wow, great idea, so you want it to take even longer for people to level. Some of us dont have 12 hours a day to sit and play cox.
It's not a bad idea but I feel the CoH will come up with a better solution that will not do as much damage.
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wow, great idea, so you want it to take even longer for people to level.
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False, with the exception of exploits/bug, this wouldn't come into play.
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Some of us dont have 12 hours a day to sit and play cox.
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Neither do I, and I level just fine without PL'ing/Farming.
This isn't actually unprecedented. During the Winter Lord craze, a change was instituted which prevented any character from gaining more than half a levels' worth of experience from a single grant. As Winter Lords gave 2 000 points of experience to characters of all levels, a single defeat would give level 1 characters a dozen levels in one go. The change was instituted to cap experience gain speed from Winter Lords.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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wow, great idea, so you want it to take even longer for people to level.
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False, with the exception of exploits/bug, this wouldn't come into play.
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Some of us dont have 12 hours a day to sit and play cox.
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Neither do I, and I level just fine without PL'ing/Farming.
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Exactly, through data mining I'm sure the Devs can determine what the xp rate for the most efficient legit team out there is and put that as the cap with a little room to breath. So the average person won't see this. In fact I'm sure PLing will still happen because they'll be at the cap. But it will be harder and for some people it just won't be worth it.
Oh, and the rate should of course take into account xp modifiers (dbl xp weekends, patrol xp, etc)
It'll be a lot of fun if they institute a diminishing returns system for experience where, if you exceed a certain threshold, you begin to earn reduced gains. I am neither sarcastic nor joking.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Quick Clearification.
This effects PLing, rather then griding, not farming in general. Grind farms will still happen. And you can't do much against that since technically you're not gaining horribly more xp. PLing those is a whole different story and this is what the change would affect.
I see that you have addressed $Inf and Drops, how about Prestige? This being gained the same way and at a comperable rate (whose rate of gain accelerates as XP gain accelerates), this would need to be addressed as well.
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I see that you have addressed $Inf and Drops, how about Prestige? This being gained the same way and at a comperable rate (whose rate of gain accelerates as XP gain accelerates), this would need to be addressed as well.
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Same deal as the others. Basically if you have xp debt, the idea is that you gained all rewards when you gained the xp. So this would naturally extend to pres.
/unsigned.
They just recently made leveling easier, right before the MA
This suggestion implemented would make no sense with that just being done.
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What would the cap be? How hard would it be to reach it? Could a fire/kin doing Battle Maiden reach the cap? What about teams doing speed runs on the ITF? More details please.
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What would the cap be? How hard would it be to reach it? Could a fire/kin doing Battle Maiden reach the cap? What about teams doing speed runs on the ITF? More details please.
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Well, one could presume the developers have some idea of how long 1-50 "should" take. Jack said in one interview that when they made the original game, they "planned" for it to take around 200 hours, and when they made 40-50, they planned for it to take about as long. That would give you around 8 hours per level, which is a lot because levelling has been made faster and that was said to be a lowball estimate.
Most people used to say they got their 50s in 150-200 hours, however, so let's put 150 that as the estimate. That would give us 3 hours per level. Of course, levels don't all take the same time, as levelling from 1 to 2 can be accomplished in 15-20 minutes, for instance. So that would mean we'd need to come up with a function that defines how much of that time frame each level would take. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, as I don't have my maths cap on tonight.
Once we have that, we have a certain outside speed of levelling, X experience points per hour, or even per minute or second. It doesn't matter for the moment. Once you go above that, your speed incurs you a decrease in gains. A proportional decrease would be the simplest, but I'd personally pick a quadratic decrease with a very smooth curve. That would be very low in the beginning, but scale sharply as you approached whatever upper limit there was at which point gains would drop to zero.
To make this work, coding aside, all we'd really need is a estimate on how long it "should" take from 1 to 50, a function of distribution and starting and ending caps on where we want to bound the decrease. It's not complicated to calculate, may or may not be complicated to code, but will probably piss off just about everybody on principle alone.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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An idea for an XP cap that has been bouncing around in my head is a rather straightforward one:
Each level should at minimum take the same amount of minutes to reach from the previous level as the number you're trying to reach. So level 1 to 2 is 2 minutes. Level 49 to 50 is 50 minutes.
Overall this works out to 21:14:00 as the quickest possible 1-50 time. Nothing a casual player would notice, but a ceiling that's hittable with farming.
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I'm not a fan of the idea. I'd rather not have more things in the game based on the lowest (or highest) common denominator. There are better ways to curb farming if that's what the devs really want to do.
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I'm not a fan of the idea. I'd rather not have more things in the game based on the lowest (or highest) common denominator. There are better ways to curb farming if that's what the devs really want to do.
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This basically hurts PL'ing at it's core. It's physically impossible to level a char faster than X (bugs aside). I don't see any better way of doing it that would be all encompassing. Notice that I didn't say it will stop PLing, or stop farming in general. It will however curb it where the things like AE, and future system that may be added will not have such an impact.
I have a similar idea. Here I will just say that the place where I would set the cap would be at the speed necessary to reach level 50 in less than 50 hours. That is so high 90% of players would never see it, but low enough to not break the game (IMHO).
I would also have such a system only kick in after level 5.
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Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
50 hours of playtime?
I think more people than you expect would notice.
I like McNum's suggestion. However, I would want it not to kick in until level 10.
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/unsigned.
They just recently made leveling easier, right before the MA
This suggestion implemented would make no sense with that just being done.
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This.
The devs aren't out to make leveling harder for players. You can get extremely good xp playing with a good 8 man team that isn't PLing with an exploit.
The main issue was people using exploits for personal gain not how fast people were leveling. The speed of leveling was a result of the exploit. Not the other way around. 
Where do you think would be a reasonable place to cap the levelling rate? Legit question.
50 hours is like 3 to 5 times the rate of the casual player who does not PL.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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The main issue was people using exploits for personal gain not how fast people were leveling. The speed of leveling was a result of the exploit. Not the other way around.
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Ehh... Sort of. The reason it was an exploit, rather than just 'something people did,' was because it allowed for fast levelling. (There are, after all, any number of decisions people can make about the difficulty and saturation level of their missions. Only certain ones are considered exploit-like.) So equally, anything else that allowed for levelling that quickly would also be an exploit.
I mean, as far as I know, base stacking was originally unintended behavior. But it didn't get 'exploit' status because it didn't interfere with gameplay.
It seems more productive to nip the issue in the bud by not allowing levelling at speeds that would cause whatever allows them to be defined as an exploit.
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50 hours is like 3 to 5 times the rate of the casual player who does not PL.
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I probably took more than 50 hours to level my first 50, but only because I spent a fair bit of that time doing nothing in particular.
With MArc -- not the hyper-farming missions, mind, just regular stuff equivalent to what's in the game already -- I could easily see myself getting a character to 40 in about 20 hours of playtime. I wouldn't spend the time I spent on my first 50 exploring, chasing badges, etc... and the MArc obviates the need to run from zone to zone chasing mission doors.
I'm not sure how long the last 10 levels would take, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was only another 10 hours or so. I do about that well on high-level characters running 8-man ITFs, anyway.
I don't usually play like that. But I don't think that people who do are exploiting the system.
McNum's suggestion, even if it didn't apply to the first 10 levels (something I exempted because existing in-game methods can provide a level in under 5 minutes easily for any of those levels) would put the min at around 20 hours. That seems reasonable enough; and having a timer longer than 50 minutes for any level, even 49-50, seems too long.
I would be happy with any rate of levelling the devs would be happy with. It's just that it's clear that 20 levels per hour is too fast.
If 20 levels per hour is too fast then I say cap the xp at whatever is acceptable, rather than delevelling players and nerfing mobs and putting timers on missions.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
As far as the actual rate, I don't think I can answer what I think it should be. I think the devs with data mining would be better to say what it should be. I can say from a design goal it should allow certain behavior. Specifically if you're fighting +3/+4 on a 8 man team, and you guys are going at a good clip, you shouldn't be affected. If you're -20 from the team, and you ask for the lowest lk so the mobs are +5 to you, should hit the cap. (hopefully that will discourage lowbies from drooling at the chance for easy PL contributing nothing to the team). And of course PLing goes even further then a lowbie taking advantage of a team. So that would be affected always.
Now, if you "farm" with people your own level, where really you're just grinding? well, chances are you won't be hit buy this cap. Because in essence you're not really doing anything different then you would normally. You're just choosing to repeat the same content over and over instead of doing arc missions. Not any diff then running paper missions IMO.
Actually it should be fairly easy to figure out; maybe I can test this later.
Form an 8 man team at max difficulty (that is not exploiting), play for an hour, track your xp. Calculate your levelling rate from that. Now we know how fast your normal teaming is.
Multiply that speed by 2x, and we have the speed of a team you would consider exceptionally fast.
The cap should probably be around that number.
If that number is faster than 10 levels per hour, your speed standards are probably too high for this game (and therby likely to high for any MMO I have ever heard of).
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
I may be reading too much into Positron's follow up MA Abuse statement, but it looks like 3 levels per hour may be the benchmark to consider.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Why? kill all xp exploits with 1 system. Then you can let people do things that they consider fun while at the same time maintaining risk(time) to reward ratio.
At high level the system would limit the rate at which XP is gained for a character. Since it is a rate, the only way to measure it is over time. In that time there's going to be peaks and valleys. You don't want to penalize a team because a blaster used a nuke so you have to accommodate those peaks.
With all that being said, here's one implementation. Not by any means the only way to do this.
At the time a user zones out of a mission the server looks at the xp gained. If it goes over the cap (whatever it might be) the character is issued xp debt. I figured that would be gentler then taking xp away possibly de-leveling a char. At this point the char has to work off the debt xp before new xp is awarded. While the user has debt xp, he will not gain any inf or drops. Since you gained them before.
In normal scenarios most people will not see this. This would only come up if you found an exploit, or if you have a very low level char sked up to a lvl 50 team.