PC Thoughts on skills, XP and perks
- Thread starter Sethiel
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That is a common defense of LBD AND if there were good examples of this then you might have a point though there are other problems. However, I have never seen a game that has been able to actually achieve this and there are some significant behemoths that have tried. Morrowind used this type of system in multiple games - it was a toxic dumpster of a system in all of them. Fallout uses a perk system - FAR superior to the silly crap you find in Morrowind. Even the mountains of mods never really fixed the level system in Morrowind.
Killing zombies to farm XP is another problem. Good thing that is not an issue here. There is a problem that you can abuse the upgrade system to get xp faster but that is neither integral to the system itself as it is in LBD and also represents a single point of failure that is possible to balance. All the evidence I have seen shows that you cannot perform the same balance with an LBD system.
This is one of the reasons that I actually prefer Rolands 0xp MOD progression system over the base game - it is a far superior system as it takes the xp motivation out of all actions other than survival - the core of the game.
Many, many many reasons. The general one that you ruin into immediately in any LBD system is that there are things you want to level that are counter intuitive to do so. the classic example here is armor skills. It is NOT preferable to get hit but it is preferable to gain resistance. There are MANY skills this falls into - jumping, running, crafting etc.
Another one that I am currently doing is changing skills late game to open your options. I main sledge right now on day 90. Going to perk into the bat as I am tired of using the sledge all the time and there are situations where the bat will be far better. This is not tenable in an LBD system as the game-stage has increased but my pathetic skill with a bat has not even if I have mastered the sledgehammer.
Another example is if I want to build a base underground mid game but have not been mining and really do not go mining much. In an LBD game I am going to have to spend hour grinding and slowly digging the base out. Massively boring if I do not enjoy that activity. In a perk system I can save some of my points and drop them into mining when I want to construct my base. I generally do this in almost all of my games to make my permanent base. Before I go mining I am going to run some quests and the like because it is boring as hell chipping away at rocks with the base skills. Not so bad after I had some fun in combat and directed some of my hard earned skill points into being decent at mining for crete.
There are more examples but the short of it is that the more you divorce the progressions system from specific actions the more you allow the player to actually play the game rather than grind to the demands of the system.
Kubikus
New member
I admit it's a valid reason for a perk-system - and obviously there have to be such reasons, given how popular perk-systems are - that you want to be able to improve anything without being forced to actually do that thing first. But I must disagree that this is in any way "organic", if by "organic" we mean natural, realistic, reasonable and such. Organic is when you actually have to practise to get better at an activity.
Do you, on the other hand, understand why LBD-advocates prefer that system? Your bat-sledgehammer is a good example: I need to build up my skills with a sledgehammer, if that's my first weapon. I mean, I actually don't even, but let's say I earn a bunch of xp by killing zombies with the sledge and put the points into a sledge-improvement perk. So here I am working on something, I go from weak to strong. If I use the sledge to improve my bat-skills - I'm not going from weak to strong anymore. I'm actually going nowhere, I'm just grinding. I kill more zombies, and then I'm "suddenly" good with the bat. It's not an achievement anymore to get good with the bat.
I also believe that designing a good LBD system is much more difficult than designing a perk system. Again, your sledgehammer-baseball bat example is a good one, because it is indeed unrealistic that, after killing 1000 zombies with a sledgehammer, you would handle a baseball bat like you never swung a weapon before. A simple method to design this is putting the sledge and the bat in the same skill; you gotta look where it makes sense to group skils.
More sophisticated designs are possible, for example could you have basic strengths "skills", for different (actual) muscle-groups. If you swing a hammer, you increase your right-arm-strength, that will also bleed into any other activitiy that uses your right arm. So you would already get better at swinging any one-handed-melee weapon. Swinging an axe increases boths arms' strength, making you better at swinging a sledgehammer. But still you would need certain training on top with the individual tool or melee weapon to really max it out.
Ok. Good then. But I still think that getting to the highest levels was taking unreasonably long, so I too were - moderately - spamcrafting some of the skills.
Kubikus
New member
Builds might even work, but the design of the perk system makes it.. difficult? Why is there not simply a discrete perk-tree for the different weapons? You have to invest into the main-skill first, which is costly, and then it makes a lot of sense to buy perks from that tree - as they are cheap. Besides that, sometimes you need a pistol. Sometimes you need a shotgun. Sometimes you need a sniper. Sometimes you need melee. It's not like Skyrim, where you can create these very different builds, that still work on their own. In 7dtd, you sorta need all the skills, with a few exeptions, such as that you don't necessarily need bladed and blunt and heavy weapons, you could go one path.
alphaniner
New member
We get you hate LBD, but "toxic dumpster" is a strong phrase. I'm the first to point out that leveling in Elder Scrolls games is flawed - see second post - but despite that for a lot of us they're what made us fall in love with LBD. The flaws are more than made up with the fact they disincentivize power-gaming behaviour like optimized builds...
Kosmic Kerman
New member
My biggest problem with LBD was all of the extra steps it required to level skills. Even if you didn’t spam craft, I bet many people would put things in the work station outputs so they could get the experience from crafting using workstations. I found this to be both more annoying and immersion breaking than spending points on perks. In the perk system, I no longer have to babysit crafting stations and can go do whatever I want instead. Also if you wanted to level armor or Medicine, the only viable option was to jump on cactus and heal yourself over and over.
Roland
Community Moderator
Not quite. It was the only viable option if you wanted to level armor or medicine rapidly. If you just played and let your armor and medicine increase slowly as you normally took hits then you could still level up those skills-- just very slowly (especially if you were good and were rarely hit).
The system is just a system. The problem is people who take whatever system is in place and abuse it in order to speed run through the game. You can play organically under either system and it feels very natural. The feeling of unnatural comes when you want to level up faster than playing organically allows. For people who want to power grind a single activity in order to level quickly LBD is the clear superior choice because you have a variety of things to do in order to level stuff up. In the current system you simply find whatever the one most efficient activity yields the most xp which could be killing zombies or mining or upgrading blocks depending on the current balance. So it is more boring to power level because you are only going to choose the best most efficient activity to grind and with the current system every time you play it will be that one activity.
Personally, I find character leveling to be a peripheral feature and not really as interesting as setting objectives and achieving them in the world. So when I'm playing I am doing what is enjoyable and what advances my goals and my goals are never "Today I will level up my character". That thinking takes me out of the world I am playing in. I have goals in mining, building, clearing a POI, finishing a quest, exploring, etc. When it was LBD I did those things as well and since it was a hybrid system I would spend points to up my skills if I wanted them higher faster which of course was like nails on a chalkboard to all the efficiency players who claimed you should never spend points on skills-- just take a day or two and grind them up and save your points for the non LBD perks. These days I still play exactly the same way. I see absolutely no loss of freedom and no forced gating to make me go one way or another. But again that is because I do my goals which involve a plethora of activities and my points I earn feel like a representation of all my experience. I usually wait until I have a few points to spend at once and then I do it in those areas I want to improve and it is fun.
I think that either system works fine if you truly are playing at a natural pace and your focus is on game world objectives rather than meta objectives like leveling up. I enjoyed the old system and I enjoy the new system. The one big advantage that the new system has is that it is here to stay and the old system is gone forever other than what modders can do to bring it back. My own modded system is also fun and has its own flavor for character progression. It was more important in A17 than it is now since I find A18 much better balanced on xp awarding than A17 was.
Incorrect. It is intrinsic in the system itself. XP is the same thing as loot - it is something that the player is striving to attain in the world created by the game makers. It is an incentive.
LBD in its very nature is incentivising you into completing tasks just like loot is incentivising you to open that container. Everyone constantly tries to demand it is a balancing problem yet even behemoths like Bethsada were utterly incapable of accomplishing. It is not a balancing problem, it is an intrinsic problem of LBD in an open world environment.
No, organic is not practising to get better - REALISTIC is practicing to get better and realism is a silly metric in game design. Organic is playing in a natural manner rather than one thaqt feels artificial. It is artificial to structure your actions around a system that is not in agreement with other core structures of the game a la avoid getting hit/get hit on purpose. Those are counter to each other.
You are not 'suddenly' good with the bat. You had to work your ass of for the points to invest there. You had to make a MEANINGFUL choice to invest your points in bats instead of something else. What makes that less of an achievement? Nothing at all.
I understand why people like the system. I also disagree strongly on the idea that those advantages even remotely outweigh the massive costs that I see in the general game play.
It is absolutely more difficult. In fact, my contention is that it is IMPOSSIBLE. You have to simply accept the downsides if you enjoy the idea of practicing skills individually rather than overall progression.
The problem comes in those skills that are not in common use but very useful to have. Balancing those for organic play leads to massive holes that can be exploited. Balancing those to close those holes means they level really slowly so people end up hugging cacti. There is no place where those two extremes meet that is well balanced.
Making the system complex does not address the underlying problem. I would point to other games with much higher budgets, far larger teams and greater resources that were unable to address the underlying problems in an open world system.l LBD will work in a game that is FAR more controlled in your actions but it just does not play well with a game like this one - a conclusion that the devs clearly came to even though they are VERY inclined to go with LBD. MM is clearly quite enamored with Bethsada.
RestInPieces
New member
Nah, it's not that hard to balance and a couple of mods is all it took. Bethesda didn't want to make it perfectly balanced in the first place -- a lot of people did enjoy the grind.
The developer has full control over everything including any incentive the game offers. Nothing is impossible to balance. One line of code would be enough to solve that cactus problem people are bringing up as an example all the time, but they went ahead and implemented LBD without any regard for these things. Any of these LBD problems could be solved in multiple ways, by adding diminishing returns, counter-incentives, meaningful item/time economy etc.
No Roland, the system is not just the system. Its entire existence is to incentivize and guide the player into actions that are enjoyable through challenge and reward. The problem is not that it is being abused but that it incentivizes silly actions weather or not you are abusing the system. You COULD ignore the fact that you are pretty good and do not get hit so your armor skill is trash but then you are ignoring the rewards purposefully. You can, of course, do this and it will likely lead to a better experience but that directly means the system is NOT working properly - you are not being incetivized to utilize it.
If the point is to ignore it and play normally anyway then that means the system itself needs to be removed or replaced - it is not working.
True - crete upgrading still needs a little love though. Last time I downed a lernin lixer before upgrading a new section of my base (rebar frames) and I walked away with something like 200k xp.
Roland
Community Moderator
I disagree. In my opinion, if an LBD system is working properly then the player is playing the game and naturally getting stronger without actively trying to directly use the system to do so. It is supposed to be a life sim type of system. In a life sim you get a pet or you interact with NPCs and develop relationships. Ideally, you are living in the world and doing activities that bring you into contact with others and by so doing the relationship grows stronger but you don't have a spreadsheet in front of you strategizing which gift or job will yield the most relationship points. You want the relationship to proceed naturally and after an amount of time you have developed a stronger attachment.
Similarly with skills you want to go about your day and work on objectives and as time goes on grow stronger and more skilled but it should be a natural growth. Again, the player shouldn't be focusing on strategies to maximize the speed of their growth and consciously doing things to improve the skill for its own sake. I participate in this forum for entertainment and conversation around a common interest with all of you. Maybe my writing skills are improving but it isn't why I'm doing this and never think about my skill in writing or how it will be affected when I post.
An true LBD system is passive in the sense that it cannot be controlled or farmed consciously by the player. There is no direct ratio of action to benefit the player knows about in order to game the system and speedrun through the progression. You just play and the growth just happens.
alphaniner
New member
Well, this explains why you don't enjoy LBD. IMO the exact opposite is true: if you're not ignoring the leveling system (by and large), that's the indication that it's broken. To wit, the major flaw with the MW/OB leveling system - according to many of us who don't hate it anyway - was that you couldn't ignore it due to the imbalanced skill-attribute correlation.
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Kubikus
New member
You continously base your dislike of LBD on a few obvious flaws the system had, particularly the armor skill. What if these would've been fixed and you would not have to do silly things like that?
Something, though: You only have to get good with the sledgehammer and then you can just let the sledgehammer skill do all the work for you. Yes, you still work, but you're not weak anymore. With lbd, you start out weak in every skill, and it becomes mor obvious when you compare skills that don't overlap. Say you would loot like a madman and get xp that way. Then you invest them in your sledge-skill and only start killing zombies when that one is leveled up. You were never weak against zombies. You never were bad a using the sledge. You opened a bunch of containers and suddenly you're an expert in using the sledge.
It is less of an achievement because of the unnatural disconnection between your skill and how you improved it. You (can) steamroll all your skills by focusing on only one. You let one skill do all the hard work.
More concrete: I would, in pre A17, level up clubs and pistols by using them. These are my goto weapons now. Later, when I'm starting to get bored, because everything is too easy, I'd move on to the next weapon, such as the hunting rifle and the machete. Things are more difficult again, freshening up the experience. Now, I have exactly one learning curve and the rest of the game steamrolls from there. "Oh, now I'm good with shotguns". "Oh, now I'm great with automatic rifles." "Oh look, now I'm good with [insert any skill here]."
It gives me the *shrugs*.
Hugging cacti again? That isn't your actual issue, I think. Your actual issue is that you want to be able to avoid activities you dislike until you improved your corresponding skills enough with points you earned doing activities you like. Is that right?
The solution for this problem also exist, simply allow character creation where you set up a bunch of preferences. Your character would be a miner, who is already so and so good at mining and levels up faster. The menu could give a bunch of presets and the option to set up leveling-multipliers 100% freely.
In the end, of course, if you don't like the activities in that game you decide to play for fun - maybe it's not the right game for you?
I don't think that it's a matter of budget. 1 person can design a good system. And I also don't think the system needs to be complex. I find the perk system pretty complex, particularly from the player's perspective. You sorta have to study it to make conscious decisions. In LBD, you do what you wanna do and just improve.
I did btw like the progression system of Skyrim, that was a mix of perks and lbd. Perks decided which skills you basically picked up, but you had to improve them by using them. I found the pure perk system of Fallout 4 (only Fallout I played) rather soulless, particularly coming from Skyrim. I hate sitting in a perk menu with dozens of perks and studying what they all do and planning how I combine them and whatnot. I wanna play a bloody game, not study like I'm in school. The system of Skyrim, then again, was also largely based on the ability to create very different characters, for example a non-magic-warrior vs a full-on-magic mage. You can't have such differences in 7dtd, so the perk-part wouldn't even be necessary.
This. With LBD, you don't need to learn any artificial perk or skill tree to know how to get better at something. You just do it. And you are never asked to live with terrible dependencies, like you need to get stronger to cook better meals.
That is my main, and honestly, the only real issue with the perk system compared to the LBD. It forces you, more or less, to meta-game. And that is, by definition, immersion breaking.
BobTheBard
New member
From an organic growth and realism angle, LBD is definitely better. The simple fact is that you get better at something by doing it. Yes, this can lead to absurd conclusions when you try to grind a skill in a hurry (like hugging a cactus to gain Armor skill) but it still has a fundamental logic behind it - In real life if you want to learn where the weaknesses in your armor are you have to have something hit it, and if you want to become an expert at making something you have to make it a LOT. Video games will always simplify and tone down the complexity inherent in such a thing, and this can lead to very strange and unrealistic optimal strategies, but that's video games for you. They can't be perfect, and at some point you just have to be willing to overlook things.
That said, from a video game angle, the perk system makes a lot more sense. While it's completely ridiculous that you can become a master sniper without ever picking up a ranged weapon or learn to cook by mining iron, which a perk system allows, the chief benefit of a perk system is that it's much easier to balance and design. You don't need to track a whole lot of variables, you don't need to balance skill gains from multiple sources, you don't need to worry about some skills being harder to raise because they're not used as much. You just need to make sure the perks are balanced. The trade-off to this is you have to accept that it is inherently video-gamey and will never be realistic or resemble anything in the same ballpark as common sense.
I personally preferred LBD, but the perk system isn't the worst thing in the world, and I'd argue it fits the current direction of the game better. The game's changed from trying to be a more serious survival sim in the fashion of Day Z, where LBD would make a lot more sense, to more of an action-oriented game in the fashion of Fallout 4, so the shift from LBD to a perk system makes a lot of sense. That doesn't mean the current perk system is ideal (I still hate the 'stat' dependencies because of how blatantly shoehorned and artificial they are, and my inner crafter hates not being able to craft a lot of things at Tier 6 because they're all behind different perks) but the idea of a perk system makes sense when you look at the game as it stands today.
That said, from a video game angle, the perk system makes a lot more sense. While it's completely ridiculous that you can become a master sniper without ever picking up a ranged weapon or learn to cook by mining iron, which a perk system allows, the chief benefit of a perk system is that it's much easier to balance and design. You don't need to track a whole lot of variables, you don't need to balance skill gains from multiple sources, you don't need to worry about some skills being harder to raise because they're not used as much. You just need to make sure the perks are balanced. The trade-off to this is you have to accept that it is inherently video-gamey and will never be realistic or resemble anything in the same ballpark as common sense.
I personally preferred LBD, but the perk system isn't the worst thing in the world, and I'd argue it fits the current direction of the game better. The game's changed from trying to be a more serious survival sim in the fashion of Day Z, where LBD would make a lot more sense, to more of an action-oriented game in the fashion of Fallout 4, so the shift from LBD to a perk system makes a lot of sense. That doesn't mean the current perk system is ideal (I still hate the 'stat' dependencies because of how blatantly shoehorned and artificial they are, and my inner crafter hates not being able to craft a lot of things at Tier 6 because they're all behind different perks) but the idea of a perk system makes sense when you look at the game as it stands today.
Roland
Community Moderator
I agree with some of what you posted and even liked it. What I don’t really agree with is the idea that one system or another is better or worse for “this type” of game. This game existed and grew popular for years without any kind of character development system.
LBD or common pool point economy are just two possibilities for how to handle progression but it doesn’t impact the type of game this is supposed to be.
This game is still largely the same as it always has been. Food scarcity has increased and decreased, zombie behavior has evolved, crafting vs looting has had different weights at different times but we have always played to secure food and shelter and gear and then defend against the hordes and explore more and more of the world.
I also see the perk system of spending points as the more classic RPG system that has roots in pen and paper gaming before there were computer games. People who played those know instinctively that spending points abstractly represent training and development. If you are doing a variety of activities then it does feel organic. Only if you are grinding in one single action will it feel like you are learning to farm by killing zombies. If we should stop talking about hugging cacti then we should also drop talking about spending points in unrelated activities because anyone playing normally is going to do lots of different activities each day.
I see LBD as actually coming about because of video games. It isn’t really something a DM would be able to effectively track whereas the computer can make it all happen easily. So for any video game where character progression is a desired aspect there is no reason not to use the technology to have LBD be the system used for character progression. There have been numerous posts as to how exploits and abuse could be limited or even completely blocked. I think this game or any game with character progression could utilize either system.
if they had desired to do so they totally could’ve kept LBD for A17 and A18 regardless of how survival or action oriented the game has turned out to be.
alphaniner
New member
I was thinking about it and it occurred to me that the concepts of XP and leveling up predate D&D. They make for a reasonable system when you don't have a computer to track and crunch lots of numbers, yet in contemporary PnP leveling is often just part of the campaign design and XP doesn't really factor in. At least, that's my experience. Anyway, it was obvious to adopt the system for cRPGs, but we're past due for a new paradigm IMO.
I think the roadblock is that LBD systems are exponentially harder to design and implement than XP systems, and moreover are effectively impossible to balance for differing play-styles. I believe that machine learning will resolve both of these issues, and that the day will come when XP systems are seen as an anachronism.
I think the roadblock is that LBD systems are exponentially harder to design and implement than XP systems, and moreover are effectively impossible to balance for differing play-styles. I believe that machine learning will resolve both of these issues, and that the day will come when XP systems are seen as an anachronism.
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