Skill Gain

[KnitePrince]

We have our own server, and we have been playing about a month.. Having a LOT of fun. Built our base, and drive from one end of the map to the other nightly.... however, we have our own server BECAUSE we have a life, and were all married, some of us with kids still at home. We get.. an hour, Two or three hours when were lucky or decide to go without sleep... I know the game is still being developed, but, were ALL about to give it up, because 95% of our skills we use EVERY night, are still basic, as we started with. Skill gain is SO SLOW, that there is really no point to even having those skills raise able. (to us) The amount of time we can play each night, tells me that it will be a YEAR of playing before we see any noticeable gains. WHY is this not adjustable for private servers? Until it is, I have to give this game a thumbs down. I will not recommend it to anyone who isnt still living in moms basement and can only play a couple hours a night. Were done, at least for now. The problem with that is, we probably wont come back when we find something else to play together. EVEN if this glaring issue is fixed. Yep, its fun, but with skill gain so SLOW, the fun fades, nothing to look forward to.. time to move on. A game is supposed to be fun. Yep it was fun! But I have good gear thats too heavy for me to carry now, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel as to be capable of carrying it without WEEKS of playing.... GREAT game, a lot of bad and useless mechanics, that ruin it. REALISTIC to the point of having to take a dump, then its all ruined by the UN realistic mechanics. Crafted ammo, even made at a press, is LESS damaging than factory ammo? HOW is that realistic? When I go to a competition, I use ONLY handloads. More powerful and accurate than ANYTHING factory made. I could go on a long time. But I will stop here. I hope this all gets ironed out, and that one day we can revisit this game, it has so much potential.... just.... not yet.

[HIGHRAD]

Skill gain rate should be set by the admin. for their own server. There are so many different types of servers that one way can't be right for all. What's wrong with having a choice?

[KeilerHirsch]

Originally posted by EvilMonk:

Some things like using weapons is leveld rather easy, but if you want to level engineering you either invest weeks and mabye even months of casual play or grind hours and hours filling up blueprints...
Yeah skill gained should be able to be set by serveradmins, SCUM has some amazing things but lacks a ton of QoL improvements.

+1

[Charles]

+1

[serilium]

so your leaving because it takes weeks to months to do what a hardcore player can do in a single night, it is true that skill development in game isn`t good, some skills i never use at all and they will never get close to basic lvl 1, as for skills being adjustable on private servers, i`m all in favour of that being an option, if they allow private servers to choose how many skill points you start with and allow you to put more points where you want them to begin with that would be great, for example with 5 points you can max out running but not stamina, i would like to set up a server so i can max out running and stamina, i would hire a server if they allowed this to happen.

[KnitePrince]

So Ferret, tell me how a hardcore player can get driving up high enough to at least not miss shifts or kill the engine in one night? As far as I know its not possible, and its annoying as heck to constantly kill the engine and miss shifts after driving across the map every night for a couple weeks. I bought a katana and specifically spent an hour JUST killing puppets with it, every night, and my skill has barely moved. I don't feel I need to stay logged in crouched in a bush all night to raise a skill i use every time I log in. I'm not interested in hacks or cheats to gain in a skill that I DO use. But this is all a moot point. The update wiped our server, and everyone quit, on to bigger and better things. I will try to convince the guys to come back when the game is more advanced and refined. Good luck to yall!

[CrankyOldMan]

I agree 100% that the server admins should be able to adjust skill point gain and starting skill points....The devs want this game to be a survival game- nothing but a grind and too many people are the opposite so in the end they limit who will play the game...
There is a need for the hardcore I love the grind players and the need for the I want it all now or else I am quitting players for this game to be truly successful!
I am in the I love the grind part myself!

[Faitheal]

skill gains in this game suck. please rework.

[CheeseKing]

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

[Charles]

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

Unfortunately that command just gives you the message "Player must be a developer". I do appreciate the attempt to inform us. I will try to give an example below about slow skill leveling. Let me preface it by saying that I understand balancing is hard and I have no animosity towards a dev team that is just trying to make an awesome game and get it right. So if at some point it sounds like I am ranting just know that I am not. I am making an attempt to convey somewhere skill gain could use some work.

As far as what skills need a rework...well that depends on the person I guess. Locking picking for instance, to level it from medium to advanced+ you would need to pick thousands upon thousands of locks. Medium to advanced, assuming failure on a player lock which is the quickest way to level, would take you 10 hiking bags of yellow screwdrivers exactly. At 50 item slots with 40 uses per you would need to attempt 2000 locks. If you would like to go for advanced plus then you will need to pick 20000 locks. If you are picking 1 lock per 3 seconds then it would take you roughly an hour and 40 minutes to level from medium to advanced. On the surface that sounds okay for grinding. However that is deceiving because in reality, with admin commands, it will take you much longer. Lets assume it takes 1 minutes of play to gather the materials for an attempt. You would spend about 33 (Iv'e completed some games in that time) hours gathering materials in addition to the time it takes you to fail the lock, and I feel that that is a comically generous estimate. I could go on but I will keep this brief and ask you to take a bobbypin out of a box, craft it into a lockpick, wait 3 seconds then repeat. Now imagine doing that 2 thousand times. That will eat way more time than one might think. Lock picking is a nice example because its going to allow me to illustrate a few more points.

One of those points is that leveling lockpicking lacks variety and gradient in its game play loop. If you are playing PVE the lockpicking consists of picking the same type of locker to extract loot. The locations are cool, but the xp you get from it isn't enough to level up. I wish I could give you numbers but I didn't find it viable so I never took any numbers down. The phoenix tears add a bit of variety to it and its refreshing, Its the same idea but you are getting a really cool/unique item out of it. There is a bit of an issue there in that there is not a use for lock picking that is both viable and rewarding(xp wise) at low skill while still providing a challenging experience. The phoenix tears are nice but the locks on it are a huge jump in difficulty from your average locker lock which is really easy. That is all the long winded way of saying that it would be nice if there was more variety in pickable things with some increased difficulty and reward along the way. The lock picking should be part of a journey that lets you do cool things. For example you could add a locked room within the hangars that have a wiring panel that you can use engineering and demolition on to close the hangar door and get some more alone time with the aircraft before the mechs start blasting. You could add a remote access panel for the bunker doors on the outside that is locked. If you pick it you can open up the door and it might just give you a chance if you aren't very good with mechs. This could also be applied to skills like demolition, I would love to have some clearly marked mined areas around military locations. If you can make me forget that I am leveling that skill and there is always something exciting just within my grasp then that is a good thing.

Lockpicking is also an interesting skill because it is in conflict with PVP vs PVE gameplay. If you make it reasonable to level then everyone is getting their stuff picked all the time. However by making it really difficult to level you have the issue of completely locking a small PVE server out of doing stuff like doing killboxes and getting phoenix tears. There are so few uses for it outside of picking player locks that its impossible to justify putting any points in it from the start. If you don't start with advanced lock picking you likely wont get it before you get bored of the game. Its an obvious problem with a lot more difficult solution. I am not going to pretend to have a magic solution to it but, if I might suggest, locks don't work in real life either. Perhaps the scum solution to base raiding and the like should not be so focused on locks and fortifications. I would be more than happy to elaborate on that if you would like.

This brings me to my final point, player choice. Honestly this is really important and in a lot of ways scum does it well but in a lot of ways it could really improve. I've been long winded enough, so ill keep this short. The person who can play for a couple hours a day and the person who only gets a couple hours a week will both have different ideas as to what is a reasonable skill gain rate. some things need to be harder for PVP balance but detract from a PVE experience. Adding the ability for people to tinker with skill/attribute gain is important. It helps people play the game the way they find most enjoyable. I think that's a good thing and it lets everyone have the best scum for them.

[serilium]

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

so if i begin a new game and alter nothing in the character select scene, then my character in game cannot get advanced in any skill, how does that work for str, which can only go to 5 on the character select tab but in game can be advanced to 8, how many points ect are needed to reach lvl 8, i have a life to live, a job, i can`t spend forever playing scum even though i wish i could.

[CrankyOldMan]

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

It does not work for server admins it tells us this

Player must be developer.

[CheeseKing]

Originally posted by Charles:

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

Unfortunately that command just gives you the message "Player must be a developer". I do appreciate the attempt to inform us. I will try to give an example below about slow skill leveling. Let me preface it by saying that I understand balancing is hard and I have no animosity towards a dev team that is just trying to make an awesome game and get it right. So if at some point it sounds like I am ranting just know that I am not. I am making an attempt to convey somewhere skill gain could use some work.

As far as what skills need a rework...well that depends on the person I guess. Locking picking for instance, to level it from medium to advanced+ you would need to pick thousands upon thousands of locks. Medium to advanced, assuming failure on a player lock which is the quickest way to level, would take you 10 hiking bags of yellow screwdrivers exactly. At 50 item slots with 40 uses per you would need to attempt 2000 locks. If you would like to go for advanced plus then you will need to pick 20000 locks. If you are picking 1 lock per 3 seconds then it would take you roughly an hour and 40 minutes to level from medium to advanced. On the surface that sounds okay for grinding. However that is deceiving because in reality, with admin commands, it will take you much longer. Lets assume it takes 1 minutes of play to gather the materials for an attempt. You would spend about 33 (Iv'e completed some games in that time) hours gathering materials in addition to the time it takes you to fail the lock, and I feel that that is a comically generous estimate. I could go on but I will keep this brief and ask you to take a bobbypin out of a box, craft it into a lockpick, wait 3 seconds then repeat. Now imagine doing that 2 thousand times. That will eat way more time than one might think. Lock picking is a nice example because its going to allow me to illustrate a few more points.

One of those points is that leveling lockpicking lacks variety and gradient in its game play loop. If you are playing PVE the lockpicking consists of picking the same type of locker to extract loot. The locations are cool, but the xp you get from it isn't enough to level up. I wish I could give you numbers but I didn't find it viable so I never took any numbers down. The phoenix tears add a bit of variety to it and its refreshing, Its the same idea but you are getting a really cool/unique item out of it. There is a bit of an issue there in that there is not a use for lock picking that is both viable and rewarding(xp wise) at low skill while still providing a challenging experience. The phoenix tears are nice but the locks on it are a huge jump in difficulty from your average locker lock which is really easy. That is all the long winded way of saying that it would be nice if there was more variety in pickable things with some increased difficulty and reward along the way. The lock picking should be part of a journey that lets you do cool things. For example you could add a locked room within the hangars that have a wiring panel that you can use engineering and demolition on to close the hangar door and get some more alone time with the aircraft before the mechs start blasting. You could add a remote access panel for the bunker doors on the outside that is locked. If you pick it you can open up the door and it might just give you a chance if you aren't very good with mechs. This could also be applied to skills like demolition, I would love to have some clearly marked mined areas around military locations. If you can make me forget that I am leveling that skill and there is always something exciting just within my grasp then that is a good thing.

Lockpicking is also an interesting skill because it is in conflict with PVP vs PVE gameplay. If you make it reasonable to level then everyone is getting their stuff picked all the time. However by making it really difficult to level you have the issue of completely locking a small PVE server out of doing stuff like doing killboxes and getting phoenix tears. There are so few uses for it outside of picking player locks that its impossible to justify putting any points in it from the start. If you don't start with advanced lock picking you likely wont get it before you get bored of the game. Its an obvious problem with a lot more difficult solution. I am not going to pretend to have a magic solution to it but, if I might suggest, locks don't work in real life either. Perhaps the scum solution to base raiding and the like should not be so focused on locks and fortifications. I would be more than happy to elaborate on that if you would like.

This brings me to my final point, player choice. Honestly this is really important and in a lot of ways scum does it well but in a lot of ways it could really improve. I've been long winded enough, so ill keep this short. The person who can play for a couple hours a day and the person who only gets a couple hours a week will both have different ideas as to what is a reasonable skill gain rate. some things need to be harder for PVP balance but detract from a PVE experience. Adding the ability for people to tinker with skill/attribute gain is important. It helps people play the game the way they find most enjoyable. I think that's a good thing and it lets everyone have the best scum for them.

Ah okay, I thought we made this an admin command but appears not. This should be alterable by server owners or in singleplayer for sure.

But yes I understand your point, some of our skills take a very long while to level and some are faster. It definitely takes a lot of time to get your character to full on most things, especially attributes.

This is just the current design that we have since multiplayer and singleplayer are basically the same at the moment, so we have things balanced for multiplayer right now. If we made it too easy for multiplayer PVP would be even more weirder.

I think that in the future we will separate multiplayer from singleplayer completely, or give singleplayer players more edge and freedom to do what they want to do.

Thank you for a very detailed feedback though!

[CheeseKing]

Originally posted by ferret:

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

so if i begin a new game and alter nothing in the character select scene, then my character in game cannot get advanced in any skill, how does that work for str, which can only go to 5 on the character select tab but in game can be advanced to 8, how many points ect are needed to reach lvl 8, i have a life to live, a job, i can`t spend forever playing scum even though i wish i could.

You only have 12 attribute points when creating a character, maximum attributes are 8 5 5 5. Sadly you can't select strength on 8 to begin with, you can level it up from 5 though if you were to select that.

How many points are needed is dependant on how you are trying to level it, to level strength and constitution properly your character needs to be well fed with protein as a majority and you need to be in a calorie sufficit. After you got your metabolism covered you need to find a proper way to level it, some people overload their character with ~100kg of weight, so that would be 2 very heavy weapons in holsters, a full backpack and a wooden log in your hands which is 35kg. After that you can basically just walk around and your strength & constitution will grow.

We do understand that this take a very long time to level, especially for singleplayer players that don't really want to go through this kind of process. But since our singleplayer and multiplayer are still in development, it is almost the same mode and is balanced for multiplayer purposes.

Hopefully in the future we will separate singleplayer from multiplayer completely where you will have all of the commands at your disposal.

[CheeseKing]

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

Originally posted by CheeseKing:

Hey guys, reworking or altering the skill gain is in plan and will be reworked. But I'm going to need more information on what skill you think is leveled too slow, what does it mean that all of your skills are still on basic. Can you be more specific about which skill and what exactly are you doing to level them up? Maybe your leveling method is not the best here, maybe your attribute is at 1 so your skill can be only basic max. Also if you give admin roles to your entire server since it's your server, you can set skills to your likings by using this command:
#setskilllevel name number

Or in practice:
#setskilllevel engineering 5 (this would set your engineering to advanced plus)
And so on for all of the other skills.

You also have these admin commands in singleplayer on default.

Also soon and with the next update you will be able to set your skill and it's experience to your likings as an admin.

Something like #setskilllevel engineering 2 (would set it to medium) 40%, will set it to medium 40%. This will be explained in the patch notes.

It does not work for server admins it tells us this

Player must be developer.

Ah yes, my bad there. I thought we made this an admin command.

[Trajan]

Originally posted by EvilMonk:

Some things like using weapons is leveld rather easy, but if you want to level engineering you either invest weeks and mabye even months of casual play or grind hours and hours filling up blueprints...
Yeah skill gained should be able to be set by serveradmins, SCUM has some amazing things but lacks a ton of QoL improvements.

Bingo!

Allowing private servers and single players to adjust the parameters of their respective experiences is crucial to the long term survival of this game, pun intended! The number of skills already in the game and the time it would take to become proficient in all of them is staggering and it seems even more skills will be added in the near future. Now, one might say "But, you don't need to be good in ALL of those skills" or "It's just not realistic enough for someone to be good in all of these skill sets!"

First of all, it's nobody else's damn business as to how I want to develop my character and if I wanna create an omnipotent and multi talented survival stud in the context of single player or a private server then damn it, I should have that option! Second, the "rEaLiSm" crowd doesn't have a single leg to stand on when it comes to putting forth arguments designed to overrule or drown out the subjective whims of those who want to enjoy this game within the parameters of their real life circumstances and individual preferences and tolerances. That is, because the very foundation of this game is based on a holistically unrealistic plane of human imagination, filled with non existent locations, characters, creatures and circumstances. With that said, if one wants to experience this game with a higher degree of "realism" then it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that they shouldn't have that option as well.

The point is, having more game play options and allowing players to adjust their own experiences at a much higher degree will not only make the experience much better for those who are already invested this game but it will also attract much more attention from a larger portion of the vast spectrum of players who appreciate the survival genre.