Quote:


Maybe something where you sacrifice your XP and give it to others? I dunno.

More like a bonus to XP based on number of characters in a party.  Severence_Pay was talking about it in the Bravery Bonus suppression thread.

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/462714-Upcoming-Experience-Changes#pos...

QuantumFX wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2015 at 4:10pm:



oooooooooooooooo. Ok.

What to promote grouping?

QuantumFX wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2015 at 4:34pm:



Hmm.. ok. Little weird. But, ok.

Meat-Head wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2015 at 4:07pm:



They're trying to promote multi-boxing.  they figure if they can't grow the number of logins with new customers then they may as well encourage the current ones to make more accounts.

when does the fiscal year start for Turbine?

Those halcyon days: waiting 30 mins for a healer to run von fucking 1. waiting 1 hour+ for a shadow kiter or tank or 40 DC CCer or whatever you needed to run the raid.

Meaningful grouping is nice and all but I hate waiting. Screw those days.

It's catch 22. We don't have population to return this game to "multiplayer" one. But status quo prevents population from growing.

5 Foot Step wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2015 at 3:57am:


I never waited.

Everything about the recent system changes in this game is divisive to grouping.

1)  80-90% of quests can be soloed on Elite difficulty with little challenge, especially during heroic levels.  If not solo, then short man/with a hireling at worst in epic levels. 

2)  The bravery bonus system heavily rewards running quests at certain levels and points, with only 1-2 levels of flexiility.  This greatly limits who you can group with to keep your bonus and who wants to group with you for their own benefit. 

3)  The XP curve is strong enough that foregoing the above BB bonus/content at certain levels cycle creates enough of a burden on the leveling process that it creates a barrier to grouping unless the BB streak can be maintained.

4)  The availability of Ionic classes and otto's stones spread out the entry and exit point for people doing past heroic lives. 

5)  The presences of two separate XP grinds - TR and ETR - create two different cycles that people might be working through at any given point in time. 

6)  Going from 16 - 20 -24 -28 levels creates a wider range of levels for people to be at, which spreads out the population.  As population drops and the number of possible levels rises, the number of players available at any particular level goes down.

7)  They have virtually given up on creating a unified "end game" in favor of the ED/Twists/E-PL system to create a character progression system that has characters cycling between 8 levels and 6.6 million XP.  Granted, the power difference is not as significant between 20 and 28 as it is between any 8 levels in heroic content, but you still get your end game spread out pretty far.

8)  Most players I know have forgone having a dozen alts and focused game play on 1-4 characters because of the large amount of TR/E-TR grind along with loot grind.  This results in fewer options each player has for running content in specific level ranges. 

A few extra XP bonuses for grouping won't make that much of a difference.   I don't know maybe if they announce it far enough in advance and the bonus is big enough then people will plan semi-static group TR/E-TR gaming sessions around it.   But it's not going to change the overall grouping dynamics for the game. 

In some ways I preferred the old epic system where mobs had epic death ward and hit like trucks to the point where you wanted a CC'er, DPS, and a healer.  Even if the healer was a bard.  I'm not saying I want all epic content to be this way, but it might be nice if 25% of the content was that way.  And that 25% offered the best xp, gear and drop rates as an incentive.

I think grouping will only happen if content demands it and the rewards for running that content are strong enough.  If you make the content too easy, people will solo.  If you make it hard enough to require grouping but offer no extra rewards, they will skip it.  It's gotta be a combination of the two.

Best solution would be to simply remove scaling.

Elite would be something most couldn't solo anymore without a group and that wouldn't be a bad thing. 

I think there is a path they can take where you don't need to wait and wait and wait for specific roles yet can't ROFLstomp the content solo.

Removing scaling would go a long way towards that now.

I don't remember that much "waiting". I guess shitty players / parties had to ?
Maybe because I played that "healer" and "cc" hehe.
There surely was much more interaction and "mutual dependency".
You could be picky, there were jerks, you could fuck up a raid, byoh dramas ... but at least it wasn't boring and certainly better than ghosttown servers like now.

Asheras wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2015 at 5:28pm:


I'm not understanding this remove scaling argument, but don't take that as an argument for or against, just confusion.

Right now scaling makes it easier to solo EE's, but EE's are still easy to solo with 5 other warm bodies in them, I do it all the time eTR'ing in PUGS to get Streak bonus.

So why will removing scaling fix the difficulty problem?

This confusion is the primary reason I am excited for a Reaper difficulty