That is why skill planning is so important... If you have a lot of 10-day or even week-long skills at this point, your skill planning is probably a little off.
How long do you expect it to take to "beat" the game and learn all the skills? Given that this is a never-ending game, long skill learn times seem perfectly appropriate to me.
Skill planning as in, you know, getting BL1 before you learn your 20th skill or BL5 before you pick up your 34th... there's "long" and there's "more than twice as long as it has to be".
Quite probably. If I don't give in to temptation and blow open the skill table prematurely, I'll finish the major skills (G5, TP5, Tinkering 5, and AK7) in the next week or so. While there are a few side trips to grab some higher learning time skills, it'll be pretty much smooth sailing after that through the tables. In the meantime, I'm getting skills before getting non-related "pre-reqs" so it's a weird order for learning things. :P
Of course, learning lots of skills and not concentrating solely on strategy means those people can also do lots of things rather than being limited to a core set of skills in which they're highly specialised. Both have their advantages, and it really depends on what you enjoy doing. :) We've got lots of time for skill learning now. Of course, I'm not sure I'd care for doing BL5 last and having it take >24d to learn...
I take it back. It's not going to take months. It's going to take years. Maybe the devs need to tweak this a bit now that it's being field-tested (so to speak). :>
@ tibbi: There are time learning penalties depending upon the number of skills learned and the level of BL you have. The penalties start after skill # 20. The good news is that you are enjoying a variety of skill tracks now instead of later. On the other hand, I started BL V with 4d/9h/36m learning time. It's been a rather tedious few days while I'm learning but I've had fun exploring and getting Completist badges and using Mining 3 to earn favor and currents.
You can knock down times by speed learning and by having the rock keep learning longer skills while you sleep. And later on, ts will introduce "unlearning skills". They will let a player "unlearn" certain skills and thereby reduce the times of skills he/she has yet to learn. If you work on BL skills now, you will notice that learning times will be reduced for future skills.
There are several threads dealing with the learning times/skill order/unlearning if you want a more detailed explanation by folks who have a lot more expertise than me, Marebito for one.
I don't know what the max time actually is that BL5 could take if you learnt it last but I've got BL4 already & I've kept my skill count below the penalty level and it's currently telling me 4d12hr for both BL5 and M4 which are the longest two outstanding on my skill pages. I guess that's the minimum it could ever be.
Atm all the skills take ~4 months to learn. They need to make the skills last longer in queue to keep up with sub times and such. If they make it shorter queues, they're gonna have to make much more skills to make up for the time to keep your queue busy, and it'll most likely lead to unpolished gameplay.
Well I guess it's time to get that Lem emblem and learn BL3. Was having so much fun learning a variety of skills, didn't really pay attention to the time penalties I was building up.
That said, I am feeling it's little bit like it's a punishment for wanting to learn something of all the skill sets.
This time penalty thing is so different from beta, thinking they didn't take the time to test what they were changing and how it would affect things.
Yes, I know about the favor thing, used it once, and to tell the truth, made me feel a little crazy and rushed. And Mr Potato Head acting all crazy at the top of the window turning pages did not help at all. Good thing I don't have epilepsy, it would have given me a seizure.
The game is so awesome, I hate discovering something I don't just love. <sigh>
Ok, so maybe it is a little bit of a complaint. hehe :>
Tibbi: "This time penalty thing is so different from beta, thinking they didn't take the time to test what they were changing and how it would affect things."
It has worked this way for the last nine months or so, so it was extensively tested in both alpha and beta :)
If you want to learn all or most of the skills in any reasonable amount of time, you pretty much have to learn all or most of the BL skills.
Hi Tibbi: Actually they did tweak the learning times during beta. I remember groaning and going into a funk when BL V suddenly changed to 10days+ to learn. ugh. I think it was around the time teleportation was introduced. But of course by then there were no more quests for me to do and few skills I had left to learn anyway. And it more or less forced me to get a better understanding of how the speed learning worked anyway. I know what you mean about Mr. Rock---lol---he works so hard getting smart fast.
I'm halfway through better learning 5, and then I've got a little over 4 days on mining 4, and then I'm doing meditation and going back to Animal skills, which I'm on level 5 right now.
I'm so glad I figured out the better learning stuff in beta rather than now, because it's going much faster and smoother for me this time.
Also, finally spent one of each emblem so that I don't have to worry about that later as well. Hardest thing is getting those first two emblems. Next stop, a pretty house!
A) I wouldn't mind that skills take so long if getting new quests is in a large part based on learning new skills. The only time it gets tiresome for me is when I'm having to create my own "quests" to give myself some sort of goal between learning times. I'd rather have more quests to do based on other achievements like leveling up, getting badges, etc.
B) More skills would be GREAT! I mean, I'm not nearly close to finishing my skill tree, but eventually it is going to happen and then what shall I do with my time?
C) Part of me doesn't mind the long waiting times because when I get busy I don't have time to play Glitch all the time. When I'm still learning something even while not logged in it gives me a sense that I'm still accomplishing SOMETHING and not totally neglecting my poor little Glitch.
I'm 3/4 done with BL5 -- about 41/2 days to learn. It took a lot of discipline to click "learn this skill." Bah!!
What have I been doing while learning BL5? It's ended up being really fun. :) I earned completist badges for two or three areas. I've been out collecting the emblems I've earned (gearing up for those skills requiring spent emblems). AND I bought a new house! Finally got a place in the firebogs (Ounass Means in Chakra). Really fun. :) BUT STILL -- it's hard to commit to BL5 when you have a bunch of skills that take less time to learn.
Tibbi: I think one reason it might not have felt as bad before launch is because you could start a long skill at the end of a test period and then have 3-5 days that it could be learned in while you were unable to play.
And yay, I have about 25 hours left on BL5. Can't wait to be able to start working on the other skills again.
On the flip side of this: I'll have all the skills in the game in approximately 3 weeks. And I likely won't be the first to learn them all.
It takes careful planning, an adherence to learning all the Better Learning skills first, and then management of shrine donations to minimize skill learning time. I understand some folks don't find that as fun as I do (I'm a CEO in my real life, so yeah, maximization/optimization is fun for me.)
Still, it's worth at least planning it a bit so you don't get stuck having to learn BL5 or Mining 4 at the end (those are the two longest skills, currently.)
Tibbi, I think one reason you didn't feel the effect of 10 day tests during beta, is that we'd often do them while the game was down. So you weren't actually playing while learning. It will potentially "feel" longer now.
I'll have all skills done in about 3 weeks also. Hopefully less if I can keep up reducing skill times as much as possible. I knocked 6 hours off BL4 and am currently learning BL 5 which started at 4d 16?h and I'm hoping to knock down to 4d or whatever the limit is. I like optimization and find it fun so I've enjoyed planning things out. Though I did probably add about 2 days worth of time since I didn't have enough to do and went in a slightly sub-optimum order to let me do more.