Two ADV level 90's - dragon slaying difficult

Well sure...but that goes both ways. There are power gamers in this discussion that are always very quick to say that crunching all those numbers and grinding out XP is fun for them so that's what the whole game should be about. I've been told repeatedly that perhaps this game "isn't for me" because I don't want to waste all my time doing that.

My stance has always been that we should attempt to accommodate as many playstyles as possible, but we should never reward one playstyle over all the others. In my mind this means that if you're letting a few folks get 1 million XP per hour by playing a specific way, that's not good for the other playstyles. The end result being that you have people like me that think that forces them to make choices about what they do with their time. Should I become the next Mac or Sara so I can continue to compete? Or should I just give up and quit the game because there's no way that I'll find any enjoyment out of that? I have to tell you that I'm very close to just quitting all together.

Even when you break down the macro XP, the game is clearly rewarding the min/max style of play at the expense of everyone else (by design). You can pick the monkey room, control points, a few other scenes, and that's it. Otherwise you're going to get less XP and fall behind.

I don't think that's the point, Solazur. You're level 98, great. But you're not 98 because you didn't play a lot. You're level 98 because you didn't farm the hell out of the monkey room or control points. The people that are higher level than you simply got more XP per hour because they figured out how to do that, what build to use, and what was most efficient. It wasn't some grand accomplishment. They just killed a bunch of stuff over and over again while you were talking to people or shopping or playing with your kids or whatever.

I'm not saying these are bad people and they need to be punished, I'm just saying that the only thing that allowed them to get to level 110+ was poor game design, nothing more. The developers could've stopped them from getting all that XP, but they chose not to. And unfortunately there are going to be real consequences for that. The game will continue to run out of content. The game will continue to be unbalanced. The game will continue to piss people off that spend a lot of time playing but don't see the same results because they're not willing to either A. compromise their character build (remember this is a roleplaying game) or B. blindly grind out XP taking the game to the least common denominator.

It's fine that some people love the numbers and love trying to get the "most" XP or whatever. But it's not fine that the game design rewards those people disproportionately. I would say that the average player probably gets less than 100k XP per hour. Meanwhile we have players getting 1 million XP per hour? You can't even get 1 million XP per hour if you're finishing the main quest line! But anyone that goes to a control point or the monkey room is some how entitled to that? It doesn't make any sense.

How does this help our game? What's the point of this? We've been doing it for years and it's not helping our population grow. So what's the justification for rewarding power hungry gamers with 10 times more XP than any normal player gets? Spoiler, there is no justification, it's poor game design.

 

The thing that Drocis forgets is that Mac is running into a wall:

I was going to say nearly this exact thing. We WILL all be there someday. It will just take some longer than others. Without the decay of XP upon death, the steep curve upwards after you get to 120ish does exactly what it needs to! Even Mac will see a time where it just takes too much to advance. He'll reach level 130 someday... in like a year. The curve will mean that all of us that "put in the time" will be in that same boat someday. It just takes a LONG time to be in that boat. Exactly as it should be! The outliers will find that they are not so much outliers at some point a while from now. This is a fact. And all of this withOUT any decay upon death.

*edit* - I forgot to finish the first statement about Mac "running into a wall"

 

That's what you say we're saying but isn't close to what we're saying. Actually stated more "I should be able to grind if that's how I want to play". Everyone else can do whatever they have fun doing. Also stated that the game needs more group content - especially come launch and that two L90s should be able to not get one-shot by the lowest level dragon.

Everyone's playstyle is rewarded in different ways. Mine with goals to be the best at something. Crafters with filling sick customer orders. Gatherers with mining and becoming filthy rich. POT owners with building their town. Guild leaders with running a guild. The relaxed group with their self-made quests and dance parties. The hospitallers with helping noobs. Merchants who sell items for me for a portion of the sale. Questers with questing and enjoying game content. Collectors with collecting. People who just want to hang out in my chat channel and shoot the **** every night while trying to repeatedly jump a gap. Everyone spends their time in game differently but not all are going to be rewarded the same way. I'll always get more XP than these other players but we all should be doing what we have the most fun doing.

If it's poor game design then stop calling specific players out and PM Chris.

Stopped me from getting 150k against low level troll, 200k in Deep Ravenswood and Ravensmoor, 450k in Wyrmsands, 300k on dragon, 700k in The Rise, 400-1 mil (depending on # of party members) in the The Fall, 700-1.2 mil in The Rise lich room, 1 mil soft capped at the new control point or in playing thousands of hours to do all the above? Be specific what they should have stopped and I'll point out what they have stopped.

 

Considering that there were a lot of gameplay mechanics which made leveling much easier before (including the absence of death XP decay) - I fully agree with this statement.

This is why the new starter areas are so important. Without them new players would just give up early and we would lose all chances of expanding the current playerbase. My gut feel is that making the main storyline quests completable by level 50-70 would make the plot progression & sense of achievement more continuous and enjoyable for the people who are just joing our community.

Everything else from lvl 60+ would be up to the individual player to achieve. Just my take on things, pretty sure there are other alternatives possible.

 

These are the last words spoken by BDF since Jan 4th. Any word on him?

 

i tend to count to thirty days when someone disappears like that before worrying. temp ban?

 

I don't know? I do not want to speculate or guess, I was just so used to him posting. I do not see how he would be banned. From what I quoted though I could see him leaving. I just wondered if anyone had any insight, not speculation.

 

that was actually meant to be reassuring. if he's silent because he's been banned, you don't have to worry that he's silent because he was hit by a car or something.

 

Ok cool. Ya sorry its hard to read context sometimes. What I am suggesting is although I rarely agreed with him, but he did build arguments that I had not always thought of and he made me think. Sometimes I ended up agreeing with him. His voice is missed here even if not always agreed with.

 

It was my intention to remain silent on this to spare the development team further drama. But I realize now that not saying anything at all will only encourage unproductive speculation.

I wasn't banned and I still check the forums regularly, though not as much as I used to.

I decided to stop posting and playing until the advancement model stops rewarding players with endless amounts of time to grind. I realize this may never happen.

It's my opinion that just like we should continue to avoid "pay 2 win" design choices, we should also avoid "time 2 win" design choices. There's a middle ground and we're nowhere near it. Currently to be a "top player" you are required to get around 1 million XP per hour. I find that to be a comically stupid design decision on several levels:

1. This is a roleplaying game. At least, it's supposed to be. It's fine if some players like to endlessly grind out levels, but it's not fine (imo) if that comes at the expense of roleplaying for everyone else. I believe that the further away the "top players" are from the rest of the pack, the less likely the community as a whole is to roleplay. I won't go into every reason for this because you either get it or you don't. (chances are if you're into roleplaying, you get it)
2. No player wants to play a game competitively if the odds are stacked against them from the beginning. For example, if you went to the park to play chess with someone else, but because they played all the time they were allowed to have all queen pieces and you only had one queen. That game would suck. People generally understand this reasoning to be true when it comes to pay2win. But for whatever reason there seems to be a disconnect when it comes to time2win. The fact that we have put obvious effort into making all the things people can pay for in this game virtually immaterial to how powerful a player is in the game was a great design choice. Why we can't extend that logic to "grinding" is beyond my understanding.
3. There was a time when I was a top player in this game (XP wise). I accomplished that over the course of a full year. But I have no more time to compete at that level. Certainly not if it means standing in "the monkey room" or a control point 12 hours a day. It just doesn't make sense for me (a roleplayer and someone that would like to pvp) to waste all my time in PVE hell just so I can hope to one day roleplay and pvp. It's a catch 22, even if I get to the point where I can RP and PVP effectively again, I'm then forced to sacrifice whatever PVE grinding time I have. There's no sweet spot, and the less time you have to play, the more true this is.

Some people will no doubt ask "What's changed? The game has always been like this!" I understand that point of view. But that's not entirely true from my perspective.

• The developers had stated several times that players with super high XP pools would "come down". They introduced decay as a method to do this, but the levels of and overall XP did not come down. The highest level players never stopped gaining XP. In fact they became more efficient in gaining XP as they learned how to play (and sometimes exploit) the game. I began to realize that allowing players to endlessly level was a design choice and the highest level players would not be "coming down" in XP. Not ever.
• The use of control points early on (after persistence) was very disappointing, and it created a gap between those players that used the control points (for sometimes as much as 4 million XP per hour - for an entire month) and those (like me) that did not. The net effect of that was arguably immaterial however, because of the "soft cap" power curve. Meaning that if was at adventure level 102 and a few other players were level 105, that wasn't that big of a deal a year ago. But then the attunement system was changed and it become very clear that if you had enough XP you could (and should) level up all the schools of magic just for the magic resistance alone. This made most (if not all) high level players some form of "tank mage", discouraged specialization (and I would argue, roleplaying), and additionally rewarded some of the worst min/maxing behavior. But instead of fixing the root cause of the problem (yes I'm aware there are updates coming to encourage more specialization) the developers continued to allow (and even encourage) endless grinding.
  • When the control points were recently updated, players could once again fight "endless waves" of monsters similar to what they had done during the early stages of persistence. For some players this probably really did "put the fun back into control points". But for me this was a complete and total disregard of the actual problem. Playing a game where the only way to be good is if you stand in the same spot forever killing endless waves of stupid AI is not roleplaying. It was effectively the last straw for me. Sure, there was a cap put into the game so that players could no longer farm out 4 million XP per hour. But I'd rarely seen 200k per hour, ever. So why was that a good thing for me? I played the game all the time, mostly grinding out XP, and I couldn't possibly keep up with that pace. Now it wasn't just a few players doing that either. It was an openly sanctioned way to "efficiently" play the game. Which suggested to me that over time it would be the ONLY way to play the game competitively.
  • Make no mistake though. I wasn't just reacting to the gap between my character XP and those of people that played longer than I did. I was reacting to the idea that it wasn't going to change. Prior to the control point change, I really believed that eventually the higher level players would "come down" and eventually the developers would make design choices that evened out the playing field. Not in a way that would make time spent playing the game meaningless. But in a way that would prevent a few players from perpetually dominating the game at the expense of roleplaying.
• Lastly, I began to understand that allowing a small or partial group of players to advance beyond everyone else makes it extremely difficult to balance the game. The best example I can give is the mass solo killing of the dragon. One guy killed the same dragon like 1200 times in a month. So the developers rightfully changed the game to make that harder for a solo player to do. They changed the combat system, they changed the dragon AI, they made (and continue to make) upgrades to prevent this from happening again. Great. But again, they didn't address the root problem. The player that could solo a dragon 1200+ times during a single month is continuing to get stronger (gain more XP) and so are other players. And that means the dragon will have to get stronger, and the combat system will have to be harder, and the upgrades will have to continue.
  • Do we have endless development time and resources to keep upgrading dragon related mechanics? No. In fact we can't keep up with players as it is.
  • Do we have any reason to believe that players are going to self regulate so we don't have problems? No. We know from experience that will never happen.
  • Do we have a playerbase where it makes sense to spend so much time on polishing higher level content? No. As much as we need high level balance and polish, our real focus continues to be new players and people that haven't spent over a year grinding out levels or "endlessly" grinding out levels.
  • Do we seem to have a good understanding of what the major root cause of small groups or solo players killing the same dragon over and over again? Yes, well I do. It's the fact that after years of development we're still allowing players to forever grind out more power. Thus making all of our best efforts to fix and balance key elements of the game nearly impossible. Meanwhile we're making that same content harder and harder for new and more casual players to enjoy. It all points to needing a hard cap like yesterday. Then if you want to endlessly level because you think that's fun, be my guest.

​

I've brought this issue up for years, but I believed it would be tackled before launch. Now I realize it's not something that is considered a problem to be fixed. So I'm not wasting my time competing with people that have more time than I'll ever have. I lost that battle the moment I got married, had kids, got a job, and looked to play games that were not built like WOW or EQ. (I never played those games for a reason)

I still have great love for the development team and wish them great success, and if this is the game people want to play I hope they enjoy it.

Now that my views and reasons are public there can be no reason to speculate, and there's no need for me to say anything else.

 

That is so sad don't lose hope you're not alone wishing for this, a niche will form and I predict it will be wildly more profitable than this rigged up RMT haven.

 

@Lord British
@DarkStarr
@Chris

Please, please take note of what BDF says above and do something about the endless grind and the over the top difference between the "top" few and the rest which is a fundamental threat to the success of SOTA imho.

 

I don't get it... What is the big deal here? Even with NO XP decay, everyone WILL run into that wall that will make it take 40 billion years to raise just one level! We all know this. You're not going to see anyone get anything to level 170. It's not going to happen! Why do people continue to complain about this "gap" when we'll all get there someday. Also, if this "gap" bugs you that much, then just play the PvE aspect of this game. I don't PvP at all... guess how much I care if Mac has 20 more GMs next week. Actually, I'm happy because I'll party up with the guy and go destroy some bosses someday. It is hardly BAD for me if I go and run into a player that is level 120. That person is on my team. Yikes...

 

Please don't take this the wrong way, I do not mean this to be judgmental, but rather experiential.

I was once very competitive with pvp in MMO's, starting in UO and then through early WoW, but I now find happiness from playing games my way, and by setting and achieving my own goals instead of measuring myself against the achievements of others.

A character's adventurer level is only one way to define a top player.

I am around AL 83, and I am a top player.

May you find peace brother!

 

They have done something, it is called diminishing returns as you get to higher skill levels. Also, knowledge of game mechanics and player skill > raw ingame levels. It is why someone like Mac with a billion Adventure XP says that he is regularly beaten by someone with only 10% of that adventure XP levels below him.

But I guess some people just view the number game with blinkers on

 

Since my last post on this thread I have gained 0 levels and others below me surely have.

The gap is closing and I am coming down to earth - more so every month.

 

It is also why artec is beating people with more levels then him, he is always practicing and testing.

 

Exactly, and thats why the fun is not in the destination; the fun is in the journey @Baron Drocis Fondorlatos. Hope you can find a goal again in this game.

 

Journey just tends to be more fun when everyone plays by the same fair rules...

 

Maybe I played a different game then , I always played with same rules as my friend avatars.