How would you stop XP trains?

akabear

In a few MMO:s I have seen group play to accelerate XP or loot gain in a manner I am certain the game was never designed.

Elders Scrolls Online
- mass groups (30-50 players) doing circuit rotation of the portals

New World
- 30-60 players rushing the high-end areas and hopping all the chests

Lineage 2
- massive pulls of full dungeon mobs to AoE, even without AoE classes. 3-4x XP rate

Players will always find a way to optimize activities. Should this be managed?

Ludullu

Make the mobs stronger when they're together, if they're from the same family of mobs within a dungeon. And ideally they'd have environmental hazards spawn if their numbers go over some system-based limit.

And mob aggro could track how many people there are within a certain range from them and if there's too many people the aggro range would increase, which would lead to the stuff I mentioned in the first point. This would also make dungeon runthroughs of raid groups a bit harder, because a ton of mobs will be aggroing onto them and those mobs would be stronger and have hazards spawning all around the raid.

Well, at least I'd personally prefer that kind of approach.

Strevi

Why all good things have to be stopped?

If the developers make the experience flow small, then I see no reason to enforce players to not use such ways of dealing with the problem.
It is a rewarding activity IMO.

The alternative is to give that experience fast and in a controlled way. But no matter how much Steven or his followers say that AoC will be different and immersion will be awesome, unlike in other MMOs, I do not believe it. Because they keep asking us on forum, in the pinned threads, how to make the game.

Caww

Good balanced gameplay won't require grinding shortcuts such as those mentioned (although some people really like doing some of that for at least a little bit of time). Time will tell what happens here with progression.

Percimes

Ideal solution.
Better AI for mobs: attacking from distance when possible and staying out of AoE. Have their casters use AoE vs the players and healers keeping their tanks up. Mobs retreating early to more defensible positions. Etc.

Extreme solution.
Make AoE true AoE. Affecting all in the area, whether friends or foes. It makes these spells more situational and difficult to use, with the current flagging system even more so (party or raid members could be ignored for corruption if killed by the AoE as a softening measure).

Azherae

Not sure I follow since the games I come from, the devs USUALLY just tweak things until 'the way they intend players to play is also the closest to optimal'.

But I also come from games with:

1. Smaller 'packs' of mobs so it takes quite long to gather them up.
2. Mobs with abilities similar to players so if you try to do this, they use ranged attacks and make themselves difficult to all keep together (for hitting them) without dying
3. AoE damage division after certain numbers of enemies
4. Level difference based damage/accuracy scaling (probably not relevant to this)
5. Healer mobs that would need to be killed separately before pulling the others or when you get them to the target location or they will backline and heal others
6. Mobs that cannot be killed in even five AoE for actually good exp by basically ANY class (this might have changed, but it combines with the first point, you can do it safely but then you don't have enough mobs and might as well just roam and kill them)
7. Mob tagging mechanics that don't allow outside groups to attack your mob, far less 'attack it and you get even proportional EXP for it'
8. Mobs that are generally so difficult to solo FOR GOOD EXP that most people will only target their 'favored prey' or do it for personal challenge and fun, or if they are antisocial.

Once we know which of these things players/Intrepid disagree with (for example, we know that as of current design, we definitely won't have level difference based scaling) we could start to guess at what they intend.

Or we can just abuse anything we find in Alpha-2 and complain about it online.

But to answer the question, I GUESS I'd... do everything from the games I already like? (Shocking, truly)

Except maybe the Mob Tagging mechanics, since Ashes wants to be very specific about that. I'd probably do the usual and give the 'multiplier for party' and then not give it for non-party players.

"Two players who are not in the same party hit the same mob, kill it, get 100 exp total split between them based on 'contribution' with no bonuses."

vs

"Two players in a party hit the same mob, kill it, get 100 x1.2 (as example) exp split between them evenly without contribution factored."

and of course

"Two players in one party and two players in a DIFFERENT party hit the same mob, both groups get (let's say half damage from each) 50 x 1.2 but if they grouped up all as one they'd get 50 x 1.4."

This way if you do WAY more damage than the other party, you can just keep going until they leave due to poor exp without really harming yourself. If you do equal, you should probably group up, maybe fight something harder.

Since this is what I'm used to, this is what I tested in Alpha-1. The mob respawn rate and values were tuned to 'what I expect from games' (it's like 80% of the reason why I'm still here).

The thing that stops high level players from farming low level mobs in FFXI is that they kill them too fast and then have to sit around and wait for them to respawn for worse exp. In a game where Mob Tagging is different and PvE 'griefing' is possible, I'm not sure this would be enough, but for the specific problem mentioned, it should be.

Arya_Yeshe

Strevi wrote: »

Why all good things have to be stopped?

That's what I though.

Path of least resistance or Principle of least effort, never forget this, we as evolutionary beings are rigged for getting more for less, it's just what we are.

But, in regards of game design, it's the company's fault not balancing the game correctly.

Who also grinded Tristram runs on Diablo 2?
Getting to level 50 was nothing

I believe that XP payouts should be split participants (being in a party or not, being mixed crowd or not) and then having the maximum payout (solo player) and the minimal payout (if there's just too many people hitting the same mob).

Example: mob is worth 2000 xp, max payout is 2000 xp and min payout is 20 xp

• solo player gets 2000 xp
• 10 players get 200 xp each
• 20 players get 100 xp each
• 8752 players get 20 xp

The proportions about how splitting the payout could be different, this is just the idea about how to split it.
If possible healers, buffers, CC characters should participate in the xp payout pool too.

Spif

Portal/event loop grinds are caused by predictable events, with repeatable rewards, and relatively fast travel between them. This game will not really have fast travel, so that will probably kill this all by itself

Mob herding has many solutions: leashing, slow spawns, mobs that are annoying to AE down, etc. I don't really think that this needs a solution, just some balance so that specific areas are not *way* more xp/hour than intended.

Noaani

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

Strevi wrote: »

Why all good things have to be stopped?

That's what I though.

Path of least resistance or Principle of least effort, never forget this, we as evolutionary beings are rigged for getting more for less, it's just what we are.

But, in regards of game design, it's the company's fault not balancing the game correctly.

Who also grinded Tristram runs on Diablo 2?
Getting to level 50 was nothing

I believe that XP payouts should be split participants (being in a party or not, being mixed crowd or not) and then having the maximum payout (solo player) and the minimal payout (if there's just too many people hitting the same mob).

Example: mob is worth 2000 xp, max payout is 2000 xp and min payout is 20 xp

• solo player gets 2000 xp
• 10 players get 200 xp each
• 20 players get 100 xp each
• 8752 players get 20 xp

The proportions about how splitting the payout could be different, this is just the idea about how to split it.
If possible healers, buffers, CC characters should participate in the xp payout pool too.

This, but with one alteration.

You dont have a minimum amount of experience for the mob, you have a cap on the number of players that can receive experience for it. That cap would be 40 players- as 40 players is the largest combat unit we are aware of in Ashes - a raid.

If more than a full raid of people are working on a mob (which would be rare for experience gain), then the raid that deals the most damage gets credit/rewards.

Make it a simple case of the experience the mob awards is divided by the number of people in the combat unit (character, group or raid) that earns the rewards. Everyone in the unit gets an equal share of experience (this covered healers, buffers and such)

Thus, if a mob awards 2000 experience,a raid of 40 players killing it will each get 50 experience.

JamesSunderland

I don't think it is something that "should be stopped" i believe it is a valid grind style and believe there should be zones designed in favor of big pulls with big AoEs, the problem is when that grinding style can be universialized as the meta in all zones, which is something easy to deall with designwise by making monsters extremely punitive on their first combat action with thing like powerful ranged skills and Hard CC.

Also, considering L2's and AA's group exp division and non-group damage contribution exp division, full 40man-raid isn't going to be very reasonable expwise in most areas.

Depraved

stahp! aoeing is fun >:

Myosotys

akabear wrote: »

In a few MMO:s I have seen group play to accelerate XP or loot gain in a manner I am certain the game was never designed.

Elders Scrolls Online
- mass groups (30-50 players) doing circuit rotation of the portals

New World
- 30-60 players rushing the high-end areas and hopping all the chests

Lineage 2
- massive pulls of full dungeon mobs to AoE, even without AoE classes. 3-4x XP rate

Players will always find a way to optimize activities. Should this be managed?

In my opinion I prefer :
- Unique mob's loots (no individual loots popping in your bag)
- Unique chest's loot (if someone opened a chest, then the chest is empty till respawn)
- Same amount of xp per mobs whatever the level
- No scrolls of XP or scroll of luck

AOC promises an Open World without instances. Individual loots are instance.

George_Black

ESO and nw and ff14 has the issue of non open world combat.
L2 had pvp to regulate such things.

But why does it have to be stopped with a way other that the actual players getting into arguments?

akabear

To be honest, I enjoyed the L2 AoE trains and training!

Don`t like the fact AoC is (or is considering) tethering mobs

ESO portal rotations, were almost like bot trains! Whilst not against efficient xp or gathering, dont want to see en mass sheep hearding!

George_Black

The eso problem cant exist in an owpvp game
People wont co-opperate. They will be greedy as well as selfish. There wont be "dolmen runs".

Eyrate

I did not enjoy the NW mobs descending upon the elite/dungeon areas at all. Was not fun to me. So I fell behind my guildies gear, and then I quit playing. Drats! Another one bites the dust. Just me, though. Others enjoyed it, I suppose.