Encharrion
L.O.T.I.S.
RISE of LEGION
107
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Posted - 2013.05.31 23:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
Firstly, I do not believe that respecs are in any way necessary or even good for this game. I believe that adding respecs would infact harm this game for the reasons specified above by Cross Atu and others. However, I am open to the possibility that there may be a way to implement respecs in a way that is in fact beneficial to the game.
A post by RoundEy3 on the first page brought up an interesting idea for respecs that unfortunately suffered from some of the same problems and introduced some of its own. However, I noticed that with specific numbers for SP cost as well as additional often suggested limitations on respecs, some interesting math appears.
The limitations would consist of:
1. Any SP from unspecced skills would be cut in half. That is, if a skill is unspecced, the amount of SP unallocated to spend on other things is equal to the amount of SP lost. This is important, as you will see later.
2. Respecs would be limited to a certain amount of SP, such that the spendable amount would be fairly limited in scope. You would select skills to unspec, and SP from those skills would be unallocated according to limitation 1. You would only be able to unspec SP up to the SP limit, and no higher.
3. Limitation 2 is meaningless if the respec can be repeated instantly, as you could simply respec over and over until you had respecced ALL your SP. If limitation 2 is to be of any use at all, there must be a time limit on how often you can respec. The precise time period is not entirely important, but I believe once every 3 months is probably too often, and once a year is possibly a little long, so lets just use that range for this arrangement (although one time only is a possible arrangement as well).
So why is cutting reallocated SP in half important? Let's say it takes 5 days to make approximately 1.5 million SP (I haven't played in a while so I am pulling this number out of my ass, I apologize if its particularly inaccurate). Our respec option allows the unallocation of 3 million SP. Half this SP is lost, and half can be allocated to other skills. Half of 3 million is 1.5 million, so it will take 5 days to make back the losses incurred by the respec. However, the amount of SP reallocated is also 1.5 million SP, so in the same 5 days in which we make back our losses, had we not respecced, we would have gained the skills we just respecced into, and not sacrificed other skills for it. This respec arrangement is kind of like sacrificing SP to frontload your skill training (although this analogy pretty much fails since you can spend the SP that you gain making up for the respec loss on new skills). It would have its uses, but other than those uses it would generally be better to earn the SP rather than respec it into place.
You still have to live with the consequences of poor SP allocation, since should you respec bad skill choices, you still lose out on a full half of the SP you spent on those skills in the first place.
I'm pretty sure this system avoids the "Flavor of the Month" problem as well. Sure, they could sacrifice some other skills they feel they don't really need to get the current OP weapon. Then when the FotM changes, they respec out of the old weapon and into the new one. Except they have to sacrifice MORE than just the previous FotM weapon, they have to sacrifice some of the SP they earned in the intervening time. This subset of players will know the game well enough to not make stupid mistakes with their skills, so any skills they sacrifice will have to be retrained. This makes any respec extremely inefficient; given the numbers above, if they sacrificed the previous FotM and another skill for 3 mil SP to skill a new weapon with 1.5 mil SP, and then proceeded to spend half of the next five days retraining the skill they sacrificed (because if they didn't want the skill they wouldn't have trained it in the first place) then they have basically gotten almost nowhere at all. They were already halfway through the time required to earn the skills for the new weapon without sacrificing the previous one. In fact, if a player wanted to capitalize on the next FotM, the most efficient thing to do would be to simply collect SP before hand and pool it until the next OP thing comes around to skill it up all at once; this is something that anyone can already do right now.(not to mention the fact that the respec is time limited, and that time period is potentially longer than FotM phases)
It would also benefit more casual players, for whom 1.5 mil SP might not take 5 days, but two weeks. This allows them to get new skills or weapons earlier in a costly frontloaded kind of way.
Just to be clear here: I'm not saying this will work. I just think that it has enough potential to be examined more closely.
Also if you took the time to read this wall of text, I really appreciate it and I apologize for how lengthy it got. Thank you! |