Experience Changes

Prodigus · Sep 20, 2008

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=429922

With GU 49, we're changing the level curve. Traditionally, we've only quietly lowered it a little bit with expansions. This will be the first time we've significantly changed it. With that in mind, I'd like to give a little insight into the changes, and some of the additional related things that will be going in to support and enhance them.
Why are we making this change?

Quite simply, we want people to have a better play experience. When you think about levelling through a 10 level spread when we do a level cap raise, there are a lot of other players around. The game feels really alive, and vibrant, because you've got people around you making your experience different every time you log in. Now look at levelling alts, especially in the 20-70 range. It's a completely different experience, especially if you don't have a few friends doing the same thing with you. What we want to do is to get new players into the game faster, give them a better experience while they're levelling up, and at the same time, give some of you folks who've been with us for a long time a chance to level up new characters without spending forever doing it. More on this later. This change to the level curve should also help veteran players choose which content they want to play through rather than always playing the same levelling path every time you create a new character.

We'll also be slightly increasing the drop rate of Adept I spells while solo to compensate for the increased pace of levelling. I'm sure this will also help out all those folks trying to level up transmuting too. The 1-59 item changes that went in recently should also help lower level gear drops be more useful to newer players.

To also try and get people interested in going back and maybe helping new folks a bit, we're increasing the amount of achievement xp earned by the the person mentoring the lower level player. This amount increases as the level difference increases, from 50% at 6-10 levels difference to 300% at a 50% level difference. Now, this achievement xp increase only applies to combat & loot achievement xp, not quest & exploration achievement xp. We don't want to encourage people to find someone to mentor only for a few seconds, we want to encourage mentoring during an adventuring play session. Between 1-5 levels difference, there is no bonus. This is going to be a delicate balance here, because we also want to keep level-appropriate adventuring being the primary source of achievement xp.

So about the curve!

We track a lot of data about how much xp is gained while actively out adventuring (questing, grinding, etc.), which gives us a pretty clear idea of how long the average person takes to get to level 80. That amount of time is 260 hours on average. I'm sure many people can do it faster. I'm sure many people are slower. But that is the average time it's taken over the last 35 days. A large part of that time is the 70-80 period of time. I'm not particularly eager to change that - there are a lot of players in that level range, and there's a lot of content for people to play through. The big sticking point is actually from 20-70, and that's where people will see the most change in time to level. To give you an idea, the old average from 1-70 was ~164 hours. The new time sits at ~100 hours. What we didn't change much were the bookmarks, which is to say, we didn't change the 1-20 experience much, nor did we change the 70-80 a whole lot either.

The last thing I want to talk about is unlocked xp bonuses. This won't be coming in 49 at this point, but they will be in 50. The process is simple - for every character that you have at the current level cap (80 for right now), you will unlock an account-wide +10% xp bonus for your other characters. This bonus will stack for each character you get to the level cap, up to a maximum of 50% bonus.

If you log onto Test to check these changes out, please also keep in mind that Test has an increased rate of experience gain, so Test will always be faster than the real level scheme. Also please try and keep in mind that players more experienced in EQ2's content already level at a vastly increased rate - not just through knowledge of where to go to xp, but also through friends to power level new characters and money for collections. Right now, this change to the curve will result in lower level characters receiving an xp bump based on where they were in the curve. We'll have to see how this shakes out and whether we want to look into changing how it works before 49 hits live.

This is not about making the game "easier", I think very few people find themselves challenged by levelling a character. It's about making it more approachable, getting a better player experience through the mid-levels, and getting newer players to interact with veteran players. =)

Have a good evening, and hope the new stuff on Test treats everyone well!

Neat, for us alt-a-holics!

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Experience Changes

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