Your conception is totally off base.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

My conception is based on the many hours I played a thief; perhaps you should elaborate. I have never trained beyond poor sneak without going out of my way to spam rooms with a refresher, and have never gotten an enlighten or skillful in less than ten rooms (yes I know aggressive mobs helps). Currently it's too hard to train sneak in normal play. Spamming circles around a city with a refresher is hardly normal play. Getting a chance to learn if you attack a mob while sneaking is quite reasonable but isn't the way you go about training it. The result is many thieves are reaching 25+ with poor sneak when in fact they probably use sneak all the time.

There is no restriction to learning sneak based on "rooms traveled". Personally, I train sneak in the course of regular zoning. No, I cannot divulge the exact way to train sneak most effectively. I can tell you, your way is not it.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

I like Nol's way of training myself, it may be artificial, and less efficient, but it's safe. It's kind of like skilling up in poker by sitting there dealing to yourself and considering pot odds. Although the wipe where I leveled a thief specifically to check certain things for my alt, I managed to train the hell out of sneak without having to use that trick once (hide, though, still frustrates the hell out of me).

The skilled thieves/scouts I know (I don't count myself among this number) don't really use this method though, and seem to train just fine while doing whatever zone they do leveling up.

I think your concern is the fact that so many people use this same method to train sneak, instead of training it in zone; I imagine this is because, when they asked someone how to train sneak/hide, this is the general method someone gave them, and as much as you might complain that it falls outside the realm of normal game play, it works just well enough that many don't feel the need to train it while putting themselves in harms way.

Besides, there are plenty of skills where the 'artificial' means of training is a lot easier. Rescuing certain mobs from each other, for example, is a far safer way to train up past awful than subject your group to that skill in a real zone. Disarm would take forever to train up if you didn't go out of your way to do weak mobs with a lot of weapons, that you otherwise wouldn't bother with, since in the big zones most mobs aren't armed, and the group usually wants you to be using impair/gaze or bash/kick/parry instead of disarming anything but a stabber.

There is nothing dangerous about grouping with another tank and rescuing each other at fair in a relatively easy zone.

But Drakantus just my point, how often do you tag team a "relatively easy" zone with another tank when you don't need to do some training?

Actually, I take that back. Given the exp system that makes it somewhat profitable to take a group into pigmies, or to 6 man Que Kul, nowadays I suppose that IS 'normal zoning' even beyond the first week of the wipe.

Well, my fault for trying to give an example without giving away any useful info, and just using a poorly chosen example. Suffice it to say, there are still an array of skills (even for the beloved warrior class) where the best training practice (or at least the most widely known and used) falls outside the realm of normal zoning.

a level 25 Thief.
You are 18 years old.
You have 401(401) hit and 36(128) movement points.
Your behaviour has been Evil.
The chill of evil pervades your soul.
You have scored 17254352 exp, and have 2168(7580) steel coins.
You need 4745648 more experience to advance.
You have never died.
You have been connected for 52 minute(s).
You have been playing for 0 day(s), 23 hour(s) and 44 minute(s).

sneak (very good)

I think you're doing something wrong here. Sneak's always been super easy to train over the course of leveling.

Nol, a hint check the helpfile on sneak, it gives you a hint on how not to train it. Though i agree with you, its retarded. I would like to see that paticular restriction removed myself, the one that is in the helpfile, as its hard not to have such things on ya. I also think there is a very valid point being made about less used skills like target, disarm, and the like. I will bet money that there isnt a single character in the last few years that got disarm to superb through the regular course of leveling without specificly aiming for that skill to be superior at 30. im willing to bet that 90% of the ranked bashers still have target at awful to poor. These less used skills should either be easier to learn, or there should be a method where you can max them out without waisting hours upon hours. And don't tell me to use target in a zone when its below average, because you far to many chances to target the wrong mob, not to menchin assist trains, and the fact that besides certin situational use, target is virtually worthless. Take taunt or spook, to train these in actual combat, and leveling is unrealisitic. It's just stupid to have the situational skills on such a high learn level compared to primary class skills, which are on a low learn level but are the ones that are always used.

I'll clarify further as people could be jumping to conclusions. The spamming through city method gets sneak to fair or good but no further, ten passes alternating through grak's and pigmies with a refresher got it to v. good, which took about an hour. At this rate it should take 20-30 more passes to get it to superb. It is possible I'm running into a recently traveled rooms/mobs sneaked past buffer but I doubt it goes as far back as a hundred rooms. It would be nicer if sneak went up through usage in general leveling. If you sneak, move a few rooms and backstab an unsuspecting mob then flee/backstab until it's dead, you will never train sneak. If you sneak, find a mob, hide then backstab it, you will never train hide. This is counterintuitive. Shouldn't you get better at mugging related skills if you use them to successfully mug someone? If you argue no only because there's ways to do it better, you're missing the point.

Skilling.

This depends on how you see the game. A big part of the game is the work it takes to skill or spell your character. Learning everything you are able to do, in the course of "adventuring" is a totally unrealistic approach to character development both in the real world and in our virtual one. It sends a bad message--you can get places in the world without real practice and hard work. While it has been made markedly easier, getting skills up is still the real dynamic of this game (levels are more or less irrelevant and ranks are largely overrated.)

Target, rescue, taunt, spook, and disarm are very powerful skills. If you don't aggressively train them, you are foolish--and that will come across when you actually need to adventure as you will be ill-prepared. We could make a game where you logged in and just zoned and all your skills automatically went to superb based on zone experience--but this would essentially be a fps. Skills/Spells and their training are the foundation of the game.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

I agree with Terk. Getting your skills during the course of adventuring seems realistic but not really if you think about it. In real adventuring, going into zones to skill up means that you put yourself in danger that might cause your death. See the bones/skulls lying around dungeons and caverns? That's failed skill by rookies.

Skills need to be trained for improvements. If you don't spend the time training them correctly, you won't improve on them. This is true even for real life skills (like sports). You just need to spend hours and hours doing the same thing over and over (correctly) to get improvements during matches/games. Repeat for each aspect of the sport and you get a good athlete. For example, in tennis you would just train your serves first, then your forehand, then your backhand. Once you get them skillful enough, you play the game and train all aspects of it at once. Trying to improve just by playing matches won't really get you anywhere unless you are SPECIAL. I assure you that won't be the case for you.

Spending time training skills separate casual players from dedicated players. You will survive with skills at v.bad but if you get it to excel/superb you will get the extra benefit in the course of playing. So it's just a matter of time vs benefits.

Be happy that skills don't corrode without usage or with age like in real life.

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Gulca stops following you.

Apparently, it depends on what class you play.

As a warrior, I train ALL my skills in normal usage. Weapon skills, bash, kick, parry, punch, even disarm all go up through normal usage in zoning, there isn't any specialize training technique needed.

I could perhaps understand making a particular classes skills harder to train to counter balance a strong class, but considering how weak thieves are that can't possibly be what it is. It seems more like a situation of the immortals capable of coding are interested in coding things they personally want to see in the game. Which is perfectly understandable, it's not like you guys are paid for what you do, but it just looks transparent when you come up with outlandish excuses for why certain broken things remain broken- when the truth is... they are simply broken but nobody who can fix them cares.

Training occurs every time you visit the guild master and type "learn", it doesn't need to be implemented any further than that.

Good for you, I guess?

Maybe you're just more accustomed to the warrior class than I have, but I've always found that optimizing my leveling means neglecting certain skills temporarily. Maybe its a subtle difference, less obvious than running off to find some trapped chests or specifically going into X zone to train a certain skill, but I imagine there is some slightly opportunity cost in training up parry/target/etc, especially at lower levels.

I agree that in principle, its rather unfair that skills like pick/disable/detect, which groups all benefit from, are primarily trained on a thief's solo time, with little chance to do so in group zoning (and probably a lot of uproar if people put more traps and locks into more zones). From the point of realism, though, it doesn't make sense for a thief to train up those and other thiefy skills while in groups, UNLESS those traps/etc are made a larger part of zoning.

... wow, isn't that sort of hitting below the belt? Especially in light of the recent, albeit minor, changes to thieves, this seems something of a backhanded complement followed by a jab to make the whole "complement" portion seem rather disingenuous.

I agree, in light of what you're saying, basher skills DO seem a bit too convenient to train compared to those of other classes, but calling the immortal response to this thread "making outlandish excuses" is, to be frank, sort of being a dick for no good reason. Perhaps the staff should reevaluate the balance between classes with extra emphasis on the amount of "extra" effort it takes to get things up. Maybe make it easier for a thief to train sneak/hide while getting dragged or leading, and make it harder to train the more vital warrior skills in zone.

Drakantus, I don't understand your comment. It sounds as if I am asking for a change in the training/skiling aspect of the game. I am not.

I'm just saying that you need to "train" (go skilling) until you hit skillful and go "learn" from guild (implied) to increase you skill. To actually "train" you need proper way else it will be mostly waste of time. Track is an example. Tracking yourself will give you a hit but you will never learn anything even if you do it a billion time.

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Gulca stops following you.

Absolutely. I can't train parry unless i am tanking, and training bash while tanking is just stupid most of the time, to take some examples.

But both of those activities (tanking, not tanking) are normal for a leveling warrior. It's not like training some of the more exotic thief skills where you do have to perform activities that are completely unrelated to your normal leveling process.

I guess I tire of reading abusive, blunt, rude posts by immortals towards the few remaining players of their game. I recall last year several posts about how changes X, Y, Z will never happen. Then 4 months later the news says those changes were just implemented. WTF? It sometimes looks like immortals just despise any suggested change that they can't take credit for, publicly discount it as a worthless idea that would ruin the game, and then a few months later they quietly add a change that does virtually the same thing as the original suggestion.

Meh, I probably made a few enemies with this post, maybe I hit things to close to the truth and this thread will be locked, but w/e I don't really care anymore. I'll speak my mind or not at all.

I'm not really sure what you are talking about. a) I don't code. b) Apparently, you don't play theives. Thieves are obviously enormously buff. The reason minor changes are made to their skills are more a whim of coders to help newer players than a real need to "balance" them--those changes barely effect good thieves. Disable, detect, etc. are extremely useful in the non group setting. Thieves are the easiest class to make buff in the game, so to say your post is unfounded is a euphemism.

Of all the classes that are unfairly balanced, this is perhaps the worst example I have ever seen. I think you essentially say that warriors train very easily as opposed to thieves. This is not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is that you assume all classes should train in exactly the same way. Warriors are made particularly easy, because they are the newbie class of the mud--a concept that is well understood. Thieves are harder to train for a newbie, but way buffer in the long run. A fully stacked warrior would be totally at a loss for killing a fully stacked thief.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

So the thread has progressed like this
idea: Make training sneak more intuitive.
replies: You're doing it wrong.
me: Here's how I skill sneak.
Terk: You have the wrong attitude towards skilling. Skilling should take an appropriate amount of effort.

I agree. I don't want skills to be given to players for free. I played low int minotaur barbs for two wipes, one with 9 int and got superb in every skill except mend, which was impossible to get above poor. It didn't happen overnight, it took weeks of on and off training. I didn't mind because that was the way anybody would train except in greater quantities. Sneak is different. If someone had pointed out that sneak is a lagless skill and thus needs special conditions to train so that people don't trivially get superb sneak, I would be confident that he wasn't misinterpreting the argument. I disagree with the current implementation on what these conditions should be.

Terk: Thieves are already buff. Thieves don't need to be buffed.

I don't think anybody is asking to buff thieves. At the risk of derailing I think thieves are given too much credit in pk and only kill stupid people. A solo thief should not kill anyone unless it's one stab or very special situations like a no_recall room with no exits. For ganking/randoming pk a thief sucks. A thief will only redeem itself in clan pk if you have stun or already have ten people. Otherwise a volleyer is way better. For zoning and tournaments thieves are perfectly fine. Because thieves only kill stupid people, the class is well suited for moderately skilled players. A skilled player could be trusted with thief gear/knows how to pop gear, but this is true with any class. It is better for a skilled player to play a druid with lots of area, mage with elite spells, a basher, a healer, a main tank, almost anything else. This is why thieves are generally relegated to alts that are summoned to disable and pick, and have never in recent recollection made a difference in clan pk.

My point is that while both activities might be "normal" for a leveling warrior, its rare (for me at least) to get a significant number of skills up by the time I'm ranked without putting some extra effort into it. You can superb everything eventually just by making a point of using more ignored skills long after you've started ranking, and eventually you'll superb, or you can specifically dedicate some time with training as the main focus, which might get your skills up faster, but at the cost of more time devoted primarily to skilling.

The exact same is true of thieves. Though obviously many zones aren't trapped, a thief does have the opportunity to train his "exotic" skills to superb during the course of normal zoning. (They may not be a majority, but there are still plenty of fun zones with non-critical locks/traps to train on.) He may not be able to do it at the exact moment he's participating in the "big three" "real zoning events" of tanking, damaging, and healing, but there are still ample opportunities for him to untrap things during "normal zoning."

Maybe the problem is that disable, especially superb disable, is too useful, there are too many easy ways to solo train thieves, and thieves are too buff at soloing. While some people have fun training these skills up in zoning, in every clan I've been in, if we didn't have an active player with superb disable at some point in time, we'd encourage whoever was leveling up a thief to work on those skills to the exception of everything else, and they usually wouldn't mind, since when soloing they could still do a wide range of zones, while speeding up their training by specifically targetting zones with high trap counts. Training other skills, such as disarm, are much the same way--trainable during normal zoning, but trainable at some pretty obscene rates when you target certain zones--but they really don't recieve the same pressure to be trained. And obviously, all skills that require certain conditions (traps, mobs with weapons, etc) to train will be more problematic than skills that simply require a warm body to fail against.

Examples, please? Since it's so endemic, I'm sure you'll have no problem digging up a link or two.

So basically, its completely improbable that such a change in plans might come from, say, a change in leadership in the game, the ability to realize that the "old system" may not be working in a new context, or convincing arguments from players who are able to argue a point against the immortals without being a complete and utter douchebag about it?

And honestly, how often do the immortals "take credit" for ideas? Adepali made that large posts about the minor changes that came from the idea file, and if ever there's an acknowledgement of some imm's efforts on the news, its never "Thanks for coming up with this innovative idea that made the game great!", its almost always something like "Thanks to Sancho for organizing this," or "Thanks to Umarth for doing all the coding bitchwork to implement this new class," or "Thanks to Loopley for having absolutely no social life and debugging this zone so we could put it back in!"

Or maybe I'm wrong, and the imms are a bit petty, and might sometimes shoot down an idea from you, only to implement it much later, once they've forgotten about the incident, and once the idea came from a mortal who didn't preface their suggestion with, "Here's some advice from one of the few remaining players to the lazy so-called administrators of this crap-hole of a game..."

Pot? Kettle? Wha?

We all have the urge to vent at people who obstinately disagree with us, I know I'm guilty at that at times, but its your posting history that's most rife with abusive language and rudeness. I don't really blame you--whenever you make one of your insightful and innovative suggestions that could singlehandedly revitalize the game, some imm comes along disagreeing with you, or bringing some bullshit excuse about "feasibility" or what not, you naturally want to call him on the fact that he's clearly too lazy or arrogant to put in an idea that he didn't think of himself. But still, you could have been a little more polite about it.

Hehe, do you seriously think that? Frankly, I think if anyone was going to label you an enemy, they probably would done so after one of your previous abusive diatribes. So I wouldn't worry yourself too much.