On Spawn and Scaling Changes

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Rhifox
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On Spawn and Scaling Changes

Unread post by Rhifox »

Hello BGTSCC,

It's been a month since the spawn/scaling changes went in and we've collected some data from the last 6 weeks.

Firstly, I'm going to take a moment to apologize to our community for how these changes initially went in. It was not communicated well and quite clearly showed a significant gap between what developers and our player community are looking for from the server experience. So for that, I am sorry, and we commit to better consider and communicate such major and controversial changes in the future.

The purpose of these changes was to try and adjust what was very clearly an outlier in terms of areas. Wyverns was far and away the single most efficient grinding area in the game, ever since the changes to Cloudpeak Foothills and Neutralize Poison drew more player focus towards it. To show just how much of an outlier it was, here is some graphs showing the area's popularity before and after the change:

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After
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After
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This very clearly shows just how extreme the difference is between wyverns and other areas, and why we felt something needed to be done to bring it in line with other areas. Since the change, you can see there is still a gap, but it is considerably smaller than it used to be, and other areas have seen upticks in activity as a result.

Now, we have heard loud and clear that players feel other areas should have been brought up to the level of wyverns instead of bringing wyverns down. But this is simply not feasible from a development perspective. There is just too much work to do to bring everything else up to the one outlier than to bring the one outlier down. However, now that the outlier has been brought down, we are looking into broad adjustments to leveling as a whole. Things such as possibly increasing general experience earned, increasing experience earned in the first few hours of the day while lowering it the longer you grind (to help people with lower play times to keep up with people who can grind for many many hours), "rest bonuses," food bonuses, henchmen, and so on. We have heard and absolutely understand that players do not have fun grinding and want more areas like wyverns was, so we are looking into better ways to address these concerns.


Of course, changing wyverns wasn't the only change done. The next big thing was the change to level scaling, which affected all content on the server. This was done because the original design goal of level scaling - getting players to use more varied areas - did not succeed, and was instead causing players to stay in the same levels for considerable chunks of their leveling experience. We have a lot of great areas on the server that unfortunately go unused, and scaling was sadly hurting this further.

Now, it was made clear by players that they greatly enjoyed the opportunities presented by level scaling. And the feedback given by players did lead us to consider rolling the change back. But after receiving the results from the change, we found a surprising development. Notably, while the top 5% exp earners (that is, powerbuilds and other builds that can clear content very quickly) have seen a significant drop, the average player is progressing at similar rates as before the change. In the following graph, you can see the blue line (top 5%) is what has mainly come down over the last 6 weeks, while the 95% rest of the player base has stayed fairly consistent.

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Prior to the change, the top 5% of earners were very likely to quickly shoot past the average player, which could have an effect of making players feel like they are being outpaced by their peers. Bringing that top group down may allow for less variance in leveling speeds between players, and thus increase the number of people available for group. As such, we are likely going to be leaving the level scaling changes in place. We may, however, temporarily add level scaling back to epic areas. We have a very clear lack of options for epic level content and not having level scaling removes player options even further in this range. Players have clearly expressed that the 20-25 range is particularly problematic, and this is a range we want to address. This scaling would be returned until such time as we can add new epic content to fill out the missing level ranges. A possible increase to the amount of experience earned in epic areas is also being considered, either in addition to or instead of a return to scaling, especially in the lower epic levels.

The removal of scaling does not mean we are ignoring the feedback given by players, though. As said above, we are considering raising overall exp rates to compensate. Unlike a return of scaling, a general exp increase would raise the level rate for the average player, rather than just the top 5%. Other possibilities include increasing the range at which party members can gain experience with each other, since some of the feedback we have received on the changes to scaling are that it has hurt party experience.

Regardless, what all of these discussions and fallout has revealed is that BGTSCC's PvE content is very lacking. We understand many players feel our leveling content is boring, simultaneously too challenging and too easy (due to bullet sponge difficulty rather than interesting mechanics or tactics), and that it can be very unrewarding. As such, a PvE rework has taken top priority for the server moving forwards. This will be done with the intent on making content more rewarding and more fun, with larger numbers of weaker mobs, interesting abilities, and more hand-tailored dungeons. I have been hard at work for the past few weeks doing a fully revised monster manual, with new, hopefully more reasonable stats and new and more faithful translations of creature abilities into digital form (such vampires needing to be destroyed with sunlight or stakes, or in their coffins). This will take time, and I hope you can be patient with us. I am hoping to have this largely finished by summer, preferably sooner, and if possible will be tying in crafting and faction systems into it as well.

In addition, we are looking into ways at tackling other player concerns with our pve, such as looting. The next patch will be including a loot pass that will include the addition of several entirely new types of armor with custom stat blocks (some of which will be on par with mithral and hopefully end the clear dominance of that one armor type), increasing the likelihood of receiving usable gear, and some possible adjustments in the chance of the RIG producing randomized items with useful properties.

We understand that our content is lacking. A lot of it is outdated, the product of being such an old server with areas that haven't been touched by developers in ages. We want to make this experience better for all players, and are working towards that. We apologize for how this recent change was handled, and hope we can earn back your trust.

Thank you for your patience.
Tarina — Witch, Apothecary, Dealer in Spirits and Black Magic
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gedweyignasia
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Re: On Spawn and Scaling Changes

Unread post by gedweyignasia »

If people are interested in examining the effects of the rebalance for themselves, I've made the data available interactively: before and after

Hopefully players will be able to combine this with their own experience to come up with new insights into ways we can improve the server. I'll try to provide more of these when work lets up in a month or so.
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