During the Magisterium iTrials last night, a player quite publicly advocated for increasing XP rates on Rebirth, which triggered some conversation during and after that iTrial was done. I was part of the conversation after, where I advocated for slowing down XP rates. The response I received was "you can always turn off XP." I didn't respond this way at that time, but I have rejoined to similar comments before with, "You can always firefarm or MSR."
So I'd like to bring this ongoing discussion here, and - with complete respect for all viewpoints - talk about options and suggestions.
First, some principles: the Rebirth devs, those volunteering their time and effort to hosting and making this version of the game available for all of us, have stated that they plan to stay close to the original devs' vision for this game.
The original devs' visions for this game included the XP rates we have now, sped up a few times during the original run of the game. At first, XP gain was a lot slower. From my memory, the last XP "speedening" (hey, a new word!) was done a little bit after shutdown was announced.
Second, some posits:
1. I don't want the devs of Rebirth to implement changes they don't want to have, and I don't want to stop them implementing changes they do. They're the volunteers making this work and sharing it with us. If it becomes unfun work for them, I would not be surprised if they stopped.
2. I think we, including the devs, want everyone playing to have an enjoyable time doing so. This may well mean offering differing experiences of the game to differing people wanting to have their fun in different ways.
Now, some thoughts from me:
One of the primary reasons I stuck with CoX for so long is the leveling experience itself, slowly unlocking new powers and enhancing them while slowly taking on new content. I actually liked street-sweeping to finish up some levels back when that we required. I consider the default leveling process a core component of the game, and if it is removed, a large part of this game's fun will also be removed.
I recently tried turning off XP to avoid outleveling contacts and content. It is a valid process, however doing so requires some research on when contacts unlock and become unavailable, and some of this information from the wikis is inaccurate. To me right now, it also feels cheap, and not in the spirit of the original CoX game. I know this option was made available for completionists, and I'm glad it's there for them. But I'm not looking to play as a completionist: I'm looking to play the default slow-leveling game.
I also don't want Rebirth to be a clone of Homecoming. The player who advocated for increased XP rates last night did receive some direct feedback, asking why they wanted increased XP rates here when they could easily play another server with them. I didn't see that the player responded, but I'm going to assume they do have valid reasons for wanting to be here... but now how to accommodate their desires along with someone like mine's?
There are ways to quickly level characters, and I have taken advantage of them: MSRs and firefarms. I have a set of two firefarmers right now. But I resisted doing this for the longest time (I never did this during live) - what prompted me do this on Rebirth was the lack of low-level common IO salvage on the AH (that's a different topic, so I won't dwell on that much more here). However, as a dev recently commented to me, not everyone has the time or ability to firefarm nor MSR - I can understand that. However, I'd say that in the same vein that we rely on the community to populate the AH, we can easily say we should rely on the community for PLing opportunities. I personally have provided those opportunities many times, mostly by bringing my 50s to MSRs, along with hosting ITFs, tips and other missions while playing my 50s.
From my viewpoint, we could easily stop there: if you want to gain XP at a faster rate, be nice to the community and take advantage of what they offer as players.
and yet...
Some ideas from me:
1. The default XP gain rate, when the server is running at normal XP, with a solo character is running at a notoriety of +0/x1, and only running regular contact missions, should be set so that they cannot outlevel at least one of their normal contacts' content. In fact, I would like the default XP gain rate to be half of that, to give room for the experience of the original live game with teaming, optional missions (such a Mayhem missions) and increasing notoriety being used more normally during leveling and still not quickly outleveling content.
2. In the same way that we have a button to stop XP gain, have a slash command to gain XP; the player enters the amount to gain. This allows a flexible way for a player wanting to progress quickly to do so, and their progression doesn't affect mine.
3. Have a slash command to "set combatlevel". For "set combatlevel 0", the player's combat level would be the level indicated by their XP. For "set combatlevel" 1-50, the player's combat level would be set to that - this would be the same effect as sidekicking/exemplaring (however without the influence gain adjustments, and not capping at level 49). This would allow greater flexibility up and down the scale for engaging with content, especially if contacts could honer the current combatlevel of a character when allowing certain missions (such as Mayhem missions and lower-level contacts' regular missions). This command should only be usable when the character is not in a mission/TF/trial nor "in combat", but the result would persist until the command was used again with a different setting.
