The art of UNlearning (in General)

I was curious about why we lose experience when we want to make a change to our strategy. I feel it's a bit excessive that we should lose so much of our hard earned XP for making as simple a change as unlearning FB to learn DX and ST [i.e., converting to a tank]. I mean if I were 1mil MPR I would lose around 15% of my experience which would drag me down to around 900k MPR (i.e., I would probably not unlearn HP).

I feel that is absurd! Shouldn't we encourage people to think, strategise, and implement changes to their strategies for fear of creating brain dead zombies? [sorry to all those zombies out there]. A change needs to be made here....Any thoughts?

This tax does encourage thinking, strategizing and knowing what you are doing before you do it. If you are a mage building to a tank, you plan for that -- taking into account the 'cost' of doing so. The penalty for being a brain-dead zombie is losing 15% XP every time you have to "undo" a mistake.

Perhaps the penalty could be lessened. If you are in the top players and choose to redo even a small part of your strategy it is huge because 5% or 10% of 500K is quite a bit more than 10% of 50K. Maybe it should be MPR level based rather than a flat percentage, that way your fightlist would change a bit more often and people would and could try out different strategies and add a little more flavor to the game.

Bast, strategising and knowing what you are doing will only get you so far. Even the best strategy will not stay the best forever. A lil experimentation is needed to maintain the edge over your opponents. After all, the great inventions of the world would not exist if not for experimentation.

Glory, that's a great idea...=) It would truly make CB a much better game...^_^

The true art of unlearning is to know where you are going. I understand what Glory is saying, and indeed people like Almuric and myself have lost so much do to untraining and retraining, but still there are ways to cut your losses.

Let's say you are a mage looking to eventually be a tank. What you need to do is consider not just what makes a standard mage good, but what part of a tank could be useful for your mage as well. A mage uses HP and DD. A tank uses HP, ST, and DX. Now ST is pretty useless to a mage, but DX, that could help you win over a few people even if you lose to others. So as a Mage you can train HP, DD, and some DX. This cuts some of your xp loss already.

Next is to know that different stats untrain for different amounts. For example, DD is the best skill to waste points into. Why? Because it untrains for 8% NOT 15%. So again its not so bad to go from mage to tank. But Tank to Mage has not as good since there is a 12% loss for ST and DX. HP is the worst thing to untrain, but then again it's nearly impossible to waste points into it. Just remember though, a wall is a horrible thing to convert into anything else. It would be better to make the change over time by simply leaving HP as is and slowly building up DD or ST and DX.

Other areas that could help are your tattoos. Converting to a ToA tank probably results in the least amount of wasted xp. Most strat changes require you to reink the tat anyhow. So throwing the new ToA on a Mage with some DX and much more HP then DD allows for a nice easy switch. It's the fact that you can and should go heavier on the HP that saves you even more xp here.

Final advice. Going from mage to tank requires a lot of gear that a mage would find useless. You won't be able to get all this gear at once so you may wish to collect it and then put it into rentals for short intervals so as to get back some of the money you lost. Remember this added gear will surely make up for the last bit of lost PR and so you have made the easiest transition possible.

The experimenting is fighting people you cannot beat and finding out why using play-by-play.
Using this you should be able to make the correct decisions in retraining things, if not you need to go find some lessons in logic.

My point is that the higher you get the less you can do just that and still compete overall.

True indeed Glory. My method requires that you have a change in mind for a very long period of time. It may be very useful to a new player who knows from the beginning that they are going mage to tank. However, an old player may be a victim of change month and cannot foresee necessary changes in advance.

I have a different and maybe better solution that directly impacts the problem, namely the change month factor. How about after every change month there be a free untraining period. During a span of several days, maybe a week, players can untrain and retrain freely to account for what was nerfed and what was buffed.

I think that is a wonderful idea Vestax. Nice work.

Either that or at least be able to partially unlearn a stat/skill/spell instead of having to unlearn the whole thing.

Amen to that idea also Ranger, wow, ya'll are geniuses! :)

Ehh, I don't know. I'll play devil's advocate. I like the current system. You have to think about your strategy at the start, and tinker with it while you're small, but by the time you get to the higher ranks you should already be set up. If you want to make massive changes, be prepared for those minor penalties. And they are minor. Imagine, they could be like 50%.

CB already has a people with people jumping on the bandwagon. Someone shows an effective strat, and everyone else copies it. Personally, I dislike this, and decreasing penalties only serves to increase the copying. We really don't need everyone to switch to the favorite team of the month every month. I like that people are encouraged to try and make their current strategy work, instead of adopting someone elses.

Whoops, meant to say, 'CB has a problem with people jumping...'.

Well, add into the above scenarios the NUB and the older players are penalized even more for untraining due to small gains to get back the exp lost, whereas the NUBS can untrain and retrain much more often and even at high MPR because of the ease in making back the losses in exp.

Right, so we give people that know what they're doing a break, and people who are brand new and don't know not to fill in every slot with an ability get penalized more when they change?

THAT makes sense....

Hmmm,

Is that not a part of the idea of the NUB, letting them overcome early mistakes such as unlearning and relearning. Sounds like people are trying to have their cake and eat it also.

Is there a specific reason for not being able to unlearn partial amounts?? I mean it just sounds silly ... you would still get the % loss on the amount you unlearn .. that's fair .. It seems like you're being forced to sacrifice a lot of xp for major strat changes..

Let me clarify my above statement. My point is that high level older players are much less prone to change their strats and further make any changes because of the exp loss, whereas NUBS can get big exp bonuses and the exp loss does not hamper them when they are at a high level MPR because of their rapid growth. I am not asking for partial treatment for older players, just equal treatment. 10% loss of exp is not the same to an older player as it is to a NUB of equal MPR. Do with that what you will, but it seems like there are many NUB bonuses that older players are getting shorted on, it is no wonder NUBS love the NUB. :)

What if instead, the unlearn cost was refactored to include the NUB?

Sounds good to me. If an old player retrains and loses 10% exp, with no exp bonus and a NUB retrains the same exp, they would lose the 10% plus their NUB at the time. Something like that.

"Someone shows an effective strategy, and everyone else copies it." - Vaynard

I really doubt that would happen seeing as a person close to my PR would require a certain type of strategy to do well [i.e., I face many different types of people]. Whereas a person that has a higher/lower PR would require a completely different strategy to do well.

In the unlikely event that everyone has the same strategy, people would find themselves having the same weaknesses exposed and you would see many people trying to overcome that with a different strategy. Thus far the evolution of strategies has been slow to an extent. Removing this XP loss barrier would encourage the evolution of mediocre strategies, to excellent strategies. Besides, John has made it difficult for us to copy strategies by censoring how much we have trained in everything but HP DX and ST. It is to encourage us to think for ourselves and give us a hint as to what type of strategy works well against certain opponents…=)

Glory, if you understand how the NUB works then you'll understand that the untraining penalty for new players has just as deep of an effect on them as it does on you. The fast growth of xp is just the illusion that the xp loss is minor.

To add, aupstar is correct. If people should join a band wagon, then they only serve to make that special counter-strat even more effective. There certainly would be an individual or two that would be eager to spend that entire week training and untraining until they finally made the strat to beat the popular one.