Daily XP Pool - Get more people playing

Helping does not pay the bills, If i do not give them money, and others do not as well, The game fails. If we do not get more players, the game fails. If we do not come up with some new ways to Keep, Maintain, and get people to invest in the game, the game fails. But whatever keep putting me down as the bad guy for wanting to help everyone.

 

Im not a big fan of handouts or just power leveling new players because i don't think that really helps player retention. But if you did a bonus like this right, where its just a small bonus for early game and scales like people have mentioned, I don't think it really causes any issues.

It could even be activated by the oracle and have a small quest attached to it.

As for the players arguing that its not fair because they had to earn their xp in a slower harder setup, well so did i. I never even did UT, i went there for a couple days, figured out how to solo it and found it extremely boring so i never went back and leveled in other zones. I would still like some bonus xp, why not?

I don't think giving players more experience is going to cause them to leave. It should instead make the grind a bit more bearable and alleviate the complaints a bit.

Ive leveled up characters since the changes and do think its much less of a grind already. Double xp helped and capping the max at 2 mil was a good change too. It still takes a ton of grinding to get to level 120+. Ive been playing since persistence and I'm only level 116 cause i don't enjoy grinding like crazy and i like to mix it up a bit.

Changes like this don't make it that much easier it will just allow for a reason for people to log in and go do different things they might not normally do because they feel the need to grind.

 

In relation to the op i agree that anything that encourages people to be logged in helps a lot in influencing a players decision on which game to devote time to and also encourages others to play the game by fluffing the concurrency numbers. While i understand the need for gaining XP by being active and doing something primarily i also feel that it wouldn't hurt to encourage players just to be logged in or at least not discourage it.

SotA has no hooks to keep people online, in fact with the afk 1 hour/log off mechanics its done the actual opposite. Many times i have come back from walking the dog or something and find i am logged off, why?? Black Desert does it well ( When i played) by having AFK fishing. Makes the game at least seem more active and alive.

Its always confused me a little why they game hasn't been designed to specifically encourage people to be logged in, even if they are not actively doing anything. Game concurrency numbers are looked at especially with Steam published games to see how popular a game is and if it is thus worthwhile playing. A crude and simple rating/review system which i wager encourages/discourages gamers more so than actually wordy reviews. If its worth playing its got high concurrency numbers, right.

The game needs to encourage concurrency numbers and that's why i support the OP and also wish it to extend to not being so aggressive in discouraging people being logged into the world.

 

In some MMO games I have played they incentivised players to log in and play each day by providing bonus or double exp gain for a short period which refreshed each 24 hours. Once this double exp bar was exhausted (oft shown as a second bar alongside level gain) the game reverted to standard exp gain. This would almost always make me log in, even just for an hour or so each day, to benefit from this short term daily booster.

 

As stated, Sota HAD this ...and got rid of it. I think it's time it came back.

This sort of thing - like daily login rewards - doesn't have to be big stuff - I've seen this done two ways;
Either have a calendar and every consecutive day you log in you work your way toward better stuff that resets monthly, or
Just have a login reward system that increments up - if you miss a day, no biggie, eventually you get to the 20th day logged in and get something nice.
They could hand out like some small amount of Coto, like 25 or something, as a daily login reward and on day 10 you get 100 or something.
Handing out currency in moderation often can encourage people to buy more too, so they can get something they want, that they might not have wanted to buy the full amount of cotos for but if they have a little pile from rewards its more likely.

Daily quests that are actually worth doing - perhaps that build up reputation with particular npcs, unlock recipes etc. that can only be gotten by doing so, etc.
Example: NPC Bob gives you a quest to go mine/harvest/obtain something or other, you turn it in, he pays you some small money/xp (like the current quest rewards, which by itself is not worth doing, BUT....you gain reputation with Bob, or Bob's faction, which increments up over the days/weeks and he offers better and better and more complex tasks. Then you implement a vendor that requires a certain faction standing or faction currency to get unique things. You could have as many different flavors of this as you want and people absolutely will log in if nothing else to make sure they get their dailies done.
It might be an idea that instead of putting every piece of new deco into the cash shop, that some of it be gated by some sort of recurrent activity system such as this.

Lastly, regarding the comment about Black Desert, afk fishing, and encouraging players to stay online.
Many games do this by adding idle/afk (extremely slow) activities. Its an opportunity for Sota.
A simpler solution perhaps would be to stop with the 20 at a time nonsense and just allow you to batch as much stuff as you're holding.
If I'm online, there's a much higher chance of someone needing help, messaging me to go do something, or etc. I'd absolutely park my character online smelting, making an insane number of hedges for a future deco project, etc and chatting while doing other stuff. The problem is the need for the every 2 minutes fiddle-about. If we're going to have tedious, time consuming activities that tie your character up, most people aren't going to want to do them during their "play" time. Making them require less attention means I maybe log on earlier and batch stuff while doing the laundry and cooking dinner, and then sit down ready to play, answer my chat messages, and sort out my inventory. I know there are concerns about people botting, scripting, automating, etc. But honestly it all goes back to you have to have the resources. If I buy materials for 1000 pie dough and park my character at a bench for six hours to make it, does it really matter if I am pressing the button every 2 minutes or not? Just let me batch it. I'll be online for hours. As it stands if I have to step away and I time out, I'm less likely to log back on and more likely to just leave it. If nothing else, it will make towns look fuller if there's people busily smelting away.