Topic

Unlearning a Skill?

I've been reading bits and pieces about learn/unlearn, but not enough to understand what they are talking about.  I think it has something to do with the time to learn skills. Why would a player learn a skill and later chose to unlearn it? Thanks.

Posted 20 months ago by GreyGoose Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Don't remember the thread, but the way it was explained to me: 

    Unlearning skills that one doesn't need will reduce the time needed to learn other skills, given the new expanding skill timeline.

    For example, unlearning Tinkering I and II because one has already learned Tinkering III.

    Regardless, not sure I agree with the underlying logic as it appears to take another challenge out of the game.
    Posted 20 months ago by Lyndon B Johnson Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It would reduce learning times for other skills and get rid of skills you don't really need for whatever your playing style is.
    Posted 20 months ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • From another thread (cause I'd like to discuss this topic separate from that one)... The discussion was on the topic of the new, longer learning times.

    "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.

    And soon we'll be adding "unlearning" skills, so you can once unlearn skills you don't want any more as you move up.Posted 5 days ago by stoot barfield [staff] | Permalink"

    So now you know what we know... unlearning a skill is in the works... which is going to make skill balancing all sorts of fun. I can't wait because it totally appeals to my geeky side!
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks all. The whole notion seems counter intuitive to me, analogous to unlearning the alphabet if one wants to learn to read. But then again, I would have never thought of petting a tree in RL or examining piggie poop---LOL I'm loving this game!
    Posted 20 months ago by GreyGoose Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Depending on how they wire it up... it's either
    a) like having a stroke that frees up room for more knowledge.. this would be if we lose access to skills further up the path. 
    or
    b) like having 'mastered' a skill... this would be if we retain access to skills further up the path.

    Both outcomes are present in life..... you can only muck a stall so many times before you can muck a stall in your sleep. Having a stroke may make you forget how to muck a stall, but you still remember how to ride a horse (outcome b). Perhaps not knowing how to muck a stall means you now have lots of time to learn meditation, and have to walk to go do it because you also forgot how to ride a horse (outcome a).
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • To clarify, you would NOT be able to unlearn the lower level skills while retaining the higher level version (e.g., you could not unlearn Animal Kinship I, II, III, IV and V, but keep AK VI).
    Posted 20 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Figured I'd have to forget how to ride a horse before I could forget how to muck a stall ;)
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh, thanks, stoot, for clearing that mystery up! Wow, that really would affect how I'd deal with skills. Hmm, I love to have as many skills as possible. I'd hate to unlearn a high-level skill just to learn another high-level skill on a different skill tree. So I think I shall just live with the longer learning times and try to balance the skills as I go. And donate to those giants! :D
    Posted 20 months ago by RM Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I am 100% baffled by this.
    Posted 20 months ago by Helcat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not Helcat.... here's a great (and more functional example)... I learned Levitation and Penpersonship because I could (and I wanted to squeeze in a short skill)... but Levitation is currently non-functional and Penpersonship I could do without. I'd more than happily 'unlearn' these skills to remove a compounding 5% in learning time on a more useful skill to me.

    As my play style changes, I'd love to be able to trade off soil or meditative skills for cooking. Obviously I'd love to be able to do it all, but this way makes for a better player-skill diversity... which in turn will benefit the community by inspiring more interaction with the market and other people... as *hopefully* people turn to each other to fill in the learning gaps.

    P.S. Helcat - I have Gnome ?'s for you... could you pop into Welcome Wagon (Group) real quick?
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm still confused on it, tho, coz it seems like a lot of the different skills are connected.

    This last test I had to use one skill (thinking it had to do with the chemistry skill which I'm not big on) in order to do one of my other skills (more than likely trying to cook a food since that is one of the things I spend most of my time doing coz I totally enjoy it).
    So if I unlearn the chemistry one (which would be one of them I'd love to chuck to the side), how will I be able to progress in whatever ones that I want to continue learning in if they are intertwined?
    Posted 20 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Say you learned cooking and decided to forget that cuz you don't need to cook anything, done with all cooking achievements and now you want learn AK skills.  You can speed the AK learning quite a bit by unlearning the cooking skills.
    Posted 20 months ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • sgjo.... let's see if I'm understanding the question, and hopefully get us both a couple answers. I think you're asking what happens with cross-dependancies...

    So... Scenario 1: Say you finished up your Meditative Arts skill sets, and now you want to focus on something else.
    1 -  Would you have to unlearn Levitation before you can unlearn Meditative Arts III? (this is actually a huge question so read carefully) Levitation has MA3 as a pre-requisite, but looks like the beginning step to a much longer skill path (probably extending float times).
    2 - Taking the Levitation question out of the equation and assuming it was never learned in the first place... I could 'unlearn' MA3, and then unlearn Transcendental Radiation... I *should* then be able to unlearn both Focused Meditation and MA2... Question: Would I have to unlearn FM before unlearning MA2? Slightly different than before, but very much within the same skill grouping.
    3 - Folllows 2, I *should* be able to unlearn any of the 'endpoints' like Levitation and TR at any point, right?

    Scenario 2: I finished my BA2 and own a home. I *should* only lose the ability to get additional papers... but I can still own a home and move and ride the subway having already completed the 'You Have Papers' achievement.... correct?

    Other than the branch hop (say having to unlearn Blockmaking and Engineering to unlearn Tinkering III) I think I see what they're driving at. The only reason I question the branch hop is because there's a certain merit to both sides of the argument. On one hand, it's letting go of a lot of specializations on one branch in favor of pursuing others on another... but there is the base-dependency argument. It's the 'has the physics professor forgotten how to teach basic algebra' argument.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I suspect we're still missing a piece to this puzzle. My guess is that the skill tree gets a major overhaul when the unlearn shows up.

    Trav, perhaps some skills are un-unlearnable?
    Posted 20 months ago by Lyndon B Johnson Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, trading a skill for a shade faster learning of a new one seems pointless, especially in an environment when we are not trying to beat a 5 p.m. closing time.
    Posted 20 months ago by Helcat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Unlearning one can cut off several hours off one skill, not to mention others.  There may be future skills with much longer learn times and current ones could have their base learning times drastically lengthened.
    Posted 20 months ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well put Tingly! Here's a great example.... using stoot's example that the 40th skill is 432% the original... that makes SA5 (a skill with a 16h start value) a 2d 21h 7s skill. Unlearning even one skill takes that down to 2d 17h 45s.

    Sure, that doesn't seem like much... but with 84 skills and counting, that 400+% becomes over 2000%.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Makes sense. Though I can't see what's wrong with the current skill system. Oh well.
    Posted 20 months ago by Hburger Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @ Trav...Let me try to explain my confusion a bit differently (and hope I don't confuse the both of us even more or discover that we're both talking the same thing, just understanding it differently)

    Say I want to skill up in the A skill and since the B skill and the C skill would go together nicely with the A skill, I want to skill up in them too. But OH! Wait! I get to a pretty good level in those 3 skills and find out that in order to advance any farther in the B skill, I now have to learn the F skill because it's linked to the B skill in some way or another, altho not a skill that I would have chosen to learn.
    Now I'm having to learn the F skill (which would not have been a chosen skill and a space hogger as far as I'm concerned) along with my beloved A, B, & C skills. But hey...it's ok coz I can handle doing one thing that I have no interest in.
    But then I get pretty high in that skill (but not high enough to make the B skill happy) and Lo & Behold - I must now learn the D skill (another skill that I may not be interested in or dislike even more than the F skill) coz the F skill requires it to be learned before I can advance any further in the F skill (which I hate) in order to advance in the B skill (that I dearly want to advance in because it fits in so nicely with the A & C skills (which, btw, more than likely will need the B skill to advance in them, anyway)! And so on and so on until I've pretty much had to learn every skill, anyway.


    So hoping this made sense to you lol
    Posted 20 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • You've learned B3 which took 3 hours.  You want to learn F 1-5 which take 5, 12, 31, 72 and 150 hours, total of 270 hours.  Unlearn B3 and the times lower to a total of 257 hours.  Relearn B3 and you have B3 and the F's learned 8 hours faster.

    The math is oversimplified, but that's the idea for that scenario.  It's not always wise to unlearn, but it can work great in certain cases.
    Posted 20 months ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "Makes sense. Though I can't see what's wrong with the current skill system. Oh well."


    the devs want to make it les than possible for people to learn every single skill, so that we will have to depend on each other for stuff.
    Posted 20 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • sgjo... I think I understand what you mean : ) There are a few skill sets that you can 'silo' and a few others with only one or two cross dependencies, but once you get into specialty skills they get to be pretty badly entangled. It's going to be just as complicated to peel them back out to 'unlearn'.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • One of the things I really like about skills is the wonderful way they are woven together.  The dependencies are actually part of the fun.

    To make unlearning workable, I'm afraid that the skills will be revamped to be more linear which will be a bit more boring than the cross-fertilizations. 
    Posted 20 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • LOL, Trav...yah ...guess I'll just keep on learning them no matter how long they take and forget about unlearning anything - at least until reset that is :D
    Posted 20 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This is not something that people will really have to worry about for a while. But, imagine when we have 150 skills and you have already learned 90 of them.

    Now, there is another set of 10 related skills you want to learn. But! They take between 2 weeks for the fastest and 3 months for the longest!! That's crazy!

    Now imagine this: if you are willing to spend a few days unlearning 30 of the skills — ones which you learned early in your Glitch life and which you are not using much anymore — the first of those shiny new skills takes only a day and the longest takes a week. That's better!

    So, it will force some specialization and limit the overall abilities of any one given player (unless they are extremely patient and have been playing a VERY long time, in which case: good fo them!)
    Posted 20 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thank you, stoot, for providing a glimpse at the long range plans. 150 skills! Oy Vey! My pea-sized brain may explode. LOL---I love this game!
    Posted 20 months ago by GreyGoose Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well Mr. Stoot, it's like this...y'all are stuck with me. I'm in for the long haul and it's your own fault for making a game that is so awesome that I fell in love with it while it was still in Alpha stage!
    *rubs hands together*  150 skills...here I come! :D
    Posted 20 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • forced specialization sounds like a good way to keep the game interesting, although there are two things i would like to see to be really happy with this feature:

    1. for unlearning, and heck, even learning in the first place, with the rock doing it for you and the help from giants, to have a good narrative backstory that will provide a *why* within the context of the game.

    2. it should take less time to re-learn a skill that you've previously un-learned, although obviously there would have to be some limits to this, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of unlearning. 
    Posted 20 months ago by katlazam Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I dislike the idea that the game forces socialization.  Some people will want to have minimal interaction with others, and I don't see a problem with that.  I also dislike the idea of forcing specialization, because (currently) the number of fun things to do in the game is limited, and limiting activity even further by encouraging people to remove skills just seems backwards.  Isn't the game supposed to be fun?  More skills == more possibilities for fun.  I understand that the number of available skills and activities will continue to grow, but right now, I can't imagine which skill I'd sacrifice in favor of another. 

    As I was saying in another thread, I'd much rather see a skill system based on achievements, so you could, for example, learn a basic cooking skill simply (the way we do now, or maybe unlock it by harvesting enough cherries/eggs/spices), then use it enough to get a badge or two, which would allow you to learn the next skill, and so on.  It could take a lot longer to learn the more advanced skills, since they'd have more difficult requirements, but they'd give players more goals, and a greater feeling of accomplishment.
    Posted 20 months ago by glum pudding Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +10 what glum said.
    Posted 20 months ago by Mac Rapalicious Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think you may be on to something glum... but maybe as a trigger to unlock something. Perhaps as a requirement to something like SA4 you have to have tended 250 patches, then... provided you've learned SA3 the new advanced skill 'unlocks' to learn... kinda in the way completing You've Got Papers works.

    I don't think they mean for the Unlearn skill to be a 'necessary' thing, rather an option for those who want to use it. And as stoot noted, it's not going to have too terribly much use (though we've come up with a few examples where it could be useful in game play right now) until we have a lot more skills.... with twice as many options to focus on, I can see where many players might want to ability to specialize.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink