Fixed Levelling: Skill Progression too Fast

[Levis]

I would Need to look into it a bit more but from the compile logs I had at that time I couldn't see any of my functions being called. It might be I overlooked something because I only noticed it a bit later and my compile log what quite full because I was Debugging something else leveling related.
But I suspect there being some Kind of "Bonus" or something like that which causes this.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'm calling this one "Fixed" until I hear otherwise.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes. Gaining rank in POTC is stupid fast these days. In GOF2 you are involved in a career.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Yes. Gaining rank in POTC is stupid fast these days. In GOF2 you are involved in a career.

That should have been FIXED by now.
If it isn't, you need to say so or it won't BE fixed either!

 

[Mirsaneli]

That should have been FIXED by now.
If it isn't, you need to say so or it won't BE fixed either!

I also think that leveling in PoTC is too easy. But I thought it was ment to be like that? New Horizons is the oldest Mod, am I right?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Wha? We're talking about the latest Build 14 Beta 4 WIP.

And it is decidedly NOT meant to be too easy.
It should be easy on Apprentice and hard on Swashbuckler, of course!

A benchmark is meant to be that if you play through the Standard Storyline without doing anything extra, you should NOT have been able to max out your player skills.

I think @Levis asked for feedback on the Leveling speed about a gazillion times.
But without knowing what is considered too fast/not fast enough compared to the current situation, nothing can possibly be done to make it better.

So speak up and give that feedback we need!!!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

That should have been FIXED by now.
If it isn't, you need to say so or it won't BE fixed either!

The leveling speed was changed drastically many months ago when I was playing GOF2. When I came back to POTC after it became playable again I noticed it right away, but decided this must be the way everyone wants it if they changed it so much.

 

[Talisman]

Wha? We're talking about the latest Build 14 Beta 4 WIP.

And it is decidedly NOT meant to be too easy.
It should be easy on Apprentice and hard on Swashbuckler, of course!

A benchmark is meant to be that if you play through the Standard Storyline without doing anything extra, you should NOT have been able to max out your player skills.

I think @Levis asked for feedback on the Leveling speed about a gazillion times.
But without knowing what is considered too fast/not fast enough compared to the current situation, nothing can possibly be done to make it better.

So speak up and give that feedback we need!!!

And everybody who has an interest in the matter on this site has expressed an opinion "about a gazillion times" - but if no one listens or does not appear to care - then what can you do ?

If you want to know people's opinion @Pieter Boelen - then I suggest you go back and read through the relevant threads.

But please don't say that you and @Levis have not been told, because that is not true.

 

[Talisman]

PS - These posts about POTC Levelling should bre split into their own thread.

Or added to one of the other threads about the new leveling system.

 

[Mirsaneli]

Wha? We're talking about the latest Build 14 Beta 4 WIP.

And it is decidedly NOT meant to be too easy.
It should be easy on Apprentice and hard on Swashbuckler, of course!

A benchmark is meant to be that if you play through the Standard Storyline without doing anything extra, you should NOT have been able to max out your player skills.

I think @Levis asked for feedback on the Leveling speed about a gazillion times.
But without knowing what is considered too fast/not fast enough compared to the current situation, nothing can possibly be done to make it better.

So speak up and give that feedback we need!!!

Ok, I can give you proper feedback, and then you can move my post to the coresponding thread. So, I play PoTC always on Swashbuckler difficulty. And yet, I easily get a good ship, easily level up. Easily get good items, because getting rich in New Horizons is piece of cake. I've been playing GoF 2.1.4 for a few days, and now I have a chance to see what's good and bad in both Mods. In GOF I barely have 6000 gold and I'm very worried how I will earn more money for my crew with my little ship with whom I have to run away from every battle I get into. Also, fighting is difficult. In New Horizons, it is only difficult at the beginning when you are small level. Later, it becomes pretty easy. Also, I always had around 1-2 milion money in New Horizons. For example, I got a good ship at the beginning of the game (Jack Sparrow storyline) after I went to Barbados. There was a battle between two good English ships vs one French ship (if I recall correct), and that enemy ship surrendered. I boarded it and got the ship. GoF doesn't function that way. I boarded a small ship in GOF (same class as mine, but the captain was higher level), and I was easily beaten just like that. So, the current Swashbuckler should be more appropriate to the Apprentice difficulty. Also, I don't know which Mod is more realistic in terms of prices, because I know very little about the prices from those periods. But it seems strange to me that I can have 2 milions of money (and I'm relatively rich), cause I've seen screenshots from players who have 20+ milion money. In GoF, if I earn 100k, I will be happy
Sorry for not mentioning this before, but I thought that it was agreed to be like that in New Horizons long time ago (since, as I mentioned, it is an old Mod and a lot has been done on it).

 

[Levis]

Just to be clear. I never said I want leveling to be easy. I want the first 7 or 8 levels to be pretty quick to reach and after that it should become harder and harder. Guess I'm going to steepen the curve a little bit and tweak the difficult modifier a bit.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The leveling speed was changed drastically many months ago when I was playing GOF2. When I came back to POTC after it became playable again I noticed it right away, but decided this must be the way everyone wants it if they changed it so much.

@Levis did a huge rewrite of the underlying game code, because the original code was messy and inconsistent at best.
A side-effect of such a huge rewrite is that you simply cannot ensure that the balancing will remain as it always was.

It wasn't rewritten because we wanted it faster though. A simple rebalancing would have sufficed for that.
Which means Levis could have saved himself a LOT of trouble if that was the case.

The point is that yes, things are VERY different now.
But from the coding side, it is extremely hard to determine HOW different and if it is actually good like this.

So if players "decide that is apparently how we want it now", then the coders never find out that it isn't how we want it.
Which means that progress grinds to a halt simply because of a lack of feedback.

And everybody who has an interest in the matter on this site has expressed an opinion "about a gazillion times" - but if no one listens or does not appear to care - then what can you do ?

If you want to know people's opinion @Pieter Boelen - then I suggest you go back and read through the relevant threads.

But please don't say that you and @Levis have not been told, because that is not true.

I know that quite recently the Levelling was INSANELY fast and players managed to get to Level 99 within a matter of days. People did report on that at the time.
Then @jsv and @Levis looked into it and found that the reason was a BUG in the new Levelling code.
In other words: That was never intentional.

Then the following happened in chronological order:

On 16 December, @Levis posted an attempted fix for this. @Jason indicated that solved the problem.

On 17 December, @Levis thought he found another error but couldn't replicate it.
But I also found and fixed an error in the code that may have triggered that situation.
So since we couldn't replicate it, we decided that has most likely been fixed yet.

On 22 December, I posted a new EXE Installer with these fixes included.
Additional attempted balancing was included as well.

I have basically seen no feedback on the Levelling speed since then. Until now.
And any feedback from before then would have been affected by this bug that has already been fixed.

Of course that was VERY recently; that installer isn't even a week old, after all.
So I must ask: When you comment on the Levelling speed here, is that or is that not based on the 22 Dec version of the mod?

PS - These posts about POTC Levelling should bre split into their own thread.

Or added to one of the other threads about the new leveling system.

Yes, it should be. Done now.
I was on my phone last night and moving posts around on that is very annoying, so I left it until today to actually do that....

Sorry for not mentioning this before, but I thought that it was agreed to be like that in New Horizons long time ago (since, as I mentioned, it is an old Mod and a lot has been done on it).

Nope, any perceived balancing issues are decidedly NOT because that is how we want it.
Rather, they are because there have been so many changes over the years that getting balancing the way we do want it
is basically impossible without feedback on what recent changes actually do for the game.

Especially Levelling has had a LOT of changes made to it and the final form of that system is still up in the air.
We've got a reasonable idea of HOW we want it, as in "you shouldn't be able to max out your player skills and abilities within the Standard Storyline".
But that is just an idea. I think both @Levis and myself have got NO clue if it actually works like that in the game.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Long Story Short

There was an UNINTENTIONAL BUG with the Levelling system. This was fixed in the 22 December version of the mod.
If your comments were based on earlier mod releases, please try again with the latest one.
Feedback on this from weeks ago no longer applies because many substantial changes have been made again.

If based on the 22 December version, you STILL find things too fast, then please say so!
At the moment it isn't clear to me if that is still the case.

Until we get confirmation on this, it would probably be the wisest to not make any changes for now.
Because when we DO make use of feedback to make further changes, we need to make sure that feedback is based on an up-to-date game version.
Otherwise @Levis might end up spending his time and effort on issues that have already been addressed, which would be a bit of a shame.

 

[Levis]

That's why I asked people to post screens of theire character after a storyline completion etc. So I could get an idea about how it progresses.
I'm still interested in those. But do note the game version and the difficulty and for example how much sidetracked you got.

 

[Mirsaneli]

I'm doing the Horatio storyline now, so I will compare it with the previous version and see if there is any difference.

 

[Talisman]

Just to be clear. I never said I want levelling to be easy. I want the first 7 or 8 levels to be pretty quick to reach and after that it should become harder and harder. Guess I'm going to steepen the curve a little bit and tweak the difficult modifier a bit.

I think the levelling system should not be tweaked any more - until after we get feedback from more players (the 6-12 people who play the mod and comment on these forums have all expressed their opinions one way or another) - after the public release of Beta 4.

Continually tweaking things is just going to push the public release further and further into the future.

@Levis did a huge rewrite of the underlying game code, because the original code was messy and inconsistent at best.

A side-effect of such a huge rewrite is that you simply cannot ensure that the balancing will remain as it always was.



It wasn't rewritten because we wanted it faster though. A simple rebalancing would have sufficed for that.

Which means Levis could have saved himself a LOT of trouble if that was the case.

Yes - the code may have been messy and inconsistent (I am not a programmer - so I would not know)



BUT what @Levis also did was to change the nature of the Levelling system from one based on an Arithmetic progression, to one based on a Geometric progression.

This has completely altered the experience of the system for the players.

In my opinion this alteration has not yet been fully integrated into the game, because @Levis has still to go through the story quests and alter the rewards the players get for completing tasks, so that they fit into the new levelling system ( since they are still currently based on the old system ).

But that is something that can wait until after the public release of Beta 4 - when we hopefully have much more feedback.

We've got a reasonable idea of HOW we want it, as in "you shouldn't be able to max out your player skills and abilities within the Standard Storyline".

But that is just an idea. I think both @Levis and myself have got NO clue if it actually works like that in the game.

The only answer to that is for you both to spend more time playing the game.



Since continually changing things without having personal experience of what the effects are in the game, will cause you to make changes that do not improve the gameplay but actually damage it.


It is not sufficient to rely on the feedback of others, since we will always have our own likes, dislikes, and prejudices. And there is simply not enough people on the forum to give you a rounded and balanced view of the situation.


BOTTOM LINE

Stop messing around making changes & release a public version of Beta 4, to get a greater amount of varied feedback from a greater variety of players about the game.


If things go on the way they are currently, then I personally don't expect to see a public release of Beta 4 before Easter, or perhaps even June 2016.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

From my side, I'd want to get it all to work well enough to be considered "functional and not broken".
So if it is still "obviously too fast", then something may still need to be done right now.
But if that is based on previous bugged mod versions, then indeed we can keep things as-is until we get more feedback.

I only care about "tying up loose ends" now. Once that is done, it is time for me to PLAY!

 

[Levis]

BUT what @Levis also did was to change the nature of the Levelling system from one based on an Arithmetic progression, to one based on a Geometric progression.

This has completely altered the experience of the system for the players.

In my opinion this alteration has not yet been fully integrated into the game, because @Levis has still to go through the story quests and alter the rewards the players get for completing tasks, so that they fit into the new levelling system ( since they are still currently based on the old system ).

This shouldn't be needed...

The reason I changed it to a exponential curve instead of lineair was because this was always the case already but you didn't see it. Most xp was scaled by you level, this was done by a exponential function. I've now made this more clear for the player. So now if you gain 50 xp for something you will always gain 50 xp for it. But you need more xp to level. In the past it could be at one point this 50 xp was scaled to 0 and didn't actually help anymore. These kind of things made some skills progress very weird. Also some didn't have the right modification. If you for example wanted to get high in repair you had to do that early in game because later on this almost gave no xp.

The largest change I actually made is the fact that every character now follows the leveling rules, so no level 5 characters with super high stats anymore etc. The only exception is the mainplayer at the moment because he gets some skill levels set at the beginning (if you don't start at level 1). I'm still thinking how to fix this.

 

[Jason]

Well I am playing the 12/22 update I thought it was about right. I am not getting the uplevel every third or fourth sword cut as before.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Thanks @Jason. Sounds to me then like the genuine BUG has been fixed.
The main question left is how the current situation works out from a balancing point of view.
But that only becomes apparent when doing a bit of a longer play-through, which hopefully will soon be possible.