Skill Point distribution [dev1021]

[ESAR]

Theres no way to properly balance the current system, it's impossible, it's not in the nature of the math.
There's a better way, if you don't see that or understand it I can't help you.
I'm trying to prevent the same problems that were present throughout the life of ffxi.
It seemed to me that this was their intention initially.
I only sought to reinvent it and make it fun and fair so there was no complaints.

Apparently though that doesn't matter, people just generally like to complain, even if they don't understand what they're complaining about. More power too you'll. But please if your gonna tell me it doesn't work, prove it with the math.
I don't care, use the current system in comparison. Maybe by familiarizing yourself with both you'll understand the differences.

[yukikaze_yanagi]

We can't prove it since we can't have a test server for our own to try it, but the massive failture of the previous sistem is there for a reason. If was really so good, SE would already did what you explaining.
"There's a better way", but isn't this. Pace yourself.
And one for all, stop speaking of yourself as the most illuminated player on the plaza, you start to getting ridiculous

ps: i have a static on my linkshell for grinding regular mob, same result of guildleves with more fun. It's just a bit difficult find camps since aren't common knowledge

[ESAR]

"There's a better way", but isn't this. Pace yourself.

And your evidence for this is what?

Show me some math.

[ESAR]

We can't prove it since we can't have a test server for our own to try it, but the massive failture of the previous sistem is there for a reason. If was really so good, SE would already did what you explaining.
"There's a better way", but isn't this. Pace yourself.
And one for all, stop speaking of yourself as the most illuminated player on the plaza, you start to getting ridiculous

ps: i have a static on my linkshell for grinding regular mob, same result of guildleves with more fun. It's just a bit difficult find camps since aren't common knowledge

The massive failure of the first system is the massive failure that caused most problems.

The change in attack speed from Alpha to beta caused too many changes, they couldn't fix them all in time.
Rather then trying to figure it out, they scraped the system, put in the one from FFXI (hopefully temporarily) because they didn't want to risk a mass walkout of the game.

If anyone else has realized, Attack speed can be related to alot of problems, SP, Skipping battle animations, Poorly balanced abilites which caused mundane feelings between weapons and classes.

It's not the system failed, it's that it was too complicated to fix with the sudden change.

How do you think they decided to fix it?

I'd imagine it went something like this...

"Well since you can now attack five times when before you could only attack once, lets spread the SP out. Lets give them SP about 1/5 hits rather then every one..."

This led to a huge unbalance and why sometimes you'd end up just getting 0SP.

The SP system was golden, you just have to understand why.

The reason some classes got more SP then others was poor judgement, the system wasen't balanced enough. Probably all related to attack speed as well.

It's was a new system, of course there were some bugs they needed to work out, they just didn't have the time to do it.

[yukikaze_yanagi]

No man, you're speaking of nonsense. The change in the animation didn't bring any problem in the sp gain since was almost random.
Do you remember the gladiators having shield skill almost null, because they were forced to attack to exp (and for a way less amount of others DoW, since their attack are weak) ? How this is qualified as a problem on attack speed ?
Do you remember the healing race ? The first healing getting huge exp, and the second..nothing ? This too isn't related to animation speed.
And for the DDs, was a race to do more skills you can before the mob die, with good pace of strategy

[ESAR]

No man, you're speaking of nonsense. The change in the animation didn't bring any problem in the sp gain since was almost random.
Do you remember the gladiators having shield skill almost null, because they were forced to attack to exp (and for a way less amount of others DoW, since their attack are weak) ? How this is qualified as a problem on attack speed ?
Do you remember the healing race ? The first healing getting huge exp, and the second..nothing ? This too isn't related to animation speed.
And for the DDs, was a race to do more skills you can before the mob die, with good pace of strategy

Not the animation, the actual speed of attack.

It's like this, they had battle and everything related to it, the actions, SP and the animations all set on this really slow battle style.
Everyone complained, they were already prepared for it so they implemented the new battle style.
The problem is they based the game around the slowerpaced battle style, not this new quick paced one.
This causes the problem of having to rebalance everything:
Enemies,
SP,
Animations,
Actions...

I'm sure i'm missing stuff that could fit in that list but this is just what I see off hand.

What I'm saying isn't nonsense, it's an educated guess. I don't work for square so I don't know for sure,but if I had to guess, it would be that the change in attack speed was more then they could handle in the small amount of time they gave themselves to fix this change wasn't anywhere near enough.

Why do you think we're having so many problems with battle and targeting?

To me it seems like the thrown together battle didn't take enough consideration into targeting.
They're going to fix this all, it just takes a little time.

Regardless the SP system is a good idea and works.

It seems however I never considered shield into this SP mix. but it could be done just the same, every block gets SP (some amount that's even with attacks, shield skills would also yield some (a fair amount) and it just gets thrown in as a party member.
Once shield is capped there is no need to give it more SP, therefore anyone using a shield that is capped wont take from the party pool.

I'm sure I can come up with something better then this for shield, but it's not that big a problem.

One idea could be to only have shield level individual to the player, not have it pooled with the party. Something like this could prevent complaints.

[Psytic]

The reason SP is so easy now is because they are just throwing it at us.
They're using behests to do that. Rather then fixing the system as they go, they decided it was best to nerf leveling until they can figure out a better solution.

Most of the reason I don't want to make it to 50 yet is because I like the climb so much, I find it the best part of the game. Regardless, it needs to be easy and interesting for players.

Right now that five minutes once an hour isn't very fun. Of course you can do Guildleves but some like to kill monsters on the field as well. Anyway, it takes a different type of strategy to kill each individual monster as a team.

Before they made the switch from action based to lump sum it was very rewarding and challenging to seek out new adversaries to fight for SP. There was alot of exploring involved, it was fun. If this current system stays, the game will never be like that, it's actually impossible for them to balance the game with the current type of SP distribution.

I know, you're not going to believe me about balance, but what do you imagine is balanced?
Balance would be this, all monsters at any given level give the same SP per hour, they only way to do that is if you pretty much relate SP to time spent in battle.
So basically if you fought threw 5 monsters in the time it would take to to fight one other you would make the same SP.
Obviously this is going to vary, but not by much.
If it takes you an extra few second to grab another monster, that's coming out of your SP gain, but that comes outta the current system just the same.

It basically comes down to this, do you want to be able to fight anything and the only way to increase SP is through increasing the difficulty of monsters or the strategy in which you kill them. Or would you rather this game end up like FFXI, only basically one monster gives you ideal SP for every level range, Also having only certain jobs wanted in the parties.

*Dunes*
Lizards in 9-11
Crabs 11-13
Gobs 13-16
Fish 16-18

*Qufim*
worms 18-20
Crabs 21-22
worms 21-23
fish 23-25

*Jungles*
25-27 mandy
27-29 gobs
llizards.

Anyway I could do this all day.

At 75 we hit Birds and they became the only thing we could level off of. Only specific jobs were wanted.
I know, jobs are very versatile so no one will be left out, but that means we also have to fight a specific way, just slaughter helpless enemies really fast.

If the system was changed back to action based, it would reopen their inital goal of allowing us to fight anything. This can only be good, there's nothing wrong with balance, it's what we wish we had but never did. Rather then being restricted in the way you fight, or what, we could do anything.
I've worked hard on this and that math has became near flawless, every time someone brings up something wrong with it, it's fairly easy to fix. I just have to manipulate the initial equation.
There's another huge added bonus to this type of SP system. They never have to adjust it. Because it is one formula, one equation and all the variables are linear, it's prepackaged to use flawlessly in any aspect of the game.

I don't just like saying this stuff because I like to hear myself talk, I really don't. This is tiring for me.
The thing is though I'm really good at math, I understand how complicated this current system is to balance, I understand their intent with the initial system (opening up anything as a target) and I used all this understanding to create a system that would be fair and fun and favour no class or no enemy.

It's really a step forward for an MMO. The balancing of SP has been completely removed.

If you have any questions I'm more then happy to answer them, but this system does everything I'm saying, I'm not making that up.

I was hoping Shadowtail would throw in his input, sounded like he new what this system could be.

So why don't they just do the ff 11 system? I don't see why its a big deal. They should scrap physical level too.

This time around you shouldn't worry about the ideal party setup because theres enough competition in the market now that Square will have to keep all classes balanced or desirable if they expect to keep subs.

Blizzard has successfully made about 3 or 4 zones people can lvl in and multiple classes that can heal, tank and dps in group effectively per level range right up to lvl 60 why cant square? I think people are letting them off the hook by suggesting an elaborate leveling system instead of asking for more content and better classes.

[Eli_Jin]

Honestly, I believe that what ESAR's is saying (the core concept) would work rather well. It bases your experience (SP) on the experience (actions) you have in battle, with the KEY DIFFERENCE TO THE SYSTEM WE HAD AT LAUNCH BEING: "If in a party, every participants SP is calculated together and split evenly."

This way you don't have someone getting 50 SP while others get 300 SP, it's all split evenly amongst those that performed at least 1 action during the course of the fight (so on easier fights healer only needs to top off the tank once and the the healer gets SP as well, or they can simply cast a nuke or debuff or something).

In groups, this makes it so that you want to fight mobs that take more than 2 seconds to kills since you want everyone to get their shot in, but you don't have to do the crabs/efts/whatever that take forever to kill either, you can move on to the next mob if your camp has the mobs/respawn rate to support you.

This also means that if you are geared to the teeth and can 2 shot a mob that it takes someone else of the same rank 4 shots to kill, you will have to kill twice as many for the same amount of SP, which will take you slightly longer since you have to find more mobs / switch targes and all that, but this means that maybe you should fight something a little harder that does take you 4 shots to kill instead of 2. (though the trade off for killing more in less time is that you get more drops, so it could be worth it depending on the group/player).

And being geared to the teeth you still have the advantage when fighting for progression (you know, that content that is coming )instead of just SP grinding, so the incentive to min/max isn't totally lost.

ALSO

This actually caters to the player base that SE is going for (casuals) that won't be geared to the teeth. Well, not that it caters to them, but that it gives them roughly the same SP/hour (unless they pause between actions/mobs for whatever reason) that the elitists players recieve. And of course hard core players will always level faster simply because they have more time to devote.

[Reika]

I was playing during the 'SP Gains Through actions' phase of the game. It didnt work. Sometimes while soloing a monster didnt give any SP at all. so, lets not go back to that, k?

[yukikaze_yanagi]

@eli_jin: this could work in a world where archers don't 2-shot EVERYTHING :P maybe when they nerf it