new area bonus

My point was, if you take away the negative, then that removes what started the complaint.

Get to the real complaint. Exp is too slow. Or the reset on bonuses is not frequent enough.

My experience is that any changes will only lead to future complaints about the same issue with some other justification.

I am part of the player base, and no matter where I have played, there will always be someone that complains about something.
 
Go and read the New Area Bonus thread where Woldaff outlined the proposed change. Or I'll just save everyone the trouble, here are the important parts of his post:

*To preface: The numbers will be done in a way that will end up with a general increase (albeit moderate) in exp gain. This is not an exp nerf.*
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Finally would be the change in resetting your bonuses. Resets from levels 0-65 would be the exact same. After 65 we would double the amount of Exp for a "natural" reset to occur. Alterntatively, we will allow you to pay platinum (the number in our head is 10k to 1k depending on how close to a "natural " reset you are) to reset your bonuses on demand
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My complaints are 1- The new system was a nerf for a large portion of players because so many zones are awful exp even with the 100% bonus that disappears after 20 minutes. And 2- The "pay plat to exp faster" mechanic was something that I was really looking forward to but it was never implemented.

It was a good idea/plan that feels like it was never really completed or revisited after the fact to see if it actually served its stated purpose.
 
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Dinadass said:
Go and read the New Area Bonus thread where Woldaff outlined the proposed change. Or I'll just save everyone the trouble, here are the important parts of his post:





My complaints are 1- The new system was a nerf for a large portion of players because so many zones are awful exp even with the 100% bonus that disappears after 20 minutes. And 2- The "pay plat to exp faster" mechanic was something that I was really looking forward to but it was never implemented.

It was a good idea/plan that feels like it was never really completed or revisited after the fact to see if it actually served its stated purpose.
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Maybe add a 3rd reset in there... X amount of RL time.
 
Front page news:
- Starting next patch, the total amount of experience required to reset zone penalties will be slashed by ~1/3. Happy hunting!
Fri Dec 13, 2013 - Slaariel
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Dinadass said:
There are automatic resets at certain levels that still work in the new system last I knew. My beastlord was at ~360aa when I quit and hadn't gotten a reset since dinging 65, but supposedly in the new system you need ~400aa worth of exp per reset (which is extremely awful and is an exp nerf; the exact opposite of what the updated area bonus change was supposed to be).
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If Dinadass is telling the truth here, which we really do not have any reason to question his credibility or memory, then AT BEST the new change means xp will reset after ~240 AAs. This is entirely too high.

Personally, I think the base xp rate on the server is too low but maybe 240 or More (maybe broken still?) is a happy fix to some. To me regular XP is slow and Bonus week xp is too fast with what would be enjoyable without haxxmode rate probably just below the average of the two. Resets would have to be significantly faster to even come close to approaching half of that kind of an increase. Something like resets ever 10 levels then every 100AA thereafter. The potential downside is you might risk losing another player or two who falls into the difficult category of "never gonna roll alts, will not play unless gaining xp, have played enough to have max or near max tomes" but make the game much more enjoyable and accessible for new and on again/off again players.

You could even risk converting some of the low tier (1-3) stuff into 6man content (which it essentially is after a certain tier, but not when people could use the drops) to make gearing easier, have cmal drop things that people present can potentially use, and maybe adding some more bounty hunter items to cram those augs into. In general giving new players paths other than "slow to no progress and probably get frustrated" or "get pity geared by skipping 8 tiers through an established guild" would be good.
 
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Ludovician said:
this game that is now played by dozens of people
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I have not logged on in a couple of weeks. Ok, so I was busy in RL, but I could make time, if I did not feel like that it's not worthwhile logging in with less that four hours to play and at least three other people. In the meanwhile, I play other silly games for an hour, and think "I wish playing Saiya was as much fun". If I did not have any emotional attachment to my toon (which was made in 2005), and some very awesome friends, I would honestly not bother logging in at all.

New content does not help so much, because it is designed to be even more time consuming and require even more help/gear/aas/faction whathaveyou.
 
Part of the nature of EQ is that it's time consuming and therefore really really rewarding when you get "far" (if that's the right word) into the game.

I have no problem with things taking time, as long as the time spent is somewhat entertaining. See: Raiding, XP groups, Quests with interesting lore, challenging and fun 6 man content.

The issue arises when the time constraints are implemented to do nothing other than be an obvious time sink.
See: xp penalties, absurdly rare drops for high demand quests (sanctum ritual spells especially), "gimmicky" raid content (ward event for yclist where a traditional raid can't really succeed on tier, instead you need to stack certain classes in a very non-traditional raid format - or at least that's how it used to be).

I've said it a bunch of times already but I might as well say it again here. This game is the among the most fun and rewarding games I have *ever* played up until about tier 10. That's where roadblocks start to appear. (Sanctum, item nerfs, xp debt on the best xp zones, needing to grind out plat for a charm to be relevant, having to do 1000's of AAs worth of tomes in aforementioned xp debt zones, etc).

When you can't even bother logging in without 2+ hours to play because it takes an hour to form / buff for whatever you want to do you're already pushing a lot of potential players away. This is the way the game is though, by no fault of the devs. Kedrin's insistence that all buffs are permanent and soulbound would be a great fix to this, but that likely won't ever happen.

I don't want to in any way take away from the game or what the dev team does to create it, it's very well made. I just want reiterate that people burn out at tier 10 - 11 regularly and it's sad because there is a lot of wonderful content to be experienced.

Maybe it's time to "lighten up" on the strictness of your idea of balance and accessibility at the higher tiers so it's more enjoyable to get there and experience the content. This is after all a free to play game that is enjoyed by the community and is most likely just a side hobby to the devs - it's not a multi-million dollar MOBA game where there are cash prizes and a huge competitive playerbase.
 
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Lightening the load for new players is a key to increasing the server base. AAs look to have bonus for first 50 or so. This probably needs a bigger bonus for more AAs and possibly for first x number of tomes.

For a new char, especially for casual players, it is currently a very steep rocky path.

Haynar
 
So many of the EQ decisions that were fundamentally rooted in being time consuming to stretch out the experience into another month of subscription fees have stuck around on SoD. I would guess this is for nostalgia or "balance" or something, but ultimately they are not game=fun elements that grind on players. Not challenge players which is fun yet frustrating, just grind.

Ludovician said:
When you can't even bother logging in without 2+ hours to play because it takes an hour to form / buff for whatever you want to do you're already pushing a lot of potential players away. This is the way the game is though, by no fault of the devs. Kedrin's insistence that all buffs are permanent and soulbound would be a great fix to this, but that likely won't ever happen.
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This is a really great example. Why not make all buffs soulbound by default? It sure would save a lot of filler time. Perhaps the AA could change to increase duration by some multiplier?
 
I had about 30 min to play last night, got about 8 kills in an had what looked like a named. Gave it a shot, died. Rebuffed, moved back to zone. Time is up. I don't plan to get on tonight if I dont have at least an hour to play. Yep, I had that ole nostalgia feeling. I was in a lowbie area, in the cesspits. But still.

Welcome to the suck.

H
 
donfolstar3 said:
Why not make all buffs soulbound by default?
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I like this very much. I don't think having buffs soulbond by default would break the game but speed up a daunting part of it.

I site other equivalent examples (in my opinion): SoD removed the whole run to your corpse to loot your body thing via the all gear on your person on respawn, removed the lose exp on death thing (RIP: sac'ing people from lvl 70 to 44), and content like Thaz is wipe recovery friendly (read: can bind outside in GD, reset the wing on demand).

Soulbond by default is also within that realm of change.

EDIT: I suppose I am a bit off topic from the OP, sorry about that. <3 So, New Area Bonus, I like it. Excited to see the reset change go in. (Now, I am only partly off topic with my post!)
 
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donfolstar3 said:
So many of the EQ decisions that were fundamentally rooted in being time consuming to stretch out the experience into another month of subscription fees have stuck around on SoD. I would guess this is for nostalgia or "balance" or something, but ultimately they are not game=fun elements that grind on players. Not challenge players which is fun yet frustrating, just grind.
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This :toot:
 
Sorry,I still dont get it.
First you made me stay in a zone by nerfing drop rates to hell(confines of the rushing stream,
camping QS for it several times a week for almost a year now),then to add insult to injury I
get gifted with a huge (25% IS huge) xp penlty in the very same zone.
Slashing the xp required to reset the penalty by a 1/3d does nothing if the numbers floating
around here (250AAS) are true,I dont want to spend 150 hours in BQ or Cita.Playing in the
average 3 hours a day it would take me almost 2 months to reset the penalty.

Let me repeat,just go away with the entire zone *penalty* system until you can come up with
*reasonable* numbers for the reset.
 
Adjusting the reset isn't really the answer, though it is a nice start. Eliminating new/old zone xp in total is a far better answer. Some zones see less action due to spawns, re-spawn timers, cash drops, loot drops, quests, base xp, etc, etc.
The better answer is to balance the xp gain across the zones (understanding that some are designed for higher tier toons than others), and ditch this xp adjustment system all together.
 
Hundreds of man hours rebalancing a huge chunk of the game v. changing the reset... I think "better" comes with a few qualifiers here. The band-aid fix was the right idea given other more immediate dev projects, just completely underdone.

The road to heaven is paved with ??? intentions? Or is it a stairway? Either way, paved with something.
 
donfolstar3 said:
Hundreds of man hours rebalancing a huge chunk of the game v. changing the reset... I think "better" comes with a few qualifiers here. The band-aid fix was the right idea given other more immediate dev projects, just completely underdone.

The road to heaven is paved with ??? intentions? Or is it a stairway? Either way, paved with something.
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In the Balancing and Discussion thread about the area bonus system changes, I said the same thing regarding dev time investment versus rebalancing dozens of zones individually.

However there still has been no word on implementing the "pay cash for earlier reset" portion of the new system that was proposed and that's a disappointment.
 
donfolstar3 said:
Hundreds of man hours rebalancing a huge chunk of the game v. changing the reset...
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I wonder how long it took them to go through every mob in the game to give them
new bane types,not to mention the arrows/items/bounty augs which needed to be
added/changed along with that.
 
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