I'm not sure we're on the same page regarding fatigue. I'm playing a low-level character with a lot of armor and health, and I'm finding fatigue to be the hardest part of the game. I hit an enemy once for every 7-10 swings, sometimes using up multiple bars of fatigue before I hit something. It's not uncommon for me to go through five or more bars of fatigue to kill one low-level enemy, let alone multiple enemies. It's terrible.

What kind of character you got? What kind of weapon are you using, and what's your skill with it?

Imperial, combat spec, endurance and willpower, sort of a paladin-themed character. Majors are long blade, heavy armor, block, restoration, alteration. Minors are spear, medium armor, armorer, mysticism, speechcraft. I'm using a nordic broadsword, some iron armor, nordic trollbone helm, and some kind of dragon spike medium shield. Long blade skill is like 50 at level 2.

Unrelated: when you lowered strength for some (all?) races, did you consider carry weight? It seems harsh. Maybe you should increase base carry weight to make up for that.

You REALLY shouldn't be having that hard of a time attacking things...



I did consider it... sort of. It's a large part of why I tanked the effect cost for Feather spells.

So, I've been tossing around the idea of putting a cap on minor and misc skills (see http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1110449-i-want-to-know-if-this-is-possible/), and I think I may have found a solution that, at least for the time being, seems like a good fit.

Simply put, I can slow the growth if misc skills hard enough that it essentially stops, so the only way to raise it would be through training and skill books.

I'm still looking at it, and I guess the only reason I'm posting about it here is to get a good idea as to how many players that would royally piss off (not that the "Settigns" plugin doesn't already do that as is).

Personally I think it's a terrible idea. It removes the natural, increase-as-you-play means of misc skill increase, leaving only a much more artificial grind-for-gold-then-pay-for-training route. It might perhaps produce slightly better balance (maybe), but the gameplay incentives it creates are all wrong. Players will be forced into focusing on gold acquisition as a means to skill gain if their characters are to to be at all individual in misc skill terms. Characters' misc skills would no longer be a reflection of their actions, but a reflection of the player's shopping habits.

At least one - or not, since I wouldn't consider playing under such conditions.

I suppose the difference in ours views is that you see miscellaneous skills as a much more legitimate part of a character's skillset than I do. Thing is, I think more people would agree with you than with me

Maybe I'll just slow the miscellaneous skill progression, then, instead of stopping it (which I'm under the impression GCD also does).

It's all something of a moot point to some extent, though, since I'll most likely end up hopping onto the atrophy bandwagon if and/or when you get it going.

Sounds just like the global slowdown plugin for nGCD. I use it.

I guess so - though I'm with you in thinking that characters shouldn't have most/all of their misc skills be high. I just think that having a few of them be pretty high, a few mediocre, and quite a few low, makes things most interesting. While I like for the initial setup to have a very large influence on a character, I prefer them not to be entirely defined by that.

Kind of - it doesn't slow misc skill development using the CS settings (since other mods might do that), but it does stop them increasing so quickly after they hit some threshold. The standard settings are pretty generous, with skills slowing down once they get past 60 + 0.8 * initial_skill, which is usually 64 for misc skills. Beyond that the increase rate drops to one half (at 64), then one third (at 75), one quarter (at 84), and so on. This is done through scripting, so it combines with whatever skill increase rate alterations are made in the CS. Importantly, it also applies to training, so training a misc skill from 75 to 76 with the standard settings would take three training sessions, and so cost three times as much. If you change things to e.g. starting slowdown when a skill gets to 20 + 1.2 * initial_skill, you'd get major/minor/misc skills slowing down from around 75/50/25, have a minor skill require 657 increases to get from 5 to 100, and a minor skill needing 26 increases to reach 101 from 100.
It's not perfect, but it works pretty well in this area. It allows a reasonable increase rate for lesser skills at the low end, but can make them very hard to increase later on with the right settings. The difficulty with going the CS route in this area is that you're stuck with a uniform adjustment, whether it's for increases from 5 to 6, or from 55 to 56, when clearly you'd like to be able to make the 55 to 56 increase extremely difficult, without making the 5 to 6 increase correspondingly hard. [[the main problem with GCD in this area is probably the influence of health on the incentive to raise endurance-related skills - i.e. even though mages have much lower endurance, it's still in their interests to increase it as high as possible, since they need all the health they can get; this means that it makes sense for such a mage to grind spear/armours/armourer/athletics/blunt-weapon/... even if they're misc skills]]

I'm moving forward with this, but pretty slowly so far. In theory it should all work out well, but practice is lagging behind at present.

[had some atrophy-system thoughts here, but they seem better placed in the other thread]

Well, I think I'm going to compromise on this one and just release the next version with an alternate plugin. Because I'm the kind of hardass that really likes the idea of not being able to advance in misc skills unless you pay for them (or find a skill book... I almost think it would be nice if there were more of them). It harkens back to the days of gaming where your choices at the beginning of the game had very long, very restrictive long-lasting effects, and it lends some sense of legitimacy to training (since any skill can technically be raised for free via endless grinding - this forces you to make use of the service for this purpose). One thing I also quickly realized is that it makes it a bit harder to get certain major stat multipliers early on. It used to be my first level was always 5x Personality and 5x Speed from the inevitable early growth of my Mercantile and Athletics skills. Now... not so much. In that respect, it keeps me much "truer" to the type of character I'm playing.

Even though I understand that you don't agree with my methods, Galsiah, I'm sure at least part of my aim makes sense to you, particularly the part about stat multipliers on early levels.

Anyway, the alternate version will just have misc skill growth slowed down as opposed to stopped. Both versions, however, feature major skill growth slowed to 1.0000 (previous growth level of minor skills) and minor skill growth slowed to 1.2500 (previous growth level of misc skills).

I've also lowered the fatigue expenditure for attacking from 8.000 (4x the original value) to 4.000 (twice the original value) as per a discussion earlier in this thread.

Well I've no objection to significantly slower misc skill development - just so long as it doesn't get to the realm where training is the only feasible means of increase. Having training be the only means of efficient-increase-at-short-notice is fine.

You do need to be a bit careful when changing the cost-in-playing-time of activities without changing the incentives that drive the activities though. For example, if you assume fixed player actions, then the misc skill growth slowdown leads to fewer related attribute increases, and a 'truer' character. However, if you assume that a player adapts his actions to achieve his desired goals, then he might well aim for the 5x multipliers, and in so doing spend hugely more time on misc skills, since it's now required to grind for much longer to get them to increase. When this happens, your changes have precisely the reverse impact you want: they have a character focusing almost all his time on unfitting skills, and increase, rather than reduce, grind. It's all very well to blame the player for this, but it's a predictable response (of pragmatic players) to shoddily designed mechanics with counter-intuitive incentives.

Of course it's fairly reasonable to assume that any player who doesn't like the vanilla levelling system, will already be using some alternative. However, if you're proposing your mod list as a relatively complete standalone solution, then it ought not to rely on other mods to maintain reasonable balance. The vanilla system has absurd incentives that are relatively painless (if annoying) to metagame. Keeping the absurd incentives, but making them hugely painful to metagame, is no real solution - it's quite likely to make things much more painful for some players. It's difficult to know how things will play out in practice - e.g. whether 'some players' is a small minority, or a significant proportion -, but problems are certainly possible.


On the issue of increasing-skills-through-training, I'm not sure it's really much better. Even with economy mods, there's an unlimited amount of money in Morrowind. There's also vanishingly little time pressure in the game, so vanishingly little cost to engaging in time-consuming-but-safe-and-dull gold acquisition activities. It's only an advantage to make grinding-for-gold more efficient than grinding-for-skill, if efficient acquisition of gold is an interesting and varied activity to pursue. Clearly there's the potential for gold-acquisition to be more interesting and varied than endlessly grinding one skill, but it can easily be pretty dull if the most efficient methods are trivial and repetitive - quite likely. If there's significant misc skill gain as a by-product of just playing the game, there's little need for a player to choose either to skill-grind or gold-grind. Once you remove that skill increase mechanism, it'll be natural for a player to focus more attention on considering how he can increase misc skills. That's only a good thing if it turns out that getting gold is an interesting process. If it is, then great. If not, then there's something to be said for leaving a more natural, gain-skill-as-you-play means of skill gain.

So long as there's unlimited gold, unlimited time, and the possibility of paid skill increases, there's no real "restrictive long-lasting effects" in the very long term, even with this change.

I agree with your motivations, but in some respects the no-natural-skill-gain approach might be sawing off your arm because your foot itches.

This is precisely the reason that I am to remove rather than reduce the ability to grind, mind you - to remove the decision altogether of whether or not you feel like grinding for an hour just for that 5x multiplier.

Like you said, this is far moreso the players' fault than the developers, and one should question the wisdom behind going so far to cut off the ability of that small percentage of players to do what comes to them naturally, but I sort of am that kind of player. To me, if there exists the ability to do something in a game, I'm going to do it. Simply having the willpower not to do so is like putting a Swedish redhead in front of me and then telling me not to plow her into next week.

Or something like that.



I think this much is just going to come down to different playstyles. I.e., I know how I play the game, and my mod list is sort of built entirely around that. What I really seek from this thread more than anything is feedback on how other people play it, and how well the system I've sort of built with my mod list stands up to different playing styles.



I see exactly what you mean with regards to grind-for-cash vs. grind-for-skills, and it certainly explains a lot of your feeling towards these changes. The thing is that one of the central concepts of my mod as a whole is to remove "cash-grinding" entirely by taking away all of the cheap ways of doing so and making the larger financial rewards more down to Earth. So, unless you count going out and killing a whole bunch of stuff and/or looting a cave as "cash-grinding", I think I've done a lot to remove it entirely. Thus, the money you DO get as a reward from your natural progression through the game now has a very effective money-sink in the form of paying to increase skills that you didn't choose as major.minor, where previously I think we can at least both agree there wasn't a whole lot to spend it on before (not counting the other huge money-sink - enchanting - which my mod also makes a lot cheaper, by the way).

I think our debate would thus boil down to a chicken-or-the-egg question: does the player actively seek to gain money so that she can use it to buy levels in misc skills, or does the player buy levels in misc skills because she has money and would like to spend it on something?




Yes and no. If training is the *only* way to raise misc skills, then the only way to raise them beyond 40 or 50 is via master trainers, which is going to be a very large investment of both time and money, not to mention the requisite attribute requirements.

Sorry to interrupt in your exciting discussion (I'm really eager to test the future mod), but I have a suggestion that goes, I think, in the spirit of your mod.

As you try to prevent any skill/attribute abuse, and as I think alchemy/intelligence has still a breach, what do you think about replacing all self-refilling ingredients sold by merchants with non-self-refilling ones?
I mean I want the once you bought any ingredient from a merchant, it will *never* reappear when you barter with him again.

The reason is as soon as you get a few gold, you can easily buy lots of cheap ingredients to boost your alchemy skill, and thus also your intelligence.
Having non-self-refilling ingredients would encourage the player to be a real herbalist who searches for ingredients in the wild and is happy when he reaches new places with new ingredients.

BTW, I may have found a small "text bug": you renamed "Potion of Rising Force" to "Potion of Levitate", but in the quest of the Pilgrim Path, it is still written that you have to find a potion of rising force, which may mislead the player.

Where do you stand on the issue, anyway? Misc skill slowdown or stop?



I thought about this for a little bit, but considering how easy it is to stockpile ingredients in the wild, it's something of a moot point, really. Vendors aren't going to be your primary source of ingredients to use for the sake of experience grinding - they'll probably only be what you go to when you want something specific and/or immediate.

The fact that Alchemy - one of the easiest skills to level in the game - is attached to intelligence is sort of moot, since a.) it takes intelligence far beyond the natural cap to really have a big effect on potions and b.) all of the other skills attached to intelligence are a royal [censored] to increase, and it helps to have at least one easy way of raising it.



Blarg. I'm not sure how - or if - I want to deal with that.

Honestly, "Rising Force" just makes me think of a potion that turns me into Yngwie Malmsteen

Haha! You've just made my day :clap:

CAPS ARE A SIGN OF BAD GAME DESIGN, HARD ONES EVEN MORE SO
Always. Question is not if the players will run into them, or when, but only how annoying it will be. I could add some hundred lines 'bout game design, gaming theory, economics and mathematics, but no-one will read them, and generally it boils down as follows anyway:
If a skill/value/whatever of 70 is as much better than 69 as is 69 to 68, and costs are linear, people will go up to 70. And hitting your artificial, out-of-game wall. Always.
Best thing to avoid this to have steadily growing costs, or diminishing returns, or -best- both, which would give the greatest flexibility in game design and in-game.

Ow, my eyes >.<

Ok, a few things. One, as we both acknowledge, caps are an inevitable fact of gaming, and will come about as a result of either a limitation of the game itself (mostly in older games) or to limit the player from becoming God (mostly in newer games). And again, like you say, the idea isn't so much to get rid of them, but rather for them to not feel artificial and arbitrary.

Thing is, neither Galsiah nor myself at this point are advocating hard caps, at least not beyond the ones that exist in the game proper. In my case, misc skills are fairly softly capped barring the location of a master trainer and an insane amount of effort and time put into raising it.

But saying caps are a sign of bad game design is going a tad bit far. It's like saying that menu screens are a sign of bad game design. Yes, they sort of take you out of the moment, but it's more or less impossible to design a game without one.

Well if you want my thoughts then I'm in the slowdown camp.
Mine too. 10/10

Sorry. Caps are sign of bad screen design as well.
Pardon the bad practical pun :wink_smile:
Btw., you asked "slowdown or stop", and a stop is a hard cap ...

"technical caps"
As you said, in old DOS games they may have had some "validity". In modern games, they (mostly) have not.
But they're not the problem here: Let's say skill level values is coded as short (integer), that still gives us 2 bytes, or 2x 0..256 as skill level, and temporal modifier, or somewhat. And we have plenty of bytes at our disposal :liplick:


"design caps"
Are evil. Ever. Always. Because they're artifical, and annoying, and will be bumped into without doubt.
And they're easily avoided with a bit of a thought by moving the technical caps to values that the player can't reach because of exponentiall growing costs and dimishing returns - let's look at the skill issue:
If you have to "pay" so much "experience" to get acrobatics from level 121 to 122 (arbitrary numbers), that it would need 3 days of constant jumping, no player will ever reach 255 - albeit he theoretically could (maybe after having his char jump for full 6 month, or something).

I must admit, that all games I know of in this genre have one fatal flaw, which is most likely because all the d***a**** playing them getting wet patches on their trousers when their char reaches level *insert top level of relevant MOO-PORK*, and start whining if you want to "take away some of their achievements":
Characters do not forget, do not lose skills and therefore become -as you wrote- gods.
While this is somewhat in-theme for MW, it could be easily avoided if you would be un-learning skills by not using them. Sadly this would break the borked leveling system completely ...

Speaking of the leveling system - IMHO it's the cause of the problems, as e.g. I find myself putting often-used skills into misc to avoid constant, and low-multiplier, leveling. (Applies even more in Oblivion, where they carried the borkedness of their system to the extreme ...)
As I have to train up these skills, it would be too annoying to have a "learning cap" on the minor/misc skill ... like "yeah I'm learning, I'm learning, I ... am a d***a***, I'll have to get me a trainer". It's just not how I see the game is fun to play.


Therefore, I'm pretty much with Galsiah here - also I'm a bit "unsatisfied" with GCD, because I have trouble finding the latest version (which is not 1.07c, I think?!), and it does not work with some of your ( BTB) modules ... . :wink_smile:
Oh, and maybe "forgetting" could be worked into it somehow, considering that it does away with the leveling system anyway, AFAIU ?!

@Arralen,
Forgetting your skills, http://s51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/morrowind/morrowindmisc/levellingwithoutcaps.jpg

And yes, I want it to apply to whole game. There is a mod for it.
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=2699

I think this is the right way. It can be extended however. I think we can change the increase-decrease rates for all skills to balance their progresses. I think this is the main complain: Some skills can't get enough success rates to increase in the first place, right? Going around that won't fix anything.

Misk skill slowdown: I *need* to know that when I use any skill, it always progresses, even if it's done very slowly. I really prefer practicing my skills to make them improve rather than looking for gold and then trainers.

BTW, I don't want to constantly think about which skill I have to increase to get a x5 multiplier or which one will inevitably stop increasing and when it will happen, and thus when I'll have to find gold and trainers. I just want to use my skills when there are needed, and hope the game mechanics will make them growing at the rate I defined when creating my character. That's why I really appreciate Galsiah's work on his GCD mod.


Getting ingredients in the wild needs you to take the time, the risks, and the good directions.
For players using a mod list similar to yours (as I do of course), traveling in the wild takes time (no extra speed) and risks (no over-powerful char, dangerous creatures (MWA...)...).

For example, I sometimes see a bunch of a specific and useful herbs close to nix hounds or kagoutis, and I have to evaluate if I should take the herbs and fight the creatures or find another place to collect my herbs. I like such choices (and I know you like choices . If I know merchant X sells these herbs for 1 gold, I will simply not take the time and the thoughts for that.

I like traveling for ingredients far much than going to an alchemist to barter ingredients coming, in the blink of an eye, from the whole Vvardenfel.


Actually they are, for me at least.
As soon as I get, say, approx. 4000 gold, I can buy 2000+2000 ingredients (using the stockpile buy/sell "bug") in a short time, and get my Alchemy skill and Intelligence attributes maxed.
4000 gold is not so much, even with all the mods you suggest.

I think that reaching 100 in Alchemy by only collecting ingredients in the wild will make that skill increase at a rate just as normal as others, and if you do it that way, you'd feel you deserve your proficiency in that skill.


I prefer having to anticipate by collecting various ingredients throughout the world and use the needed ones at the right time.
BTW if you really need a few amount of a specific ingredient, you'd still be able to buy them, they will just not self-refill.


With 100 in Intelligence and Alchemy, and using the (grand-)master alchemy sets, I think one can get very powerful potions.
For example (IIRC):
- Fortify personality: A boost of ~60 for days which is far sufficient to get anybody compliant to your requests
- Swift swim: You can swim (for days!) faster than you ran with the original boots of blinding speed ?_?
- Feather: ~900 for days
- Restore health/fatigue: Fight anybody without too much risks (even with your severe fatigue settings)
And with the current game settings of all my/your mods, I can get such potions very early in the game.


I agree. However I would really prefer seeing their progression rates increased rather than allowing an instant boost to max of Intelligence.



I get what you say, but this quest is the first one of the Temple faction and I really think players (who don't already know the quest) will stuck at this point.
I don't have any nice solution though.

Maybe add diminishing exp gain to potions that have already been made/discovered (or their effects at least) or alternatively, less exp for simple potions (complexity being defined by price of ingredients used.) Not sure if that's technically feasible though...

for slowing misc skill progression I kinda like that.

btw is this going to be modular with separate modules (esp′s) ?
just wondering,if so players could choose what to use,slow,slower,full stop etc for misc skill progression for example.

Even though that I sometimes pick my least/lesser used skills as major,and have what my character use the most at misc,to keep levels under better control.
so full stop doesn′t work if I do that,naturally.

Yeah, but it's a different kind of hard cap. I'm not stopping growth at a certain point, but rather by a certain means. Thar be a difference



Galsiah is actually working on such a mod. See the other thread with my name on it.



I'm not sure what you mean by this.



Nope, Galsiah has confirmed that there shouldn't be any compatibility issues between his mod and mine, not counting the fact that his rewrite of the skill system makes the level-up-birthsign remover script in my mod worthless.



This one quote is very interesting to me, because it tells me something very important: players do a lot of things that they ordinarily wouldn't for the sole sake of the feeling of accomplishment that comes from gaining experience.

For example, when I get off the boat at Seyda Neen and grab Fargoth's ring from the barrel, I always use all of its charges before giving it back to Fargoth. Why? Because it gives me experience, of course.

When I'm selling stuff to Arrille, I take my time to bargain for one extra septim in the smallest amounts possible. Is it because I need that one extra septim? No. It's because I want the experience in Mercantile.

Neither of these are major or minor skills for me. Thus, it feels a bit stilted and awkward for me to devote such effort into raising them. Gaining experience in the skills that are tied to your level-ups makes sense. It's the whole point of playing, and leveling up brings you closer to your ultimate goal. Raising misc skills, on the other hand, simply makes you more powerful without making the game more challenging to compensate. Less scrupulous players will simply choose skills they never use as major/minor so that they are free to level up their other skills in peace without the game becoming any more challenging while they do so.



I'd like to think that there's a fine line between thinking about it and obsessing over it. And that fine line consists solely with how easy it is to max out those multipliers. Make it exceedingly difficult to do so, and the consideration you put into what skills you raise will simply be more of a strategic decision. And you know how I like decisions

(Cont.)

I guess my two main lines of thought are as such:

One, I'm not fully aware and/or convinced that every ingredient, particularly the rare and therefore hard-to-collect ones, are so readily available from merchants as to make them a far more preferable option to hunting them down in the wilderness. You say that 4,000 gold will get you 4,000 ingredients, but that's still 4 grand that could have been spent elsewhere (perhaps on training for misc skills that you can't raise on your own ) that you're dumping on things that you can find for free with just a little effort.

Two, I'm not quite sure how much I feel like editing the inventory of every merchant in the game, or how horrible that would be for compatibility.



Again, I'm definitely in agreeance (is that a word?) with this. But, on the other hand, it would make sense that certain large cities like Balmora are going to have a large commercial selection of ingredients from across the land. But again, you're actually going to have to pay for them.

For the record, only 15 non-unique ingredients in the game cost only 1 septim: Small Kwama Egg, Bungler's Bane, Hypha Facia, Bread, Chokeweed, Violet Coprinus, Kresh Fiber, Marshmerrow, Muck, Rat Meat, Roobrush, Luminous Russula, Saltrice, Stoneflower Petals, Trama Root, and Wickwheat. Everything beyond that costs 2 septims (thus doubling the cost of what you specified above) and beyond.



This is incorrect, I believe. I tested this myself by setting my intellect and alchemy skills to 100 in the editor and then coc'ing to the toddtest cell. Nothing I was able to make there with those two values was too far into the realm of nuts.
I even raised my intellect to 150 (assuming a mage birthsign and several fortifications from in-game spells and items), and the additional power conveyed by the boost was negligible.



Yeah, neither do I. It's not exactly a high priority, though.



Neither am I. Scripting isn't really my bag.



Well, since it's my mod, and the target audience is, well, me, the main mod proper will be built to my own specifications. And so people don't tar and feather me when I'm walking down the street, I'll include an alternate module that simply slows down the misc skill progression rather than stopping it.



Well, again, this is the sort of behavior I'm trying to *prevent*

I understand you reasoning, however. You simply want to have control over your level-ups rather than abuse the system by raising your misc skills to godly levels. If you have a look at the "Settings" plugin for my mod, however, you may notice that I've done my best to identify the skills with the most cancer-like growth levels and lower them to more manageable levels.

Also, as I noted above, in addition to what I'm doing with misc skills, I'm also lowering the growth rates of major and minor skills.