I'm not exactly into buffing the experience too much as I feel it is in a fairly decent spot right now, but many would disagree, and that crowd appears to be growing as time goes on. It's been a week and the posts about the experience grow more numerous by the day. I've been thinking over a few things and decided on something that seems reasonable. (The reason why I'm bringing this up is because I'd rather everybody enjoy their play time, these heavily negative threads that ONLY talk about the experience and potions are getting fairly tiring and I'm sure everybody just wants to have fun.) Instead of buffing experience around the board, try this. Provide a far greater bonus to more difficult challenges. What this means is that certain encounters or quests will provide a major bonus to your character development, giving the playing field a bit more level, so everybody can do what they enjoy (with some trouble, but not to the extent people feel it is now). Examples of things that could be buffed: -Quests that involve multiple steps and/or a lot of running (Potential boost about 30-50% depending on current reward). currently quests like these feel very under rewarding for time invested. Many quests in Nektulos Forest feel this way, same for Thundering Steppes. -Heroic boss encounters, and ^^^ mobs. These specific encounters in leveling take a while to kill, and drain plenty of mana especially from healers and/or mages. A fight that drains plenty of resources and takes quite some effort to bring down should yield a greater reward, especially if the mob is a higher level encounter than you. (Potential boost about 50-300% depending on relevance to the individual player's level, harder bosses yield greater rewards, letting the lower level people catch up easier.) -Quests that are currently out-leveling you, and heritage quests. If a player does a quest that is orange to them, and can take 10-30 minutes out of their day, I believe they should get a greater reward than 1-2% experience. Sometimes it feels like these quests are the only quests that you have available, but it feels very draining to do a quest like these and have the reward so small, and then the next quest be even more time consuming for a similar reward. (Potential boost = BONUS for quests being higher level. about 100-200% boost for quests of higher level.) Heritage quests are fairly few and seem to yield an underwhelming amount of experience for the time invested in them. -City writs hardly give any experience reward at least from what I've seen. The mobs give a greater return than the quest reward itself, even for first time. (Not even sure what kind of % would make sense here... Perhaps a 600% bonus for first writ?) -Crafting quests/rush orders consume vitality so quickly, and then when it is gone crafting is a complete drag. (Potential boost should be around 50%, especially with how writs start to get green before you can get to the next grind level. Ex - 20 - 24 - 29) These numbers may seem really big upon first glance, yet I've done a lot of this stuff and they all feel very under rewarding for the time spent on them. It's fine to have things be a little grindy, but an orange quest that gives 1% experience doesn't feel like a grind, it feels like a brick wall to an extent. There are always alternate methods to gain experience, but I feel that the BEST way to get experience should be to challenge your character, challenge the player. Note: All that was provided above are EXAMPLES of adjustments, in no way am I saying this is the best route to take, but I feel this would certainly lighten the load a bit, take the weight off of the shoulders of players and developers alike so we can all enjoy this lovely creation. Enjoy FG guys Hope this seems viable to everyone.
Yesterday I posted the following reasons to address the rate of experience gain. I am not sure what you suggest would address these areas as effectively as may be needed. I believe you could effectively double the rate of experience gain across the board as a first attempt to address this issue. By doing this you could address the outleveling of quests, encourage people to play alts (which keeps people interested in the game longer in terms of replayability) and address a common issue I have seen in groups. That issue would be someone joins a group then burns through their vitality and log out as the experience without vitality is not worth it for a segment of the playerbase. I believe DBG could institute this simple change today and publish it via their forums and social networking. I believe this change would be seen very favorably by the playerbase. 1. Not feel so grindy. 2. Many people like to play alts and more than one main. 3. Those who are late to the server are not totally left behind. 4. Encourage more play styles than just grouping in contested dungeons.
33% is how much it feels off. I would settle for less than that as a flat increase, if they added a group XP bonus to boot. Group XP grinding in this game feels like I'm playing C64 Lemmings.
The thing is, 33% would do virtually nothing to experience gained in groups. There are also multiple quests that hardly give any experience at all. 33% across the board would overshoot some things while not doing nearly enough to other things (most of the content) My suggestions were to provide a bonus so what you do in between main questlines feels more rewarding and actually worth it. People want it to be in sync, 33% wouldn't do that. Also, it depends on a flat increase to what... Everything? If collections gave even more experience than they already did their value would shoot up a ridiculous amount because they give massive experience while everything else is a barely noticeable difference.
Experience gain rate is not a function of server type. Yesterday the Community Manager stated the new server was not designed to be reflective of the original launch back in 2004. So, we are talking about a time locked progression server and the experience rate could be reflective of live servers or something in between that and the original product launch. I believe to maintain a healthy population for the server the four areas of concern need to be considered. 1. Not feel so grindy. 2. Many people like to play alts and more than one main. 3. Those who are late to the server are not totally left behind. 4. Encourage more play styles than just grouping in contested dungeons. Doubling the rate of experience would address all of these areas to some degree. If you want a healthy server population you want to encourage many types of play styles. Bring on the hardcore and casuals, boxers and soloers, hard core raiders and altaholics, adventurers and crafters.
^^^^^^ This..... For my first character I can tolerate this exp.....I dont like it but I am clenching my teeth and pushing thru. Doing some stuff (quests) I would normally skip and thats interesting. BUT, I'll be thinking twice about doing this again and again. If I am groaning and complaining over my first character....doing alts is a big red flag of no fun. My idea has been increasing the exp of the levels for the past expansion. So when DoF comes out 1-50 gets an exp boost. When KoS comes out 1-60 is now boosted. Maybe the exp for this is equal to Stormholds exp. So exp boost isnt ridiculous but its better then how it feels now.
Doubling the rate of experience can only go so far... There is experience in this game that doesn't scale what-so-ever so grouping starts to get more and more diminishing a lot quicker. If the experience rate is doubled people will still fall behind, doubling the exp would only slightly delay the inevitable, and it would likely break more than it would fix. Experience needs tuning to an extent, but not across the board. Buffing everything would mean certain quests and all collections give WAY more than they already do. Try to pay more attention to little detail rather than the big picture. Most rewards are too small, yet some are completely massive. Quests like Windstalker Rumbler and the Gobbler give around 10% experience even if you are higher level than them. These quests would be MASSIVE blasts of experience where everything else is still barely noticeable. not all experience rates need to be tuned, some areas are just lacking.
I like the xp now, but I suppose it could be kind of a grind on alts, or after the first wave of players have moved on. Maybe they could do a veteran bonus where you get some sort of xp boost for every character above x level.
I don't mind it myself, I'm pretty sure I mentioned this post isn't for me, but more for the huge amount of people that feel like they are forced to buy potions and can't level alts.
None. The whole point of the server is to enjoy the leveling and the experience. I'm doing just that.
After spending some time crafting today I harvested a couple hundred tuber strands figuring I could get 2 toons from 14-19. Not unreasonable, way more than is necessary on other servers but thinking I did some extra work to make sure my tailor/sage would be fine. WRONG. Crafting exp is completely broken. I ran out of all hides/tuber strands and didn't even make level 15 on ONE toon. Spending 45 minutes with 100% vitality and not even going 14-15, sawing through 30% of my vitality has completely killed crafting. I got 80% into 14 and just stopped. Harvesting 1000 tuber strands to go 14-19 seems a little ridiculous. The adventure exp is fine because of heroic ^^^ content and groups in dungeons....Crafting doesn't have this option and such should have better exp rate than adventuring.
Maybe for each character you get to lvl 50 (current maxlevel), you get a package of Potty sent to your mail (or claimable) that you can use on alts to speed up their experiencegain.
I haven't really started crafting. How far do you get doing the crafting quest lines? I know there is one in the newbie zones of FFS and DLW, there is the one that you get in your home city from doing the newbie area, and there is one in New Halas. I'm pretty sure I've heard there are others, but I'm not sure where. Just curious if maybe that's the way to go over just grinding out the combines.
1-7 will be done in the DLW questline. From there, grind to level 9 then get your subclass (dont even need 100%, just gotta be level 9.) Then, go to Frostfang. Questline there will take you to 14.5 with vitality. Then grind the rest up to 15, and do work orders to 20. From there, rush orders to 50. Good luck!
