Asherons Call: Further Clafication on the Spec'd Skill Changes

And from our AC Discussions Forum yesterday:

[blockquote]So the big question I see is: Why did we do this? I can answer that.

See, I was fixing some bugs in the experience system in prepartion for a quest that you'll see next update. (No, it's not a skill sellback quest.) I found some .. holes .. in the sanity checking of the system, plus an awful lot of pretty bad code. It was all legacy stuff, not wrong exactly, just legacy code left from a time when the system was supposed to meet a certain set of goals, none of which are useful anymore.

The easiest way to fill the holes and solve the problems I was running into was to rework the underlying data structures that store skill experience. That had certain side-effects, mostly positive, but one of them was to eliminate what I'll call the 'tessera-beyond-max' effect.

Now, this isn't a huge deal for most players, but I knew it *would* be a huge deal for players who had used tessera (or the Scroll of Dark Rain) to get beyond the normal max skill level. Losing up to 8 points of a skill is not a happy thing. And although we *did* tell players not to use tessera beyond the max buyable skill level, we were never quite as clear or authoritative on that point as we could have been. And more damning, we left the ability to use tessera this way in the game. So I wasn't sanguine about just taking those points away from people.

Well, we talked about this as a team, and we came up with what we thought would be good solution. Reworking the underlying data structures of skill experience had given us a new ability -- the ability to award free skill points instead of just awarding skill xp. This is especially powerful because it doesn't raise the xp cost of buying the next skill point.

Now, we could replace the initial 10 levels worth of experience you get when you specialize a skill with 10 'free' points. This would have the overall effect of raising everyone's spec'd skills 10 levels, which would counterbalance any loss they felt from the tessera-beyond-max change. In addition, it would help solidify the benefit of specialization at high level.

While it is true that specializing a skill has clear benefit these days, it is also clear that at the highest levels of play, the level gap between a spec'd and a trained skill was previously only about 20 points, which is many cases is pretty much negligible. This has now increased to about 30 points, which -- while not overwhelming -- is a bit more in line with how we like to think about trained vs. spec'd.

So, next question: Why didn't we do the same sort of thing for trained skills -- give them 5 'free' points if trained at creation? Well, trained skills don't have to deal with the 'tessera-beyond-max' effect -- that has just never worked with trained skills. But regardless, we would have liked to give skills trained at creation the same sort of dynamic as spec'd skills now get. But we can't do it retroactively, and that's the only way we'd want to do it.

See, internally, we store what level of training a skill has: specialized, trained, untrained. Notice, however, that there is no trained-at-creation or trained-after-creation -- there's just trained. For whatever reason, the original architects of the skill system decided that it wasn't useful to store whether you had trained a skill at creation or later. So while it would be possible to give new characters who train skills at creation 5 'free' points, existing characters would not get free points and would forever be gimped.

We didn't want to do that. So we applied the 'free' points to specialized skills only, because those are guarenteed to have been taken at creation.

So those are the two big questions that I remember, but this post is getting long and I'm sure other people have posted while I was writing this. So I'll leave this post here.

Oh, one more thing, about the old-school characters with trained skills: You don't lose any points with this change. The only way you would lose power due to this change is if we now power up monsters in general to match the new spec'd skill levels -- and we are not going to do thats. The team has discussed it, and we agree that we will not be taking these 10 'free' points into account when designing new content or retouching old content. So you can relax about that. *grin*