Goblin Squad Member
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I'm in the process of waiting 18 days to buy my next level of Tanner. Don't tell my company leader, Fierywind, but I sometimes give myself permission to buy 100 or 200 xp of combat skills every three or four days.Are you not allowed to spend your exp as you wish?
That sounds pretty lame.
The fact you don't actually play this game, yet you're so heavily invested in these boards and its posters habits, seems equally lame.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not only "yes, someone will pay" but "yes, so many people will pay that it would be a common occurance".
When we are ready to talk more about Holdings & Outposts you will see some ways to magic-bullet a character. Formation combat and seige warfare will provide others. Any time we introduce a game system where one character can have a big impact on economics, logistics, or combat, magic-bullets become a real issue.
Regular purchases of power are less effective at inducing retention than intermittent random power increases of decreasing frequency. That is why booster packs of trading cards have rare, uncommon and common cards. You need to reset the platform eventually when the frequency of reward drops too low (which we will do by regularly introducing new Feat trees everyone can start "at the beginning").
But that isn't why base capabilities like Power and Hit Points are on a curve not a line. If they were on a line then the "correct" choice would usually be to purchase more of them before any other Feat, leading to the syndrome EVE encountered when it had Learning Skills (skills that let you learn skills faster). People were pressured to learn the Learning Skills first, which took 6 months, before starting other training. "Smart" players understood that doing so was the "correct" sequence even though it cost six months of game time and boredom. That was, for obvious reasons, bad.
Thanks for the clarification, Ryan. I am still not sure sure about the magic bullet thing but I sure am looking forward to these new game systems. It's true that I myself am "saving" a character for future development (accruing xp as a twin) but this is just because I know cool new roles will be implemented at some point.
About the regular increments versus random, large boosts: I think I see your point. I am currently tackling an escalation near us, killing reds, for the occasional T2 recipe that they drop. The drops are pure RNG (as long as you kill mobs of the right level), and I get lucky streaks and very unlucky streaks. When I get one, the boost is enormous, and it fuels me for at least a few more hours of grinding.
If instead of the RNG I would earn "tokens" for every red that I killed, that would yield me one T2 recipe for 50 tokens, I might already have given up on this grind. Not sure though: token systems seem pretty popular in todays MMO's. Maybe not a good example of your boosterpack analogy but still. I do agree with introducing new feats and skill-lines|: that will certainly work for me to break the monotony of climbing up that steep hill to some Max skill.
About the hitpoints being on a curve rather then a linear skill: is this to make the choice for more hitpoints more meaningful? I think I understand that too. I don't think that Hitpoints is quite comparable to a skill that increases your XP gain(which seems like a no brainer to get first for anyone with basic math-skills) but I can see how making the skill exponentially more expensive will cause people to think hard if they really prefer to get a few more hitpoints, rather then flesh out some other (maybe new) skill-line.
I am sure when more and more skills and feats are implemented, that our possible choices will become so many, that "waiting 3 weeks for that next increment in some Bow attack skill" becomes just another choice, rather then our "only" choice (which is still somewhat true for pure crafters, I think).
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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In EVE, you earn skill points in real time by picking a skill to train and working until it's finished training. So the only way to get skill points is to be actively training a skill. You can "pause" that training and starting training something else but that doesn't rebate the skill points accumulated for that skill that you paused.
In Pathfinder Online you gain XP in realtime into a bank. You can then spend that XP any time you want to acquire a Feat.
Without the achievement gates, people would allow characters to accumulate XP for a very long time, and those characters would be extraordinarily valuable on the secondary market, because without the gates, you could buy one, and immediately acquire exactly the right Feats required for any needful purpose without any delay whatsoever. Those characters would become "magic bullet" solutions to many in-game problems.
With the gates you have to spend some time actually playing the game in order to advance your Feat training, in addition to just having the XP.
Running the math; the cost of such a character would be (rounding) $150/year.
After four years the speculator would have $600 invested for four years; expecting a 10% return per year he insists on $900 for the character.
That seems like it would likely sell pretty quickly.
But a different speculator sees the writing on the wall, and also invests heavily in grinding those characters. After spending three months' worth of XP and getting lots of skills to a minimum level, he pays someone to grind out the acheivements.
Assuming that nobody bans the six accounts who grind out the achievements in the easiest way possible (right now it would be stabbing the starter goblins), I figure that the speculator could manage to only double the cost of XP and get one rank-10 achievement per month.
Let's say that after four years, the speculator wants to sell six characters that he has $1200 each invested in; is it reasonable that there will be people in four years who are willing to pay as much as people today are willing to pay for a tavern?
I bet there will be.
I'm not going to speculate in characters for sale, because I am at the point that I do not prefer to have more money and more headaches. However, I am willing to keep a stable of characters accumulating XP. Knowing that achievement points are expected to slow me down later, I might start looking for ways to get those points now.