Exp nerf

Moraelintz

Moraelintz

Dalayan Elder
I noticed that there has been yet another exp nerf. I am not in favor of this at all, for the longest time it was as if there was only 1 good exp zone. When OG was released it opened up a second viable zone to exp and explore. Right now kaesora and bq are both better than citadel.

As another note the gap between the top end is just getting further and further apart. Why are you increasing the time investment for the exp needed to bridge the gap when you should be closing it? You are making it harder and harder for newer people to reach the endgame an possibly causing burnout, when if you made it take less time to reach the end you wouldn't lose people because the people that are hardcore will stay hardcore. They will continue to play regardless how howuxh or little it will help their toon.

Some of the recent and not so recent changes that I think effect this are as follows:
Ikkisith exp nerf (recent); take more time to fill books
Remnants undead respawn timer increase; take longer to farm a charm
Ikkisith exp nerf (previous) longer to fill books

Again the main problem is not that the high end are getting too high up, it is that we have all had the luxury of farming out a lot of the advantages these zones had before the nerf. So now if someone wanted to catch up it would take them 2-3x the invested time in grinding that the previous person took.
 
Agree with this thread. Exp/cash nerfs are not good for the health of the raid game.

I already find myself looking at the bad tomes I have (because I don't currently have or can realistically get any good ones) and thinking it is pointless to exp them and that logging in to help more casual players in my internet guild get some of their codex done is an even more pointless pursuit due to the even slower speed at which they will complete them with what time they have to put into the game.
 
Overgrowth was great the first week of release. Then it was tweaked, still good. Tweaked again... it was alright. Tweaked some more, still bearable... Tweaked tweaked tweaked, never gone back. Can't even get the guild interested in the potentially amazing stuff in there for raids and 6man.

I feel like the closer I get to finishing Codices of Power, the further and further is becomes in reality. Persistent grind I guess is the logical solution, but I don't really see what was so "broken" it warranted another set of exp nerfs "here and there".

Does getting good exp have to be coupled with annoying and tedious dungeon crawls? Why can't there be more spots like Mossbeasts in OG initially? Nice relaxing spawn point of maybe 12 mobs, very fast respawn time, and a group can leisurely pulled 1-2 at a time and camp the spot. No constant moving, no getting spawned on top of, no race to rez run before mobs path through. Just hanging out with cool dudes, talking in vent, and slaying dragons (or mossbeasts).
 
Each nerf makes it harder and harder for a casual player, like myself, to accomplish anything in the time I play. Which makes me want to play less, which makes for less players here. Hardcore players will grind out 100+ tomes because that is what they do. You can nerf and nerf, and many of them will soldier on. Sure, they'll gripe, but they'll keep doing it. Now, I am fairly sure the ratio of casual to hard core is somewhere in the 75/25% to 90/10% area, so all you do is hurt the larger portion of the player base, the ones that are more likely to get fed-up and quit. Not the kind of thing that promotes server growth, now is it?

Even before the nerfs, xp here was slower than what it is like on live these days. Sure, it's probably faster than p99, but that means pretty little. Base EQ is free these days, so you need to compete with the original product also. The custom content is enough to bring people into see, but slow gains will send them back out the door even quicker.
 
I don't play but I don't agree with exp nerfs either. If exp is a little too good somewhere, I'd rather see other zones boosted to make them worth looking at again. There's literally no reason why "everything slower" is preferable to "everything faster." Grinding, when it really is just mindless grinding, is easily the worst part of playing the game. And there's really no basis for how long it takes; the amount of time it should take to get a level, AA, or completed tome is completely arbitrary. It hurts nothing to make it all a little faster. Someone might say it would throw off balance or something, but really exp rates are balanced against nothing at all.

And I'd like to echo how this is a big screw you to casual players. The way exp works in general already hugely favors people who spend way too much time playing. We shouldn't be trying to balance exp rates by going: "look how much 10-hours-per-day player x can get in zone y, time to nerf." Those players shouldn't be setting the benchmarks, at all.

At a certain point I think you have to say that the system itself is broken. I think stuff like old area penalties and new zone bonuses, when Wiz put them in all those years ago, were supposed to balance the casual players' exp against the hardcore players'. But they aren't nearly enough: new, worthwhile zones don't come around that often, and casual players can easily get old area penalties in all the good zones at their level before getting very far with tomes.

Since it's what I do, I have a vague and radically different system in mind for consideration: scrap the whole "mob x is worth y points of exp at level z" thing that we have and replace it with something that explicitly favors casual players, but still allows hardcore players to grind. I think there will be plenty of objections to my first formulation, but oh well:

1) Window of Guaranteed Exp: the basis of the whole thing. The idea here is that for a period of, say, 90 minutes per day, regardless of what you are killing, how fast you are killing, how many things you are killing, that is to say, if you are exping at all, you are guaranteed to earn x% towards your next level/y number of AAs/z% into your current tome, depending on your current level/number of AAs/whether your tome is a codex of power or not, respectively. This guaranteed exp would be fast, at least from the standpoint of a casual player.

There'd be a lot more to say about this, of course. You'd probably still get exp from each mob you kill, but the amount per kill would shift on the fly depending on how frequently you are killing, how much you've earned in your 90 minutes so far, and how much of the 90 minutes are left, aiming toward a certain average amount of exp per 10 minutes or something. If you don't kill anything for, say, 10 minutes, the timer would pause altogether. Some time might be deducted if you die, just to make sure there's a penalty there, but maybe not. Killing harder, higher level mobs would still be worth more exp than slaughtering light blue cons; the higher the levels you are killing, the higher the bonus you'd get on top of the guaranteed amount.

When the guaranteed window is over, you'll still get exp for killing mobs, but at a greatly reduced rate. Other bonuses like new area and ZEM might still apply; perhaps new area could be shifted to work on a per-day basis as well; first 30 minutes in a zone you haven't killed in today is worth 25% more exp, something like that. Other notes: killing stuff fast during the guaranteed window would still be beneficial in terms of earning more money and loot, just not in terms of more exp (just in case anyone was thinking that you'd be just as well only killing 1 thing every 10 minutes when you could be killing much more). Also, soloing would become pretty attractive during the window as well.

2) "Haven't played in a while" Bonus: shamelessly cribbed from other games. When you haven't earned exp from killing something in a certain amount of time, perhaps a day, your character will start to accumulate a bonus exp modifier that will apply during your next guaranteed window. The longer you go without killing things, the higher it will get; it would probably peak after a week, and then give diminishing returns until capping at a month without killing stuff for exp. Just another little thing to help the casual player keep up, though obviously the person who plays 5 hours a day or whatever would still get much more exp in the long run.

So yeah, long, rambly, lots of holes. Go, thread, go.
 
I can't read but yeah rested exp would be a great addition
 
i find your idea to be enjoyable zaela. as for the work involved to do it i cant say. but at least it would a step in the direction of helping.

aside from that though, only other thing that i think can be done is zone by zone exp/spawn timer fixxes which i doubt anyone really wants to spend alot of time on. there are many zones that used to be loved for the grind and casual crowds alike but due to spawn timer nerfs or just out-clased exp gain they are horribly under used aside from questing or soloing out of boredom ect. zones like Eldenals, highkeep, kedge come to mind and im sure there are more others can point out.
 
I just dont see the point in at one point allowing people to gain so much xp, then making new players trying to catch up have to spend 5x the ammount of time as others had to.
Personally I feel like zae is on the right track, and I totally agree with the op. Find a better middle ground for some of the higher tierd folks.
 
I agree with the thread but don't really feel like typing the same thing I've typed a million times, but to be sure about one thing: the exp nerfs are 100% slaariel and woldaff (and i'd surmise 95% slaariel), you would need a response from one of them.
 
I like Zaela's ideas suggested there. I also think that nerfing cash sucks in light of the incredible tedium of farming charms. I think that charms dropping from zone bosses (even if these charms are inferior/different from traditional moneyed charms) would be a great boon to everybody. Trying to find areas that have decent platinum drops and then farming them literally 10 hours a day for weeks to get eternal/supreme isn't a fun mechanic. As these areas get "discovered" they get nerfed accordingly, and that compounds the poor design of having to spend so much time and platinum on charms.

Charms were ostensibly designed as a platinum sink - a plan which completely does not take into account that most of the money enters the economy for the sole purpose of buying charms.

If unimbued charms dropped from a zone boss and the lower bosses dropped class/race/archetype gems that could be turned into a quest npc to make stand-in, raiding/questing based charms, that would be a great thing. I'm not saying put supreme charms in NDHK, but a cool reward for the charm slot that could bypass a great deal of the pointless grinding for money (and fighting people for money camps/spawns/doing dodgy stuff to get more money) would make the game a lot more fun in my opinion.

edit: You know how you can get trophy statues in the "house" zone? Make charms on some universal system that they upgrade throughout the game with certain milestone boss kills. "Leveling" a charm if you will, but based on a progression of mob kills and not traditional grinding.
 
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Fuwok is right. Total game completion should bring you to a better charm or character reward than spending all your waking fun time farming by yourself. Through my observation, farming a supreme causes people to quit exponentially faster than people who just play to play.
 
I always felt someone who doesn't actually play SoD anymore, and in no way is really in touch with what is going on makes the exp changes generally. I could be wrong, but I don't see how someone could sit and slave over a hot database for a few hours and think

"Man, I know what will make people have more fun/ balance things out/ have a positive reception to the hundred or so players on our game/ make people happy! I should just slash some exp points on semi popular and popular zones! YES! This is such a good idea, I can't wait to bask in the admiration of my fellow gamers!"

I just don't understand the train of thought on it.
 
Grinding for a 1.2 million charm should not even come into the conversation when you are talking about casual players. No one that plays a few hours a week is ever going to care about that. I think, as in almost every conversation on these forums, people are forgetting what a casual player is. It seems if you are not t10+ with 50 tomes then everyone here sees you as casual. No. A casual player is someone that logs on every now and then, has maybe one character that is level 65 with a few aas and is lucky to have 1k in the bank. These players do not have an army of character’s info available to them and already are facing an uphill battle just trying to play on this server. With the current state of the server, I do not see anyone new coming in and staying for an extended period of time. I think before we worry about it being harder for someone to grind out a 1.2 million charm we should worry about those who cannot even afford spells.
 
Nearo said:
Grinding for a 1.2 million charm should not even come into the conversation when you are talking about casual players.

*snip*

I think before we worry about it being harder for someone to grind out a 1.2 million charm we should worry about those who cannot even afford spells.
Click to expand...

These are pretty much the same concern. When you nerf money droprate, you nerf everybody's opportunity at getting money. I just used the 1.2m as an example because it is something that everybody understands as the end-all be-all of the grind for money (which is not a very fun thing).

Even zones like Eldenals have had cash nerfs. That hurts if you're a new 65 much more than an endgame charm farmer.

Another idea with the charms: people love "achievements" in other games. If charms worked similarly to achievements, that could be a lot of fun. "Kill Gnok the Silverback in under 3 minutes" -> "Charm unlocked! Claim your charm at the charm trader in Grobb!"
 
I agree with your idea, but again, a casual player may never see a raid mob, even if we are only talking tier 1 and 2 stuff.
 
The raid game actually does eventually require you to possess a non-welfare charm, for most classes a 228k Diabolic/Holy Charm/Juggernaut eventually being the bare-bones minimum to scrape by without being a total carry in a raid mostly comprised of people who have eternals and supremes at T12-T13. People are not incentivized to "play" when they farm charm money, they farm for the specific purpose of getting money for that charm as Fuwok said. It's not a real platinum sink when most of that platinum is being earned for the sole purpose of spending it on that charm.
 
I just want to say that I've pretty much stopped playing outside of raiding because grinding xp/plat is so effing boring at this point.
 
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