Topic: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I think there should be a small reward for those people who are actually active, right now the only thing stopping really active players from being the best is the fact that they have been playing for a short time. Take Eve for example, I used to play it almost everyday but because I hadn't had my account for 6 months I couldn't get into any of the really cool stuff. I just don't think its fair that people can sit in a hanger for a year, come out and have the best skills when someone else who has been working hard for 2 months has nothing but the basics.

Here is what I propose:
- Make it so people who are active in game earn a small bonus to XP, maybe 1.5 points a minute instead of 1.
- To stop people from farming there should be an activity timer of like 15 minutes or something.

Just an idea I think that would like to be implemented into the game.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Greetings:

I agree. A small incentive for the active players to get an "edge up". Even though you still have to buy the skills with NIC which requires mining etc., hence activity. Money can be made fairly quickly if you know what you're doing and have a specialized bot. This incentive would help keep some from being inactive for a month then just logging on for a day to make enough NIC  to buy whatever. This wouldn't stop such activity, I guess if that's your style of play. Instead, it will give a little bonus reward to those who are regular contributors to the online world.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I really liked eve's implant approach. With a little more risk, you basically turned your money into more skills. I can imagine a similar system here.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

There where and I believe still are many many threads in EVE about this.
1, Once ppl program some bots which will be playing 24/7 it will get inbalanced.
2, It is not healthy to spend all you free time behind a PC espetially if you sit behind one in work which alot of ppl do. This system would even more encourage and reward ppl spending unhealthy amouth of time in the game.
2, Why should you get ep which you can spend for misslel if you using laser?
3, Implants would be a very nice.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

No, never any grind-based EP, please, unless you're going to scrap the entire system. Also, a 50% boost in EP rate is not a small boost, it's an insane bump to grinding, and makes sure that you're going to have bots on 24/7.

How are you going to define active play? Is it enough to be logged on and in terminal? If not, what do the "really active players" do when they're wardecced to get this 50% bonus?

Plus, if you didn't have anything to do in Eve for 6 months, you weren't looking. You could be a tackler in less than 2 weeks, and the actual skills that you learn there are far, far more important than any skills that you trained. There's a reason that people that buy characters and ships are pretty much fodder for comedy killmails.

I would like to see a way to increase my attributes, though - learning skills or implants or something similar.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I agree with Jonas that there should be no Grind for EP.
Its a fixed rate and thats it.
50% is a huge amount and as the Devs are already talking about reducing the ep rate per day (which I think is a bad idea) I cant see them allowing an increase.

And as pointed out EP alone do not a good player make, as Jonas says give an unskilled player a highly trained Toon and its a recepie for disaster, like the guy in Eve who bought a capital toon and had no idea about anything and so lost 2 carriers and a dread in the same day. The dread had an XL shield booster fitted not a capital shield booster as he did not know jack!!
He quit Eve soon after we still laugh about it

Its like life you realy want something you will have to work for it and it takes time

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Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Forget about game design. This simply won't happen due to Perpetuums business model upon release.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I don't often get to say this, but I completely agree with Jonas on this one. It should remain at a flat static gain to ep. And as for the Dev's decreasing ep gain, I don't like the idea either, it will already take years to max just the current skills. If they really want to slow it down, just increase the ep costs for each skill by a small percentage. Anyway, back on topic, the bot problem pretty much spells it out. I can personnaly say thhat if that were implemetned, I myself would program a bot to get the ep bonus, because I'd feel that gives me a even chance with the other 70% that would also use a bot. It's just a bad idea period.

Last edited by Blackomen (2009-12-04 13:14:08)

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Jonas Pharamond wrote:

Plus, if you didn't have anything to do in Eve for 6 months, you weren't looking. You could be a tackler in less than 2 weeks, and the actual skills that you learn there are far, far more important than any skills that you trained.

Agreed! I am a semi-new player to Eve myself and I quickly realized that while I wasn't going to be in the biggest ship on the field anytime soon, it was often those very same big ships that would BEG for new players to come out and support them because they needed scouts, tacklers, bait, etc.

Games like Perpetuum and Even, any sandbox game, will always have a place for new players you just have to seek it out.

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Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

" Make it so people who are active in game earn a small bonus to XP, maybe 1.5 points a minute instead of 1."   

I second this method.

Better yet, have it scale. The longer you are in at any given time the higher the Xfactor of points you get. Maybe track activity time, or the number of things killed over a given time peroid and give them faster training.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Jim wrote:

" Make it so people who are active in game earn a small bonus to XP, maybe 1.5 points a minute instead of 1."   

I second this method.

Better yet, have it scale. The longer you are in at any given time the higher the Xfactor of points you get. Maybe track activity time, or the number of things killed over a given time peroid and give them faster training.

I had a nice long post typed in response to this, but I decided that it was too much. I think most everyone that supports leaving things as is understands the points of a time based over an activity based system. I'm not sure that those that support changing the system understand a time based system and so I'd like to hear what the questions are. Maybe those of us that like the current system can share our understanding on the system or one of the devs can post their reasons for the chosen system.

Last edited by Fumen (2009-12-14 07:48:19)

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Jim wrote:

" Make it so people who are active in game earn a small bonus to XP, maybe 1.5 points a minute instead of 1."   

I second this method.

Better yet, have it scale. The longer you are in at any given time the higher the Xfactor of points you get. Maybe track activity time, or the number of things killed over a given time peroid and give them faster training.

So you want to penalise those players that have real lives and dont have lots of time to play every day then.

It also raises the spectre of "leveling schemes" or Bots as in games like WoW.

So I am AGAINST the activity based boost.

I much prefer time based and time based alone although I am not sure the current 1 point per minute is the best way to do it.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I also disagree with topic starter, if i dont have time for beeing ingame, and someone who doesnt have smth to do will play = have better skills.
1 point\minute is a very good idea, so with time, when daddies waiting to gain their skill from 9 to 10 , meanwhile newbie extends it from 1 to 9 smile
a good idea with implants, which can give better attributes

Last edited by Black Punisher (2009-12-15 21:32:30)

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I think 1 per min is too slow.
And some basic extention could lower the "rank" from 5 to some 1-2 .

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

CHORT wrote:

I think 1 per min is too slow.
And some basic extention could lower the "rank" from 5 to some 1-2 .

Devs have tought about making EP gain actually lower after launch actually, but they might not have complete plan on it either at this time.

EP gain seems a bit low at start, but after couple months it seems fine or actually little fast to some point.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Jim wrote:

Better yet, have it scale. The longer you are in at any given time the higher the Xfactor of points you get. Maybe track activity time, or the number of things killed over a given time peroid and give them faster training.

If there was to be an activity bonus, I would only support the opposite of this statement. Start at like a 25% bonus and downgrade to 0% over the course of 2-4 hours. Resets everyday back to 25%. This would encourage players to get in game and be productive without giving a huge advantage to those that play all day. In a game that requires player activity to run the economy, some sort of incentive would really do a lot to improve the productivity.

Another option is to give out daily assignments for small EP gains. You could require players to select a profession that could only be changed once in a day. Then, at the beginning of the day they receive a corresponding assignment with a 24H time limit. This quest could scale in difficulty as you gain more overall EP. For example, if you choose to be a miner you get a mission to exploit 100k Titan Ore as a newbie. When completed, the minerals are still yours, as the purpose is to produce for players on the market, not NPCs, so you then have 100k titan ore to sell to a local refiner and some extra EP.

As you advance, lets say you have earned 1.5x the amount of EP to max your mining skills, your missions will have progressed to much more difficult minerals found far outside of police zones, thus if you wish to continue getting bonus EP, you need to make connections with a security team or join a corp with an outpost.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

I would say increase the EP scale for extensions and lower the starting costs of extensions.

At forst its quite slow going, as you have easily enough money for bigger and better things but you have to wait to get the EP to use them.

Once you get going you get more than enough EP to level up secondary things like economy stuff and e-war without worrying its cutting into your primary goal.

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Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

The bonus for "really active players" is that they have the NIC to buy stuff and replace things, and , oh i don't know...have fun playing the game?  People who are just stockpiling EP offline will get skills, sure, but no NIC to buy things to use those skills. 

Any "EP boost" will mess up the entire system.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Styx wrote:

Forget about game design. This simply won't happen due to Perpetuums business model upon release.

This is the real issue here guys. Time based experience (EP) gain is a totally different model from grindy MMOs. Having a flat rate over time means:

- People are encouraged to pay for more than one account.
- People are encouraged to continue to pay for their accounts even when they're not actively playing.
- Those with less time (i.e. those in full time work) benefit more from this system than those with more time (i.e. the young/students/unemployed).

Those in full time work are also those with more disposable income and thus the means to pay for multiple accounts. It's a different model with a different target market - older, more patient, more cerebral - compare the depth of gameplay you find here to that of a grind based MMO which tend to have lots of pretty colours but fairly shallow game mechanics.

Asking for a bonus to EP for active players is akin to asking the game to be totally redesigned with a different market and different playstyle in mind - not gonna happen.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

How about the ultimate NIC sink? You can buy 256 EP for 1M NIC and that price doubles per run.

dex@dexhome:~/projekte/perl6$ echo 'for (1E6, 2E6,  *+* ... *)[0..10] Z (256, 512, *+* ...*)[0..10] -> $nic, $ep { say "$nic for $ep" }' | /usr/local/bin/perl6
> 1000000 for 256
2000000 for 512
3000000 for 768
5000000 for 1280
8000000 for 2048
13000000 for 3328
21000000 for 5376
34000000 for 8704
55000000 for 14080
89000000 for 22784
144000000 for 36864

If 144M NIC for 36k EP (both is summed up) is to low simply raise the exponent.

A new player could get that missing few EP to get the fitting extention for that last offline gun _without_ logging off and waiting until tomorrow. You get an incentive for providing a target to others (have the station where you can buy EP in PvP area or something) and playing the game. And not so new players could have a nice way to burn excess NIC when they resub for that new, exciting and awesome expansion. You can help young corpy or a buddy of yours to get into gears a bit faster.

As a side effect it would help with inflation, both by monitoring it (and any exploit that creates NIC directely or indirectly) and with keeping it down a bit. That's where the risk is too because there is no NIC cap but an EP cap. So in case of a hyper inflation everybody will hit maxed out extentions fairly quickly.

That's why it might not be a good idea. (I just wanted to show off with my leet perl6 skills anyways. smile

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

every time you kill another player, you get an instant ep bonus of 20-30.
-> encourages pvp
-> industrial folks dont exactly need more anyway
-> did i mention, encourages pvp? (this is a good thing)
...you might think it's too small to be significant, but a) if it was big, that would be bad, and b) over  a long while, as you get lots of kills, especially once pvp becomes more the most important activity ingame, it will be a nice bonus to people risking their bots.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Prophet wrote:

every time you kill another player, you get an instant ep bonus of 20-30.
-> encourages pvp
-> industrial folks dont exactly need more anyway
-> did i mention, encourages pvp? (this is a good thing)
...you might think it's too small to be significant, but a) if it was big, that would be bad, and b) over  a long while, as you get lots of kills, especially once pvp becomes more the most important activity ingame, it will be a nice bonus to people risking their bots.


Nice troll. I really hope you aint serious, if you are then i feel a bit sorry for you

Last edited by Nagrhia (2010-06-24 21:11:59)

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

Those who have more time to play already have a huge advantage, they can afford more bots, better equipment in PVP/PVE. And on the long run exntension doesn't have as big impact as you think. Much more depends on tactic, fitting, choosing the right equipment, and being member of an organized team.

Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

DEV Alf wrote:

Those who have more time to play already have a huge advantage, they can afford more bots, better equipment in PVP/PVE. And on the long run exntension doesn't have as big impact as you think. Much more depends on tactic, fitting, choosing the right equipment, and being member of an organized team.

/thread

Agree with Styx/Galahad, and those stating that the system is fine as-is.
For my two cents, no, the idea of ep for kills is stupid. For the same reasons activity-reward extra ep is stupid.
"Hey buddy, lets go farm ep in arkhe's!"
"Okay, you kill me 20 times, then I'll kill you 20 times."

your idea wasn't bad, it just wasn't good because if you think about it, it's really susceptible to bad players. Sad but true.

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Re: A mix of time based and activity based skills

DEV Alf wrote:

Those who have more time to play already have a huge advantage, they can afford more bots, better equipment in PVP/PVE. And on the long run exntension doesn't have as big impact as you think. Much more depends on tactic, fitting, choosing the right equipment, and being member of an organized team.


It bemuses me that this post was not made in this thread sooner.

Even in EVE, skill conquered activity.  In Perpetuum, I expect that factor to be tenfold.