Shattered Kingdoms

Please, next time, don't ignore what I post just to get a pseudo-flame in on me. It's rather unbecoming.

However, yes, they are the skills. You don't 'learn from your mistakes' often with the basic weapon skills, or some of the automatic skills that aid your leveling (med, fast healing, etc).

1) you can learn from mistakes with spells
2) as others have mentioned, shield block levels insanely fast, and isn't among the concerns, here
3) the greater issue with dodge (which in my experience levels at a decent rate), as Cyra mentioned in his original post, is that it severely hampers the leveling speed of other skills, such as parry, e-parry, and riposte, which already level quite slowly.

Spells can actually be quite fun levelling. With my hellion, I simply logged on, cast in an Inn and RP. Actually RP'ing am elee and going out for hours on end is mind numbing. Holding a good RP through tells is a bit difficult than face to face as your ME eventually runs out over long periods and you can't really emote as well. I'm in favor for a few skills bein easier to level. As they've said, a person can have the means to RP, but unless they have the wisdom to use those skills, all the tools in the world are useless.

First off, IMNSHO, you shouldn't have the expectation that your character will ever have everything perfect. You also shouldn't expect to get to GM before you start "playing" your character. I am shooting for a world where people who get to Mentor are the norm, where actually playing at Mentor is fun, and where GM is for those who have stuck with their characters and achieved it naturally over time. NOT because they spent hundreds of hours grinding.

I'm totally against grinding. If you find yourself grinding, you should stop and actually play the game instead. But this requires people to alter their expectations and be prepared to settle for a less than perfect character.

Honestly, the game does not yet meet the above description. But that's where I want to get it. If you want to play a game that let's you get top level and perfect skills in record time, I'd honestly prefer you to quietly find another game - because I think that attitude needs to change and it won't change as long as perfectionists are setting expectations.

There are things that I also need to do to make this vision a reality, but I'm not always sure which way to proceed. For instance with the speed of skill trains, I'm sure some of it could use some tweaking. But the contents of this thread so far do me no good at all. It's easy to [REDACTED] and moan. It's a lot harder to put together concrete data.

If you want actions on skills speed tweaks, I want to see a spreadsheet with a list of all skills as the rows. For columns, I want this sheet to go through at least 5 players who rate each skill's speed on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 would be too slow, 10 would be too fast, 5 would be just right. I want the players who participate to be people who disagree with each other, not just a rubber stamp. That would mean both Cyra and Grakus for starters. If you can get more than 5, that would be even better. The last column should compute an average of all the participants.

I would suggest setting up a Google Spreadsheet, so that a participant can always go back and verify that their rating hasn't been altered by another participant who has a different viewpoint.

Now if anyone actually takes action on this, I will be flabbergasted. Instead, I expect most people will have stopped reading after the third paragraph and this thread will proceed with more bitching about skills, my vision, or both.

If you want that type of player response, with cohesion and direction, I'd recommend you make another forum here. Call it 'Player's Council', and you/imms randomly pick 10 players to be a part of a long-standing effort to help improve the game.

Here you lay such tasks (such as google spreadsheeting for skills, or collection of game data through player experience, etc) and keep them organized and a reference point with plenty of back and forth between you and them.

Throwing a "hey, why don't you guys do this", while perhaps correct in the focus of our attentions instead of endlessly, baselessly debating, doesn't do yourself as much justice as having a structured, uniform control that you can tap whenever you want to make changes or get feed back from players that isn't in the form of bitching about xxxx, but hard numbers and well formulated player responses.

However, even if we do this, can we still [REDACTED] about your vision as well? I wouldn't want to limit options here.

Said spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... T_sva1GOdQ

Edit: I can allow anyone to view it, but unless you're on my email list already, you'll need to sent me your email address to be added as a collaborator.

Big D, if you want more people to be at mentor, you could just have a minimum hr req before they can get reviewed for Master, Champion, and Grand Master.

You know, one of the reasons that people start grinding is because they can't find anybody to RP with, or they have no reason to just sit in a popular area and wait for RP to headbutt them in the balls. That gets boring -really- fast, so you go start grinding, which is only slightly less boring than sitting around. What I would like would be for levelling to be another way to find RP. That's not much of a problem at low levels: just go bash a few heads in Teron at the goblins or in the arena. Once you get higher up, though, the landscape gets pretty barren of other players, except sometimes at certain bottlenecks. I'd like to see an area popular command that lists the areas at your level in order of which has the most PCs in it. Would that work?

You fail.
You learn from your mistakes and improve at whining!

Noone's going to want to sit at Mentor/Master if the reward for being a Grandmaster is a ton greater.

There was a suggestion once that enchantments on armor should not artificially increase the actual level of an item. In other words, Mentor/Master armor that you find can be enchanted to GM but be able to be retained as a Mentor/Master -- at the very least, up to a certain amount of enchantments.

But that's for another thread!

The spreadsheet idea is pretty boss.