Less Expedition Bonus Experience OR Less Spirit Points in Larger Expeditions

[4thJobHokage]

In my opinion there is an issue right now where player's who play during certain time periods have a huge advantage over player's who play during a different time period. For example just after reset each day there is a bossing "train" that runs through (2x of each boss) Horntail, Von Leon, Chaos Zakum, Zakum, Chaos Scarga, Scarga, & Krexel, this is a total of 124 Spirit Points if I have done my math correctly. Anyone level 150+ can come to all of these bosses, anyone 140+ can come to all except the to Chaos bosses, anyone 130+ can come to all except the two Chaos bosses & Von Leon. With a White Scroll (worth 95m) at 70 points & all of these bosses taking around 2.5 hours that means all players in the boss run level 150+ gain around 168m mesos worth of Spirit points, or 67m mesos/hour. Players who are not in this timezone (I know there is one another smaller boss train that runs maybe 11 hours afterwards) take more than twice as long to make the same amount of mesos doing something like farming Ghost Ship 2 and the player's in the boss run get the equivalent EXP as 2.5~5 hours of grinding, while the players farming Ghost Ship get essentially no EXP. So these players need to farm GS2 (for example) for 5.5 hours & then go grind for 2.5~5 hours to keep up with players who jump in boss runs for 2.5 hours total. It's 8~10.5 hours of stuff to keep up with 2.5 hours of stuff because one player is in the "right" timezone & one isn't.

As a level 240 it also feels wrong that it is more beneficial for me in terms of EXP/minute to go on 24-man Zakum runs that kill the boss in under 2 minutes than it is to go & do a 6-man Toad or a 6-man The Boss run. Basically for everyone the most efficient thing to do is to get into the largest run possible because a 24-man run or a 6-man run give nearly the same total EXP due to the bonus boss expedition EXP.

My suggestion is to either reduce the Boss Expedition bonus EXP in larger runs OR to reduce the Spirit Points in large runs. I'm not sure the specifics, but maybe 2~6 man = full reward, 7~12 man is "tier 2", 13~18 is another "tier 3", 19+ is the lowest "tier". Or 2~8 man = full reward, 9~16 = "tier 2", 17+ = "tier 3". If it's bonus experience we're reducing I would say Tier 1 = Full, Tier 2 = 50% as much bonus EXP as usual, Tier 3 = 33% as much as bonus EXP, Tier 4 (if there is a tier 4) = 25% as much as usual bonus EXP. Since it's still full SP players will still want to run all the bosses for the 168m equivalent, but they will then have to go train, so their gap ahead of someone not on the boss train is not as large. Player's who want full EXP will run 6-man of these bosses. Groups that cannot 6-man CZAK for example, may combine with another group that cannot 6-man CZAK in order to clear it for the SP and the rewards, it's better than not being able to clear it & getting 0 SP.

If it's SP that is reduced I would suggest tier 1 = full reward, tier 2 = 3/4 reward, tier 3 = 2/3 reward, tier 4 = half reward. Even at 50% reward, 2.5 hours for 62 points (84m mesos) is still better mesos than people not on the boss train & it would still be the best EXP, but at least the gap is smaller between those who can & those who can't go on the run. If higher level players want the full Von Leon/CZAK/nHT, etc Spirit points they will need to do 6~8 man runs (depending on if 6 or 8 were the cut-off) at the expense of slower EXP.

Thoughts? Anyone have other ideas, or anyone have reasons why this set-up would be bad in a different way?

 

[yuna]

I'm thinking that we can reduce the SP gained for larger runs, in tiers, as you mentioned. But before implementing this, I'd like to hear some candid/objective feedback from everyone else please!

 

[pretty]

As much as I love the easy SP points, I too agree with 4th that it may make progression in the game a bit too easy.

I think there should still be some benefit to the inclusive large expeditions, such as preserving the exp bonus, since these raids add a unique element to this server that I and others cherish. The big raids take a bit more effort to organize but have provided a mechanism for connecting this small community.

I think in the future, when the player base grows, and we have more alts to run on, we will see a trend of additional large expeditions running at varying hours.

As much as I love the progression I’ve made from the exp + sp, I do agree that both is too much.

 

[Aralaya]

i think that, firstly, this idea is really nice 4th. second, i think this will also help with seeing more bosses being run throughout the day and more chances to group with different sets of people. i think its cool.

 

[Dilemma]

Added some off-topic suggestions too, since hitching a ride off the bossing system here.

1. Family System - As population dwindles, the "buff points" will be lacking in supply without new fresh population (unless creating mules to re-supply the pts, in which it will be counter-intuitive). And as per Ara says, 1-family-wins-all situation. The whole social infrastructure / ecosystem is not gonna be healthy with this in place.

2. Dailies / Boss Runs - Basically same issue as the family system. U dont join the correct guild/ally/fam, u will be on the losing end, and will be having extreme difficulties in progressing, ending up being forced to join said social ecosystem in order just to survive. But inevitably by joining that said guild/fam/social hierarchy/bossing group, you are being at the mercy of the host/core of the group itself. ie. "Teamo's Runs" etcs. Im pretty sure i wont need to continue explaining further, but those who get it, will get it. Being at the mercy of others will just allow the newcomer to be abused by the host/core for his own growth at a great advantage while the victim/newcomer can barely grow (only SPs/ No loots). It will form a vicious cycle of increasing the inequality and lead to further abuse. On another side of spectrum, there's syndicated mule system to AFK in boss runs by hitting minimum dmg to qualify for boss rolls (for the busy ppl on schedule) while the ppl who are free/available to run will take the core accounts/mains to run internal boss runs on their own for own internal drops. Essentially "Mule-Leeching in mass runs with chances of boss loots while AFK/busy" and only truly participate in their own internal boss runs.

2a. IMHO, i disagree with blanket-nerfing mass-runs bossing EXP/SP as it will hit both the growth of newbies (unintended friendly firing) and mules/leechers (intended effect). The key issue here is differentiating leeching vs genuine grind-up efforts, and not letting the disparity between newbies and experienced bossers further widens to a further extent. (Refer to Suggestion B).

Suggestions?
A. Balance farming/grinding with bossing. Make bossing important but not overbearing and growth-killing if a newbie has trouble finding a regular bossing group till he has a decent set of equipment via farming.
-Increase mesos/scrolls/eqp drop rate (not too much, it will trigger inflation)
-Make mobs drop a low rate of gacha tickets (extra earnings, pushes the economy forward) / nx points (reward cosmetics farmers, help alleviate the heavy cash nx of HP medal)
-But pls do not make mob drop WS/CS, that will be too OP.

B1. Make sharing of accounts against TOS - highly unpopular suggestion but it is needed - to curb syndicated mule-leeching. In addition, if a player wants to play truly, he wont be passing his account around to mule-leech, in which is defeating the purpose of "playing". It also axes out the formation of syndicates of sharing 1 account just to abuse skill mules (i know there's only 1 bossing instance per device) but they can always plan the AFK/skill mules/leech mules (actual humans/extra devices, but too busy to boss actively and able to just AFK in there) in advance to work around this.
OR
B2. Make bossing instances count daily tied to IP instead of accounts/characters instead.
ie. A can only login to his own account to say.... do Nzak. He did his daily 2 Nzaks and will be unable to use Account B to mule-leech Nzaks for his friend who may be too busy to go online.
On realistic terms, doing 1 full loop of bossing marathon should be tiring / time-consuming enough. Allowing more than 1 full loop will actually open up more exploits instead. If content is not enough, u may consider increasing the cap limit of per-boss daily, but still keeping the total daily count to IP-tied (ie. Nzak from 2 to 3? But still tied to per IP).
Not sure how feasible is this in regards to coding wise though.

C. Advertise this server more. This server is decent, just that the population is kinda dedge now, hence unappealing for now. Would have a healthy positive impact on bossing ecosystem if the server has higher population. and critical mass does snowball its way up easily, its the first step that's the hardest.

 

[jupjup95]

Taking this into account I would also like to add another perspective.

Continuing to have this server runs is gonna kill the market in the long run:
1. High volume of white scroll (getting to end game is gonna be extremely easy at this rate with the number of people abusing server runs)
2. It is gonna be bad for the economy (This is gonna end up like another maple-royals and mesos are no longer gonna be a form of currency anymore)
3. The server is pretty much dead after this large server runs, I have noticed people struggling to find runners for even easy bosses.

My suggestion:
1. Reduce the expedition size to 12 People (Max), even 18 is too much (It is not going to make a difference)
2. I like 4th's idea of having a different tier system for Spirit Points, 6 Pax (SP + Bonus) & 12 Pax (Sp - nerfed)
3. Nerfing expedition exp for more than one party (I suggest having both nerfing of exp and SP)
4. Increase the minimum damage required to obtain spirit points
(Yuna please make this damage output significantly higher, people can easily afk with the current amount of damage required)

Farming:
1. We need a significant boost for farmers so that obtaining SP isn't the only efficient way of farming Mesos/ White Scrolls.
2. Balance farming/grinding with bossing

My Suggestion:
1. Adding Gacha Tickets to the drop mule for mobs (Low drop rate similiar to maplelegends)
2. Family drop buff is 1.5X for normal mob & 1.2X for Bosses

Irrelevant Suggestion
1. Reduce death counts for the Empress (Would be nice to have perf mechanics to actually kill it)
2. We don't want empress to be another punching bag

Will continue editing this post

 

[GorgeousCow]

I don't intend to speak on anyone else's behalf, but I interpreted that the foremost idea behind the conception of these bossing trains as community centric to generate opportunities for participants to network with new players/make new friends. While also enabling rapid community progression via the cited immense participation gains as a secondary goal/outcome. I feel that our primary target benefactors for these trains were less funded players in the community to provide an accelerated means of establishing themselves in a relatively new server. With the routine having gone on for roughly one week, I believe that one of the initial goals of boosting the total community SP has been mostly satisfied.

That's not to say that the current speed for a 24-29 player full train clear (~120mins) is a fair/intended feature of this server. I average around 2-3 WS per day on my account from this with other dailies not included in the train. Indeed, the benefits from these boss rushes are possibly borderline extreme and may possibly cause players in other time zones to feel "forced" by logging in at sub-optimal personal times to participate. I heard mentions that players are waking up from sleep to incorporate this into their schedules.

After weighing the pros and cons, I think the principal question in consideration is if "this good for the server/players overall?". I personally always have a great time playing/chatting in our voice channel during the bossing train and is a sentiment other players might also share. It's my assumption that redeemed SP items like WS/CS/CSS are used up to enhance gear before reaching the market place, but I can foresee negative economic impacts if this goes on long enough and excess luxury items are generated. For example, I do not think it would be conducive of a good server if 40% of the player population possessed 3+ perfect/end game pre-empress SW items after say, 3 months time. I personally value an organic, slow grinding process.

I am also unsure if the server player base size at this time is ready for the possible widespread formation of exclusive bossing groups/cliques. So, I think server figures that detail player immigration & emigration should be assessed in that regard. I foresee strong players with existent communities splitting up and forming small 2-6 player runs amongst themselves, and less established players having to search for and run as larger groups to network sporadically at the cost of reduced rewards.

I see the server boss runs as an absolute good as of this time and it would be a little sad if they were to end following a rework. I think that bossing together as a server has revitalized the community since its inception. I can also envision a potential server marketing opportunity where a live stream of these runs be shown on the website/other platforms advertising the strong & inclusive YMS community to players prospecting a private server to play on.

I propose that we allow the daily boss clears to continue for a period of time at the community's discretion. After which, the daily schedule of these runs be transitioned to be a 1x, 2x weekly; bi monthly, etc. occurrence with the flexibility to fit the majority of player schedules.

It would also be my hope that expedition exp remains as is for any changes that would occur since I would like to see more players progressing to PB making ROTs a bit more accessible. In conclusion, I see the SP gains from these server wide boss runs as a borderline game mechanic exploit that also carries possible server community/population expansion opportunities with it.

This would conclude my primary thoughts/opinions, thanks for your time and for reading.

 

[yuna]

Thank you everyone for your feedback! A clear direction is still not known but ears are still open.

I'm seeing that the main issue is that bossing is too "valuable" - especially when you consider server runs/runs with guilds. That means that it undervalues non-boss activities.

What if we implemented something that "scales" with your level - i.e. instead of nerfing bossing, we buff a different aspect of progression?
Something along the lines of if a player is below level A, provide them with option B to gain C spirit points, up until a cap of D.

The reason bossing is so good is simply because its not viable to do anything else during those runtimes, so if we make something ELSE a little more lucrative (not saying it should be as good as bosses), then hopefully we can counter the effects of the bossing meta. Do keep in mind some edge cases (i.e. if we made something like every 1000 kills gives you 1 SP, that could easily be abused by, lets say, mages). Measures can be added to counter this "abuse" as well.

Looking forward to hearing back from the community~

 

[4thJobHokage]

Here are some suggestions I have for making non-expedition boss stuff more viable.

1) Weeklies: Right now a good boss train is 124 SP/day & the latest one I was in just after reset got that many points in around an hour & 40 minutes (everyone is getting stronger & it's taking less & less time), so not including other dailies, that alone is 868 Spirit Points/week or around 1.2B mesos worth of White Scrolls. The weeklies add up to 25 Spirit Points/week & for most players it's not worth it to do them unless they happen to be kill a boss 5 times that you're going to kill during the boss train anyways.

In my opinion weeklies could be re-worked where as you get higher level they give more points. Sure when you're below level 70 5 spirit points might be okay, but as you get higher & start bossing it's negligible. Maybe level 71-120 are given weeklies that give 10 spirit points each, 121-160 give 15 spirit points each, 161-200 have weeklies that give 20 SP each, and 201-250 have 25 SP each weeklies. I would also suggest having zero of the weeklies as kill an expedition boss x number of times, because those bosses already give Spirit Points. Maybe kill Capt. Latanica 5 times as a 121-160 weekly, or kill Anego 5 times as a 161-200 weekly, or just stuff that isn't expedition bosses.

2) Buff Area Bosses the same way that a bunch of both low level as well as high level mobs got buffed: Nobody hunts area bosses because it's slower than grinding due to the party EXP bonus. Even though people can Skele/Petri at level 100 (some classes as low as level 80~83), and a Bigfoot probably can't be solo'd until level 130+, preferably 140+, it's better EXP by quite a bit to get into a Skele party than to go hunt Bigfoots because the Bigfoots would generally be done solo. It would only be worth it if you could convince 5 people to follow you around in party while you do Bigfoots. In a recent near 30-man Horntail run I got 7% of a level in around 7~8 minutes (how long it took to down HT), while a 2~3 minute Kacchuu kill gives me 0.10% of a level up. I would say triple the EXP of Bigfoot, Anego, Kacchuu Musha & maybe Royal Guard Type S (I haven't even done those quests yet as it didn't feel worth it, on other servers I know being able to kill a Royal Guard Type S is MAD experience. I remember on another server I played it was soo worth it, that I went fast Combo Barrier build to survive it, & I makered all of my equips with Garnets/DEX in order to be able to solo Royal Guard Type S as a Warrior). I also would say add some Spirit Points to the high level area bosses (Bigfoot, etc). Bigfoot is harder to kill than a Papulatus, I don't think it would be broken if killing a Bigfoot yielded 1 Spirit Point. If someone went around & killed 15 of them, they would get themselves 15 SP in probably 1~3 hours depending on how strong they are, & that much SP even doing 6-man boss runs can be achieved in less time than that by doing 2 Zak runs & 2 Krexel runs. Bigfoot, Kacchuu Musha, Anego could be 1 SP, Royal Guard Type S could be 5 SP, it's harder to solo RGS than it is to solo Zakum as far as I know & it requires Neo City quests completed I believe. Triple EXP+the SP I suggested I think still pales in comparison to expedition bosses, but it's something.

I know there is currently two boss trains about 12 hours apart, but that still doesn't cover everyone, I believe it's about a 24~30 man train and a 15~18 man train, so there are another 40~50ish people who don't benefit from these. I assume some people are working during one of the runs & get home after the run is done, & are then sleeping for the other run. I've finished a 30-man 90 seconds Zak before & then an hour or two later seen someone smegaing R> nZaK, got 2 people so far. If they're around Zak level (130-150) they can't exactly carry the run & it's hard to level up for them because they're not playing during the boss trains & it may be hard to find a Bearwolf party if they're playing when other people aren't on. If this person could log on & it would be viable for them to go hunt Bigfoots, if they can't find a bossing party I think that would be sweet. I probably missed some area bosses, off the top of my head I can only think of Bigfoot, Kacchuu, Anego & Royal Guard Type S, but maybe there are others that could be useful. Classes that aren't great at BF, can Anego, higher levels who can't find a bossing party can attempt RGS.

 

[Teamotqm]

I think my suggestion is better about all this... is that you lower the number of people per expedition... zkm (6 people) Krexel the same Etc.. (Chaos Scarg, Zkm, Ht, PB) Maximum 12 people Empress 18 people... Empress entry 215... Force people to level up, focus on something else... In the Weeklies Daily, upgrade them based on mobs of your level... send people traveling around the world looking for those mobs to earn those points... that people earn 2 ws a day... it's not something valuable, first analyze the loss in terms of potion, attack potion, items (Sweetwater) It took me months to create them and Good luck that these items come out with good status...

Other things... This goes with the comment of the friend above who gave me something... I don't play to keep something that is not mine... On the contrary, I help people like you or better. .. That you as a person would like to demand some items in a streak of 6 people of only friends is something else. I consider that I am fair to everyone, I do not benefit from anyone, rather I help them to improve... that people are toxic and racist for the simple fact that I am Latino, I do not want to say that I am a bad person.