Ah Pook wrote on May 5
th, 2015 at 6:02pm:
I know it was many, many months ago, but I can't remember... (*cough* old age). Did they close that the same day as the patch? I remember it being *really* quick, even by Turbine standards. People can't keep their goddamn mouths shut.
It wasn't just Crucible... it was all the Gianthold main quests that lost their XP nerfs.
150KXP for POP, Heroic, Normal, First Time... without a potion running.
now for a bit of history about Gianthold and the multiple nerfs that occured because of it's introduction in game.
When Gianthold was added, the Level Cap was raised to 14. ( before that it was 12 ).
There was no level restrictions for entering anything... a LVL 1 character could enter VON5 ( as long as he was flagged ).
And LVL 8 characters could enter Gianthold... especially they could enter Gianthold quests...
At that time was also that nice puny precursor of the Retarded Streak... namely Underlevel bonus.
So LVL 8 characters, doing POP on Normal were getting +50% bonus ( + the eventual First time bonus ).
Initially the levers in POP could be targeted and activated from inside the cells. This led to the first Nerf : move the levers so that you need to keep somebody outside.
This one was performed pretty quick ( in a matter of days ).
Then it became obvious that all the servers were in Gianthold, and that many parties were getting their ass reamed because they weren't up to the stuff ( aka trying to maximize their underlevel bonus while not being able to do it )... and at the same time it became obvious that the XP all over the place were over performing. ( aka getting you a Level in two runs of POP, but two runs of any other quest could do the trick too ).
This lead to another nerf : this one on the XP of the quests, and they locked out characters below LVL 10 from entering Gianthold by refusing to teleport them there...
The teleport lock was quickly bypassed by the sorcs and wizards, as, along with Gianthold, they got Greater Teleport. So people just popped into a quest with a friendly wizzy that teleported their LVL 8 characters in GH for more POP ( because it was the easiest ) farming.
They then decided to take more drastic measures... They nerfed POP XP hard a second time, and went through all the other quests ( to a lesser extend compared to POP ) as a conservative measure... and they locked out the quest givers/explorer entrances/Area Teleporters/whatever all over DDO for characters that they consider to be too low level.
But in the time it took them to do all that ( at least in Europe ), most of us had our LVL 12 characters capped at 14, we had all the ones that were above 8 capped at 14, and were working our way towards getting more characters at cap...