Discussion:Decking Skill UE Cap Discount

Just making a discussion thread for the recent poll:

This is just an idea we want feedback on. There are several decking skills (programming, cracking, systems), and they have coded uses, but each skill only has a few coded uses. A proposed idea for alleviating some of the pain around these skills having partial implementations is to discount the amount of UE these skills count towards the UE cap. You would still earn ue/spend ue the same on these skills, but if you put 1 point into programming, it would only count as 0.33ue toward the UE cap. The hope with this change would be to allow people to get these support skills and start using them, without impacting their overall gameplay too heavily, given the UE cap. Plenty of stuff would need to be figured out, but the question is: Do you think this is a positive change?

I agree with the premise that programming, cracking, and systems are too split up and thinly populated with mechanics to really be meaningful distinct skills, but I also think this is arguably true of other skills (explosives, forensics, munitions) and weighting how much a skill contributes towards the UE cap based on how useful it is at the time is a very messy and subjective road to go down that will probably end up with some really confusing issues to resolve in the future.

If it's felt that there is any skill that is unlikely to see much isolated development, my feeling it would be better to bite the bullet and depreciate it and move its checks to another skill and deal with the short term cleanup of characters that have skilled into it already, rather than the long term headache of gameplay skills being weighted differently in experience costs.

I'm under the impression at least one of the skills in the poll is now also working with another archetype which has the ability to generate a lot of income and a significant amount of IC data-gathering. If that's the case, I think giving any skills that work within that new archetype a discount would end up pretty disastrous overall over time.

Yes please.

I don't think changing the UE cost would impact the core problem that these skills lack merit via coded systems to interact with. I think either reducing the number of skills or simply making more meaningful coded interactions is the best way to go.

We aren't going to stop working on decking, but I wanna be realistic about where we stand. Cracking and programming are at the minimum a tertiary skill that people invest in. They have uses, and combining them into a decking skill is also a possibility. I included systems despite the updated uses that skill has to gauge interest / feedback.

I would love to make decking better, so would Johnny but I also need to be realistic about the time I have available and the other responsibilities I have to the game (bug fixes, administrative stuff, etc).

And realistically, I can't commit to making huge progress on it this year. So, rather than more of the same I started to ideate on solutions that would be easier to implement that might have a positive impact on these skills and their usefulness.

Reducing UE cap cost is easier than combining the skills (by far) and far less likely to cause new bugs. It's also easily reversible for when we do flesh out these skills more.

The general idea is that maybe people would be more interested in checking them out or investing into a partially implemented skill if they knew it wasn't going to come at such a high cost to other more immediately and regularly useful skills over the length of the character.

I don't like skillsofts in general and think they are a detriment to the game-- and removing them would force people to invest in skills to investigate their usefulness. So removing them entirely, or at least the softs for skills I mentioned is another possibility but that seems more punitive than beneficial and so I don't wanna go that route at this time.

So yeah, the idea of lowering cap cost with no other changes seemed like an easy way to make the decker life more accessible without requiring the UE cap investment of a full character build as it were.

My main concern is down the line. There seem to be plenty of long lived characters in SIndome, especially in recent years. If some of the less fleshed out skills get reduced cost (effectively) now, it's going to be hard or impossible to walk that back down the road when decking (as an example) does get fleshed out.

If my character who is a master decker now who is also a top line doctor and candyman but only because of the skill cost discount has to suddenly become mediocre at some or all of these things, it would leave a sour taste in my mouth.

I'd rather not give something away that I might have to take back later.

Another concern is that if someone decides they still want to focus on decking and not diversify, these characters will be able to reach greater heights in those skills then they could before. Maybe with most builds C level skills are top level with the occasional B but now a focused decker can hit A levels.

These characters now supercharged in these skills will be yet harder to deal with if it's ever decided to roll back the cost reduction. Not only that, give how these skills used to work (not sure if it's still that way) the things they do on the grid will be untouchable by other deckers should the skill cost be rolled back as a focused decker would no longer be able to reach those heights.

Also worth considering is how many characters and how much investment it takes for such characters to be able to do awesome decking things with GM support. I know it doesn't happen often due to manpower constraints but I do think that the changes in how many characters are at this level and how easy it is to get to this level are worth considering.

All in all, none of this can be dealt with if it's decided that new layer of weighting skills by mechanical usefulness is desired. I'm not a huge fan of it in combination with the UE cap but it can all be made to work. At this point I just want to point out things that might be worth considering as this is all explored!

Walking back the changes later would be updating the code that calculates max ue and asking anyone who has ended up over it to respec, which is what we did when we implemented the UE cap. It's a fairly well worn path that we have tooling in place for already, so that aspect of it doesn't concern me.

I'm not pushing this one way or another, other than to surface it for discussion. I think a lot of good points for and against have been made in this thread. I'm still on the fence on if it would be a positive or if it would have a negligible effect but increase confusion.

@slither

Is there a desired outcome? What is the end state that you are driving towards?

More people / players getting involved in the Grid? What does that look like? What is the benefit?

(Deckers / plug your ears here)

When I started playing ~5 years ago, I really wanted to play a decker. I feel extremely fortunate that a long term player / character steered me away from that. They made the analogy that decking in Withmore is more or less drawing dicks on nodes. It's a bit crass, but also seems to be 85% accurate.

(Back to dialogue)

I think it was @Grey0 who brought up the point that there are 1 or 2 Max UE deckers in the game. I think that anyone else who gets into decking is going to run into issues that are inherent with the system. Max UE deckers can essentially lock everyone else out of "doing things".

If the goal is to give the two current Max UE deckers more competition, then lowering the UE cost of decking skills might achieve that.

If the goal is to get more people into deeper into the Grid in a casual (read : not primary) endeavor, I think we run the risk of running up against the Max UE / lock out challenge.

Decker archytypes are done so damn dirty it's not funny. That's the real core of the problem. Who can blame the person who, having read neuromancer, wanted to have high-tech, low life adventures in the Dome, only to find, well yeah, drawing dicks on homepages. Especially with the totally justified kind of secrecy around IC stuff, which is frustrating as a new player, but I think, even with that frustration, that it's for the best, there would be like, no way for a brand new character to find out, other than scouring the bitch boards for scraps of complaints, that there's not much fleshed out in the system. Molly Millions is in the Drome. Right down to the nails. But Case? Case realized he didn't have a chance in hell, and did something else. Cybernetics, in its dictionary definition, is about the interaction of systems. I think that there'd need to be a system in place. Ways for the grid or the matrix to touch things in meatspace. Elevators, bank accounts, cameras, power grids.