Okay, so it's of a click-bait title. There's probably a million and one reasons why this isn't possible, but hear me out.
This just happened to a barbarian in TF:
> > IF: 1750 00% learning (3/34) +1.46
First off, round of applause. Fantastic feat. Congratulations. There should be an inappropriate monument erected in your honor in the crossing barbarian guild in TF.
Having said that, it took you 9 years of 24/7 scripting to cap out the FIRST tertiary skill. Let that sink in. Roughly 78,000 hours of draining the skill. Even with a good script, that's kind of crazy, +/- for multiple leap years (seriously) and REXP which covered some but not all of this change.
Let's put this into perspective.
- If you starting driving a car at 60 miles per hour when the character was rank 0 in inner fire, and you kept driving it at 60 mph only when training, you would have 4.68 MILLION miles on your car when you hit 1750 in the FIRST of potentially 27 skills (weapons/magic tert - RIP traders) (or in this case, first of 19 skills).
- Continuing with the obligatory car analogy, if the shortest route coast to coast in the USA takes roughly 4 days, you would have driven the width of the entire united states 812 times. If your car was capable of space travel, you would have driven from the earth to the moon and back almost 10 times.
- If you worked on this for 35 hours every week, with no vacation or holiday time, You'd need over 2200 weeks or roughly 43 years of watching scripts move to see that number, before REXP. The average person would literally be eligible for Social Security before they capped their FIRST tert if they treated this game as a full-time job. That's even true if you used 40 hours / week, assuming some schooling requirement.
- If you were starting today, in prime, as a premie player, only training during the REXP window playing to maximize gains. Assuming no REXP was used by GORT (it was), you're still looking at more than 26,000 hours of grinding (not socializing, playing or otherwise interacting with the game). 4334 days. At 6 hours a day (42 hour weeks) that's approximately 11.9 years. https://imgflip.com/s/meme/Too-Damn-High.jpg
- If you worked a part-time job, maybe watching a fryer at your local burger joint for 6 hours a day rather than playing DR, 5 days a week, only in the time you were in REXP, you would have made $188,500 over the course of the same time, before taxes, of course.
I get that a lot of people who still play this game are okay with this. You kind of have to be or else you wouldn't be playing. Cool. No problem. I'm happy you're happy. I'm not really even bothered by it myself. It's a part of the game, but that doesn't make the numbers any less daunting and frankly unrealistic for most players (I'd hope at least). I think it would do us all some good to have these requirements brought back down to sane levels.
Here's my thought. Either...
A) Raise tertiary drain rates to match secondary skills.
- Lore-wise, this makes the most sense. No one one should be worse at anything than your average commoner. If your character is a commoner on Tuesday, they can learn how to use swords fairly well. As good as a bard or ranger, even. However, the minute they join a moon mage guild, they suddenly lose that innate ability shared by every non-guilded individual. It doesn't make sense.
- Guild wise, learning rates wouldn't differentiate guilds from each other, buffs would. Abilities would. Unique aspects of the guild is what makes them different and better in those aspects. What makes moon mages special is secret guild knowledge that improves their practical capabilities (and primary skillset learning rates).
- Learning rate doesn't have to affect skill-set perks. Your ranger can still be better at shields than a commoner and not as well-trained in magic as a moon mage, but they at least wouldn't learn any worse than that commoner.
B) Offer benefits and a matching 401k
- If nothing changes, at least make the benefits comparable to other low-skill jobs.
SHIFT3
ACIDICSNAIL
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
11/13/2019 06:44 PM CST
I agree wholeheartedly.
While reaching 1750 in any skill, let alone a tertiary skill, has never and most likely will never be a goal of mine, the egregiously slow rate at which tertiary skills train only serves to make any kind of far reaching goal in DR all the more daunting. Rested Experience has helped considerably, but it does little to prevent the enormous gap that inevitably forms between primary and tertiary skills, and it's not fun to be held back from advancing up the creature ladder because you need to wait for your tertiary skills to catch up.
I don't want to even imagine what it must be like to try to become a proficient crafter as a lore tertiary guild.
I'm all for guilds having 1 primary skillset and the rest be secondary. I don't believe we need to rely that heavily on skillset placement to have meaningful differences between the various guilds that share a primary skillset; as Shift said, each guild's unique abilities are what should accomplish that.
While reaching 1750 in any skill, let alone a tertiary skill, has never and most likely will never be a goal of mine, the egregiously slow rate at which tertiary skills train only serves to make any kind of far reaching goal in DR all the more daunting. Rested Experience has helped considerably, but it does little to prevent the enormous gap that inevitably forms between primary and tertiary skills, and it's not fun to be held back from advancing up the creature ladder because you need to wait for your tertiary skills to catch up.
I don't want to even imagine what it must be like to try to become a proficient crafter as a lore tertiary guild.
I'm all for guilds having 1 primary skillset and the rest be secondary. I don't believe we need to rely that heavily on skillset placement to have meaningful differences between the various guilds that share a primary skillset; as Shift said, each guild's unique abilities are what should accomplish that.
C0UGAR
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
01/15/2020 05:12 AM CST
<<Having said that, it took you 9 years of 24/7 scripting to cap out the FIRST tertiary skill. Let that sink in. Roughly 78,000 hours of draining the skill. Even with a good script, that's kind of crazy,
I'm willing to bet its not anywhere close to that. Stats got better over time, re-writting the scripts probably got better and trained more effectively. IF hasnt been out that long, if I'm not mistaken (and was grandfathered, also if not mistaken). I'm guessing it was *a lot* less time than 78000 hours.
I'm willing to bet its not anywhere close to that. Stats got better over time, re-writting the scripts probably got better and trained more effectively. IF hasnt been out that long, if I'm not mistaken (and was grandfathered, also if not mistaken). I'm guessing it was *a lot* less time than 78000 hours.
SHIFT3
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
01/15/2020 08:17 AM CST
> I'm willing to bet its not anywhere close to that. Stats got better over time, re-writting the scripts probably got better and trained more effectively. IF hasnt been out that long, if I'm not mistaken (and was grandfathered, also if not mistaken). I'm guessing it was *a lot* less time than 78000 hours.
Let's assume a new character could do it in 50% of that time with the spider, almanac, optimized stats, and the best scripts. I think this is too generous, but let's go with it for sake of argument. You're now at 39,000 effective hours. 39 THOUSAND HOURS. To better illustrate this point, let's say you're only training during REXP windows and completely ATK as per policy. You don't have to be focusing on the game, but you're response (ie: multitasking at work).
So your 39,000 hours, at 18-24 effective hours per day, brings you to 1625-2167 days of effort. If you were scripting combat for 12 hours a day - straight - 365 days a year and you're still at roughly 4.45 - 5.93 years to cap out your first tertiary skill. You paid $2,136 - $2,849 (just premie subs) and years of your life for the privilege of looking over your shoulder, watching a text-based character gain power.
But wait, there's more. Let's say you're at rank 1740, and you took a little too long to respond to a script check while multi-boxing in the combat room. You're picked up (not the issue - don't focus on this point). You're tagged with a 10% penalty and knocked down to 1566. You just lost 21% of your time investment. 21% for a busy day at work overlapping a unlucky day in a game. Practically, at a minimum, this boils down to 340 days of effort. That's a penalty you'll spend 12 hours a day for 340 days to recover from, and $480 on top for sub costs alone.
It's kind of nuts. How do you convince new or returning players to do a repetitive grind, ATK, 6-12 hours a day for peak performance at 3x the cost of your AAA MMO? It's not even like you're promising an engaging RP environment or a unique experience while they grind away. They can do less, with more interaction, in other games, reach cap, and then have an end-game which regularly clears the playing field and offers catch-up mechanics.
If the answer is that they shouldn't care then they need a mechanical reason not to care.
We all play this game for various reasons. Some people like infinite progression, but would you join or rejoin a game which promised years of solo-work to begin to reach your power limits on that character? I think some people would, but would enough?
You know what, here's an idea. What if premies gained xp while they were logged out, up to a cap. Rather than a login drain, you login on your character, once a day, and it converts 12x your entire field xp into raw ranks. It doesn't clear them, it just pulses ranks like you were a new character leveling up. They would definitely sell more premie subs, have a hook into MTX, have an easy login reward, encourage players to work multiple characters (which they'd want to gear up), encourage players not to worry so much about xp and just play, give death a real penalty and risk (it takes a while to build the perfect pools), reduce the need to build new training methods, and further separate plat generation from xp farming.
The only risk is that players would login; get the pulse; say, "okay now what?"; and logout. I don't think it's an insignificant risk, but your characters in game would likely be far more attentive and hungry for something other than a grind (assuming it's still not significantly better in terms of progression). You also have slower training skills being more of an issue, but that's not really a problem with so many alts. They'd just be more specialized.
Let's assume a new character could do it in 50% of that time with the spider, almanac, optimized stats, and the best scripts. I think this is too generous, but let's go with it for sake of argument. You're now at 39,000 effective hours. 39 THOUSAND HOURS. To better illustrate this point, let's say you're only training during REXP windows and completely ATK as per policy. You don't have to be focusing on the game, but you're response (ie: multitasking at work).
So your 39,000 hours, at 18-24 effective hours per day, brings you to 1625-2167 days of effort. If you were scripting combat for 12 hours a day - straight - 365 days a year and you're still at roughly 4.45 - 5.93 years to cap out your first tertiary skill. You paid $2,136 - $2,849 (just premie subs) and years of your life for the privilege of looking over your shoulder, watching a text-based character gain power.
But wait, there's more. Let's say you're at rank 1740, and you took a little too long to respond to a script check while multi-boxing in the combat room. You're picked up (not the issue - don't focus on this point). You're tagged with a 10% penalty and knocked down to 1566. You just lost 21% of your time investment. 21% for a busy day at work overlapping a unlucky day in a game. Practically, at a minimum, this boils down to 340 days of effort. That's a penalty you'll spend 12 hours a day for 340 days to recover from, and $480 on top for sub costs alone.
It's kind of nuts. How do you convince new or returning players to do a repetitive grind, ATK, 6-12 hours a day for peak performance at 3x the cost of your AAA MMO? It's not even like you're promising an engaging RP environment or a unique experience while they grind away. They can do less, with more interaction, in other games, reach cap, and then have an end-game which regularly clears the playing field and offers catch-up mechanics.
If the answer is that they shouldn't care then they need a mechanical reason not to care.
We all play this game for various reasons. Some people like infinite progression, but would you join or rejoin a game which promised years of solo-work to begin to reach your power limits on that character? I think some people would, but would enough?
You know what, here's an idea. What if premies gained xp while they were logged out, up to a cap. Rather than a login drain, you login on your character, once a day, and it converts 12x your entire field xp into raw ranks. It doesn't clear them, it just pulses ranks like you were a new character leveling up. They would definitely sell more premie subs, have a hook into MTX, have an easy login reward, encourage players to work multiple characters (which they'd want to gear up), encourage players not to worry so much about xp and just play, give death a real penalty and risk (it takes a while to build the perfect pools), reduce the need to build new training methods, and further separate plat generation from xp farming.
The only risk is that players would login; get the pulse; say, "okay now what?"; and logout. I don't think it's an insignificant risk, but your characters in game would likely be far more attentive and hungry for something other than a grind (assuming it's still not significantly better in terms of progression). You also have slower training skills being more of an issue, but that's not really a problem with so many alts. They'd just be more specialized.
C0UGAR
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
01/15/2020 06:24 PM CST
Some people have already invested over 10-20K hours into their characters. Some characters are 20+ years old. (Mine was rolled in 2001). I dont think the time investment is something too many DR players worry about, tbh.
RHODGES232
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
01/16/2020 06:17 PM CST
That is absolutely not true at all. Well speaking for myself that is, i have been in these realms nearly as long as the game has been released to the web ( I know I am not an AOL or prodigy guy so sue me) and I am also an avid investor in someone else hard work. I wish that were not the case I wish all that was discussed above or even something else would make it more in line. I want fresh people to play this game, because as so many people put it, it's the people that make this game not the leveling and grind. I could be wrong but I think the number of new unique accounts created a year is less then a lot of us would expect.
RHODGES232
Re: Let's nuke tertiary skillsets
01/16/2020 06:21 PM CST
(a lot of missing post from the previous one for some reason with no ability to edit it)
Wow looks like I typed the bulk of that message into the ether. Bottom line, I wish leveling were faster I wish more incentives, I wish just for the game to succeed.
Wow looks like I typed the bulk of that message into the ether. Bottom line, I wish leveling were faster I wish more incentives, I wish just for the game to succeed.
