Genesis

So I am a father with a very full time job, I can't spend all day on this game training my little heart away like I use to but I come to understand that, I don't expect to be the strongest. So in saying that, I only see a few options to this system with each option more than likely upsetting someone.

1. Remove power, make it full on text roleplaying: Upset everyone

2. Add in a more powerful catch-up system that catches people up to "no-lifers" with little effort: "No-lifers" get upset that their hard work is invalided.

3. Add in some kind of slow down/stall system that limits the "no-lifers" so that can not progress too far ahead everyone else: Again, "no-lifers" will be upset at this. Maybe promote roleplaying since focus is pulled away from training since it does not benefit as much.

My best idea is a system to relies heavily on your mods and a realistic training system. It would simply work similar to the current system but switching your training doesn't reset it. Instead everything would slowly become resilient and you would have two options. You would either training at a much slowly stat gain rate or you could simply just run around and roleplay or do whatever till your body was able to "rest" in which would allow you to train at your full capacity again after this resting break.
With this system, you would be allowed to train to whatever you preferred without being forced into a rotation for a character that will never use force. This system will also benefit people who can only play a hour or so because their max gains will be obtained when they are on and can log out to allow their character to rest. The people who want to no-life still can but they can not pull ahead because their characters are being over worked.
I don't know if logging out should "rest" your character at a faster rate, the time in which resting takes before your stat gain is at 100%, all of that would require testing. I doubt anyone else will like this system because it limits people too much. Oh well, I am sure I sound like a fool.

I am sure there are more options, other things to be tried but those are very simple ideas to mull over. My thing is that what exactly kind of game do we want? A roleplay game where everyone is equal, no one stands out with hard work and we have to rely on admins to alter people to put them above others or do we allow people to pull ahead with their and create roleplay with their character's capabilities.

Honestly it is up to Hobbit, I have my own ideas on this. Hell, he could make it where we only train for five minutes before our stats get capped then we have to run around and roleplay till they get uncapped, who knows. This man built the game to be like DBG and DBG was no perfect game.

Honestly.I would change 4x to something bigger, like 10x, so it goes by faster and you can't accumulate so much that you'll never out pace it. (Like what is happening to myself and a few others) Ontop of this, we could give new characters 4x or whatever x gains based on what year it is. You're 30 years behind? Cool, we'll increase your gains to the point where you'll catch up and have lost -NO- time at all. No averages, just fair and time based. This'll satisfy both the nolifers and those who don't like their characters or are getting into it late.

I never had any issue with them either, which is why I made a thread asking why people wanted a catch-up system so badly, when just last wipe and prior they were extremely against it.

To reply to Netro though, I know some people have a big problem with 4x because they either believe that 4x isn't doing enough or it's doing too much. Literally there is only a very small subset of the community that believe 4x is doing just fine. Do I think 4x is a fine catch up tool, yes and no. It has it's problems but, like I said in my post above, any catch up system is going to have it's own issues. But you can't play the game without one because then the only people who are powerful are the no lifers.

Also I believe Arcane Addict a lot of the people who were saying why they didn't want a catch up system (Myself included) was that we wanted a wipe, where we could see the game without it, to know where the problems were, so then we could MAKE a catch up system that fixes the problems. You can't design a good catch up system without having empirical data to see where your problem areas are.

Yeah no, I hate gate keeping unless the suggestion is entirely not fit for the game. I'm willing to listen to any suggestion, even if I completely 100% disagree with it. Cause how do you know if a suggestion is good or bad if you don't read it yanno?

I think it’s important that we define what a “catch-up gains system” should entail. To me, a catch-up system should be a system where new players/weak players, can catch up to the server average in gains. That being said, I don’t think 4x gains is a catch-up gains system. However, I am not completely against the idea of 4x gains.

So let’s define what 4x gains really is: A catch-up on lost time system. However, it’s not catching up on lost time for the server in general, by this I mean that if a new player starts 10 years late (10 years in game), he’s never going to get enough 4x gains to make up for that lost time of 10 years. What 4x gains catches you up is lost time that you missed by not playing after character creation. So it’s catching you up to people that started at the same time as you. However, as people point out it’s only 80% efficiency. For example, there’s player A and B. Player B stays on and train while player A logs off for 4 minutes. Player A accumulates 1 minute of 4x gains and gets back on to train for a minute. After that minute, player A is at an effective training time of 4 minutes, while player B is at an effective training time of 5 minutes. However, people are using this “80%” statistic as the end all be all argument of why 4x gains are fine and should stay the same, when it’s actually misinterpreted by most people. Yes, the 80% efficiency is technically true. However, what it fails to acknowledge is the fact that 100% efficiency would mean being online for 24 hours straight. I’m not sure if everyone remembers from the test wipe, but I was the one who made the graph and formula of how effective 4x gains were. Where the x-axis would be amount of time spent online, and y-axis would be the total effective training time with 4x gains added. The most effective time to stay online per day was 4.8 hours. Because that’s how long you can stay online to use up all the 4x gains you accumulate per day. I can go into more detail of how I derived this number in another post if it’s confusing. Anyway, that would mean an effective training time of 19.2 hours, which is 80% of 24 hours. Now, every hour you do above 4.8 hours, only gives you 15 more minutes, or .25 hours, of effective training time. Why is this? Let’s make this easy and round: If you play for 6 hours, you can only be offline for 18 hours in that day. 18 hours is only 4.5 hours of 4x gains, so for 1.5 hours of that 6 hours, you are training in normal gains. So the effective time would be 18 hours (the 4.5 hours of 4x gains) + 1.5 hours. Which leaves you at 19.5 hours of effective training time. So some guy that only played for 4.8 hours would be at 19.2 hours of effective time while you’d be at 19.5 hours of effective time, despite you playing for 1.2 more hours. Now, why is this important? So now we’ve established that 1 hour more than 4.8 is 15 more minutes of effective training time. So 4 hours more is 1 hour of effective time. That is 8.8 hours of playing, which is a lot. Alright, time to put this into perspective. Player A started day 1 and player B starts day 2. They both start at the same time (as in, starting at 8 am on their respective days for example), but player A plays for 4.8 hours a day and player B plays for 8.8 hours a day. End of Day 1: Player A is at 4.8 hours of effective training time. End of Day 2: Player A is at 24 hours of effective time. Player B is at 8.8 hours of effective time. End of Day 3: Player A is at 43.2 hours of effective time. Player B is at 29 hours of effective time. End of Day 4: Player A is at 62.4 hours of effective time. Player B is at 49.2 hours of effective time. End of Day 5: Player A is at 81.6 hours of effective time. Player B is at 69.4 hours of effective time. Basically, player B is only gaining on player A at 1 hour per day, despite playing for 4 more hours EVERY SINGLE DAY. This isn’t math class, not going to walk you through this next one. On which day will player B catch up/slightly surpass player A?. If you got, on Day 17, you’re correct. Imagine, playing 4 hours more per day than player A, but because you started 1 day later, it will take you about 3 weeks to catch up to him. Crazy, I know. This is why I say, the 80% efficiency statistic is a bullshit statistic. Because what that number really means is, 80% of 24/7. Which a no lifer would not physically be able to do.

Okay, that was a lot to take in. But if you’re still reading, you might be thinking “You must want 4x gains removed.” In which case, you’d be wrong. While it is not a catch up gains system, it does help you catch up to people that do play more than you. I just think that 80% efficiency is TOO efficient because it doesn’t really allow those who start later to catch up. I’d want this decreased to 50% efficiency, I don’t have a ratio for what it’d be, but assuming people agree to this, I’ll figure it out later. At 50% efficiency, it would make it easier for those who started later to catch up, despite starting later. Of course, that’s assuming they put in more time than those ahead of them. It would still be hard to catch up, but it allows for some leeway in the 4x gains to not be so rewarding with how many minutes it gives, to allow for more power gaps, weaker people catching up, etc. So after we’ve done this, what is the new problem? There’s no real catch up gains system implemented in the game. My example earlier, was someone starting 1 day late. Imagine if it was a week? A month? You would multiply that 17 days, by how many days later someone starts, and that’s how long it would take to catch up. Assuming it isn’t decreased to 50% efficiency, in which case, I don’t know. I haven’t done the math for it. Anyway, you can see how it gets out of hand.

Now we’ve established: There’s no catch-up system implemented into the game. Decreasing 4x gains to 50% efficiency ALLOWS for catch-up, but it isn’t an actual system. As for an actual catch up systems, I liked what manly-pink has said in the discord. But suggestions for one is good too. Here’s what manly said: “Basically alright. Catch up in DBG worked like this. If you were a fresh spawn, you gained up to the average and basically the way it worked was that it applied a multiplier to your gains (Like 4x does currently) but it doesn't affect the amount of personal gains you get. you'd still gain like a first gen in terms of personal gains. But the closer and closer you got to the average, the less and less the multiplier affected you. So like in the beginning you might be gaining at like 10x your personal gains, but then it drops off as you get closer and closer and you start to rely on your own personal gains. Cause you were at the server average. Now let's say you trained for a week constantly (Like 16 hour training days) then you log out for a week. It'd still affect you the same way it'd affect a first gen. you'd just reach the server average faster than a first gen because you had those personal gains that you trained up with. Basically depending on how far the wipe goes on, if you make a first gen under Catch up, you'll basically be carried by the average until you get enough personal gains to pull ahead. Or unless you mated into an OP family”

If any of this is confusing or perhaps you’d like for me to go more in depth, I can make another post. Just let me know what parts to go more in depth about. I can also link my old graphs I made 8 months ago if you’d like to see it. If you’ve actually read up to this far, Thanks for taking the time to read this essay, didn’t mean for it to turn out this long.

Edit: Did the math on what a 50% efficiency for 4x gains would entail. Instead of the usual 4:1 ratio, it would be a 7:1 ratio. 7 minutes offline for 1 minute of 4x gains. This would make it so that you can play 3 hours per day for the optimal time, which would put you at an effective training time of 12 hours. And instead of every hour above that only giving 15 minutes more of effective training time, it would give about 34 minutes more.