Neural Remapping

Now, we have a pretty obtuse stat and skill system that really rewards people spending a lot of time ICly discovering what does and does not work. And to an extent, this works better for some skills and professions than it does others (namely, in the lesser used skills- there is not a wealth of people to knowledge transfer from, and/or they might not be willing to do so for IC motives.)

We do allow players to have a one time respec after playing their character for a year, but even with these people, I have heard some complaints about them making mistakes in allocation and not being able to fully realize their errors until weeks or months later. And rerolling sucks. We all get that.

In the spirit of encouraging more people to stick with their characters, to promote older characters to leverage vacations and open up newer characters for growth, and with the changes to UE spending in mind, I propose the following:

1) Allow us to cryo vacation a character with a hefty fee involved to undergo 'neural remapping'.

2) Player plays a vacation character or characters as per usual for six months.

3) Upon return, allow the character, with a @service-request to apply to remove six months of UE expenditure in skills or stats of their choosing.

4) Character must then follow the weekly UE expenditure limits as per normal from there out and can spend from their pool of de-allocated UE. No instant badasses in totally different skills just because you underwent this procedure.

Considerations:

-Use of admin time. With a six month lag between starting and requiring the service ticket addressed, this is simple and easy to schedule accordingly for.

-Gameplay balance. Six months of UE is a significant amount, but you're not going to take someone who is the world's best katana user and make them the world's best sniper.

-Allowing a feeling of character growth or a shift in direction in an organic manner which is not going to overturn existing character power roles and dynamics.

-Might actually promote vet characters to make changes to their sheets, and provide tons of opportunities for the up-and-coming in the recently vacated roles and positions. Who knows, might just shake things up when they get stale!

Thoughts?

I think you'd need much more than six months of UE to go from a decker to a corpsec agent, truth be told. Given that it's a bit under one fifth your total allocation.

As for it not being common place, I think a good starting point for pricing something like this would be around a quarter mil. That plus the fact that you'd have to shelf a character for six months would probably make this something that people aren't doing constantly. That said- if someone wanted to spend two, five or seven hundred kay on this and take their character out of commission for the better part of a year or more to do the decker to corpsec agent thing? I don't see that as being the worst thing in the world. I'd rather see that living history of an older character shift over time rather than just getting chopped off because the player gets frustrated oocly and decides to perm them. But that's just my 2 chyen.

Do shitty work for your criminal overlord? He sends you on a forced 'vacation' to come back and clear your head for some new direction under his tutelage. That would be -such- an awesome plot.

But a more gradual system as proposed by Slither? I would love this. But I do worry about how this will interplay with advantages/disadvantages specializations. I personally wouldn't mind a system where you could remove an advantage/disadvantage pair every 3 months or something. Once removed you could select a new one. Same with specializations. Maybe also being able to lower a specialization by one level every month or something.

If anything, this would help my @stats screen not take up so much space.

I see this also being good for the midbie who is not quite at a respec service request who learned that the skills they picked were useless, and the new player who likes their character and doesn’t want to booth.

This, I like it.