Upcoming Experience Changes

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Torven, Jun 24, 2020.

  1. Lenas

    Lenas I Feel Loved

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    The plot thickens
    [​IMG]
     
  2. Darchon

    Darchon I Feel Loved

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    The 3 mob in melee range thing is a topic often discussed on P99 forums. There likely was a time very early on (1999) where you could only have 3 mobs in melee range for each character on the mobs hatelist, the others would sit back and watch. But it sounded like this was removed by Kunark from all accounts.

    It is possible that in Luclin they dug up that code and used it as a preliminary attempt to nerf AE groups before they added unstunnables in AC.

    I’m curious what that dev Lenas mentions has to say on his stream When he interviews him.
     
  3. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    I’m done asking or caring.

    we got all the AOE is evil and non akkurate rifraf posting now out of ignorance and close mindedness and nothing we can find out will change the outcome of this anyway.

    let’s move on and look forward to PoP.

    One thing I’ve learned in all this is eq devs are super easy to talk to very nice people who never miss an opportunity to talk about old times.
     
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  4. Tryfan

    Tryfan People Like Me

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    I remember the 3 mob issue. It used to muck up quad kiting BB dwarves if you let them get too close to you.
     
  5. Synthetix

    Synthetix Well-Known Member

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    The amount of non-AKurate changes on this server right now is mindblowing.
     
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  6. Verdent

    Verdent People Like Me

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    Yarnee, people didn't die AOEing 90% of the time. I saw plenty of bards swarm kiting loads of mobs in PON. Plane of valor shakerpaging often broke the zone and I'm for that nerf but it wasn't a 90% death-rate.

    I don't advocate for whole zone pulls. I do think AOEing is a great way to group and xp. I don't agree with you that it breaks the game.

    Whining that you can't get AOE groups is maybe the reason you can't get AOE groups? Why would I invite someone who hates it?
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
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  7. Tuluvien

    Tuluvien I Feel Loved

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    Take a hike or get on board. The constant whining is tiresome.
     
  8. Walex

    Walex I Feel Loved

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    I've been a silent reader of this thread because i don't want to kick up any more dust. Frankly, I'm not interested in fighting this battle. If the xp reduction is due to packet loss, a missing variable, whatever... does it really matter if the end result is the same as AK? We have video evidence of what a FG and PoV aoe should yield xp-wise, as well as logs of how long it takes to get an aa in a regular xp group. If at the end of the next patch both of those scenarios do not line up with TAKP, then this should be revisited. Until then, what's the problem?

    I'd rather the dev time was spent on PoP anyway; this has already gone too far off the rails.
     
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  9. Yarnee

    Yarnee People Like Me

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    Just before sunset I PLd 6 wizards I remember it very hard to find good AOE spots, the only zone i had 0 problems with was lguk, i dont know why but lguk pathing and stuff was really spot on. Maybe it was my connection but i dont think so cuz i remember asking lots of people sometimes latency just prevented stuns from landing when the pulls got too big
     
  10. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    [​IMG]

    The balance approach at the time was geared toward making aoe farming a high-risk, high-reward proposition hmmmmm
     
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  11. snorks

    snorks Well-Known Member

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    His last post was 8th august 2018, I'd hardly call that constant whining :)
     
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  12. Tryfan

    Tryfan People Like Me

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    We're beyond the point where what exactly was changed really matters honestly. It wasnt a direct pbae spells nerf. But the numbers are what they are. Somewhere somehow they will need reconciling and in the end the experience will be what Torven saw in his logs because that is the RIGHT number, the mobs killed between dings do not lie. The question is what exactly was causing it now that we know it wasnt pbae and i would really hate to see other exp get nerfed right now.
     
  13. Mokli

    Mokli I Feel Loved

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    Probably a bug somewhere that contributed to this confusion and then was fixed without a notice in a patch notice.
     
  14. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    Shrug, don't care. My quest was to prove this wasn't an intentional SOE nerf or a mechanic implemented with those weird parameters at the time to punish AOE. And it doesn't look it is.

    There was no intent for this discrepancy is the point, i know intent has been speculated before on other topics and this one to justify changes here.

    Could have been lag, some weird AK level discrepancy / bug in exp calculation, who knows.

    The changes are here to stay and everyone knows this, because of a weird sense of Akkuracy mattering when it's punishing in any way, but not when it provides bonuses. I think we've all made our peace with this trend by now.

    Server still rocks, carry on.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
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  15. Dane

    Dane People Like Me

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    That’s a fair point. This specific nerf is aimed at the highest end of AE xp, yet it will have negative consequences for all AE unfortunately. If I take my 3box crew to AR and farm tradeskill mats via AEing 20 mobs every 30 minutes, this nerf will penalize that rate of xp gain - which isn’t intended or Akurrate. As long as if statements are being implemented gratuitously, it would be nice if the pbae reduction triggered only on a certain amount of mobs > X. However, I’m A-Okay moving on if this craziness is delaying PoP development.
     
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  16. Tryfan

    Tryfan People Like Me

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    I am sure Darchon is right and the exp descrepancy was caused by issues at the server end, from vastly inferior hardware and connection compared to now. Its why i am curious if a shakerpage log showed the same issues. They may have solved the issue by GoD which would be why its no longer apparent.
     
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  17. sowislifesowislove

    sowislifesowislove People Like Me

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    For what’s its worth I’ve enjoyed reading your posts and respect your thirst. 3 old school EQ devs in as many days. :)
     
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  18. Tuluvien

    Tuluvien I Feel Loved

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    Yeah, classic scapegoating.
     
  19. Torven

    Torven I Feel Loved

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    I found an old Graffe post that I had written (and totally forgot about) explaining that the behavior was active in AC in Jan 2002. In the post I speculated that it was Sony trying to prevent AoE of course. So add it to the list of stuff Sony did to try and curb AoE.

    How exactly Sony figured out what should be reduced is not certain. My Karnor's pulls were much smaller (like 25-30) and they showed a full reduction in the cleric level I tallied. Also examining my 126 kill video frame-by-frame, the early kills seemed to show reduction. So if this was 'all kills after X kills' or whatever then it seemingly was not very forgiving. Admittedly the margin of error is higher for these.

    I'm still investigating and may find more answers later.

    I'm examining a warrior log now that has Shakerpage in it. If powerlevelees were only getting 1-2 levels a pull then it indicates they were not getting full exp. (which should be in the neighborhood of 200 million in a group of two) However this could be from the MLM not applying, which I think is highly likely for characters in the mid 50s. It's also hard to know how many people were in the group since it wasn't my log. If anybody has info regarding exp gains from shakerpaging I'd like to hear it.

    I'll restate that my Jan 2002 logs indicated no reduction, nor did my solo magician or necro before level 42, which seems to rule out 'bad server hardware'
     
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  20. Torven

    Torven I Feel Loved

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    Lol. The bugged group bonuses grant you 50% more exp than late PoP era, not including 1.2x server bonus (after June 2003; even more in PoP zones due to unchanged PoP ZEMs) and compared to PC EQ in Luclin era (when the 6 man bonus was 1.2) TAKP players are getting 2.6x the exp.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
  21. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    It's a good thing we're not emulating EQPC!

    We certainly got some fixed Akkurate specific behaviors deemed 'beneficial' and 'not intended' by sony though.

    Again, server is fine, why don't we all move on at this point?
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2020
  22. Thunderace

    Thunderace People Like Me

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    you are still talking about this? #movedon
     
  23. showstring

    showstring I Feel Loved

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    Thanks Bragon for getting so many oldschool devs to confirm this mechanic didn't exist, nice work!
    Great to see them so open to chat about the good old times.

    I guess if this is still going to be pursued, it needs to be under "something else that's unintentional" causing the exp nerf, so we need to be careful in how it's implemented, if it still gets implemented. As mentioned, such things can have cascading unintended consequences further down the line. If we're just replicating server bugs at this point, then I guess needs to be coded in a buggy manner? Kinda like the kite nerf?
     
  24. Pithy

    Pithy I Feel Loved

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    @Torven, what FG zone trash (if any) did you pull alongside the caller mobs in those groups? Were your toons all level 60? Are we pretty confident the caller mob levels are AKurate?

    This seems like a good end-to-end test of the recent changes: record kills per AA in a group of five in FG under the same conditions as your AK logs. The TAKP and AK numbers should roughly match, right? At least up to the random variation in your data. (In the 87 AA logs you posted, the average number of kills [experience messages] per AA was 273; the 5th and 95th percentiles were 261 and 283.)

    I may work on that, but want to make sure the conditions are as close as possible to your AK data.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2020
  25. Walex

    Walex I Feel Loved

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    Likewise, what about the povalor conditions from your videos?
     
  26. Torven

    Torven I Feel Loved

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    Pithy, you can have Ravenwing send my logs to you or I can if you want to examine them. But I'm happy to answer questions.

    Yes those were all caller mobs. My characters were all 60 for the vast majority of that but the first several AAs might have had some under 60. If that were the case then the Druid's experience would have been almost the same regardless. I had kept my characters at 60 a very long time as I was well aware of Zamiel's thread, which is also why I grouped 5 at a time since some characters needed a lot more AAs than others.

    Caller beast levels I think I just got from observing Live. If Sony had changed the levels at some point then it would be extraordinarily unusual as I cannot recall an instance of them changing levels. If they were all under 50 then I would not have AoEd them at level 65 in 2004. Regardless even if you changed the levels to all be 45 in the spreadsheet, there would still be a massive experience reduction indicated. Furthermore the AAs I got from mushrooms, bandits and dregs showed roughly the same amount of reduction, but I'm not sure what my AA% was on those; I was dying a lot there so it might have been 90%.

    My Valor video clips are almost all at 60 but I did show my bard dinging 61. My Valor data pretty much perfectly aligns with Zamiel's data, random 'I get X experience from Y mob' anecdotes I've compiled and the old data I found from packet sniffers.
     
  27. Tryfan

    Tryfan People Like Me

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    If FG takes 273 mobs to ding aa then and takes the same now then thats the way it should be.
     
  28. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    We don't kill the same mobs however, we zone pull which is a lot of different levels having no access to the juiced up callers.

    Not sure how comparable the data will be.
     
  29. Walex

    Walex I Feel Loved

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    So all toons level 60 (except for the bard once he hits 61)? I also noticed that the regular xp bar moves a little in some of the kills. Seems like you had it set to either 90% or 99% towards AA. Was this across the board for each character? I ask because the video doesn't always show the xp hits on the same character.
     
  30. Walex

    Walex I Feel Loved

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    It sounds like he's planning to spend some time at the caller caves not AEing the rest of the zone.