Regarding quest experience

[Raelle]

regarding shared quest xp.... what does genesis/the community stand to gain if established players are able to more easily grow their alts?

(draugor.... can we handle MORE of you?? )

[Cherek]

regarding shared quest xp.... what does genesis/the community stand to gain if established players are able to more easily grow their alts?

(draugor.... can we handle MORE of you?? )

Usually when we have this discussion, the main argument for shared QXP is that some people feel "stuck" with their current character and want to try something new with a new character, but the questing needed feels like a big hurdle to overcome, and thus they stick to their current character, or maybe don't even play at all. Shared QXP would make it easier to restart, and this is absolutely a valid argument that I can understand.

However, I think it would be too easy and would lead to all sorts of problems and abuse. Shared QXP if you've done the majority of all big quests with your main character (which most older players have) means that you can create a new character that's extremely pacifistic at expert-ish. So, the main portion of Genesis active population would be able to start a new character at expert with full QXP, meaning they would probably be hero/titan within a few days. I think we'll end up with an army of mid-sized players who are up to no good

Sure, we could limit the number of alts to perhaps... two? Or something? But that sounds weird, confusing, and a bit unfair. if you get two "free chars" for every character that you quest with, it means that a person who already has three unregistered alts today, will suddenly have six mid-sized characters with little effort. And those who registered their alts, or had them registered by a "nice" wizard, will only get two. It'll just encourage players not to register alts until their main character has done all quests, and "group" their alts into groups of three. That sounds... odd.

Then comes the problem with those who have "too much" QXP, due to old quests, old rewards, or the infamous QXP multiplier incident. They suddenly get more characters with the same awesome QXP. Ugh, that'll most likely multiply the complaints about that issue by ten...

And what do we do with event QXP? If we share QXP, then that will be shared too since we have no reasonable way of "splitting" normal QXP from QXP gained from events (or other rewards). I have a feeling sharing event rewards between characters might upset quite a lot of people and feel unfair as well?

Also, what happens when one of your character finishes a new quest, or wins an event? Is the QXP automatically shared with your registered alts? Or does it only happen on character creation? Meaning you'll have to do all new quests with all your characters? Just like today? If so, then it would _discourage_ people from creating alts until they've done all quests, and preferably won some event rewards too. So, the "correct" way to play Genesis would be to create one character and fill it with QXP, and then create alts. Which is kind of the opposite of the usual pattern today, where players tend to create their alts relatively early. Probably because they like to try different paths while learning the game. I think that is a good thing, and not something we should discourage.

Only making some QXP shared, or some quests shared, seems odd and confusing to me, and would require a lot of recoding of individual quests for it to make some kind of sense (like suggested by Drazson). It would also make little sense logically to share XP for selected quests. Why are some quests shared and some not? Also, the way quests and QXP work today, there is no way of knowing how much QXP a player got from a specific quest without going through the individual code for all quests and recoding the whole system. And even if we do that, we would still have to identify and leave out all quests with variable rewards. No, sorry Drazson, realistically it would probably have to be all QXP or none I think.

I also struggle with the logic in general. Why would your new character get QXP just because another character of yours finished a bunch of quests? And if so, why only QXP? Why not combat XP too? Personally, and I know I am not the only one, I think the grinding is the main hurdle when starting a new character, not the questing. So, if we share QXP, why not share combat XP too? Or let us choose to share combat or quest XP? I don't think we should share any XP, but if we were to do it, it would be much easier to share combat XP, or a portion of it, to let alts start at a higher level. (Which in turn would make it easier for the alt to quest)

Finally, as someone who prefers to solve quests over grinding, I would be quite disappointed to start a new character and the ONLY thing I can do to grow is to grind...

So... while I understand why shared QXP sounds like a good idea, I think it comes with too many problems, and simply does not really make game-design sense in Genesis. Everything is possible of course, but this sounds like A LOT of work for something that I think would cause more problems than it solves.

[Draugor]

regarding shared quest xp.... what does genesis/the community stand to gain if established players are able to more easily grow their alts?

(draugor.... can we handle MORE of you?? )

Prolly not, alot of thin skinned people here But you WANT more

[Kvator]

regarding shared quest xp.... what does genesis/the community stand to gain if established players are able to more easily grow their alts?

Totally nothing.

Except more abuse* (putting 'voter' chars in each possible guild, etc).

* it's already there ofc, but there's no valid reason to make it easier (it's already quite easy tbh - nowadays you need like 7-8** in game days to get to titan with max qexp).

** if you have friends for grinding/helping with some quests (add 3-4 days if not)

[Thalric]

I really don't understand why it isn't a relatively quick fix to deal with those "wrong multiplier qxp people"...

Would it be that hard to run through which quests a character made, and based on that give them the amount of QXP that the rest of us got?

Making a character at some "preferrential" time ought not be possible, and whoever were lucky or cheaty enough to have done so, ought to get things fixed to remove that bonus.

[cotillion]

I really don't understand why it isn't a relatively quick fix to deal with those "wrong multiplier qxp people"...

Would it be that hard to run through which quests a character made, and based on that give them the amount of QXP that the rest of us got?

Making a character at some "preferrential" time ought not be possible, and whoever were lucky or cheaty enough to have done so, ought to get things fixed to remove that bonus.

Event rewards would be zapped then also.

[Thalric]

Why?

I didn't say you should scrap all qxp, but just adjust xp given for the individual quests.
But I see the issue if all qxp has just been thrown into a pool without reference to where it came from.

[Mersereau]

Who's gonna code all this?

[Cherek]

Why?

I didn't say you should scrap all qxp, but just adjust xp given for the individual quests.
But I see the issue if all qxp has just been thrown into a pool without reference to where it came from.

Yeah, that's the problem. We only know which quests a player has completed and the player's total amount of QXP. We would have to go through all the code for every quest (thousands of files scattered all over) to be 100% sure how much QXP each quest gives. And even if we did that, we do not know if a player got the full reward for the variable reward quests, as we can only know that they finished the quest, but not how much QXP they received. Unless there is some local logs for specific quests that records a list of players with partial rewards, but I doubt that exists. Even if it did, it would be a mess to sort out.

Regarding the super old quests that no longer exists, I don't know if we still have a record of the QXP rewards and if the quest bits (the stuff that saves which quest you have finished) still exists. Maybe Cotillion could dig it up, but I bet it also would be quite the mess to sort out, even if we have records of it somewhere.

And, even if we figured out all of the above, any event rewards or other QXP rewards (or punishments) a player may have received is not recorded either. It's all just one big happy pool of QXP.

So, to properly fix the multiplier issue, and if we wanted to, also "fix" the variable QXP rewards (which I personally do not really like), we'd need a new global system for QXP. I remember that we discussed this some years ago and a number of players also volunteered to help map all quests and suggest new QXP rewards. The idea was to balance the rewards better (no more big quests with tiny rewards) and I think also to remove the variable rewards. As with many big projects it was unfortunately abandoned. I don't know why, but it usually has to do with lack of time and/or underestimating the size of the project. But if anyone who was part of the team is around and read this, feel free to correct me if I am wrong!

[Darken Rahl]

I think I read somewhere on the forums that you can fix this "Questissues", that ONLY the biggest player has, cause he ranting about it a lot, by just make the all questrewards added together and then you do the multiple.

On the other hand Questexp doesn't matter shit once you hit very violent-ish , then it is the endless grind that are equal for all I guess since the reward of a monster depends in its size and your brute level. (if solo)

@Cherek
Regarding Cloning QEXP I share the first part of your message Cherek, but I don't agree with the rest. There were also an old thread about that discussed long ago.

If I don't recall wrong it was something like this
The LIMIT shall be ONE! no more and will be automatically registered as a second to the one you clone of. The current quest exp and bits will be cloned and you cannot CLONE a CLONE!
There are many people that are stuck with their "mains" and don't have the urge to redo the quests, they rather stop playing.


I don't think there will be people doing a lot of mischief.

How about this suggestion then.
Let it roll under a testperiod, like 1st July to 31th December. If people can't differ between their chars, abusing the system etc then the CLONE and the MAIN character will be deleted. Then people know what they have to deal with from the beginning. People(read rotten eggs) will sort themselves out.