1) creates an ever-growing gap between winners and losers, and between existing players and newcomers, in both cases pushing the latter ones out of the game until a wipe;
2) makes it highly problematic to balance unnaturally high players' stats and items with natural objects.
The idea is not much refined, but I suppose it's better to start a talk early than not to start it at all in an endless internal pondering.
The main reason I see to have a decay is that any personal number left to unilaterally grow and affect a gameplay will give an advantage to already playing people over those who don't play yet, an advantage groundless and useless for players as for real people. It's just putting ones over others. Such growing gap can work at early stages as a marketing move to motivate people to get in, like saying "get in the game earlier or lose it". It will lure some additional players while the gap is still small, but later the same gap will become a thing blocking the inflow of players.
A disclaimer.
The idea is applicable only if jorb&loftar have intention to get rid of endless world wipes needed because of ever-growing Q gap and ever-declining population. If this is not the case, restarting the quality race every N months can be the answer as well.
An important point.
"Quality" after implementation of progressive decay becomes a different indicator, and can't be directly compared to the existing Q in a way like "We've reached quality X in a World N, and now we have quality Y that is more(less), so it's cool(crap).
What I suggest.
To apply a progressive decay of quality on everything player-made with Q, and to stats. A progressive decay means the higher value you have, the faster it ticks down. As Q becomes lower, decay changes (becomes slower) according to the new value. So, instead of eternal increase, players will experience increasing resistance of, let's say, nature, until they get to a Q where their efforts suffice only to keep it that high. While they more or less stop growing Q higher at this point, the very fact of being at this Q, owning and using items of this Q (with respective power), becomes an acknowledgement of their efforts. It is essentially a difference between an odometer and a speedometer, with the former being currently implemented Q and the latter being suggested one. It can be easily seen that a mileage and a speed are not directly comparable values.
Natural entities should not be affected by decay. That is: unpicked forageables, trees, boulders, wild animals, unmined ore tiles, terrain quality nodes and so on. Wells should decay only to their natural quality. I'm not sure about domestic animals and unharvested crops, and tree qualities may need a rework, as (AFAIK) they have no natural nodes and aren't easily divided into natural and player-cultivated ones. Generally I mean no decay on natural entities that are not growing in Q either. As things are taken, picked, caught, killed, etc. to have their Q raised or to be used in Q growth, their Q starts decaying from that moment.
While progressive decay is not a cap, it still puts a vague limit to the numbers that can appear in the game. This should greatly help with keeping Q of the world resources, animal strength, and other Q-based mechanics relevant, as natural Qs can be set to exist up to the highest imaginably reachable Q... well, up to the Q which decays significantly to the moment you bring it home... or other way round, decay can be adjusted to fit possible Qs into existing mechanics. And while it is a kind of limit, it can be pushed by players. So it solves problem #2.
Also, as other players are not building up an endless "mileage" that you'll have to repeat sooner or later to have a chance against them, one won't get the pressure to grind as fast as possible _every_ moment of the game. One still may need to grind as fast as possible at some particular moment to be competitive for some time, but what's important, regardless of how long he and his rivals are sitting here already. This applies both to newbies and to the people thrown back to a subpar level by mid-game defeat, thus solving problem #1.
Now to numbers.
How much should be the decay? It should create a challenging, increasingly steep "slope" somewhere around the top of natural Qs. I've thought about quadratic and cubic progression, but they both seem to either impact casual players too much or to leave Q of many hundreds still possible for top ones. An exponential progression seems to be better at combining ease at lower Qs and a constraint at higher Qs.
As for numbers, it's up to the jorb&loftar who hopefully have statistics on what Qs players have and how fast they grow, and a vision on what Qs natural objects have or should have. Very, very roughly, only for example, I can imagine something like 10^((Q/100)-1) units per day. It equals to:
- at Q30: -1Q roughly in 5 days
- at Q50: -1Q roughly twice a week
- at Q100: -1Q a day
- at Q200: -10Q a day
And the decay at Q10 and lower, I suppose, should be set to zero. Otherwise it will become, according to the formula, once a 8 days at Q10. It's still a bit too much a nuisance at that stage.
Now I come to think of it, it's probably better to count time between decay ticks, so the top items won't keep their Q a full day regardless of how unimaginably high the Q is. The time can be calculated as 1/ticks per day, for example. Being precise at this doesn't matter much. Unfortunately it matters that one tick at Q200, plus one tick at Q199, plus one tick at Q198, and so on, doesn't sum to 10Q in a day because later ticks are counted against less than 200Q. It's more noticeable at Q300, as it will lose only 53Q tick by tick over the 24h instead of 100Q planned. As I played with numbers a bit, it seems that "100" in the example formula (a Q level that gets decay of -1 per day) can be tweaked to something like 80. Then Q300 will really get 100 times a -1Q in the next 24h.
Examples of how it looks like with duration between ticks equal to 1/(10^((Q/80)-1) days:
- Q11 in a week and 6 hours becomes Q10
- Q12 in a week becomes Q11 (then obviously Q10, taking 2 weeks and 6 hours total)
... - Q14 in 4 weeks, in four steps, becomes Q10
... - Q20 in a month becomes Q15
... - Q37 in a week becomes Q35, Q29 in a month
... - Q56 in 48 hours becomes Q55, Q49 in 2 weeks, Q43 in a month
... - Q80 becomes Q79 next day, Q58 in a month, Q45 in two.
... - Q104 turns into Q103 in 12 hours and 1 minute, Q102 next day, Q92 after a week, Q83 after two.
... - Q190 will barely last an hour before becoming Q189, Q172 in 24 hours, Q82 in a month.
... - Q250, if it happens somehow, will lose quality in 10-minutes ticks. Yet Q195 in 24h.
Additions.
- The formula for items used in active manner can have a counter for usage-inflicted wear as well, like Q = f(Qcrafted,Tcrafted,Wcounter).
- I suppose, the decay of quality can even help with siege mechanics, if walls are made to have quality that affects soak (durability?) and can be increased by repairing it with materials of higher Q. Then the siege supposedly becomes the game of pumping and sustaining Qs of walls vs Qs of siege machines (decaying too).
- The main downside I see is that people who like to engage in a race for the sake of being nominated as a winner at the end of a session... are likely be utterly disappointed. An absence of sessions, and thus impossibility of being recorded as unbeatable winners, may become the absence of goals and fun for them. Perhaps it can be partially solved with creating a kind of sessions on the base of seasons or in-game years.
- Another possble downside I thought of, this may somewhat favor attackers over defenders, as attackers would need to burst their Q only for the moment of an attack, while defenders would need to keep defences constantly. OTOH it would be not much effective to loot high Q from others if you can't sustain that level yourself.
I'm aware of A Plea for Decay (Character) topic, just thought that non-linear decay on everything may be a different approach. I won't object to being moved or merged though.
Feel free to correct my English if you really wish.
