Exp in instances nerfed?

They will only hurt themselves.

When a pvp server comes out most of us will be dead and buried for a hundred years at that point.

My guess is after next Wednesdays update you will be getting almost no AA exp on raids in AoC instances now.

It's sad, on Phinny during just a PoF raid in PoP I would get 2+ AAs. Even the people that just logged in for raiding would at least get some AAs, but that was too much for DBG, no more they say.

I wish they would give us a good reason rather than "they were never meant to be that way". They were meant to be a one time clone of the open world zone, so everyone expected the exp to be the same. It's not great in a raid, but it's not bad either, it's something extra.

Maybe they want to limit the number of AoC instances people spin up because their servers can't handle a bunch of them being up at once? That's the only legitimate reason I can think of.

Given that they changed pick zones due to server stability issues, it seems clear that 6 people spawning an AoC instance to XP in would cause even more of a server load. Yes the lockout is a week but even if only one group per guild is doing this on Phini per night that is 20 additional zones the server has to support, and that is not even including Agnaar and Coirnav doing it as well. On top of the server resource issue, there is also risk vs reward to consider, as has already been pointed out, since mobs don't respawn in the AoC the risk is simply not there and it is not how the game was built to be played, where respawn timers are an important consideration and game mechanic, which you either have to deal with by not pulling when respawn is due, or you have to crawl through faster than respawn occurs.

I do a fair amount of crawling through zones and it is quite possible to crawl to wherever you want if you bring a decent group and use good tactics to split and kill, one of the coolest parts is the time pressure of 'can I clear the next area before this one respawns?'. Sometimes you can't on first try and you have to rethink your tactics to make it happen.

With summer right around the corner you think they would be making changes to draw people into the game not push them away. Not that I used AoC's to get instances to farm xp ( mainly because of the lockout timer and conflicting with guild raids ) but I really dont see the harm here.

Seems simple. They want people to buy more potions.

You only have to play the game to realize it's not a server stability thing. The servers are running fine, and nearly all of live is private instances now as that is how the game evolved. I don't quite buy the "we're just now getting around to nerfing the rest of the instances" because none of them were nerfed previously. All of the raid instances on Agnarr gave normal group exp up until about 4 or 5 weeks ago when The Hole was nerfed. To consciously take a valued asset, that has been available since AoC implementation, away from the player base must have a little more thought behind it than "just getting around to it." A more conspiracy theory oriented guy might wonder if there's some RMT driver at play.

To be fair they could fix act to act xfers in about a week, if they wanted to.

You are correct, they could do many things if they focused their resources to one area. It's apparent it's not a top priority or else it would be done right away.

To me it's not a huge deal, though I have no personal problem with people xp'ing in their own dz. Perhaps that is something people care about when they sign up on a "classic" server, so I can understand the devs not wanting to encourage that behavior. Maybe I'd be more hot and bothered if I were starting over (again) on Coirnav, where there are not non-AoC instanced group expeditions to play yet (LDON, GoD, and onwards).

While I did use AoC's to kill old raid guys with a group, I never really relied on it for xp early in Phinigel due to lack of respawns. I do prefer not to deal with camp drama, so that is why I still enjoy playing on Phinny and did not re-roll on Coirnav.

You can still pop instances for sweet, sweet loot!

Only a matter of time, probably. Only got to give feedback on one of our families accounts. If DB is keeping count, the other 5 also cancelled because of this pointless blindsiding nerf. Would have liked knowing this was coming months ago.

This is a really disappointing change, the TLP servers are so crowded and camped in popular spots that it was nice having the option for a chill dungeon crawl without all the insanity of highly contested zones like Sebilis.

Lol... if you were getting 2+ AA's on a PoF raid, someone soloing/grouping the instance was probably getting slot-machine payouts.

Either way, given the instances don't logically scale xp-wise, it would be good if they simply turned Raid XP off in said Raid Instances, rather than playing whack-a-mole as people found exceptions to the rule they could exploit as the servers progress.

Oh yes.. the old mantra... Raiding is for loot! Grouping is for XP!

Welcome to Everquest, son. If you Raid for XP, you're doing it wrong.

And soloing is for cash money~

This is a very bad change, were you clearly did not see all the consequences out side of it making DZ's non attractive for XPing in, and at this point, why would you go this way?

You just necro'd a 2 year old thread. Not completely your fault as someone linked it like it was news. Anyways, there is a chance the recent changes were a mistake. DZs were already about 75% real exp. Now they are closer to 7.5%. Maybe there was an extra zero added somewhere.

You've just necro'ed a four-year-old thread to call out a dev who doesn't even work for the company anymore. Good job. The simple truth is, EQ is a MMO and not a huge single-player RPG. Pretty much every MMO in existence has raid content which is intended for looting and not levelling. I say bravo for them finally cracking down on this, it should help with server performance (read: lag). Anyone who can't find ways to grind XP in this game without running DZs every 30 minutes needs to git gud.

Above post stated what I did and just read it

/golfclap

Nerfing xp in DZ’s is disrespectful of players’ time. Why does a modern QOL improvement have to come with a huge asterisk?

I dislike it nearly as much as punishing raid XP gains to the point of near worthlessness. I’ve never understood the thinking behind that. “Thanks for putting in all the time and effort it requires to play our endgame, but sorry, you don’t get decent XP and loot at the same time.” If the xp bar is meant to measure how experienced I’ve become, why do the most difficult encounters and enemies in the game give less xp than the easiest ones?

In a game where the average raider has to commit 10-12 hours a week JUST to raiding, it would be cool if those adventures weren’t a complete waste of time experience-wise. I definitely wouldn’t burn out as fast if I could earn roughly the same amount of XP in a 3 hr raid as I could in a 3 hr group grind. That 9th PoFire raid 4 months into PoP sure wouldn’t feel like such a slog.