So I was running numbers today, and I realized that we have a problem with a bunch of our critters in the game.
In 2.0, things were a bit different a bit more... let's say organic. The nature of the system in 2.0, however caused the best creatures to have much higher defenses than offenses. You got more experience for a higher-offense critter, and if you loaded yourself up with enemies their low offense was counterbalanced by the sheer number of experience ticks you would get.
This, in turn, led to great rejoicing when creatures had lower offense and high defense. There was basically no challenge, and you could whack at them all day long and get experience. Celps are the perfect example for this. Their defense is 20% higher than their offense, which is why everybody loves them so much. They're easy, nay, free experience for most players because it's easy to defend against them but they give wonderful weapon experience.
On the flip side of the coin, you have creatures whose attacks vastly imbalance their defenses. Even without magic or special abilities, these creatures have vastly more skill in attacking than defending. Creatures like this include alley thugs, skeletal sailors, and damaska boars - All of these have TWICE as much attack as they do defense. This means that IF you can stand toe to toe with them, they're very easy pickins. These are creatures you hunt if all you want is loot and you've got some backtraining to do.
So, that's the problem. There are creatures who are basically configured to either be pinatas or big dumb walls you can swing your sword at and learn a TON. It's the former I'm more worried about, honestly - By and large, pinata creatures are dropping worse loot than their counterparts, and aren't contributing egregiously to the economy in a terrible way. The big dumb walls, though, are a problem. Their existence actually damages the ability for experience gain to be balanced - Why fight something challenging if you could instead fight something NOT challenging for the same rewards?
So, to handle this, there are a couple possible solutions:
1) Fix these creatures so they're more balanced. This is the solution I prefer to go with, because it leads to a simpler system where things are more predictable.
2) Find a way to counterbalance the fact that divergent BDWs like Celpeze are giving experience in a way they shouldn't. One option is to apply an experience reduction based on how divergent the stats are, but no matter what road I go down with this problem, the result just feels kludgy or overcomplicated. It doesn't solve the problem at the base, which is that the creatures are unbalanced.
What are your thoughts? Something needs to be done to rebalance the system, because what we have breaks any risk vs reward model out there.
We're discussing this on our end as well, but I wanted to give you some insight as to why some creatures (particularly celps) aren't training that well.
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