U60 Lammania Preview 1 - XP System Adjustments

[Homunkurusu]

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

True and the would not be able to code it. However they want us to help them brainstorm solutions. Perhaps my suggestion would highlight how their proposed solution is not that great. My guildy and I 2 man R6 with no problems, we also tend to kill everything in our path to avoid alerts.
If you want to change behaviors of players you really have 2 choices, the carrot or the stick.
Well you see how effective the stick is going to be against the player base. It will work just will have unintentional consequences such as people leaving the game.
The carrot approach would be better, make it worth it to the players to not get alerts.
What would do that, more xp, better chances at better loot, perhaps if they are running xp pots recouping time on the pots?

Sure, if I am running a Sov pot and I am not getting any alerts and my pot timer goes up. You know what my goal will be, to see how many more hours I could add to it by not getting alerts.
Maybe if you don't get any alerts after x amount of quests you get a special reaper shard that you can put towards reaper item enhancements at the reaper vendor?

Now that being said, what will cause me to create more DA?
Having to run more quests to recoup xp that I would have gained normally because I now have to get Conquest. To me that screams run faster, kill less get to the end and complete.
Now when I am farming for gear I will want to complete as fast as possible, no DA and a higher chance to get the gear I am looking for with Reaper enhancements on it would be a huge carrot for me.

The best way to change a behavior is to understand why they do what the do and use the appropriate tool to modify it.

 

[Oliphant]

Maybe just go through all the quests and figure out what is the minimum time to complete without "hyper zerging" and nerf the xp if the quest timer is less than that number at completion. I really don't want to be turned into a zombie murder hobo to fix your performance issues or worse, fix some notion you have about xp/min and box sales.

 

[calouscaine]

Maybe just go through all the quests and figure out what is the minimum time to complete without "hyper zerging" and nerf the xp if the quest timer is less than that number at completion. I really don't want to be turned into a zombie murder hobo to fix your performance issues or worse, fix some notion you have about xp/min and box sales.

Mmm. . .put a timer on each quest for average non-zerging time, and if you complete it after said time there is an xp bonus?

Though, then people might just camp and zerg after the timer.

 

[Homunkurusu]

How about x amount of quests done with out DA you get a token that allows you to save a saga stone that persists through TR and is bankable in the character bank?

 

[rabidfox]

Maybe just go through all the quests and figure out what is the minimum time to complete without "hyper zerging" and nerf the xp if the quest timer is less than that number at completion. I really don't want to be turned into a zombie murder hobo to fix your performance issues or worse, fix some notion you have about xp/min and box sales.

Mmm. . .put a timer on each quest for average non-zerging time, and if you complete it after said time there is an xp bonus?

People would zerg quest, afk at end until they hit that time, and then end quest. It would solve nothing other then encourage people to be bored at the end of a run waiting.

 

[Shevahli[Khyber]]

I dont like this idea.

 

[Lotoc]

Some very jank suggestions that just spring to mind

Let lootgen items drop with reaper bonuses (very rarely in comparison to named items) and be broken down for freaper fragments, as of now too many optional chests are totally devalued because they offer nothing rewarding, going for rewarding chests rather than ignoring worthless ones will slow down hyperzergers. (in fact people will frequently not loot a single chest in the harbor quests.)

Thin out enemy groups but redistribute the health to the point where nukers don't just oneshot enemies, increases the value of single target dps somewhat, largely increases the value of instakills but tbh they could do with a niche when stuff gets instakilled by nukes anyway (it's honestly rather unfair that nukers can deal with red and orange names while instakillers can't but also nukers deal with trash mobs just as well?) and at the same time reduces calculations of mob pathing by having less enemies.

Have red alerts disable wings/abundant step effects, they're too effective at dealing with the threat they're meant to pose.

 

[Oliphant]

I'm not seeing the "hyper zerging" in PUGs. I'm not conceding that this hyper zerging even exists but if it does it sounds by definition an extreme form of zerging, like cheesing the whole quest zerging to the very end, completing very fast. If people are squirreled away in the dark doing something they won't do in the light, then they can sit around waiting being bored a tad imo.

 

[Arcanaverse]

Had another idea... @Cordovan @Torc

Quick Kill Bonus
Each monster has an effect (similar channels to epic/legendary ward) that has a limited number of charges... for conversations lets say 5. Each time a monster attacks, it loses one of those charges.

Instead of or in additional to conquest, we gain bonus points or "kills" based on the remaining charges. (probably tracked separately from actual kills). And give out bonuses and gifts based on that.

Idea being that players will want to kill as quickly as possible instead of just as many as possible. Should keep down on DA alert as well. Attacks only reducing should keep stealth game play unchanged, and avoid spawn issues.
Also should slow players down. Since we want to kill as quick as possible, kiting should be less/not optimal. So it should better represent pre u59 speeds of dealing with packs as they come.

 

[Zaszgul]

I think they just need to clarify their data some more. It doesn't seem to match what we're seeing/doing. They're talking about completion times, seemingly about breaking new world records, in all quests, including on HC (where player power is lower and risk is higher!). But the only thing that actually matters is red DA right? So why talk about anything else.

Is red DA really cropping up more in every quest, even on HC? Or as others have mentioned, is it just in Lordsmarch content, where literally every quest has sections where you can trigger DA very, very easily?

Cuz if it's just a content issue... change the content.

 

[Kortar]

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 t

I think it's more likely you broke your reporting tools with U59. (or accidentally fixed them)

 

[Crell_1]

In what ways were players completing content in U58 that they're completing faster in U59? This is one of those cases where data would be useful. Is it primarily 'returning players' that came back with all the 'reduced lag hype' playing in faster ways? etc.

 

[Oliphant]

If people are really figuring out how to break quests this bad since U59, seems like doing away with first time bonus would be a disaster. They can just do the most vulnerable quests over and over and over.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

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.

Well, the amount monster pathing AI lag is going to relate to the number of active monsters, regardless of # of instances. So 10 solo players killing everything likely causes less (of this particular type of lag) than 1 party with a permanent red alert running past everything.

If the scope is expanded beyond this thread to look at ways to decrease the # of instances as well, then the 2 most important things to encourage players like myself who solo most of the time to open up groups are:

1) xp bonus per party member to make up for all the wasted time waiting around for slow players to get into the quest
2) a way to open the quest window directly from the lfm panel so players aren't slow in the first place (this could also reduce explorer instances)

 

[cocopufff]

I'm... a little bit surprised that no one's talking about this change in the context of getting favor. Intentionally increasing how long quests take, even if it gives more exp, is always going to result in slower favor generation and slower DDO store point generation.

 

[rabidfox]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds.

It was pointed out by someone else already, but the more I think about it the more it really rings true. u59 let us heal between pulls on reaper without penalities. This means less downtime scrolling back to full health. This would mean faster completion times all around for anyone who ever spent time healing up between fights. You could pretty much explain any time differences seen off this factor alone.

You literally wanted players to have less downtime and be able to go faster but you're surpised that quests are getting done quicker as a result?

 

[CBDunk]

I can see players completing things more quickly due to the Reaper 'out of combat' healing, lag reductions, trap alerts, Hardcore season with minimal Favor requirement (allowing quests to be run on Normal), incomplete HC quests to get dragon hoard pieces, and other factors.

If this increase in 'overall questing speed' is causing lag problems above and beyond the pathing issues and they want to slow things down again (without restoring previous levels of lag) that goes a LONG way towards explaining the 'higher conquest XP'... and indeed that seems like a good idea. However, I'd go further and boost the XP of ALL the optional content and/or increase loot drop rates for people completing optionals as well.

I do not think you need to nerf other play styles, so much as try to bring the benefits (XP and loot) of the 'do everything' play style up to the same level. I'd suggest starting with small boosts to XP and/or loot for as many optional factors as you can... then see if that leads to any change in the run time results you are seeing. If it does... make further adjustments along those lines. Maybe bring down the benefits of 'doing the minimum' a little if needed to make it easier to balance the two styles.

Just take it slow, small steps, check the results, and continue adjusting as needed.

 

[Kortar]

Yep! We are reading, and looking at these dungeons that people are posting about.

So when we started looking at this we knew we'd have some "but I don't get conquest in this dungeon" problems. I eluded to this with Castle Ravenloft and the Vault of Night Dragon quests which have had their conquest thresholds adjusted in this build. We hoped these would be a few dozen outliers we could just fix.

We didn't expect not getting conquest to be presented as "really common" in general. If no conquest bonus is more of the rule than the exception this plan will not do! Us devs tend to ramble out into the optional wings when we play I guess....

Clarify a few things...

1> Our lag problems are less about fighting monsters, then running from monsters and leaving them far behind. The bottle neck is in the path system doing long paths as the player gets far away. Ergo, not wanting to be bothered with the monsters at all feeds into that.

2> As has been pointed out this plan was all stick and no carrot. We are looking at some combination of making conquest thresholds more forgiving and/or upping the conquest/onslaught/aggression bonuses a bit further as some have suggested. We also may punt until we can do more elaborate incentive systems instead.

2> 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

There is an issue with reapers that make seemingly every mob in the dungeon aware of your location. So if I correctly stealth pass some mobs and they don't try to follow me (and therefore should not be causing costly pathing behavior) then if a reaper spawns it instantly makes them aware regardless of how far away they are. (sometimes causing instant Red Alert and causing them to calculate long paths to reach me)

 

[DreamForge]

The only thing keeps me playing DDO nowadays is the TR train. Now that they make it 2-4 times longer for each TR due to this new XP system, it's time for me to spend my precious time on something else.

 

[Xandrah]

I'm... a little bit surprised that no one's talking about this change in the context of getting favor. Intentionally increasing how long quests take, even if it gives more exp, is always going to result in slower favor generation and slower DDO store point generation.

This is a good point, but for me the favor to gain ddo points never really mattered since you need a lot of grinding to afford anything worthwhile. I could see with the summer sales though, this being a good opportunity for anyone f2p getting new adventure packs.