[crossfire] Proposal to fix experience inflation due to random maps

[Andreas Kirschbaum]

Alex Schultz wrote:
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      I'm personally thinking that something along the lines a 25% decrease in
     
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      density, and a 25% decrease in the number of levels in the large ones
     
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      (heaven, hell, TCs, but leaving the smaller ones alone in number of
     
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      levels) would be good.
     
     
That is, you suggest (for heaven) 75 levels with 75% of the monsters in it?
That would still result in more than 200 million exp you can gain there.
Compare that to the non-random warrior proofing tower that only gives you 70
million exp. And I'd say the warrior tower is much harder to solve (which is
why I suggest you should get much more exp from the warrior tower than from any
random map).


>
     
      Overall, I'm thinking we both need slightly reduced monster density in
     
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      random maps, in addition to more non-random high level maps that
     
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      actually have a decent number of high exp monsters (unlike evil masters
     
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      which is just puzzles and bosses, which are nice but don't do much for exp)
     
     
I don't think so. See my arguments below.


It seems to me that nobody else than me thinks that the random maps give (far)
too much experience. Nobody even bothered to comment on the experience tables
in my initial mail. The responses merely said something like "please don't
reduce the experience" without disproving my arguments. Therefore I'll try to
illustrate my point of view a little more:

In my opinion, a game must be fun for players. Otherwise they will just not
play it (for a long time).

One fun aspect of a game (again in my opinion) is that you always should have
the impression that you could reach even more than you reached before if you
just try. Be it more levels/experience, equipment, knowledge, etc.

Therefore, if you are able to reach the maximum level in no time, it does not
give you any sense of achievement when you actually reach it. On the other
hand, it would just render the game to be not fun. Actually, reaching the
maximum level makes the game boring because do not have that impression I
described before.

Note: I consider level 110 (but not 115) as the "maximum level" for crossfire
because additional levels above 110 require double exp but do not give you much
more benefits. Therefore these levels are just not worth the effort you need to
gain them.

That said, I'd rather make the game (much) harder to level than to create new
high-level maps for level 110+ characters.

With "much harder" I imagine something like:

- level 30-50 is the common level for many (serious) players,

- level 70+ should require quite some work (maybe at least a few weeks playtime
  if you really know what you are doing),

- level 100+ should be really hard (at least a few months playtime), and

- level 110+ should be virtually unreachable (maybe a year playtime)


One more reason is that (in my opinion) a player should have lots of maps to
choose from, regardless of his level. (Probably with the exception of level 115
characters: I do not care too much for these characters.)

Now, my impression is that many developers are working on new server (and
client) features but very few actually create new maps.

Therefore, if we make it easy to become a high-level character, most of the
existing maps become useless. So even if we create a few new high-level maps,
overall we end with fewer (useful) maps than before.


To demonstrate my point how easy it is to become a high level character by
using the currently existing random maps, I created two new characters on my
local server. I used different races and used skills to level them. With both
characters I reached about level 90 in less than one hour playtime.

Of course, I outfitted them with good starting equipment, but I think reaching
a high level should mean quite a lot work, no matter what items you start with.
(Besides that, I cannot think of any way to archive that with non-random maps
-- ignoring that some other skill(s) do have the same problem.)


Said that, my point in draining the experience from the random maps was

a) to prevent players to gain huge amounts of exp (and high-levels) simply by
   doing random maps over and over.

   For example, my test-characters would have reached level 45 only (which also
   is too much for one hour playtime) with my exp/20 proposal, and

b) to encourage players to clear non-random maps simply by making the exp
   reward for (comparably simple random) maps not rewarding.


PS: one last note about the training center: on metalforge I've seen quite a
    few players that got killed somewhere, then switched to the TC because it
    is safe and effortless to level there. (It's their own choice to do so, but
    I don't think the training center (or any other random map) should make it
    possible to level faster than by clearing "regular" (non-random) maps.)