Teaching UE
Help newbies progress just a little bit quicker via RP.

The idea is as follows, player A (let's call them 'Veteran' or 'Vet') decides to take player B (let's call them 'Newbie' or 'Newb') under their wing and show them the ropes of some IC role/job/skillset. Vet, being more experienced both IC and OOC, RP's out a scene over 30-60 min with Newb, who actively participates in their tutelage, asks good questions and keeps the interaction very themely as they explore this new knowledge both as a character and a player. At the end of the 'teaching' session, Vet uses a '@teach Newb' to award them 1 extra UE outside of their normal daily advancement. Both Vet and Newb are put on a 24h delay timer before they teach or be taught again.

I'm very curious what folks think about this. It's based very heavily off of a system in another MUD I play, and I felt like it was a very balanced solution to an issue that seems to keep coming up from time to time. It offers, at most, a ~33% increase to character progression, but only if a player is actively searching mentorship IC, which I see being suggested very often for learning the mechanics of the game in general for new players.

It could also be an easy way to incentivize group RP scenes if you could 'teach' multiple people in the same room. I imagine things like sparring exhibitions, workout classes, tailoring lessons, language lessons, etc. being marketed out as a useful service both for the IC knowledge they provide and the tangible mechanical benefit to a character's progression.

I also could imagine there being a limit to how much someone can be '@teach'd, most likely determined by overall UE gained, though I don't see that as entirely necessary, honestly. I can tell anyone from experience that this sort of system is difficult enough to coordinate IC that getting a 'lesson' daily is near impossible, especially over stretches of more than a few days. Even if one did, we're talking about reducing the time to max ue from 2 years down to 19-20 months, and that's for someone actively roleplaying enough to gain max UE plus finding a mentor and engaging actively in a lesson every single day. It would also be necessary to make sure the scene is acted out as a full lesson over a notable amount of time, say something like 20min.

Anyway, feel free to share thoughts and opinions on this. I'm very interested to know what other players think.

It would probably come down to how the playerbase handled it. Just based on my own experience of how good people have been about keeping stuff IC, I'm decently optimistic that it could be held up, but the abuse is certainly a concern.

That said, I wouldn't be terribly against the limits for being taught and even for teaching. Set a limit akin to, "you can be taught until you've reached 500 UE on your character" and "You can only teach if you've earned at least 1000 UE on your character" or something like that.

I can agree that the UE being such a universal OOC resource is something I thought of, but since it's how the game runs, I'm not sure what could be done around it. I did have the thought that instead of awarding UE, you could essentially 'pay' a UE spend in a specific stat or skill. This would make the stopping points easier as you could just say that only those with above 'the curve' in a specific skill or stat could teach and only someone who is below 'the curve' could be taught in that same skill or stat.

On the point of time allocation, I see what you're saying, but I would like to offer that a lot really new players are rarely super active at the beginning just due to how the system works. I would also counter that players with limited time might feel better about what time they spent if they felt like it was directly helping their character get better/to a level of skill where they're actually functional in whatever 'role' they want to pursue.

Either way, still a fair point. Wonder if anyone else has ideas on how you'd solve that.

The more I think about this, the more I think having a 'teach' award a specific stat/skill tick (assuming it's not to 'curve' levels yet) seems like the way to go. It also makes me imagine someone running a weekly spin class for endurance ticks, which makes me chuckle.

On the second point, it may be fair, but it's too slow. It's always been too slow, and it's especially grinding to new players who don't understand the mechanics as well as others, not to mention that the system around many things in-game is based on very little random chance and almost entirely relies on skill levels. Regardless of all of that, this an absolute maximum of a 33% increase in the speed of progression in a specific skill or stat up to a point that is most likely just verging on the edge between useles and beginning to be worthwhile (specifically when taking the example of 'teaching' someone in a specific skill/stat up to the point of hitting 'the curve').

Whether the end result of 33% faster progression is actually good for the game I don't know, but it requires no new systems, causes no problems with more incentives for player coordination, and benefits newbies and veterans alike.

When players talk about UE progression being too slow usually what they really mean is wanting to feel plateaued so they are potentially making similar contested combat checks as everyone else could be. However having more characters at the Max UE plateau actually makes younger characters weaker overall because the average progression is deeper on the curve and so relative checks become harder.

My feeling is also that universally increased progression better enables players trying to mix-max their characters because sticking to an ideal skill progression is very difficult across three to five years of play that could have a lot of different and varied gameplay demands on it, compared to a few short months or a year.

I feel like 90% of the issues players have with UE progression is the psychology of it and the belief that a characer who has 2000 UE is automatically twice as good in combat as a character with 1000 UE, when they would probably still within the margin-of-randomness when it comes to weapon attack tables, and at worst actually weaker.

I've never played a combat-focused character to full UE max or even half of that before, so I'm not sure how close 1000 UE would get you in terms of hitting close to the most UE you'd reasonably want to get in the different stats/skills for combat. That said, it should be noted that 1000-2000 UE equates to 1-4 years on the same character, depending heavily on how consistently active a player is on said character, which I honestly think is a weird benchmark for comparing things. In that analogy, you're skipping over 8-12 months of feeling like a useless sack of meat.

Regardless, this is off of the topic of the original post, as it's not meant to be some solve to the isssue of character progression, which we all know is never going to change. It was just an idea for a simple system that would help some people get through the lowest echelons of progress a bit quicker through active RP.

On your example of EVE, yeah that seems pretty great and makes sense to me. If you had means to hit ~1700-1800 UE in around 6-12 months on a character, that would probably be quite an improvement on the current setup as far as letting new characters/players get their stats/skills up to snuff before they start getting to the point of burnout from being useless and getting bored of bar RP and the occasional mugging.

Man, I don't know. I feel like this doesn't properly appreciate how extreme the late game curve is and how much players advance early on. 1800 UE is basically finished for an elite combat character with a few support concessions that wouldn't be super relevant. You'd have half of all players or more walking around with end stage characters they didn't even know how to use with skill checks for weapons they couldn't even afford.

This 'I can't do anything yet' mentality is pure psychology that players talk themselves into, except in very niche situations with high fixed skill check professions which only a tiny minority encounter. Truly end stage characters are operating in a whole different quasi-retired-from-normal-play strata of the game which barely effects other players a lot of the time, like pretty much everyone who is interacting on a day to day basis are all sitting within a few hundred UE of each other and plenty of people with more haven't done anything like mix-maxing. Like 95% of the game is available to characters well under a year old.

And on this note I want to reiterate that in my experience a couple hundred UE difference is night and day. I have never seen my chances of success go up in any activity slightly. Everytime I've improved something, sometimes by as little as one adjective, in a skill/stats/set of stats, I have seen tasks/actions go from near impossible to trivial. It's one thing if you end up having to act in a sphere you don't play your character as being 'good' in and have to deal with the consequences, but it's quite frustrating when you dump all your UE into the appropriate things only to find that the rival who's got an extra month under their belt is a seemingly impossible hurdle for you to overcome.

"Oh but don't worry the curve will flatten things out and you'll catch up." Sure, but when will that happen? In a month? No, that's not nearly enough time. Three months? Six months? And that's if I'm playing for a few hours every day?

I know I'm brushing over a lot of the reasoning for why the system is set up the way it is, but I'd hope we can all agree there are flaws here that could be addressed, and that those flaws are highly likely to be hurting the game's ability to entice new players.

I've seen this while well into at least the lower ends of the curve, so I'm not sure how true that is but I'll take your word for it as I haven't got up to the level given as an example. Still note that most people probably aren't to those levels inside their fist 8-12 months on a character.

Characters under the curve on their stats and skills advance very, very rapidly in ability so what you're probably running into is that extra month being very early on where each UE advances a relatively large amount. Whether everyone is getting 2UE a day or 4UE or 10UE the curve is going to feel the same regardless so that very early PC to slightly older early PC power differential won't really change.

I'd like to note that the "early" we're talking about is several months of consistent play up to the range of ~1 year. Again, I don't think the game's doing itself any favors by expecting new players to invest that level of time to get to points of notable competence. And explaining how speeding it up still keeps the differences the same is exactly my point. Dealing with people being better than you is one thing, and it's fun and themely. Dealing with almost everyone being better than you for upwards of a year while actively playing consistently is little more than a slog in the hopes of one day catching up, which sucks.