No documentation regarding Player_ExpBonusMaxRangeSquared

In R36 there is a maximum distance that players in your party will receive the following benefits (in R35 there are scene-wide):

Splitting gold that is looted
Have access to loot the creatures that are killed
Grandmasters providing apprenticeship buff to partymembers

Is there any particular reason this noticeable change to game mechanics wasn't mentioned in the dev notes? Are the 20 units of distance the same units used for range on tooltips (if so it is possible for a party member to not get gold/loot even when participating in the kill with 30 range glyphs)? The naming of this variable also indicates intent to prevent xp from being shared past this range, is that assumption correct (and if so have you planned for the blowback of breaking some players primary income source)?

I personally don't care if players are selling/buying xp, but if the two assumptions are correct then this change could lead to issues for primarily ranged characters in a patch that will be pushing people to experiment with something other than magic (due to resistances being added).

 

Fight like a man, there is no skill in killing poor beasts with long shots across half the map Just kidding, this change is really annoying because the party bonus was neat for party to cooperate in one map and fight in different areas, now it really feels it is best to use singleplayer... or to abuse xp boosts in very specific scenarios.

 

Edit: This post was based on old data from an older QA patch and is superceded by live patch 416, post about 416 is below

I believe, specifically, that this variable that you've pulled out of the game library, is meant to work directly in contrast with the 20% party experience bonus which was right before it(10% for party, 10% for each extra person). This fixes the current system where two people party, they each run through opposite ends of the map, effectively fighting solo, but each benefiting from the +20%.
Whereas with this they'd each get their appropriate 50% splits vs the 70% previous.

It also fixes part of the issue with people "Selling" experience when the person buying was halfway across the map safely mining/etc.

But again, if you're going to pull variables out of the library, at least post what is around them, as those context clues are highly relevant.

 

I provided the relevant areas this constant currently effects (the list of three things is changes). Like most contants it is stashed in TweakValues so the surrounding code is only marginally related to the topic at hand (the variables usages are more telling than surrounding code).

If people are interested in discussing the game in a more technical format then I am glad to do so, but this current context limits the scope of what should be discussed.

 

I was talking about the adjacent lines in the tweak list:
public float Player_ExpBonusInParty = 0.1f;
public float Player_ExpBonusPercentPerPartyMember = 0.05f;
public float Player_ExpBonusMaxRangeSquared = 400f;

Which implies heavily that this only affects the exp bonus.
I know this was one of the first things i tested once QA went live, and then it only affected the bonus, so unless something's hit in the latest QA patch that changes that, I question your earlier assumptions.
We were getting gold split/exp split/etc at full distance, just the bonus 20% was missing.

I'm patching up now and will test the newest version on it.
Also per a discussion with one of the devs earlier, this particular library should be compiled to full binary shortly, so we'll lose this window into how things work, at least not near as easily. I've been using this chance to pour over to find any code edge cases (like a recently discussed issues with monsters missing high level players who are naked but not equipped) that we need to get eyes on before then.

 

Trace usages on that variable.

 

Hrm, interesting.
Good find @0Psiris

Confirmed on newest patch, 416. Looks to also be in 415, but not in my pull of the initial release patch for QA in 412. Working back through patches to see when exactly the extra functionality snuck in.

I agree, this -definitely- should have been reported in changelog, especially due to 20 is hardly an appropriate distance just due to the existence of range 30 abilities (obsidian arrow/archers) and the fact that there are times you want to outrange a character before it dies (troll/pheonix) so you don't get hurt.

I am also equally disappointed it seems to not affect EXP anymore, which was one of the only reasonable situations to have it exist in the first place.
One of the big points of partying is pairing up adventurers with crafters, a group of adventurers may decimate a scene, and a couple dozen yards behind there a skinner is working his way through the corpses for them, catching up when he can, which they now can't loot/skin, but they still get exp from.

If people are out of 40 range, no exp, no loot, no nothing.
If they're within that, let em.

Given it's iterated appearance, i may guess this is getting polish but it'd be nice to get confirmation from whoever is heading up this initiative?