Recent changes and the direction of the mud

[Caelnai]

I guess I have a similar point to make that I made on the "death" thread...Not all PCs are equal, and not all fit into the A or B that Dalvyn described above. I also think that it comes down to the fact that "twinkish" players are going to find a way to twink, while RPers will RP...and little outside of direct Imm observation changes that. (I speak from experience, having previously owned a mu*.)

To the point of this thread however, I will say that many recent changes have forced me into what I consider "twinkish" behavior. My drow used to have an RP-appropriate way of making coin until it was eliminated because one person was abusing it. My ranger's skills suddenly aren't good enough to keep her self-sufficient. My dwarf suddenly can't make enough off of mining to keep her in ale. So they all have to go around twinking for coin...or remain logged out. A sad turn of events in all of their lives.

But, as I have said...my characters are not the norm. Their player shamefully insists on sleeping instead of logging them in during prime time. They aren't high-level or pack rats. None of them have ever been to Hartsvale. What of those who want to chose unusual RP's, like refusing to enter cities, or preferring to order others to do their killing?

I feel like I've lost some good RP with my characters because of a few people who were abusing the systems...and I'm not really convinced that the changes or suggested changes are going to remedy the problem.

EDIT- for spelling

[Tavik]

I agree with everything Dalvyn said. My primary character RARELY goes out to fight anything for the sake of training something up. I find wasting mobs over and over again extremely boring. However, he does spend most of his time discussing various magical things (he a wizard) and debating and teaching and so forth. What bugs me about this is that my character never gets better at hardly anything, which hurts him when he does enter into a RP that requires him to help take out some rather difficult mobs.

Now, wouldn't studying spells and such help him learn to cast them better? I'm speaking in reference to wizards here, but this applies to all classes. You shouldn't have to fight things to get better at something. Wizards can study and research spells, preists preach and what have you to gain favor, bards can do voice exercises, thieves can research different forms of misdirection, and warriors can practice their forms as well as RP some physical training.

I think that for starters, the skills/spells/weapons xp gained from killing mobs should be increased. Again, I know this invites twinking, but I don't think it is a major problem at the moment and it is pretty easy to recognize and thus correct/punish. This way, people are able to gain skill level quickly despite not fighting much due to RP.

In the long run, I wonder how hard it would be to establish a system of skill xp rewards for RP. That is the ideal way to learn somethign in my mind, but I don't think fighting mobs should be discredited. The best way to learn anything is through practice and application, and as such I think people should be able to gain more expreience in these things from fighting mobs.

Just my thoughts. It is pretty frustrating when I never get better at anything, because I'm busy RPing and not willing to waste mobs over and over again.

[Glim]

All this really brings up the question now though:

What is the point of training anymore at all? Because no matter what, B's skills are going to be as low or as high as he can train them from a trainer, they will never improve during the few times he goes adventuring with friends or the like. A's skills are going to to be at about the same level, if maybe a small amount higher, making the hard work he did to actually train useless. B's skills will never improve because he never trains, A's skills will improve at such a slow rate that he has to spend hundreds of hours doing this to see any difference, but he will not have the same interaction and RP that B got.

Now, I agree that FK is a mud and that "something to aspire to", "something to try to reach" would be nice to have. It could be: "I want to know the wilderness very well and the names of the forests and rivers" for a wandering ranger; it would be "I want to have apprentices and teach them" for a wizard; and so on ... I could also be "I want to GM mining" or "I want to GM lapidary". But... I don't agree that the only worthy achievement is to level or "skill-level" up. There's much more than that to FK.

I agree with you, no, that is not the only worthy achievement, but I dont think that it should be made impossible for those who do have that achievement in mind. I want to be a master swordsman. I want to be a master tracker. I want to be a great armoursmith. These things all must come from hard work. Those that work hard to achieve these goals I believe should not be punished, because it also punishes those who merely go out on an adventure every once in a while, because they will never get any better from these few forays.

Here too, I disagree with the principle that "If you don't train up your skills and spend your time bashing mobs, your skills should not evolve as quickly as the skills of someone who trains up and bashes mobs again and again."

But what about the opposite? The principle that if you dont spend time Rping, you should not receive as much fame or glory or be as well known as those who do spends all the time rping and becoming friends and the like. Is that any more fair?

And I don't buy the principle that B's skills should suck either... for two reasons: (1) B might chose to roleplay that he spends his offline time training, and (2) Training is not all.

(1) It would be perfectly understandable from an IC point of view that B thinks that mob-bashing during 6 hours is boring and not the kind of thing he wants to spend his free time on. And if B roleplays that he spends his offline time training, the weak IC excuse of "you do not train, so it's fine if your skills suck" is not valid anymore: because B ICly trains. And if we deny B the option to roleplay that, then it amounts to say that "You have to earn your high skill levels... by doing mindless, repetitive bashing". Talk about being educational! Making plain, mindless, repetitive tasks the only way to get a reward sure is not my idea of good game design.

This can also be reversed, though it is more difficult to say so. If B can RP that he trains in his off time, cannot A RP that he goes out and interects with the populace in his off time?

In some ways, I agree, that repetitive tasks are not the most interesting or fun ways to gain a skill reward, but what are the alternatives? Everything being automatically given upon level? Removing a skill level based system? I would love if there was a way to gain skills that included more RP.

I think that both training and rping can be balanced, and have been, by many players. But making it so that it is nigh impossible to become better in a skill by working towards it I do not believe is a better solution. Rping has its own highly satisfying rewards, but I believe so should training.

The same could be said about a wizard spending his time studying spellbooks, researching spells, and discussing magic with apprentices and collegues. Or a fighter teaching and revisiting battle movements with his apprentices, and so on... Training/mob-bashing/spam-casting is really not the ultimate way to improve. At least not if we want to remain consistent with DnD and the "roleplay" label set on FK.

I believe that a common rule on the mud was that there were many ways to gain experience besides fighting mobs. In my opinion, though, there are not enough ways. Nor is experience the only reward that should be given, I believe there should be many more ways to train your skills than just going off and doing repetative actions. These ways should also include more roleplay. The teach command was a good step, but it only goes so far.

So far I have not given any alternatives, but that is where I am coming to. Lets see...off the top of my head, ideas I have would be...

1. Make it so that skill gain greatly increases if you practice that skill with another person in your group and they are in the same room as you. You never learn faster than with another person to point out your flaws and mistakes and to help you work through them.

2. Include more ways to train skills than by merely typing the same command over and over again. Allow wizards to study their spellbooks or certain spells for however long. Allow warriors to train with each other in ways that do not cause damage to present a more realistic way of actual sparring (*shameless plug* http://www.forgottenkingdoms.com/board/ ... php?t=4490)
. Allows thieves to train in obstacle courses. Priests to meditate over spells. Most importantly, I believe that the skill gain as it is now in the game should stay the same if you are by yourself, but this could be combined with #1 to encourage roleplay and interaction between members of the same class/faith/race.

Yes, I do understand, training is boring for most people. But then again, unless you are learning new things, isnt that how it is in real life?

I will post more when I have more ideas, sorry, long posts and I tend to lose track of what I was talking about. And Dalvyn, if you feel that I singled you out, it was not meant as offense.

Thank you, and feedback is always welcome,

[Taerom]

One of the things I enjoy most about RPGs is the effort/reward system. If you put in the time, you get the really cool character. This goes both for roleplaying and for killing mobs, however. Who really cares if X character is better than Y character in combat if all they do is mindlessly kill mobs? Not me. Now don't mistake that for me saying that no one should care about excessive twinking. However, I like the current system of skill levels awarded for skill usage. I may sound crazy to some, but there's a method to my madness: if everyone of a given class/guild gets X skill at Y level, then everyone of the same class/guild and level is largely the same, and that, to me, is no fun at all. The current system allows for far more dimensions of freedom in which direction you take a character than simply granting level-less skills on each level gain would, in my opinion.

The only problem with the current solution to the problem, as many have already said before me, is the incredible slowness with which skills increase in levels now, even with high intelligence. It solved the problem of twinks getting more powerful, but it created a whole new one at the same time. Not only does it punish everyone on the game, not just the twinks, but there's another effect a lot of people are only starting to realize. I think I've mentioned this on the forums before, but it creates an even greater rift between characters who already have increased their skill levels to a high degree, and those who have not, than ever before. It basically makes the twinks untouchable. What maybe a hundred or so hours of skill training could have evened out before, will now require perhaps a thousand hours of skill training (read: hard twinking) to change. If character X wants to someday be able to beat twink Y in single combat, he's pretty much down on his luck. Now, maybe that won't matter so much a few years down the road if all of the twinks were to pack up and leave. In addition to not seeing that happening, however, I really don't think like that, because we're all still here in the meantime.

I hate to say it because the immortal team works very hard as it is, but the best solution I see to solve the problem of twinking is individual punishments dealt out to twinks. A problem so abstract can't really be solved with code, barring some complex artificial intelligence programming, unless you were to limit everyone to single-level skills, which as I said I find to be very restrictive, and quite frankly not an improvement but quite the opposite. I see skill levels increased by repetition as something that this MUD has that is much better than D20 systems. This makes it so that a random goblin shaman's flamestrikes aren't of the same power as, say, the High Priest of Kossuth's flamestrikes. I am sure that were there a reasonably easy way to have such a system with a pencil, paper, and die, it would be the same in the D20 system, because modeling real [fantasy] life, though boiled down, is really what the D20 system is all about.

[Glim]

I hate to say it because the immortal team works very hard as it is, but the best solution I see to solve the problem of twinking is individual punishments dealt out to twinks.

The problem I see with that though, is that there is no definitive definition of twink. There are exceptions to everything, as well as I think every imm and every person has a different idea of what a twink is. Some people are in a time zone where RP is very rare so they get bored and train. Others it might not be ICly for them to go to a place where people are, so they get bored and train. An imm might log on all the time and see someone training in a certain place alot, but then, what about what that imm doesnt see? That imm might consider a certain player a twink while another imm, from what they have seen, might not. What about the middle ground, and the people who both train and rp, are they still twinks? I dont think that there is a solid enough basis for the idea of a twink to be able to start handing out punishments for such things. There have been many attempts to try and define what a twink is, but also, there has always been too much doubt or too many exceptions to that definition.

[Taerom]

I'm first to admit, whether a character is or is not a twink is almost completely subjective. That's why the problem can't be solved with such an objective solution.

[Jharthyne]

The slow rate of gaining skills reflects the fact that improving something is very difficult. Not everyone can be a master smith, much less be a master smith and a master swordsman at the same time! So it actually makes the MUD more realistic to have slow advancing skills, for it makes players think abt what they want to do with their characters.

But, I play the MUD to get away from the real world, so being too realistic can harm that aspect of fun in a virtual world. Some people play to have lots of interaction with others. Some play because they want to be both a master swordsman and a master smith at the same time. While FK is a RP MUD, the code used to have a balance between hack-and-slash and RP. Right now, the code is biased towards RP, yet hack-and-slash remains part of the FK world (in terms of areas and mobs), which really takes some fun out of the game. It is hard to be a hero (or even just someone who is not your ordinary commoner) if you can't even kill a rat without suffering mortal injuries.

[Dalvyn]

Re: Reward the effort!

The introduction of pay-to-play massive multiplayer online "so-called" roleplaying games have done really really bad things and have worked towards associating things together that should not have been associated in the first place. One of those things is the equation (or implication) "If you put the time into doing something, you should be rewarded for it."

I kind of frown each time I read something like "hard work" or "great effort" used to describe the mindless task of repetingly using a command or bashing mobs or spam-casting. There's no work or effort in there - even a mindless zombie would be able to do that - there's just wasted time.

Now, take a step back to consider the situation as if you (= generic you) were not involved in it. As a general rule, do you think it's a good idea to reward people just for doing something mindlessly repetitive? Is the notion of "time spent" sufficient to entitle someone to a reward? Is it a good idea to support the implication "Yes, it's a good thing to waste your time on doing something that requires no effort except hitting the Enter key every 2 or 3 seconds?"

I would think the answer is no. Ah, of course, if you own a MMORPG and want to be rich and want your players to pay yet another monthly fee, you are going to answer yes... because you want your players to think that spending more time on your game (read: paying more fees) is the only way to get a cool character.

It's a rather extreme view - I agree -, and maybe I'm attributing too much "educational" aspect to the mud, but I definitely think that people who spend 500 hours doing mindless tasks to GM a skill should be told "Hey, dude... what about doing something useful / more interesting / involving other people / requiring some thought / ... instead?" instead of "Wow... what a man! That was a really incredible effort, and you shall be rewarded for it!".

I'm not saying that mindlessly killing = bad. If you are on your own, or if you are bored, or if you just don't feel like doing anything else, sure, do it! In a few words: if you enjoy it, it's fine... in this case, it's its own reward and does not need to get additional reward.

Re: Unreachable goals, everybody is the same

Now, I'm not saying that we should just get rid of skill levels, not at all. Nor am I in favour of a system where people would just "level up to the next stage" after X hours online and all fighters would be copies of each other with the same skills and so on. Nor am I saying that those who want to become master swordsmen or master armoursmith shouldn't be able to: never did I write that people should be stuck with the skill level that trainers could teach them.

No, I was just saying that mindless training as the ONLY way to increase your skills = very bad in my opinion. Someone pointed out that "practice makes perfect". Well, that might be true (for some things) in real life... but should this be applied in the mud or should we just assume that people practice while they are offline? After all, as someone else said, they play the mud also in part to have fun and get away from the boring/annoying/... aspects of real life.

Now... what to replace training with?

Well, there are several options, and once again, I'd rather use something inspired by D&D. In D&D, you have skills (jumping, horse riding, swimming, climbing, hiding, spotting, spell knowledge, concentration, ...) but, of course, you don't roleplay repetition. There wouldn't be much fun in spending (wasting?) 4 hours on sessions where a player would say "I mine", then the DM would answer "You hit the rock, but find nothing" then, after 30 seconds, the player would say "I mine" and the DM would answer "You hit the rock and find a piece of copper!"; then, after 30 seconds, ... you get it.

No, session time is not "wasted" on that. Instead, when a character levels up, (s)he gains "skill points" that can then be distributed amongst the skills. The player then has to choose how (on what skills) to spend those skills. The character could become an expert at hiding and swimming. Or be good at hiding, swimming, riding, and climbing (only good, not an expert... since the skill points are spread amongst 4 skills).

With that system,
- skills can still be increased (and you can become a master in a select skill if you choose to, or more of a generalist good at more than one skill);
- character are still different (you spend your skill points however you want, and no two characters are alike).

Now, on FK... This could be generalized to all things that we call "skills" (including spells, weapon proficiencies, and so on). And skill points might not be given at each level up, but rather, as a reward for good roleplay, as a reward for some quests (and imm-run quests), and also might be given continually as time passes (a bit like kismet).

What would that mean?

- You could still practice a skill by mindlessly using it if you wanted... but that would be far from the most effective way to do it. I think a good way to sum up a "roleplaying mud" would be to say that "People can hack and slash as in a regular mud, but they are inspired to spend most of their time roleplaying with others - and roleplaying can be done while questing/exploring/hacking." And that's exactly what this system does: you can still hack, and you will progress (although very very slowly), but you are inspired to rather spend your time roleplaying.

- You can increase your skills (and choose which skill to increase) without having to spend hours training them. Take part in an imm-run roleplay, or get rewarded by someone, or just spend a few hours on the mud (roleplaying or mindlessly training or whatever), and you will gain skill points that you can use to increase your skills.

- Adventuring, exploration, questing ... all those would still be useful to acquire special benefits (like: the joy of discovering new mobs/items/areas, increasing your character's background, getting quest rewards, acquiring loot and coins, finding hard-to-reach but more expert trainers, ...), but you wouldn't be incited to do them just to increase your skills.

All in all, I don't see much negative with this system (though I'm most likely biased and I'm sure some will find negatives): those who choose to spend their time roleplaying don't get punished by having their skills suck anymore; those who want to hack mindlessly at mobs can still do so; adventure/exploration/questing are still possible and encouraged (especially if they are done with a group where roleplay can be had).

[Caelnai]

Re: Reward the effort!
All in all, I don't see much negative with this system (though I'm most likely biased and I'm sure some will find negatives): those who choose to spend their time roleplaying don't get punished by having their skills suck anymore; those who want to hack mindlessly at mobs can still do so; adventure/exploration/questing are still possible and encouraged (especially if they are done with a group where roleplay can be had).

Well, the talk sure sounds purty...

But I think I brought up a few concerns with implementation in my earlier post. Any comment on those?

[Jharthyne]

Actually, I think that we as players can suggest whatever we want, but ultimately, this is the admin's game, they decide what they want to implement, they steer the game towards their vision of what they want for their MUD. If we as players don't like the way the game is being developed, we can continue to suggest (and hope the admins take our ideas into consideration and maybe even implementation) or we can always go have fun somewhere else. After all, the admins get to choose their players (through strikes and bans) so players also get to choose their admins (by playing on MUDS that they enjoy).

[Dalvyn]

I'm not sure exactly what changes you are alluding to, Caelnai. But if you think they might have been a mistake, or want to suggest another change about area-based systems (i.e., who trains what, who buys what, quests, mobs, equipment, ... but not the commands, the memorization system, ...), feel free to drop a mail to builders@forgottenkingdoms.com. I try and answer all those I get in a timely manner.

[Caelnai]

Apologies that I'm not expressing myself well...so I'll try again. I really didn't want to talk about specific examples, nor am I trying to "complain" or "tell the imms what to do". This thread began with the following;

That said, I feel that many recent changes to the mud have made the game mechanics unnecessarily difficult. I also feel that there is a difference between challenge and frustration.

Dalvyn has made several long replies which I think have been met with alot of player approval; basically that the intent of any changes is to increase RP. Yea! We are all happy with that!

However, we still haven't talked about whether the implementation is working. A few people (including myself) have given examples where the changes have actually been a bit of a detriment to RP. Personally, I'm concerned that the overall plan to decrease skills, buff up mobs, and lower the amount of available coin is actually having the opposite intended effect, and doesn't consider some of those of us who have more "outlier" PCs.

And as a disclaimer, I am assuming that because both players and admin are responding on this thread, it is a topic open for discussion. Apologies again if it is not.

[Zach]

I like what dalvyn was saying... Each level one would get skill points to put to your character.. and during good RP you would gain an extra one. Or am I not understanding the concept of the suggestion?

[Dalvyn]

Yes, Zach, that's the core of the idea above.

overall plan to decrease skills, buff up mobs, and lower the amount of available coin

Decrease skills. The only change I made is to balance out all areas and make them all all follow the same guidelines. Some areas had extra high trainers available to all, while others had very limited trainers. I simply dropped the training levels in the first kind of areas to about the same values as those in the second kind of areas. The idea was that, once again, this was mostly benefitting people "in the know".

Buff up mobs. Mobs were not buffed up intentionally. Though, the buff up could result from two reasons.

A - I had to start with the versions of the areas that were on the mud, since I did not have access to the original files. Yet, there was a bug in the code writing out areas into files that removed all guild information from the mobs (e.g., all thieves and bards became simple rogues, all fighters/rangers/paladins mobs became simple warriors, all mages/evokers/illusionists/... became simple wizards, and so on). In some case, I manually set the guild back, but that was just too tedious and, for some areas, I simply used a search & replace to transform warriors into fighters. That means that some mobs, who might have been simple warriors before, became fighters (and thus got more attacks per rounds, more efficient attacks, and things like bash/punch/kick). Note that ICly, most of those should have been fighters in the first place.

B - Spellcasting mobs benefit from the new spells just like spellcasting PCs (maybe a bit more since the mobs don't need trainers). That means that, if you fight a high level caster, the mob will cast nasty things like weird, finger of death, scintillating pattern, and so on... That's part of the standard fighting programs associated to those mobs. But this code will most likely be revised, since it uses too much resource. So... more to come about that later when the code has been updated.

Amount of coin available. I don't remember changing anything related to that. On the contrary, I added several new options for characters to gain more coins, like escorting mobs from town to town... and more will come. So... without precise examples, I am not sure what modification you are talking about here.

[Lerytha]

So, one possible idea, Dalvyn is the skills being points...

Would they all be gained by points?
Would spells be gained by points?
Would you train skills in the same way they are now, or just points?
Would roleplay-awarded points have to be given by imms?

Just to say... I REALLY like the idea, but would just like clarification as to what it entails... but yes, if that happened, I'd be very very happy.

[Tavik]

I really like like the idea of getting skill points to spend. I think it will benefit both players that like to RP and players that like just wasting things. The ONLY problem I see in this when compared to the current system is that with the current system, people have the POTENTIAL to GM everything they know. This does take a HUGE amount of time, and as far as I know, no one has done it.

However, the simple idea of POSSIBLY with time being able to GM everything give players something to work forward to. Would this be possible in you suggestion, Dalvyn? IMOP it should be if you can gain extra skill point through RP, thus encouaging people to RP as often as possible.

The only other problem I see with this system is in regards to how many skill points a character would get per level in relation to class. If everyone gets a set number of points per level despite class, then classes with fewer skills (fighters) would benefit a lot more than classes with loads of skills (mages). Basically, a mage would have distribute their points more than a fighter would and thus would not be able to learn as much or to a great an extent than fighters (I realize mages are generalist and cannot leanr any spell to it's full potential. I just used the mage as an example).

My suggestion to this would be to vary the amount of of skill points depending on class. Theives and fighters don't have many skills and thus should be given fewer points per level than classes like wizards and priests who now have an obscene amount of skills. Also, I would think that INT would play a factor in how many skill points one gains per level.

Eliminate these two problems and I think you've got a perfect system that works for everybody.

Thoughts?

[Dalvyn]

Well, first of all, it's important to make it clear that it's just a suggestion that I have posted in several forums, nothing is set in stone and the debate as to whether or not to use it is still going. So, don't take my posts as "This is what we are going to have". I don't have access to the code and thus the decision is finally up to the coders.

That also means that we are not yet at a stage where hammering out the finer details is the main goal.

Re: spells, skills, and so on...

Well, as far as the code is concerned, all those things are just skills. The only difference is the header under which they appear when you type 'practice'. So yes, the skill point system could be applied to all of those.

Re: award/reward given only by imms?

Currently, when non-imms give out experience and kismet via the 'reward' command, they actually spend their own kismet. That limit makes it impossible for two players to just spam-reward each other. So I guess that, if skill point awards were given to mortals, there should be some sort of limitation... and having to spend your own skill points to give skill points to others is not very IC. So... I would think that only imms could do that perhaps. But, as I pointed out above, nothing is set in stone.

Re: Potential to GM everything

That does not change. Spend enough time online, roleplay well and get enough rewards, and you might end up GMing everything. It would still take a HUGE amount of time and good roleplay.

Re: Classes with fewer/more skills

Several options are available. One of them is indeed to give out different amounts of skill points, depending on the class, but I'm not too fond of it, because it does not allow for much refinement. Another option would be to set "learning difficulties" on skills (= skills, spells, everything).

For example, it might take 1 skill point to get better at 'gnome' as a language, but it might take 3 skill points to get better at 'dodge'.

Better yet, the learning difficulty could vary between classes:

For example, hide could be given to all characters... but improving hide might cost 2 points for a thief, and 8 points for a cleric of Oghma.

More... the learning difficulty could depend on the skill level to reach:

For example, it would take only 2 skill points to improve hide when you are inept at it, but it would take 20 skill points to improve it when you are a master.

And, finally, classes with more skills (like casters) do not have to be GM in all of them. They might have to select a few skills/spells they want to specialize in and accept to not be that good with the other spells. Another option would be to divide down some of the fighter skills. For example, rapier and short sword would be 2 different skills (they are currently both grouped under the name Thrusting blades).

[Amalia]

I think following the D&D method of skill distribution in terms of skill point numbers would also work well here-- the classes that need more skills get them, and that number is modified by their INT (thus keeping the idea that INT has an impact on how fast you learn). Fighters get other things like attack bonuses and weapon proficiencies to make up for fewer skills. The Class-skills vs. non-class-skills system appeals to me too, where it effectively takes twice as many skill points for, say, a fighter or rogue to increase their Spellcraft as it does for a wizard or priest. Then any class can learn (almost) any skill, but some classes will (as appropriate) be more adept at picking up certain skills than others.

One thing I don't think we should carry over from D&D is the skill cap by level, since I think if a character really wants to spend 95% of his time training (for example) rope use it seems reasonable that he'd get really great at rope use, at the cost of his other skills.

I have one suggestion regarding the "extra" skill points given out-- if it weren't too hard to implement, perhaps they could be for specific skills, if there is one appropriate to the RP? For example, if Bob the apprentice and Jim the archmage are having an in-depth discussion on Bull's Strength, Bob might become better at casting that spell, whereas Jim's advance might have more to do with any questions Bob has that challenge him and force him to rethink something-- so he could get better at Bull's Strength as well, or he could improve at Knowledge: Weave (if such exists) or gain some spellcraft, or even gain some teaching ability if that is ever instituted.

[Rhiel]

Wow, point well made, Dalvyn. I understand your line of thinking.

I too had noticed the frustrations mentioned, but now, as I believe I may simply state, all we (as players) should have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride. While it seems frustrating now, it would appear that this is merely an expected result of a massive overhaul, as well as a fair amount of exploratory experimentation. It sounds like the imms and coders have a lot of good things in store for us. I think we should endure the inconveniences (perceived or no) and let them work their magic. My faith was waning, but I've seen so many keen ideas addressed, and I must confess my thoughts do not stretch that far forward. Faith restored. Sorry for doubting, guys.

With that shameless plug inserted, I /do/ have a question.

I know you all are volunteers, and that you work with what time you have, but is there /any/ sort of timeline for these updates and grand ideas to be put into motion?

Thankee

[Balek]

I really like Dalvyn's idea, and in fact I was going to suggest something very similar myself before I read his post. I have a question, however. Under the proposed skill point system, would the current system of learning be maintained? I would like to see mindless training as a possibility, albeit a slow one, for leveling up skills because sometimes I'm just logging on for an hour between classes to smash some mobs and pass the time. It would be nice if I could still see occasional skill gains from doing that.

Other than that, I like the proposed system. It makes sense to tier skill point usage so that it costs more skill points to bump up a skill to master than to bump one up to apprentice. Ideally I suppose these skill points will be given out at levels, for quests and by imms. I don't think you mentioned giving them out for quests, but I think that the possibility should be considered as a way of linking skill advancements to higher quality fighting than mindless bashing.