>>Obviously, you GMs and management have an important business decision to face but I don't think this is the best move to combat attrition and improve the game experience (no pun intended) as presently proposed.
It's not either/or - We've got a lot of work going on to get higher-level stuff done, too (and DR3 is enabling some of it). The main thing is, we need to combat attrition at high levels and we need to combat it at low levels, because we need to make the game something people want to discover and play - You may laugh, but we DO see new accounts and totally fresh, never-played-a-MUD people on a surprising basis. There are a bunch of problems to solve in that area, but one of them is that we don't let any of our awesome content hook its claws into them, because they blow by it so fast. Also, even if they take the time to smell the roses, everybody else is so high level that it doesn't really matter anyway.
>>As already mentioned in the thread, the damage** has already been done and you cannot undo it. You can't just let people learn at faster rates for many years and then go back to the old system, unless you're somehow going to scale down peoples' ranks and remove all the 'unearned' ranks learned under the New Exp system.
Definitely true - we can't only cater to the existing players, though, and we harm fresh blood significantly by letting it continue to happen.
>>I think you guys need to make sure it hurts as little as possible at this point. We need more people in DR, not less.
Another core tenet of this release. We've gone to great lengths to try to make this as painless as possible - Grandfathering your ranks to be at-circle, giving respecs, trying very very hard to balance combat to be at-level, etc.
>>I hated the old experience system with a passion - and I was one of the people who trained to super high level under it. You want extreme hardcore grinding from hell with a twist that would drive casuals to the edge of sanity? That was old experience.
I definitely don't want to go back to the old Mind Lock system, either. That WAS a debacle.
>> Personally I think the New Exp system is freaking awesome and absolutely good for the game in every single conceivable way
There are a lot of good parts. However, a lot of decisions were made based on inaccurate predictions as to how people would play, and how it would affect younger players. The combination of all of the bonuses given to young players and the size of the pools ended up leading to the content issue I've discussed.
>>Well, what exactly is the goal? From my very limited experience, friends who have proceeded in the game at a pretty standard, scripting pace have hit 100th over about 2-3 years. I expect they're on course to reach 150th in, say, 4-5 years. I realize this could be vastly different from the median but it's all I have. I'd imagine that very casual players proceed much more slowly, and perhaps hit 150th after 7-10 years.
I've seen a fair number of people reach 100th pretty quick. A random 101th circle thief I found hit it in under a year - I have no idea of the training regimen, of course, but that's an insane speed to hit 100th.
What I'm thinking about is maybe normalizing the gain rate. Right now, the gain is enormously bolstered at low ranks, and penalized at high ranks. I'm thinking about smoothing that out, which will reduce the drain rate at lower levels and make the drop from 'fast' to 'horribly slow' less painful. This would make the first 50 circles less of a total blur but wouldn't really make the higher ranks, where things are super slow, worse. A little slower to GET to, yeah, but not longer per-rank there.
>>It has nothing to do Exp being gained too fast.
It does. The issues you mentioned are ALSO problems, and very big ones, but there IS a big problem when a new character hits 50th circle in a few weeks because of immense bonuses to exp gain, thereby missing our most robust and interesting range of stuff. Slowing down that initial blur IS something we need to take care of, and I'll be interested to see how the change mentioned above could impact it. Other problems that cause burnout ARE being worked on (and, as I said before, some are being enabled by DR3), but this is something that needs addressed.
To Recap My Current State Of Mind:
- Reduce the bonuses people get from having low ranks to reduce the accelerated start
- Grant a bonus for training fewer than N skills, where N is something like 10. There will be a gradient in there somewhere, so that people aren't as much in the mindset of 'I have an extra slot to train a skill for maximum efficiency, I'll add this random skill'
- TDPs are back to the 'socialist system' where all skills contribute equally (this is just a reminder for people who keep forgetting)
This slows the game down at low levels and gives people more options on how train without penalizing people who train a lot of skills at once.
Seems like a reasonable compromise between the initial goals and some of the issues raised.
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