TBS flawed reward downscaling system

Currently on Mangler all the TBS group tasks out of Katta for Orux and faction have had their rewards grinded down to near min. It seems like the system was designed for a much smaller base then Mangler has.

I understand having a system to encourage the player base to try different missions instead of just rerunning the few deemed "easy". The current system just drives them all down and recovery time is far too slow for the server population, and it's turned into a grinding nightmare.

Yea, this is a thing I posted in the discord about, but basically apart from the 2 or 3 missions that take place in Silyssar they all give paltry to garbage rewards and its set up to reward someone like me who grinded out missions immediately and punish anyone who started doing it later. These missions have no other reward for them, theres no autogranted item like DoDH or an end loot reward like many other missions. Theres no rare spawns or anything. Its just a straight faction reward.

It's really odd to me that one mission that takes my group 30 minutes to do is worth 180 orux and 90 faction but another mission we could do that takes 30 minutes that is only marginally less difficult gives 27 orux and 14 or whatever faction.

Was this actually designed to only lower amounts but not increase any others? With manglers population, it just results in most missions have terrible rewards.

It's currently taking 3-4 hours to get enough Orux for a Rank 2 spell. 10-15 hours if you want a purity aug.

Good luck if you don't have the faction yet.

The "reward balancing" in TBS was an attempt to prevent people from grinding the same mission (like Creator in DoN), but it can be a bit aggressive. Keep in mind there are 20 total missions. If a mission is run at a higher rate than others it gets reduced (to a minimum of 50% I think) while any mission run at least once but at a lower rate than others gets boosted (up to 300%).

Your best bet is to look at other missions (the non-progression ones are rarely done) and find one with a green reward.

Here is a list - https://www.raspersrealm.com/Everquest/TBS/mission_KattaSummary.html

From phinny I remember pretty much every mission involving Jewel and Thalassius + progression missions being very low rewards because they are just easy or required for Solteris access. In comparison the annoying Zhiszha/Silysar ones were usually always green high rewards.

For some reason Stone Tongue from Jewel was often unusually high reward though, maybe people didn't understand the event?

If ALL the missions are in red though that seems like a bug.

I know what you guys are talking about with one exception: Where does this red/green show up?

I want to say that when you preview the reward for the task the Orum reward will either be in Red or Green font coloring depending on how much the mission has been run recently, with Red being really popular and green being unpopular with rewards scaled to account for it.

Heres my mess of a table because I don't know the codes on this forum or if its possible to make a real table.

╔═════════════════════════════════╦════════════════════════
║ Mission ║ Zone ║ Reward ║
║ *Knowledge for Power ║ Atiiki ║ 51 ║
║ Stone Tongue of Ateleka ║ Atiiki ║ 25 ║
║ The Great Invasion ║ Atiiki ║ 59 ║
║ Fate of the Combine ║ Atiiki ║ 50 ║
║ Gorillas in the Garden ║ Atiiki ║ 25 ║
║ *Locating the Statue ║ Thallasius ║ 28 ║
║ Coral Diving ║ Thallasius ║ 25 ║
║ Evidence of Unity ║ Thallasius ║ 35 ║
║ Sea Serpents ║ Thallasius ║ 50 ║
║ The Hydromancer ║ Thallasius ║ 33 ║
║ *The Snakes are Hiding Something ║ Zhisza ║ 55 ║
║ *Counter-Attack! ║ Zhisza ║ 102 ║
║ *Confront Emperor Vaakiszh ║ Zhisza ║ 81 ║
║ The Domes are Cracking ║ Zhisza ║ 27 ║
║ Leave No Stone Unturned ║ Zhisza ║ 27 ║
║ *Where there's a Will ║ Silyssar ║ 88 ║
║ *Slay the Serpent ║ Silyssar ║ 172 ║
║ *Stop the Ritual ║ Silyssar ║ 163 ║
║ The Source of Shissar Power ║ Silyssar ║ 180 ║
║ Immortal Coils ║ Silyssar ║ 180 ║
╚═════════════════════════════════╩════════════════════════

* denote a flagging task

Formatting sucks because it stripped out my spacing.

There are currently 5 tasks over 100, a further 6 between 50 and 100 and 8 that are below 50 but most near or at 25.

I guess the question is, what is the baseline supposed to be? It seems odd the lowest mission gives 12 faction but the highest gives 90.

That said, I would really like to do something besides The Source of Shissar Power and Immortal Coils for faction.

Just a note, full credit to raspers guide cause thats what I copied and used as a baseline for mission list.

The baseline for the first ten is 50 orux, which can scale down to 25 (as you see). The rest vary between 55 and 90 I think. The 27's are from a 55 scaled down 50% for example.

On the reward preview it should show the reward in green (boosted) or red (scaled down)

try repasting from your source, like so (your spaces have been stripped now).

Code:

[code]
<paste your table with the spaces intact>

then
[/code]
to close the code block that should retain the spaces.

see if that works

Looks like it is working as intended. Those numbers are similar to what we had on Phinigel. You just need to run the missions no one else runs.

Are these values supposed to reset after some interval? Tried grinding out some orux earlier today and it was ridiculous how little these tasks were giving compared to what the same task was giving at the start of TBS, despite there likely being a fraction the number of people even doing these tasks at this point.

A week or two I'd guess. But keep in mind all it takes for a task to be in the balance pool is for somebody to have completed it recently. You'll have to decide which is better for you and your group, the simple task for 25 orux, or whichever difficult one that is rarely done and scaled way up.

I don't think they ever completely reset but they do adjust over time. The ones that are required for progression are generally never good orux in era. People keep doing them to flag alts, etc, and a lot of people do them to farm orux because they aren't familiar with any other tasks and can't be bothered to learn. It's well worth the effort to think a little outside the box and do the things others aren't doing.

You get faction fastest by literally doing the same missions in the same zone over and over again. Its a dumb system that punishes you for the actions of other players. And it won't get fixed or if it does it won't get fixed in a timeline that is even vaguely relevant to our server.

You want real rewards? Do nothing but the silyssar missions. We've got the answer, its working exactly as intended.

That's the conclusion I came to, which is lame because there's a good reason nobody does those ones. At least on the next TLP I'll know to grind a lifetime's worth of orux in the first week.

Another point to bring up, if they ever managed to retain a high pop into the TBS, the automated bot farmers could easily corner the market orux by just having scripted teams run all the easy missions. I know they have been looking ways to speed up the pace of TLP's that appeals to casual players.

Selo was originally marketed as a casual server, it just had an insane pace that scared off all the casual players. Mischief/Thornblade have a shorter classic/kunark and LDoN then a standard TLP.

This.
I can see what the aim was, only the time investment and the varying difficulty of the harder missions (Silyssar and Zhizsa) will not see the rewards system swing back in favour of the easier tasks (Atiiki / Thall). First in best dressed!

You seem to have missed the entire point of the system.

Why script the easy missions when you can just as easily script the hard missions no one else is doing and earn 5-6x more orux?