U60 Lammania Preview 1 - XP System Adjustments

[Hawk]

These changes might be fine as-is, if... OPTIONAL XP was increased GREATLY. Not slightly... not moderately... GREATLY.

90% of the optionals in this game are complete garbage xp, and this needs to change.

(Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the good opts that we all know about: von3, wiz king, etc. Yes, we all know about these already. Make every other dungeon opt feel the same.)

Here's an example of some heroic dungeons:

Dungeon completion with skipping all optionals: 9,800 xp (Completed in 4 minutes)
Optional #1: 240 xp (Takes 1 extra minute added to the completion.)
Optional #2: 180 xp (Takes 30 seconds extra added to the completion.)
Optional #3: 210 xp (Takes 2 extra minutes added to the completion.)

This is what most of the game feels like. It's like doing another separate dungeon, only to get like 600 xp. Those opts should be giving 2000-3000 xp each in those cases. In some cases, even multiplying the opt xp by 10x would still be horribly bad. Each dungeon needs to be hand-fixed by a developer, not a blanket bandaid.

Some opts in the game literally take longer to do than completing the quest, and they give like 4% of total xp. Fix this first, and people will then be glad to kill more monsters, and do more stuff in each dungeon.

Q: But isn't there enough dungeons in the game to level up even if you skip many or skip optionals?
A: Yes, of course. However, the point of these changes is to make players engage in EACH dungeon more, right? So then make the optional areas, and the areas that players skipped actually feel MEANINGFUL.

Not only would you make players more happy, but you'd be increasing the "useable" content viewed by players. Players would be more encouraged to explore side tunnels and whatnot. Boosting opt xp significantly would make many dungeons feel more fun and rewarding. Players might actually want to explore stuff they didn't previously, because the xp was so horrible in some of them before.

Otherwise, the original proposed xp change just nerfs xp for no good reason, and further cripples newer players or players still working on TR's, while people previously didn't have to do as much to gain the same xp.

 

[Krell]

I haven't read every post but one thing I haven't seen discussed is consideration of player griefing. A lot of DDO functions are designed to prevent griefing based on feedback from previous Turbine games. Instances to prevent line jumping, individual loot in chests instead of loot dropping for players to grab. Raids were changed so that everyone got their own loot instead of the party leader deciding who gets loot (Remember that?). Consider a scenario where the party splits up to get conquest and someone runs to the end and finishes the quest before the party can get the bonus. The same applies to some ideas I've seen such as bonuses for few or no alerts. Again, someone runs ahead and and gathers mobs for red alert. Remember how mad people would get sometimes when someone died and everyone got a death penalty before they made it individual? This is potentially a much bigger penalty than that. One player shouldn't be able to substantially penalize the reward that the rest of the party can get.

 

[Natashaelle]

They do respawn but it is still not enough to get conquest.

Don't know if they respawn infinitely or not -- If I'm bored enough might check later, though it would be a lot of twiddling my thumbs, respawn rate is very slow.

 

[Zokathra]

What about if there was a flat bonus amount of XP per monster kill, instead of a % bonus for Onslaught/Conquest, that is given at quest completion.

So for example when doing a quest that gives 1,000 XP, you get a bonus 10 XP per monster killed, or something like that.

 

[gravisrs]

Once again - every update this game makes it harder and harder for new players to catch up with old veterans. No wonder this game is dying. Noone wants to hop a slowing train.

 

[Krell]

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?

It depends. If players are mostly clearing and avoiding alerts and they are completing a little faster because there is less lag, I don't see that as a problem. If a lot of players changed behaviors and are zerging with alerts when they weren't zerging before, then I agree it is a problem. In other words, xp per minute changes aren't a problem unless it directly affects server performance because I don't think it would be that much of a difference if they are clearing as they go.

If they are running up alerts just leverage alert penalties. Get rid of the harried on contact and tie harried to dungeon alert status. Green, hard capped (No boosts, bonuses) at 30% speed. Yellow, hard capped at 0% speed bonus. Orange, 0% speed bonus and equivalent of Heavy encumbrance penalty, can't tumble, leap, wing, etc., Red, 0% speed bonus and equivalent of Overloaded encumbrance penalty, can't tumble, leap, wing, etc.

There may be solutions to slow down players that are easier to code than what I suggested. But if you understand the motivation for running through a quest with a train of mobs, which is completing a quest as fast as possible, it is easy to counter. Just slow down player movement and speed up mob movement to the point where it will take far longer to complete quests with dungeon alert than without it.

There could be other creative solutions, like if you get red alert you get dimension doored to the dungeon entrance. Likelihood of reaper spawns increase. Raid length raise penalties. Just throwing things out there but overall I think there are lots of ways to ensure a quest takes longer if players are running up high alerts. No need to mess with XP and affect players that are clearing as they go.

 

[Rhisen]

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?

Easiest solution for everyone here is to sell stones of experience independently of Otto Boxes, say for 1995 DDO Points.

SSG makes more money. Check.
Decrease in number of past life zergers. Check.
Less lag for everyone. Check.

The current game state is targeted to end game anyway and most of the players who are zerging are trying to achieve past lives to have the best possible toon at end game. There are 183 lives. 183. That's a lot of past lives. These proposed changes are slowing down the speed for everyone to attain said past lives. Whether a player is going for completionist or not, the barrier of xp and repetition and boredom stands in our way every time we reincarnate a character. I personally do not want to spend any more time in a life when I have a list to get through and feel like those of us who are not zerging in the way you state are being punished.

Flowersniffers will always sniff flowers.
Zergers will always zerg.
But money is forever.
Sell the stones.

 

[Argavyon]

why not just give an xp bonus for killing (almost) all aggro'd mobs?

Questionable Stealth (>90% of aggroed mobs killed): +10% base XP per quest difficulty (ie: +10% casual ~ +40% elite / +50% reaper)

 

[orz]

Making red alert harder is a good and acceptable adjustment to slow down zerger. But moving 1st time bonus into conquest isn't.

My play style is fast, especially in doing those old but fun heroic quests. I usually only do the main objects, but will also do the opts sometimes, because that's fun. I don't want them be a "have to" objects. This change makes them not fun, makes them boring in the future.

If I am the party leader, I will always wait for people before finishing, I will introduce the opt story to newbies (if I know), I will guide them how to run the quests, I will do anything worth my time. But making conquest bonus in every quest a half-mandatory xp bonus does not worth my life time!

 

[Eoin]

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.

New Red Alert Feature:
The Master of the Hunt has been alerted to your presence.

Could have it work similar to the above, but reuse the Fey Hunt Hounds. Or even pull the party to a hunt zone that has hounds.

 

[Ying]

I only do optionals for two reasons:

1. Leveling XP. And it needs to be impactful XP. For example, there's an optional in Raven's Bane where to talk to a ghost. It's 68 heroic XP which includes a 50% XP bonus. I mean, c'mon. That's not worth the mouse click or the 15 second pitstop. If optionals added to reaper XP, I'd be more incentivized to complete them in Legendary levels.

2. If the optional has a chest with named loot, and I want that named loot. This can include ingredients. For example, when I'm farming crafting mats or hunting for named augments in Legendary Isle of Dread I will do all of the optionals with a chest. If I have all the ingredients or augments I need, I will skip them.

 

[Sylla]

Im not making a final judgement yet, but as the changes are stated in this preview, they are accoplishing two things:

1. more mobs killed - more aggro/pathing - more lag (people will agrro as much as possible and just aoe kill)
2. players forced to either grind more which results in a burnout a ppl taking a break from the game or spending more money on exp potions.

Both of these are borderline unfriendly towards players.

The sad part is, its not suprising to me at all.

If these changes goes live, even more people will play casters only, speedrunning the quests with red allert and killing stuff with aoe spells. Then just repeat the quest to make up for XP loss.

Then you will nerf the casters. Then the game will be a slog for everyone. More ppl quit.
Is this the route you want to go?


Look devs, we all know MMO players dont leave their games easily, but everyone has its limit.

Instead of fixing your own mess of overpopulating dungeons with legions of monsters, you punish players for your own mistakes.

 

[Triaxx2]

Sure, you do that now. But will you still do that in 2 years time? Very doubtful. Just consider if you still go out of the way for chests in Sharn for materials... I sure don't and haven't in a long time.

Loot only matters while content is relatively new - xp matters forever.
Optionals need to add alot more xp. Some could give 10x the current xp and still not be worth the time. The problem is that this needs to be done on an individual basis as making all optionals suddenly give 5x as much xp would make the few already worthwhile optionals over the top good.

Yes, I probably will, for two reasons. First, DDO's not Wow, where new content instantly invalidates all that came before. We hit 30 and people were still obssesively using Legendary Greensteel. People still do because it has some entirely unique effects. Heck, people still use HEROIC greensteel because it has unique clickies. And second, because the optionals I do now, are the optionals worth doing, which will continue to be worth doing. Look at Bullywugs and Boobytraps. There are a bunch of optionals that are one room off the main path. Completely skippable... yet so quick doing them is basically all gain. Even if I don't bother to loot the chest, why would I skip free XP?

That said I do agree that optionals should give more XP. As well as 'total optionals completed' being a percentage increase in total.

Actually delving should be the final tier of optionals completed.
>50% optionals completed (triggering after doing one.): Explorer +10% XP
50-75% optionals completed: Dungeoneer +25% XP
75-100% optionals completed: Delving +40% XP

 

[PaleFox]

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.

As in finished and completed or as in abandoned and reset?

There is a big difference between the two.
The second has all kind of reasons which vary from party wipe, oops entered on normal, this is a bad instance, to why do a complete quest if what you're after is located at an optional?

 

[somenewnoob]

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

These changes might be fine as-is, if... OPTIONAL XP was increased GREATLY. Not slightly... not moderately... GREATLY.

90% of the optionals in this game are complete garbage xp, and this needs to change.

(Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the good opts that we all know about: von3, wiz king, etc. Yes, we all know about these already. Make every other dungeon opt feel the same.)

Here's an example of some heroic dungeons:

Dungeon completion with skipping all optionals: 9,800 xp (Completed in 4 minutes)
Optional #1: 240 xp (Takes 1 extra minute added to the completion.)
Optional #2: 180 xp (Takes 30 seconds extra added to the completion.)
Optional #3: 210 xp (Takes 2 extra minutes added to the completion.)

This is what most of the game feels like. It's like doing another separate dungeon, only to get like 600 xp. Those opts should be giving 2000-3000 xp each in those cases. In some cases, even multiplying the opt xp by 10x would still be horribly bad. Each dungeon needs to be hand-fixed by a developer, not a blanket bandaid.

Some opts in the game literally take longer to do than completing the quest, and they give like 4% of total xp. Fix this first, and people will then be glad to kill more monsters, and do more stuff in each dungeon.

Q: But isn't there enough dungeons in the game to level up even if you skip many or skip optionals?
A: Yes, of course. However, the point of these changes is to make players engage in EACH dungeon more, right? So then make the optional areas, and the areas that players skipped actually feel MEANINGFUL.

Not only would you make players more happy, but you'd be increasing the "useable" content viewed by players. Players would be more encouraged to explore side tunnels and whatnot. Boosting opt xp significantly would make many dungeons feel more fun and rewarding. Players might actually want to explore stuff they didn't previously, because the xp was so horrible in some of them before.

Otherwise, the original proposed xp change just nerfs xp for no good reason, and further cripples newer players or players still working on TR's, while people previously didn't have to do as much to gain the same xp.

Yeah, I pointed out earlier, if the optional xp is there.....WE WILL CLEAR THE DUNGEON. Proof = Epic WK. That optional xp is so nice that they nerfed optionals in a past update!

My solution was to leave everything as is now, add a BIG BIG slayer bonus for killing more stuff, and jack up optional xp across the board.

That's carrot, not stick.

 

[Haramel]

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.

In the reincarnation system where you have to repeat the same quests over and over most players have already explored all the quests and there is no incentive for further exploration. It is very tiring to repeat content. DDO is a great game, but, sometimes, it seems you can't find solutions that don't punish players tired of being in the hammster wheel.

 

[Kortar]

SSG's war on player speed is a fool's errand, no matter which stick you throw at us we will adapt and keep going. By the time you manage to slow down the fastest players you will have alienated the majority of your player base, I guess fewer players means less lag.

If you want to reduce zerging behavior, you need to reduce the grind. If the grind wasn't so daunting I never would have cared about XP/Min and would still be doing every optionnals and killing everything in every quest like I did the first 10 lives or so. But the lack of progression made me try to speed things up. It was your design decisions that turned me into a zerg.

There are many ways to reduce the grind but SSG seems to be so afraid that their game isn't good enough to keep us around at the end of the TR train that they won't consider them.

 

[Rage]

I think this is a fairly decent idea overall and it does help resolve the general thrust of the problem with monster skipping in quests and thereby deterring pathing/lag issues with monsters.

However, I think it does need a considerable amount of polish.

First, Reaper Tiers adding to delving XP or formerly known as bravery bonus XP is a very bad idea. I know many who do not like being pushed into R1's during the leveling process to maximize XP gains. Pushing them to further increase the skulls to get more XP seems like a slap in the face to those that do not like Reaper or want to participate in Reaper. Reaper I believe was considered an add-on to the game and never part of the "main" game. It should stay that way.

Second, there needs to be a detailed review of every quest to adjust aggression, onslaught, and conquest thresholds. It isn't enough to just set percentage kill thresholds universally across the board because some quests are leagues more difficult in terms of time spent to hit those marks. That is to say, many quests -perhaps a majority- will never be done because they will double or even triple the amount of time it takes relative to other quests where things are a lot more linear.

Yes, this isn't just a handful of quests. This is like ~80% of the quests that needs to be relooked at. It's unfortunately, a lot.

Third, as others have almost universally suggested, there needs to be some carrot that goes with these changes. As of now, even with adjustments to monster kill thresholds etc. these changes will substantially increase leveling times. There's no way around that. If you're going through killing every monster encountered in the most ideal path to the end, it will increase times for many people.

If you have to go through every side passage and through every door in order to hit those conquest marks, it will dramatically increase leveling times even for "regular joes" who are just playing normally and not meta-gaming the game.

I'm not sure what the carrot may look like but it needs to be legitimate and it needs to be packaged with the final product and not after to maintain goodwill with the players, imho.

All in all, I'm not totally objecting to the changes and even consider the general theme of the idea to be a good one. But it definitely needs a much deeper review. I would put something like XP changes to be probably -the- most controversial topic to touch and the most complicated, especially so in terms of game company to player relations.

Thanks for listening if you got this far. xD

 

[karthunk]

Move the proposed experience values for killing NPCs into the optionals.

 

[Cesaro - Tandy]

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?

Why reduce the speed of the players is a mandatory thing? So they will not aggro as much moobs, causing a lot of monsters active at the same time, causing lag?
Solution: Reduce the time and distance that the moobs will follow players and desactive them where they lost agro.
- Player who likes to kill, will continue to kill
- Player who like to speed, will speed even more whithout causing any harm to the server.
Why not this is viable?