Post:New TDP Method - 10/02/2012 - 16:33

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Re: New TDP Method · on 10/02/2012 04:33 PM CDT 3349
>the reduction will have a low cap that makes sure you still drain experience.


>>What does that mean?

It means that the amount that your draining is reduced by training a lot of skills at once is capped at some number.


>>What I, and certainly a bunch of people I know who play the game, want to know is what the hell is going on. Negative TDPS and Pools draining slower .. If I trained (therefore payed for it) why would it drain any slower than the next person imo that is just wrong.

I'm not sure what to tell you? Since all of the skills are changing, the number of TDPs that you've gained is also changing - this has been discussed pretty heavily over the last couple years (archives of the important points are on Elanthipedia I believe). Pools draining slower has nothing to do with 'keeping what you've earned' - You're still absorbing all of the experience you've gained (except for that gained above Mind Lock, of course, just as it is today). Just at slower rate if you're learning a lot of skills.


>>Can you also explain with anymore detail what is going to happen with the bonus pools we are getting ?

Bonus pools are still going to work exactly as they always have in every description I've given - They will increase your drain rate while you still have bits in your bonus pools. All of the drain rate modifiers are % based, so you can multiply in any order and you'll still get the same result. It's definitely true that any slowdown caused by draining many pools at once will reduce the amount that you gain from any given skill, but your bonus pools will still give you the same number of bits in total, after they've been fully depleted.


>>Wow I'm pretty shocked at this kind of mentality. Wasn't NewExp supposed to help fix the gap for people who didnt wanna train as much as others??????

A few things:

- One question mark probably was enough
- It depends on what NewExp you're talking about. The NewExp from 2009 WAS designed to help close the gap between the casual and the power players. However, it's very very clear that this didn't work, because while casual players are circling faster, power players are circling WAY faster. This can largely be attributed to the fact that power players can keep upwards of 20 skills training at maximum speed, while casual players usually achieve far fewer than that for a much smaller span of time.
- Skills 3.0 never intended to help close the gap between the casual and the power player. The TDP changes associated with it were designed with that in mind, but analysis proved that it wasn't actually going to solve the problem, so those changes were mostly abandoned.
- Making the experience better for the casual player IS something we want to do in general, and the drain modifications discussed in this thread are a good way to give them a chance to focus on circles or more discrete tasks and be somewhat competitive against people training broadly for hours on end.


>>TBH I just see this as the beginning and the next step will be the whole "Oh you can learn 3-5 skills without penalty with a basic subscription, but I can sell you this mighty fine EXP penalty removal potion for $10 ;D"

Eh, I think you're misreading a slippery slope. This has nothing to do with what your account type is, and everything to do with the way that you train. If you currently train everything, everything will drain slower. If you currently train just a few things, you'll find that you're learning more. The goal here is to provide support for a wider variety of training styles. Right now, training 5 skills is strictly worse than training 30 skills (so long as you can keep them all above 1/34), because those other 25 skills give you TDPs if nothing else. These drain modifications make it so that sometimes, training 5 skills IS better, because you're trying to circle or reach a milestone or backtrain a weapon. It emulates the simulation aspect of cramming a small set of subjects vs learning everything at once, and it also provides support for more styles of play.

Yes, this IS a change from what's there right now. Change isn't always bad, but it IS different and it's not always beneficial.


>>What about for skills whose actions also train other skills?

There's no reasonable way to approximate this, unfortunately. Combat especially trains a lot of skills at once. Remember that this isn't a sharp cutoff - It's a gradual reduction in drain rate. It's not NEARLY as aggressive as the old 'super frozen' mindstate stuff was.


>> I can understand giving a bonus to draining few skills, but a penalty to training more skills? Just doesn't sound like a good idea imo.

It depends on your perspective. This could be phrased in three very different ways. Let's say that the worst penalty is at training 20 skills at once, and the best bonus is training 5 or fewer.

Perspective 1: Everybody training more than 5 skills has their drain rate penalized
Perspective 2: People training more than 10 skills have their drain rate penalized, and fewer than 10 skills have a bonus (any point in the middle, really)
Perspective 3: People training fewer than 20 skills have a bonus to their drain rate

What you're asking for is perspective 3. You can take it in any of three ways, but remember that any bonus or penalty to drain rate can be taken in any of them.


>>This sounds like system designed to reward a very specific type of game play that not everyone enjoys.

This is a change designed to put balance into a system that is horrifically unbalanced right now. Training 20 skills will still net you FAR more bits per pulse (overall) than training 5 skills at once.


>>I'm more worried about the number of people I have telling me there going to quit that any of the future more money to play issues.

I don't see how this is related.


>>getting a bunch of new information to try and makes sense of just .. "weeks" before release.

If you remember the last major combat rewrite, you'll recall that there was precious little information released prior to the the changes. The vast majority of these changes have been discussed heavily over the last two years, and a ton of input and testing has been done (and is still being done). I think equating the two is both premature and not supported by evidence.

This message was originally posted in Abilities, Skills and Magic \ The Experience System, by DR-SOCHARIS on the play.net forums.