No kill history is on today, and the only reason I noticed was the xp I am getting from my coliseum runs is almost doubled. Which lead me to question why Bonus Experience was implemented, when it would appear that perhaps the real problem was that kill history was just a bit too effective?
Which led me to wonder if kill history really had the desired effect on players that immortals felt we needed… as I notice that once an area’s been hit, it’s rarely re-hit and group ends after 1 run through a list of area’s.
Looking back now that we have hind sight, was it a good move? Should the effect of kill history be reined in a bit… do we need bonus xp? Was bonus xp only implemented because of some whiners a few years ago… where are those whiners now? Do remorts get bonus xp on there bonus xp? How does it all fit together?
I’m interested to hear what people think about this.
- We don’t hit other areas, because of aged exp, not kill history.
Basically, mobs have base exp, and when they are left alone for 4 hrs, they get +50% exp bonus.
Naturally, if the group is doing one continent, it won’t come back for low exp.
If the group is doing all the areas on all continents, then it can come back to the bonus continent for almost full aged exp without kill history penalties.
- Kill history penalties aren’t that bad for big groups, because it takes 1-2 kills to make the exp suck. Doesn’t matter for big mobs, because there are few of them. The only exception are probably the energy drakes in the positive plane.
For stab/blast groups, it does matter, though, because even if you do the cloud giant residents run for the first time, you end up getting hit with kill history by the time you are done. So you can’t camp an area and get the same exp. This is why kill history was added: to make ppl switch areas.
- Bonus exp was added, because people were getting levels much slower past 6x40, as shown by statistics. This led to people leaving at around 5-6x40.
Now, before bonus exp was added, we had immorts (JB) add 5-15% exp bonus to select areas (I don’t remember/know, which).
If kill history did slow solo people down a lot, and that’s why they left, I wouldn’t know, but maybe immorts can pull stats on that?
- Another problem with exp is the cap, in my opinion.
Mob exp is derived from mob hp/damage/hitroll/procs and gold/eq (negatively).
However, if a player kills a mob over his cap, he doesn’t get full exp. Why is this a good idea?
If a small group kills a large mob, shouldn’t they deserve all the exp for the mob? Why not?
I know nocap is placed to curb experienced people from morting 50mil mobs to 20levs, but why should others suffer, especially that 20s are already filtered from the nocap bonus?
Could Splork or JB explain, why must we have the exp cap, when immorts had to add bonus exp?
Thanks.
P.S. Apparently, of all active imms, only Splork knows the answers to these questions, and he isn’t as active as he once was. So good luck to us hearing back from him.
I hesitate to discuss this topic too much with mortals…because it’s such a fundamentally hot topic, at the core of player behavior and we could argue for months and never come to consensus. That’s one of the reasons why there are so few us with the ability to manipulate xp values on a wide scale and why we touch it so infrequently.
So that being said, I think the existing system is quite effective and there are good reasons for each piece. Bonus xp was added to tweaked to make the xp chart numbers closer to game reality. It worked.
Zone xp bonuses are added to account for such things as, qwerks in the mob xp algorithm, and inherent danger of the area. The qwerks that I’m talking about is mostly in the lowbie range because the mobs are thick relative to the level of players that they are intended for and so the xp isn’t enuff. Danger is for areas like formics, where at any time you can be killed mercilessily.
The xp cap among other things, helps us keep the large group format. If you notice, when nocap is on, a lot of the high level players prefer 2-3 man big stuff instead of joining groups.
Killhistory xp stuff does encourage people to explore more areas, instead of getting hyper-focused on power- gaming 1 or 2 zones. Another big advantage to this is discouraging players fighting over areas. By discouraging camping, we cut down on fights, and that’s huge.
I’m not real keen on revamping areas at the moment. I’m still proud of how the newbie areas on Thordfalan play after my tweaks, but I don’t plan expanding that approach. Also I’m not real keen on discussing zone xp bonuses.
I may not be as active but I check the website and the server daily…
Plenty of the older Immortals know the reasons behind the features mentioned here, not just me, as they were all heavily discussed, debated, and ultimately agreed upon.
Juggleblood nailed the reason behind bonus experience, I almost wonder if he checked his emails :lol:
We have been quite open about why these changes were made and the answers are most likely somewhere on these forums…
Many of the bonuses I pushed to have added to the game have been an attempt to move players to older areas such as zone/mob bonuses. Its much easier to add these bonuses and encourage movement than to try to rewrite hundreds or thousands of mob stats…
If I remember right, I don’t believe bonus experience is capped?
I also think the time it takes for mobs to fully age should be much longer, that would encourage more movement of players…
Hey, Splork, nice to see you participating in this discussion :)
Pardon my pessimism, I’ve learned that response to my suggestions isn’t as quick as from Teker, so I assume you ignore them .)
I understand that other exp changes actually work and agree with them.
I kind of see how caps make people group instead of solo, but is it really that beneficial to solo huge mobs for exp in nocap a lot? There’s a handful of such mobs across the game, and it’s not that fun to keep killing them over and over. Isn’t a factor of killing bigger mobs faster with more people one of the main reasons ppl group?
What’s more, when we have a monthly nocap bonus (with occasional astrology bonus), we can go solo or 2-3man to use it. However, my opinion is that once we get rid of caps, people will group all the same, rather than rely on solo or 2-3man efforts, because while soloing huge mobs may be fun once in a while to add variety, it also takes lots of effort and may not be that efficient in the long run.
At least I know not much will change in my killing patterns, because I don’t really like soloing a lot, because it’s almost as exhausting as leading, and mostly not that rewarding.
Maybe 9x40s would chime on why they prefer to solo nocap exp.
Also, you said that making mobs age much slower would help people move more. Could you please clarify your logic, because I have already said that it is the other way around: groups stop in their tracks, if they can’t hit aged mobs. In fact, i recall a day, when we did all offlyme areas, and went chopping, because those were the areas with most aged mobs that we could hit.
A few things here. One, I don’t get the passive aggressive attitude toward Splork. Can we please try to be pleasant?
Second, xp bonuses were added, but you talk as tho xp was nerfed. Aged xp was an increase in xp, not a decrease. If it was removed, overall xp would go down, not up.
Next, I have been playing heavily for more than a year and I have not observed this phenomenon of the group grinding to a halt when the aged xp runs out. If anything, we run until we burn the leader out.
Regarding kill history xp, it seems Gorka is asking for it to be removed basically so he can double the xp he pulls out of the coliseum. Non-starter.
Regarding XP caps, I’ll reiterate here that it helps maintain our group format of Open Xp where players are welcomed into groups. Small nocap groups tend to be greedy with their xp. But when the optimal strategy is to kill a lot of mobs in a steady fashion, we get these nice groups where everyone is welcome to join. The group xp bonus and group gem bonus help this as well. This format is the primary reason this game still exists.
Taron is at 8x39 and has banked more xp than any player in the history of the game. Gorka is at 5x40 and growing steadily, despite spending most of his time in coliseum. Some groups are achieving amazing xp. I believe something like 200-400 mil per hour sometimes? Personally I’m stoked with 100M per hour.
So before we pick apart the xp system, tell me what your objective here is? You want to be able to do 400 mil an hour all day, every day? And 6 months from then, will that be enough?
- First of all, I only stated how I feel about Splork’s responses to my suggestions. I don’t expect him to respond to all my posts, but in my/his case, ‘monitoring site daily’ and ‘responding to suggestions’ are different things.
While you, Teker and Breeze respond to them, I haven’t seen Splork participate to my suggestion posts recently.
So I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here. There, I added smilies to my intro, should look better :)
- My goal as with other suggestions is to remove gameplay that causes dissatisfaction, because as it accumulates, the desire to play dwindles. I am not saying that I am quitting if robe sizes aren’t doubled, but it means that I’ll have to tolerate this stuff, and so will others.
I agree that other exp improvements have increased the exp a lot. Without them, it’d be a drag to get to 9x40.
As for nocap, the reasons to discuss this are the following:
exp is a major component of the game, so anything that improves it will improve the game for players noticeably
the inability to get all the exp you deserve for the mob is unfair and reduces the enjoyment of the game. By opening the cap, we allow people to get the exp they worked on.
So I simply try to provide constructive feedback on the parts of the game that could be improved, if within certain limits,
- Well, I do remember making choices between hitting other continents or calling it a day, and it’s usually whether we have enough damage/heal mana to kill areas non-bonus continent fast enough. When I say, ‘it’s over’, it could be for any reasons, not because I’m burned out.
For example, on an Island day with a small group, I usually do dinos+ud2+ss mobs+moria, and that’s it. More melees/blasters would mean orc mines + ettins, and maybe even positive planes. Even more people - then we do dweb/hades/negative planes/mordi/draconian lair. With small groups, though, it’s not worth venturing outside the bonus continent, because it already goes slow and hard and hitting areas w/o continent bonus exp would make the exp/hr average at best.
Increasing age time significantly wouldn’t help us move anywhere. In a situation, when we’ve done all the good exp areas, it’d just reduce the exp in the areas we’ve already done - but we rarely even get this far, and if we do, we’d just stop there or go chopping, as we do when we run out of areas on bonus continents for small groups.
Now, whether we do bigger areas also depends on whether we’ll cap harder on those, even if we practically can kill them with a few 9x40s. Nocap would allow leaders to pick areas by group ability, not by whether ppl cap a lot, even though it’s a good measure on its own.
- Well, I think that people would still run groups with enough people to kill mobs continuously, rather than having to regen. They still need gems, so it’d open the door to newbies, especially that there are at least two leaders, who actively recruit new players to groups.
Perhaps we could test this for a month or two and see what happens. (Ironically, 2 months is about what it’d take for me to finish my non-leading stuff.)
The key here is that people would realize that it’s a long change and they can get more exp together, as usual, rather than alone or 2man.
- In my case, while I do have lots of exp, I still lead/tank for the game experience of it, not just for exp. However, I still try to run ok exp groups, because being suboptimal exp annoys me - you know that :)
It’s precisely the thought that as tight groups we can do dimetrodons, cap, and not receive full exp on them, is what prompted me to bring up the nocap issue.
Right now, I’m in an eq phase to beat the 9x40 score and to get gold for the avatar shop, but once I’m done with that and with the remort, I should be back to actively leading exp.
However, it’s not about me per ce. I want groups to be freeer in picking mobs they want to hit, rather than fretting, whether they capped or not, and by how much overcap exp they haven’t received. Maybe I’m the only leader, who frets about these things, because I’ve been led to mobs, where we capped wildly and got drained, but it’s something I’d want to improve.
But just as with anything,it’s more about making the game more enjoyable, really.
Teron wrote:
- the inability to get all the exp you deserve for the mob is unfair and reduces the enjoyment of the game. By opening the cap, we allow people to get the exp they worked on.
Oh come on. Are you serious? What exactly determines the “xp deserved for mob”? The xp algorithm is a rough guide at best, there is no objective measurement of how much xp is deserved for any given mob. This is another reason why a cap is needed. If there were no cap, then the entire game would change. People would switch to only killing outlier mobs with high xp values and then would proceed to complain about why all mobs aren’t the same.
If we made 1 mob with super XP that was easy to kill, players would kill only that mob and complain about all the rest. If you don’t believe me, remember back to when players could simply group up to kill Xerxes over and over again. There were plenty of groups, but they were killing only 1 mob. I am not exaggerating.
Ending the xp caps is a non-starter in my opinion. They are fundamental to the game.
Double posting here, cuz I forgot to mention that xp caps help in mob design, in that we can give the builders a freer hand to design the mobs however they want, knowing that they can’t game the xp algorithm too much because there’s an xp cap. If caps were removed someone would suddenly need to start nerfing outlier mobs, and we know how the players love those kind of changes. Won’t be a lot of imms volunteering for that job.
Interesting discussion… it’s a difficult and emotional topic.
The reason for my post was because I was amused by the paradox. We have systems in the game that are nerfing xp (kill history and aging, nerf xp from repeating area runs), and we have other systems in the game that are adding xp (bonus xp). It just struck me as being conflicted.
Things are often done in the mud to “encourage” players or “force” players to behave in certain manners. I think that point has been clearly suggested here as a reason for why immortals change things. Speaking for myself though, I tend to ignore pressures people put me under to behave in a controlled way, like if the coliseum got changed and I couldn’t get my trickle xp during my working week, I would probably quit sloth within a few weeks. It would be interesting to know how many players actually feel that game changes have forced them into new areas. I figured players do things once, work out whats best and just do that over and over… Players will do whats best for them, and I don’t think they show interest in anything that is second best, unless first best is taken. I think when the system was new, players probably had a look around at other areas for what worked in the first week, but since that first week, I bet they have been rinsing and repeating there runs ever since. Like how effective do you really think that change has been? Maybe I am just more resistant than others.
Yeah, we’re guilty of trying to force a certain vision for the game on you. Our vision is that the optimal strategy in the game is to maximize cooperation with other players. Part of that vision is the large, open XP group, so we reward leaders and tanks with extra xp to incentivize/acknowledge that need. We shouldn’t need to force anyone into our vision. They either find something they like about the game as we’ve structured it and stay, or they don’t.
Quote:
- First of all, I only stated how I feel about Splork’s responses to my suggestions. I don’t expect him to respond to all my posts, but in my/his case, ‘monitoring site daily’ and ‘responding to suggestions’ are different things.
While you, Teker and Breeze respond to them, I haven’t seen Splork participate to my suggestion posts recently.
So I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here. There, I added smilies to my intro, should look better
I normally stay out of any posts regarding Jezer or Taron and all of their alts, even when baited…
I am quite sure everyone already knows we do not see eye to eye and that’s quite obvious by their posts and continued in-game comments.
Time to bow out, two posts in this thread is too many from me:)
JB,
- I’m almost sure algorithm works okay for melee attacks, unless attempted to get tricked with high damage/low hitroll, but with the new AC engine it almost doesn’t happen, really.
With mobhp and melee attacks, the progression is linear: mob hp/damage/hit are to be dealt with players’ mana/damage. The thicker the mob, the harder it is to kill it - it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Let me give you a few other examples.
a) You want to kill Aalkrost for the ring.
You make corpses, animate undeads, buff them, spend all your mana to kill him, and he gives you 13mil exp. Except your cap is 8mil, so that’s what you get.
Aalkrost isn’t an easy mob that anyone would farm for exp, it’s an eq mob. It is also above your cap, but you only get your cap. It could be any eq mob you can solo: gildervine in arboretum, the chaos elemental, the balor demon or any other large mob you can solo with mare.
How is this fair?
b) A group of 5 comes to kill ankylosauruses.
They blast them to pieces, and since it’s an Island day, they go to kill dimetrodons.
But dimetrodons are thick, and they spend time chopping the dinos.
Thanks to the age and bonuses, dimetrodon gives you 11mil, but your cap is 8mil.
So, while you spend so much time and mana on a thick mob, you don’t get the full exp for it.
c) A group of 10 comes to Mount Mordin for exp.
They clean the area, cap slightly on wolves, and go to the avatar of Ithaqua.
It’s a thick mob, so it takes more time and mana to kill it.
They kill him, and you get 15mil exp, but really, you only get 8mil.
An avatar of Ithaqua and a white wolf are different mobs, yet you get the same exp for them.
These mobs are not what you’d cycle for nocap exp - they take effort to kill, but you don’t get full exp for them.
Why is it acceptable?
- I understand that nocap would make people switch to lower effort/high exp mobs, but they already do kill similar mobs within their caps.
Even if there are some outliers, I’m sure removing caps would yield more exp, than we’d lose if you fix the outliers.
But the net result would still be more exp, obviously. Isn’t more exp what the aged exp, bonus exp, continental/extra bonuses are made for?
Xerxes was definitely an outlier, because it provided astronomical exp for the effort. It was 400-600mil, irrc, so everyone got lots of exp from chopping for 2 minutes.
This is very different from a standard group of 7 killing 30-50mil mobs offlyme.
What if you add 1mil to the cap for every group member? Practically, that’d remove caps in groups with 5-10 people. Clearly that’d encourage people to group for nocap exp.
- As I said earlier, group cap is a good estimate, whether the group can handle the area well and not spend the mana quickly.
Without nocap, we’d get maybe 5-15% more exp from the same mobs, rather than start doing 50-60mil mobs 2-3man - I assume Lyme will still have nocap because of chop mobs.
- You say that no one wants to nerf outlier mobs, but what about being an immort that’d remove exp caps? Surely that’d be awesome.
However, nothing is just joy, so the same immort would have to nerf the outlier mobs to make experience even. Such is life, really, anyone who wouldn’t expect that would be naive.
- Can you give me examples of mobs, which were made above cap to accomodate an immortal’s idea?
Gorka,
From what I remember, aged exp was added, it wasn’t a nerf.
Splork,
No one is trying to bait you. I try to get a discussion going about my suggestions, so we can find a solution that solves a problem. Especially that you make major decisions, no agreement or even a discussion with you means nothing will change.
You said:
Splork wrote: I also think the time it takes for mobs to fully age should be much longer, that would encourage more movement of players…
but then you don’t explain this logic that contradicts what I’m seeing in the game: groups already don’t kill the same areas in the same day, unless it’s Lyme.
juggleblood wrote: Yeah, we’re guilty of trying to force a certain vision for the game on you. Our vision is that the optimal strategy in the game is to maximize cooperation with other players. Part of that vision is the large, open XP group, so we reward leaders and tanks with extra xp to incentivize/acknowledge that need.
I think that’s a noble vision JB… How do you achieve that? Has it been achieved?
I still don’t understand why sloth has all these great systems in game that fight against each other… We have astrology, daily bonuses, bonus xp fighting against caps and kill history and age xp for people who sit in areas. Has the implementation of the vision become a bit confused? If I wanted to encourage group xp, I have to agree with Taron that changes to caps would be the way to do it. It’s pretty clear that for grouping the idea of caps and bonus xp are kind of in direct conflict… It strikes me a bit like building a fast car, but leaving the hand break a little bit on. It’s just an observation, sorry if that annoys you.
I didn’t mean to get anyone’s back up… It’s a bit disappointing it always ends in some stupid war, but sometimes the questions need to be asked.
Quote: Splork,
No one is trying to bait you. I try to get a discussion going about my suggestions, so we can find a solution that solves a problem. Especially that you make major decisions, no agreement or even a discussion with you means nothing will change.
Yeah, whatever…
I will say this one last time, I do not make (nor did Jake)all of the major decisions for Sloth and never actually did, contrary to your beliefs. I know it’s fun to blame and bitch about me but that is a fact. I am part of a team which discusses major changes and comes up with a goal and then a plan to implement it. There was a time where I would fight like hell for my point of view to be heard but if others ultimately did not agree, it did not go in-game.
Immortals run things past all of us because we have 25 years of experience to draw from. I don’t even think I’ve vetoed anything in years, I now simply tell people what I think will happen and say go for it and good luck :mrgreen:
If an Immortal wants to bring any of the ideas they see here to our admin team, they are free to do so and it would be discussed.
Enjoy your thread,
Well, I was under assumption that you do call the shots.
If it is more democratic, then I apologize for the comments I made about you. I kind of try to keep others civil, and should try to be such myself, too.
As for nocap, I’ll just clarify one more thing.
This isn’t a whim of mine. As a leader, it’s my responsibility to lead groups to mobs they can kill easier to get more exp. However, I also need to lead groups to mobs they won’t cap, because then group would be wasting time/mana/effort on exp they wouldn’t get - with a few thin mobs as exceptions.
So on every mob that we kill in a group, I look at my cap and try to assess others’ caps, whether we hit them or not. And when we cap, I wince at the amount of exp we do not get - and I/we do it so often, mostly by 5-20% - that it prompted me to write what I knew would have been hard received.
I’m sorry Taron, but you don’t know what you’re talking about with regard to the xp algorithm. It is a very blunt tool. And the thing that you are ignoring is that not all classes are the same, nor playstyle. Let’s imagine a 250 hp point mob. It could be designed for a newbie warrior to hack down with his sword, or a supreme mage to blast down with a single bolt. Trust me when I say that the xp algorithm will end up cheating the newbie warrior. It is a BLUNT TOOL. Because it is a blunt tool, there exists an xp cap. The xp cap is the upward end of what a player deserves for any given kill. Then we designate another tier of cap for encounters with epic mobs, because it’s understood that such mobs are much more of an ordeal. All mobs are imperfectly designed and all xp settings are imperfect because they are set up by player volunteers, i.e. builders.
I don’t really think this system is up for debate, because I don’t know what would replace it. I think I speak for all the admin when I say we aren’t up for turning on nocap for all time.
Give me an idea of what days you want me to turn nocap on, and if you’re announcing in advance that you’re going to lead an open group that day, we can prolly accommodate that (turn it on manually for a day).
I did say that there were exceptions.
If you are saying that the exp algorithm doesn’t work for all the mobs, then maybe it needs to be improved, no?
Interestingly, it boils down to the relation of damage/mana/hp of mobs and players again, as it does in eq stat values.
I’ll take you up on your offer, but it won’t be soon.
I guess I have hijacked the thread inadvertently - Gorka does have a few questions for you.
There is no such thing as a universal algorithm that doesn’t take the player into account. Think about it, the amount of damage the mob done largely depends on how many rounds of combat it goes, which depends on the player character in question. This is why the xp system needs to be complex and why bonus xp scales with player level.
Quote: There is no such thing as a universal algorithm
:shock: That’s sad if that’s true… That would mean everything must be maintained individually, and the bigger the mud grows, the bigger the maintenance tasks grow with it and the more burdened everyone becomes and the harder it becomes to change anything.
Hung is right ya know, I read his post from ages ago about sloth becoming open source… sloth needs to become a community project if it’s to have a future because it needs a certain amount of modernization to become more maintainable and that work can’t be achieved through a small team of overloaded immortals. Slothmud needs SQL abilities with managing Player/Mob/Area data and without this I think the game will die with this generation of players. This is kinda sad, we love this silly game.
I don’t get what’s so sad about. There is a system and it is working. Players just need to understand that the cap is part of what makes the game work and that its not somehow “stealing their xp”. Also figuring out which mobs to kill is part of the game’s strategy.
juggleblood wrote: There is no such thing as a universal algorithm that doesn’t take the player into account. Think about it, the amount of damage the mob done largely depends on how many rounds of combat it goes, which depends on the player character in question. This is why the xp system needs to be complex and why bonus xp scales with player level.
It also means that more people can kill a single mob faster - but they also share the exp with more people.
And if mob hp make a mob harder to get killed, then max hps need to be rewarded more.
If we look at it from a player standpoint, right now thick mobs give bad exp - and that’s an objective reality, because it takes lots of time/effort to kill them, even if they do low/medium damage.
Of course, you could kill thick mobs for nocap, but it’d take lots of time to do it, reducing the exp/hr you get. It’s essentially more efficient to do thin high damage mobs, which my runs and popular Lyme mobs prove.
So, perhaps you need to give more exp for mob hps, and that’d at least solve the issue of thick mobs being useless. Not sure how it’d help with the caps, though, I guess it’d only make us cap easier, but it’d also add many more mobs to our runs.
You ignore my main point. The issue is that all players are different. There is no objective measurement of how much experience any given mob is worth.
What is thin? What is thick? To Josiah a 1500 hp mob is relatively thin.
What about AC? It affects low level characters on a matter of scale differently than higher level players. And it doesn’t really affect mages at all if they intend to blast it down. So how do you possibly factor AC into the algorithm if it’s going to be universal?
If you philosophize about it long enuff, as I have over the past 10 years or so, you will realize that experience is supposed to represent challenge / effort, which is always relative to the player in question. So maybe one day we’ll have a sophisticated AI that can act as dungeon master and decide how much experience the player really deserves. But in the mean time, the best we can do is say, the experience for any given encounter with a mob will fall within such and such range, i.e. between zero and your exp cap. And then we have the builders who have the ability to play around with their mobs and manually adjust xp a bit and admin who can adjust on a somewhat wider scale. It is a pragmatic system, born of necessity, and I wish you could see that.
The xp algorithm will definitely not be tweaked. Firstly, because that would change how the builders zones play, without consenting them. Secondly, it wouldn’t help address the issue of relativity. It would be an attempt at the impossible. Xp values don’t exist objectively. I can’t repeat that enuff times.
- Of course we need to take into account how hard it is to kill mobs.
A thick mob has several times more hps, than a thin mob of the same exp.
However, when you compare Josiah to a 3x40, do remember that Josiah spent hours and hours (years, in fact) to get to 9x40 and buy all the damage, earn drachma and buy the drachma eq.
If he can kill a 1500hp mob in a few rounds, then he earned this. Same with Cizin, who can splork a 15mil mob. They also need billions of exp to gain improvements, though.
Mob hp, damage, hitroll, ac, a number of players are all numbers - so you can create a balanced algorithm, provided you want to define a math problem and solve it, rather than relying on a crutch that the cap is.
I’m not saying it’s easy - there are many factors, but if we think long and hard, it’s possible to account for most of the factors and make the exp algo more objective. After all, someone did estimate how much exp each proc gives, which factors did he take into account?
AC is what it is. If you bring mages into this, compare mirror image to parry, aerial servant or shield of thorns. It’s still a math problem. However, you can keep it simple and accept the advantage(?) mages get in gaining exp for using their prime skills.
I’ll think more about how to relate this relativity, but to me, it’s all a math problem that can be solved. After all, algorithms are written by humans, and can be adjusted as well.
I don’t think you found many objections from builders to change the backend for creating mobs/procs and such, why would they object to a more objective exp algorithm that wouldn’t rely on cap to work? If anything, increasing exp for more hps would add a bit of exp to all mobs, not just thick mobs.
Give up Taron :lol: You keep coming back for more… You only have to read the tone of JB’s many replies to know that arguing with the content is futile. I think I made a strong point, we have a conflict in bonuses and caps in xp calculations… it’s simply the truth.
I get where you are coming from, you see the problems, you see the path to improvement, you see how better things can be, you can even detail how we all get there… but at the end of the day people don’t want to follow. I understand your frustration, because the assumption is we follow logic, and logic follows the way of efficiency.
At my work, I designed a system for calculating sales and cost prices using a single core formula, despite the fact our products and services are completely unrelated and with different calculations and attributes. I know it can be done… how maintainable it would make updating every mob… but at the end of the day, even with the best intentions, plans and ideas we are not in charge of other people’s decisions.
Not many days pass in my own life, where I feel myself trying to swallow this truth.
Wow Gorka/Taron. This is not hard to understand. There is no conflict between those two things at all. They are complementary. And no, YOU CAN NOT MAKE A MEANINGFUL UNIVERSAL XP ALGORITHM BECAUSE THE PLAYERS ARE SO VASTLY DIFFERENT. You and Taron both just keep disregarding everything I am explaining to you and come back and say “Nuh-uh”. At this point please just drop it. Cuz you are going to continue to resist understanding and it’s not up for debate anyway.
Quote: At my work, I designed a system for calculating sales and cost prices using a single core formula, despite the fact our products and services are completely unrelated and with different calculations and attributes. I know it can be done… how maintainable it would make updating every mob… but at the end of the day, even with the best intentions, plans and ideas we are not in charge of other people’s decisions.
I think things are getting a bit confused here. We do have a core function which calculates the experience of mobs. We also have several ways to adjust said results…
That formula has been tweaked dozens of times by dozens of people over the years with similar results.
As JB said, it’s not something we are looking to alter at this time, as the results will piss off as many people as it appeases.
JB, for the sake of enlightment, care to clarify, where you can’t analyze different players with numbers? Can you give an example? If we don’t understand it, surely we need something more, than the same thing repeated in CAPS.
Thanks.
Also, we aren’t assuming that players of vastly different levels will be killing the same mobs, are we?
Maybe this is better:
There is no algorithm we could write which would accurately assess the proper reward from any mob to any player.
When you write one, post it here for debate.
I did think about what you wrote above.
Firstly, I thought you meant players ac, because incoming damage depends on it, not mob AC. But even then, players ac matters too (or whether the mob splorks). I understand this , but this is where we need to take additional median data about players and factor it in, depending on playstyles for the mobs.
Secondly, the longer the mob lasts, the more chances it has to hit players, to proc and such. It means that hp needs to scale all the other procs, not just with hp/damage (ie, hps need not to add to the total exp, but to multiply all the other stats). I wonder if this is why hp doesn’t give lots of exp at the moment.
Yes, I’ll think more about the algorithm.
I would love if xp caps were removed from the game!
Currently my optimal xp run is solo, and it involves killing the entire continent of lyme, and a few off-lyme areas, and then calling it a day.
Aged xp factors fairly heavily into that strategy. I don’t have to worry about which areas are best, because aged xp makes lesser areas better than ever repeating a zone.
Without caps, I’d have a whole new world to explore. Maybe I could find a small group composition that is better than soloing. Maybe soloing new areas like tomb of the forever king or matterhorn on bh day would be comparable to lyme xp. Maybe a bard and I could make a killing in kara’sa.
I’ve enjoyed very much the altered playstyle on nocap days.
I’m unconvinced that caps achieve any worthwhile purpose, except for the lowest level players. It would breathe new life into the game and open the world up if they were removed.
And lyme grip/stab/blast would still probably be the best xp in the game. There would just be interesting competition.
I agree with Josiah.
I dont know any mobs thats load so much exp and easy to kill at same time to be better then simple fast stab run.
Most biggies we kill are for eq. And thats 1-2 mobs for same 5-10 mins run and 50-100mils of exp. With way higher risk and efforts.
Thats speaking about 9x40 for sure. I see why caps needed at low levels. But when coming to the top - they change nothing in terms of xp runing.
So maybe formula of cap should be tweaked a bit, to be same at lower and mid end, but almost non-exist at the top.
Though speaking by true, that will not change anything for me - i will only run biggies for eq anyway, just will get more exp for them. And that will be way less exp then my usual exp run.
You don’t think small groups would start coming into conflict over who gets to kill the ice mobs in Saurian Frontier over and over again? Crazy easy nocap exp for a few avatars.
Well, we could try to balance it out better you might say, so it’s not such an outlier, we could dial down the vulnerability to ice, or apply a negative xp multiplier.
But who is going to be charge of watching over outliers like this? Not me.
When this becomes the dominant style of xping on the mud, who is going to want to go back to large groups? Are these nocap groups going to be very inviting? I doubt it.
If we had some particular admin who was keen on doing this and was dedicated to do all the balancing required to keep things in check, maybe it could be done. But this is not the case.
It’s like the system “created” outliers…
Now we can’t change the system because of outliers…
It’s a tangled mess. It shouldn’t be that you can kill smaller mobs for less effort and therefore more xp, than big mobs. Mobs should be worth what they are worth.
Caps and bonus xp should go. The system needs straightening. These systems are fighting each other and have caused outliers, now we need more outliers to make the system work?
The longer the mud continues with this way, the more outliers that get made, which in turn make the mud harder to change. It’s a no win.
We appreciate the work of the immortals, but just expressing our concerns, it’s like we’ve backed ourselves into a corner here.
The current experience function is hundreds of lines of code which takes into account everything from a mob’s total attacks, damage they do, procs the mobs have(dif procs have dif exp bonuses), hitroll, hit points, armor class, bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah…
This function has been continually adjusted for the past 25 years in order to give us the result we desire. Any change to simplify this function to a few lines of code would have drastic effects on every mob, area, and continent in-game. Unless one of our programmers finds a needle in a haystack, there is not one algorithm which would closely match up to our current mob values. I completely understand that it’s possible to come up with AN equation and we have done so in the past, just not anything we felt comfortable with. No system would be perfect though which is why having room/area bonuses, mob bonuses, etc, would always be needed.
I’ll be honest, I am perfectly fine with removing the current equation and trying to come up with something. Just like I was fine with coming up with a universal algorithm for all skill based damage based on class order and other variables or the idea of a point eq system(Teker). Changes like these normally alienate at least half our player base, if not more which is why they are normally done with a pwipe :mrgreen: I think we all hate the idea of caps(eq, exp, etc_ and wish the game was balanced without needing them, that is not currently the case though. Caps were the quick and easy solution to many huge issues…
There are two major changes on the lines of these which come to mind and went in-game as configs so they could be turned on and off until we felt comfortable with our adjustments(not including the addition of 4 new classes); new armor class system based on tenths rather than whole numbers, new timing system from tics to continual. Both systems were eventually adopted with player input and are live today. Both changes changed our game drastically, way more than we ever anticipated and were done when we had probably 10 active Immortals and 4-5 active coders.
Just a few observations…
taron- you get exp for damaging mobs … so mob hp do factor in work exp, just not as much in the kill award.
Stab mobs being the best exp…. riiight.. thats why we are all playing active thieves!
Hand damage/grip mobs… yep, massive exp.. no practical cap…. problem? You saying we should cap it?
Cy never leveled from lyme solo…. could not solo lyme till max avvie. Primal did a good mix of lyme and off lyme.. Ip leveled same as primal mostly till max avvie boosters.. Paka… i play on lyme mostly, but could do well off lyme too..
Each classo seems to level completely different…. but i always end up on lyme now due to lazy leaderin!
Also:
No history day-Avoid lyme.. lol
No cap day- avoid anything i may wanna hit!… please?..p
I personally would prefer to see more exp from work than from just being in a group for kill… but i am fine with it as is now.
Also, can anyone present the fomulas for exp from work exp? healing raising damaging .. debuffs… etc..?
well, my two cents.. thanks!
Shrugs. Noone speaks bad about exp formula i guess.
Kill history and aged exp each doing its own purpose to move ppl around the areas. Fine with it
Only the caps breaks out of the logic.
And since we ALREADY have no cap days, do you really see some drastical changes during them? A lot of small groups dominating dinos? Dont laugh my shoes. We barely have ppl to lead anything 2 times a week now.
So no real changes are needed in code. Just put that nocap setting up on each server start and check what will changes. If we will see some negative result, it only will be required to disable setting off.
As for me - i dont care about caps, or bonuses, or kill history. Everything is fine and playble. But reasons to not remove caps seems irrelevant to me.
Cyprimus,
Work exp is negligible, because it’s damagemoblevelrandomizer. It doesn’t take into account anything but hps and mob level.
Nowhere did I say that splork mobs needed to be caps - reread what I wrote.
I simply meant that hp needs to multiply the bonus of all the other factors, because they only work, when there’s a round. Anything that fights for a round or two, like the massive black dog, needs to give more exp - not just because it hits 700/round.
- There have been plenty of groups this past year, and even more groups now that Splork has fixed the chop rate on Lyme.
JB,
I understand that there are many factors, but could you say, whether hps add to (+) or multiply (*) mob exp right now?
If you say that plenty of mobs were fixed with bonuses, then it is a mess. I see that an immort would have to look over most major mobs/areas and adjust exp bonuses, if the new algo would increase exp. It’s a big task that would indeed require mob knowledge and lots of work.
Without the cap, the algo would take into account the damage multiplier and reduce dino exp accordingly. Though to keep the mob exp on level with the rest of the area, they’d have to be made thicker.
Right now, on nocap days, it’s only worth 3-5manning ice dinos w/o a mage, and 2-3manning with a mage. I don’t do it often for the lack of mages, but I see little competition there. 5 men wouldn’t reach a cap without exp bonuses, and wouldn’t cap on a fresh mob with bonuses. And then kill history kicks in noticeably.
So while it looks bad to you in terms of caps, players don’t really cap much without mages and there’s only a few of them. Though I do see that they would even be more popular w/o the caps.
The way I see it, someone needs to identify various use cases for mob kills for algo and for nocap killings, so that it’d be easier to find solutions for each of them.