So - first of all, I did not play any of the old Everquest titles but took my first MMORPG steps in World in Warcraft as a teenager. Even back then I kinda enjoyed the idea of rested experience if you decided to put your character in the correct spot. Did the original Everquest have rested experience in its first format?
Furthermore - what are our thoughts about it in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen?
Should we be granted a slight, huge or decent percentage boost to our experience gain if we decide, or make, it to what is to be considered a safe space for the night?
What are those safe spaces to be considered as? An inn? Any other ideas?
What are the positives and negatives, in your mind?
If there's any other posts covering this, I'm sorry, but I couldnt find it.
I would have to say no to rested experience, its just my personal preference, nothing extremely wrong with it, i just think trying to find ways to speed up the leveling process that litterally require you to do nothing(and quite litterally nothing, like not even logging on.) it just sounds bad to me.
Another middle position for me. The positives are rewarding people to get off their butts every now and again (a feature Im personally going to implement into my guild either way), the negs however are this feature always seems to be abused in conjunction with xp potions or experience modifiers. I think resting, if we are going to implement that should perhaps have a different effect than modified experience rate.
It's a no for me, I don't see it as a necessary thing and not having it keeps players more spread out over a longer period of time for ease of finding groups at any point in ones journey. Offering bonuses for inaction seems antithetical to the goals/tenets of this game.
I've only had experience with it once, a long time ago in a galax....GAME! far away. It seemed to me that it's only purpose - other than to let pretty much everybody level faster -was to help a person who's friends were all playing more hours than they did. It could help make up the 'deficit' by logging where they could get rested XP.
While helping friends is a worthy goal, it seems to me that the majority of those taking advantage of it will just be those who wish to race to end game. While I sometimes ponder if it wouldn't be good to just help them to speed to the 'finish line' so they have their fun and then move on to another game, I can't really endorse it for reasons already mentioned above.
I think a small EXP bonus for logging out in a safe area like a town would be a good way to get people back into the adventuring areas.
I think EXP bonus when resting in adventure/non-safe areas would not be a good idea becuase it would encourage people to just log in, blow through their bonus, then log out. Reason being, this is a group game and we want to encourage people to stay playing.
I like the idea of having some way to reward players for taking the time to go back to town at the end of a gaming session. An experience bonus is fairly counter to the idea that leveling should be a slower process in Pantheon. Tied in with that I also think Racers are bad for a game and would look for ways to discourage players from grinding experience for more than 8 hours in a day.
A “Well Rested” buff could last for say 4-8 hours after being logged out in an Inn for the same amount of time. Said buff could give you a boost on perception, a small boost to combat speed and maybe crafting speed as well. Your chance for discoveries or skill ups could also be increased if “Well Rested”. Maybe there could also be a way to refresh your timer for another couple of hours if you return to an inn and have a meal and listen to a bard.
The motivation behind this has several parts. Encourage congregating and as a consequence socializing in and around inns. Help form local groups as your well rested buff will not decay within a close range of the Inn. Build an organic but mechanic driven play time cycle. Discourage truly unhealthy game play sessions.
At the end of the day the buff will only be of low importance so that if you cant be bothered its not that big of an issue.
I'm going to have to say that at the moment it's a soft "no" for me. There's a lot of valid reasoning on both sides I believe others have stated fairly well, but I also just don't feel like an experience bonus sends the right message to players. Ideally, we want people to appreciate the journey more than they do in other games, since we all recognize that leveling people too fast is a cardinal sin of many other games. To give people a way to level faster simply doesn't fit with that ideal. To put it another way - I think we want the focus to be on socialization, exploration, gameplay, and content - and not on how fast or slow someone is leveling. People will focus on that on their own, there's no need to help draw attention to it.
I think there are other ways that the game can encourage people to go back to town at the end of a play session, but let's leave experience bonuses out of the equation.
My 2 cp.
Trasak said:A “Well Rested” buff could last for say 4-8 hours after being logged out in an Inn for the same amount of time. Said buff could give you a boost on perception, a small boost to combat speed and maybe crafting speed as well. Your chance for discoveries or skill ups could also be increased if “Well Rested”.
I like the idea of encouraging players to visit towns frequently, and agree with your suggestions for ways to do it that don't include bonus XP. The one part that I disagree with you is
Trasak said:Tied in with that I also think Racers are bad for a game and would look for ways to discourage players from grinding experience for more than 8 hours in a day.
While I feel as you do about 'Racers' in general, the idea of putting a time limit on players is a 'can of worms' with more detriments than benefits. One really can't isolate one particular day in a player's life and say that X number of hours spent playing is too many. Many full time workers may not be able to log in all week, between job and family responsibilites. I'm hard pressed to believe that a 30 hour playing marathon on the weekend is particularly harmful to them, let alone to the game. And this doesn't begin to address the issue of selling 24/7 access to a game through a subscription and then saying "but after 8 hours, we cut you off for xxx amount of time".
Rested XP is a hard no for me. You should never benefit from not playing the game, for any reason, ever. EVE Online once required you to log into the game to change skills but later that was done away with and you could schedule skills so that as one ended another would begin. You could skill up for years and never actually play the game. I know it is the same thing, but in both cases you are getting a benefit for not actually logging in and playing.
Rested XP as a means to speed up the leveling for those players who can't or won't spend the time needed to level then I would say NO.
Rested XP or some other bonus to those who have spent an Unhealthy amount of time online in a given time frame, as a means of encouraging healthy gaming sessions then sure I’m OK with that.
Jothany said:Trasak said:A “Well Rested” buff could last for say 4-8 hours after being logged out in an Inn for the same amount of time. Said buff could give you a boost on perception, a small boost to combat speed and maybe crafting speed as well. Your chance for discoveries or skill ups could also be increased if “Well Rested”.
I like the idea of encouraging players to visit towns frequently, and agree with your suggestions for ways to do it that don't include bonus XP.
Players will visit towns/cities often enough for tradeskills, buying/selling/trading, banking, training, quests, and whatever else.
Quality of interaction matters, psychologically manipulating players into feeling like they are missing out on something for not going to an inn is (IMO of course) awful. It has led to no quality interactions between players in WoW or any other game I have seen such a mechanic, just a "forced" FOMO mechanic.
Most games with this offer players a "hearthstone" to facilitate it and design their worlds in such a way that a new town or hub is always close, one in just about every zone (if not more). I really don't want to see this in Pantheon, I especially don't want towns/hubs in every zone. If traveling matters and it can take a while to get places then I would rather players be encouraged (rather than punished) to camp out near where they are leveling so when they log in they can start finding a group asap, be it right outside an outdoor keep or zoning right into the last dungeon they were in at a "safe" spot.
Keno Monster said:I don't see how requiring players to return to an inn is going to promote any kind of social activity. The casual person looking to get an exp boost by logging out at an inn probably isn't going to do anything other than return to town and log out immediately.
I agree, 99% of people - casual or not - will just use it for the bonus.
@Iksar
We come down on different sides on this one. I think the natural tendency is for players to just solo grind. I don't want to just psychologically manipulate players into centralizing and interacting with other players I want to directly and tangibly reward them. You can choose to never go back to town but you are choosing to forgo the well rested buff. Its a benefit but it is partially to offset the loss in efficiency that is represented by going back to town before logging out rather than just logging out on a random hill side.
Inns would not need to be in every zone for this to work, it really more depends on run speed and zone size. I would try and have one inn within a 10 minute walk from all major dungeons and points of interest. If centrally located and the zones are small enough then that one Inn could service 4-9 zones.
Logging out in an Inn is intended to serve a lot of functions rather than just generating buffs. A little bit it is an immersion tool, especially of beginning and end of play session tasks are located in or around an Inn. Knowing where to go to find groups in your level is also helpful for speeding up getting into a group and getting back to playing, knowing you have logged out exactly where groups will be forming is helpful. Inn's can be a good place to put adventuring boards where group leaders can pick up level appropriate, quasi randomly generated group quests. The quest your group gets will take you into nearby content but have you moving around and possibly discovering rather than just calling out a camp name and sitting there for hours. Not that you can't still sit at one spot and grind just that there could be other more enjoyable and equally efficient play styles.
The concept of an Inn itself is really just a construct. The true point of it is to create natural gathering nodes for areas by concentrating non-combat or pre-combat functions into centralized locations that are relatively easy to access and service a larger area of considerable danger.
Trasak said:Tied in with that I also think Racers are bad for a game and would look for ways to discourage players from grinding experience for more than 8 hours in a day.
That idea should die in a fire under a #% &*#@% bus. If I want to play 15 hours a day I should not be punished for doing that. Yes, I'm going to outlevel you quickly and we wont be competing for any of the same content. Yet you want some stupid mechanic to punish me? How about we punish you by capping how many skill ups for tradeskills you can earn in an hour, or how much money you can hold/earn based upon your level, or how many harvestable tradeskill items you can harvest in an hour.
This is a virtual world and people should be free to play as frequently or in infrequently as they want, for as many continuous hours as they wish without penalty.
EDIT: @ Trasak, I wanted to clarify that my use of 'you' was not directed at you specifically, but a generic plural 'you' meaning anyone who thinks that penalizing players who have the freetime to play more often and thus can level faster as a result is actually a good idea.
Vandraad said:This is a virtual world and people should be free to play as frequently or in infrequently as they want, for as many continuous hours as they wish without penalty.
Again I agree here. As if Real Life wasn't restrictive enough, don't go restricting my (and others) escapism. No thanks.
Trasak said:
The concept of an Inn itself is really just a construct. The true point of it is to create natural gathering nodes for areas by concentrating non-combat or pre-combat functions into centralized locations that are relatively easy to access and service a larger area of considerable danger.
These already exist, and always have in these games. They're called cities. People will bank, craft, travel to and from them. They will serve as hubs as they always have. There is no need for some artificial exp mechanic to encourage people in the same zone to say hello to each other.
Vandraad said:Trasak said:Tied in with that I also think Racers are bad for a game and would look for ways to discourage players from grinding experience for more than 8 hours in a day.That idea should die in a fire under a #% &*#@% bus. If I want to play 15 hours a day I should not be punished for doing that. Yes, I'm going to outlevel you quickly and we wont be competing for any of the same content. Yet you want some stupid mechanic to punish me? How about we punish you by capping how many skill ups for tradeskills you can earn in an hour, or how much money you can hold/earn based upon your level, or how many harvestable tradeskill items you can harvest in an hour.
This is a virtual world and people should be free to play as frequently or in infrequently as they want, for as many continuous hours as they wish without penalty.
I can accept that's more of my own stance. Part of it is driven by my own health history and the effect of long sedentary periods. I would still like to compensate/reward people for the time spent in-game inefficiently going back to town and doing long form group quests rather than speed pulling the same camp. No matter what I wasn't suggesting a penalty for people who play longer, you would just need to refresh the buff again. Good time for a food/restroom break (hopefully not at the same time).
It should also be noted that I am not infavor of an EXP boost but rather a perception and small haste boost.
I'm not in favor of making a activity reward more someone who plays less, we should get what we play for and not be rewarded for playing less.
While I agree "sleeping" in an inn/bed should give something such as a rested state, I don't think it should be experience based. Perhaps even, sleeping in non safe areas should give a 5% malus to stats that an inn doesn't impact, something that reflect the "fatigue" of the character.
MauvaisOeil said:
While I agree "sleeping" in an inn/bed should give something such as a rested state, I don't think it should be experience based. Perhaps even, sleeping in non safe areas should give a 5% malus to stats that an inn doesn't impact, something that reflect the "fatigue" of the character.
Which directly impacts experience gain. Let's stop suggesting that increasing attack speed, or lowering stats, isn't exactly tied to exp, to make people feel better about this terrible idea.
No boosts to exp at all in my opinon, aside from mitigating loss of XP due to death through player interaction.
I like the idea of maybe having a "well rested" bonus. For example, for every X minutes you are logged off, you get a small buff for X/5 minutes with a cap to stop it from being abused. But even with that, I would want to be careful it doesn't become a tryhard requirement to raid with, as I generally don't like the idea of world/environment buffs that you can take into dungeon/raid content.
Matter of fact, as I type this, I've changed my mind - what purpose would that buff server? Why shoudl we have it? I'd say just do nothing. Some of my best sleep I've got out underneath the stars.