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[Nummyfood]

People have been making a lot of posts worrying about the costs of the skill tree, loss of resources in transition, and boating. I'm writing this post as a suggestion for a path we can take. I welcome everyone to tear it apart and figure out what works and what doesn't. I have seen ideas about giving "freebie skill points" and alternative refund methods, so I will kind of put in my two cents. I will group this into specific concepts, so you can just ignore a section you don't care about.

First the simplest: Loss of Resources in Transition.
This is paying homage to those who have played far more than I have. It isn't easy losing a lot as the cost to transition has basically thrown out the rule of 3 and the necessity of using different variants.

1. Make historical exp apply across the chassis, not just the variant.
This was posed in a different post as a means of "making up for the rule of 3" somewhat. Yes the exp required to master remains about the same, but since we used many mechs in the past to gain that exp, historical exp possibly should apply to the chassis as a whole, not just the variant. It is much easier to implement as exp per variant (since that fits in with the new system), so perhaps a greater than 1:1 refund on hxp. I won't propose an exact ratio, but this might make veteran players more satisfied with the transition.

2. The new system has made variants useless for mastering.
Buying those variants was expensive, and not everyone uses those variants anymore. It is hard to find a happy medium on this one. But i feel this maybe a solution. Have a fully basic'd variant be worth "X" c-bills in reimbursement. an elite would be worth "2X" and a master "3X". So if we declare X to be a million c-bills, basic = 1 mil, elite 2 mil, master 3 mil. Veteran players who mastered a mech would see a reimbursement of up to 9 mil for "mastering" 3 variants.

Second: That boating thing.
Boating has been a trend long before this skill tree concept came alive. Ghost heat was the interim solution to it, but it has been successfully ignored in a lot of meta-mechs out there.

1. The first X nodes of each weapon skill tree are free. Reduce the total skill point pool by that number from 91 to (91-X). This makes it so that there is an initial freebie boost to each individual weapon system. Sure it won't be as powerful as your focused system, but it makes it less useless too. I will leave the number of free weapon nodes (per tree) up for debate, but I feel 5 might be an okay number. So this means I can put 5 points in every weapon tree before I start consuming "skill points."

2. In microeconomics, we have a lovely concept known as marginal theory. Each additional dollar you put into that beef steak you are buying is going to result in less and less of an improvement of quality. When you decide that it isn't worth that extra dollar to get a better steak, you settle with what you have. Likewise, nodes of the same effect may need to scale marginally. Thus, lets say AC's get 5% total bonus in cooldown. Instead of 1/1/1/1/1, it may need to be 1.2/1.1/1/0.9/0.8. Still totals to 5, just marginally less beneficial each time.

Third: Overall costs of respec and speccing
Speccing may look expensive on paper, but it isn't as bad as it seems.

Since we are on the topic, lets see how we can make it cheaper, FAIRLY. Trying new stuff has always been a big thing in MWO for those who just play for fun. Having to "purchase" nodes kind of sucks when you already bought initial nodes. It may be more prudent to buy the skill point instead of the node? Then you can have a refund cost for trying again. So its X money to buy all the skill points + X EXP. Then its Y money to deactivate a node, but free to apply it somewhere else. A cost to undo is enough, no need to add cost to "redo".

[TankBadger42]

Yeah, I think I agree on most of these points.