To change direction from the last couple of posts:
I'm wondering why we are talking about giving XP back at all once CoP goes away? The PP refund I 100% understand, and high level ideas for solutions have been put forth that sound like they may allow a refund to occur in an automated way.
What the staff has stated: CoP is going away, and the bonus it use to give is going to be distributed across completion of other tomes. Basically, this allows CoP to go away without a full retooling of the raid game. It makes a lot of sense to make the change this way. Characters who have already completed any portion of CoP will keep bonuses they have already earned.
The keeping of the current bonus is, I assume, why the idea of an XP refund came into play. What was discussed is that players can reallocate this 'banked' XP to new tomes in order to keep their previous CoP bonus. Depending on the way the CoP bonus is distributed across tomes, this could cause hardship for players to get back to their current power level.
Why not handle all the XP 'refund' on the back end in an automated way?
1. Have a database field that indicates the current 'CoP' bonus % per character with a max of 100%. This field will drive all eq 'CoP' calculations and/or trigger other flags as needed.
2. On cut-over to the new system, populate this field with each Character's current bonus %.
3. Put CoP bonus across the other tomes as per the current plan.
4. Create an XP ratio between new tomes/cop bonus % in order to increment the CoP bonus % field while players are working on new tomes. Once a character reaches the 100% max bonus they stop earning toward a 'CoP' bonus % but can obviously keep XPing tomes.
Outcome:
-This would allow new players to start earning CoP bonus from 0% when starting tomes. (The whole point of the change.)
-It would give current players who are working/completed CoP their bonus right away since they already worked it. This would also allow them to start new tomes 1 at a time instead of potentially needing tons of tomes in bulk to dump XP refunds into... Cash issues, tome availability issues, etc.
-Additionally, this does NOT refund 600AA worth of XP that can be put into other tomes/AAs/XP content down the line. Obviously, we want people to keep playing the game, not have a fuck-ton of refund XP they can insta-use on any new expansion.
I think the downside of my way of doing things is that it kind of hits dudes on switch over who have CoP completed and enough tomes to say the bonus is maxed in the new system. They may have the perception that they are losing XP. I don't really think this is a good way of looking at things, but to each their own. Maybe give this people something special like an "I did CoP when it was hard, and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt" title, or something. I don't know. I do know that not everyone is going to be happy no matter how things are changed, and I clearly don't think almost 600 AA worth of banked XP refund is the right way to do it.
EDIT - I also think my suggestions can be implemented in such a way that allows for new tomes to be implemented in the future without causing the system to collapse.
