Goblin Squad Member
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Correct, I left that part out on accident. So it goes more of save up 100 xp, Go get skill, Notice skill requires you to have done X amount of Y (rather it kill 30 orcs, or build 100 swords, or hit 50 targets with your bow) so you do so, then you can go and purchase skill, leading to BOOM. I looked for the post some more, still cant find it. I must be to low of a level for Nihimon, he keeps casting AFK.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not sure if we need the badge/accomplishment before or after we get the skill.
Depends, as some badges appear to be part of the prerequisite for learning a given skill, while others give you a new "level". I think some things are still in flux as the Devs work out the coding and how things will be implemented, but on the whole, it appears that you train skills using the accumulated XP you get each day, and the other prerequisite things, like defeating x number of a given enemy (or perhaps using said skill a certain number of times), which leads to a badge. That badge may give you a new "level" or may serve as a prerequisite for other skills, the obtaining of which will lead to "level" giving badges.
The whole idea is to turn the whole "you level so you get new skills" idea on its head by making it "you gain new skills, which leads to new levels". I presume a big part of this is due to GW and PfO not being part of the OGL, so things need to be different enough from WotC's IP system, plus it makes "leveling" a bit more old school (back in the day, you couldn't level until you found a trainer/higher-level NPC who could give you the training needed to advance - I miss those days, and often refuse to level my PFRPG characters until I find such an NPC, and almost every GM has gone along with this as they miss that aspect too).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here's the relevant part from "Are You Experienced?", which is the most recent blog about character advancement, skills, etc.
Character Advancement
Our current concept of the character advancement system is similar to that of EVE Online, but adjusts some of the process to be more familiar to fantasy games.
Every hour your character is able to advance (via being subscribed or otherwise buying advancement time), you gain Experience Points (XP) whether or not you're logged into the game. These accumulate at a fixed rate throughout your career (currently at a rate of 100 XP per hour, but that may change as we get deeper into pricing). After 24 hours in the game, you'll have earned 2,400 XP; after 10 days you'll have 24,000; and so on.
Spending XP
In order to spend this XP to advance your character, you'll need three things:
Most importantly, you need to find a settlement with a training hall that has the feat you want to buy. The NPC settlements will have a lot of the basic feats, particularly for starting characters, but you'll need to find player-created settlements with advanced training halls to get many feats. Training halls are generally role or skill-based (e.g., Fighter College, Blacksmith, etc.). They will be able to train specific feats for that role or skill and generic feats that are useful to that role (e.g., you need to go to a Fighter College to learn Weapon Specialization and other Fighter-specific feats, but you can buy additional Hit Points and generic melee attacks at the Fighter College, Barbarian Lodge, Paladin Annex, etc.).
In addition to an XP cost, each feat may also have prerequisites. This will always include lower-level versions of the feat (e.g., you can't buy Blacksmith 3 without Blacksmith 2), and will almost always include some kind of achievement/merit badge. This can include ability score requirements (see below). You can't buy the feat without the prerequisites, so even if you don't play your advancing character for a while and come back to a huge pile of XP, you'll have to go out and earn achievements that unlock the feats you want.
Finally, each feat may have a cost in coin that's set by the settlement that owns the training hall. Like any other fee, such as using their markets, settlements have a lot of control over pricing for these feats and can charge a different rate for guests or members (and likely more fine-tuned control for different types of members).The fee is important, because each hall offers a limited amount of training (there are only so many instructors to go around), and the settlement probably doesn't want guests swooping in to take all the training from a building they made to support their members. Settlements can also choose to only allow certain types of characters to use the training facility, such as only settlement members of a certain rank or only characters who are members of the same player nation. Thus allied settlements can trade training access to each other as part of being a player nation. Training slots for different feats recover over time, and settlements may be able to increase the speed of this generation as well as the depth of feats available via building upgrades. A portion of money spent on training goes to the settlement coffers to pay for settlement upkeep.
If there's available training, you meet the prerequisites, and you can afford it, purchase immediately deducts the XP and coin and awards you the feat (though we might throw in a little fade-to-black to indicate that you're going into the back and having a quick training montage).
What this means practically for your advancement is:
You'll never have to worry about losing progression because you were away from the game and didn't set a new skill to train.
You will need to go out and get the appropriate achievements/badges (we're not sure what name we'll settle on calling them) before you can buy a lot of feats.
Feats that are generic, low-level, and otherwise common will be easy to find and train. As they increase in focus, level, and rarity, you'll have to travel to settlements that have the requisite training halls with training in stock or convince your own settlement to build what you need. Either way, it will probably be much cheaper to train as a member than to rely on training as a guest. Some settlements may gain an advantage purely because they've followed an upgrade path that unlocks feats that no other settlement can train yet.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you, Keovar. Saved me some linking.
I see that my impression was wrong. I was thinking the in-game Achievements (Merit Badges) would be added like a Quest after you bought the Skill Training, but it sounds like you'll have to earn those Achievements prior to Skill Training.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Great, thanks Keovar for the linking.
So basically, xp will be proportional to time (and eventually some money you expend), you use it to buy skills, so in this way the system really is simmilar to EVE's.
We just have the need of trainig facilities as a difference. I like it this way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you, Keovar. Saved me some linking.
I see that my impression was wrong. I was thinking the in-game Achievements (Merit Badges) would be added like a Quest after you bought the Skill Training, but it sounds like you'll have to earn those Achievements prior to Skill Training.
Makes me wonder if there will be an achievements list that you could accomplish at any time, like a kill counter for a monster type incrementing at 5, 25, 125, 625, and 3125. Say a ranger wants goblinoids as a favoured enemy. She might need to have earned the achievement for defeating that many, but if she spent her first couple years training as a barbarian and has already fought enough of them back then, those achievements would already be fulfilled.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Great, thanks Keovar for the linking.
So basically, xp will be proportional to time (and eventually some money you expend), you use it to buy skills, so in this way the system really is simmilar to EVE's.
We just have the need of trainig facilities as a difference. I like it this way.
Except that Eve makes you pick the skill that your points go into, so if you don't have one queued, you're losing points. Players have worked around this by setting an extremely long-training skill to go while they're offline, and then converting those points into something else once they get back, but of course that has limitations and still has a lot of potential for error. PFO is basically giving us an XP bank that will hold all of our points until we spend them.
The comment about time is an interesting one, though. If a subscription were charged monthly, the seven months with 31 days would be more valuable than the others, and February would be poor. In a use-based system like UO, or a kill & quest XP system like most theme parks, no one is earning experience at a constant rate anyway, so a few days difference in monthly subscription length isn't significant. It wouldn't be a huge difference in PFO, but there would be a difference in value and I wonder if that will show up in subscription numbers. People coming off holiday season may be short on funds and cut their subscription for a month during February. Any time someone goes on hiatus like that there's some chance that it will become permanent. Maybe GW could just divide the 8766 hours of a year evenly, so you get 730.5 hours worth of XP every month, regardless of its length.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Keovar, that's the impression that I get from the description - whether you know you're prepping for a particular feat or not, you can still be accumulating the required achievements along the way.
If Mining 3 requires, say 150 nodes mined before it's unlocked for purchase, you can go ahead and start cranking out those nodes, even if you've not got enough XP to purchase it, yet
Heck, you may try to focus on one particular type of mining node (gold, for example) while going through that 150, in order to unlock a sub-perk that nets you a small increase in gold mining yields, provided you've mined 50 gold nodes. You'll still have to pay some XP for your Goldhound perk, but accomplishing its requirements helps you work towards your Mining 3 unlock.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Most of us seem to be focusing on a system where we would spend xps to buy skill points. In this kind of progression, more advanced feats would become available as we bought more skill points.
The blog post above describes basically the opposite system. We would spend our xps to buy feats directly, and it seems likely that skill level would be a calculated value, derived from the number and difficulty of our feats in a given skill tree.
This makes the teaching system very different. Since we don't declare a skill to train ahead of time, spending time around a teacher while accumulating xp wouldn't work very well. Also, the best teacher would be someone who has the particular feat you want, not just a higher base skill. Two people could reach the same calculated skill level with different collections of feats, so higher skill level wouldn't guarantee possession of the feat you want.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Great, thanks Keovar for the linking.
So basically, xp will be proportional to time (and eventually some money you expend), you use it to buy skills, so in this way the system really is simmilar to EVE's.
We just have the need of trainig facilities as a difference. I like it this way.
Except that Eve makes you pick the skill that your points go into, so if you don't have one queued, you're losing points. Players have worked around this by setting an extremely long-training skill to go while they're offline, and then converting those points into something else once they get back, but of course that has limitations and still has a lot of potential for error. PFO is basically giving us an XP bank that will hold all of our points until we spend them.
The comment about time is an interesting one, though. If a subscription were charged monthly, the seven months with 31 days would be more valuable than the others, and February would be poor. In a use-based system like UO, or a kill & quest XP system like most theme parks, no one is earning experience at a constant rate anyway, so a few days difference in monthly subscription length isn't significant. It wouldn't be a huge difference in PFO, but there would be a difference in value and I wonder if that will show up in subscription numbers. People coming off holiday season may be short on funds and cut their subscription for a month during February. Any time someone goes on hiatus like that there's some chance that it will become permanent. Maybe GW could just divide the 8766 hours of a year evenly, so you get 730.5 hours worth of XP every month, regardless of its length.
The way I would do it is to handle the recurring billing every 30-31 days and give them constant XP; skymetal training would be for period of 30 days at a modest premium over subscription training.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You might need to replace the final step with 'apothecary' in that, since 'alchemist' is a popular base class in Pathfinder, which people will eventually want added. Does that name still work for the concept?
What about growing your own herbs, being a gardener instead of a forager?