I think that we can all agree that the PST skill tree system is bad for countless reasons. The majority of the posts here are currently and rightfully critical of it. Here is what I would change, in no particular order:
- First, I would remove trees & skill node layouts. They just create the illusion of choice and massive feelings of wasted expenditures when you have to spend skill points, XP and C-Bills to unlock skills you don't want to reach the ones you do. You are going to be unlocking almost all of the nodes in each tree anyways, so the order that skill nodes are unlocked is basically irrelevant.
My Fix: Instead of nodes, each attribute that modifier has its own individual slider bar to control how many skill points are being spent on it and none of the attributes are reliant on any of the others. This would create a much cleaner and compact presentation and would allow players to only buy the skills they actually want. Each skill would have a range of 0-5 skill points which can be allocated to them.
- Second, diversity is basically none existent in the current system. In order to create diversity, you need to create "differences in kind". You do this by making each unit play differently, but the PST skill system doesn't encourage that. You always want to fully unlock all of the skill nodes for your mech's defenses and mobility and for the weapons mounted on the mech, resulting in the same over bonuses for each mech in the long run.
My Fix: Limit the overall number of skill points can be spent on a mech. This would prevent every mech from having the same abilities and force players to prioritize the skills they unlock based on their play styles. As a random guess, I would test the system with limits of 40 skill points for a Clan Mechs and 50 skill points for IS Mechs.
- Third: A lot of mechs are still just going to be plain up worse than others, even with optimal skill unlocks. Also, if skills (eventually) completely replace quirks, a lot of mechs are going to lose the only abilities that make them viable.
My Fix: I would collapse the quirks into the system and have each mech provide a set of customized bonus to their skills. This would allow mechs to have some basic level of "skill"/quirks without having to spend any resources on them and increase their maximum ability in that skill when compared to mechs that don't have the bonus. Mechs are inherently weaker due to any number of factors would simply be assigned larger bonuses to their skills.
- Fourth: The costs are completely out of wack and prevent new players from experiencing the system and discourages players from customizing their mechs.
An Aside: I am going to approach this from a perspective that doesn't intend the system to be a C-Bill sink. While the game does need a C-Bill sink of some kind, I don't think that the skill system is a good place to implement it. I would much rather have insanely high C-bill cost for some of the items which are currently MC only. For Example: Mech Bays could cost 500 MC or 5,000,000 C-Bills, which is an insane discount compared to everything if purchased with MC. You could do the same thing with colours and patterns. or even supply crate keys.
My Fix: Instead of paying a C-Bill cost for unlocking each new node and either a C-Bill cost or MC cost for respecing a node, you paying a flat 200,000 C-Bill fee to change your skills, irregardless of how many skill levels you add or remove. Even as a fairly bad player, I can easily get 50,000 C-Bills on a loss, so even for a new player, getting access to the skill system is only going to take a couple of games. For people who are actually good at the game, the fee can be earned 1 game (or less). Individual skill levels would have their own XP cost and lowering skill levels would refund their costs back to the Mechs XP pool. It would not require spending any MC to use any feature of this skill system.
- Fifth: The current skill system encourages skill and equipment boating, and the fixes presented above would make boating even worse as it limits the number of skill points available to be spent.
My Fix: In order to make it more appealing to spend your skill points across different skills, the higher skill levels would be less efficient. For example, the first skill level could provide a +10% bonus, the second a +9% bonus, the third +8%, etc, with each rank having the same XP cost. This would have purchasing a lower level skill for a different system or ability more attractive than simply increasing one ability higher.
Hopefully, these ideas general some good discussion and PGI does some major reworking of the skill system.
0
