Training has become an obstacle for me in terms of RP, character development, and time commitment to a character. It encourages needless grinding. When I play, I want to interact with the characters in the world, not shut them out to train a skill. Consequently, if I do not train, I am not competitive to the level I would want to be. I think all skills should be set to 90% automatically.
A character is then given a skill credit every 5 levels.
1 skill credit = 5% points.
At level 50, a character may have 10 skills at 95%, or 5 skills at 100%.
Equipment will still play a role.
Alternatively, I would be interested to see Celerity's skill idea marked for implementation. Set skills to multiple tiers and let characters select between tiers of a skill. Then, eliminate training altogether by having rolls against a tiered level of a skill as opposed to a percent.
I've contemplated celeritys skill tiers and will eventually implement something similar. But not for all skills. The unbalance that would immediately follow would be too much to deal with.
Only a few at a time.
My opinion however, about training, is that you don't really have to stop anymore. I've watched people rank from 1-50 in a single day and have over 80% of their skills mastered along the way, not even stopping.
I am probably one of the very few people who have enjoyed training a character. Not because it keeps me away from other characters in the game, but more so for the fact that I could also multitask in real life, whether that was watch a movie, do some laundry or whatever else I may need to do. When I recently came back, I was kind of saddened that by the time I hit level 30 I pretty much had most things mastered and that by 50 anything I was going to use going forward was completely mastered too. Granted there were some skills that were rather painful (lore), but they're pretty much a breeze now. By letting people have their skills set at 90%, I could see potential problems with excessive trains that some races normally wouldn't have and that would allow them to have quite possibly a HP setup that would be insane. I kind of prefer it how it is now, and in some cases the way it used to be, but it is indeed interesting how quickly training/ranking have become since I last played.
I wouldn't play if I couldn't spend time training. I am not as interested in player killing as I once was. I just want to train, level to 50, and do it over on a different character now. Prob why since I've come back I've trained like 8 characters and deleted them afterwards haha.
Besides it's far too easy in my opinion. You don't have the time investment in a character like you used to when you would train for a while and then get to 50. Which makes folks delete when they get spanked because they can have a new character fully trained and level 50 in 2 days. It's the instant gratification we all love.