New exp system

[Rapugnak]

I will hold my personal opinions of the new exp system as not to taint the results of this poll. I will say that even the smallest changes can in a system can have far sweeping impacts in the way that system works... please take the time to share your feelings if you vote as to why you voted that way.

[Day Old Bread]

I believe we all need to stop placing so much importance on how XP is gained and just play for enjoyment.

There are a wide variety of ways to gain experience that appeal to a wide variety of play styles.

[SardineTheAncestor]

I see no issues with it. Leveling got faster and less demanding.

I still think the level cap is too high but the speed at which you can level vs. the level cap itself are two separate issues.

[zDark Shadowz]

People who have more time to both roleplay and dungeon will level up quicker than those who don't, considerably.

Nothing has really changed.

[ViktorYouFool]

I'm not sure what the improvement with this change was supposed to be, but I can tell you the impact. Before the change, I had largely the same group of folks that I could reliably count on to show up for whatever my group was doing, whether that was dungeon stuff, social RP, events, and so on. Now several of them are on that character once a week or so, usually just long enough to run a dungeon or two, before disappearing back into the mists and playing their alts instead.

The primary effect of all this seems to be to tell people that if they enjoy the content on the server, then they need to have multiple characters at once and bounce between them depending on who is capped at any given time. The net effect of this is less story cohesion, relationship development, and role-play overall. Even with the "RP xp shortens the cool down" effect, you can get the necessary ticks in while running the dungeons themselves.

I've not noticed any real benefit in xp gains, just a net loss in RP.

[SardineTheAncestor]

Personally, I noticed plenty of that even when I was active. That's just what you get with caps, especially ones that count offline time.

I also noticed some players becoming really frustrated with the previous XP system, not just because it was unclear, but because they felt that no matter what they did, they were going to have to spend a lot of time dungeoning if they wanted to reach an appropriate level anyway.

If people are planning their play entirely around XP gains or other rewards, that's up to them, you'll never convince them to play otherwise. RP XP could be buffed and combat XP nerfed to tilt the incentive into the favour of RP XP though.

[Day Old Bread]

I'm not sure what the improvement with this change was supposed to be, but I can tell you the impact. Before the change, I had largely the same group of folks that I could reliably count on to show up for whatever my group was doing, whether that was dungeon stuff, social RP, events, and so on. Now several of them are on that character once a week or so, usually just long enough to run a dungeon or two, before disappearing back into the mists and playing their alts instead.

The primary effect of all this seems to be to tell people that if they enjoy the content on the server, then they need to have multiple characters at once and bounce between them depending on who is capped at any given time. The net effect of this is less story cohesion, relationship development, and role-play overall. Even with the "RP xp shortens the cool down" effect, you can get the necessary ticks in while running the dungeons themselves.

I've not noticed any real benefit in xp gains, just a net loss in RP.

Interesting take. As far as I understand it, that's just a bonkers response to the new system. It means more time for the PC to get out of blind drive and less experience all together. I don't think anyone reaches blind drive any faster and so they're effectively slowing their progress by jumping into an alt instead.

Is it possible the crew you run with us just getting more into other characters? I could speculate all day. But my take on it is that the changes are very small for the dungeon grinders and more forgiving for the RP focused crowd. Anyone in the middle should see an improvement in the rate at which they gain experience.

Oddly enough, I am floored when I hear people are stuck in blind drive. In three years of playing I think I've only reached that level of XP exhaustion a handful of times.

[SardineTheAncestor]

I've known plenty of people who I'd consider fantastic RPers to prefer the adventure of dungeons especially during the period when there were almost no MPCs or DMs active. I found it very unfortunate that the only reward for their time, in a community which seems so absorbed with reward vs. time investment, was gold they felt they didn't need due to the way the economy works.

[Cody]

My only gripe with the system is that there is a very distinct cap on how much you can roleplay towards trying to speed up your recovery. You could spend hours and hours of time roleplaying in the 5-6 days it takes to recover fully, but roleplaying doesn't seem to make it significantly faster compared to without. Except maybe there being a single day shaved off of the total time.

I don't really need a reward for roleplaying, but it is nice to see continual benefit for doing so if a person does want to go dungeon faster for more XP.

As others also mentioned, I do find it disappointing at times your characters can make friends with others, but OOCly the other players are prohibiting themselves from adventuring with you just because of XP caps. Then when the time comes they're out of the caps, now it's your turn to be in the blind drive.

Oddly enough, I am floored when I hear people are stuck in blind drive. In three years of playing I think I've only reached that level of XP exhaustion a handful of times.

I've gone up to level 10 in maybe around a month or a month and a half with the character being my sole actor at the time. If I did about four dungeons in two days around Barovia I would hit the caps very easily.

Maybe this is harder to do for higher level characters that need much more XP to gain progress?

[ViktorYouFool]

I'm not sure what the improvement with this change was supposed to be, but I can tell you the impact. Before the change, I had largely the same group of folks that I could reliably count on to show up for whatever my group was doing, whether that was dungeon stuff, social RP, events, and so on. Now several of them are on that character once a week or so, usually just long enough to run a dungeon or two, before disappearing back into the mists and playing their alts instead.

The primary effect of all this seems to be to tell people that if they enjoy the content on the server, then they need to have multiple characters at once and bounce between them depending on who is capped at any given time. The net effect of this is less story cohesion, relationship development, and role-play overall. Even with the "RP xp shortens the cool down" effect, you can get the necessary ticks in while running the dungeons themselves.

I've not noticed any real benefit in xp gains, just a net loss in RP.

Interesting take. As far as I understand it, that's just a bonkers response to the new system. It means more time for the PC to get out of blind drive and less experience all together. I don't think anyone reaches blind drive any faster and so they're effectively slowing their progress by jumping into an alt instead.

They aren't slowing anything at all. According to the writeup for the thing it takes about half an hour a day, or six hours or so across a rolling week, of RP XP to maximize your XP Cap cooldown. You can easily get that during the one or two goomba runs you make per week. There is no additional benefit to anything beyond that. You can very easily max out multiple characters simultaneously and still be at full XP cooldown benefits.

Oddly enough, I am floored when I hear people are stuck in blind drive. In three years of playing I think I've only reached that level of XP exhaustion a handful of times.

I have been in blind drive at basically all times on this character since I was level 6 or so, with the exception of for about two weeks after I stopped playing him for nearly two years. I've hit red cap three times since the change was made, the first time less than a week after someone on staff said they don't expect very many people to ever see that point. Once you are in that cycle, it's very difficult to get out of without saying 'Okay, I guess I'll just quit playing for a few months.' I can go a week or two without doing anything and be back in blind drive in a single night of actually playing the content.

Pretty well everyone in my extended group of people is in the same boat, and now our conversations about going to do something chiefly revolve around who isn't going to bother because they are in such severe penalties. So we just do less stuff as a group, overall.

So at this point, the way the server is set up, the only practical solution is to just train up several PCs at once, because that's the only way to actually do those things and continue playing with the players I wanted to play with. The net result is that I will spend less actual time RPing on my main dude, because he'll by necessity be on less while I go fool around on characters who have even less RP going on because they only exist to goomba.

[zDark Shadowz]

Regardless of what you do, combat or roleplay, people will only be falling behind those in levels that consistently roleplay with anyone and anything.

For those that somehow haven't seen the XP brhaviour yet, when you are at blind drive, it only takes one level appropriate dungeon per week to remain at a state of switching between slow-down and blind drive. That's genuinely the rate it goes.

If someone isn't seeing that they're still coasting off of other buffers created at character generation or extended periods of time of roleplay over combat, or they're level 5s-10s still killing beetles and skeleton knights and things far below their level they believe are actually for their level for one reason or another.

People that lead a more mechanically challenging roleplay style over a socially challenging one will inevitably encounter blind drive one way or another unless they are a really casual player.

People that spend far too much time in combat will experience a perpetual state of blind drive. People that spend far too much time in roleplay (there is such a thing, unhealthy hour scheduling) will (and have) power levelled onwards and upwards while never seeing what a blind drive is.

The mechanics have been spoken of and even if the numbers themselves are fairly enigmatic by virtue of not being apparent... if you want to level fast, you have to roleplay. There is no getting around that fact.

The combat XP buffer just determines on which side of the central level point you should be sitting at in terms of time spent in game and how much you have roleplayed.

If you want to move the focal point of where you sit for your expected level, only real life time passing, and roleplay XP will shift it upwards.

It's just the math of how the system works. Increased and decreased percentages against the combat experience, do not shift that point on the scale, because that point on the scale is only = time + roleplay XP. A percentile buffer for combat XP, negative or positive, is still trapped and locked to that point on the scale.

It's not math numbers that you can see, but it is math theory that you can apply. You have to roleplay if you want to level fast.

Alternatively, make multiple characters and they all benefit from their own XP caps that shift the same amount of time. Technically makes it worth it, but it does split ones attention.

The TLDR graph:

[Day Old Bread]

Pretty well everyone in my extended group of people is in the same boat, and now our conversations about going to do something chiefly revolve around who isn't going to bother because they are in such severe penalties. So we just do less stuff as a group, overall.

I guess I was under the impression that before the changes people were getting so far into blind drive that they were getting basically 1 xp vs. where they are now, knowing that they're getting 0 xp.  So to me it sounds like the solution is just to bring it back up to extreme xp gain penalties but still let it trickle in one xp at a time.  Just gotta keep dangling that carrot.

[ViktorYouFool]

Pretty well everyone in my extended group of people is in the same boat, and now our conversations about going to do something chiefly revolve around who isn't going to bother because they are in such severe penalties. So we just do less stuff as a group, overall.

I guess I was under the impression that before the changes people were getting so far into blind drive that they were getting basically 1 xp vs. where they are now, knowing that they're getting 0 xp.  So to me it sounds like the solution is just to bring it back up to extreme xp gain penalties but still let it trickle in one xp at a time.  Just gotta keep dangling that carrot.

This really is it. Everyone in my extended groups has been on blind drive basically their entire play through, but there is a world of difference between knowing you're probably not getting much out of it at this point and yet doing it anyway out of some vague sense of progress and getting those "EXPERIENCE GAINED - REDUCED BY CAP" or worse "NULLIFIED BY CAP" red messages that keep reminding you "Sorry, you're wasting your time." 

To paraphrase a friend: it's one thing to tell me that the trolls are giving me 1xp each. That's fine, it means I just need to kill 14,000 more trolls. When I get a message informing me they are 0xp each, that tells me to quit playing -- which is exactly what I'm watching happen. 

Honestly, if the goal was really to convince people to RP more rather than just tell the goomba-grinders to pound sand, the smarter trick would be to uncap RPXP gains on Dungeon XP benefits. Instead of just having a threshold of "if you get at least X amount of RP XP, it increases the XP penalty cool down by 20%" make them trade directly. Make Every tick of RPXP worth some tiny amount of reduction towards my XP penalty so that when I'm capped in one direction, it's time to go RP XP grind in the other. A hard week of meetings then clears my cap entirely and I can go grind hard in the other direction.

As it stands now, it feels very much like the only smart play is just to start an alt while I let my main character cool down.

[Day Old Bread]

This really is it. Everyone in my extended groups has been on blind drive basically their entire play through, but there is a world of difference between knowing you're probably not getting much out of it at this point and yet doing it anyway out of some vague sense of progress and getting those "EXPERIENCE GAINED - REDUCED BY CAP" or worse "NULLIFIED BY CAP" red messages that keep reminding you "Sorry, you're wasting your time." 

To paraphrase a friend: it's one thing to tell me that the trolls are giving me 1xp each. That's fine, it means I just need to kill 14,000 more trolls. When I get a message informing me they are 0xp each, that tells me to quit playing -- which is exactly what I'm watching happen. 

Ignorance is bliss, right?  Seriously though. I can appreciate that take on it.  And I can see where it would certainly feel like a slap in the face to see that red "Nullified by cap" message.  Being that I've never experienced it, I honestly can't speak to how it feels.  So then the question I have is, if nothing were to change aside from that message telling you you're capped, would that change how you and your friends approach playing? Secondly, is it fair to allow someone to believe they're progressing when they really aren't?  I do see the value in a more direct exchange of RP XP for Blind Drive, XP exhaustion, whatever you want to call it. Might just be that it's too difficult to implement.

[Revenant]

Small point of fact - you weren't getting 1 XP per kill, when under the same level of cap that now gives you 0 XP. You were getting more like .005 per 100 XP you "should" get. The regularity with which this is being brought up after the change does make me wonder if there's some bug with it, since I was also made aware that basically nobody hits that level of cap (at the time of the change).

[DaloLorn]

I have also historically ended up in a near-constant state of blind drive, usually sometime after levels 6-8. In one case, I thought that was fairly reasonable, as my party had done an inordinately large amount of grinding, justified by the as-yet unknown amount of gold they might need to fork out for a regeneration spell for one of them. (The amount ended up being zero in the end, though.)

However, for most of my other characters, I've never felt that I was doing anything particularly extraordinary. I do hear stories in one of the Discords I'm in, about blatant powerleveling adventures undertaken by its members... but to my knowledge, I've never done anything of the sort. (... Well, except that time someone took Aela and a bunch of other blasters into a temple in Har'Akir, and they casually engulfed the place in fire. I guess that was probably pretty rewarding for the amount of trouble we had. )

[Brian D]

lower and mid level characters are the ones who get hurt by this system, while they are slowed down to a crawl, upper level characters who don't concern themselves with levels as much because it takes them so long anyway, they are continuing to strip mine upper level dungeons, amassing wealth and items which are not filtering down to the lower levels. In short, they are getting richer and more powerfull. Congratulations, you have created a cast system!

[pretty]

My character spends 4/5 just role playing usually or looting things that are below her level.

Then we go a single dungeon and she jumps from fresh to slow down and second dungeon the day after she is in blind drive again, and that status takes a week of role playing to remove.


And i am leaving aside you need to gain coins as she is making barely enough to slowly build up. But getting coins keeps ticking blind drive up and thus my elf is forever locked between slow down and blind drive if i play extensively entire week while going once or twice to a dungeon.

[SardineTheAncestor]

It has always been that 1 or 2 dungeons can put you into blind drive, which is the same as slow down.

This server has never allowed players to rush up to a high level in just a couple weeks of focused farming. Level 10 in a month is still achievable, 16 in 6 months is still achievable, 20 in a year is still achievable. But you will find that those levels are redundantly high for all but a few activities.

The leveling rate is faster now if you follow the advice of the rest notices and XP messages and slow down before you get the red message.

I think it's a shame that it splits parties up based on who can gain XP and who cannot, but it isn't suddenly impossible to level up where once it was fast.

[PrimetheGrime]

So this has been mentioned before, but the xp system really didn't change all that much. The only difference from now and before is that you're being told when you're not getting any xp for something. It was put in place to make it easier to decide "do I want to grind some more and push through blind drive? Or do I want to rp and chill, waiting for it to go down?" Now you know that trying to push it wont help you.

Some dungeons will have a higher general xp amount coming from it depending on the challenge rating of the npcs and how many of them there are. If you're dungying all the time or doing short spurts of multiple dungeons you will become mentally exhausted/reduced cap very easily. Also fyi, any creature that you kill can count towards that combat xp cap. My advice is to take it easy, hang out in an inn, temple or gathering spot and just talk for awhile. Your cap will go down much quicker that way.

[DaloLorn]

I feel like some of the posts, both in this thread and the other, are ignoring one key thing:

You can be a pauper and level up quickly, or you can be decently wealthy and stuck in constant blind drive. With how quickly you can push yourself into blind drive, and how easily you can stay stuck there, you have to spend 95% of your time in town, and live with the constant understanding that you'll always be struggling to make ends meet, if you want to avoid that XP reduction.

[SardineTheAncestor]

Do you mean in terms of gold or XP? Either way, I'm not ignoring it, just disregarding it. Gold and XP are both optional as far as RP goes.

Blind drive is a choice. When you see it, you know what to do if you want to keep it or get rid of it. The new system provides real time feedback as to when you have reached the XP reduction and allows you to lose it more quickly if only you get 6 RP XP ticks a day.

[DaloLorn]

Do you mean in terms of gold or XP? Either way, I'm not ignoring it, just disregarding it. Gold and XP are both optional as far as RP goes.

Blind drive is a choice. When you see it, you know what to do if you want to keep it or get rid of it. The new system provides real time feedback as to when you have reached the XP reduction and allows you to lose it more quickly if only you get 6 RP XP ticks a day.

I mean you are actively pushed to choose between either gold or XP. Either you pursue gold and ram yourself into a state of permanent blind drive, or you pursue XP and remain a pauper until level 20.

There is no viable balancing act. Consider Pretty's post yesterday: Here you have a player who spends a ton of time RPing, plays the game on a daily basis, and still blind-drives just from trying to get the minimum amount of gold his character needs to keep growing.

Furthermore, the assertion that gold and XP are both optional only works if you don't plan on, I don't know, fending off hostile PCs. Loravara(sp?) is a bodyguard; what use is she if she can't land a hit on anyone, and if all she has to work with are a rusty sword and a rotten breastplate?

[SardineTheAncestor]

But there are plenty of ways to gain gold which don't involve gaining combat experience at all. You'll just be subjecting yourself to a different kind of grinding. Crafting, gathering herbs or whatever to sell it, ninjalooting... some of it you can even do while grouped up and RPing. Not all activities can be provided with the same homogenised rewards so that everyone gains as much.

Besides that, there is a viable balancing act. Save money instead of spending it, and do not go into dungeons if you have any XP reduction at all. This is a real option for any class, even if you don't make much, you will eventually have plenty if you don't throw it away. And if you are extra patient, wait until strong desire I suppose, then it's impossible to fall into blind drive without doing 2 or 3 at-level dungeons in one day.

The cap is restrictive if what you like to do is log on, find a group, and adventure. This is a viewpoint I support. I completely believe the claims that people are feeling disincentivised to go dungeoning with friends because they're at cap. I wouldn't dungeon at cap either.

I see the problem, but I don't think it lies in not being able to make "enough" gold or avoid the cap. And, not to dismiss what you are saying, but PvP is its own can of worms.

[Pav]

Playing around with this in the last few weeks has made me come to dislike the gameplay aspects of this server more than ever. It has been genuinely unfun to play, and the arbitrariness of the Roleplay Progression system is only empowering my frustrations.

To clarify, I have played a character that had the maximum potential bonus experience for not dungeoning. After a single dungeon, it went away. That's business as usual. What I wasn't ready for is the fact that within the same day, doing like level dungeons, I would become capped. Roleplaying seemed to have done nothing, and roleplaying in dungeons seems to just... not work, as I have not gotten the Progression by Roleplay tick more than a couple of times today, while roleplaying extensively. I imagine there's an oopsie somewhere in the database, considering the recent instability of the server on the Beamdog client, and that something, somewhere, is fundamentally broken.

Regardless of that, I find the server's continued punishment of players wanting to play the game to be disheartening. People don't come to play on Roleplay servers unless they intend to roleplay (and if they don't intend that, they either leave, don't bother anyone, or get banned swiftly). Why is it still a thing? How does it actually help? It seems to be on the same line as the Roleplay Progression cap at 14, something that is completely unnecessary and only limits the experience rather than expanding and enriching it.