S_M_W said to spread out our constructive criticism, so I moved this post here...

In general, the optimal strategy for leveling up involves killing as many AI as possible, as fast as possible, with possibly a partner but never more than that, or you experience diminishing returns.

This usually takes the form of finding a cluster of dgs close together that can be done repeatedly in sequence. The whole Hermes thing was kind of the same thing, but you never had to move to find more spawn, the AI were over-leveled for their difficulty, and you could camp it afk.

Now, because of the levels of the AI available for this kind of chain-massacre are leveled between 1800 and 2k, this puts a soft-cap on our ability to effectively level at 2-2.5k

Point 1) I get the feeling the devmins intend for the softcap that results from this limit on the leveling effectiveness, and I don't disagree.

Point 2) Leveling to 2k is boring, not hard. I would like to see content that made leveling hard and fun. (dynamic dgs, see Clam's Gauntlet suggestion for a rough idea of what I'm talking about) Most importantly, it should be a 5-10 man experience.

Point 3) While leveling has traditionally been relegated to killing large numbers of comparatively low level AI, it would also be possible to level off smaller numbers of higher level AI; a dynamic dg could contain instead of many level 1800 ai, two or three level 4k ai which would take more effort to kill, and achieve a similar amount of XP. However, this defeats the soft-cap on level, which I suspect is not something the devmins want.


Point 4) While so far I have generally agreed with the admins, I must point out that the incident with Hermes shows that some people would really love to level up beyond this soft-cap of 2.5k, without resorting to either Heal XP (broken) or XP tithe (broken).

Discuss.

I might be mistaken, but I believe they changed long ago so that you actually get increased experience by having more people in the squad. In theory, if you kill one Ai that gives 500 exp solo, you get... Well, for the matter of conversation, you get 500/2 + 1 exp if you're two people, and 500/3 + 2 exp if you're three etc. I have no clue what-so-ever of the actual numbers, but I'm pretty sure I've read something like this in an update.

Secondly, I know people who still level from DGing at level 3k. I have no personal experience of this, so I can't really say, but spend a few hours just moving from DG to DG (not camping the same) and see how many levels you've made.

Leveling past 3k gives more prestige and bragging rights than it does actual use in the game. Sure, if I was given another 1k skill points to put into Zen skills, I wouldn't turn it down, but it's not that important. The whole Hermes leveling exploit made people gain that extra zen skills with relatively little effort. (Definately not completely without effort or risk, but still relatively little compared to spending month after month after month in DGs.)

If leveling is boring - bring friends and just power through DGs. It's not as effective as making an optimal setup for, and just camping, high level AIs, but it's a whole lot more fun.

This game has moved from being completely solo-oriented, to actually requiring some team/squad effort at times. (Or MCing.) I mean, there was a pretty long time when Shield Monkey wasn't invented yet. I like that change. If they made a way so effective leveling past level 2.5k or 3k (or whatever) actually requires a squad - I'd be delighted!

In my mind - if you want to level, go DG. If you're bored, bring a friend. If you DG just for the intention of finding DG loot, the levels do come. Slowly, but they come. If your main goal is just to level upwards 4k - what's so important about it? If some people find it worth the time to use heal-exping up to and beyong 4k, I wouldn't value the time spent on it worth it. And exp tithing - that discussion has been dead for sooo long, and only arise since people now all the sudden became interested in leveling since it became relatively easy for a brief moment.




I'm sorry for this long post - I'm tired, and probably won't stand for all of it tomorrow. I just don't consider this whole leveling past 3k discussion very important.

I think they should put in a leadership healing specific xp tithe where directors/councilors of teams get exponential bonus xp for healing because two brokens make a fixed, right?

kyp, after re-reading your post, I realize I agree with a lot you've written. I'm sorry to bring such a long rant upon you, when I think you're right on many points. I just saw red when I've heard soo much complaining about leveling in all chat the past few days, and then saw a post about it that I only read very briefly.

(You did say "discuss" though.)

Make level hard, but fun. Getting levels past 3k should take a long time and a lot of effort in my mind, and in most cases I believe it has.

Also, being a director or councilor of high ranking team actually usually takes quite a bit of time and effort in itself. You have to stay in that spot for a very long time to actually get to those extremly high levels from it, and I personally think the people who think it's worth it deserve it. If you don't think they deserve it, you have two options - whine about it on forums and hope for admins to change game mechanics, or force their team down the drain/force the person in charge off the throne. We want more in-game gameplay-oriented hostility don't we, instead of just the pointless forum/all chat-hostility we see today?

No need to apologize, the reason I wanted to make this thread is because I think its a topic ripe for discussion. The Hermes exploit shows us that.

Since I'm a councilor on a top 10 team, I think I get the right to speak to the subject of XP tithe

The reason I say XP tithe is broken is that you can leave your computer on 24/7 and never get kicked off SS, and get a few levels per day if you're on an active top 10 team with 0 effort. Furthermore, the "diminishing returns" from lower level characters on the team doesn't seem balanced to me, so that the soft-cap on this kind of leveling is probably around 3k

Now really the main point I wanted to come to was that having a soft-cap on leveling around 2k makes sense. Towards that end though, I think there are things the devmins could implement to make the process of getting to 2k less dull, even if its harder or slower. Taking 5-10 guys from your team and hacking your way through an onslaught of enemies sounds like fun to me, even if the rewards are fairly minimal.

tl;dr: dynamic dgs with varied, difficult, and multitudinous AI, whose rewards are #1 not boss based, and #2 leveling oriented, with the goal of making leveling not boring.

For the crap a director on a high end team has to put up with, a few levels a day isn't hurting anyone.

Yes, but if you're level 4.2k a few levels a day is quite difficult otherwise. I call that broken.

I can kill 2 Dgs and get a few levels.

Using ShM healing experience okay nice...

Kyp is right praise be him!

Hmm.. ok. Well that wasn't really the point of this topic anyways. Any more thoughts more to the point?

Councillor/Director work is much effort and I think it's very good to reward those players. I have tried keeping my councillor char online 24/7 but I think it's not worth it. Sure, LC isn't the most active team so other teams get more xp for their leaders.

xDrag0nx is top1 and he hasn't used team xp.

Well lower end team directors get exactly the same sort of crap too.
Everone seems to bring their problems to the director and it takes time and can be quite draining emotionally. I think we should be beefing the Director/ Councellor bonus.

Right, he used heal xp, which I think everyone agrees is broken.

df 300+ dgs should have two or three Sets of differant ai per level with the number of ai limit increased to lets say 12-14, basically make them much more difficult and change the drop tables for these to actually give u decent stuff more for incentive for people to group up to go try dging more previous ones with just mfrs/platties can be moved down to 250-300. could integrate the newer roaming oly ai to some of these too would actually give something decent to level off along with being a bit more of a challange than the general boring levels of one type of ai to get to a boss

Also the idea from the reconditioned ai was brilliant, added more stuff to kill more to do would be nice if they could be given a drop chance of the earthforce tokens that you traded the base remains for at the start of the uni, or perhaps earthforce token shards which you need 10 of to create one for a reason to hunt these more.