Skill Pooling

[Tremere]

Pools aside, as I do not have data for lower skill levels but it may by slightly too much, I really dislike the approach you've described here - that is to 'dominate'.
This is an RP-based game, not a hack and slash, the goal here is not to be the strongest fighter on Urth and to dominate the world but to have an interesting character that leads to entertaining RP. And there is nothing more boring than a world where everyone is the master and there is no apprentices, or people just plain bad at something because it cuts a lot of RP possibilities and reduces whole interaction of "circling your enemy" to some stat fest (which is borderline meta-gaming) and ignores the actual RP that goes with it.

And if anything this is what newbies need to learn, that not-perfect characters are NOT inferior, are or worse nor they are disadvantaged in any way shape or form. If anything they have way better RP opportunities than that established master warrior who kills everyone with 1 hit.

Lets be frank, this is a game and yes people will have varying levels, there are going to be apprentices. However, the premise of the game and really most games is that the players represent those with the greatest potential. And like it or not, the skills and progression is a major part of the game. The problems people have complained about with villain characters and things like that will be just exacerbated by this issue. You say they are not inferior, certainly they are not from a story perspective. However from a game perspective and a stat perspective they are categorically and numerically inferior. It's what the stats say.They are definitely disadvantaged if the rest of us were able to get our skills up high when it was easier than they are forced into a longer, slog to get their skill ups.

The community here is better than other games in terms of welcoming the newer players and I love that and it is possible for lower skilled characters to progress, I think that's great. However, because this is a game I think that the game mechanics should be more fair. And yes, the new players will get the opportunity to rp working through the skills. Well, they were able to before as well when it was at a much more reasonable rate of skill increases. All you are doing now is stretching it out for no reason. I really dislike your idea that 'some people are going to be worse', we need apprentices' to justify unbalanced game mechanics.

[Puciek]

Pools aside, as I do not have data for lower skill levels but it may by slightly too much, I really dislike the approach you've described here - that is to 'dominate'.
This is an RP-based game, not a hack and slash, the goal here is not to be the strongest fighter on Urth and to dominate the world but to have an interesting character that leads to entertaining RP. And there is nothing more boring than a world where everyone is the master and there is no apprentices, or people just plain bad at something because it cuts a lot of RP possibilities and reduces whole interaction of "circling your enemy" to some stat fest (which is borderline meta-gaming) and ignores the actual RP that goes with it.

And if anything this is what newbies need to learn, that not-perfect characters are NOT inferior, are or worse nor they are disadvantaged in any way shape or form. If anything they have way better RP opportunities than that established master warrior who kills everyone with 1 hit.

Lets be frank, this is a game and yes people will have varying levels, there are going to be apprentices. However, the premise of the game and really most games is that the players represent those with the greatest potential. And like it or not, the skills and progression is a major part of the game. The problems people have complained about with villain characters and things like that will be just exacerbated by this issue. You say they are not inferior, certainly they are not from a story perspective. However from a game perspective and a stat perspective they are categorically and numerically inferior. It's what the stats say.They are definitely disadvantaged if the rest of us were able to get our skills up high when it was easier than they are forced into a longer, slog to get their skill ups.

The community here is better than other games in terms of welcoming the newer players and I love that and it is possible for lower skilled characters to progress, I think that's great. However, because this is a game I think that the game mechanics should be more fair. And yes, the new players will get the opportunity to rp working through the skills. Well, they were able to before as well when it was at a much more reasonable rate of skill increases. All you are doing now is stretching it out for no reason. I really dislike your idea that 'some people are going to be worse', we need apprentices' to justify unbalanced game mechanics.

It isn't which is why I've said "pools aside" as very first 2 words.

And this didn't change with pooling, i still will always put story over stats or whatever win they carry over. I do not get where do you get this premise that players represent the greatest potential, can you point to a helpfile explaining that? Because if that is the case then I've been playing the game wrong as I always put story above anything else, especially game mechanics which is counter-intuitive with notion of us playing the "exceptional".

[Tremere]

It's impossible to ignore stats all the time. It's the framework for the game. And I said with the greatest potential, not that they all had to be. And that is exemplified in well the base core of the game. If you spread out all of your stats evenly they are all good, better than average. Average is fundamentally... the average and all things being the same everyone starts out, overall above average. Of course you can spread your stats this way and that, yes you can play your character pretty much how you want to to suit the story you and we are trying to tell. But that's not what is at issue here. What's at issue here is that pooling right now disadvantages newer players compared to others and while you can play as an apprentice and have fun, it is fundamentally not fun to keep working on something over and over again and see little improvement.

[Puciek]

While I agree on the pools being to harsh (on level 45 skill I am getting just 1% per tick now which is... silly), I still absolutely disagree with the disadvantage part of it.
Because the characters with worse stats are only worse if goal of your play is to have the best stats, not to have most RP fun. And from that perspective if you lose a skill contest roll, or make a cabinet with wobbly legs, it doesn't make the story any less interesting, quite frankly it opens a lot of possible twists and turns. So I am not saying to ignore stats, I am saying to embrace them, even if they are low.

[Tremere]

yeah, but currently with skill pooling it will cost the newer characters a lot of time and in the case of crafts a lot of -money- ridiculous amounts when it already used to be extremely high. That does materialistically burden the players and disadvantages them. And I fundamentally disagree with you on it disadvantaging them. I understand they can have a good time still, but as far as the mechanics of this game that we are playing go, those who have more experience, more qp from being around longer will have greater skills starting out always and will pass them up. And the slog to catch up in skill level is outrageously difficult right now.

[Rabek]

I've gotta say, there's not much RP to be had sitting around while all your customers go to the crafter with the best skills. Kind of with Tremere on that one.

That said, I'm fairly convinced this big of a change is the result of a bug rather than intended behavior, so let's see if they tweak it back. I mean, the opening post was talking about how they upped pooling for a skill because of how difficult it was. It seems unlikely that greater difficulty for all skills was the intended result.

[Pixie]

I've gotta say, there's not much RP to be had sitting around while all your customers go to the crafter with the best skills. Kind of with Tremere on that one.

That said, I'm fairly convinced this big of a change is the result of a bug rather than intended behavior, so let's see if they tweak it back. I mean, the opening post was talking about how they upped pooling for a skill because of how difficult it was. It seems unlikely that greater difficulty for all skills was the intended result.

+1

[Takta]

To explain a little bit more of why we changed it:

I happened to notice that small amounts of pooling were infinitely more efficient and was curious about the scope of the effect. Now, under the hood, pool is represented not by the big generalized categories you see (A little, A lot, etc.) but by numbers.

When I tested it, it turned out that every pooling 'tick' was taking 1/10 off your pool in exchange for one subrank. So, if you had 300 pool (which is More than you can grasp for someone of average int), the first time it drained you'd go from 300 to 270 (300-30) in exchange for one subrank. But by the time you got down to 10, you'd be getting 1 subrank per 1 pool. Hence we were penalizing people who wanted to get all their pooling done in one big blob and then go RP.

So the intent of the change was to remove that and make it easier to train a specific amount, but the weirdness of the algorithm (making it so that 1 subrank could = anywhere from 1 unit of pool to like 50, at max int and max pool) made it hard to settle on a single number. We plugged one in there, but given feedback it might change. Additionally, it turns out there was a subtle bit of code that added occasional bonuses that was also trimmed, and so that might make it back in as well. The intent was not at all to change the speed of pooling - just to make it more fair, efficient, and predictable.

[Puciek]

Well I have decided to do some science as i couldn't understand whether its the new pooling or just some bad luck on training. So I've taken my character to the GM trainer, set my defense skill to middle leveled one (45 lvl at session start) and wielded a highly leveled weapon (64 level) Whaled the GM trainer until he kicked me out of the session which left me with a pool:

Code: Select all

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Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
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defense_skill (rank 45 / 77%)           Some
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 48%)             Considerable

And then I've ventured to that PCs phome and set a trigger to pop "pool" every 5 minutes. If staffers want I can submit them a complete log of that (not posting that on public as it would take A LOT of cleaning to get it up to snuff of all sensitive info).

But the TL;DR version is that at the end defense_skill of that PC was at level 46 with 4% progress toward 47, and weapon_skill at 76% toward 65 skill rank. This seems very low gain, but what was really interesting was that (those are all 5 minute intervals):

Code: Select all

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Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
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defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 68%)             Very little


pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 68%)             Very little


pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 70%)             Very little

pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 71%)             Very little


pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 71%)             Very little

pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 73%)             Almost none

pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 75%)             Almost none

pool
----------------------------------------------
Abilities Learning              Amount Learned
----------------------------------------------
defense_skill (rank 46 / 4%)            Inconsequential
weapon_skill (rank 64 / 75%)             Almost none

Which is... very weird as we see the weapon skill is progressing but the defense skill is stuck. And it remained at the 4% until pool was drained empty. But clearly something is not working, as those gains are way lower than they were before, before a training session like that would grant me at least 1 rank of the defense_skill, even at 10+ start levels.

[Kinaed]

Okay, we've adjusted pooling to be quicker across the board today, but we're still not sure that it is correct.

Next Tuesday, I will ask how this feels again and see if we need another adjustment. Thank you for your feedback, folks.