Experience and Incentives

[Dice]

Hypothetical, here - Let's say on average a player gets about seven hours of MUD time a week. That's normal, right? Most MUDders I know tend to cram their MUD time into single day events of like three hours straight RPing. Anyways, seven hours a week, and let's say two hours a scene - so roughly three scenes a week. How long do you think it should take this person to GM a skill? A month? Two months? Is this person an active player, or no? Would ten hours a week be 'active', not in code eyes as the current definition is, but in the eyes of other players?

Keep in mind that GMing a skill requires nearly 25,000 exp.

Our average seems to run about 10 hours, from past research, and it's a reasonable number IMO. 10 hours should definitely be active.

I have not seen the actual numbers, but judging by the theoretical numbers, it should take something over 100 hours of RP to gain 25,000 XP, now. (This is assuming a gain of 3 RPXP a tick on average, which is actually a pretty rosy forecast when you consider the ticks spent at 0 in each span.)

So... 10 weeks, or 3 months and a bit, to find the XP to raise a single skill to GM.

But usually you don't only want to have one skill at GM. If you want to be a fighter good enough to play with the big boys, you'll need 4 skills (2 attacks/2 defenses) at GM/Master levels and your stats raised decently high. Let's assume you need to raise 70s to 85, instead of going all the way to max.

To raise a stat from 70 to 85 costs 42k - three stats, 126k. For 4 skills, using 24k for round math, that's another 96k. In sum, that's 222k. Now you came out of chargen with 50k that was likely used for your skills if you wished to be a combatant. So, we're talking 172k XP needed to make a combatant who's able to stand toe to toe with the old, established PCs.

And that will take you 716 hours of RP to gain, or - at 10 average hours a week - 71 weeks, or about a year and a quarter of constant activity.

[Kinaed]

Hi Guys,

I will fess up that I haven't read this whole thread because it's pretty dense and I'm on a cellphone. Early on I read something along the lines of "it's been confirmed that this is not a bug". That is not necessarily true.

Az and I have spent the last week collecting back end data to determine how much XP people are earning, how much time they are RPing, and their average RP level over that time.

I must admit that I have been very busy as well as waiting to have enough data to make some decisions.

Preliminarily, it looks as if people are not achieving the expected RP levels during RP. I cannot yet confirm this is correct.

As for other questions about how fast people ought to earn, etc, here are the staff chosen answers. They are not right or wrong, other answers have benefits and weaknesses as choices. This just what staff and I agreed:

300k XP is what I consider to be a mostly mature character. It excludes massive Stat gains because I view stat increases as unnecessary and luxury... the final frontier of char development. We feel it should take approximately 1 year to achieve this OOC, so we've mathed that out to the average XP per tick for the average player (10 hours per week) to be 6 XP per tick.

We feel this should be adjusted 10% up or down over the average for average RP behaviours as per our data collection.

Now there are some caveats that players may not like, but I'll explain what they are and why they are. I know that some players might not agree with it, but it's what we do and our reasoning.

From creation to 200k or so character SPEND, people earn XP more quickly. At 300k it slows down more. To be clear, the RPxp code has ALWAYS done this. According to our stats, the average XP spend of what we deem to be "old" characters is still well below 400k for most players. In this recent iteration, we added another layer of slowing at 400k. Thus certain characters are feeling the pinch more than others.

So this leaves a "why" did we do this, and the answer is simply that TI's XP system is open ended. We want to encourage people to spend XP on alts rather than create characters that are too extreme in spend for newer players to catch up. We considered if we wanted to base the slowing on XP earned rather than spent, but decided not to because the issue is the size of span between new and older characters rather than an issue with older players earning XP. There are more intricacies than this, and I admit that I don't think it is the most elegant solution for XP, but it does what we need it to do in the game's framework. Numbers being balanced is an intrinsic flaw to having a learning system dependent on numbers at all.

If this paradigm changes, which someday it might (but it'd be a lot of work given how reliant TI's underlying framework is on XP at the moment.

This all said - RPxp is not done, please expect some changes this week or next week based on data about our underlying usages, etc.

[Geras]

<3 Good to know Kinky. :)

[Dice]

I understand the need for slowing, but if you're slowed once at 200k, again at 300k and then again at 400k, people who are trying to RP on established characters may be getting essentially nothing. Hopefully this is only a relic of the current issues, but I am getting somewhere in the vicinity of 1 XP per tick on both of my main characters.

This is hugely problematic for the purchase of silver (on one alt) and the raising of skills (on the other alt). While they're both above 400k XP, I tend to raise stats as soon as I can, so the newer alt is far from done skill-wise and was still training skills before I ran out of XP.

So I need XP bad. But, I can't play 3 characters well simultaneously unless two of them are given shorter shrift, with the 3rd really maxing out at about 5 hours a week. So I can't just create new alts to take advantage of their better rates without actively killing off characters I like to play - and even if I did that?

As a highly active player, I don't play 10 hours a week, I play 30. That means I'm liable to hit the 300k ceiling in 4 months instead of a year... meaning that, in 4 months, that alt will start gaining too slow to support their own skill training.

I recognize the reason why tapering at higher levels is considered desirable, though I would argue it does very little to address the problem of making newbies competitive. (If anyone wants to hear more of my thoughts on that matter, I can expand, but in a nutshell: it's not the uncapped number of total spent XP that represents a character's "power" in terms of what a newbie must compete with, it's capped stats and skills).

But I would like to ask that the ADDITIONAL tapering at 400k be reconsidered. I would also like to ask whether or not tapering should in general be so strict as to reduce people to <1 RPXP a tick on average.

I play more than almost anybody (in fact, right now my alt is at #2 on the RP activity list) but despite maintaining ~30 hours a week on one alt, ~15 on another and ~5 on a third, I actually haven't been able to raise my RPXP high enough that I feel able to get back to training skills.

Granted, this may well be influenced by buggy algorithms, and I recognize that - but I think now is the time to speak, before the changes are actually made, in the hopes of influencing them.

[Geras]

I've paid QP to have my stats reduced before. It cost 10 QP which was pretty steep though. Perhaps that cost could be reduced.

[wimple]

A move towards alts being required is disappointing. I didn't, until very recently, have an alt at all. I just did single characters until they were off'd. It wasn't until recently that I started an alt, and there's no way I could juggle a third.

I'm forseeing lots of people establishing players (alts), then offing or disappearing on them to start other ones. Making a lot of fragmented stories rather than a larger narrative. I suppose this'll work well for some people's play style and less well for others.

[Kinaed]

I think it depends on the psychology of the player. There are a lot of older players who will never actually spend that much on their character, so won't experience the XP turndown and won't have any issues at all simply because they reach a point where their character is complete and the XP isn't an issue. There are some who won't notice because they don't watch their XP and use it rarely. Then there's people who actively improve all the time, watch their XP like hawks, and maneuver for it. Some people like to alt, so don't see alting as a burden. Unfortunately, it's hard to say what the pbase mix is.

I think there may be some more elegant solutions, such as having XP costs increase for skills, stats, etc, towards a terminal point as more spend is introduced on the character or getting rid of XP, keeping LBU and letting people pick a set number of skills to a certain rank in chargen, or closing the open nature of the learning system and putting in learn master slots down to the literal bottom of the skill pyramid to force people to pick specific skills they want and never step outside of their choices without lowering another skill.

There are other options, and some might be elegant... but they're all massive code rewrites. As I said, the slowdown was already there, no one noticed it before though, seems like. Probably a mix of how extremely things are off balance-wise in the RPxp system mixed with adding the 400k+ tier.

[Leech]

Are you pretty adamant on a mature character taking a year to achieve?

[Geras]

Could the reduction in XP simply be made less steep?

[Kinaed]

The reduction in XP will probably be less steep. I was working on it today, but apparently my attempt to save it to my cloud drive failed, so it wasn't here when I got home. Sorry for the delay, I'm working as fast as I can given IRL commitments (alas, my job).