The achievement and feats threads had me thinking about what I would like to see for content incentives. We as a community are a machine of cost benefit trading and in a world of static incentives, we quite quickly and accurately determine the most effective approaches to maximize benefits. This results in competition over the known the highest exp spots and ignoring the known worst spots (some may see this as a wonderful free-market-esque system). However, I would like to see a system that encourages balance throughout the world without demanding participation.
The following idea is designed for AA experience, but could readily be applied to regular experience gain, item drop rates, or nearly all incentives. Basically I'm just trying to bring up the idea of dynamically incentivizing players to keep the many populations (and by extension factions) of Terminus in balance and to branch out on a personal level to participate in new content. The key point of this thread is found in the population health metric for scaling of rewards.
AA Experience broken into 4 categories:
Regular experience: Determined by whether the mob is level-appropriate to you. This is as it was in previous MMOs and remains unchanged.
Population health (absolute): How healthy the mob's population is. This is a metric of how hunted a given population is. If the giants that rampage the commonlands have not been hunted in 2 days, then their healthy population yields a hefty bonus when killed.
Population health (relative): How healthy a contested mob type (e.g. goblin vs. owlbear) population is. This is a metric of how frequently goblins are killed relative to how frequently their compeition (owlbears?) are killed. If everyone hunts the goblins, then the owlbear population will run rampant and require killing, providing a bonus for those who do.
Mob type novelty: A slowly draining bonus based on mob type. If you've never killed skeletons, then skeletons give you a big bonus and vice versa. This should be a smaller portion by comparison to the other two factors. This should reset (and also increase?) for Progeny.
Pros:
Cons:
This idea may or may not be suitable for Pantheon and given that we have very limited information on the game (and even less information on the specifics factions, mob populations, incentives, etc.), this discussion should probably try to be focused on the abstract concept of population health guiding rewards.
Unfortunately, we have several topics on Alternate Advancement as I will link below, so this post is better suited to be included with one of those threads to keep the information and ideas consolidated, for that reason Iw ill have to go ahead and close this one down, please feel free to repost this in one of the other threads and prior to creating a new post, please make sure you do a search as more often than not, you will find that your idea/suggestion/question has already been discussed over the last 3 years of development.
By typing Alternate Advancement in the search function, I was able to find these topics:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/4318/alternate-advancement-aa-s - CM Content
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3680/aa-alternate-advancement-points - AA Discussion
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/4335/methods-of-alternate-advancement - Closed Duplicate