Game Update - 12 December 2019

That's absolutely not what caused tps1 to end...
THe problem is no new player would ever play that game when they had 1450 skills to catch up. Without a cap it would have been 2400, you really think it would have been better?

I'm looking forward to the Christmas Event. I've been a good nuruk all year, so I'm expecting some awesome gifts this year.

Right now I feel 50 levels to hard cap seems like a big gap. What about making it only 25 right now and when people reach 400 increase it to 30....then at 450 increase to 35?Larger levels doesn’t have as much of an effect as a difference of 50 levels at 350. Unless a differential of 50 levels is what the admins want? I’m just curious of why 50.

If it was any less than 50 most players would just sit at softcap and farm secundaries while a few ones struggle to hardcap. With only 25 skills difference they would still be able to kill those who are at hardcap, while not going through any of the struggle.
Making the gap proportional to the skillgap does not make sense because skills (AP and DP most specifically) work in 'A minus B' way and not 'A / B' way. 50 skills difference at 350 has the exact same impact as 50 skills difference at 600.
50 skills is not so big, it's less than 2 months training at softcap. It means a new player can potentially reach softcap in 1 month, meaning he can already play a role in group fights, and then a further 2 months and he can be at hardcap.

The first line doesn't worry me in the least. Players who do secondaries instead of hardcap are 99.9% wrong in advancing their character, and can not do simple math. To me, it doesn't matter if the gap is 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, it's a wrong decision for character growth, period. All it changes is how long you spend on main skill, not that fact you should always do it first. There's plenty of that in agonia already, and those players are already "behind".

Going from 350 -> 351 is 550 exp, roughly. Due to this being softcapped, multiply by 4, so 2200 exp cost, giving you 1 power.
Going from 399 -> 400 is 775 exp, roughly. Due to this being softcapped, multiply by 4, so 3100 exp cost, giving you 1 power.

If your average skill (general, or weapon, doesn't matter much for this), is [150] (I used a "low" number for emphasis)
On average, you'd need around 140 exp to skill up, and you'd gain like 4~ evo per skillup (I rounded up!).
With that 2200 exp, you could get 16 skillups, or 64~ evo.
With that 3100 exp, you could get 22 skillups, or 88~ evo.

If your average skill is [200]
On average, you'd need around 200 exp to skill up, and you'd gain 6 evo per skillup (I rounded up!).
With that 2200 exp, you could get 11 skillups, or 66~ evo.
With that 3100 exp, you could get 16 skillups, or 96~ evo.

Your stat buy costs would have to be very, very low compared to normal-age players nowadays for this to be ANYWHERE near viable, comparable, power gain... and it would not be sustainable at all due to the rising cost of stat purchases. If your stat purchases are that cheap, it just means there's already a huge power gap between you and the highest players. Most players are looking at 160+ to 200+ stat purchase evo costs, which means grinding softcap is anywhere from 3-6x more profitable power gain per day than secondaries, depending on what your average secondaries are. Also add to this that STR is now .9 power with damage increase and AGI is now 1.7 power, while a skill gain is still 1 power and damage increase.

For absolutely new players, who just reached 350, they will never win a fight against an evolved 350 opponent anyway, and they will benefit from getting HP, AGI, and STR high enough to wear tier 3 or tier 4 equipment, and to survive in the highest fauna areas first anyway. I don't see this as a problem, like I said this is not sustainable and they could never out-power an older character anyway, just begin to close the widening gap between newcomer and veteran.

TL;DR You can not out-evolve the power gain from softcap grinding, the math is too stacked. Even if you could, it's not sustainable.

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The second line is more of a design philosophy that I can question... Is the intent of the softcap to create two tiers of fighters then? The gap has to be so large that the ones who "suffered" sufficiently can completely slaughter anyone who didn't in a 1v1 fight? If everyone who wants to be a relevant fighter in agonia and able to realistically fend for themselves has to go through this suffering, what does the softcap struggle add? Why can't the hardcap just increase with no softcap?

What does the softcap do for the game? What problems is it trying to solve? This is effectively a new addition to the game, even if the intent was there before and always looming over us, knowing what it's supposed to do for us, or for the game, will help the players swallow two months of initial burden alongside the two-three days a week it will take to keep up with the increasing cap for the next years... and at the very least, allow us to critique it more accurately.

1. Nop, that's actually what we want to avoid. A too thin gap would mean we'd have these two tiers of fighters. With a large gap, you are making only one route really viable (as you described in full details).

2. It adds something huge: a differencial between old players and new players who will join the game in 3 years.
In 3 years, the softcap-hardcap may be somewhere around 550-600. The difference is that the chars that exist today will have gone from 350 to 550 the hard way. New characters will advance straight to 550 without any softcap struggle. If it wa just a hardcap, then old players will have all their skills at 600, making it absolutely impossible for any new player to hop along and be competitive.
Another thing it does is to make deaths most costly for strong chars, without affecting new players.