by Fantastication » Sat Jan 08, 2011 7:43 pm Not every part of this system has to be adopted, this is just what I've thought is the most complete version. All numbers/formulas are just examples, tweaking is expected. Critique is welcome.
A quick recap of the current system:
- Every activity gives LP, varying by quality of the result or difficulty of the creature (or amount of LP your victim had)
- Skills are increased at a linear rate ( 100*x, where x is the rank you are increasing to)
- LP is also used to increase personal claim sizes and purchase static skills (Fishing/Lumberjacking etc)
A very brief outline of the proposed system, make sure you read it all before freaking out:
- Skill increase cost becomes exponential (from 100*x to x²+50x)
- A new Trainer/Teacher incrementable skill is added, allowing players to teach some of their skills to a player, giving the student a discount on LP used
- Each skill usage has a chance of increasing the skill, the chance based on a few factors
Details:
The simplest and, most likely, controversial part of the system is the exponential increase in skill increase cost, but before you worry too much, here's a few numbers and a shiny graph to show you how it's not as bad as you imagine.
Cost per skill increase, blue is current, red is proposed. Y-axis is LP cost, X-axis is skill level.
It's slightly cheaper while the skill is under 50, but after that, wooo it's expensive, hey? Not quite. The cumalative cost to get to 300 (I picked 300 because it's a nice high-end number for almost all skills, many aren't ever needed past this) under the current system is roughly 4.5 million LP. That's quite a bunch. Under the new system, it'd be just over 11 million, providing you never had anyone teach you and never had a random increase by using the skill. That's an at-worst number and it's still only 2.5 times the current amount.
So how does this teaching system work then? Easy!
In the village RandomVillageName, Alice has just recruited a brand new player, Bob. Bob has Farming at 1. Alice has Farming at 300. Alice is tired of farming and Bob would like to take over. Alice can give Bob a discount on his Farming increase costs by teaching him, provided he has the LP and he isn't increasing his Farming beyond her Farming or her Teacher/Trainer*2, whichever is the lower. How much is the discount? I'd start at 30% or so, but that's just an initial guess. It could also be affected by the intelligence of the teacher or student or both, lots of options here.
The bonus of the teaching system is that creates another market, education. For the low low price of a chest of cavebulbs, Charlie will teach you Farming up to 150 (but not up to his 450, because he still wants his q450 fibres to be marketable too).
But that's still an extra 3 and a bit million LP to get to 300, let alone higher, whaaa! Well yes, but that's where random increases come in.
Turns out Alice had no Teacher/Trainer skill and wasn't interested in learning to do it, so Bob's on his own. Each time Bob uses Farming (planting, harvesting, perhaps even ploughing), he has a chance to increase his skill. Let's say the basic chance to increase is 1/(2x), where x is your current skill level. Since you have 18 chances to increase every time you resow a small 3x3 plot, Farming gets no bonus (Cooking might have a 2x multiplier, since it takes longer/more resources per attempt). You have a 50% chance of getting to Farming 2 the very first seed you plant, but at 300 that chance has dwindled down to a mighty small 0.16%. There's a few options for making that bigger, one is to change the formula, easy to do, the other is to increase the chance by 0.1% or similar each time you use the skill, meaning after 1000 uses you are absolutely guaranteed, even if you normally fail a 99.9% chance, to get that increase. Grindy? Not really, regardless of whether you increase or not from use, you're still getting LP anyway, so you can still go out and farm/hunt/kill players/mass produce buckets and increase your farming without having to grind farming to increase your farming.
Pros:
- More options in how to increase skills, farming wheat/flour/bread-dough is no longer the best way to increase your MM, but it's still viable.
- Tighter knit villages/community, with those spending the time increasing their teaching skill having the option of helping their fellow villagers/selling their services for a profit.
- A slow down on skill advancement after 50, not hardcapping but gradually making it harder and harder to get to crazy high numbers like 1000 (which isn't relevant for many skills anyway, Carpentry/Survival for example).
Cons:
- A larger amount of server calculations, as each task performed requires an increase check.
- Some skills don't suit the system particularly well, like Exploration, however, it could be considered a skill performed each time you 'see' a new foragable/scent, so not all hope is lost, Marksmanship is also a bit odd, as the more you increase the faster you get, leading to somewhat easier increases.
- Some skills are perfomed less often (eg. Smithing), balancing what's 'fair' might be hard, as you can spam nuggets into bars into nuggets etc and it counts just as much as making a B12, so each recipie might need it's own modifier to the random chance.
- <insert con here>, I've done a bunch of thinking, but that doesn't mean I've found them all, post them if you think of them.
That's the system I have in mind. Again, not all of it has to be included, training isn't neccessarily required, the random increases aren't required, the increasing chance of random increases isn't required and so on.
Bash/flame/critique/cheer/implement away.
