Post Friday, 29th April 2011, 19:32

New take on skill experience and Victory Dancing

I had an idea that I posted in the How to Remove Victory Dancing thread, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside, and I'd like some feedback on it.

It sounds like you already have a system that is actively being implemented, so this suggestion might be coming a bit late. But for the sake of futility, I'm going to post it anyway. I'm also going to confess that I'm fairly new to DCSS and haven't made it to D:10 yet (I like to bite off more than I can chew), but I have a good understanding of what Victory Dancing is, and why it's retarded and not fun. I've also read the experimental skill pool changes page and forum threads, so I think I have a good grasp on what needs to change.

Taking another look at why VD is necessary, there's the experience draining attacks, and there's the accidental training of useless skills. We also want to avoid pre-dancing as it's as tedious and not-fun as post-dancing. All of these are addressed in galehar's/kilobyte's idea (which I like, personally). We have the manual mode to address pre-dancing and useless skills, and getting rid of the pool to combat exp-drains.

However, there is still the idea that a skill should only be truly trained if it's used, and the proposed "Manual Mode" sort of goes against that idea. We could do a pure-automatic run, but then we risk training useless skills or not training seldom-used skills when we want (unless the logic for determining pre-used skills is spot on - a very difficult thing to fine tune). So my proposal is instead of applying experience directly to a skill, we apply the experience to raise a skill cap, then allow the actual skill points to be gained by using the skills (but not beyond the cap, obviously).

The cap-raising allocation can be done any way we'd like:
    -Current system: enabled skills get preference, disabled skills get 25%
    -Multi-tier weighted current system (select 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, proposed in the wiki)
    -Automatic based on pre-used skills
    -Manually
    -Hybrid of the previous two (via galehar/kilobyte)

Of course this doesn't eliminate Victory Dancing since players could still dance to gain points within the cap but only until they hit the cap, and we could apply some limitations to the way points are gained when a skill is used:
    -As a skill gets closer to the cap, increase the number of times it's used between skill gains
    -Apply some kind of item/spell/target tracking system (via XuaXua earlier in the thread)

TL;DR: We apply galehar's idea to a skill cap system, which allows training via skill use, but also kills off the need for Victory Dancing.


Criticisms? Just a dumb idea?