A Plea for Decay (Character)

[dafels]

why taking a vacation from the game should be punishing? This idea is ridiculous

[terechgracz]

Its not punishment, it's basically stat cap that allows extreme grinders to waste their hours to get advantage of stats. The way Granger proposed it would be pretty punishing, but the way I did it would be just a stat cap that allows to get past it but with cost of maintenance.

[pppp]

Taking a vacation will be punishing under character decay scheme.

[Granger]

Taking a vacation will be punishing under character decay scheme.

Which would be an upgrade to the as-is of a vacation being defeating under the current endless growth scheme.

[Shipright]

One of the reasons why I decided against a level below which the decay stops is that this allows to pre-produce alts that can be hibernated (idiocracy style) till they might be useful.

Another reason is to attach a maintenance cost to alts, which at the moment doesn't exist as currently you bring it up to the needed level to eg. forage stuff and it'll can operate till the end of the world without any further need for LP or FEP.

Which are both things I would like to kill off as a side effect of this suggestion.

That's nice thought but, in my mind i'd want being said that X is your midpoint of game, you won't decay untill you get there. Let's say this X be such to allow you to kill boars, bears, overall get standard industry going. This would mean quality from that level would be mediocre but quality that goes above that point is getting really valuable items because of industry going on. This would allow most people feel safe for their stats but still forcing 'big bois' to give more and more effort.
Alts which are on that X level are useless untill you shove another thousands feps so you have to keep your stats because you'll stop being able to produce valuable goods.

The threshold after which decay takes place should be dynamic. Make it the median skill level of the entire world population active within a certain timeframe. This way what constitutes a "big boy" and subject to decay is relative to the overall world development and what constitutes a newbie that needs the crutch of the non-decay threshold expands as end game players push the median higher. A late game influx of new players may lower the median, but such a phenomenon would surely be a welcome development given the repeated participation death of every single world. Also, alts would lower median average too, so it is a slight tax on those who abuse them.

[Fierce_Deity]

The threshold after which decay takes place should be dynamic. Make it the median skill level of the entire world population active within a certain timeframe. This way what constitutes a "big boy" and subject to decay is relative to the overall world development and what constitutes a newbie that needs the crutch of the non-decay threshold expands as end game players push the median higher. A late game influx of new players may lower the median, but such a phenomenon would surely be a welcome development given the repeated participation death of every single world. Also, alts would lower median average too, so it is a slight tax on those who abuse them.

Alts lowering the median as a tax is dumb. Don't try to pass off a major flaw of your suggestion as a perk. If they did go with a dynamic decay threshold it would have to be based off the top 1000 players. Spawning in 10000 alts to raise the decay rate on your enemies does not sound like a good idea.

But I do want decay mechanics to be added, would be pretty nice.

[pppp]

Meh, dynamic threshold will still move upwards and over time will devalue mobs as a challenge. Of course we could go raising animal stats by the same factor but then newbs will meet ants that are as strong as bear at the start of the world but with armor bypass. So we can continue this raising initial stats of new characters by the same factor and natural qualities and all the shit until we some day realize this is utterly stupid.

[Shipright]

The threshold after which decay takes place should be dynamic. Make it the median skill level of the entire world population active within a certain timeframe. This way what constitutes a "big boy" and subject to decay is relative to the overall world development and what constitutes a newbie that needs the crutch of the non-decay threshold expands as end game players push the median higher. A late game influx of new players may lower the median, but such a phenomenon would surely be a welcome development given the repeated participation death of every single world. Also, alts would lower median average too, so it is a slight tax on those who abuse them.

Alts lowering the median as a tax is dumb. Don't try to pass off a major flaw of your suggestion as a perk. If they did go with a dynamic decay threshold it would have to be based off the top 1000 players. Spawning in 10000 alts to raise the decay rate on your enemies does not sound like a good idea.

But I do want decay mechanics to be added, would be pretty nice.

I don't consider the alt effect a flaw, only something end game players would not like so thus addressed as being better for them (the lower the threshold, the more accessible the game is to new players and thus an active world). But we can say the calculation is made using the highest leveled character from each account if you don't want alts impacting the result.

[Tamalak]

I'm totally on board with WORLD decay. Crop quality dropping the longer it goes unharvested etc. Make it so that if the world lasts 10 years we don't end up with q10,000 seeds, but rather works in a cycle.

CHARACTERS should not decay. Diminishing returns for stats along with players joining and quitting is sufficient. And if I took off from the game for a week and came back to see my character even slightly decayed I'd never want to play again.

[Vigilance]

Taking a vacation will be punishing under character decay scheme.

Which would be an upgrade to the as-is of a vacation being defeating under the current endless growth scheme.

How?

I'm totally on board with WORLD decay. Crop quality dropping the longer it goes unharvested etc. Make it so that if the world lasts 10 years we don't end up with q10,000 seeds, but rather works in a cycle.

CHARACTERS should not decay. Diminishing returns for stats along with players joining and quitting is sufficient. And if I took off from the game for a week and came back to see my character even slightly decayed I'd never want to play again.

Your mentioned world decay would do literally nothing but gatekeep new players out of quality things without player interaction. The gigafarms and bots that produce current flax/turnips/who gives a shit are not going to be affected by literally anything short of environmental caps, which themselves lead to the problem of "Person in ideal area is able to quality race harder than person in not ideal area" and the search for that area is not a fun one