I wanted to give this a shot, so went testing to get some real numbers & results. For my initial test, I specifically excluded any form of questing. This was intentional; part of the system design is to encourage trying out different ways of generating the reward, so I excluded the one that appeared to be the best. When the system is appropriately encouraging people to do pursue multiple paths, I would expect a decent outcome from doing so.
The non-questable dailies that are always available are: 1) Hunting, 2) Influencing, 3) Org power quest, 4) Scholars, bards, and pilgrims.
I spent four and a half hours doing these tasks, and I ended up with a takeaway of 12 credits.
It took: 62 minutes to get 500 kills (3 credits). 161 minutes to get 500 influences (3 credits). The rest of the time was spent running around catching crow shadows, scholars, bards, and pilgrims. 27 crow shadows = 54 power. (2 credits) 37 pilgrims (2 credits) 19 scholars (1 credit) 22 bards (1 credit)
Note that pilgrims, scholars, and bards *do not* share the same counter. This means that for scholars and bards, where there are less than 15 in a full spawn, you must collect all of them and wait for a respawn to complete the cycle. I would suggest that this be considered, as it could lead to more competition for these resources if people are each trying to collect more than one spawn.
Some details are included here (feel free to skip): I do consider myself to be a decent hunter, and also a decent influencer (13/13 to all influence types), with a pretty good celerity value. It's definitely possible to do what I did and optimize it via scripts to be faster in some respects, or to use gnomeweapons instead of a wonderwand, or to utilize consumables such as wonderpies / etc, but I would be pretty comfortable making the assertion that the average player is not going to do much better on timing than I did.
For the kills, I opted to go for Kepherans and Illithoids because they are so plentiful. Astral is slower because you have to sit and wait for links, so I wanted something that didn't require waiting. I used poison-tuned wonderwand to slaughter 300 kepherans, and then I switched to Illithoid. These were very handy in spawning worms for additional kill counters and my magic-tuned wand made short work of them for the final 200 kills.
For influencing, I just picked guards because they are stacked. I stuck with brave guards only (to reduce the number of influences), with maxed out empowerment & max prestige. I was influencing guards in 4 to 5 hits. Obviously this is a lot longer than plowing one's way through denizens... and further note that I had absolutely no competition in terms of other people wanting to hunt or influence the stuff I was trying to do (which I don't expect to be the case in Live, guards always seem to be getting influenced...)
I had to do multiple rounds of the bards & scholars to try to get a tick as well.
------------------
I plan to wait for the weave, and sometime after that changes, I will do a second test with nothing but commodity quests. My plan is to limit myself to exactly 1 hour of gathering, and see what the outcome is for 1 hour of commodity questing, and how that compares to 4.5 hours of doing everything else.
I spent four and a half hours doing these tasks, and I ended up with a takeaway of 12 credits.
So we have a minimum, but do players or staff have feedback on the maximum time it should take you to get 10 to 20 credits at lvls 95+?
It should take at least 1 hr to gain 10 cred, up to 20 cred in 2 hrs. In Xenthos's example (minus questing, comms etc), it takes 3 hrs 45 mins to gain 10 creds, up to 20 creds in 7 hrs 30 mins.
That sounds reasonable to me, but maybe that's coz I'm a noob? What do other players think?
I spent four and a half hours doing these tasks, and I ended up with a takeaway of 12 credits.
So we have a minimum, but do players or staff have feedback on the maximum time it should take you to get 10 to 20 credits at lvls 95+?
It should take at least 1 hr to gain 10 cred, up to 20 cred in 2 hrs. In Xenthos's example (minus questing, comms etc), it takes 3 hrs 45 mins to gain 10 creds, up to 20 creds in 7 hrs 30 mins.
That sounds reasonable to me, but maybe that's coz I'm a noob? What do other players think?
If there is an opportunity to get 20 credits daily, as said - Then it should be at least an hour or more of work. Anything past 2 is a bit much in my mind because people have lives outside of this, and who wants to spend 7 hours trying to get 20 credits when you can buy them in like 5 minutes.
I know in my mind, that if I spent an hour after work that would be fine with me for my daily play. But if it's 7 hours total, I could do something else with my time. People are wanting to play and work for it, but I think that's way too much.
The cool night-time breeze shivers in the arid caress of the streets of the capital city, brushing the earthen taste of dust across your lips.
*
A blessed silence falls upon the city for the moment, most activity confined to the towers and the theatre due to the snowy weather.
*
Pinprick points of light twinkle in the deep black overhead, their brightness full of a cold, hungering malice.
I spent four and a half hours doing these tasks, and I ended up with a takeaway of 12 credits.
So we have a minimum, but do players or staff have feedback on the maximum time it should take you to get 10 to 20 credits at lvls 95+?
It should take at least 1 hr to gain 10 cred, up to 20 cred in 2 hrs. In Xenthos's example (minus questing, comms etc), it takes 3 hrs 45 mins to gain 10 creds, up to 20 creds in 7 hrs 30 mins.
That sounds reasonable to me, but maybe that's coz I'm a noob? What do other players think?
If there is an opportunity to get 20 credits daily, as said - Then it should be at least an hour or more of work. Anything past 2 is a bit much in my mind because people have lives outside of this, and who wants to spend 7 hours trying to get 20 credits when you can buy them in like 5 minutes.
I know in my mind, that if I spent an hour after work that would be fine with me for my daily play. But if it's 7 hours total, I could do something else with my time. People are wanting to play and work for it, but I think that's way too much.
I, someone with a gnomeweapon, still can't do anywhere close to 500 kills in an hour. I am more like 100 kills in an hour.
Is the goal for "the average player" to gain 20 credits per day? That seems really high to me. Would be helpful if players or admin had specific goals for players in different level ranges.
If you hit your cap after 1 hour of solo play, why would you use teamwork hunting or bother with guild tasks / city rewards?
Because @Xenthos is such a top tier player, are Xenthos's results essentially the minimum # of hours? Then yes, it looks like this system is a lot more grindy than Estarra seems to be shooting for.
Ha yea forgot about that. Havn't seen it done in a while.
Hmm that's not a bad idea though. Maybe if you buffed the numbers on that so that a crew could cap everyone in it in like an hours work that'd be sort of comparable to Imperian and their boss runs.
Hmm there isn't really any way to group up and work as a team to get points that I can see yet.
Yeah, part of my point was that I'd like to see more opportunities for groups to benefit. If the only way to get credits is through solo activities, competition goes up a lot and cooperation goes down a lot, which isn't necessarily a good thing and which can cause people to ignore their city and guild mates.
Is the goal for "the average player" to gain 20 credits per day? That seems really high to me. Would be helpful if players or admin had specific goals for players in different level ranges.
If you hit your cap after 1 hour of solo play, why would you use teamwork hunting or bother with guild tasks / city rewards?
Because @Xenthos is such a top tier player, are Xenthos's results essentially the minimum? Then yes, it looks like this system is a lot more grindy than Estarra seems to be shooting for.
Xenthos has a lot of artifacts, no doubt that contribute his speed of influence/hunt time. His results aren't the minimum, but the max, if he has every artifact to benefit him just as an aside.
This speaks to me of this needed to definitely be tinkered with for a daily 20 to be earned without spending the whole day playing.
I would like to see someone hunt without artifacts or any benefits, and log the times it takes to meet any of the requirements. Maybe like a newbie character with low skills. So we can show the starter player vs. experienced artifacted player.
The cool night-time breeze shivers in the arid caress of the streets of the capital city, brushing the earthen taste of dust across your lips.
*
A blessed silence falls upon the city for the moment, most activity confined to the towers and the theatre due to the snowy weather.
*
Pinprick points of light twinkle in the deep black overhead, their brightness full of a cold, hungering malice.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant the minimum # of hours. So, Estarra's ideal minimum atm seems to be 2 hrs for 20 creds.
Testing without artis is important, but also if earning 20 creds a day becomes common, testing with artis is just as important bc people will be able to get great artis within weeks.
Test #2. I ignored everything except commodity quests.
I had 14 credits worth of comms for turning in within 11 minutes.
After 28 minutes, I had completed 7 villages' quests and netted 17 credits.
I feel like there's a big disparity between 1 thing that earns me 17 credits in 28 minutes, and everything else that takes me 4.5 hours to make 12 credits. I cannot imagine anyone wasting the time on the "anything else" unless they were going to be doing it anyways, the questing end of things is definitely the winner here.
I was a little confused until I looked up the commodity turn in recs, and yeah... per village per day makes it really easy so long as you're not enemied and prevented from turning stuff in. Does the quality of your mob kills count towards the 500 total for hunting? Because if quality doesn't matter, you can make good progress on those numbers just killing cows and rockeaters and hitting every village.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant the minimum # of hours. So, Estarra's ideal minimum atm seems to be 2 hrs for 20 creds.
Testing without artis is important, but also if earning 20 creds a day becomes common, testing with artis is just as important bc people will be able to get great artis within weeks.
Oh, I thought you meant like "how effective an player's output (bonuses, buffs etc) could be."
It's that common ground honestly that needs to be found there as you said. But this game is going to F2P, gotta balance that too.
The cool night-time breeze shivers in the arid caress of the streets of the capital city, brushing the earthen taste of dust across your lips.
*
A blessed silence falls upon the city for the moment, most activity confined to the towers and the theatre due to the snowy weather.
*
Pinprick points of light twinkle in the deep black overhead, their brightness full of a cold, hungering malice.
With an intentionally casual 55% crit rate and running some standard areas, I killed 847 things in 60 minutes. I'd estimate a real "max" would be somewhere around 1k-1500 at the very top end in one hour. Poteen mobs and perhaps other trivial mobs should be excluded, too.
If 2 hours of work for the cap of 20 credits is the goal, most average hunters would probably struggle to get more than 500 in an hour, so 1000 total seems more reasonable (structured however incrementally).
Commodity Quests will now take 20 completions to gain the reward (up from 12) We've removed getting rewards for guild tasks. Scholars/Pilgrims/Bards all count towards the same pool now. Hunting/Influencing will now score points and you'll earn the rewards when you hit that point threshold. Anyone under lvl 61 will get 4x the points and anyone under lvl 100 will get 2x the points. (This is ideally so they can achieve the goals as well)
So I'm gonna preface this by saying that having a desired amount of effort necessary to generate capped daily credits is absurd as long as you continue to permit an (in-game) effort free method of credit generation, but
Currently the bashing kill count is pure kill count: you're rewarded for hunting the easiest thing that you kill in the least time. There's already a system in place to circumvent that failing and apply incentive (or at least benefit) to hunting larger prey, which is the scaling system used in greathunts (apparently death/harmony have a separate scaling system? i dunno which would fit). The numbers presented above demonstrate that current credit reqs are probably steeper than intended, so (in addition to maybe just dropping the numbers a bunch?) make mob strength point scaling apply for credit gen.
having a desired amount of effort necessary to generate capped daily credits is absurd as long as you continue to permit an (in-game) effort free method of credit generation
What's the effort-free method? Since you say in-game, I assume you don't mean purchasing creds with RL money?
So I'm gonna preface this by saying that having a desired amount of effort necessary to generate capped daily credits is absurd as long as you continue to permit an (in-game) effort free method of credit generation, but
Currently the bashing kill count is pure kill count: you're rewarded for hunting the easiest thing that you kill in the least time. There's already a system in place to circumvent that failing and apply incentive (or at least benefit) to hunting larger prey, which is the scaling system used in greathunts (apparently death/harmony have a separate scaling system? i dunno which would fit). The numbers presented above demonstrate that current credit reqs are probably steeper than intended, so (in addition to maybe just dropping the numbers a bunch?) make mob strength point scaling apply for credit gen.
Most, if not all, credit generation has been removed at this point in time.
As in, the effort spent in-game is zero. Purchasing credits, yes.
Thanks for explaining. In that case, I think calling it absurd assumes people have the money to purchase credits. Lots of people want to be able to compete in PK and obtain convenient artifacts without spending RL money. Bulk buys, best value for your money, can be esp inaccessible. 20 creds per day is $8 to $10 per day at small pack rates and $5.50 at bulk buy rates. That's $2k to $3.6k per year in savings.
Earning 20 a day is a pretty good run. You can look at it like this. I'm a newbie mage who wan't to be a useful group melder so I go hey I really want that 200 credit demense rune. Hmm ok thats just 10 days of full cap. Nice got that in a week and a half. Next hmm Ok I feel I need to be tankier so I'll buy the 250 credit health artifact thats 12.5 days to get. Cool I can make solid progress in getting the stuff I need to be competitive in a reasonable time totally by in game actions.
Then on top maybe I'm also getting 50 credits from my commune for a prize or a reward over the course of a game year because I'm so active and helpful at stuff etc.
Although I really think we should include something like Imperian has with big easy to get credit rewards for achievements.
Although it does look like Lusternia will be awarding out more credits to the org than Imperian does. So it sort of puts these kind of free credits in the hands of the orgs as opposed to the individual players. I really think based on the current assessment and numbers that every org really should start doing some sort of newbie equipping package.
Something along the lines of get CR3 and be able to buy super duper cheap credits, 1000 gold a go to get tri trans or something. (just a rough idea atm but you get the concept)
Commodity Quests will now take 20 completions to gain the reward (up from 12) We've removed getting rewards for guild tasks. Scholars/Pilgrims/Bards all count towards the same pool now. Hunting/Influencing will now score points and you'll earn the rewards when you hit that point threshold. Anyone under lvl 61 will get 4x the points and anyone under lvl 100 will get 2x the points. (This is ideally so they can achieve the goals as well)
I like these changes but my biggest complaint/suggestion would be could we get the bashing points assigned to the squad members equally.
Like quick reason is to give more encouragement to group stuff.
Although it does look like Lusternia will be awarding out more credits to the org than Imperian does. So it sort of puts these kind of free credits in the hands of the orgs as opposed to the individual players. I really think based on the current assessment and numbers that every org really should start doing some sort of newbie equipping package.
Something along the lines of get CR3 and be able to buy super duper cheap credits, 1000 gold a go to get tri trans or something. (just a rough idea atm but you get the concept)
Will there be checks and balances built in like with gold in cities?
It will be open to abuse - I am not saying it will be abused. I am saying that there is the potential for it to be abused. (Like giving out 50 credits to a CL for being active and helpful..... )
With an intentionally casual 55% crit rate and running some standard areas, I killed 847 things in 60 minutes. I'd estimate a real "max" would be somewhere around 1k-1500 at the very top end in one hour. Poteen mobs and perhaps other trivial mobs should be excluded, too.
If 2 hours of work for the cap of 20 credits is the goal, most average hunters would probably struggle to get more than 500 in an hour, so 1000 total seems more reasonable (structured however incrementally).
I note that you are missing a couple of things, like 1) Weapon choice and 2) Targets. I'd guess you were using a gnome weapon for multi-kills? If so, that definitely skews things a very large bit towards the "top" (which is why I specifically noted the absence of said gnomeweapon). I rather strongly suspect that the average player will struggle to get to even 500 in an hour; doing things like mowing down 15 inner worms with a gnome weapon vs. a wand (or any other single-thread class attack which does significantly less damage than the wand) is a huge difference. Also, I think you have area clear scripts; were you using that? I am curious (as I did mention the optimization involved with scripting, which I did not take advantage of for my own testing here either per my statements).
I wasn't really interested in what someone with the absolute most could do, I was interested in what the general player would likely be able to achieve on any regular old day, and approached it from that standpoint (though obviously still using many of my advantages to be on the upper end of the range-- I did not intentionally handicap by removing / undoing things either). So for the people who were looking at my runs as a "max," Ixion is correct, it is definitely possible to do better. Higher crit rates (I also went with a casual crit rate of around 53/54% I think, don't remember checking but that's usually around where I hang on a basic defup), different weapon choice are some big ones. Falcon scarf for extra damage, the damage resolution, and so on (none of which I availed myself of either), etc.
Changing it to a points-based system is good (and necessary) though, am glad to see that done. Will have to check out how it works.
Edit: And I did the exact same thing for test #2 by the way. I used my inbuilt advantages (travel tools, etc) but not scripts or things to do it for me. I did it all manually; an area runner that collects bards/sholars/shadows/rockeaters/fish/cows/sheep/etc would have done even better on that timing as well.
Comments
The non-questable dailies that are always available are:
1) Hunting,
2) Influencing,
3) Org power quest,
4) Scholars, bards, and pilgrims.
I spent four and a half hours doing these tasks, and I ended up with a takeaway of 12 credits.
It took:
62 minutes to get 500 kills (3 credits).
161 minutes to get 500 influences (3 credits).
The rest of the time was spent running around catching crow shadows, scholars, bards, and pilgrims.
27 crow shadows = 54 power. (2 credits)
37 pilgrims (2 credits)
19 scholars (1 credit)
22 bards (1 credit)
Note that pilgrims, scholars, and bards *do not* share the same counter. This means that for scholars and bards, where there are less than 15 in a full spawn, you must collect all of them and wait for a respawn to complete the cycle. I would suggest that this be considered, as it could lead to more competition for these resources if people are each trying to collect more than one spawn.
Some details are included here (feel free to skip):
I do consider myself to be a decent hunter, and also a decent influencer (13/13 to all influence types), with a pretty good celerity value. It's definitely possible to do what I did and optimize it via scripts to be faster in some respects, or to use gnomeweapons instead of a wonderwand, or to utilize consumables such as wonderpies / etc, but I would be pretty comfortable making the assertion that the average player is not going to do much better on timing than I did.
For the kills, I opted to go for Kepherans and Illithoids because they are so plentiful. Astral is slower because you have to sit and wait for links, so I wanted something that didn't require waiting. I used poison-tuned wonderwand to slaughter 300 kepherans, and then I switched to Illithoid. These were very handy in spawning worms for additional kill counters and my magic-tuned wand made short work of them for the final 200 kills.
For influencing, I just picked guards because they are stacked. I stuck with brave guards only (to reduce the number of influences), with maxed out empowerment & max prestige. I was influencing guards in 4 to 5 hits. Obviously this is a lot longer than plowing one's way through denizens... and further note that I had absolutely no competition in terms of other people wanting to hunt or influence the stuff I was trying to do (which I don't expect to be the case in Live, guards always seem to be getting influenced...)
I had to do multiple rounds of the bards & scholars to try to get a tick as well.
------------------
I plan to wait for the weave, and sometime after that changes, I will do a second test with nothing but commodity quests. My plan is to limit myself to exactly 1 hour of gathering, and see what the outcome is for 1 hour of commodity questing, and how that compares to 4.5 hours of doing everything else.
It should take at least 1 hr to gain 10 cred, up to 20 cred in 2 hrs. In Xenthos's example (minus questing, comms etc), it takes 3 hrs 45 mins to gain 10 creds, up to 20 creds in 7 hrs 30 mins.
That sounds reasonable to me, but maybe that's coz I'm a noob? What do other players think?
I know in my mind, that if I spent an hour after work that would be fine with me for my daily play. But if it's 7 hours total, I could do something else with my time. People are wanting to play and work for it, but I think that's way too much.
theatre due to the snowy weather.
hungering malice.
What he does in terms of bashing and influence will be done much much quicker than the average player.
If you hit your cap after 1 hour of solo play, why would you use teamwork hunting or bother with guild tasks / city rewards?
Because @Xenthos is such a top tier player, are Xenthos's results essentially the minimum # of hours? Then yes, it looks like this system is a lot more grindy than Estarra seems to be shooting for.
It looks like kills, quests, influencing etc are all solo reward activities.
Hmm that's not a bad idea though. Maybe if you buffed the numbers on that so that a crew could cap everyone in it in like an hours work that'd be sort of comparable to Imperian and their boss runs.
theatre due to the snowy weather.
hungering malice.
Testing without artis is important, but also if earning 20 creds a day becomes common, testing with artis is just as important bc people will be able to get great artis within weeks.
theatre due to the snowy weather.
hungering malice.
If 2 hours of work for the cap of 20 credits is the goal, most average hunters would probably struggle to get more than 500 in an hour, so 1000 total seems more reasonable (structured however incrementally).
Commodity Quests will now take 20 completions to gain the reward (up from 12)
We've removed getting rewards for guild tasks.
Scholars/Pilgrims/Bards all count towards the same pool now.
Hunting/Influencing will now score points and you'll earn the rewards when you hit that point threshold.
Anyone under lvl 61 will get 4x the points and anyone under lvl 100 will get 2x the points. (This is ideally so they can achieve the goals as well)
Also, see my post just before yours.
Then on top maybe I'm also getting 50 credits from my commune for a prize or a reward over the course of a game year because I'm so active and helpful at stuff etc.
Although I really think we should include something like Imperian has with big easy to get credit rewards for achievements.
Although it does look like Lusternia will be awarding out more credits to the org than Imperian does. So it sort of puts these kind of free credits in the hands of the orgs as opposed to the individual players. I really think based on the current assessment and numbers that every org really should start doing some sort of newbie equipping package.
Something along the lines of get CR3 and be able to buy super duper cheap credits, 1000 gold a go to get tri trans or something. (just a rough idea atm but you get the concept)
I like these changes but my biggest complaint/suggestion would be could we get the bashing points assigned to the squad members equally.
Like quick reason is to give more encouragement to group stuff.
It will be open to abuse - I am not saying it will be abused. I am saying that there is the potential for it to be abused. (Like giving out 50 credits to a CL for being active and helpful.....