My thoughts on how a player should gain experience.

Sathrago

I believe that grinding, artisanship, and events should make up the majority of the experience you gain, while questing should be more focused on rewards like items, unlocks, titles, cosmetics, and other perks. Yes, I truly believe artisanship should represent a significant portion of the experience points. This way, players who want to focus on their artisan skills don’t feel like they’re falling massively behind.

Currently, the experience rate is very low. For example, if it takes around two hours of grinding or events to go from level 10 to 11, it should take about three hours of gathering to achieve the same. Although the crafting side can level quickly when fed resources, a crafter still has to farm mobs for silver to fund their work, so it would be fine to reduce the experience gained per craft slightly.

Processing should follow a similar pacing to gathering under the current system, but with adjustments. The amount of goods that can be processed simultaneously should be increased, and the need to select rarity should be removed. This change would allow players to process items of all rarities together, eliminating the need to micromanage or stockpile materials before beginning the process.

here's a rough estimate of what I would like to see. LMK what yall think.

Winterfang

What about PvP (Battlegrounds & Player Kills), Exploring, etc.

Sathrago

Winterfang wrote: »

What about PvP (Battlegrounds & Player Kills), Exploring, etc.

hmm i dont think we need to see people leveling in pvp events. Its just one more way people could game the system tbh. I also dont think you should give experience for exploration. Knowing what the map entails, finding good farming spots, those are their own rewards.

0tee

Hi I like your approach, here is my opinion on this. I really like that Artisanship should give more exp, because why not. It´s also very time consuming and why not give players who want to focus more on that more reason to do so. Also, I agree, that events should give much exp (they already do in my opinion). For me doing such public events is the most fun way of leveling.

However, I disagree with the emphasis on grinding. Currently, in Alpha 2, most players gain the majority of their experience and high-level gear (even the best gear?) by grinding, so there's little incentive to do quests apart from testing. Your approach would likely make this even more prominent in the finished game, where testing wouldn't be a factor anymore.
To keep quests appealing, you’d have to make grinding very unrewarding in terms of loot drops. I don’t think this is a good idea, though, because we all know how satisfying it can be to occasionally get a great drop from mobs. Making grinding feel less rewarding (in case of loot drops) would just make it more tedious—at least for players like me.

I think quests and grinding should be balanced and complement each other, so that neither makes the other unnecessary. I really like their current approach to quests and how they’re set up (even though they’re still quite buggy). I’m referring to the "real" quests here, not the commission board tasks. There should be some quests that offer less experience but have valuable rewards, and others that provide little or no rewards but offer good experience. But overall questing should be only a bit less rewarding exp wise then grinding (like max. 10%).

Winterfang

Sathrago wrote: »

Its just one more way people could game the system tbh.

There is the possibility, but if you are low level in a pvp battleground or whatever you will get farmed anyway... So I don't think this will occur that often.

EDIT: experience could be granted based on win or loss, after the battleground...

Sathrago wrote: »

I also dont think you should give experience for exploration. Knowing what the map entails, finding good farming spots, those are their own rewards.

There will be thousands of players which are only there for traveling the place. So no, I disagree.

Flashfirez23

I think all things should be a viable way to level. There should not be a set way to level up. Ashes should let people do what they want. Quests, dungeons, raids, partisanship, PvP, exploration, and events. Should all give comparable experience.