[2023] Observation about direction of game...

RNG is RNG, and decisions are decisions. I crafted my own gear plenty, rarely found a Q6 before I'd already made a Q5 a week or two earlier.

But if you have really good luck or raid higher tier POIs, or grind quests 24/7, I could see you ending up with Q6 gear before you can craft Q5. But I think this is more a matter of the loot lists and such not being fully retailored to account for the crafting curve- Most notably, there just wasn't enough info on the loot list inadequacies prior to the patch going public. The testing group as I understand it never ran into this 'problem'; But after it went live, there's been sporadic reports of people getting Q6 before they can even craft Q5. So I'd expect it to get polished out in the nearer future than the further future.

Originally posted by Weczer:

Originally posted by entropy008: It's been so long since I played the early Alpha that I can't even remember - was this game's skill progression ever similar to Skyrim? As in "do X and get better at X the more you do it?" I'm fond of that moreso than the present system.

Follows "practice makes perfect" and all that.

It was like that but devs couldn't manage it and gave up on it.

You mean that it was completely un-balanced and super exploitable, so they got re-designed it from the ground up.

Originally posted by Weczer:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: You mean that it was completely un-balanced and super exploitable, so they got re-designed it from the ground up.

So I'm right, no?

No, you aren't. Saying that "they couldn't manage it" does not mean the same thing as re-designing a system to better meet their development vision.

The former implies that TFP was incapable, which is incorrect. The LBD system was just filler. It was never intended to stay.

Originally posted by kandar:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: The LBD system was just filler. It was never intended to stay.

So TFP put, no telling how many man hours, and money into a system that wasn't meant to be permanent? That's some of the best bovine scatology I've seen you post yet.

Barely any man hours and maybe a couple hundred bucks tops. They bought a skill system off an asset store and spent an hour or two renaming things to suit the genre; They spent more time on the parts they thought they might be keeping down the line, and almost no time on the parts they knew were going to be removed.

Go back to when the skills were introduced at first, and follow the changelogs- You'll see that the most LBD aspects got was some very minor adjustments for balance, while basically every impactful change to the skill system was made on the aspects we still have to this day; like the weapon specific perks.

Just because something is put into a game as a placeholder doesn't mean it was a huge time sink or a huge waste of money. Asset stores LITERALLY exist for that reason(among others)- So you can just grab something that's already in a working state and slap it in as a placeholder with minimal added effort.