We have identified a couple of issues with point decay and are working to have a solution published to shards early next week. The issues are these:
1> The rollover times day-to-day were not working as expected
2> The buffer of 36 hours is insufficient
3> If you miss a day of decay bypass, the bypassed decay may catch up and hit you all at once (subject to some caps)
In addition, the City Loyalty system actually requires a certain amount of decay in order to function correctly.
Each city has "Love", "Hate", and "Notoriety" ratings for the player. Each of these three values is a pool. How the city regards you depends on the ratio of your Love or Hate to the total value of all three pools. Furthermore, gaining Love from a city converts some of that city's Hate for you into Notoriety. Gaining Hate from a city converts some of that city's Love for you into Notoriety. So, essentially, the more Notoriety you have, the harder it is to get the more extreme levels of both positive and negative regard. Those who are consistently loved or hated by a city have the easiest time getting the strongest ratings from that city.
Each pool decays at a different rate. Hate decays slowest, Love is in the middle, and Notoriety decays the fastest. By freezing all decay, the beneficial effects of loss of Hatred and Notoriety are lost.
Furthermore, we also believe that the decay rates for city loyalty values are too high, and we will cut all of the decay rates in half.
To address this, we are working on making and testing the following changes:
1> The buffer will be increased to 40 hours from 36, and will use a different method to track the daily rollover for decay. Before doing point decay for loyalty and virtues, the system will check to see if the player has logged in or logged out in the last 40 hours of real time.
2> If the "moons align" to prevent decay, the the decay timers will be correctly updated. This will prevent a "catch-up" of missed decay.
3> For City Loyalty, the decay prevention will now only work for the city's Love. Notoriety and Hatred values from cities will always decay. The decay prevention will instead only prevent cities' Love for you from decaying.
4> All City Loyalty decay rates will be halved.
If the moons align, we will have these changes live by early next week.
