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Status of Proficiencies (July 7, 2006)

What is the status of Proficiencies? Have they been scrapped, or will they be retained in a modified form?

MrTact: They are on hold while we deal with the aftermath of Pub 41, the gold sting, and the forthcoming PunkBuster beta test. If I had to hazard a guess, I would lay even odds on whether we end up doing them at this point. We will need to do extensive public testing before we decide either way.

Feedback on Proficiencies (May 12, 2006)

Have you been listening to our feedback on Proficiencies? I haven’t seen you comment on them recently.

MrTact: Proficiencies slipped out of this publish, both because we bit off more than we could chew with pub 40, and because of the level of player reaction to the announcement of the feature. I haven’t been talking about them because there was more than enough controversy over what was left *in* pub 40! As we come to the close of that publish, we’re going to start talking more about proficiencies.

It’s clear to us that we need to take our time and make sure they are done right. Accordingly, we are actually slipping them out of pub 41, as well – we have some time-dependent features in that publish, proficiencies are a big change, and we don’t want to push them out half-baked just to make a deadline on another feature. We’ll be working on them, and they should be available on TC for players to experiment with, but the earliest you would see them in production is pub 42.

Armor Resists and Proficiency (March 31, 2006)

How will armor resists work with the proficiency system? Can I still have all of my resists at 70% if I want?

MrTact: Under the current plan, no. However, the armor proficiencies are one of the more controversial elements of the proficiencies system, and are likely to undergo some changes before deployment. There is an active discussion of this in the proficiencies thread on Stratics.

Timer and Proficiencies (March 31, 2006)

Do you still plan on putting a timer on changing proficiencies?

MrTact: Yes. The model I’m basing this on is the Soulstone. However, I am open to the idea that playtesting may show this to be too painful. If so, we can always relax that requirement.

Proficiencies and Testing (March 31, 2006)

When can we expect Proficiencies to be on a Test Shard?

Ando: Most of our focus at the moment has been on Pub40. We would like to try and get a Pub40 Test Center up for players to start testing some of the PVP fixes as soon as we can. At this point, there is only one technical issue remaining that needs to be addressed before we can do this. We are also working hard to get the Pub40 client ready so players can get their hands on the new targeting system and buff / de-buff system.

I don’t see us putting up a Pub41 proficiencies Test Center until after we release a Pub40 client. This is mainly due to the fact that logging into a Pub41 shard using a Pub39 client displays a lot of text errors when trying to test the proficiencies. I will also point out that when the Test Center does go up that it will probably only contain the tier 1 proficiencies at first.

Proficiency and Pvm/PvP (March 24, 2006)

Does the proficiency system have any impact on PvM, or is it just for PvP?

Wilki: It will be applied equally to both PvM and PvP. However, for weapon damage increase, there will be options to focus in both PvM and PvP WDI, or both if a player chooses to allocate their proficiencies in that manner. So far, everything else is equally applied to both, though that could change as we begin our testing phase.

Diminishing Returns, Proficiencies (March 17, 2006)

I heard something about “diminishing returns” and now “proficiencies” that had to do with combat in UO. Can you tell me what that’s all about?

MrTact: Short answer: diminishing returns out, proficiencies in. Keep an eye on “In design”. There should be a document explaining the proficiencies system in some detail very soon.