Power Boost coming up

[Tom]

Right now, there is no way to change your name, but I will manually change them if you really want it.

[Morningstar]

Right now, there is no way to change your name, but I will manually change them if you really want it.

Early on, you said there'd be a reboot/reset before things kicked off for real and we'd have to remake accounts anyway? I think that's all he's asking.

[Tom]

I'll probably not wipe the characters, because that would mean all those spells are without inventors. But I'll allow name changes before we go "for real".

[^ban^]

In that case, I'd like to request a change to Moridin. Account name is bannable@gmail.com, character is "Teutch the Silent".

[Morningstar]

For what it's worth, I didn't get a chance to jump in right away when the testing thread opened up (lacking time and no spells) so I decided to test the system another way.  Without casting any spells or using the parser, I'm looking at 4,4,1,6,1,14 in various skills as of today.  I don't have any opinion on the matter, but compare this (with no casting XP) to what others are posting after a week or two of having extra casting XP.

1) Is there a noticeable difference?
2) If so, is the difference suitably large/small enough to serve our intention?
3) If not, what, if anything, should be done?

[Nathan]

For what it's worth, I didn't get a chance to jump in right away when the testing thread opened up (lacking time and no spells) so I decided to test the system another way.  Without casting any spells or using the parser, I'm looking at 4,4,1,6,1,14 in various skills as of today.  I don't have any opinion on the matter, but compare this (with no casting XP) to what others are posting after a week or two of having extra casting XP.

1) Is there a noticeable difference?
2) If so, is the difference suitably large/small enough to serve our intention?
3) If not, what, if anything, should be done?

Mine is 4,4,4,4,4,4,12 with 112 XP spare (still deciding where to put it). So that seems like quite a large difference, but I've not really done much casting. When did you sign up? Because it seems like it might be the amount of time you've played (not necessarily cast spells for) that is the bigger difference. I signed up on 25th August at 1:39pm (I kept the email), I don't think XP gain was working then but it came in shortly after.

[Zane]

1) Is there a noticeable difference?
2) If so, is the difference suitably large/small enough to serve our intention?
3) If not, what, if anything, should be done?

1) I haven't been casting a lot of spells and most aren't very challenging (so generally low XP).  In  addition, I've been kind of scattershot in choosing skills instead of specializing much.  I have skills at 12,5,5,4,3,3,2,2,2,2 - and at least one in every other base/intent.
2) The impact of casting experience has been relatively small as compared to the hourly accrual from what I've seen.  But that may be because I'm not firing off a lot of high-powered spells.
3)  I feel it might be better to either increase the XP gain from spellcasting or reduce the time-based accrual (or both?).  Sitting around and waiting gets you more than doing stuff, from what I've seen.  By the time you have enough XP to cast a spell, your skill levels are high enough that actually casting it doesn't get you much additional XP.   It's a struggle to find a spell that can gain me more than 4-5 XP total, while I gain 24 XP a day.  That seems to me a little out of balance.

[Tom]

It's a struggle to find a spell that can gain me more than 4-5 XP total, while I gain 24 XP a day.  That seems to me a little out of balance.

It's intentional. To be casual-player friendly, activity should not dominate time-in-game.

[Morningstar]

Any chance one of the GMs can create a simulation character, start him with the estimated XP we've gained so far (what, 1000 + 24[days live] ? ) and then add an estimated daily casting bonus for the same time period so we can compare against my baseline and make sure it'll truly look the way we want?  Like Tom said, things almost always work well at startup but you have to test them at higher levels to make sure it still works too.

[loren]

Any chance one of the GMs can create a simulation character, start him with the estimated XP we've gained so far (what, 1000 + 24[days live] ? ) and then add an estimated daily casting bonus for the same time period so we can compare against my baseline and make sure it'll truly look the way we want?  Like Tom said, things almost always work well at startup but you have to test them at higher levels to make sure it still works too.

That's how we switched to Concentration/Mana used for gains.  I did some quick calculations and showed that the decay in the usage of energy/concentration as you skill up caused a large acceleration in skill advancement.  We did the same sort of envelope calculation to show that you gain a boost to skills, but not something that is earth shattering.  The real trick was the assumption that you'd have spells that would advance your skills.  If you haven't noticed it rounds down, which slows gains even more.