First and foremost I want to say that I believe getting your character to 5 stars should be a difficult achievement and it is not required to do well in the game. Secondly, the last time I messed with mechanics, it was to make the game more difficult overall, so it's possible I did not balance or test it well enough.
The issue, I believe, is the "uphill" mechanic that makes it much harder to learn untrained skills. If you raise a skill a little bit and then move on, it basically evaporates. I can see why that's frustrating. I always wanted the game to be about band members complimenting each other, rather than them all being well-rounded, but it is a sim player's compulsion to get all stats as high as possible, I know. I expected players to utilize their resources - gains from hanging out, equipment bonuses and character strengths. The stat raising was balanced with those bonuses in mind. Does that make it inherently flawed? Maybe.
When I ran some tests just now, I found that stats were depleting at a rate that I had reserved for the "Hard" difficulty. I likely did this as a quick fix for people getting to the AMPs too quickly. I also found a bug in Star Quality stress increase. Lastly, I decided to make the following changes:
- Chance to get stressed while grinding significantly lowered if that skill is their strength
- Chance to lose stat is lowered if they are well-trained (150+) or that skill is their strength
- Amount of stress recovered from relaxing is increased if the character has a low stress tolerance
I felt like this helped. :)
I appreciate you bringing this issue to my attention and the work you did to record your testing, helping me fix some bugs and saving some people out there some frustration. If you don't already have a premium code, I would like to give you one. Could you email me at: maselphie AT gmail? Thank you.