[crossfire] stat loss and highly specialized players

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:21:28 -0400, "Andrew Fuchs" <fuchs.andy at gmail.com> wrote:
> As what i could skim off of  I440r__'s rant on IRC, players that are
> highly specialized (high level) in only a few skills can loose an
> unreasonable amount levels in skills that they are trying to develop
> from low levels.  His general point was that it should take longer to
> gain levels, but players should lose less when they die.

As mentioned a few days ago, the default experience table is rather bad,
especially near the higher levels because you only need to increase your
exp by 1 or 2% to gain a level.  You always lose a reasonably fair amount
of experience when you die (death penalty is 15% by default) but this
translates to many levels in some cases.  The problem is in the mapping
between experience and levels, not in the death penalty.

I think that I440r__ had some valid points: levels should not be gained
so easily (at least for the medium and high levels) so that the death
penalty would always represent a reasonable amount of levels lost.  As
I stated previously, I consider death_penalty_levels to be a bad
workaround that encourages server admins to keep on using a bad exp_table
instead of fixing the real problem.  The new exp_table used on Metalforge
is a bit better, but still far from perfect.

By the way, I added a link to
  http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo:exp_table
from
  http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo_new
but I did not assign a priority to it.  Maybe Mark or someone else can
prioritize this?  I would like to get this fixed in 1.x, but I understand
that some server admins would prefer to keep their old exp_table until
the bigger changes in 2.0 so I marked it as a 2.0 feature.  But if we
decide on a better exp_table, I would still like to add it to the 1.x
branch but commented out like the exp_tables A and C.

-Raphaël