On The Topic Of Historical Skill Points And General Skill Points

Reading the Q&A over the up coming skill tree I have a few, well beefs with the whole system and need to lay out my criticisms with the logic used. I know it is too late to change how things will be done in the patch, but, I still feel it is something worth saying.

General Skill Points have no place with giving players Historical Skill Points. I find it funny the reason that GSP is being used instead of a full module refund is this line here:

"The Module > C-Bill refund system as originally planned failed to account both for the role of Modules as Skill system items and for the essential role of XP within the new Skill System, leaving a greater portion of players with enough C-Bills to put toward Skills, but not enough XP to actually acquire those Skills."

While this is true, they solved this issue alone with Historical SP, General SP was created as a redundant system to solve the same problem. What the hell. To not remove context of their elaboration for GSP:

"With the use of General Skill Points (global points which can be consumed to acquire Skills for any 'Mech Skill Tree, without requiring the use of any C-Bills or XP) we are ensuring a majority portion of the playerbase will be fully capable of skilling their 'Mechs with no loss of previous skill status or associated progress."

Now think about Historical Skill Points, skill points you get on any mech you had skills on before that give you free unlocks equal to a certain threshold that of previous mastery into the new system. It accomplished this mission goal of General Skill points more cleanly than GSP ever could have because GSP people could shuffle away from mechs that they had mastered to mechs they hadn't mastered.

Flat out, GSP is redundant with the existence of HSP. Given that PGI will not give an inch on the GSP system and refunding modules in a more equitable way (with either a choice of how much GSP upon log in and Cbills or opting for Cbills or GSP in some fashion, far too late now for that), it's time to kiss those old modules goodbye at half price.

Now my other beef is PGI seems to have done some very bad math when it comes to the economy.

"We took a data pull from all Tier 4/Tier 5 players without Premium Time, but who are active players, and looked at their average C-Bill and XP earnings per-match. The player data showed us that the average C-Bill earning per-match for a player in that bracket was 119,315 C-Bills. The XP average was 818. With the feedback from the initial costs of the Skill Tree and an overall re-evaluation of total costs, we felt that around 30-35% of the average C-Bill earning per-match was an appropriate value for contributing to a single Skill Node. When it came to XP similar principles applied, and we felt the single average match earning in XP was an appropriate value for contributing to a single Skill Node."

The important part to pull out of this is they did an average, I wish I knew what type, was it the most common cbill amount, was it just a flat average of everyone? Because the most common amount per match is what really should be what is looked at not the average amount. Even if say roughly 120k cbills per match is the mode average of player income in that bracket, in which case you did the right thing, we are talking about a 30-35% income decrease for new players on top of saving for equipment.

So if you are cutting out 45k per match from 120k that knocks it down to 75,0000 cbills a match, so what this does is makes a new player have to slow down on upgrading a mech, or, buy more expensive mechs that already come with DHS, and Endo, if they already know about the DHS and Endo tax for IS mechs which are significantly cheaper. And that is a problem, IS mechs attract new players due to their time to cost value making them new player traps, who buy them, then have to spent half again the mech's value to make it work in many cases due to DHS tax, endo tax, new engines, and an optimized payload on many. So cutting out 37.5% of a players income (and a new player makes far less than a seasoned player of course) is going to cut into new player retention, HARD.

Now what makes this worse is that this change widens the gulf between those who have played for a while and those who are just starting out, because those already set up with a mech and have it equipped and mastered under the old system in a few weeks will be putting 0% of their income once again into this skill system per match so all this has created is a cbill sink for the lowest level players and new players. People who don't have much time or are new to the game, creating a further bar to entry because it takes more time to get anywhere. Without a subsequent income boost somewhere this is murderous.

I highly suggest looking into some kind of income multiplier, maybe for their first win of the day, to be put into the game for non mastered mechs to help ease the pain of this new system. Even then I highly suspect that won't help the mode income earnings of most players in MWO who will suffer under this and likely run even smaller stables of mechs due to they can't afford to have more mechs given the larger cbill sink put into the game for newer players or non-paying customers. While I am okay with a cbill sink existing, it should not be one that is so hugely impacting progression as to slow someone from getting Double Heat Sinks by your own numbers from 12.5 games (120k per game) to 20 games (75k per game after 45k skill tree tax for skills each match).

These are my two major beefs with the system as it is being rolled out. The format could use work but that is design choices and I can live with it. I have more issues with you have overlapping solutions for the same problem that nullify one another with GSP and HSP, and that you are introducing another cbill sink into the game and I rather worry that you did not look at the mode of income instead of the average. Because in T3 when I spent about two weeks collecting data my average came out to 114,836 cbills per match, but about half of those made under 100k, and another half made well over 200k, a new player is going to be making like 55k, of course they won't get enough XP in that match for a node, but, still, that is a lot more of their income with a lot of low income matches going to the skill tree.

TL:DR GSP and HSP solve the same issue of player progression, 30-35% skill tree tax only exists for new players and new mechs then vanishes, doesn't impact older players really, without an income boost for unmastered mechs you are just hurting new player retention in my mind as they are having to choose skills or working with a bad mech and don't know skills won't make up for single heat sinks and standard structure.

On The Topic Of Historical Skill Points And General Skill Points

#1 Moonlight Grimoire

#2 Shinear

#3 drachnien

#4 Badassnrocknroll

#5 JC Daxion

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