Hey, so we've got some fun and very preliminary data that I got permission to share with you. We're mostly interested in what areas people use so that we can create areas that respond to players' needs. Haven't gotten though that analysis yet, but I do have some fun stuff about how we play.
Let's start with a breakdown of where everybody gets their XP.
... not a lot of fishermen in Baldur's Gate.
So clearly people in BGTSCC like combat for leveling. How do they go about that?
Most of the XP comes from parties, but nearly half is from solo players.
Does that mean the average player does most of their fighting in a party?
Not quite! Parties give XP to lots of people per creature, so fewer creatures killed in a party can translate into a big share of the server's XP. However, your average player earns more than half of their combat XP solo. This might mean that the XP curve is a little too forgiving, and isn't pushing players to party up and take on a bigger challenge. We'll have to break it down by area later and find out.
What about RP? Let's take a look at that initial pie chart again, but break it down by party size.
It looks like parties are a good mix of RP and combat! Just what we'd hope for. The results kind of break down after party size 7, because we have very little data for larger parties. It looks like a DM had an event with 11 people in it, though!
Do lower-level players tend to party up more than high-levels, or vice-versa?
There's a change in behavior from low-level to high-level, and it looks like PCs tend to form bigger parties at higher levels, but the share of their XP that people get in parties of various sizes is only weakly correlated with their level. It's interesting to see some people's
average party size was greater than 3, meaning they spent the vast majority of their time in decent sized parties. (Wish I was that popular!)
What do these parties look like? In the graph below, blue is the average difference in XP between party members and orange is the largest difference. We're only counting party members who were in the same area during combat, so if your friend stayed at the tavern, that won't affect this next graph.
Well, at the low levels it's a lot of characters who are very, very close in level. Makes sense; you can only party up with people somewhat close to your level, and the difference between your level and the next is only a thousand XP at first. Things get pretty crazy around 200,000 XP though. Why? That's where the epic levels start! They end around 430k to 530k XP, depending on your race. You can see the spread taper down as you approach 530k XP, since there's nowhere higher to go.
That's pretty cool, but how many PCs are there to party up with at each level?
Well, if you're Lv30, you're in good company.
If we take a closer look, just over 27% of the active population is Lv30.
There are a few clumps elsewhere, but it's a fairly even distribution. You'll have twice as many friends to choose from at some levels and half as many at others, but never a 1/10th or 10x, unless you compare to Lv30. When you account for the fact that parties can be spread out by a few levels, that means it's pretty OK and there's no points in the level distribution where you just
can't find a party or partner.
Are there any levels where it's really hard to grind because there are no areas made for you?
It doesn't look like it. You see a pronounced dip around 15 that's a little troubling and a weird, sharp dip at 23 (might be an artifact because we only have 38 days of data here), but for the most part the amount of combat XP increases roughly linearly with level. That makes sense, because the amount of XP you need to get to the next level increases linearly, so people are earning XP at about the same rate until they get to the epics. Things really slope downwards at the epics.
Let's see how much XP people are getting per kill.
I see 3-4 bumps centered on 1, 8, 14, and 18. Those last two might just be one big bump spanning 14-18, or they might be two separate, overlapping bumps. These bumps probably point to really good grinding spots, where players are able to level very efficiently. things really go downhill in the epics, though. Players get progressively less and less XP. Even if epic creatures give less XP in general, you'd expect this to hold steady through the whole range. What's going on?
It helps to look at the average by total XP earned on the server, instead of the average by player.
This one shows those same bumps, but cleaner/smoother, and it has much less drop off in the epics. Why is that? This means that there's a lot of XP being earned by a smaller subset of the playerbase fighting harder monsters in the epics. Whether these players are partying up, power-building, or just taking bigger risks, the data tell a very clear story: When you get to the epic levels, a few players are earning XP much faster by taking on a bigger challenge.
So how do people earn XP in the epics?
On average? A little more questing, a lot more roleplay. Roleplay XP makes up a small but steady fraction of your XP early on, but when the combat starts getting harder, that RP XP grows and overtakes it. It effectively doubles the rate at which you progress through the epics, so any buffs or nerfs to RP XP will really change the epic portion of the grind to Lv30 for most players.
Let's take a look at how fast different players and characters make that grind.
Omitting any earning less than 5,000xp or more than 400,000xp, here's what the distribution looked like. I've rounded the data to the nearest 10,000xp and then plotted the percent of players or PCs that fit that description. Each account can have multiple PCs, so it's not surprising that accounts tend to out-earn PCs.
Refining our scope to just combat XP, we see that the accounts earning the most combat XP do not correspond to an individual PC. (Red dots earning the most XP have blue dots at 0%; no characters earn as much XP as that account does.)
Dalo astutely observed that this probably means a player is grinding loot and wants to change PCs between runs so they can hit chests which are now on cooldown. Makes sense; it's not against the rules, and it's a rational behavior given the way the server has set up its incentives.
I wonder if people who do more RP tend to have a lot of alts, too.
Nope. Our most dedicated RP'ers tend to stick to just one toon, it appears. There are a few up there who are comfortable playing a larger cast of characters, though.
Alright, what about quests? I remember the pie chart from the very beginning showed those gave almost as much XP as RP does.
Wow, quest XP is all for alts! . . Okay, not quite. Quests can only be done once per week, so there's necessarily a cap on the quest XP. That means players who play only a single character can't possibly keep up with accounts with alts when it comes to quest XP. And you see how many players don't use alts, because their quest XP caps low! (Pay close attention to the y-axis on these last 4 plots; they aren't scaled evenly with one another. The first red dot here is only slightly lower than where the first blue dot was on the others.)
Fin!
Epilogue: Here's that bar graph of combat xp share by party size translated into a pie chart.
Shrink that blue section for me! Especially you folks in the epics; the data are telling you to fight harder monsters!
Disclaimer:
This is ~38 days and ~340 players. It's not the whole server, it's not the whole year. Patterns change, and these are relatively small numbers to be working with. Don't take this as gospel. The server is constantly changing; both the world and the players.
Edits:
2021/12/8 - Changed a graph from avg party size vs XP to avg party size vs PC level and a weak trend is now visible that was previously obscured because the low levels were crammed into a small space.
