U60 Preview of Preview 2 Lammania XP Changes

[Ipsum]

I'm still going to advocate for consolidating reaper and elite mode bonuses. The idea would be to encourage vets to group more often with newer players and not force new players to feel like they need to play the reaper challenge mode. My proposed updated delving bonuses would be something like:

+100% Hard
+150% Elite
+1% per reaper skull

 

[Lazuli]

Dear fellow ddotics players let's join forces and protest in marketplace, like in the season of hearts for reincarnation... Seriously now I would strongly ask you to reconsider and not remove / transfer the first time bonus, just add extra incentives for killing mobs (we already had dozens of suggestions in the previous post).

My way of protesting will be to go to another game if this goes Live. And honestly seeing the trend of the game in these last two years, it's the best I can do. This game is going downhill and without brakes.

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

An updated proposal from feedback and additional leg work on a hot topic!

This is an early preview of what preview 2 might look like (this doesn't reflect what is in preview 1)

To recap our goal here is to make monsters a bit more worth while from an XP perspective using the conquest bonus. We also wanna clean up some of the confusion in first time bonuses (only one type plz). We got feedback on a mess of issues but one thing that came across is conquest is busted in many places and even when it's not busted, it's often not considered worth while because you need to go off critical path, and there are fears the XP per minute will slow significantly....

So we are changing our approach, and are using the lower conquest threshold of Aggressor as more the balance point with some XP buff-age for the higher conquest tiers.

Have a look. New stuff starts at bullet point 3. There are some important additional notes on reaper here btw.

Changes:

1. Bravery Bonus is being renamed Delving Bonus. Still. It's also getting a new tier for reaper so it will now work as thus...

Hard 50% Bonus

Elite 100% Bonus

Reaper 150% Bonus

Uses the same logic as bravery bonus did before meaning if you play on hard then elite you'll only get a 50% bonus for reaper, or if you JUST played on hard and then reaper the bonus would be 100%. Playing reaper from the get go would be 150%.

2. the "First Time Bonuses" per difficulty are being removed (Still. We are boosting in other places though to make up for it)

3. Conquest, Aggressor and Onslaught Bonuses are be greatly boosted, and give different values based on difficulty.

NEW CONQUEST BONUS VALUES

	Normal	Hard	Elite	Reaper	Old Requirement	New Requirement
Conquest	50	75	100	100	kill 80% of mobs in quest	kill 75% of the mobs in quest
Onslaught	35	45	50	50	kill 65% of the mobs in quest	kill 50% of mobs in quest
Aggression	25	25	25	25	kill 50% of the mobs in quest	kill 25% of mobs in quest

Additional....

A> The thresholds to reach a bonus are being lowered. Getting Aggression is twice as easy as it was before.​

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B> Dungeons with extremely large monster counts will get addressed - There may be 400 mobs in TOEE (guessing) will be adjusted so aggression/onslaught happen for running critical path, and conquest won't require that much extra exploring. Broken quests (haverdasher/vault dragon fight) in heroic will get fix. The previous preview 1 thread gave us a pretty good idea where problem quests were.​

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C> We are looking into communicating how many monsters you need to get these bonuses in the quest panel. We THINK we can get this working.​

4. Reaper XP

So as we've been looking at this we saw a few things we want to tweaking about reaper. In general reaper XP will just go up due to the conquest/Aggressor increases because those apply, but most of what we want to address is feedback in the quest panel about reaper XP is really lacking.

Note: First time bonuses and bravery bonus never applied to reaper XP, this was terribly unclear, which we intend to correct.

A> Reaper XP will now display before getting your 10 kills , and let you know you don't get reaper xp till you kill 10 mobs​

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B> The Reaper XP 200% first time XP bonus will now display in the quest panel when it applies, and it will state that this bonus is used instead of delving​

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C> We are looking at making the Reaper XP 200% bonus apply separately for heroic and epic/legendary each - so you can play something on reaper on heroic that has a legendary mode without screwing yourself out of the 30+ level bonus later.​

BEFORE & AFTER CHARTS. Example of Total XP % Quest Panel Bonuses.

NORMAL	Old conquest	New conquest	HARD	Old conquest	New conquest	ELITE	Old conquest	New conquest	REAPER	Old conquest	New conquest
conquest	25	50		25	75		25	100		25	100
1st time	20	0		20	0		45	0		95	0
Bravery	0	0		50	50		100	100		100	150
Ransack	15	15		15	15		15	15		15	15
Tome of Learning	50	50		50	50		50	50		50	50
Tamper	10	10		10	10		10	10		10	10
Observance	8	8		8	8		8	8		8	8
Total	128	133		178	208		253	283		303	333

Reaper XP note - because conquest applies to reaper xp you'll see about a 10-15% increase of total reaper xp for those who get conquest in a reaper dungeon when playing it the first time. The replay value a bit higher. We may increase xp ransack on reaper if spamming quests becomes common, the but delta is still a 2 to 1 or great ratio in favor of new quests so we don't think that'll be to much of a problem.

Note on daily bonus. Someone asked if this was changing...it's not changing at all! (probably should of been in this example chart. Shrug.

-T

From a reaper perspective, I am only seeing upside to these changes. I keep hearing this is a nerf, what I am missing here? There is zero reduction in reaper xp as first-time bonuses weren't used - instead there was this 200% first-time bonus I didn't know about which remains the same and is possibly getting improved to allow for runs on heroic and legendary.

Regarding regular xp I don't see this change substantially moving the needle as monster requirements are being reduced. In some cases players will get more xp by hitting tiers not possible before and some cases they will lose. Overall I don't think it's going to significantly change leveling.

Still a 10% boost to the daily bonus may be an idea worth considering to minimize the # of people impacted.

 

[Krell]

Here's what is hopefully a less confusing table for xp on reaper since the definition of aggression and onslaught are changing.

	Current live xp bonus (FT+bravery+kills)	New xp bonus (Delving+kills)
0-25% of mobs killed	195%	150%
25-50% of mobs killed	195%	175%
50-65% of mobs killed	205%	200%
65%-75% of mobs killed	210%	200%
75-80% of mobs killed	210%	250%
80%+ of mobs killed	220%	250%

I still don’t like it if the goal is to reduce lag. No point in aggroing mobs in optional areas that never would have been aggroed in the first place and adding server load.

If the goal is to increase completion times, that is just another way of saying slow down leveling and past life farming. I would say this successfully accomplishes that goal but that is not going to be popular. Combine it with some way to get past lives faster and I might buy in.

 

[Terpilar]

As a suggestion, if looking for an incentive to "explore", for each optional objective fulfilled, add a cumulative % of named loot in end chest and/or put named loot in optional chests, as some old content does.

 

[The Narc]

As a suggestion, if looking for an incentive to "explore", for each optional objective fulfilled, add a cumulative % of named loot in end chest and/or put named loot in optional chests, as some old content does.

Or much like slavers, put an additional ingredients chest beside the main optional chest and that chest contains some sort of level/area pertinent ingredient. I dont do a lot of optionals but i think this would be a good change for those that do.

Ie in epics all optionals chest could be accompanied by a chest containing random small amounts of fragments of the twelve and commendations of valor.

 

[alcolitoz]

Devs should say clearly what their problem is: lag due to mob pathing or players completing dungeons faster so more instances created.

None of those problems can be fixed by nerfing Xp.

DDO is different from other mmos because you have to complete a quest, its not about killing monsters, this is not diablo (which gives xp for every monster killed, no tied sometimes to an unreachable threshold).

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

Some quests obviously need to be looked at like Eyes of Stone where you kill every monster you come across and still get discreet bonus. Haverdasher, etc.

 

[DBZ]

Von 1 full murder 74 kills 0 bonus if u wait for the last pack at the end you can get an aggression bonus for a 40 percent xp loss

 

[Lazuli]

Some quests obviously need to be looked at like Eyes of Stone where you kill every monster you come across and still get discreet bonus. Haverdasher, etc.

Or better, they could not waste time going through every quest in the game for a change that is not necessary and no one has asked for, and spend it on something useful that pleases the players instead of angering them. Wow, much more practical.

 

[vryxnr]

All of this feels like a Sunk Cost fallacy, and unfortunately I've heard this essentially confirmed by the devs in the past (in a live stream iirc): that they function on a sunk cost fallacy mentality.

That is, they will value the time it took to think of and develop something more than the effect it will have on the game. Some thing will drive players away right away and make the overall player experience worse, increasing the risk of burnout and more players leaving in the long run, but this one dev spent TIME doing it, so it's going to be rolled out anyways.

This is a bad thing imo.

If this is a money making ploy, if one ONLY thinks about quarterly reports, this may seem like a good thing - abusing human tenancies of addiction - but in the long term this strategy ends up imploding on itself and eventually fails. For LONG TERM profits, making quality products that consumers ENJOY will keep more of them coming back for more.

Sometimes it's OKAY to completely scrap a bad idea, regardless of how much time was put into it.

 

[Dredre9987]

From a reaper perspective, I am only seeing upside to these changes. I keep hearing this is a nerf, what I am missing here? There is zero reduction in reaper xp as first-time bonuses weren't used - instead there was this 200% first-time bonus I didn't know about which remains the same and is possibly getting improved to allow for runs on heroic and legendary.

Regarding regular xp I don't see this change substantially moving the needle as monster requirements are being reduced. In some cases players will get more xp by hitting tiers not possible before and some cases they will lose. Overall I don't think it's going to significantly change leveling.

Still a 10% boost to the daily bonus may be an idea worth considering to minimize the # of people impacted.

What changes is xp/min

 

[The Narc]

Von 1 full murder 74 kills 0 bonus if u wait for the last pack at the end you can get an aggression bonus for a 40 percent xp loss

According to the first chart the old kill total for aggression will now become the kill total for onslaught. Not sure why the old onslaught isnt becoming the new conquest why there is a 10% difference in this?

 

[Abax11]

As many pointed out, better numbers but still you are forcing players to play in a certain way and is still unrewarding in most of the quest so people will end up zerging and trying to pull as many mobs as possible in a single place to blown them up. Unless the change to monster pathing improved that idea so players can't pull many mobs to one place or red DA extremely punish casters you won't be reducing lag.

Also, i agree that in many quest you need far more than 80% kills to get conquets nowdays, sometimes you need to like almost every mob and even you need respawns or reapers to reach that threahold. There are quests were i kill every single mob(because i usually like to take my time in quests, bad practice for TRing ) and still can't reach onslaught.. do you intend to review every quest in the game to make those numbers clear for any player?

 

[CBDunk]

Even if the average XP per quest would really come out about the same after this change, (which still seems unlikely) quests taking longer means that this is a nerf to player XP acquisition rate. Further, quests taking longer will also be a nerf of loot, favor, guild renown, DDO points, and other reward systems. So... AS DESIGNED... this is a nerf to pretty much all rewards systems in the game. Players COULD avoid taking a nerf to those other rewards by continuing to complete quests as quickly as possible... but then the nerf to XP rewards is even greater.

AND... because players are being encouraged to kill more monsters, there will inevitably be MORE instances of pathing monsters to AoE kill zones and thus MORE of the pathing lag that we were originally assured was the problem this change was meant to FIX.

Sorry, but based on everything I've seen, it seems clear that 'slowing down player progression in the game' is the ACTUAL goal here. Which... MIGHT have been ok. There are cases where a slower pace can make a game better. However, the way this was communicated to the player base... you could not have done it worse if you tried.

 

[Grub]

A note about mob pathing. I'm not a game programmer, but mob pathing is similar to other N* problems that are infamous sources of performance issues in a large number of programming problem domains.

Aggroing a mob or even a dozen mobs and killing them in the same room is not likely to have much impact on the server. Aggroing a group and having them chase you through the dungeon is a whole different story. In a single room the calculation is one or two steps to figure out how to get to you. Once you get a couple of rooms away, the calculations become a lot of steps for example how to get around a corner, and through a door and up some stairs and...(including around other mobs that are moving and getting in the way...) Each obstacle between the mob and you adds calculations on how to get around it. It also has to recalculate its path since you are likely to be moving. The other mobs chasing you are also probably moving and may be getting in the way forcing a recalculation. The further you get away, the more steps the mob has to calculate and the more possible paths it has to take into consideration so the greater the impact on the server. Now add in that many mobs also perioidically check line of site to see if they should stop and throw a spell or fire a ranged weapon instead of chasing you... Like most N* problems this quickly gets out of hand and can involve dozens or even hundreds of calculations.

I see this pathing problem in action all the time in the home sweet sewer quest in the harbor. If you run through the dungeon and gather all the dogs up and get them chasing you, about 1 time in 10 they will start getting in each others way and their progress will slow to a crawl as they constantly recalculate how to get around each other. Tends to happen in the last hallway before they exit at the door. It can take a couple of minutes for the dogs to make it the 75 feet to the exit.

Mobs chasing you through a dungeon could easily have hundreds of times the impact on the server of mobs that are aggroed and killed in the same room.

 

[Nimvind]

Do we have to take a hit to the experience points? Would it be possible to add looting corpses to the game, like in pen and paper. You and your party kills mobs and then loot the dead, so if we can loot the dead we would make more dead. Killing mobs = rewards that we can either sell or crunch for cannith essences or etc. Which would motivate players to kill more? I'm sorry if I'm being a stubborn mule about this experience thing, I just don't feel like this is a good route. But if it must be done, let it be!

 

[Torc]

Torc,

First you wrote: "Uses the same logic as bravery bonus did before meaning if you play on hard then elite you'll only get a 50% bonus for reaper, or if you JUST played on hard and then reaper the bonus would be 100%. Playing reaper from the get go would be 150%."

Then you wrote: "The Reaper XP 200% first time XP bonus will now display in the quest panel when it applies, and it will state that this bonus is used instead of delving."

I might be failing reading comprehension checks, but it seems like these contradict. Can you please clarify that we receive 200% first time reaper and do not receive bravery (IE: delving) bonus? Or do we receive 50% delving + 200% first time reaper?

Or better yet, just clarify what happens if I run level 32 quests at cap on elite to help guildies farm gear and then try to run it R10 for the RXP. Will I lose all the bonus XP or will it be 200%?

Thank you for pushing this update out quickly and for clarifying.

EDIT: I think the devling bonus applies to quest XP and the 200% bonus is only for RXP, since Torc clarified bravery didn't apply to RXP. If this is correct, then disregard my question as these statements don't contradict.

It's pretty confusing which is why were kinda keen on consolidating a little. So the First time bonus and Bravery never applied to reaper XP...instead there is a separate 200% first time reaper bonus that was always there but didn't display in the UI, leading to much confusion because bravery plus first time bonus almost total to 200% anyway.

This reaper xp bonus does not care about you playing any other difficult (it's doesn't care or work like bravery/delving). It applies the first time you play the quest on reaper on heroic and then again on epic/legendary

We thought this reaper bonus didn't keep separate track between heroic and epic because we got some complaints that it didn't but it appears to actually do just that...

 

[Baahb3]

Reaper should have never had a greater XP reward than elite. I have said it may times before, the carrot for Reaper was Reaper XP, better loot chance and the original sales pitch of 'more challenge'.

Yet here you are, reinforcing the idea that Reaper is now the default difficulty level to gain XP in. What a crock of ****.

 

[Ahpuch]

Or better, they could not waste time going through every quest in the game for a change that is not necessary and no one has asked for, and spend it on something useful that pleases the players instead of angering them. Wow, much more practical.

Yes spend the time fixing pathing and monster agro in those quests that go to DA inappropriately. Much better than going through quests to tweak conquest numbers.

In the management area there is a caution to be careful what you reward because behavior will follow those rewards and often in unexpected ways. (Over)Rewarding a brute metric like kill count will change peoples behavior. Why use a skill like diplomacy to avoid a fight when it is more rewarding to kill everything? Why pick a lock to skip a fight when it is more rewarding to kill everything to advance? Why is that hall an optional when killing the mobs is required? Eventually those alternate strategies that add depth and choice are not even put into the quests. Why take time to add those choices when everyone is geared and tweaked to AOE slaughter everything. Eventually the game becomes more linear and less rich. Some players won't care about that. But there are some who come for the D&D and they will notice.

As a player who normally welcomes change and switching up the system, I am suprised by my dislike for this change. And I think it is because there is the not subtle encouragement to force a single way of playing. DDO has too much of this in quest objectives and doesn't need more of it in a blanket system. I don't mind changes (sticks or carrots) to deter players by speed running and ignoring mobs (that should be done better than current DA but that is a different thread). But this change will not be that. It will be something more and I don't think I like where it is headed.