How you view albion online changes and possible suggestions that

Hello my fellow players. I want to start a discussion about learning points and how they are impacting the game play experience for players both casual and hardcore.

 

As many may have predicted, the new learning point system is now not so helpful to the casual gamer. Before the change to learning points, they were seen as a roadblock for players who spent many hours a day playing the game. But with recent changes to learning points, the whole game experience is changing for players in the long run. There is a definite trend towards hardcore players having multiple characters so that learning points will accrue over many accounts, resulting in a player with 6 characters on their account having a learning point generation 6 times normal. These hardcore players plan to use 1 character for each different fame line, such as 1 character for refining, 1-3 characters for crafting different specific items, 1 character for farming, etc (you get the idea). So now what was seen as helpful to the new player in order to compete with the more hardcore player is tilting to favor the hardcore player.

 

Many people may argue that casual players can also make 6 characters on their account so they can also benefit in the same way as hardcore players who use this tactic. This may indeed be true, but the main problem I see with this is how learning points are actually CHANGING the way we play the game. No longer can we plan on making only 1 character, now we are being encouraged to play many different characters with finite specializations.

 

There is also some potential synergy to mention with players who use multiple characters, and that is going to be the access rights on private islands. What is to stop a player from making a private island for each of his characters, then giving each character access rights for every island. So now a character specializing in farming can have 6x farm plots to grow things on, 6x herb gardens to grow potion ingredients, etc (you get the idea). However when thinking about this it is important to remember that technically this will happen already in large guilds who may have a player who is the main farmer, and jumps between player islands to grow food for everyone and level his farming extremely fast. HOWEVER, the idea that one player can have access to 6x the plots without having to network with others simply encourages problems in the later game, such as people selling gold for real money outside of SI, botting, and other issues which detract from the open world sandbox experience.

 

I want to get feedback from the community on how you view these changes and possible suggestions that may bring the learning point system back in line with the concept put forth by the developers. Like many people who love this game, I want to encourage a robust community of players which range from casual to hardcore to ensure the longevity of our beloved game. Any system that can be abused is a system that should be carefully looked at by our friends over at Sandbox Interactive.