Why the static quest XP reduction?

[Vendrin]

And when a new static that can nearly kill a lv3 cleric gives only 50 xp, yea.. not so fun.

[Magonushi]

"Thanks for playing but we're putting you at a disadvantage for starting late."

+1

Basically the gap between the old and new PCs is being exacerbated.

These quests aren't repeatables so the only players losing out are those creating new PCs. How is that fair? How is that leveling the playing field?

[MorbidKate]

before long, most PCs will have moved on from RM. It will only be a few new PCs left. That willl make it more difficult to find a party, which is essential to doing most of the statics. Then it falls to DMing. It has to date been rare for me to see a DM even on, and I've not been DMd myself thus far. Yes, I have a very limited playtime and cannot get on regularly.

Even if we accept the rat-race argument, who is slowed down most by drawing out lvl1? Its people like me, the people who lag behind in the race anyway. We are the ones who have the least chance of enjoying some DM time, and lowering static rewards makes everyone that much more dependent on DM time. The rat race isn't diminished, its simply substituted away from a "race" for statics toward a race for DM time.

I thought this was a lesson learned in NWN1? Sure, its easy to look at a given static and say its got to be nerfed to balance risk and reward for that particular static, but I think its better to consider the reward in the overall context of a PCs life. As a player, this is discouraging and now I feel like I'm going to have to do that much more hunting if I want to get out of level 1, or wait for some scheduled DM time that I can actually be around for. Neither encourages me to want to log in.

+1 to everything Fluff said.

I've only had one brief improv DM session since I rolled up my toon and that was basically a reaction to a particular player's constant venturing into the Rivermoot hills to attack the Orcs. Other than that, it was hard slagging as a non-meat shield getting to Level two. I grouped with others to do most of the statics I was IC aware of as soloing is near-suicide.

Mind you, I do like the need to make friends to do statics but as the player base moves away from Rivermoot, new players and new toons will have less and less players around to befriend. All I can say is thank you lord for the RP XP scripts which at least take a bit of the sting away from those of us who get little or no DM time... for whatever reason.

Kate

[Mikayla]

I assume that when folks are talking about statics and the rat-race, they are including me and my PC since I seem to be towards the front of the so-called "rat-race." Now, lets assume that I am (I don't really know what levels other people are, but I am assuming I am in the upper echelon).

The statics played very little role in my ascent to Level 2. I made level 2 because I was fortunate enough to hit both Indio's DM event, and Wynna's DM event (Greengrass festival) basically back to back, and I stayed logged in during the first day for about 20 hours (and thats a lot of RPXP). At the point I completed first level, I think I had only done maybe 3 static quests (Dogleg Dell, Kobold Runt, and Lizard Aerie).

So, point being, it was not the plethora of statics which led to rapid advancement - it was playing every freakin' wakin' hour I had, and being fortunate enough to catch two DM events back to back. The statics had very little to do with it. I did not get to doing a lot of statics until I was well into level 2, IIRC, and even level 3 - and I know that the one person I am aware of whose PC is further along than mine in the "rat-race" did even fewer statics than I did during the early days.

So, I don't think the statics contribute to the "rat-race" as much as people think they do - what makes it seem that way is just all the time folks spend in game. In my case, I have spent more time in game in the last three weeks than I probably have in the year prior (much to the chagrin of my real-life lover).

Anyway, I don't think there is any harm in returning the statics to their previous awards - but its a call for the DMs naturally.

[Misty]

........... It's nicer to be in on the creation of a unique backstory for each newly minted PC.

In a utopian gaming society, perhaps this is feasible.

But the reality is that there is not enough DM coverage to make this the norm. Therefore, some will be left out, struggling to get to 2 when it shouldn't be a struggle.

[fluffmonster]

Mik, I personally don't subscribe to the rat-race hypothesis and I think most people don't, but arguing whether there is one or not gets less milage than showing the flaws of the rat-race justification on its own terms

[Mikayla]

fluff:

Mik, I personally don't subscribe to the rat-race hypothesis and I think most people don't, but arguing whether there is one or not gets less milage than showing the flaws of the rat-race justification on its own terms

I didn't make an argument that there was no rat-race. I made an argument that if there is a rat-race, the statics don't play that big a part in it. There may well be a rat-race, I am not saying there is, or there isn't. Just that statics were not what this particular "rat" (who appears to be near the head of the 'pack') used to get from 1st level to 2nd level. Point being that nerfing the statics will not, in my opinion, have much appreciable effect on the "rats" or the "race."

[HATEFACE]

Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I liked to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became the Valsharess of the Underdark.

In Skullport born and raised
On the playground was where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all sacrificin' humans outside of the school
When a couple of males
Who were up to no good
Startin making trouble in my neighborhood
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
She said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air'

I whistled for a priestess and when she came near
Her eyes were full of respect while the males had only fear
If anything I can say this priestess is rare
But I thought 'Now forget it' - 'Yo homes to Bel Air'

I portalled up to the house about 7 or 8
And I yelled through the portal 'Yo homes smell ya later'
I looked at my kingdom
I was finally there
To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air

[AcadiusLost]

I did it, with my little ax.

Odd, I could have sworn that I did the static quest XP reduction. Special consideration for first level PC, or no, it didn't make sense to give 66 xp for walking through a safe, unguarded trigger, all of a minute and a half's walk from a quest-giver. Neither did it make sense for a single combat against a single opponent, also only seconds' walk from the questgiver, to give as much or more XP than an hour of active, challenging DM questing.

I made the experience reductions at the same time that I fixed the quests for party completion, which enabled PCs to complete these quests collectively (lowering the effective difficulty level). The 25 xp scouting statics are all ones that involve zero risk, I'm not sure why anyone would argue that they underaward, considering none even take very long to accomplish.

Honestly, the more inflated XP from a particular static is, the more OOC incentive is added for IC reasons to be "bent" in favor of doing the static to "keep up". I am of the school of thought that not every static should be attempted/completed by every PC- they're simply not going to be IC for everyone. When the rewards are high for compromising character concepts and doing each and every dubiously justifiable static, it further penalizes those players who take a principled approach to the decisions about which quests to take and when.

So far, it has seemed commonplace for PCs to run out all the available quests automatically- mere hours from when I'd re-enabled 7 High Hold statics, there were quite a few PCs who had completed each and every one of them. And suprise, they wanted more- better rewards, plus more DMing because they didn't have any more statics to do (on account of having rushed through them all).

I think the "instant gratification" mode of the early days of Rivermoot, with high-reward quick-completion statics has lead players to expect to continue that sort of rate of advancement, which in my view, is not terribly compatible with ALFA's atmosphere.

Now, maybe I'm way out on a limb here, and no one else agrees- certainly the most vocal players seem to think so. But I've staked my wager on the fact that there are plenty of other players out there who don't want to rush through every static on the menu, and feel some level of resentment at the level of reward enjoyed by those who do work the system for all it's worth. Certainly, the 003 DM/build team is welcome to push the reward levels back up on the statics. I ran my XP reward change suggestions past them in the build forum before implementing them, but they were fundamentally my call, which I felt entitled to make after spending 12-odd hours debugging/testing/fixing various aspects of the quest system and the specific triggers/conversations/creatures involved.

I'm certainly not in favor of "taking back" XP from those who did the quests before the reduction, just trying to put things to a reasonable standard for the future. XP granted by major bugs, sure- but it's absurd to try to retroactively rebalance the past.

[Mikayla]

LOL! (@Helios - damn funny).

[Mulu]

Now I've only done the 3 scouting quests (no character motivation for the others) so I can't speak on the rest, but the first 2 in scouting either don't have any spawns, or only pass by a pre-existing spawn, and are/were an easy 99xp when I did them.

Pre-existing spawns are life threatening when you aren't a stealth build. Trust me, I've picked up plenty of bodies in those supposedly safe areas of Veilan's, within 30 seconds of the gate.

If RM were to be given a bunch of low xp but zero risk statics, that's fine, but the existing statics are life-threatening to most low level PC's. I also hate to see us repeating mistakes from NWN1 like making level 1 a frequently insurmountable hurdle and cause to reroll. Wynna, most PC's have a backstory and bio at creation, and few PC's get them advanced by DM's. In three years of playing ALFA NWN1, I only had one DM'ed campaign, and it lasted about four weeks. My PC's advancement was 99% player driven, not DM driven. I suspect the same will be true for many PC's in ALFA NWN2.

I wish it were otherwise, but that is the reality of a PW environment.

[fluffmonster]

Apparently, I was wrong. AL makes it very clear that the rat race is in fact very much driving policy.

Closing the door behind the rats that are away, the rest of the rats locked in to stay...

[AcadiusLost]

The so called "rat race" was a contributing factor. One could counter the "closing the door after the rats" analogy with plenty of counter-analogies.

Or is it seriously the assertion that, because some PCs got more XP for a static quest before, we're never allowed to reduce the static down the line? If this is the case, I'm not sure why we'd even bother with trying to examine game balance. Those caves that had prefab original campaign loot, loaded up with midlevel scrolls, gems, stacks of 500+ gold- guess I'd better edit those back in, after all, they were there at Live, so it's unfair to remove them now, right?

The point is to try to adjust the server on the supply side to a happy medium. If the only direction the builders are allowed to adjust is upwards (more gold, more loot), things are going to get out of hand fast. Wait, though... adjusting up a reward is unfair to everyone who took it before though, isn't it? The only "fair" thing to do is apparently never to change anything about the server. That's certainly less work, guess I've been going about things all wrong.

[Vendrin]

The happy medium does not consist of making lv1 difficult to get out of imnsho.

[HATEFACE]

Its still in beta. Hardly anyone was play testing when it wasn't 'live.' Shit isn't going to work right the first time but I'm sure it'll be looked at and worked on. Complaints should be taken as legitimate and looked into to make sure there is any validity there.

Now, maybe I'm way out on a limb here, and no one else agrees- certainly the most vocal players seem to think so. But I've staked my wager on the fact that there are plenty of other players out there who don't want to rush through every static on the menu, and feel some level of resentment at the level of reward enjoyed by those who do work the system for all it's worth. Certainly, the 003 DM/build team is welcome to push the reward levels back up on the statics. I ran my XP reward change suggestions past them in the build forum before implementing them, but they were fundamentally my call, which I felt entitled to make after spending 12-odd hours debugging/testing/fixing various aspects of the quest system and the specific triggers/conversations/creatures involved.

There are some players, my self included, who feel that statics are not indicative to gameplay or enjoyment of roleplay. I don't care if someone chooses to "work the system" just so long as they're reasonable and do not abuse. This is not just another MMO, this is ALFA.

When in a 'PvP metaverse' where PvP is common and sometimes expected; it can get a little harsh when other people have far greater play time, like to do statics, & particpate in all DM events and your left w/ not that much than pitted agaisnt each other, it could lead to some butthurt ooc. You know, that's a problem w/ all other MMOs and its a hard one to solve; casual vs hardcore gamers. "GIVE ME BACK MY CLOUDSONG!!11" But I'd like to think of ALFA as a community where everyone can enjoy the metaverse irregardless of alignment, race, & class selection. In this "rat race" we shouldn't all be equal; that's just crazy talk. That's called communist state/modern liberal socialism and you know how that turns out. . .

. . . Continue with your work AL you're doing a fine job. fyi. FIX THAAT DAMN BRIDGE IN SHIEVERLERYMOON!!1 I'm not woaksdljfsiodgn on clouds! Who walks on cloud? clouds are not thick enough to walk on the baldrsdparticles dont talke to me about magic!