Category Abilities, Skills and Magic (24)
Topic The Experience System (15)
By DR-MAELONA from PLAY.NET
On Mar 28, 2002 at 12:38
Subject Re: Survival -- bug or not? (2813)

Pell: << Would you mind expanding on this for those of us who didn't make it to Vegas? Especially how this would impact rangers, please? >>

Certainly. :)

First of all, you should know that we haven't discussed new Ranger requirements yet, so I have no definites to tell you about on that. (As a side note, I don't think there's too much that needs changing in regard to current advancement reqs for Rangers, although obviously I reserve unto us the right to make wholesale changes if those do ultimately appear necessary during discussions!)

To the specifics of your question. I had said, "If Brigdha approves of the new way we're planning to handle "general learning", if you like, then traditional averaging will go away when it comes to the new advancement requirements we're currently working on."

The current situation for most Guilds that have an average requirement of some kind is that they have some specific requirements in various individual skills in a skillset, plus an average in all the skills in that skillset that your Guild includes in the average.

What we're hoping for is this: Asking for, say, 2 ranks per level in each of your top 6 Survival skills. Or, 1 rank per level in each of your top 3 Lore skills. (Obviously the amount of ranks required per level, and the number of skills concerned, varies from Guild to Guild.)

This allows for two major improvements to the handling of advancement requirements: First, it allows the player to choose where he's going to focus his training. Second, it allows us not to have to re-do everyone's advancement requirements every time we introduce a new skill (and new skills are planned on an ongoing basis).

The disadvantage of traditional averaging is that, eventually, it only makes mathematical sense to train every skill in the set. Thus, players are effectively forced to train all the skills available to them in the set, and this ultimately leads to cookie-cutterism.

The disadvantage some higher level people will see with the proposed new method is that they may be deeply invested in certain boring, tedious skills that they hate, just because they've been required to train them thus far, and those skills will naturally become the "top three Lores" under the proposed new method. Therefore, when new skills are added into the set that these people might be interested in using, they will have a bunch of work to do on the new skill if they wish to train it up high enough that it nudges one of the old skills out of the "top three" for advancement requirement purposes.

However, my attitude is that if people are interested enough in the new skill, they will work it anyway just because it's fun to do, which will lead to its naturally catching up.

Pell, this is how we've handled Survival and Lore in the Guilds we've already worked on. Note that we have not yet worked on any Survival or Lore Primary Guilds, though, and obviously a Primary skillset generally warrants specific requirements rather than "your choice" requirements. Additionally, this new process has yet to be approved by my boss (Brigdha) so all may yet change. What I've outlined above is what I'm hoping for as a future process, though. :)

Maelona