Role-play Suggestion

[Belle Hibiki]

I hope you're not offended, but I just did a /search of your posts for the last nine months. I didn't want to look farther, because that's roughly when the new stats/systems/personal saga grading and such was announced.

You've participated in DA and CC, it's true. Back in January you finally closed out Retribution on Koola (no reward asked, presumably because the bulk of the work was pre-customs.) But other than that you made, what, a few solid posts in Duality?

Not to sound like a dick, but I think it's rather presumptuous for you to say that the current system isn't 'rewarding' enough for personal sagas when, from what I see, you haven't made the effort to get one.

After speaking with Vi last night, I thought I'd expand on this. And maybe do a little flip-flopping.

Although I don't think anyone has the ability to say that personal sagas aren't rewarding enough - I don't think anyone's really completed/graded a big one - if they're anything like the saga rewards from CC, you'd be correct.

What came to me last night is probably another main reason why people are listless, and that is a flaw in the Diminishing Returns system of stats. Not a flaw in the calculations themselves, but in the amount of experience that players are awarded for actions. The difference in power between the big guys and little guys has been lessened by DR, but a person's power relative to others has become more static, not less.



To explain, let's compare Raditzu and Belle Hibiki. Raditzu has somewhere around 2260 SP, last I checked, and Belle has 1201 SP. Now, I earn 6xp per week. At my rank, that's enough to buy 1.2 stat points. Got that? Good.

Even if Raditzu never trained or did a saga, and I did not suffer further diminishing returns from here on out and was active every week, it would take me 1000/1.2 = 833 weeks to catch up. Over 17 years to catch up to someone who's not doing anything, and that assumes that I don't get hit with further DR.

Now, consider the recent saga: Calculating Catastrophe. Raditzu and I both scored big in rewards there - we both got the highest amount of TP/XP there was to get, which was 20. At that time, that was about 5 SP for me.

If you want another reason why people aren't interested, there you go. It's effectively impossible for lower dudes to catch up at the current rate of growth. I doubt this site will still be up in 10 years, much less 17.

Now, it's quite possible that maybe personal sagas do something ridiculously more than Staff Sagas and give like 100 exp or something, but I sort of doubt it.

So, actually, in a way I think Orion is right. But it's not 'more promise of rewards will get players to play more', it's promise of 'play having any real tangible effect on play. Period.'



I don't think the DR system needs to be changed; I think DR is a great idea. What needs to be changed is the amount of experience we allot. 5 XP per week is far too small. It's a pittance. The amount of experience awarded from all activities needs to be ramped up by several degrees, either by:

• Increasing the benefit of weekly training/gravitychamber/weighted clothing by x10, or
  
• Increasing the benefit of weekly training by like x5 and then having rewards for effort (personal sagas, activity in Staff Sagas) contribute vastly more than they do now.