| yup, the new xp scale |
|
|
| yup, the new xp scale |
|
- lev 50 mobs are worth 20K (some of the more difficult ones will be worth more, but 'average' lev 50 mobs such as Dun mobs will stay at 20K as I understand it)
- There are mobs I can kill in 1 round that give me 4K, and others that I can kill in 2 or 3 rounds worth 9K
- Pkill deaths at lev 50 cost 375K, which is 18 'average' lev 50 mobs (previously it was 1 mill or 9 'average' lev 50 mobs) So now the comment - I will agree that a new xpscale is a good idea, to 'flatten out' the scale and make it more even, and to bring into play the underused mid to high level mobs that were not getting killed previously. However, my 3 main points with the new system are:
1) There is no incentive to kill high level mobs anymore (except for equipment). If I can kill 3 fairly easy mobs such as Bengal Lancers and get 8K each for them (losing few hps and with no chance of dying), why would I bother trying Big Jim for 20K when I will lose more hps, and there is a chance he could kill me?
2) There is less incentive to group. Because of the point above, I can see that people will kill fairly easy mobs by themselves all the time, instead of getting together with others to take on the bigger mobs - this obviously hits healers especially hard - they will have a hard time finding work and are not as good at killing for themselves.
3) It is harder to recover from a PK death. I know are are some people who feel that pkill death xp should be even less than it was previously, but I think there should definately be a reasonable penalty to a pk death. However, making the penalty effectively double what it was before seems too harsh to me.
Ok, so what to do about this? Well I think the lev 50 mobs need to have some sort of a premium on them, if a bengal lancer is worth 8K then surely Big Jim is worth at least 50K? I think that it needs to be worthwhile for a level 50 player to kill a level 50 mob, basically.
So. At lvl 29, i kill 7 or so outlaws, mostly in one round or so, and it nets me the same amount of xps as killing quickley, with whom i have to battle toe-to-toe and risking death at one miscalculation.
I haven't checked fleeing xp yet, so i won't make any comments on that but if it didn't change, it means two flees are worth a lvl 50 mob's xp. (At lvl 50 against lvl 50)
And the entire thing got flattened out, except at lvl 50, where we have all our unpaid interest from the lvls 1-50 accumulated and just waaaay overwhelming... much like having finished k-12, college, and PhD on a deferred loans. Not many of us will live long enough to repay that kind of a loan.
Maybe we can simply have an option where, at chargen, one can choose between the old and the new xp scale. Too much to ask, i know, but darn, the new xpscale is totally immature (premature, rather) Why wasn't there even a HINT of an effort to have the mobs xp adjusted when the xpscale went in?
Was there such a pressure from the players to have the xpscale changed that it couldn't wait a few more weeks to have the mobs adjusted? Surely SOMEONE must have seen the problem of killing half a dozen outlaws yielding the same xp as killing Herne, the hunter? It's not as if the old system was buggy and was waiting to crash upon us at any minute...
Did it get easier for newbies? New players?
i started a lvl 1 char, and found that my xp to lvl had more than doubled. Killed an eel, and it gave the same amount of xps as it had before. No, certainly for a lvl 1 char the new system isn't any easier. Isn't Lvl 1 the lvl that determines for a new player whether the mud is playable or not? From 3 xp rooms to lvl, it now takes roughly 4-5 xp rooms to lvl, and the mobs haven't gotten any easier. Heck, an eel still gets you to almost dead or so as a lvl 1.
So who did all this change benefit? New players who've already gotten beyond the introductory lvls, and have already made up their mind to give this mud a try. But at what cost? It's significantly harder now and stupefying for some of us who spend most of our online time as a lvl 50 char.
And, to those newly initiated to the mud, they'll never understand the thrill of bringing down a mob twice their size and lvlling in one kill. Almost sounds like the SAT inflation, GPA inflation, or whatever else that is being done to help out the declining new generation.
First, as for it being easiest killing mobs that are significantly lower level than you: that's going away. Next reboot you'll get less xp for beating up on mobs that aren't a challenge to you.
Grouping not being worthwhile: I think this is a symptom of very few of the high level mobs being worth anything more than 20k. I've found groupin to be just as worthwhile, if not more so at levels lower than 50. When the mobs are updated, I think it'll be worthwhile again.
As for the lack of effort in getting the mobs updated before it went in: It's basically impossible to figure out how much extra xp a mob should be worth without having some sense of the new scale. Sure, that rat in Tudor is slightly harder than a normal mob of it's level, but what does that translate into in the new scale? It's not a linear adjustment. Furthermore, a bunch of the builders spend a lot of time updating areas and they continue to do so. It's not an easy thing to do and requires a lot of effort. Please don't say that there was no hint of an effort for something that requires a lot of offline effort.
Having an option at character generation is impractical in terms of the code. It would create extra overhead that's not efficient. It wouldn't fit with the overall goal of the coding staff to make a releasable code base without anything legend specific in it. And finally, no one would choose the new xp scale as it is clearly harder.
Who did it benifit? The whole player base. Having a more rounded and sensible mud benifits everyone. Who does it make the game harder for? The people who have been around for a long time and won't be able to make it up levels as quickly.
As for pkill death being significantly harder to recover from, we're going to re-evaluate that in a few weeks once some of the other major problems have been worked out. If it severely effects people's desire to pkill, (as many are concerned), we'll change it. It's not a hard thing to change.
Also going in next reboot will be code which will set level 50s who have under 25m xp to 25m xp -- we pulled everyone else out of their xp holes so we'll do it for the level 50s, too.
-Ea!
Is there any particular reason the method selected to increase difficulty over levels involves a linear relationship between level and number of required kills? That is, a constant (26) plus number of levels which increases by a constant increment of 1 kill per level. This means that the rate of increase in difficulty is the same at the 'difficult' end of t the process as it is at the easy end of the process.
What is the reason for preferring this over say a power-function increase in the number of required kills per level, that is a constant multiplied by current level raised to a power. This produces a negative acceleration in the rate at which the number of required kills increases with level (ie the number of kills required increases with each level, but at a decreasing rate over levels. Thus each level is harder than the one before, but the rate of increase in difficulty decreases over levels. This doesn't make any difference to the total number of kills required between 1 and 50 but allows the rate of increase in difficulty to be manipulated by adjusting the power to which level is raised before being multiplied by the constant.
Anyway, didn't mean to ramble, I was just curious as to why this linear increase in difficulty was chosen.
Zelda the rambler.