Datachips

Okay, so you want datachips back?

I might be willing to cut a deal with you all. To accommodate players that have hectic schedules RL and can’t spend their time leveling, I agree that it should be possible for them to level with datachips and botting. The datachips will have to be changed so that they do not give experience in any particular skill. I mean for them to level a person in a particular category only. I also think that the amount of time spent botting up your levels should take considerably longer than traditional leveling. It’s not fair for one guy with access to chips to bot his smuggling all the way up while he sleeps, while another guy is out there doing the work, and has to do it while he’s at the computer.

Maybe there is a little bit of flexibility in there, but not much. Please discuss.

I like the idea of it leveling the category and not individual skills and having them give less experience per successful study…both of those seem fair to me. Maybe even making blank datachips fairly dang expensive could help curb 10,000 datachips popping up. Here are my questions I think needs to be looked into though…Who gets to write the datachips? Does the person have to have the high science skill (whatever level its decided to be set at) and be a master in the top level skill of that category? Do they have to be 150 in that category to be able to write a datachip in the subject? Does it have to be their main? Or maybe only leader mains can write on the subject and their level of skill is the max you can get to via that datachip? IE: Leader/Combat that has Combat 110 could only write a 110 combat datachip.

Okay, so I understand a little how datachips worked previously. Here’s my suggestion, for a new system:

1. Make it so you can only study datachips of skills you have available to you. If I’m trying to level leadership through studying datachips, at level 1, the only thing I can study is a datachip about teach. I will only be able to study teach until level 25, where I’ll be able to use jail. If my leadership max is 29, I will never be be able to understand the information contained in datachips about call or torture.

2. On a successful study, you should only get as much experience as you would be given on a successful use at the level you first get the skill. So, if I’m studying a datachip about showplanet, I’ll only get 250 experience total no matter what, or whatever the ceiling is for experience on that. It wouldn’t scale like it would if you were actually using the skill, since putting the abilities into practice would be more important than just reading about them.

I think it would keep them from being the only method of leveling characters, while still giving people the option to bot their %s higher on skills that may be difficult to adept i.e. tuneship, cyber, etc.

Well, before we try to figure out how to solve datachips, it would really help if we understood what the problem with them was – I still don’t know [b:1cfqlt9n]why[/b:1cfqlt9n] they were taken out. Datachips did the job they were supposed to do, and they did them well. It almost seems as if this TL was reshaped to be more… I don’t know, WoW-like. But there are problems with that. The first problem: people don’t play here to grind levels. This isn’t WoW and it isn’t a hack-and-slash MUD. It just doesn’t make sense to pour so much effort into quests when a player’s real goals lie in the MUD’s end-game – RP, PK, and the TL-based conflicts.

Here’s the way I see it. Datachips did a lot more than people seem to realize for the MUD. Not only did they allow people to level without having to trek to remote corners of the MUD, they allowed people to adept difficult skills, they fleshed out a class that desperately needs filler, and they created an important sinkhole for excess credits.

I’ll start with the leveling, since it’s the most obvious function of the datachip. The current way of leveling, questing, just doesn’t make a ton of sense if you’re trying to get people together for RP. I can’t think of any quests that really REQUIRE more than one person, and the locations of the majority of the quests don’t exactly draw a crowd, either. With a datachip, you could take the tedium with you and at least surround yourself with interesting people while you were doing boring work.

Let’s look at the skill part of datachips now. With a datachip, adepting skills really wasn’t that much easier – flurry was still an incredible pain in the ass, as I recall, and the majority of skills aren’t that hard to adept anyways, they’re just tedious. Now, there are nice things about datachips focusing on specific skills – it creates a divide in the quality of datachip available, it gives newbies an alternative to paying 300-500k for a higher-skill datachip, and it makes certain race/class combos worthwhile (Arkanian combatant?).

I don’t think I need to explain how science needs more stuff… it’s pretty obvious, so I’ll just skip to the economy part. People might not have realized it at the time, but datachips made up a pretty big part of the MUD’s economy. People had something to spend their money on during the leveling process, rather than amassing credits FROM leveling. Seriously, pay 350k for a datachip to level espionage, or bot it for a week and walk away with two million credits? Datachips helped keep credits moving from player to player in their own little way.

I really don’t understand why they were taken out in the first place, so it’s hard for me to come up with reasonable changes to the system. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Well, I like to hear about datachips coming back personally, specifically because i agree that i don’t think they were broken.

I think the major problem with datachips last tl was the level required to write them, which made combat classes able to write datachips, which i must say i don’t agree with. combat is one of the fastest things to level with just a bit of credits, and if you have low/high engineering, you can make those credits within a couple of hours. a new character leveling engineering through quests, which only takes about an hour and a half to hit 100 in for an engineer, will make about 100-150K, which is the current rate for training in the mud anyways.

I think that if we had datachips for skills, with a half experience skill rate(if you have a 50% chance to get a % gain doing it, you have a 25% chance while studying a datachip), it would all work out. Keep science skills at their current levels if they are put back in, please. at least that way we know combatants have to do their shit to level(don’t mean to pick on combatants, but seriously, they are the one class when in a clan that is at war, or when fighting, they should know their character inside out.)

I suggest only being able to write on skills in a class you have avi’d, because at least this way it lays restrictions to how many chips people will be able to write.

I personally can’t see myself going back to studying datachips to level in the current situation, questing is just faster for the most part, and the way quests are laid out on planets make it efficient to level by questing, but at the same time, if someone works 8 hours a day, and bots the datachip for those 8 hours, I don’t think they should be able to solely level their character through botting.

Perhaps you could put a level cap on the datachips being used, such as a baseline of 100, you can hit 100 with the datachip, and after that it only gives half % of use of skill for the skill the chip is written on.

Anyways, this post seams like a mess, hope people understand it.

If you make the amount of XP gained from studying a datachip less than the XP gained from performing the skill, there’s zero reason to add the datachips back in.

The problem with quests versus datachips is quests you can level fairly quickly, but you have to be actively at the computer, actively traveling to the ass ends of the galaxy, actively competing for the stupid packages, and it makes 0 RP sense about 99% of the time. Some of you will say "oh it’s perfect RP sense that a new character just graduating from the academy would do odd jobs" or "oh it’s perfect RP sense that a person wanting to be a scientist or whatever would go collect samples". How much sense does it make for a character who already exists? Who has a job already? Whose starting RP was not "I’m 20 years old and just graduated from the academy". How much sense does it make for a senator/jedi/sith/clanleader to go fetch and carry rocks and flowers because they decided a couple more levels of something would be handy? Are we going to require that people be 100% fully leveled before they do any RP, in order to compensate for the ridiculousness of the so-called RP of the quest system? If so then what’s the point of the mud except to grind (no offense) really lame quests?

I can see giving a slightly smaller XP reward for studying than for quests but keep in mind, quests pay credits, datachips cost them. I don’t see datachips as being a way for new players to learn, or really even brand new characters, but for people to continue their training after they’ve started RPing.

I could go through and quote every point Avanga made and say how much I agree with it, but to avoid redundancy I won’t. …But I agree with every point Avanga made.

Moving on…

I meant, if you lower the XP gained from ONE study of the chip to be less than the XP gained from ONE doing of the action. Because it sounds like that’s what was suggested. And if that’s the case, it’s better to just run the skill on triggers.

I actually like the idea of only being able to gain levels and not gain skill percentages from datachips. It makes sense to me and kinda ties in with what I had in mind. Basically making datachips like being in a tech school classroom. The datachips would be your "theory time" while going out and actually earning your percentage points through hands-on use would be your "lab time."

Personally I never had a problem with simulators other that stupid bastards arguing over who got to use em first. They let clans pop out soldiers awful quick so it wasnt ever much of a problem to get people to go out and fight. Another thing was their was clan eq. You could get trained up and semi decently equipped in a matter of hours and be out into the fight. These days you gotta either wait for someone to make you some armor or go make 150 – 250k to buy some from an engineer. That takes time and effort and player investment that aint going to have most people out wanting to go try and fight. Now I dont think clan eq should be better than player made by any means but just something half decent to give to noobs that’ll hold em over. I’m not asking for sims to be put back in but you should be able to level every class by yourself just like they recently fixed slicer up to do. Thankfuly I never make a pilot but I would royally hate having to fly back and forth between two planets for two days and be utterly bored just to level.

You can solve the eq bitching problem by making them both have the same gear just named different and making it not be clan only so whoever ends up with it down the road can use it. Also after saying no clan eq was gonna be given out the mandos were given mando only clan eq.