Upcoming Experience Changes

[IronClan]

~ There is now an NPC in the Hall of Heroes that will suppress your Bravery Streak and associated bonuses. While suppressed you can go off and do content on lower difficulties without ruining your streak. This allows you to group with friends, or join pick up groups, or even do new content on lower difficulty settings without ruining your bravery streak. Note that while suppressed bravery streaks are not ended, but you don't get associated bravery bonuses.

Sev why not just increment the BB to 5, cap it there then when "broken" you only lose 1 of the 5? Decrementing the streak by one has been suggested over and over by the players as a great way to mitigate the rigid streak mechanic and make them less binary.

This is a clunky extra hoop to jump through. It's better than nothing but it will be underutilized.

[HatsuharuZ]

Sev why not just increment the BB to 5, cap it there then when "broken" you only lose 1 of the 5? Decrementing the streak by one has been suggested over and over by the players as a great way to mitigate the rigid streak mechanic and make them less binary.

This is a clunky extra hoop to jump through. It's better than nothing but it will be underutilized.

Your idea would be abused horribly, sorry. By level 8 my own streak is at 82, so I won't notice any loss of exp for quite a few quests.

[IronClan]

There is now zero insentive to do teamwork with non-guildies I will be much less likely to buff or heal any more and it will be the same across the board. All they are doing is giving more and more incentive to look for a replacement but I dont think there is a MMO but lucky there is roll20

Wow you only buff or heal because of the 750 xp you might lose out on if they died? LOL...

[IronClan]

Your idea would be abused horribly, sorry. By level 8 my own streak is at 82, so I won't notice any loss of exp for quite a few quests.

you missed the part where I (and many others who have suggested the same idea) said cap BB at 5... Having the number be 82 versus 5 makes no difference.

The "collecting meaningless numbers" aspect of BB is actually one of it's biggest problems... people actually think they're losing something when they break a 1125 in a row Elite streak...

Optionally they could keep track of your Streak separately (like on your bio page) for those who enjoy collecting meaningless numbers, and make the BB increment to 5 and decrement by 1 when "broken" people would break their streak occasionally (AKA lose the full stacked BB bonus for 1 quest and get it back in the next quest)... And no hoops to jump through.

[IronClan]

nm now I'm just ranting.

[Daine]

Wow, great ideas, happy to see them all implemented!

[Pseudograph]

Players:

1. Has so much knowledge/experience/gear/plat/TP/favor/past lives and just plain LEET UBERNESS!!!!(Attitude) that he doesn't feel any incentive to group with anyone who doesn't offer some BIG advantage to his group. "I don't need anybody! Don't you dare slow me down!"---(WON'T HELP)

2. Very experienced, well equipped/funded/organized/efficient willing to include anyone who doesn't cause a complete failure. ---(might help)

3. Reasonably experienced with above average gear and resources(minor "farming/grind", maybe few or no past lives). He knows he still has work ahead of him but has built something of consequence. "Working with others is probably still a good idea"---(will help)

4. Heroic experience through upper/mid levels with some good/named gear and an "OK" understanding of feats/skills/enhancements. "I'm a team player if you are" ---(appreciates help and will help)

5. Has almost half of the adventure packs and considerable enthusiasm for anyone who will "offer a pass" or an elite opener. Beginning to love the game - but still unaware of a ton of things the "old timers" know.----(needs some help and will help as much as can)

6. "My buddy and I just started playing, but he can't play this weekend. Can I run with you guys?" ----(needs help for sure)

You can only take 5. You're the leader. Who do you choose?

p.s. Hirelings are still an option I suppose.

Pseudograph

p.s. I think the general idea behind these changes is pretty good. Implementation/application is always the tricky bit.

[Postumus]

Wow you only buff or heal because of the 750 xp you might lose out on if they died? LOL...

Exactly.

[Postumus]

Your idea would be abused horribly, sorry. By level 8 my own streak is at 82, so I won't notice any loss of exp for quite a few quests.

In think he meansyour streak, in effect, caps at 5; so if you run 500 quests on elite, then two on hard, you would need to run the next two quest on elite to get the full elite quest bonus again.

[Nascoe]

But am I a good team mate for bringing enough deathward potions for the whole party?

Or are they good teammates for bringing their own pots?

Both of you are good teammates. You for thinking about the others maybe not having them, and they for being considerate enough not to count on you to always supply them!

[Jiirix]

Thumbs up, all this sounds great to encourage grouping Now please travel back in time and implement it with modul 2.

[Aurora999]

Firstly on the no deaths bonus. This is basically irrelevant when elite streaking. The difference between 320% of base XP and 330% is 3.125%.

But a lot of people don't understand it, and think it's the difference between 320% base and 1.1*320 = 352% base. Those people will feel better for the change; me, I will continue not caring.


This change misses the whole point of why grouping is unattractive in DDO, even to people like me that strongly prefer grouping, and that is dungeon scaling. Compared to solo, adding a random player results in mobs and traps doing ~40% more damage, having ~30% more HP, and having better saves. Assuming you are a solid player (i.e. capable of elite streak soloing to 16 or 17 at a decent pace), you need an above average player to make up for the additional difficulty.

If you really want to encourage grouping, remove scaling entirely, then adjust Casual difficulty to be the same as it would be now with only 1 player in the dungeon. Set Normal to be what it would be now with 1 player plus 1 hireling. Hard scale to 3 players, and Elite to 6. Then, if five people want to go and run Waterworks on Normal, let them just stomp it.

Before scaling, adding a known mediocre to bad player always made your group stronger (unless they were actually trolling or sabotaging the run). Post scaling, adding a known mediocre player is usually neutral at best, detrimental at worst.


A final point. Early in DDO voice chat was used in most groups. Now it isn't. Voice makes a huge difference in giving the tips needed to turn a mediocre player into a solid one.

Pretty much all of the above with the figures maybe adjusted a little bit more for scaling. 1/2/3/4 or 2/2/3/3 I think sounds a bit better but this will be trial and error to achieve the best balance between group and solo play.

As far as personal experience goes, I've only met a single player (post-BB) that got mad at loosing the minute xp from a party death. Nobody else cared enough to even mention it besides the sometimes "Ding" or other silly remarks being shown in chat accompanied by general laughter at the way somebody died. An interesting alternative would be the previously mentioned:

Flawless = 10% - No party deaths
Survivor = 5% - Somebody else dying
0% - You dying

Maybe just flesh it out a bit more but will still only affect those players who don't understand the mechanic or those that have to take one for the team.

Removal of the BB system entirely is still the best choice in my opinion or as somebody else mentioned, cap it at 5 and decrement by 1 instead of a restart as any number above 5 serves no purpose at all besides make people have an inflated ego boost.

The suppression of BB can go in multiple ways. Running to an NPC to stop/start your BB will present future problems for those who forget and it will be a pesky annoyance having to run around to do more stuff before/during chain questing where speed can be somewhat of an issue. Ghosts of Perdition comes to mind for Elite Streaks coupled with chaining and all the gather mechanics of the quest itself. Also with the current tier of difficulty and game "balance", running elite is not an obstacle a lot of players cannot tackle efficiently so much as scaling is. Those who lack having a lot of packs and struggle reaching level 20/28 due to missing a large number of packs will continue using Elite BB as its their only way to reach those levels in a timely period without having to wait a week for ransack timers to expire and farming the exact same 2-3 quests over the course of that week.

Only good part of BB suppression is being able to freeze progress for raids or in progress groups that do not want to repeat elite (not an actual issue as elite does offer higher base xp than hard/normal).

@sirgog: I think the use of voice chat has diminished as the semi broken quality of the sound being transmitted makes some people even less understandable then they already are with either heavy accents, poorly optimised settings, bad quality microphones or people who disable microphone sound from the in-game settings. More commonly used these days that I have noticed is using third party VoIP like TS, Skype or Mumble as their quality is much better and allow for more control over optimisation. I won't deny its in-game purposes during messy scenario's or explanations.

[Robbenklopper]

Based on player feedback we are implementing some experience changes.

~ The Flawless bonus to experience now only counts your character's deaths instead of the entire party. This means if you invite someone less familiar with the content to your group and they die you won't lose your XP bonus unless you also die.

~ Henchman deaths no longer reduce the flawless XP penalty.

~ There is now an NPC in the Hall of Heroes that will suppress your Bravery Streak and associated bonuses. While suppressed you can go off and do content on lower difficulties without ruining your streak. This allows you to group with friends, or join pick up groups, or even do new content on lower difficulty settings without ruining your bravery streak. Note that while suppressed bravery streaks are not ended, but you don't get associated bravery bonuses.

We also have some special events coming up to reward grouping.

~ We are working on an additional DDO bonus days event that will award a percentage bonus on completion XP for each additional person in your dungeon group. This will not affect raids.

~ We are working on an additional DDO bonus days event that will award a percentage bonus on completion XP for each additional person in your raid group. This will not affect dungeons.

Sev~

Full Respect for this Severlin! Double thumbs up!

[Eth]

There is now zero insentive to do teamwork with non-guildies I will be much less likely to buff or heal any more and it will be the same across the board. All they are doing is giving more and more incentive to look for a replacement but I dont think there is a MMO but lucky there is roll20

lol

You have a weird understanding of teamwork, if teamwork for you is helping others only in order to save "your" XP.

[Flavilandile]

Based on player feedback we are implementing some experience changes.

~ The Flawless bonus to experience now only counts your character's deaths instead of the entire party. This means if you invite someone less familiar with the content to your group and they die you won't lose your XP bonus unless you also die.

~ Henchman deaths no longer reduce the flawless XP penalty.

~ There is now an NPC in the Hall of Heroes that will suppress your Bravery Streak and associated bonuses. While suppressed you can go off and do content on lower difficulties without ruining your streak. This allows you to group with friends, or join pick up groups, or even do new content on lower difficulty settings without ruining your bravery streak. Note that while suppressed bravery streaks are not ended, but you don't get associated bravery bonuses.

We also have some special events coming up to reward grouping.

~ We are working on an additional DDO bonus days event that will award a percentage bonus on completion XP for each additional person in your dungeon group. This will not affect raids.

~ We are working on an additional DDO bonus days event that will award a percentage bonus on completion XP for each additional person in your raid group. This will not affect dungeons.

Sev~

Good to see that something is going on on that topic.... Though, it's not enough and it's quite late.

Ok, the no death bonus removal is a good thing. But the rest are just workarounds.

While the mechanisms called Bravery Bonus, Dungeon Scaling and Dungeon Aletr had a meaning when they were put in place, nowadays they are damaging the game and need to be killed.

- Scaling should go back to what it originally was : One size fit them all, aka full party ( 4 or more ) scaling. If people want to solo, fine, they can use the Casual ( former Solo ) difficulty or they can try to challenge quests on normal/hard/elite. That should bring back braggings about being able to solo this quest or that quest on normal/hard/elite. ( and maybe some people for the challenge )

- Alert should be killed and remade in such a way that it doesn't trigger uselessly because people are doing the quests the intended way.

- Bravery bonus should also be killed and a mechanism that encourage grouping, that is XP neutral and that push players towards challenging quest difficulties ( or quest levels ) should be put in place.

[Beethoven]

All the changes sound awesome to me, shy one which I think could be improved:

~ The Flawless bonus to experience now only counts your character's deaths instead of the entire party. This means if you invite someone less familiar with the content to your group and they die you won't lose your XP bonus unless you also die.

I think a much better change would have been to make it cummulative by giving giving each player 10% for making it through without dying plus an another 5% for each additional player in the group that survived without dieing.

So, in other words:

The maximum possible flawless victory bonus someone can get when solo'ing a dungeon is 10% as there are no additional players.

However, a group of four where one character dies but three make it through without death would award flawless victory as below:
* 20% to the players that did not die (10% for not dying themselves and 5% for each of the other two that made it through with no deaths)
* 10% to the player that did die (no bonus because they did die, but still 5% for each of the two that didn't).

A full group with no deaths would give up to 35% and a full raid group up to 65%.


The advantages I could see with that are:
* it makes the bonus more meaningful, likely causing more people to actually care about it and thus promote grouping
* it gives a (in my opinion much needed) XP boosts to raids
* it does not make it feel somebody else takes away the individual player's bonus, but other players have the potential to add to it.

[davmuzl]

Sev why not just increment the BB to 5, cap it there then when "broken" you only lose 1 of the 5? Decrementing the streak by one has been suggested over and over by the players as a great way to mitigate the rigid streak mechanic and make them less binary.

This is a clunky extra hoop to jump through. It's better than nothing but it will be underutilized.

I like this one much more than having to run to an NPC even if there is one of the guildships aswell. Imagine joining a gh group where most players have done a quest already but are willing to repeat it on hard. I would rather reduce my streak bonus to 4 than have to go somewhere else before.
It would also keep a bit of the idea of rewarding players for running the highest difficulty all the time. Calling it a streak when you can turn it off whenever you want wouldn't make sense.

[EllisDee37]

Severlin, the changes in the OP are good but they're the wrong direction. Bravery is overly complicated and creates sociological issues where there don't need to be any. There are two alternate solutions that are much cleaner:

1) Cap and Descend
As IronClan already outlined: Streak caps at 5, "breaking" streak decrements it instead of erasing it. This is a better solution than the OP, but still sub-optimal, IMO.

2) First Run bonus
Remove the bravery bonus entirely, and add a "First Run" bonus that all players always get the first time they run a quest. This First Run bonus doubles your difficulty-based First Time bonus. At the same time, drop the first time elite bonus from 80% to 75%. The numbers work out essentially the same for hard and elite streaking, plus normal gets a mild bump.

The First Run bonus is far superior to any workaround for streak, whether it's suppression or capping. You get the same equivalent xp as bravery gives but there's no complicated explanation required (look at all that text in the xp report explaining bravery!) and more relevant, there's no psychological pressure to avoid grouping due to losing out on streak bonus.

[knockcocker]

False dichotomy.

Just waiting for Chai to come along and point out that it's not a false dichotomy because it wasn't
explicitly stated that they were the only two options...

[patang01]

Likewise, the "grouping bonus" will simply become a "soloing penalty".

Unlikely

The Flawless bonus existed whether you soloed or grouped, but was particularly punishing while grouping (or using hirelings) since you lost it if anyone died. A grouping bonus is something you only get for grouping.

Personally I think this is the right thing to do - there should be an exclusive bonus for grouping, not a penalty if you fail to group (meaning one person in the group dies).

My argument has always been in all these discussions that grouping should be rewarded in addition to all regular xp. I solo for most parts since I have limited time to play and less dead time standing around waiting for groups to form, but at the same time have no problem grouping when possible since it greatly lessen run time.