Oppinions on Individual and Over-all Skillcaps.

[Enroq]

So, I'm in the midst of a project and I've really be wracking my brain on what to do about the skillcaps. As we all know, the default for uo is 100/700 without scrolls of power. While this does accomplish the "classless" game-style that is uo, it still leaves something to be desired in my eyes.

What do I mean? Consider this: when is the last time anyone actually chose to forgo a 7xgm for a 10x70? That is what I'd like to change. Consider if you will a 200x600 cap, where players could choose between having 6 gm skills or three skills up to 200, probably what I'd call legendary instead of 120.. In this scenario the player would have to make the choice whether or not to be a pure mage, and specialize, taking 200 magery, eval, and med or taking maybe 200 magery, 200 eval, 100 med and 100 wrestling. Then there's the 300x900 skillcap ratio which I'm also considering.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm hoping to get from this, but I don't really have any input on it aside from my own, and a singular perspective is always a weakness, so if you wouldn't mind sharing I'd appreciate it. Just your thoughts on the subject, I suppose.

 

[Heim]

I like the thought process going into this. I would normally overlook any shard that tampers with the skill caps as they don't seem to justify the reason apart from to allow you to make an OP char.

A lot of it would depend on what your shard will offer and the player count. If you offer new craftable items at higher levels, then I am sure crafters will embrace it. If tamers can control more/stronger animals then I'm sure they will take it. Even PvM warriors and mages will go for imo as they could cater their char better to farm certain NPC's.

When it comes to PvP I think it will come down to player count. The template you gave example of above '200 magery, eval, and med' would be a great damage dealer as part of a party, but would not be viable as a solo template. As numbers are generally low on free shards, I feel players would naturally attempt to build balanced characters, which may not take advantage of the skillcap freedom they have.

Hmm my reply has not really been helpful here at all. I guess what I was trying to say is this: I like the idea and I think it could work well if it was combined with an overall game design that would offer some advantages to maxing out some skills, but not so good that it would become a requirement to have X skill maxed out.

 

[Talow]

I'm not sure how that method would work, what I can tell you is some of the things my server has worked on. Not in great detail, and not because we hide that info, I'm just tired and wanted to give some input before I head to bed. Anyways, When it comes to the builds and the ideas for the builds I've found so far every change we make gets evaluated by our players (be it one player or 10). This is good for us, our players know we are coming to the end of our shard's first build set and are working towards balance changes now in order to improve our game. We are looking for some things to be solo able and other things to ... well not be, but still not just flatten down or 1 hit everything because balance wasn't thought out first. So we work on it constantly.

Another thing we look at is the skills, We want every skill to be special and have been working at them systematically, okay so the system might be when I get inspiration, direction/feel like it. I'll give a simple example, we have items that you find in the world require you to ID them before you can use them. It's expensive to buy item id wands / scrolls but it insure everyone is able to ID items. You can be cheap and get the skill to like 50, but now it's annoying that you have to use the skill, maybe fail and do it again. You could take it to like 80/90 and ID the item more often, Or even 100 and just ID the item. But even then it's aggravating to do this on each and every thing that you want to ID. What's a boy to do? Well this is where we got a bit inventive, we added a 120 value to the skill, and if you take ItemID skill past the 100 mark then you can now target a container with the skill and it will ID every item in the bag/corpse/treasure chest/container. We also made this follow the spirit of UO and made it the closer to 120 you are the less you fail to ID everything, but I tell you it's really useful for use when we go treasure hunting and don't want to loot the crap to start with.

Pretty much when it comes to builds we give extra tid bits at the tops of some things, the player either wants that tid bit or another and they climb one tree or another to get it. If they want another perk from somewhere else, they will do just enough to get it where it's comfortable. It's your job to either be sure that what they can combo together isn't game breaking, that's the hard part.

 

[Enroq]

Well, I think what I'll be doing is asking the player to choose one skill to have capped at 120, three at 100, and five at 80. This seems like it'll be a better route.

 

[Talow]

defiantly a sound plan and forces the player to think about their skills.

 

[m309]

Great idea, and something I've done in the past - and it was actually embraced by the players.

 

[Vorspire]

Yea, plus allowing skills over 120.0 cap will require a lot of work changing skill checks, craft systems and many other sub-systems that expect a ceiling of 120.0 on any given skill - and that's a lot of places to change, probably a couple hundred edits just to make gaining above 120.0 balanced and physically do-able.

Some shards in the past have ignored the standards and went down the same path as WoW did with 400.0+ skills, which does give you more to work with but is hard to achieve in balance.

The first shard I played, around 10 years ago, allowed 400.0 in all skills, gaining from 300 to 400 was a total pain, but it was really worth it, the day I managed to get my taming to 400.0 and I could finally tame the "Evil Llama" was such an accomplishment it made the grind well worth it.

In this day and age, I find that a lot of players have been shard-hopping and they eventually get tired of grinding skills and stats from scratch, the day we introduced "all starting skills 100.0", we saw a 20% player count rise in the first couple of days. The real challenge was finding power scrolls and doing the grind from 100.0 to 120.0.