PSA: Bonus XP on Lower Populated Shards Coming to an End

[Sanguinesun]

9 hours ago, Ukase said:

I thought that was the reason behind the XP boost, wasn't it? To take load off of Excelsior and put it on the other servers? 

 

 

I did the same thing initially. This is what I found: 
Because nobody would help with GMs when I found them, I had to either do without them, or wait until once a day, instead of multiple times a day. Sorry, but that's just not smart play if you're after the loot. Now, I have plenty of loot, and I don't need any more. But without reward merits, prismatics and such, I don't really have a reason to play anything more than once. Sorry, I don't. Now, that's just me, but playing on Indom while I did was an opportunity cost of about 300-400 reward merits a day. 
 

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MSRs - 2x a day
Hami Raids - 2x a day (sometimes 3x a day, and at least 3 runs each time)
Adamastor - up to 8x a day with different characters

Normal TFs and such are about the same, maybe a little more because one doesn't have to wait forever for the team to form. 
iTrials - just about at any time of day, not just once in the evening. (they give 20 reward merits, generally) 
Other named GMs, particularly the Croatoa GMs. - 3-4x a day

Indom has some smart, good people. Helpful people. But they can't make up for the lack of opportunity to pursue merits and team play. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution aside from folks on Indom moving to another shard - which I know many will despise that, and probably quit. And I wouldn't blame them. 

Another potential fix would be for new accounts to only see Indom, Torch or Reunion as an option. Just hide Excelsior and Everlasting from new players. That's not a great fix, or even a good one, sadly. And I'm not sure we are getting enough good players for that to even work. 

Another option might be for the rewards on Indom and Torch to be a percentage greater than on Excelsior and Everlasting. How much? No idea. 

Another possible solution is for the HC GMs to encourage SGs to branch out to Indom for certain nights. 

Imagine about 5-10 of the larger SGs from other shards recruiting for various things throughout the day, but only needing 2-4 players to fill their group. Plenty of players are already "nice" enough to do something like that, they just need a reason, and they need it to be easy. A transfer is easy, but I'm not sure an SG would want to transfer over and lose their SG affiliation - and their base. If a solution to that dilemma were possible (other than these SGs making another base) then I could see it happening. 


I think if incarnate reward tables for various trials were buffed to give a 40%-50% chance of rare/very rare - that alone might see more folks doing the higher level stuff more often. 

I can brainstorm until the cows come home. Some folks will hate the ideas, and some ideas would be impractical. The best solution is probably to do nothing. 
 

 

You cant hard code social dynamics.  That's the rookie dev mistake many games learned the hardway years ago....

 

Life finds a way 😛

Edited November 1 by Sanguinesun

[ivanhedgehog]

11 hours ago, Skyhawke said:

 

Where everyone says people pop over to say, Indom, farm up with 4x XP then transfer back to Excel. If a "special rewards" character was shard locked, nobody would do this. The point of more xp was to incentivize folks to play on lower pop servers, even if only part time. My thought is if you could have some alts on a lower pop server that get some nice rewards for being there, you'd play them at least some of the time. This would have shards see more traffic at times and possibly hook some into staying full time. 

Maybe if we quit this obsessive compulsion to "regulate" farming we might address other problems. The devs had no issue with helping hardmode farmers collect billions of inf with the prismatic aether. just let them play the game and let people have fun.

[ivanhedgehog]

34 minutes ago, Sanguinesun said:

 

You cant hard code social dynamics.  That's the rookie dev mistake many games learned the hardway years ago....

 

Life finds a way 😛

Torch has the SNS (synapse saturday) and thats a lot of fun.

[ZamuelNow]

The XP boosts made sense for the first month or two but not longer.  Considering that Excelsior was genuinely straining the server and was a danger to itself, I'd say a carrot, a stick, and a mix would be better.

 

The stick would be to simply lower the max shard population.  I believe the max is higher than 1000 which seems a lot for a game with older code yet multi-shard architecture.  This could backfire if people can ping the server while waiting and aggressively impatient people keep clicking the button to enter (though I forget if the option to click even exists when a shard is full).

 

The carrot would be to promote the player events that happen on smaller servers or choose those servers for doing events.  I think this was part of the reason for why the anniversary costume contests were where they were, though the first created shard and the European shard make sense as locations.  The contest on Reunion wasn't at earlier times and the one on Torchbearer didn't take screenshot of every instance but no one's perfect.  Promoting things like Saturday Night Synapse or Themed TF/SF Saturdays won't attract everyone but helps showcase things that are going on.

 

The mix would be being stricter about things like multiboxing during events.  It's a stick to the person multiboxing but a carrot to everyone else.

[Troo]

15 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

obsessive compulsion to "regulate" farming

 

I think I'll address this in a separate thread.

[Without_Pause]

I tapped out my farmer in terms of recipes duo boxing a number of build into their 30s. They should honestly target low pop servers like this during the holiday season. 

[Heliphyn34u]

On 11/1/2024 at 2:36 AM, Troo said:

 

um.. just fyi: the server experience bonus did not reduce infamy ($$).

 

Oh!  That's very different.  Nevermind!