I'd say have a roll over SP pool, but reduce active SP by 50% and increase passive SP to compensate. That'd reduce the grind quite a bit.

A cap protects players from themselves. This triple SP weekend just proved to us all that we'll sit here and grind endlessly if CCP lets us.

Players burning out and quitting within months is a far bigger problem than not attracting new players in the first place: This game will go nowhere if we develop a high turn over rate and can't retain players.

The thought behind the cap is that once players get every skill they're interested in to 5 interest in the game will wane and they'll stop playing. Something like that anyway.

I'd like to link to my suggestion for a large, constantly regenerating pool of SP: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=462915#post462915



Active boosters simply increase the rate at which the pool refills (and increases the max pool size).

..valuable stuff...

This thread has grown into a much more complicated discussion than the merits of a rollover mechanic. It did last time around too. We are now discussing the entire sp system and game design. Probably unavoidable since these things are connected and bear directly on player experiences for noobs and vets alike.

Laurent, i have a lot of respect for the opinions you present on the forums. They are typically well thought out and you have the best interests of the game as the central focus of your posts.

ITT, i like what your post brings to the conversation. I agree with your design goals, perhaps with the caveat that at some point skill points lost is an ok thing. But that's a minor quibble and i'm willing to be neutral on that point.

What i vehemently disagree with is your endorsement of the in-match passive skillpoint rewards(5sp/s) originally introduced by CCP(and without consulting the playerbase). The motivations are noble: to provide a helping hand to struggling players, to limit the magnitude of the skillpoint gap between casuals and grinders and to support various playstyles. However, best intentions notwithstanding, the passive in-match sp mechanic is ultimately destructive and i'm sure we can find many constructive alternatives that contribute much more to DUST and the player experience.

Why the hatred for the passive match sp mechanic? Because it is the diametric opposite of a meritocratic reward system. Because it sends a message that engaging the enemy(or supporting your team) is neither honoured or required by the game mechanics. The fundamental criticism would be that it rewards passivity as a valid approach to the game. In a very real sense it devalues player effort, and an argument could be made that it is a patronizing, rather than an enabling, approach to struggling players. More could be said, but this is the essence of it.

I believe that once a player becomes aware of this mechanic, there is a sense of psychological d+¬nouement: in a universe with a reputation as harsh and as legendary as New Eden's to discover that the developer is putting all players on a mandatory meritocratic welfare program is disheartening and disillusioning, imo. I believe that the game will pay a price for this in terms of credibility and romantic appeal. I realize this sounds a bit histrionic, but people are very sensitive in situations where the walk doesn't match the talk. The ultimate victim here is New Eden.

Ok, so long story short, alternatives to a passive dole? It must be a mechanism that rewards only actions. My personal favourite is an asymmetrical WP to SP conversion factor based on how well a player did or didn't do in a given match. There are no doubt other, better mechanisms than mine. The point is that they must reward action and not reward passivity/disengagement.

I think it's important to separate the topic of SP pools and 'catching up' with vets. (the latter should never be implemented if you love the game and want to be playing it in 10 years time)

When the SP pools/rollover thing was discussed months ago I recommended a logarithmically decreasing payout from an SP pool. (Comp. Sci graduate so this kind of stuff is second nature to me...)

Basically you have daily injections of (constant) SP into the player's SP pool (which is enough to go from zero to full in 3-4 weeks). When calculating the amount of SP to award the player the input value from the battle is run through a logarithmically decreasing function that makes it so that the closer you get to emptying the pool the less SP you get.

Now if you play your first battle in a month it's going to give you a lot of SP (could be reduced to not be overwhelming), ten battles in you're getting still very high rewards. Now if you stop playing for a month, during that session you might have emptied 3/4 of the SP pool.

Enter the weekend warrior; he binges on weekends... He plays 20(?) matches every weekend, and he takes his SP pool from 3/4 to 2/4 every week. The last game he plays every weekend gives him half the SP the first game gives him.

Last is the dope smoking college guy; he plays 10 matches every night (except weekends), and his SP pool is always at 1/4. He gets about half the SP of the weekend warrior per match. The reason his gameplay is rewarded is that at lower levels the SP pool regenerated a bit more per day.

I understand disliking the passive SP in fight entirely. Trust me. I spammed the forum back in the day when it was announced by CCP about the fact it would make people passively farm in the MCC. And it happened, and lasted for month (year ?)

I wouldnt be saddened if it were to completely disappear at some point, far from that. I just tried offering a valid system using the established components. But yeah there is definitely a system, somewhere, in someone's mind, that would offer a much more valid and balance system regarding SP progression.

Yet, the way it helps players and specific roles to still be in track SP wise seems to me like a decent enough idea. I know it has many downside. But to be fair, players being passive, or playing it safe isnt tied to passive SP in my opinion.

In every FPS, you'll see people not taking chances, and hiding if the wind doesnt blow in their favor. Redlines, cowardness etcc arent a dust only thing. So i wouldnt pin that on the passive SP. Though i would agree that the current protection against AFK farming are way too weak and need to be addressed.

No passive SP\WP gain while in the redline would already be a good first step for example.

All i know is that the current system is not good enough. i'd rather get a better yet still not perfect system that allows for many things that arent possible now (rollover\New player experience and sp progression) than the perfect one in a year even though ultimately i'd agree with you regarding passive SP in battle.

WP to SP only system sounds perfect on paper. And tbh before the beta was released, i always thought the active SP part of battles would be just that and that the off battle passive part of the SP earnings would be the main SP income source for everybody. In a way, it would be just the same but very different at the same time.

I think it's important to separate the topic of SP pools and 'catching up' with vets. (the latter should never be implemented if you love the game and want to be playing it in 10 years time)

When the SP pools/rollover thing was discussed months ago I recommended a logarithmically decreasing payout from an SP pool. (Comp. Sci graduate so this kind of stuff is second nature to me...)

Basically you have daily injections of (constant) SP into the player's SP pool (which is enough to go from zero to full in 3-4 weeks). When calculating the amount of SP to award the player the input value from the battle is run through a logarithmically decreasing function that makes it so that the closer you get to emptying the pool the less SP you get.

Now if you play your first battle in a month it's going to give you a lot of SP (could be reduced to not be overwhelming), ten battles in you're getting still very high rewards. Now if you stop playing for a month, during that session you might have emptied 3/4 of the SP pool.

Enter the weekend warrior; he binges on weekends... He plays 20(?) matches every weekend, and he takes his SP pool from 3/4 to 2/4 every week. The last game he plays every weekend gives him half the SP the first game gives him.

Last is the dope smoking college guy; he plays 10 matches every night (except weekends), and his SP pool is always at 1/4. He gets about half the SP of the weekend warrior per match. The reason his gameplay is rewarded is that at lower levels the SP pool regenerated a bit more per day.

What does "Catching up to vets" mean anyway?

Does it mean making one effective fitting that can kill a vet, or does it mean matching a year or three's SP in a few months?


You can acomplish the former with a starter bonus pool, but attempting the latter is guaranteed to break the game. You simply can't earn SP fast enough without completely devaluing the rewards.

There is no need to have everyone at the same level, just competative.

But even there, does competative mean competative against proto vets, or simply competative against the players in match? A better academy system and a low level match mode could ensure competativeness without handing out 5M SP.

The cap is there to prevent players from doing just that yes, but not because their interest will wane. CCP wants players to continue buying their products, booster and the such. But if you max out your skills, why buy anything from the aur store. I will say though, maybe for the moment this kinda holds true. The End game is a bit lacking atm. Need us some PvE

We had that before and it was universally hated.

I heavily endorsed Rasatsu's logarithmically damped reward system when he first proposed it, and still do. In a very real mathematical sense all staged or tiered reward systems are an approximation to the logarithmic system.

There are a lot of advantages to this system, but perhaps the biggest are that once you get a little bit of experience with it, it becomes very easy to estimate how much grinding time you need to reach your goals, and that there is no hard cap on your efforts(plus daily top-ups), and especially that if you only have a few hours a week to play you are well-rewarded for your time.

It provides good results for casuals and prevents runaway grinding with one elegant equation.

This scaling wp->sp degradation sounds absolutely terrible. It caters to casuals and hurts the people who already play games till cap every week. We just need to modify the pool to regenerate constantly rather than harsh breaks from every Tuesday to Wednesday. New users get some points thrown into the pool and faster initial accrual rate, and that's it.

I myself would find it infuriating to not have the wp/time I spend in combat to never line up with my end reward, who enjoys non-linear progression?

Some of these ideas are very good. But, I know it's an odd point but I could see new players getting SP faster than they grow in wisdom. In my eyes this would lead too new players spending millions of SP on "useless" skills and then suddenly being tapped out.

Okay, so it's stretched long enough that it'd be fairly consistent for a daily player. What about weekend players?

Also, difference WP -> SP rewards for different players would an issue. So although there might be very little inconsistency within a single small play session - you have differences over long play sessions, between sessions with larger gaps gaps, and between different players.

A weakness of this is that players who ask the question "Am I being fairly rewarded?" don't have a simple or easily accessible answer.

Plus, as a programmer you're a special breed: you're very comfortable with complexity whereas most people aren't and don't trust things they can't understand - especially when they thing it *should* be simple.

Rasatsu your suggestion is dope.

Make the SP total of Dust's highest SP player the soft cap. Allow everyone under that total to grind until their heart is content. For the top SP player, increase his or her SP soft cap every week by the same amount as the current weekly cap. Do this and there's no need for a rollover. If the top person grinds through their soft cap and creates more distance between them and the rest of the field, they've actually done us all a favor by increasing the new soft cap that we can all grind to. The rookies are happy because they'll be able to become competitive quickly and the vets are happy because they can develop their characters horizontally. Remember, you hit a point of diminishing returns once you're around 15 mil SP. We need to focus on getting players to that point quickly while also letting vets enjoy further character development opportunities that don't really give them a significant edge over those under them.

Many things i d like to comment in the last posts but i have to be somewhere so will do that later. Still on the catching up to vets part, it s neither for me.

It s more of having a way for new players to slowly compensate the gap they have with older players without it being an easy or too fast track to get what those older players have. Sp bank or "retro active" rollover on that matter can make that possible in some scenarios. And it s not only for new players. Would also be nice for people who would decide to start yet another character.

But again it all depends on the general sp suystem scenario

My idea behind it is that a newberry needs to get to a certain point SP wise to be halfway effective. A faster progression, which could be a higher return on WP than average, would help close the gap between vets, but still leave them way ahead.

Just enough to at the very least let them get a ADV suit and weapon, shield and armor skills lvl 1.

I'm not really in favor of offering an automatic faster progression for new players till X SP. After all, everyone had to live through those hard times at some point. Offering a free booster to new players (a 7 or 30 day), and make sure they dont hit a cap that will discourage them from playing at some point and maybe push them away definitely would be a good start.

I strongly 1 SP should have the same "work" value for any player. Thus why i suggested the "passive sp rollover" solution that tends to make things more even for everyone. It's not perfect but use already existing mecanics and answers to what i think are the main goals active sp progression system should have.