Level pacing, grinding disincentives, and bucket introduction

[nobody]

I keep going back and forth on the experience bucket thing. I mostly like it, part of me doesn't. I wouldn't be averse to tweaking it so it's not quite so much downtime. I'm also happy to entertain ideas for alternative methods of pacing. My original pacing idea for The Other Game was simply rest time to regenerate energy. That goes a little more quickly than I think I'd prefer for a pacing mechanism, though. Maybe. Hmmm. Happy to hear additional ideas from anyone on this subject (preferably in a separate BBS thread dedicated to the subject, though).

At level 1, you are lacking in all resources (skill points, ability points, riln) and if you are a new player, you are also lacking applied world knowledge (where things are, what things are or are not a good use of time). I think the most difficult part of the exp bucket is wrapping your head around the idea of the bucket and understanding how your actions should be influenced by it. When I first started out, I would also just stop doing things that got me exp and try out things that don't give exp (exploration, shopping/selling, organizing my inventory, meeting people when they're around). After more exposure, I just ignored the bucket altogether, and now after much more time, I've divided activities into three categories:

- Large exp rewards from limited resources (setting fishing records, studying, long distance deliveries, etc) - These you watch your bucket and never ever do when you already have a full bucket. They're a great kickstart to your activities when your bucket is low or empty except when you want to grind skill practice, then you should be focusing your low bucket time on those skills.

- Exp from non-limited resources (combat, resource gathering, crafting (ish)) - These you can do to fill your time at any time, and are good for filling your bucket when its low, but having a full bucket doesn't necessarily mean that you need to stop. If you want to stop, you should. If you don't want to stop, don't.

- Non-exp/low exp activities (RP, exploration, inventory/vault management, foraging, felling trees*, clearing stumps, etc) - These you do when you have a full bucket or when another good opportunity presents itself. If an activity grants exp, but doing that activity will never fill your bucket, it belongs here.

That brief set of thoughts aside, I can understand wanting to change up pacing (particularly at low levels) and I've thought about a few ways to do that, presented below:

• Rework the exp tables: This is kind of big and kind of not big. Currently, exp to reach a level is a function of level as follows: exp needed = 125*level^2 + 4875*level - 5000. If this formula were to be tweeked, there are two fixed points that we absolutely want to keep the same: level 1 (because you shouldn't need to earn level 1) and level 100 (so that it still takes the same amount of time to reach level cap). Within that range though, there is considerable flexibility. The most straightforward way is to keep the same kind of formula and just tweak those numbers. You can find a table of what that would look like here. I've added some key summary bits to help make things clearer, namely what level you are when you've gotten a set percentage of the exp needed to reach level 100 (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%), and hours needed to reach levels 10, 25, 50, 75, and 100. I think A=175 is too fast, while A=150 might be fine. You can also rework the exp function to be a different kind of smooth function, but those tend to be complicated and unintuitive and unless you want players asking constantly why level 2 is 4,114 exp and level 3 is 8,332 and what bizzare thing is going on, I'd avoid those for simplicity's sake. The pros here are that you could increase the leveling pace at lower levels and decrease it at higher levels and because you're only adjusting the formula everyone falls nicely into their new level and doesn't need to feel cheated that they missed out on an accelerated early level experience. The downside is that it may accelerate people out of the range of challenges presently in game.
• Rework the exp tables using piecewise functions: This is as above, but you have say, one function for levels 1-10, one for 11-20, etc that are all patched together. This is more confusing than the above, but also gives you more fine-tuned control over pacing in different bands. Same pros as above, with potentially less impact from the downside mentioned above.
• Expand and rescale tutorial tasks: If you expanded the number of tutorial tasks offered and converted them all to instant exp, you could essentially use the tutorial tasks to move a character from level 1 to level 2 or 3 fairly quickly. This would help players feel like they're making quick progress, but it wouldn't ease them into the bucket, it'd just give them a longer walk before taking the plunge.
• Low level partial instant exp: This is the crazier suggestion. Have characters get all of their exp split between bucket exp and instant exp at low levels. For example, when a level 1 character kills a mob, they get half that exp into their bucket, and half as instant exp when the bucket is below 100% and only 10% instant exp when the bucket is over 100%. At level 2, adjust those down to 40% instant and 8% instant with a full bucket, 3, 30%, 6%, 4 20%, 4%, 5 10%, 2%, and then at level 6 they've joined the normal uphill battle of the bucket. Ditto for all other exp-gain activities, and make sure to not echo any instant exp gains below like 5 or 10 exp (carving a longbow and getting constantly spammed with [Experience +0.3] would just be silly and annoying). If you go this route, make sure that (1) tutorial tasks require looking at help bucket and (2) that the documention for help bucket gets updated to explain this acceleration process at early levels and that it gets phased out to introduce people to the bucket concept. The upside here is that it incentivizes low level characters to stay active and learn the game, but also starts the process of teaching them that continuing to grind when the bucket is overfull is less effective. It also takes longer to fill the bucket, and when combined with the instant exp will do a lot of heavy lifting toward accelerating the leveling process. It also incentivizes low level characters to keep grinding to get the riln they desperately need at low levels (unless they're killing ravens-I'll post a separate suggestion for that shortly). The downsides are that it might be too much acceleration and also that some players might have felt cheated for not getting this lovely swift boot out of low levels, but the game IS still in alpha and many of those players enjoyed a period of vastly easier/safer combat or if they're really old animal husbandry with no poop, so probably it all breaks even somewhere.
• Reduce combat exp: It's been a bit since I've properly done combat, so I don't know that it needs to be lowered on everything, but low hp mobs like ravens could stand to give less exp. Maybe give them an additional exp multiplier of HP/100 to reflect that they're really easy to kill. This only helps combat focused characters, but given the relative safety of non-combat exp gains, I don't feel like non-combat characters have quite the same downtime struggle at low levels, but I could be wrong.

[nobody]

Forgot that I wanted to include some ideas for expanding the tutorial tasks:
Have a task to use a targeted say (sayto or say ::person) to a PC or NPC.
Have a task to use a speech or tone.
Have a task to use an emote, include info about targeting emotes, speech in emotes, and appropriate emoting.
Have a task to use *at a character appropriate moment* the think command. This would be a great way to introduce the think command and explain how you would like to have people use it.
Have a task to nominate another character (maybe also suggest that the reason they provide be the nominate task, as that'd make sorting through those quite easy).

[Heron]

Regarding EXP:

- I'm not sure how lowering EXP gains would help low-level fighters. The downtime is more a function of the infirmary bleeding your small riln reserves to death while you earn nothing back. I did tasks until I could get armor, and then filled out my practices by fighting birds for I believe .2 a kill? I vaguely recall EXP was like 12%-13% a kill, and then it very steeply dropped to 6%, then 2-3 before vanishing altogether.

- It's important to note scholars and adventurers might want to fight too, even if it's not their main thing. I get 40% EXP a kill per hill guardian, but hitting above your weight class is one of the privileges of being in the warrior guild. This is not going to be a usual experience for members of the other two guilds. At level 4, with rolls of roughly 140 vs a laborer's 100, I couldn't handle them. One or two would beat me badly enough that I'd have to visit the infirmary. Going duelist gave me access to sweep, which meant I now had positive hit rerolls, and they went from taking the worst of three from timing (-2) to taking the worst of somewhere between 6 (low, low balance) to 17 (Prone and low balance). All warriors have access to tackle, which is similarly devastating. I suspect trying to grind combat practices without assistance from abilities would be painful, and littered with infirmary trips.

- My views on the bucket are a little different. In my mind, the bucket should be above 0% at all times. While the bucket is above 0, you can do whatever you want, up to and including nothing at all. When it approaches 0, it's time to do a couple big-EXP things to fill up. Filling the bucket is trivial at all levels, including 1. Stables, lamps and local deliveries are annoying but effective in that regard, although I only do long deliveries now. This makes me see the bucket as something of an idle check. You just have to keep the wheel spinning every so often.
- The goal before your level raises to the next is to max your practices in your desired skills. In this way, my view of the grind is practice-based, and the bucket is just a timer that I have to wait out. Before guilding up, filling my practices took most of the 5-6 hour wait period. I wanted both range and melee and didn't know they could be raised simultaneously. I'd raise my melee to practice cap first, 50-100 crows per level (.2 diminishing to .1 a kill) until they stopped giving EXP altogether. Then I'd repeat the process with a sling. This process held true for skeletons, too. Honestly, it was a little painful early on. Now hill guardians give me .6 a kill in both as long as I remember to hurl, so I only need to kill 17. I fight exclusively to fill my bucket when it runs low, since by the time the timer runs out I'll be at max easily, and if I'm not, it won't take long to get there.

- My understanding with crafting classes and scholars is that your bucket also pretty much remains full as long as you do something. I don't know how quickly practices ramp up, or if they wall you out.

- I like maxing out easily and then having downtime to goof around without feeling like I'm missing out on anything.

My only real concern with the bucket is that the lack of initial resources plus the time/skillcap wall preventing you from getting them effectively prevents newbies from playing the game. For this reason, I don't think an accelerated early process is all that bad, even if it's just delaying the 'plunge.' Once you can interact with the world beyond being a task slave, then whether you enjoyed it or not you can say you gave the game a fair shot. The point when a player can say that should come as soon as possible, and ideally not after 5-20 hours of task and idle time, depending on how adventurous the player in question is.

It's hard for newbies to agree to stay and wait for some odd hours before they develop any attachment to the game.

[Rias]

I'm honestly kind of tempted to do away with the experience/level system and just leave it up to skill practice instead like I have in the past, while still keeping the overall 10k skillpoint cap. In such a case, those who have done the time earning gobs of experience already for their characters on their accounts could have that experience work similar to sunset points to accelerate skillgain practice, to make it not feel that time was wasted for them.

The only real value I see in the experience/leveling/bucket system is A) progress pacing and B) giving people a reason to occasionally take a break from the powergrind. The progress pacing could still be accomplished, with fewer steps/complication, via simple skill practice rates. The encouragement to occasionally take a break from grinding might be accomplished with a little tweaking of the energy system (particularly energy recovery time). Or maybe keep the bucket concept for skillgains directly, and not experience.

[Rias]

And for those who enjoy the concept of a character being a particular "level", that number could be calculated based on a total of a character's skills. Players could still get the fun "You've leveled up!" message and feeling when their characters reach those total skill thresholds. Useful for easily conveying OOC how overall skilled a particular character is. And continuing to give that feeling of accomplishment/progression by seeing that stat number climb.

[nobody]

I think you'd probably want to have climbing and swimming converted to practice skills, meditation converted to a study-and-practice skill, and perception... I don't know what you want to do with perception. I just mention those because without the level/skill limitations there would be nothing stopping players with the riln to just buy those skills to where they want them as soon as they have the riln to sink. Maybe that's not so bad though.

[Heron]

In my somewhat limited experience, I don't think a slower grind or pacing are dealbreakers for a lot of players. This isn't the slowest-paced mud I've played, or the grindiest (and those are two separate entities), and I can say with absolute certainty I enjoy the bucket a whole lot more than the other game's task system, which paces players by giving them the equivalent of several realtime weeks' worth of Cogg's menial tasks. It's like cleaning lamps, but forever.

In all honesty, I kind of enjoy the bucket. What do you think about a fixed EXP per level system? We could roughly estimate how much 'content' (grindtime) is in a single level, and then mix a healthy amount of downtime in. Suppose the first five are a bit faster (1-3 hours?) and then it rests at a static five or six? Seven or eight?

If it were 5 hours (4500 exp?), the more grind-casual players might level fast enough that they have to chase their caps, while the really crazy ones will still need around like, two months to hit 100 (and who knows how long to get the practice). At 8 hours, which would be on the longer end, it'd still be pretty easy to hit skillcap but you can expect some pretty significant downtime.

If it's too fast, there's no sense of accomplishment, and consequently no sense of attachment. That's important too. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that if the bucket never existed, my combat skills would be in the 300s or higher by now and I'd be wandering the wilderness, pining for higher-cap mobs. Then I'd move on to an alt. That's no good for the game either.

To reiterate, I've never expressed concern for the bucket system as a whole-- just that there's no newbie consideration. It does feel a bit slow, but that's nothing that can't be tweaked. I've gotten all the abilities I wanted, and now I don't really care about levels anymore. I'll keep the wheel spinning, and they'll come as they come and I'll chase the caps when they do, but it's really not a big deal. You know? That's my two cents.

[Rias]

I'm just thinking about the experience/levels system itself as an unnecessary extra layer. It was implemented in order to set overall progress pacing and to allow the bucket system to pace grinding. But why have an experience and level system on top of skill practice when we can just pace skill practice itself, and apply the bucket directly to practice gains instead of experience gains? We'd still have the intended effect of experience/leveling, and get rid of an unnecessary extra layer of abstraction that people feel they need to learn and potentially be confused about.

[Irylia]

I don't want to say I'm opposed to dropping the bucket and levels and all that, because I often struggled with buckets and having my progress so gated. If there's a way to do it and keep pacing to a good level - then fine.

But I'm not sure the solution of it working like sunset and increasing skill gains is going to work universally. For example - my crafting character is still waiting for the Artisan Guild to be implemented. Currently all her skills are capped at 400 because there's literally no way to raise them. Until that happens she is pretty much stuck. In her case, dropping all that she's accomplished in leveling with the bucket system is very much turning that into time wasted. And having actually leveled as far as I have, I can appreciate how long and how much effort it took and say that it did feel like a great accomplishment each time I gained a level. If you do away with the bucket/level system, please still have some sort of pacing in place that isn't just based on skill/practice. I feel like that goes straight back to the grind mentality that COGG was trying to avoid by adding the bucket to begin with.

On that note, one thing that started to really turn me off of the other game was the fact anyone who enjoyed grinding and power-leveling could so easily out-skill a veteran player who focused more on RP and didn't want the grind past what was needed to maintain functionality with the majority of the player base. On the one hand - yay, players can get on an even playing field much easier if they put in the effort. On the other hand - boo... now some brand new character is stirring up crap and has zero respect for RP or established characters simply because they can overpower them through combat. I feel like removing the additional pacing the bucket provides makes it so much easier for players to skip content and force themselves into things they may not be prepared for on an RP-level, or encourages a type of gameplay that's based in trolling, and that there's often a lack of courtesy that comes from building up a character over long-periods of time and through many RP sessions.

I've even seen some veteran players roll an alt - power-level it - then proceed to be total jerks to everyone and dump the character shortly after just because they find ways to game the system and level skills by the easiest path, can do what they wanted to do, then peace out without any harm to their main characters and no chance for closure for anyone else. This being regardless of RP enforcement or any other restrictions that might otherwise prevent them from said actions. I just really want whatever this evolves into to be super carefully considered before making the switch is really all I'm saying. I have a lot of concerns about how this might affect the game in the long run.

That said, I do think that it's hard for low-level characters to get a foothold. Honestly one of the things I loved about Somnium was the fact you could pick what kind of character you wanted to be in character creation and the game gave you a starter pack relevant to you. Basic tools and other gear you would need to get going. Especially now that item damage has been so heavily modified, it can be really hard for a new character to get very far on the limited starter riln.

So here are some of my suggestions to make lower levels easier without editing pacing of the bucket:
1) Add in starter gear packs. Maybe this can be part of speaking to Ragni and completing the quiz. They can ask a question about what you want to do with yourself and based on the answer, give you something to use.
2) Allow players to train other players, but encourage a fee (like with medical treatment where you can set a price maybe). I'm pretty sure this isn't a thing in this game - at least I've never tried it. It's something that was always very helpful in the other game and would help new players save some of their starter riln for other things like armor or tools. It also encourages player cooperation and RP.
3) Add more zone variety and/or closer options for combatants. Since foraging is so limited and not a riln-maker, and not even really a good way to feed yourself usually, it would be great if there were more low-level-friendly options close to town. Food is very expensive, after all, and the closest area doesn't drop riln until you're several levels worth of skilled in combat.
4) Implement credit or low-level debt forgiveness on common services. Rather than basing it on a timeframe, base it on level. Maybe up to level 5 or 10 - all repairs, medical costs, guild dues, and even food is free. There could be a soup kitchen or something that gives out meals for low-level characters that is morale-neutral.
5) If you don't like the free food idea, at least let starting characters have food that isn't JUST hard-tack. I feel like there's other ways to introduce the morale system than having new characters either sell all their food for riln because it's so awful, or eat it and suffer.
6) Increase starting riln total. Characters shouldn't have to feel like they have to sell their starting light source and food just to buy some gear. Either increase the riln, add gear packs, or make the starting food palatable so they actually want to use it.

I definitely agree with adding more tasks. I'm pretty sure there are task suggestions littered throughout the boards if more ideas are wanted. And I like the idea that maybe some give direct xp rather than bucket for low-level characters. Alternatively, maybe low-level buckets can drain faster or have higher capacity than later in the game? I'm not super fond of bucket alteration in general, but if you wanted to go that route, those are the options I personally think might work well. My main issue with bucket adjustment is then we get into characters out-leveling zones too fast again if they're combat-focused.

I do want to say, I'm not really sure about the money for ravens thing. I like the concept and encouraging the feel of Shadgard not digging nether and sorcery, but I also don't want to pay high-skilled characters tons of riln for creatures they can one-shot easily... and I think those characters would take advantage of that task frequently because it's so close and easy. On the other hand - if this is implemented, then I also feel like the riln reward is too low (as-suggested). I would say restrict it to characters based on skill level, increase the riln, and put a timer. 15 birds at low-level will take longer than any of the other tasks (I'm pretty sure) and 100 riln is not very much.

I agree with Heron that I see the bucket as always needing to have something in it and I only want to idle or RP when it's not at 0%. To help with that, I've always kinda thought it might be nice if the bucket was bigger, or emptied more slowly. I know this is probably counter to a lot of people's views, but to me having the bucket take longer means when there's an event or RP going on, my character can safely go participate for an hour or two and not feel like she's not able to progress at the same time or that she has to rush back to work half-way through (granted, an event will probably give some bucket fill while it's ongoing too - provided the challenge is right). I'm pretty sure this would have no impact on combat skill-training other than the fact it's level-gated. You can still train the skill over bucket-fill from what I could tell.

Sorry that got so rambly. It's Friday and I'm tired. I'm sure I'll post more later or just be generally mortified when I go back and reread this tomorrow. As always - feedback encouraged and thanks to Nobody for making this thread.

[nobody]

But why have an experience and level system on top of skill practice when we can just pace skill practice itself, and apply the bucket directly to practice gains instead of experience gains?

I can think of exactly one particularly compelling reason: you would be trading one problem (how to pace levels) for a larger set of problems, namely how to pace melee, and artifice, and mining, and...