specializations and a new use for religons

After resubbing my account, other than the monotony of level grinding, one thing really caught my attention and that's how tedious raising skills are with having to resort to *ahem* creative use of game mechanics.  It can take days and days of playtime just to get certain skills to the point where they are useful.  This is fine for player who can commit large sums of time to the game, but myself as well as most gamers just don't have the time to commit to it. 

For example, after two hours of fishing, I went from a little under 100 to a little over 101.  When you consider the scaling down of skill gain, you can be looking at hundreds of hours committed to just fishing to max the skill out.  For the sake of argument, if we take out the scaling and we keep the progression rate flat from the 100 mark, it will take 200 hours to reach max skill.  If we consider someone who takes the game seriously, but doesn't play totally unhealthy amounts, you can say over the course of the week that person will probably average 12-14 hours a week played.  As you can see, that's a long time to play and in each increment of play, you'll see very little progress to goad you into logging on the next day and continuing.

So what to do?  You obviously can't scale down the rate of increase to complete extremes simply because it would lower the replayability for those who commit large amounts of time to the game.  One idea I came up with is to implement a totally different way to handle the various religions in the game that will not only help casual players see progress without heavy commitment, but also allow the other religions to be on par with GeG.

Now, this is just a basic outline and it's be no means meant to be the definitively outline for implementing this system and it obviously can't be done in the current client, but I think it'll get the basic idea across.

Lets just say you have the same current religions and perhaps add one or two others(perhaps a Faldonesque version of Freemasons)

GeG - committed to faster leveling.  Exclusive spawns and gold reward bonuses, no need to touch this religion.

Paladin - Add one nice, unique healing or protection spell and ditch the other junk.  You add bonuses to skill gain on Thum, healing, maces, ect.   The bonus scales with level points committed to the religion(will discuss this in more detail later).

Undead - Add one nice damage spell and ditch the other just that never really worked.  You add bonuses to skill gain in Necro, mana theft, snoop, whatever.  Same deal with the bonus scaling.

Druid - Keep summon wolves and ditch the rest.  Bonuses to elemental magic, ect...

Free mason-type religion - Perhaps gets a bonus in money earned from selling to NPCs and discounts in buying.  Bonuses in Wiz, ect, ect.

All the skills will be divided equally among the 4-5 religions(except GeG since it's rewards are strictly tied to the hardcore playstyle). 

Changes to all religions.  It might be time to completely remove disadvantages such as not being able to use certain skills or revamp them so that all religions(including GeG) have certain skill limits.  Personally, I prefer removing the limits all together or simply losing points slowly for breaking your religion's rules(like one per 24 hour day for breaking region's tenement).

The scaling aspect will be another huge change.  Given the fact that it's been made very clear that there won't be a wipe come next client, it's time to give players alternative ways to gain points towards religions without having to be griefed by wildly inflated level players in the PvP field.  The obvious suggestion would be to have daily quests for each religion as well as pvp in order to gain points.  You, of course, put a daily limit on the number of points you can gain in a single day to prevent exploiting as was done in the past.  The skill gains will all scale based on a Logarithm that uses your current points and not just flat increases for religious titles(the priest, high priest, ect will be purely cosmetic).  the scaling and the daily limit will be very important because they will be what prevent players from jumping religions every time they want a new skill without having to give up a large time sink to switch.

Last edited by pennywise (April 8th, 2010 2:52 PM)