2003-08-13: MrTact's Thoughts on Gaining Skills

MrTact's Thoughts on Gaining Skills

Aug 13 2003 1:30PM

This was originally posted to Development at uo.com.

I have been thinking long and hard about what to write about in this Team Comment. This morning, I saw a thread on the message boards from a player who had returned to the game but had given up in disgust over the tediousness of skill gaining. This inspired me to devote this article to skill gain--a topic I have been hinting at for months. This is a summary of my personal beliefs about what needs to happen with skill gain and some notions I have arrived in response to the massive amount of feedback I solicited a couple of months ago.

Caveat: these are MY thoughts. This is not "the plan." I am mentioning these things in order to stimulate feedback from the community. As any changes to skill & stat gain are purely speculative at this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether the changes we end up doing will resemble these thoughts in any way, shape or form. My overall philosophies

• Stat and skill gain should not require any special gameplay. You should just do your thing and get your gains at reasonable intervals.
• Gain rates should be the same no matter when or how long you choose to play.
• Gain rates should be predictable.
• Gains should be quick enough at low levels for new players to feel like they are making progress and slow enough at high levels for experienced players to feel a sense of accomplishment.
• With reasonable gain rates through regular gameplay, macroing should be unnecessary and should be discouraged.
• All skills should gain using the same algorithm. Individual skills should not be any easier or harder to learn.
• The algorithm should be simple and straightforward. Complicating things simply separates those players who have figured out how to finesse the system from those who haven’t.

My thoughts on Skill gain

• Checks for skill gain should happen after each skill use. Most skill gains should happen on successful checks, but there should be a small chance of gaining on a failure, especially at low skill levels, to help "bootstrap" new characters.
• Successful skill checks that are more difficult should yield more skill points. Easier skill tests should yield less.
• There should be a minimum gain interval that scales as your skills & total skill points increase (i.e. ROT). This is to curb macroing and increase the predictability of skill growth.

• This interval can be higher on abyss-type shards.
• It could also potentially be tied into some game mechanic, e.g. players could complete quests to alter a global skill gain interval modifier. (With emphasis on COULD there; this is one of my more pie-in-the-sky ideas :-)

• There should be a maximum gain interval (i.e. GGS), after which you automatically gain.

My thoughts on Stat gain

• Checks for stat gain should happen after each skill use. You should not have to succeed to be eligible to gain a stat.
• There should not be an arbitrary limit on the number of stat gains you can make over time.
• There should be a minimum gain interval that scales as your stats & total stat points increase.
• Stat gains should be managed using stat locks instead of having to know which skills raise a particular stat.
• There should be a maximum gain interval, like GGS. If you don’t gain a stat within a certain amount of time, you should just gain in it.

How long should it take to Grandmaster a skill? This is a very subjective (and contentious) issue, but I will take a chance and throw my hat into the ring. My feeling is that the first skill you GM should take about 40 hours of dedicated gameplay, longer if you rely on GGS. For a hardcore player, this is about 2 weeks. For a casual player, maybe 8 weeks (but the casual player will derive more benefit from GGS, so it’s probably not a direct linear relationship). Each subsequent skill should take some incrementally larger amount of time. If that amount were 20% of the base time, a 7xGM would take at least (roughly) 450 hours, or 22.5 weeks (5 months). If it were 10%, that would be about 360 hours, or 18 weeks (4.5 months). Those numbers seem pretty close to reasonable for a hard-core player, but the casual player numbers (40 months, 34 months) don’t seem appropriate.

So what about stat gains? Right now you can gain 10 stat points a day. I feel that for a new character, that’s too low, and for a character close to their stat cap, it’s too high. Maybe 2 weeks to raise a stat into the 100 range? Anyway, those are my thoughts. To reiterate, only my thoughts, meant to provoke discussion and nothing more just yet. So, go discuss!

MrTact

Lead Server Programmer

Ultima Online

References: