[Dev 1011] Failing Guildleves Intentionally?

So I've noticed something kind of weird going on that people seem to do alot, and I'm wondering if it is an intended game mechanic or not. Would be nice if an SE rep would chime in if possible.

What I've noticed is people failing battle guildleves intentionally. I've never done it myself, but I think the reason they do it is because they can still get full sp for it, then reattempt it the next reset and get full sp for it again, with the chance that they will receive the same leve again, for even MORE sp.

Now this, to me, seems borderline exploit. I'm not sure if this is the way the game is supposed to be played, but people failing leves on purpose because they get more sp that way seems to be against the way the game is supposed to be played.

Devs, is the game supposed to allow you to retry a guildleve that you have failed? If so, why can you only do it with battle leves and not crafting leves?

I wish the Dev's would chime in here and let us know if this is an intended game feature, and if not, what they intend to do about it. A simple fix would be to make it so that if you fail a leve, battle or crafting, you do not get a chance to retry it at all. If I'm not mistaken this is the way crafting leves already work. Why should it be different for battle leves?

I'll reemphasize, it just seems contrary to the spirit of the game when you are in a party and players constantly say, "wait let me run back and fail this leve, then we can keep sp'ing". People should not be able to intentionally fail leves to gain more sp than they normally would if they completed those leves.

This was brought up in a previous thread but it seems to have been ignored by the Dev's and community in general, so I thought I would bring it back to life. If I do not get any response from Dev's in here I will post in General Discussion which seems to be read by the Dev's more.

well its not really so they can attempt it twice more, they grab the best leves possible for a certain camp, (Like Dunesfolk in BW) and intentionally fail it every set so they can always link it every reset. Personally I find it to be cheating and I cant stand doing that in any game I play so I have never done it before.

Im not sure what could be done to prevent this, I suppose make it so we cant repeat it which is what I would suggest. Something needs to be done in this game to stop making it easy mode. Not everything added needs to be super conveniant and make everyone stronger, at some point they are going to have to up the difficulty and give consequences for players actions.

Easy solution is not let people retry failed leves, I believe it was like this back at the start... and I believe people abusing the system is why the devs where hesitant on adding it.

Aka you fail levinshower you only have a 33% chance or what ever it is to get it again next reset. Would stop the fail leves instantly.

Loved doing some grid leves with my ls for a change the other day and having a few members saying "oh I can't get leves because I will lose Levinshower, ranin reveries, all cracked up, and dunes folk." This is something that should of been patched months ago.

The devs already stated that it was fine as the trade off is you don't get the reward for completing the leve.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

Easy solution is not let people retry failed leves, I believe it was like this back at the start... and I believe people abusing the system is why the devs where hesitant on adding it.

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So, I spend my 500 faction points on an NM leve, start it, and before I can even get away from the aetheryte, boom! Ten minute disconnect! Well, there goes my 500 point leve. . .

Of course, they could just make it so disconnecting doesn't fail a leve. That would be nice, too. Of course, if you could retry a leve after d/c'ing, that would just be the new way of getting the same leves every day. So, yeah, not seeing a good way out of this one, especially since SE's apparently said they're fine with the status quo.

The game client is still unstable. If game crashes when I'm on leve, I want to retry it, becouse I want my reward, especially if it is guild marks.
Need another solution.

'Sounds to me like the solution is to tinker with the retry feature as others have suggested...

It's all well and good wingeing about losing a leve if you disconnect, of course that's stupidly frustrating. But what kind of idiot developer builds their game's systems around an issue that needs to be fixed?

That aside, in normal play stability is much, much higher than it was and still improving. I disconnected during a pugilist mark leve (bleh) two days ago - for the first time in almost two months.

Don't really have much choice with how uninspired partying on roaming mobs is, and how fail behest is after 30. :(

To play devils advocate here, you look at a Leve like Dunes or ACU and with a 4 way link you can maybe get between 10 and 20k SP depending on how lucky you are. Then you look at another BW leve, say A Devilet's Best Friend where a 4 way link will be lucky to net you 2-3k SP, same with Whipping The Curs or A Terrible Thirst. In fact, once I reached a level that I could do level 40 leves and I saw some of the ones on offer it made me wonder how SE could say soloing is a viable option.

Think about it, you are level 40, I think it's 77k to level 41 then (give or take). You go to the counter and get Curs, ACU and Dunes. You can probably solo Curs on one star, maybe two for 2k SP. You realistically can't do Dunes due to the regen on Hounds, but that would give you the most SP so you try, and probably lose 9 mins of the leve through weakness. OK, time for ACU but most of your time is then spent dodging and/or clearing mites to get to the Dodos.

A better correlation needs to be made between SP rewards over all leves versus SP limits between levelling as well as addressing the problem of losing leves due to timeouts / dc's as well as addressing the chance of success in a level for parties of 1-2 people. Of course people are going to fail leves to give themselves a better chance at levelling, it's 100k between 49-50 and the level cap can potentially get to 100 in the dats.

If you think failing is cheating then don't do it. As mentioned when a level is failed there is no reward.

Certainly, this reeks of exploit. I think it's natural that people do this with the ridiculous xp curve imposed on them though. Not being able to retry failed leves is a non-starter option, every single leve I've ever failed has been due to a game crash or d/c, and it's unbelievably frustrating that they even fail in the first place, let alone that you couldn't retry them before.

Considering that people will, in general, want to maximize the amount of leves they do, and there's a finite (too small) amount of leves available per level as it is, they should probably normalize the difficulty and sp gain of the leves to remove the motivation to do this. It'd be better to have all leves give roughly the same amount of reward for time investment then having people pick and choose leves in far off places and leave some leves completely untouched. Not a totally ideal solution, but I believe it's better than the alternative.

Easy solution to this is fix the other Leves of the same rank in the game at every camp to be equally as good when it comes to SP. no one wants to be stuck with a levequest that only has 4 monsters to kill, when they can keep the levequests where you have 20 monsters to kill.

I also think SE said it was OK to do the fail method, because you dont get the reward for failing it.

First, it's not an exploit. The devs have said as much themselves for one.

Second, like others have mentioned, the lack of unique or comparable leve-quests make this almost a necessity to keep people logging on and leveling at this point.

If someone could post a link pointing to the post where devs said it was ok I would really appreciate it. That's really what i was looking for, some sort of feedback from the development on this issue. I follow the dev posts incredibly closely, but I must have missed that one somehow.

I, personally feel it smells like an exploit and I don't do it, but many in my ls do and I don't try to tell other people what they can and cant do. If you want to do it, that's your choice.

That said, it would be would be a very tough thing to fix fairly. I think the best option is to normalize sp gained from leves to remove the incentive to do this, like has been suggested by other posts in this thread. As long as some level reward much more sp than others and the system remains the same as it is now, this will continue.

Devs, please chime in on this thread. And again if someone could post a link to the previous dev feedback on this issue I will give you a cookie.

SE can add more than 7-8 leves in the entire game that are worth doing and I'm sure people will consider not intentionally failing them to keep them on lock for the next reset. "Normalizing" SP across leves is probably a good solution since it removes the impetus to hold on to the only thing worth your time.

As was mentioned, you forgo the reward in favour of SP in this case. I suppose you forgo faction points too but I guess that's part of the "reward".

To the OP: I'm curious on a side note if you don't keep the worthwhile leves how well you fare getting leve parties? The question is not intended negatively I'm just curious.

@ angry - I stopped doing leve parties when I realized everyone does the failing thing. Just doing crafting now.

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Originally Posted by Jibe

Alexia can you copy your op into the thread I made in the guild leves section of the forums about abandoning leves? The thread you already posted in. I love your idea and I would think the devs should see it. Very very good idea imo.

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As you wish:

Guildleves, the content you love to hate

So I have been thinking of how SE could improve Guildleves and solve many of the issues with them ie. abandoning them, only picking certain ones, certain camps over-crowded and have come up with a few idea's.

First though I believe the original plan for Guildleves as we have them now was that it was supposed to be more casual/quick content in that you could login and grab some leves and go do them. The main problem is that they are pretty much the only content, so everyone is doing them as they have nothing else to do. Also certain Leve's are better than others in the the SP/EXP gained so this also make Leve Abandoning to keep these certain Leve's more effective.

My first fix would be to allow all 9 Leve's to be available for selection every reset for every camp. This would allow people to freely choose the Leve's they wish to do so if they are in a group they can make sure they get the same ones to link if they wish.

Next would be to change the way Leve SP/EXP is accumulated. For this maybe it would be better to give a lump sum of SP/EXP at the end of the Leve upon completion and remove the SP/EXP gained from the mobs killed. This would have to be scaled in different ways though. For example all Rank 20 Leves gave 5000 SP upon completion, Rank 30 gave 10,000, Rank 40 15,000 and so on. That would be the base, then you could add a multiplier for difficulty with the number of stars the Leve was completed on. Maybe 5% per star so if 10,000 was the base and you completed it on 5 stars you would get 15,000 SP/EXP. If they were to give static SP then they would have to probably have a minimum rank restriction in place to stop Rank ones tagging along on R40 Leve's.

By doing these two things it would allow people to spread out and utilise different camps to do Leve's as all Leve's of the same Rank would give the same SP/EXP so there would be no need for everyone to go to Broken Water to do the best R40 Leves. Also it would stop Leve abandoning as you could decide with your group before hand which Leves you were going to take and obviously if you abandoned you would get nothing as the SP/EXP is rewarded at the end. This would also allow you to retry Leve's immediately if you did fail or D/C as it wouldn't be exploitable because the SP/EXP and reward is only gained upon completion. So if you D/C halfway though the Leve they could allow you to retry straight away as you wouldn't have gained any SP/EXP until the end anyway.

I think with just these two changes it would help a lot with the current situation regarding Leves and make them a bit more enjoyable as players will be able to go out and try different Leves at different camps without feeling like they are missing out on huge amounts of SP/EXP by taking different ones.

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Originally Posted by AlexiaKidd

The devs already stated that it was fine as the trade off is you don't get the reward for completing the leve.

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Dont forget that this feature was specificaly added so we could repeat failed leves.

Yes folks, the feature was ADDED.

it is not an exploit
it is not cheating

the devs specificaly added this feature to repat leves if you fail them.

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My first fix would be to allow all 9 Leve's to be available for selection every reset for every camp. This would allow people to freely choose the Leve's they wish to do so if they are in a group they can make sure they get the same ones to link if they wish.

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Agree with this !

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Next would be to change the way Leve SP/EXP is accumulated. For this maybe it would be better to give a lump sum of SP/EXP at the end of the Leve upon completion and remove the SP/EXP gained from the mobs killed.

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Agree with this!

I have a static group where we all leve link the same leves to maximize our SP gains, the reason we fail is so that we can all be on the same leves for the next reset, I see no harm in this, it doesn't hurt anyone else and as someone else stated we lose out on the reward so it seems to even out in my opinion.

Of course if SE allowed us to choose any of the available leves on reset then there wouldn't be an issue.

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Originally Posted by Jinko

Agree with this !

I have a static group where we all leve link the same leves to maximize our SP gains, the reason we fail is so that we can all be on the same leves for the next reset, I see no harm in this, it doesn't hurt anyone else and as someone else stated we lose out on the reward so it seems to even out in my opinion.

Of course if SE allowed us to choose any of the available leves on reset then we would complete them most likely.

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I do not doubt that it does not hurt anyone else. My qualm is that it seems kind of contrary to the spirit of the game that in order to get ahead you have to intentionally fail something. It seems contrary to the spirit of the game that in order to get maximum sp you have to intentionally fail leves.

Yoshi said he thought it was contrary to the spirit of the game to have people death warping, and I think that this is along those same lines. Some people might not think so, that is just the way I feel. Forfeiting your life to arrive somewhere faster is along the same lines as failing a leve to obtain more sp, imo.

I think one of the problems here is that many people care far less about the rewards than they do about the SP/XP. Right now, it seems most of the leves give gil as a reward. Some give marks, or gear, or crystals, but most just money. And gil is very, very easy to come by the way things are now. Just having a certain amount of gil is not going to be enough incentive for a lot of people to actually complete a leve. That, in my opinion, is what the developers are failing to see when they claim the failing method is "fine".

I like the idea of making every leve (of the same rank) worth the same amount of SP/XP, and having the SP/XP only being rewarded when the leve is finished, with the option to immediately try again if you fail. If that idea isn't seriously considered, I hope the developers at least take the time to consider that people will not stop failing the leves until it becomes worth their while to actually finish them. Gil alone isn't worth it.

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Originally Posted by Jibe

@ angry - I stopped doing leve parties when I realized everyone does the failing thing. Just doing crafting now.

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Not everyone does it, I dont think a single person in my LS has ever even tried this before.

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Originally Posted by Choc

Not everyone does it, I dont think a single person in my LS has ever even tried this before.

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Sorry I didn't mean to overgeneralize, I just meant everyone in my ls and a lot of people on karnak. That was hyperbole, sorry for that. A lot do it though.

I didn't always do it either. I just joined in because just about every other leve completely sucks for SP compared to those select few.

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Originally Posted by Jibe

I do not doubt that it does not hurt anyone else. My qualm is that it seems kind of contrary to the spirit of the game

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Not to nitpick, but the game, in it's current state and playability, has no "spirit" whatsoever. Pretty much the only thing you can do is grind battles or crafts, or dig up crow feathers and copper ore for hours on end.

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Originally Posted by Issachar

Not to nitpick, but the game, in it's current state and playability, has no "spirit" whatsoever. Pretty much the only thing you can do is grind battles or crafts, or dig up crow feathers and copper ore for hours on end.

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You are nitpicking, and what you said doesn't really have any bearing on the topic at hand.

The Guildleve system was built specifically for casual players, and was not -originally- intended to be a system where you fail leves to optimize your SP gain. HOWEVER, this game does not have content for hardcore players, and thus, the guildleve system is the method of choice for grinding ranks. The reason the ability to abandon a leve was added was to cater to these hardcore players.

Once the actual core of the game is fixed, content becomes added, and more options become available, this will obviously become less of a problem.

Now, as it stands, apart from reward/sp balancing, there is NOTHING wrong with the Guildleve system. So instead of grinding on an already over-burdened development team to overhaul/change yet ANOTHER system in the game, how about you just wait until planned fixes are in place which will inevitably fix this issue without requiring the use of any development time on an already struggling game.