Set Strength Confusion

[Nate]

My Hunder had a Strength of 2 with the skills Brawling/Athletics at 4.  I decided to purchase the Implant that sets STR to 6.  My intent was to install that, to then spend EXP in order to raise my Brawling and Athletics to 6, and to then uninstall the chip.  Essentially, I wanted to use money as a method to save EXP costs for raising skills.

My issue is that after installing the chip, STR displays as 2(6), but the cost to raise Brawling/Athletics from 4 to 5 is (15).  This is the same as before I installed the chip.  I'm extremely disappointed at the insane waste of money this represents for me.  It took hours to grind that money, and now I will not only have to uninstall the chip, but I will have to grind all that money back just to be where I started.  In other words, I just lost over 40k yen (which is about two real days of grinding at the pace I go).

That's horrible!  Please explain what went wrong.

[slayernz]

nate, I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that your natural attribute and skills values are different from the "augmented" attributes and skills values. The natural attributes levels have a direct influence over the XP cost of the skills, whilst the augmented values help during your encounters and incidents where you need to do save rolls against those values.

So you can't augment yourself to super-high values and expect to save any XP cost, because your base attributes haven't changed.

OF course, my understanding could be all rubbish -

[fallen]

Sorry, only natural stat values are used for spending XP.

Having 6 Strength is great tho. Why would you uninstall the implant?

I will make sure this more clearly stated in the manual next release.

[Nate]

There is no point keeping the implant since I'm going to have to spend EXP in order to raise my STR to the requisite level now, anyway. Meanwhile, it's hurting me because I'll be getting even less EXP on average, so that achieving the goal for which I installed it actually takes longer now. It's absolute rubbish. The only time I use augments are when they are required, or when I reach the stage of the game where I've leveled everything to max (at which point it becomes the only way to get stronger). Until then, the drawback is not worth it. I only used it here because if it worked the way I assumed, then it becomes an interesting short-term solution for character growth (until I have the luxury of catching my STR up natively, at which point I'd dump it). Anyway, the way it works now I just paid 20k to get less EXP, which is so frustrating that I lost any will I had to keep playing.

That said, thank you for replying.

[fallen]

nate - I am sorry that you are frustrated. However, you can see that allowing implants to modify XP cost goes against the whole idea of Human DV (the cost of implants) having a negative impact on experience and training, and would also allow for "gaming the XP system" by installing and removing implants (what you were doing, but you could take this much farther by rapidly installing and removing them just to spend XP). I'm sorry that it wasn't clearly stated anywhere.

We will work on improving the help file for this one, and I hope you're still enjoying the game.

[mandomaniac]

Are u saying that it would.... ruin the "experience" of the game? XD

[fallen]

Lol