On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds.... 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 guess my question is did anything change in U59 that led to the change in player speed? I don't remember seeing anything in U59 that would have pushed players to speedrun harder or anything like that. If it's not a change from mechanical changes to how the game works, it must be a change from how certain players are approaching the game. I've come back after a bit of a hiatus and since I've been back I've been playing the same way and things feel about the same speed wise. I feel like maybe the solution is to aggressively disincentivize disruptive gameplay methods instead of impacting every player.
One of my big problems with dungeon alert is that it feels like it's very punitive when encountered "organically" (i.e. big pulls). From way way back in the day before mobs chain aggro'ed, you almost never ran into dungeon alert, and when that change happened, overnight a bunch of quests became minefields. That has been improved since then, but that chain aggro (which was designed to prevent a slow and cheesy playstyle of sniping a handful of mobs at a time and generally playing like a stealth archer) change seems to be fundamentally connected to today's problems, since now people are pulling much larger hordes of monsters and it leads to a lot more pathing. However, the way that dungeon alert functions is not actually super responsive in addressing that without punishing players who just end up in a bad situation with aggro'ed mobs- usually ending up with a dead player who doesn't know why the entire dungeon just got really angry and therefore powerful.
My suggestion is to focus on the performance of problematic player behavior- kiting swarms of mobs through dungeons. Currently, almost all the dungeon alert effects are designed around "When a monster hits you" things, but that obviously doesn't actually prevent aggro, that just means if you get hit you might die and need to do it again. If kiting a billion mobs is 50% faster than the "right" way, but you die 1 in 5 times, you still come out ahead. If dungeon alert applied a movement speed reduction on players based on how many monsters they (specifically the offending player) were kiting, that would potentially keep players from dragging such long pathfinding trails for monsters, make it easier for monsters to catch up, and force people zerging every mob in the dungeon to kite them around like a massive angry swarm of bees to actually deal with their choices.
If every mob aggro'ed to you past, say, ten (or maybe 20 for really big pulls, since I have definitely done that in some quests just to gather up for AoE) gave you a one percent movement speed reduction, it would make most of the disruptive behavior I've seen cited for the pathfinding issues much more difficult, while also not punishing as many innocent party members who have to deal with someone zerging the entire dungeon but fighting nothing. If you make kiting a billion mobs only 20% faster, but you die 1 in 3 times, the economy swings in the other direction away from the disruptive behavior which I think SSG is trying to prevent. Now, this could still be somewhat exploited (having a tank pull hate after someone grabs a bunch of mobs to "free" them to run to the end of the dungeon, for example) but it would at least force someone to take some hits and fight some mobs and lead to actual gameplay, which I think would make it harder for the most abusive practices
as I believe they exist based on what I've gathered of the situation and prevents the idea of exploiting "video game mechanics" to "break" the game.
And as a random Hail Mary suggestion, maybe the solution isn't having every mob in the dungeon be quite so aggressive? If pathfinding is the problem, maybe... just let the zergers win and drop pathfinding at a certain point? Not every kobold is actually that invested in hunting down the adventurer who wandered into the den, maybe they just want to eat their sandwich or look like they care to impress their boss but you know it's a long way down that hall and was that a trap you know on second thought I'm just going to wait for them to come back... There could even be a system that targets that behavior specifically like experience reductions for "kiting" hordes of monsters if you track how many monsters people aggro then reset it by running too far away by counting the number of monsters who had to have their pathfinding reset. This wouldn't punish stealthy players or avoiding optional combats, since it means that only monsters you actually aggro'ed would count. Just a thought. It's more mechanically complex to implement, but I think it could be a more elegant solution to targeting that particular playstyle (or, not-play style as it might better be called) than changing experience formulas.
On a side note, I think SSG simultaneously doesn't give us enough aggregate data about what's actually been happening for us to be helpful finding a solution to this problem nor communicate clearly what the problems actually are sometimes.
Player speed shouldn't be the problem, things that lead to excessive pathfinding should be. When this problem is couched in terms of player speed, it sounds like people are just getting "too good" at the game, not actively abusing pathfinding to avoid actually playing the game and just running to the end boss, and I think that's why people are just kind of lashing out instead of working on productive solutions. If a player finds some neat build to do things quickly or effectively or some neat strategy that lets their group mow down hordes of monsters, I don't think that should be punished if it doesn't impact the experience of other players. This is a cooperative game. The tone communicated by the team is often that players are just too good and it's frustrating when you communicate it that way because it makes it sound like we should be waddling slowly through quests and abandoning optimization, when really what I hope the team means is that disruptive and exploitative behavior has increased and that should be reduced. I know that's not the intent, because I read the context, but not everyone does, and it contributes to a sense that the team views
players as the problem, not the problems themselves, which leads to more toxicity on the forums, which leads to toxicity in game, which leads to no one having fun, and at the end of the day the point of the game is to have fun, right? I know it's a garbage job to get yelled at in internet daycare, I've done it before and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but it often feels like the response is to paint all players with a broad brush when to be honest unless I'm just living under a rock it's a relatively small (but loud and disruptive) subset of any group that causes most of the problems that need to be addressed.
I do stand by my previous post- I don't think this is a smart way to solve this problem. But it's mostly because it's done in a way that suggests that the problem is that people aren't killing all the monsters, and solves the problem in a way that causes problems for how a lot (and not just a few, a
lot) of quests work meaning that there is a lot of legwork to do to fix it and how people play leading to a lot of anxiety about the change. But I think the reason why I even came into that thinking this was a stupid change is because I can only see how it's communicated, and it reads as "People aren't killing monsters" not "People are kiting hordes of monsters through dungeons and it's ruining performance". It invites unnecessary concerns about "the only way SSG wants us to play the game is to murder everything, stealth is dead, choice is an illusion" when really that is neither the intention or the problem (I hope). We don't get the luxury of tables full of data or meetings about what is causing the problems, we see a post in the Lammania forum and see that there's an implementation and if that implementation has implications, that's what we're going to see, and that's going to color our reactions.
When the entire community gets involved, the decisions that were already made and the conversations that were already had aren't always available to players to review, and I think that makes it harder for us to help solve this problem because I can't see any rapid spike in completions in my own gameplay, I can't see any changes in U59 that should have led to massive changes in player behavior or completion times, and I certainly can't riddle that it's about pathfinding behavior leading to performance when people drag hordes of monsters through dungeons from the initial post exclusively nor immediately understand why this decision was made because of that problem. Without that being more clearly communicated as the why that actually caused the need for the problem is obfuscated behind the statement that changes are to "increase incentives for killing monsters, and to make it a little less confusing."
Anyway. that's my long, unsolicited essay on how to fix the problem. I could also ask for some less likely changes (reduce the amount of experience required in general to discourage the treadmill's effect on pushing people towards grind which was once again in the addition of 18 new heroic lives for the new archetypes that further encourages any behavior that makes the grind less tedious) but to be honest as much as that's a wishlist item of mine in general it still wouldn't stop people from doing the behavior that causes this latency since any grind whatsoever would encourage it anyway, and giving everyone free true completion (the only way to prevent any experience farming from the past life treadmill) probably ruins the game more than it helps so I won't imply that it would fix the problem since it absolutely would not, and it would be the wrong reason for the change anyway.
