The Facebook post got me thinking. What are some ways to incentivize not spamming?
It is pretty much given that since spells and skills have an additional failure chance
based on skill % means that people will spam.

Feeding off of that, it would be cool to make it so if you did not spam skills,
you would get a higher chance to improve. Something as simple as keeping track
of the last two or three skills used in combat and getting a learning boost based
on not having used them. Thus by not spamming all of your skills would go up faster.
It would have to be a significant bonus to make it worth while though. To be clear,
this would only affect in combat skill/spell/song use, not out of combat.
I think it would be cool to give people a reason to switch up their skill use in combat against mobs.

One thought for skill spam (and other passive skills such as progs or DB to get a more even spread of successes and cut down on streaky failures or successes)

This would probably break the MUD if not layered properly over the top of some skills, but the idea being this (this is a mathematics concept, not plagiarizing game mechanics):

http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution

Basically you could determine which skills should or shouldn't get PRD. It would remove streakiness on the RNG with regard to skill improvements or success rates on progging skills, but be an overall buff to both.

Further if you want to make Intelligence matter more, in most cases PRD means intelligence lowers the initial gap for number of attempts versus success rates.

Therefore, if you are in combat with a berserker underprepped, it is easier to prepapre mentally for the spike in damage DB offers and then the argument that "Deathblow merely speeds up fights the berserker was going to win anyway" is no longer a simple acceptance of the RNG dice and instead a strategic consideration on both sides, e.g. "I will inevitably suffer at least one deathblow per fight with this berserker"

With regards to skill spam it gets even better, you are guaranteed a skill improvement within X range of attempts, where X range gets wider the lower your intelligence is. So you have a base percentage chance to improve at a skill which goes up by a fraction of a percentage point with every improvement, until you actually get an improvement, whereupon it drops back down to it's base percentage chance (typically somewhere in the single digits and increasing by a half a percentage point for the sake of this example). This makes skill improvement a steady guarantee over time but resets after a certain timer of not using the skill. You can tweak this to make the base percentage chance of skill improvement boosted by 5 or 10 percent when in a group and gaining XP.

This cuts down on streaky 'lol I just learned 9% in this obnoxiously hard skill in 5 minutes, this happens only once a character lifetime if that' versus 'I haven't seen a skill improvement in the last four hours of using this skill literally'

The math involved in implementing this over the top of certain skills would probably break the MUD multiple times but the dividends and strategy in how it would change skill spam AND fighting against progging gear or DB would be immensely more fun for both the users and the victims.

Theoretically you could guarantee with a higher probability when and how your next successful dice roll would occur, but in practice this never actually happens in DOTA2 nor would it happen in CF, it is effectively random to the player but they see a more steady, smooth pattern of progression. In the case of DOTA2 it's implemented to balance out streaks because the characters using those skills rely on them for DPS or crowd control, in most cases this is even more true in CF.

In this way you can set even stricter but more fair controls on when characters should be mastering their skills solo levelling versus in groups or potentially in RP. If you need to overcome the PRD for any reason, there's always tweaking skill learn further.

1) Invisible game/class balance lever. Imms can tweak skills to be more or less difficult to learn over time or even for specific characters invisibly, conspiracy theorists aside. In this regard it's not that much different from Becoming quests.

2) Minimum-Maximum character investment. The intent of skill spam is to put one element of personal investment into a character. PRD allows Imms to more tightly control numerically a personal investment into not only a character but an individual play session as well.

3) Removal of psychological barriers with regard to RNG. Valg and Daevryn have both addressed this numerous times over the years but now they can unequivocally say 'There is a guaranteed finite amount of time you can spend/will need to spend/will be allowed to spend spamming X skill'. Likewise streaks are reduced but not eliminated, making them slightly easier to RP around rather than whine OOCly about.

4) Little to no additional processing load on the server, properly implemented you can create use-case scenarios for optimal skill improvement conditions versus sub-optimal ones, and tweak the PRD marginal return rates accordingly, likewise with a reasonably short timer to expire between use of skills and the lower playerbase that we have, you should have minimal load updating PRD counters with each tick that are layered over the top of each character.

5) Selective implementation, you don't have to implement this for every skill in the game, you only need to determine the most time consuming ones and implement it for progging gear. Numerous items could be rebalanced for certain 'roles' in classes that can use the item based on PRD marginal returns.

Given that favorable and unfavorable runs even out over the life of the character, this is a lot of work solving a problem that isn't there. If you hit some threshold level of Sword a little early and Dagger a little late, you're still spending the same fraction of your time fighting. There's a zillion other things I'd prioritize over this sort of thing.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Not address the issue.

One of the only reasons I still play is to figure out ways to perfect skills and spells efficiently. That doesn't mean I put my role on hold while I do it. I have no need to use scripts, because I genuinely enjoy watching the skills go up. It's a predictable, objective source of enjoyment.

There has to be something more to the "problem" of "spamming" than enjoying a different aspect of the game.

Is it Solo Spammer with De-facto Quiet mode on, ignoring everyone and/or using a script? Then that specific guy is a problem.

Kinda weird. Never was a skill/spell spammer before. But I oddly find enjoyment in it now (at least, as you said, trying to find out more effective ways to do it).

As the fact that solo ranking is optimal for pk success, and that even solo ranking is best done slowly to optimise pk. As a result you have made it so that people tend to choose not to group. Then you have less rp and a less attractive environment for new players.

If your goal is to nudge people back toward levelling, you would have to make skill learn actually mostly reliable (it isn't now, as far as I can tell setting it has no effect) and make a hefty bonus to skill success rates during levelling given that you are by definition going to have a drastically reduced amount of attempts to do everything when grouped.

There is the valguarnera argument where people should only be improving these skills by doing but that dumps you directly back into solo levelling. While solo levelling probably shouldn't become worse than it is now in order to allow people to fill downtime and be hunted for PK while logged in, every other option needs to become better.

You are in a situation essentially where you want people to be playing the game when they have limited amounts of time on their hands.

However, there is a third way. Typically players don't spend more than an hour or two spamming skills together due to a combination of boredom and getting busted by the imms for permagrouping even if it wasn't the intent or the characters never chargened or substantially levelled together. Since the game needs to trend back toward playing with your friends without creating roving PK range cleaning gank squads, I would propose that you make sparring and/or gambling and other social events a better option.

You basically want a system that creates bonuses to your skills based off RP with other people, not random dicerolls or spam. If you become a legend in most fantasy novels and D&D campaigns, it's very rarely because of what you did alone, it's what you did socializing and getting to know other people.

So how would this work? You'd basically have to group the bonuses by type of skill. Martial skill does up by sparring, luck skills (stealing, backstab, pincer, dodge, etc.) go up by gambling or playing a coded game of blackjack in the Inn. Lore skills (lore, appraise, improved compare, lore of the ages) should go up when you tag an observation or exploration point while grouped, and you should get MORE edge points/obs exp/explore exp/mvs etc. tagging these while grouped and multiple members of the group tag the same observation spots (It would, after all, require you to show new things to people who haven't seen it) Mages would have to engage in some type of game similar to the Blackjack game above but competing in the game boosts the spell percentages of mages.

So you essentially create a system where you need different classes to gain levels but you are best off with similar classes to RP and get skills to go up faster than they would through running it solo. Soloing doesn't get a nerf, but skillups get a boost based off RP, not botting. Seriously, if you're going to 'bot' the skills up in these activities, you're best off RPing anyway.

Once you've implemented and QA'd each of these options, you could do things like consider letting skills go up in Galadon Arena for sparring purposes but put a time limit on the fights themselves, say about 10 minutes. Imperials really need a code copy of the Galadon Arena thematically in the Imperial Lands once the above is balanced appropriately, to use as sparring grounds so that the Emperor actually can patrol them and RP with the grunts rather than mundane cabal raiding orders. The sparring arena can remain broken if the Codex is taken.

I won't deny the above has potential for abuse by OCD players, but I certainly would be more focused on RPing with newbies and discussing things if my skills were going up and theirs were too. You already have half the code in place for the above which is the skill dice on level up, now you just create the above system to skill learn and people have mechanical incentives to explain in-depth how to fight, how to explore, or gossip.

Done correctly, it doesn't break PK balance, people can get levelling groups when they want it, and observation point botting instead becomes a social activity due to the fact that you're going to get more points missing a few observation spots with a group than you are hitting every single one of them solo. Things like that.

Warlocks also had the tome skill before it became sold in-game, I would argue every cabal needs some version of something that will help improve a certain set of skills, preferably based on the above system.

I would agree with that. I would rather there be a strait up bonus to skill learn in a ranking group. But I think that has been shot down many times.

Edit: To be fair, that might not be the best way to do that but still.