Gaining SP/EXP - Moving forward

[Betelgeuzah]

I'll make a quick note here: Leves won't be primary thing to do for exp when more content comes. It's idea is to make casuals with little time at hand happy with quick boosts to exp. Also if I remember correctly fatigue will be removed when first dungeon comes.

Heh, taidat joutua pettymään... ^^

[Betelgeuzah]

yes you can participate in someone else's guildleve, but thats not on your demand, thats by theirs.

The point is to make other people need you in their group, not make it a voluntary effort "if they feel like inviting you". There must be a mutual interest for both the one lfg and the one lfm to look for each other. XI had this through the party size being established at 6 people, so you were always looking for 5 people to join you.

What do you suggest SE do to improve the lack of repeatable content?

Make participating in the current repeatable content easier and more universal. Make parties look for members, make members look for parties, improve their tools to do so, and remove aspects of the game that are in direct conflict with this concept- monster grinding, first and foremost. It needs to go, for everyone except those who want to solo/duo. They can not divide their playerbase between two different activities that are both used for the same purpose, as well as require group effort to work efficiently. They need to be able to control our progression to make sure that everything works as intended. If any group size is fine, any group set-up is fine, and you can progress in various ways that the developers can not control, we come to the current situation that plagues the game. XI suffered from this, but not as much, because the developers controlled the party sizes and set-ups. Yet they didn't control what we killed and where, and the end result was crabs, crabs, crawlers, more crabs, manaburns, monkburns and arrowburns.

[Jinko]

You guys have totally taken this thread off course, it is named Gaining SP/EXP, not how to fix guildleves.

I don't agree that we need more content per say, we just need more to do though, hence why I suggested a complete SP/XP fix to make grinding parties more viable, sadly SE have already had several goes at fixing the SP system in this game and still they come up with a broken system.

[Betelgeuzah]

You guys have totally taken this thread off course, it is named Gaining SP/EXP, not how to fix guildleves.

Talking about guildleves is exactly on topic.

And the system won't be fixed before SE takes control. Your suggestion does not fix the system. It will conflict with guildleves, and the developers won't be able to control us any more than they do now. They can take all their time in the world to try to balance the open world monster grinding, but they won't succeed. They will either scrap the idea and focus on guildleves (good idea) or make few select monster types on any given level range best to EXP on (colibri and mamool ja come to mind) while scrapping guildleves (bad idea).

Why is it a "good idea"? Because guildleves let developers control us much better than open world content can. In addition, guildleve monsters are not subject to overcrowding camps and such. In the end, if the current method bothers people they can simply make us fight lots of monsters in a 30min timeframe like in MMM and it won't be any different from normal monster grinding, except there is never a lack of mobs and the exping comes in good 30minute chunks and there are little objectives to clear.

[Naylia]

1) Nerf leve-linking - removes the heavy slant towards leve only leveling
2) Reduce the Party "Bonus" (Penalty) when playing in rank range - encourages party play outside leve-links by not penalizing so much
3) Let dlvl scale higher than 10 ranks above you - encourages parties to take on more challenging content instead of maximizing efficiency by fighting exactly r10 above you

Current system penalizes you for partying larger than a duo - since a duo can easily handle r10 above them in a fairly efficient manner there is no incentive to party up outside of leves. The incentive only exists with leves because party members can bring leve links. The solution is not to add more leve-linking to the game, but instead reduce the sp bonus for leves, and make partying outside of leves are more viable form of play by letting parties challenge higher ranking mobs and get rewarded for it.

Right now, when I'm in a party and you kill a hard mob that takes a while to kill and you get rewarded by "yay, we killed it" and then you go "oh...they nerfed our SP...I guess we should just grind low rank mobs". Reward players for grouping up and fighting harder mobs. Theoretically I should get the highest SP per hour by getting a good group together, playing well, and destroying really high rank mobs. But no, that is not how we are encouraged to play.

[Jinko]

Problem with that is that, hard monsters would actually produce less SP gains because of their difficulty, in most cases something that is 15-20 levels above you is going to take a long time to kill.

It's kind of like kill lots of lower level monster for fast kills and low sp or kill higher level monsters for slow kills and more sp. (both of which would work out at roughly the same SP per hour)

What they should be doing is making it possible to grind off any mob types and not just the ones that current have high base XP values. (Raptor parties I'm looking at you)

Previous to the SP fix it was (Coblyn parties) whats next ?

Plus the way that damage scales in this game high level monsters tend to have abilities that can one shot anyone within their AOE range, making the increase in dlvl pointless.

[Betelgeuzah]

What they should be doing is making it possible to grind off any mob types and not just the ones that current have high base XP values. (Raptor parties I'm looking at you)

They can't control us. They can't produce a situation where monsters are equal, without actually making them all homogenous to each other. If SP is universal, we will figure out a monster type that has least bad moves, a camp with most mobs, the variables are numerous and we will figure out another. Then the developers are left to try to figure out what we find out next.

That's exactly what they shouldn't be doing, since its a bottomless pit. They need to control us, not try to guess what we might end up doing next.

Previous to the SP fix it was (Coblyn parties) whats next ?

It goes on until they stop trying.

[Jinko]

Yea so you end up with a situation like FF11 where everyone is killing Collibri because they have the highest XP per hour. (path of least resistance)

But lets go back and remember what FF11 used to be like before those monsters where introduced, players killed all kinds of monsters to level on, some were more favourable than others but there was a greater diversity in what was viable for good XP.

I don't care what I SP on as long as I'm having fun, of course there will be people who will want to maximise there SP/hour just like in any other MMO out there, but that's just the nature of that beast I guess.

The fact still remains that if I'm killing rank 20 marmots and rank 20 Dodo's they should be giving the same SP or at least very close to it, sadly this isn't the case, not even close.

[Naylia]

Problem with that is that, hard monsters would actually produce less SP gains because of their difficulty, in most cases something that is 15-20 levels above you is going to take a long time to kill.

It's kind of like kill lots of lower level monster for fast kills and low sp or kill higher level monsters for slow kills and more sp. (both of which would work out at roughly the same SP per hour)....Plus the way that damage scales in this game high level monsters tend to have abilities that can one shot anyone within their AOE range, making the increase in dlvl pointless.

Currently - hard monsters produce no SP benefit. Why not reward me at least a little for trying? Dlvl doesn't need a cap...the cap is that monsters get too hard for your group to kill. That should be the cap. Why build artifical incentives into the system by capping groups that attempt challenging monsters? The current system literally says - "Don't bother even trying to kill something hard with your party of 8 people - go zerg this giant salamander instead who is of no danger to your large party"

[Naylia]

The fact still remains that if I'm killing rank 20 marmots and rank 20 Dodo's they should be giving the same SP or at least very close to it, sadly this isn't the case, not even close.

Agreed...I think you can have some flexibility in base to account for the individual difficulty but they should be ballpark.