalink