Shared XP and Assists

Vaehl

Alright then keep xp shared for non-party members please  

Mycen

You guys are have lost your minds.  You think it's so easy just to snipe kill.. you utterly fail to realize that we often die first if you aren't smart enough to move when someone first targets you.. and even then you get hunted down endlessly when you lave your city.. so sharing sniping exp is just stupid.. first you guys bitched about backstab.. now it's sniping..  Grow up..  but if you are so determined to share in snipe exp.. you gonna share in our deaths too??

Dalran

That argument went from for snipe sharing, to against in one paragraph. I'm so confused

Nim

I think they're arguing against archers having to share EXP with those pesky melee folk. I think.

Siduri

The argument saying that a sniper is safe is complete bullcrap.

1) Chances are both parties have serpents, and that these serpents will be exchanging blow at some point.

2) If you start moving in the sniper's room, he'll have to melee you (unless YOU are lacking awareness?)

3) Given how most snipe squads work, people are targetted, and the squad smashes the snipe button until the target comes back in LoS, eats 3 arrows and a soulspear, and dies again. It's not a matter of 'being aware', or of 'moving out when the first arrow hits', since most of the time you don't even get that luxury as a sniper.

4) Your argument revolves on a moral postulate: "I consider this skill 'easy', thus unworthy of sharing the EXP which I have earned 'the hard way'", which does not take into account the logical postulate that: "Sharing EXP on assists means awarding EXP for helping bring down a target, be it through non-damaging skills or with damaging skills". If we follow your moral line of thought, Monks should not receive EXP for using telepathy to force movement or strip defenses, Necromancers should not be allowed EXP for soulspears, etc. It's a slippery slope that only caters, finally, to a single playstyle and would go against the very idea of shared EXP.

I'm pretty confident that the admins, should they revise both threads, will just shrug and disregard that bit of nonsensical thinking to concentrate on making a system that's balanced and allows for more versatility.

Mishgul

We should have it so you get xp per amount of fun. We can measure it in hedons

Siduri

And I want to add this:
1) Sharing EXP means that snipers actually share the kill EXP with the melee fighters, and the other way around too. It's what we call teamwork, and it's fair for everyone.
2) If serpents start earning EXP for dstabbing, you will most likely start seeing them more and more in melee, where they can be useful -and- rewarded for their varied efforts. Sniping squads might lose a bit of their punch because some serpents will start going into melee now. In the end, it's a matter of using the skills of your class, whatever they are, to help secure victory.

Vaehl

Siduri said:

The argument saying that a sniper is safe is complete bullcrap.

1) Chances are both parties have serpents, and that these serpents will be exchanging blow at some point.

not what I'm talking about

2) If you start moving in the sniper's room, he'll have to melee you (unless YOU are lacking awareness?)

LOL

3) Given how most snipe squads work, people are targetted, and the squad smashes the snipe button until the target comes back in LoS, eats 3 arrows and a soulspear, and dies again. It's not a matter of 'being aware', or of 'moving out when the first arrow hits', since most of the time you don't even get that luxury as a sniper.

what are you even talking about

4) Your argument revolves on a moral postulate: "I consider this skill 'easy', thus unworthy of sharing the EXP which I have earned 'the hard way'", which does not take into account the logical postulate that: "Sharing EXP on assists means awarding EXP for helping bring down a target, be it through non-damaging skills or with damaging skills". If we follow your moral line of thought, Monks should not receive EXP for using telepathy to force movement or strip defenses, Necromancers should not be allowed EXP for soulspears, etc. It's a slippery slope that only caters, finally, to a single playstyle and would go against the very idea of shared EXP.

not really what I'm talking about

I'm pretty confident that the admins, should they revise both threads, will just shrug and disregard that bit of nonsensical thinking to concentrate on making a system that's balanced and allows for more versatility.

lol

Siduri said:

And I want to add this:
1) Sharing EXP means that snipers actually share the kill EXP with the melee fighters, and the other way around too. It's what we call teamwork, and it's fair for everyone.

rofl

2) If serpents start earning EXP for dstabbing, you will most likely start seeing them more and more in melee, where they can be useful -and- rewarded for their varied efforts. Sniping squads might lose a bit of their punch because some serpents will start going into melee now. In the end, it's a matter of using the skills of your class, whatever they are, to help secure victory.

what is even going on anymore

I thought the discussion was over but here are some well thought out counter points.

Atalkez

As a serpent you can easily be just as effective in room with dstab/camus as with snipes.  Sniping is just ez-mode kills.

Bukariin

More like Dajio mode am I right

Jurixe

I don't really care about getting Dragon and so xp isn't a huge subject for me, but I would disagree as well with snipers not being able to share in the xp. As long as we are counting contribution to the kill, people should be able to share in the reward. Sniping by itself, unless there really are a ton of arrows all firing at once, doesn't do much - you need someone in the room to help with hindering to pin the person down while the snipes do the damage. Yes, perhaps comparatively the sniper(s) is/are in less immediate danger, but that doesn't mean they contribute any less. Maybe if you wanted to scale it, people out of the room could get marginally less, but I definitely don't think line of sight should be completely excluded.

Speaking as someone with terrible Internet, sniping is pretty much the only way I can reasonably contribute in a fight. I've tried the dstab/bite thing before, but huge chunks of text move so fast that I don't even know whether it went through or if it just hit rebounding/sileris, and usually the target's escaped/died by the time it comes through. So I resort to sniping because I can stay out of spam, still contribute, and hopefully die a little less. Dying itself actually doesn't bother me that much, but I can just help so much more with sniping than otherwise.

Sure, I guess it is easy mode and I'm not trying to make it like I'm some great combatant. But while I recognise the desire to shift group pvp to a more melee-centric environment, I don't think that line of sight should be penalised that heavily either. Sometimes, even independent of Internet woes, it's just a way for people to get more confident in combat before shifting into full on in your face melee mode.

Synbios

I'm not a sniper and even I think that they should receive xp portions as long as they belong to the same party/city/org/whatever floats your boat.

Siduri

Daeir said:

Mycen said:

You guys are have lost your minds.  You think it's so easy just to snipe kill.. you utterly fail to realize that we often die first if you aren't smart enough to move when someone first targets you.. and even then you get hunted down endlessly when you lave your city.. so sharing sniping exp is just stupid.. first you guys bitched about backstab.. now it's sniping..  Grow up..  but if you are so determined to share in snipe exp.. you gonna share in our deaths too??

It is literally the easiest way to be a strong contributor to a fight in the game. You do significant damage and venom burden from the safety of 1-12 rooms away, on a class that has evade, wormholes, two tree tattoos, phase. You hit one alias every few seconds, and if you're into advanced snipebot techniques, you periodically squint to see how the rest of your team is doing and if you're about to get targeted next.

Before I started class hopping, I had 120~ kills and about 35~ deaths. Every single one from sniping. It isn't hard. At all. 

The point here is not whether it is 'hard' or 'easy'. It is 'does it contribute', and you said it yourself here.

Mishgul

i don't get it

Iocun

1. Sniping is ridiculously easy.
2. This is entirely irrelevant in regard to the topic at hand.
3. I learned today that horses can't puke and that's part of the reason why they die so easily to toxins.
4. This is also entirely irrelevant in regard to the topic at hand.

Jovolo

It isn't irrelevant, because the main point I think me and Vaehl are trying to argue is whether or not we should encourage this type of fighting by providing positive reinforcement of it in the form of experience. That's very relevant to the topic at hand and it's my position is that we shouldn't do this. Snipers already got more than enough for their contribution, objectively, in the form of immense kill-to-death ratios and large positive amounts of exp. I only previously focused on sniping because it was already brought up as an example. I don't think you should get experience for any out of room kills if you didn't get the kill yourself.  

Whether you agree with it or not is different, and it seems most people disagree. That's fine. Ranged fighting will always be a dynamic of group combat, and I guess most of you want to treat it this similarly to melee fighting.

Zeon

@Jovolo tbf snipers take such a large portion of kills that I wouldn't be surprised if there net xp gain went down quite a bit if they had to start sharing. Even with the bonus of 'assist' experience.

Any sort of xp assist splitting system that doesn't decrease net xp for people that usually get last hits, doesn't seem like it would be working as intended. Unless we just add to the amount of experience generated by PK (which we definitely don't need imo).

Siduri

@Jovolo : I don't want to make this sound like it's personal or anything. But why do you believe the administration should discourage an entire mechanic that they, themselves, put into the class abilities. I mean, if they wanted to discourage it, we wouldn't have these abilities to begin with (such as what they did with the old hypnosis theft, or area-wide kai chokes).

What @Zeon said is actually very true. It means that snipers will see a decrease in their net exp because they now have to share it with melee fighters who work to kill. It encourages a dynamic that's part of the system.

Finally, EXP sharing from assists will -encourage- some classes to just come and melee, varying strategies. You don't need to give an ass the stick if the carrot works.

Halios

If I choke someone for 35% of their hp and don't get shared xp for that kill something is seriously, seriously wrong.

Vaehl

yea tbh you're right.

Nim

You're talking about two separate problems. Shared EXP is to fix the problem of people contributing to kills but not getting rewarded for it.

You're talking about the problem that sniping is too easy. That's a separate problem entirely, and should thus be fixed separately. Not giving people EXP for sniping will not solve the problem that sniping is too easy - it might discourage people from sniping, but it'll still be easy if they choose to do so. If it remains highly effective, orgs may even compensate their snipebots in some way to keep them, for example.

However, it will diminish the solution for this problem - now you'll have a class of people who contribute toward kills but don't get EXP for it. Problem 1 not fully solved, problem 2 not truly solved.

Iocun

Jovolo said:

It isn't irrelevant, because the main point I think me and Vaehl are trying to argue is whether or not we should encourage this type of fighting by providing positive reinforcement of it in the form of experience.

It wouldn't encourage sniping any more than it is currently encouraged. If anything it would encourage any form of fast-hitting offence that hits multiple targets without doing much damage. Sniping hits a single target, does plenty of damage, and isn't faster than a lot of other attacks, so it wouldn't benefit disproportionally from such an addition. It would simply remain a fine attack choice for people who want to get kills(/assists) while staying out of harm's way.

Merador

@Tecton @Sarapis Any updates on this at all?

Melodie

I am still in so much support of this idea.

So much.

Jovolo

This with the removal of experience loss propaganda. We'd all get Dragon in a week

Merador

What I like about this change in particular is that nobody would feel the need to change to "greedy" classes or strategies for the sake of landing killing blows. Taking part should be a reward, regardless of whether you're a class that has bite/bbt/enfeeble/incin or you're providing a useful support role.

Mishgul

I can imagine there are massive upheavals of code for this to be implemented properly. Flagging attacks as assistable for example.

Merador

@Mishgul Did you read the other posts?

@Tecton: "Actually, we have most of the framework in position already for this, so you can probably expect it some time in the future!"

@Sarapis: "Well, it'll only apply to PvE at first, but the changes required to adapt the system to PvP shouldn't be too large. It won't be completely "accurate" in the sense that we're not going to worry about whether webbing someone is more or less valuable than afflicting them with asthma, but other than that should work out."

Obviously there may have been complications, but these comments were made 6 months ago.

Mishgul

Yes. Reminds me of when I am talking to customers from my workplace.

Tecton

Still on the books, it's just lower down the list than many other changes!