A lot of good points on microtrans, which I won't address here, but I have some thoughts on this overall.

One of DR's unique draws has always been its (more or less) uncapped model for skills/stats and the ability to really customize your character. You can be a Moon Mage swinging a twohander if you want. You can be a War Mage that ambushes and steals if you train for it. The main limitation has always been the primary/secondary/tertiary skill structure, which is still fairly effective at holding archetypes for the first 150 levels or so. You can excel at some tertiary skills, but it slows down your progression as a whole.

What problem exactly are we trying to fix here? Is it that everyone toward the top tends to hit that soft max of 100 (where diminishing returns kick in hard) and everyone becomes homogenized? If that's the case, I'd point out that my level 130 Necro who trains 8 weapons is still well below 100 in any stats (my max is currently 75). Is this problem really at my level or any levels below it? Or is the problem primarily at the top? Does it make sense to apply a 'fix' to everyone if the problem is indeed at the top?

Further I'd point out that combat-wise, DR has never adhered any kind of equity between player and creature level. A level 50 barb is going to have different effective weapon and defense skills than a level 50 Cleric or a level 50 Moon Mage. Does it make sense to tie stat balance completely to level when creature level is irrelevant and everything is based on skills?

I think making TDPs entirely static is a mistake. There's a way to do this that retains some of DR's unique features and freedoms that can still bring about balance for the people who are well beyond 100 in all stats. Is it worth taking something big away from everyone to fix the min-maxers at the top?

>>I think that for the life of the game, a change to TDPs needs to happen. And honestly, I think it's over-blowing the issue. If someone bought an almanac/etc. just to keep oddball skills going, eh.

The issue I'm trying to focus on here with this thread is the incredibly deceptive and predatory nature of the microtrans that has already occurred without respect to the intended changes. The price of the most recent almanac was $1K in simucoin. Even with discounts, you're looking at a ~$750 purchase. It's an incredibly expensive item with regards to the current gaming market. That may be the value of the item under the current TDP system, but it will not be the value if and when a TDP change like this occurs. Even the $100 almanac from last year's HE is incredibly expensive with regards to typical microtrans of today, and this proposed system will make it practically worthless.

My point of all of this is the change calls into question the good faith and fair dealings of Simu as a business with regard to other "train everything" items, to include gear purchases that otherwise would not have been made under the current TDP system.

I don't want to focus on who should be training what because really it's none of my business to tell other people how they're supposed to play the game. My point is that a monumental amount of time, money, and energy has been devoted to the current implementation, and taking that away after selling such large ticket items that directly support it is deceptive to the point of feeling like a scam.

If the intent is to make the game "easier" for the average noob, there are plenty of ways to go about that without killing it or nerfing the game for the people at the top. It just takes a lot of forethought and planning and testing.
The rested XP model seemed like a decent step in that direction.. But I think it needs more tweaking.

You want to talk about training all skills to 1000+ ranks... do you have ANY idea how long it takes to get those skills?
Over 1000 ranks in secondary and tertiary skills you are looking at like 0.1 ranks per day or something and that's training constantly in TF.
We are talking in the 5+ year range. And when the ONLY thing you have to look forward to, is TDPs... taking that away would be the biggest slap in the face.

Training skills over 100 costs like 5x or more the amount of TDPs as normal. It costs me like ~3,000 TDPs to train ONE stat.
Not to even mention you see diminishing returns with stats over 100. It's not even that effective, the cost is absurd for a completely trivial stat boost.

I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make the game more "noob friendly" and "fun to play" for the masses, WITHOUT pissing off and alienating the most hardcore players.

we all don't want to spend 15+ years training every skill we can, to produce more TDPs. If it was changed to rely on your circles for stats, instead of playing the zills all the time, then I think that would be better. Less back training for more TDPs, less boring skills to train, and more time spent training only the skills you want and need to circle.

Saying you would quit if the current system changed, sounds like when, not if it will happen. You don't want to lose all that hard work, so what do they need to do to prevent that? For me, i would prefer being able to choose which stats go up as i circle, and that stats felt more important. They feel important now, if you earn enough TDPs. I wouldn't mind if the stats cap at a lower point, and max every stat by circle 200. That gives me more incentive to hit circle 200 rather than more ranks per day. Like i said though, i still want the stats to feel just as important, so it comes down to giving us enough points to hit 100 in every stat, minimum, or changing how stats work too.

At a minimum, if they changed it so you only received TDPs for circles, and still gave us plenty of points, i would work with that too.

For the microtrans, i don't have any criticism for that right now.

I think it IS clear for the long-term health of the game that something has to be done to curb the runaway stats and the training paradigm that is utterly overwhelming for new players. And while I have some concerns, they're not same ones that have been listed here so far. I want to address some of what's been said already.

* Microtrans - I don't think this is a big issue. The little things like weapons are small potatoes, easily purchased with freebie Simucoins if you save. If you're buying big, expensive weapons for things you only train for the TDP's, I think that's a separate issue entirely. Additionally, I have a cheap almanac and won't feel ripped off even if I no longer gain benefits for those additional skills - I still think it's cool for my main that's been around in the game for 20+ years now. Regarding the big almanac... well, if someone dropped $1K on that thing I could see them asking for a refund, but I'll wait and see if someone who actually has one wants to raise that issue. I certainly don't think it's worth holding the entire game back for that (likely) one or two people's sake.

* It's unfair, etc...
>I didn't spend 15 years maximizing my efficiency to have everything stripped. You don't just outright change core game mechanics that have been in place for 20+ years without REALLY REALLY thinking about it for a long time and considering all the variables, doing tons of tests and getting tons of feedback, or you are going to end up pissing off a large portion of your already small and dwindling playbase. And you certainly do not punish your most core players.

While I agree that this needs to be done very carefully, I can tell you for certain that I came back in 2013 right around when 3.0 happened, and there's been rumblings about changing TDP's ever since then. Regarding player feedback, realistically there's always vocal people pissed off about one thing or another. That's never going to change, and telling the difference between that constant undercurrent of dissatisfaction and legitimate, widespread outcry seems like a difficult enough task to me that I'm willing to cut them some slack.


Those things being said, I do have a few large concerns about how the TDP change will shake out that I feel the GM's will NEED to address to make this a good change.

1) SvS Contests, particularly as Race plays into it. The existing system has always allowed players to overcome racial deficiencies with enough training. This whole system is going to need to be reworked to avoid a situation where at high levels debilitation either never works or always works.

2) The stats are not even remotely created equally. I would hate, for example, to be one of the guilds that has heard, "Hey, we're going to give you guys a reason to train Charisma!" Stats need to be equalized by buffing the bad ones, or if GM's think they are balanced then the info as to why needs to be shared rather than this PAFO stuff. Additionally, guild-specific stat reliance needs to be looked at from a balance perspective.

3) Some guilds are far more stat-needy than others. Each guild needs to be re-evaluated to have guild-specific stat reliance limited to the same number of stats across the board. This was never an issue when we all could hit 100 and anything beyond that was severely throttled, but it will be far more of an issue in a more limited system.

4) Widening the gap between the ultra-HLC's and the rest. Right now, debilitation is a bit of an equalizer, as people can probably cap the appropriate stats and be able to affect 200th circle characters at 150th or so, or perhaps a bit earlier. I see this as a nice feature, something that makes the huge skill disparity slightly less obnoxious. I'd hate to see this lost in the changes.

5) Racial parity. In the past there's always been the sense that you can choose whatever race that you want, that it will "flavor" your character, but not dominate the character's destiny. While I don't think that race should be a purely cosmetic choice, given the issue of SvS contests, I'd hate to see it become a thing that you basically have to be an Elothean to be a competitive Magic Prime character at cap, or a Kaldar Barbarian.


I hope that as GM's are working on these things get their plans more solidified that we can have a productive conversation on these forums as plans become more solidified, as I think long-form discussion better suits the issue. Discord, I think, is too transitory.

- Saragos

I'm pretty sure they do a lot more than 5 minutes of testing. the real issue is how everyone does things differently. They also think and care about different things, so trying to make things better for everyone can be hard.

I think they need to give us more information before springing something as vague as "we're getting rid of TPDs" on us. that could mean a lot of things without more information. I wasn't there, but i only heard people at Simucon were upset. And getting second hand information isn't always reliable.

Unpopular opinion:

My primary char is a well-trained 190-200 and I’ve been around for about 15 years, barring the last 4–which had a lot of changes in player perspective.

Originally, before mix-maxing became the default way of proceeding for tdps, the point of training a skill was, you know, to have a char that could use that skill. Consistent with that approach, it was (and should be) important to draw considerable positive/negative modifiers between different weapons etc. Put more simply, the advantage in training many different skills should be the intrinsic ability to use many different skills—not to have higher stats. The move away from this years ago led to a meta where everyone trained everything for tdps alone and now believe they have zero “benefit” from training, for example, crossbow and bow aside from TDPs.

Once upon a time, a character had to make a real decision between the two because shortbow or longbow trained much faster than LX, much less HX, but HX blew them away for damage (until basilisk arrows came and shifted it back to bows). Point being, variations in skill advantages (be it learning rare or power) drive decisions more than tdps.

We are far past the point of that being an option because weapons were homogenized and equalized for the most part in core combat; damage done is not part of the exp model really (giving no room to incentivize improved weapons or heavier damage weapons outside pvp and the exceptionally rare RP scenario where you actually have to fight over your head), and numerous skills have zero to little “fun” utility or are made moot by MT items that outclass them (pretty much all crafting).

I guess to sum up, I personally train things because I like the idea that my character can use those skills—and tdps are a nice but not necessary bonus. I’ve seen this game change enough times where it’s cool to be like “okay now HT is good again” or whatever it is and actually have it trained. But I am very much in the minority in that thinking and the truth is the core base probably isn’t 10-15 year players anymore. It’s a lot of lichers and relatively newb min-maxers that have invested in the game under a certain dynamic for the past handful of years and TDPs are an enormous part of what they feel like they’ve invested towards.

So I think a TDP rewrite is a bad idea without heavy changes to the benefits of certain skills and a serious and meaningful use of “lost” tdps in some way that provides min-maxers a heads up on something.

The problem is there will never be consensus on what’s a fair return for taking away tdps. Some might do it for alterations. Others might do it for simucoin Credit. Some might prefer materials, or priority to end game dungeons or something. Some might not really care if it’s applied equally like any game damage tweak.

It’s a change that is sure to piss off a lot of people no matter what. But if it leads to a better and more fun game in the end, like the skill merge did I think, then I’d support it.

With that said, if game design is shifting towards a willingness to piss off portions of the player base at the risk of pleasing others, can we please have a war? TDP change outrage and impact and effect will make the Outcast War whining look minor so let’s just go all in if we go all in eh?

Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the
other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice. —Inferno

If this is the change that's going to happen, I don't think it's unreasonable to offer a refund for a high dollar item like the $1000 almanac since people purchased it under the old system where it could be viewed as being worth that much. However, that's not going to happen. People felt safe making that purchase because the dynamic has been the way it has been for the history of the game, but that trust has now been broken. I can absolutely see someone feeling cheated having bought this item and then shortly thereafter having this massive change proposed that destroys its value. It's not a good look for Simu.