U60 Lammania Preview 1 - XP System Adjustments

[Sgreene]

I do not like these potential changes to the way XP works. I don't think it makes sense to shift the xp from the first time bonus into conquest since a lot of quests require you to go out of your way to get conquest. I think there should be more focus on fixing monster density and AI rather than trying to change the way players play the game.

 

[Arkat]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds. It is essentially why, after the recent lag work, the community has been seeing increased lag, as the speed has pushed to the point that things have become somewhat untenable. That was one of the main reasons why the suggestion to move first-time XP to the Conquest system was tried; it allows players to earn more XP in general since they can get that bonus XP every time they run the quest rather than just the first time, but also discourages some amount of the hyperzerging that had been taking place. We recognized that it would impact people's XP/minute calculations, but the hope was to find a solution that both encouraged exploration and offered generally more XP with an acceptable level of slowdown of player speed. For players who wished to continue at their current pace they still could, although they might need to run a few additional quests per level, but others might be encouraged to take advantage of these new bonuses.

Is it the hyperzerging you're concerned about or is it lag, possibly caused by so many dungeon instances because so many people are either soloing or maybe two-manning? I'm thinking too many instances will over-stress the servers, yes?

One idea (that isn't mine) I have seen is to do more to incentivize grouping up so there are fewer instances being created. The idea I saw proposed is implementing a permanent +5% XP per party member Buddy Bonus in regular 6-person dungeons.

 

[Leo_of _Sarlona]

Torc & Cordovan thank you for responding and letting us know SSG is reading.

I have been playing DDO since 2009, took a little break but 10+yrs playing time. Only 10 past lives on my main, too many alts and didn't bother to TR until recent years. Always been VIP and gladly spend money on the biggest expansion packs to support such a great game. My first thoughts were maybe this is the end and time to pull the plug if this update slows my TR grind even more. Can we not all win, less stress on servers and better XP/min

I don't solo if I can help it, I group with friends if our schedules sync and I LFM or join PUGs almost daily. I don't like lower levels and will eat XP stones to lvl5 if I have them. Can't say I'm average player, I just want to enjoy the game, get ok xp/min and kill as I go. I run with all kinds of groups, slow flower sniffers and Zergs, everything in between. I love seeing various players at end game on R10 avoid and run a quest I have done dozens of time do it differently.

There have been some really good suggestions and I read all the posts till this point.

I wasn't even sure what Conquest really was till yesterday when I looked it up. I like bonus XP, but I want to have fun and get going at the same pace for PL and RXP. Please don't nerf XP for average players. Don't make us do Conquest for a big XP/min penalty.

Trying to think what is coded in the background before I give my ideas so they could be potentialy done simply...

XP per monster killed that has been agro I think would have everyone killing what spawns. No XP if it takes too long, but that I guess would add additional timers and load to servers.
Give the sneaky players a reward for no agro, kill if you do. Win/win.
Give the none AOE players harder mobs but less.

Fix for long path/lag:
I like the idea that someone had about making them teleport to end and come back full health.
Make them come back as champions after teleport on Elite
Bring the HOUNDS from HC back if they teleport on Reaper
Keep the paths short and make people pay for not killing where they spawn.
If teleporting to the end is not possible make them re-spawn in proximity to random party members like the hounds spawn in HC.
Fixes another issue too if the spawn in a wall or something, you can un-stick them by letting them teleport.

After the instant Dungeon Alert problems are resolved, you could have a penalty on XP for each level of DA, make it hurt the XP, buff the mobs and let them make the players pay for splitting up and causing agro and lag.
Set a timer on the DA like a death time in reaper. Each DA level XP penalty starts to count down once they are ALL killed. If you get a red dungeon alert make it like a R10 death timer, make it long.
If you can teleport to end, the end fight could trigger a DA, a timer and XP penalty. Wasted time at end or suffer your mistakes.
I liked the XP bonus for no DA on completion.
End chest becomes a mimic if a DA is tiggered, make it a painful fight for your loot.

Use your big Dev stick and fight the problems the servers are having, making people kill more is not the answer, killing effectively and quickly as you go should be everyone's goal.

Make the Buddy Boost permanent for VIP, I hope those weekends have shown promise and I think there have been more LFMs and PUGs make those weekends stack with VIP to give the non VIP a taste of the XP benefits.

 

[popejubal]

This change also means that solo players are going to get hit with a big nerf because of the number of quests that just don’t spawn enough enemies to get conquest when you don’t have a party with you. Lame.

 

[Spook]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

You had no feedback on this because none of us have changed how we play since U59 - i think you need to re-examine the data

 

[Zaszgul]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds. It is essentially why, after the recent lag work, the community has been seeing increased lag, as the speed has pushed to the point that things have become somewhat untenable. That was one of the main reasons why the suggestion to move first-time XP to the Conquest system was tried; it allows players to earn more XP in general since they can get that bonus XP every time they run the quest rather than just the first time, but also discourages some amount of the hyperzerging that had been taking place. We recognized that it would impact people's XP/minute calculations, but the hope was to find a solution that both encouraged exploration and offered generally more XP with an acceptable level of slowdown of player speed. For players who wished to continue at their current pace they still could, although they might need to run a few additional quests per level, but others might be encouraged to take advantage of these new bonuses.

So... is what you're seeing:
1) Significantly fewer or exactly 10 kills (for rxp, since I'm assuming reaper is the base case for all power players) in majority of quests
2) Significantly higher number of active mobs and likely permanent red DA in nearly all quests, including on HC
3) Extremely widespread adoption of this, despite DA buffing the boss now?

I have not seen this. Are you sure it is not just your measurements that have changed? I am especially skeptical of permanent red DA intentionally triggered on HC, for obvious reasons.

But if this IS happening, then I would caution that anything that degrades xp/min -- at all -- will just push them harder in this direction to "get back" the old xp/min.

 

[Lotoc]

You had no feedback on this because none of us have changed how we play since U59 - i think you need to re-examine the data

I mean strim did put out a video showing how easily you could just zerg through slave lords with the lag improvements in u59.
I wouldn't be surprised to see people following such behavior.
Honestly the average quest completion speed has grown massively since the stat squish but the lag was a major limiter.
Enemies got their health lowered by too much to compensate for our stats lowering but our dps did not go down as much as enemies lost health, it put many enemies in the "Oneshot by a sorc/alch/druid" threshold which dramatically increased the performance of those classes.

 

[Homunkurusu]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

How about the higher alert the harder to kill mini boss teleports to the group! At red alert ALL unopened doors can not be opened and ALL open doors have a force wall apear in front of them, think the Shroud force walls. Kill the alerts and the walls go away. At red alert you have a duplicate of the end boss appear, so you may have to fight the end boss and kill him multiple times in the quest.

 

[Finngon]

3> We really want killing monsters to be a worth awhile activity. I understand some folks have perfected some play patterns that avoid such a thing, and we don't really want to impact your fun, but we do want the conquest option to have a certain attraction as well because so much of our systems and content do focus on combat. In a perfect world these both would be perceived as equally valid options. In our current world we feel that killing monsters has dropped a little lower in the play patterns than is probably wise.

4> Specifics are very helpful in regards to the conquest bonus issues! Dungeons you typically play, how you play them, and what level of conquest you get, how many kills, etc. What Optional are worth while? How you make the choices you do?

-T

3: I'd say just increasing the bonuses you get from killing monsters (Aggression/Onslaught/Conquest) AND then increasing the optional XP a lot more should help it a lot more for people to do more of the content. I mean, getting like 200 xp from an optional at lvl 8 quest or so is really not worth it if it takes long. I'd argue doubling if not even tripling the optional XP bonuses where you are going out of your way to do stuff (like Bargain of Blood's slave freeing. Btw, one other quest where Conquest is unachievable)

4: I usually do all the optionals that give at least a considerable amount of XP (1k+ XP) unless they're either quick to do or on the way of the quest (VoN 3's optionals). I haven't gotten a conquest from newer quests for a while now due to the scaling (Solo, and maybe even with two other people). I don't focus on getting conquest either. I get it if I get it. It's usually Aggrression/Onslaught though.

 

[Xandrah]

How about the higher alert the harder to kill mini boss teleports to the group! At red alert ALL unopened doors can not be opened and ALL open doors have a force wall apear in front of them, think the Shroud force walls. Kill the alerts and the walls go away. At red alert you have a duplicate of the end boss appear, so you may have to fight the end boss and kill him multiple times in the quest.

Not a fan of this idea. It would be a way to lower player speed through quests as people are not playing as much!

 

[Jack Jarvis Esquire]

I think I understand the premise here and am generally supportive of the aim. Improving performance, who wouldn't be?

What I'm not so clear on is what change was made in U59 that has led to speedier completions impacting performance. I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I don't understand why it is. Can someone explain that please?

On a personal level I'm not conscious of any particular speed up, but I don't tend to zerg much so maybe that's why I don't see it.

If zerging is the issue then aren't the proposed DA changes sufficient to address that?

So, I'm not against these changes in principle, but I don't feel there is sufficient information or justification for them being made yet, at least.

Would it not be sensible to implement DA changes first in U60, and then review/determine whether or not further measures are required in say U60.1?

I'm just a bit concerned about overshooting the mark unnecessarily here. What's the apparent rush for a "perfect storm" approach Vs a more gradual implementation if/as necessary?

 

[Arcanaverse]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds. It is essentially why, after the recent lag work, the community has been seeing increased lag, as the speed has pushed to the point that things have become somewhat untenable. That was one of the main reasons why the suggestion to move first-time XP to the Conquest system was tried; it allows players to earn more XP in general since they can get that bonus XP every time they run the quest rather than just the first time, but also discourages some amount of the hyperzerging that had been taking place. We recognized that it would impact people's XP/minute calculations, but the hope was to find a solution that both encouraged exploration and offered generally more XP with an acceptable level of slowdown of player speed. For players who wished to continue at their current pace they still could, although they might need to run a few additional quests per level, but others might be encouraged to take advantage of these new bonuses.

Ah ok. So its not just about defeating monsters, but also the act of getting in and out of quests frequency is up enough to impact lag. I can see better now why conquest was the idea.

My initial thought is incentives for optionals. Most often this is going to be loot and/or xp, but anything that has value to the majority of the player base will value highly. Adding multiple things things seems prudent.

Ideally these would be thematic and tied to the quest, but i'm going to assume we don't have time/budget for that.... so my suggestion adapts to... how do chest look tables work? Does every chest have its own table or are some of them actually shared?

A potential idea.
If they are shared (or if they aren't hard to update)... say if we add different tiers of rarity of things to only optional chests

Some example of structure (actual things listed don't matter, just an example)
Always - probably some turn in material, something we want a lot of.
Common - Named items, cosmetic drops, cheap store items (tools, potions)
Uncommon - valued Store items (kits, xp pot, mana pot), cooler named items
Rare and rarer - mounts, shards, boxes, super cool named items.

Could even add varying levels of xp stones and renown.

We kind of have stuff like this with bags and items like the stone of luck, so thinking if we overhaul that feature and making it more known that cool stuff comes from optionals.

Will think on this more... lots of angles to consider.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds. It is essentially why, after the recent lag work, the community has been seeing increased lag, as the speed has pushed to the point that things have become somewhat untenable. That was one of the main reasons why the suggestion to move first-time XP to the Conquest system was tried; it allows players to earn more XP in general since they can get that bonus XP every time they run the quest rather than just the first time, but also discourages some amount of the hyperzerging that had been taking place. We recognized that it would impact people's XP/minute calculations, but the hope was to find a solution that both encouraged exploration and offered generally more XP with an acceptable level of slowdown of player speed. For players who wished to continue at their current pace they still could, although they might need to run a few additional quests per level, but others might be encouraged to take advantage of these new bonuses.

I suspect that what you are seeing in the data is not a real increase in quest speed, but rather a decrease in the occurance of lag artificially raising completion times. Quests take longer when you get minute+ long lag spikes...

Besides that, legendary Framework (the quest) is notorious for instant red alerts and extremely fast completion times (ignoring the unavoidable red alert) and that alone could be skewing data.

The only other thing that might cause a slightly faster completion time is the removal of reaper healing penalty, which is likely the "larger pool of players" component, since melees typically had issues with this.

In my experience there is no change in completion times when running good builds at leveling speed.

 

[dng242]

I really think that you are approaching this from wrong angle. Focus on your problem statement. Which if I read it correctly is that there is too much lag cause by monster pathing when they are not removed.
I see nothing in there that say we need to reduce speed. Sure it might help if that means more monsters killed, but at the expense of really annoying a lot of players (a lot player that like to pay for things like xp pots).

What do the players want?
1) We don't want to get less xp/min
2) We don't want to chase mobs all over the place simply to get kills (melee toons and ranged mobs on platforms... annoying)
3) we don't want to have to play a nuker caster simply because we need to one shot rooms and hit things at range while hoping to keep kills up while doing leveling for lives (Granted we may play then anyway, but don't force us)

Now, I realize the dev's also have objectives
1) not making this so easy that people get bored and leave
2) controlling lag, so people don't get annoyed and leave
3) any other things to keep revenue up, etc. (btw, I have issue with this concept, it's a business).

With those in mind, we can probably think of some options
1) Reduce the # of monsters but make them more powerful. (might also address overpowered casters). Few monsters, less pathing, but still the challenge
2) base conquest on mobs agro'd, not possible mobs in the instance. Doesn't slow us down, but then that shouldn't be your objective anyway.
3) Lower the xp needed in general for levels, reaper points, etc. Have your changes, but ensure our grinding isn't made worse
4) Add the ability to one shot rooms to Melee and Ranged. Yeah, okay, I really don't like this idea, but it's like #3 but addresses non-casters will suffer the most from your changes
5) some combination of the above. I like #1 and #2. Make fewer, but more powerful mobs and force us to take them out.

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

 

[Nickodeamous]

I speed run the quests because there are 183 past lives. I've seen it before, many many times. I know the path of least resistance to achieve my playstyle goals. I don't think that adding more grind is the solution, and as some have stated, people that have done the same dungeon hundreds of times don't want to veer from their path just to get junk, nor do they want to have it take longer to than it already does.

Here is my suggestion for Cordo and Torc:

• Draw a line that takes you from the quest entrance to quest end and see which mobs are within that direct path to completion. Make Conquest occur with this 90% of subset only. The optionals are NOT going to agro, so leave them be.
• Now, IF you want to do the optionals, add a bonus to every mob killed past this point.

For Example, Quest A has 100 mobs from beg to end running in a linear line. Kill 90% of these and get conquest. If however, you go above 100 kills, give us 100xp, per kill (scaling of course). This incentives more kills in optionals and additional exploration, and give us a carrot.

Here are some other suggestions that would be welcomed I think:

1. XP pots stop ticking while using a shrine (30 seconds save)
2. XP pots do not start until the first toon MOVES in the dungeon. You can port in and wait, and once the first person moves, its starts ticking.
3. XP potions do not tick during long dialogs...I'm looking at you Just Bus and Spinner...
4. Ability to pause XP pots when running for favor where no XP is available (helping out)
5. Slayer Pots don't tick in heroic areas if you are in epic.
6. Ability to by one time use POTs. I suggested this years back. Just a thought.

Hope this helps!
Nic

 

[rabidfox]

The only other thing that might cause a slightly faster completion time is the removal of reaper healing penalty, which is likely the "larger pool of players" component, since melees typically had issues with this.

That's probably a big factor in how some people run through things.

 

[Oliphant]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

I'm not seeing any of this hyper-zerging and xp/min lift off after U59. What? And is this even about lag? Sounds like you have an xp/min issue but went with a headline about lag in the OP.

 

[Kairess]

@Cordovan Over time the player push toward efficiency and speed is going to lean toward optimization. If your goal is to actively reduce how quickly players are finishing quests along with slowing their rate of leveling, there isn't really an answer to this question. Efficiency players are going to hate it no matter how it's introduced, particularly those who rely on xp potions to speed through incarnations.

In terms of the 'everybody else' category, adding something like an extremely rare but extremely desirable item such as a reward cache that gives super rare gold roll rewards or a raid item trade-in ticket from a random raid or something along those lines that drops only from optional chests such that a reasonable chunk of players feel taking the time to always detour to optionals is worth it might cause some players to be incentivized to slow down in hopes of shinies rather than just being comfortable with slower xp rates.

On the overall - If you're restructuring xp, please consider moving all bonus base xp (IE not reaper xp itself) out of reaper while making these changes. The highest xp rewards for raw leveling should come at elite so reaper play is truly optional. Reaper points should be something people who want to do reaper can pursue independent from normal level progress without punishment. (When newer players come in to the game, they frequently can't get groups without going into reaper, but reaper unprepared is the polar opposite of fun. It took me 5+ reincarnations to be comfortable doing R1, and public questing very, very rarely gave people to group with due to not wanting to lose reaper bonus. I did however sometimes get tells letting me know that they were sorry they couldn't help due to the reaper bonus, but it is just the game's design.

 

[T.O.]

We are doing some updates to the XP system to increase incentives for killing monsters, and to make it a little less confusing. This all ties into a series of changes to make running past large numbers of encounters a less desirable behavior because of what it does to our servers due to pathing costs.

Changes:

1. Bravery Bonus is being renamed Delving Bonus. (this is mostly so people coming back to the game don't still think they need to worry about streaks, which came up a bit when we tried to talk about this to our surprise....).​

​

2. The "First Time" bonus that appears per difficulty is being removed and its value is being absorbed into Conquest and the Delving bonus. It was redundant, a bit confusing and we need the numbers elsewhere.​

​

Details Below:​

​

First Time bonus Changes - These bonus are being absorbed by other bonus types.

Difficulty	XP Bonus	In New System
Solo, Casual, Normal, Hard	20%	Move to Conquest
Elite	45%	Move to Conquest
Reaper*	95%	Move to Conquest & new Bravery aka Delving tier

What about quest's where Conquest is unattainable? I.E. Feast or Famine.Which you can kill everything in the dungeon and not get any bonus. Heroic VON 3 conquest is also unattainable.

 

[MSC]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

What is actually causing the increased load on the servers? More instances being opened and completed and ran, or the xp/min?

If it is the instances being opened and ran and a faster rate, you can decrease this occurrence but keep xp/min, by increasing the xp that optional bonuses or optionals give, this would keep more people in smaller numbers of instances. If you make rushing through quests not xp/min optimal but make the optionals/bonuses that increase questing time more optimal with xp/min you will see a general shift toward said things. Increasing a quest's time to complete by often a significant amount, but keeping the xp payout the same as it was before the change, will cause a lot of backlash, as kind of seen in this thread.