Leveling bug: Should it be removed?

[Lance]

Originally Posted by Schlurfy

But if so i don't understand why the Admins of the past didn't prevent it.
And now, while they are not playing anymore and only working a bit in the background for GK talking about it, instead of acting and report it as a bug.

You seem to be forgetting a few key points:

1) These are mudlib issues. Stefan has to fix them.
2) We "Admins of the past" brought the old incarnations of this bug up before. That is, when people with drastically different overall levels did the same thing, they received outrageously high amounts of experience. This was perceived as a bug, so the party level limit was put into place to counter this. Unfortunately, it wasn't considered at the time that people could have very similar overall levels but drastically different skill levels and thus could continue to abuse the bug that way.
3) a) I haven't had a chance to speak with Stefan since reading this thread.
3) b) I hadn't learned of the existence of this incarnation of the bug until reading this thread.
3) c) I can't fix it myself.

Yet, somehow you are blaming us "Admins of the past" for not discovering / dealing with this problem earlier. That doesn't make sense. How about working on helping fixing the problem (helping contact Stefan) instead of affixing the blame?

[Sam]

Originally Posted by Lance

You seem to be forgetting a few key points:

1) These are mudlib issues. Stefan has to fix them.
2) We "Admins of the past" brought the old incarnations of this bug up before. That is, when people with drastically different overall levels did the same thing, they received outrageously high amounts of experience. This was perceived as a bug, so the party level limit was put into place to counter this. Unfortunately, it wasn't considered at the time that people could have very similar overall levels but drastically different skill levels and thus could continue to abuse the bug that way.
3) a) I haven't had a chance to speak with Stefan since reading this thread.
3) b) I hadn't learned of the existence of this incarnation of the bug until reading this thread.
3) c) I can't fix it myself.

Yet, somehow you are blaming us "Admins of the past" for not discovering / dealing with this problem earlier. That doesn't make sense. How about working on helping fixing the problem (helping contact Stefan) instead of affixing the blame?

I am helping by talking about it with Björn and I said in this thread:

Originally Posted by Schlurfy

...Maybe Stefan can clarify what is intended and what not.

A normal player without knowing anything about programming or how much exp and whatever killing any kind of monsters cannot know is it right or wrong how much he level by using the party tool.
If it was not intend that people can level in that way in a party Stefan will fix it.
I didn't know that this is a problem that most likely came into being from the new mudlib. I never pretended to have knowledge from programming, now I know that this is not an problem what was also in the past.
Therefore I apologize to blame older Admins for being inactive.

[--Chris--]

"They complain about it simply because they do not want to devote the time needed to leveling or getting the maps." - Deo

I don't play.

[Splke]

Attempts to prevent it went failed; like Ed said. That's why you don't notice the admins doing anything. That or they just suck. :l

[Craigus]

Before this "bug" can be fixed something in the leveling system needs to change otherwise lower levels will never be able to compete with older players.

[Butz]

Originally Posted by Craigus

Before this "bug" can be fixed something in the leveling system needs to change otherwise lower levels will never be able to compete with older players.

Indeed. Experience requirements that go up almost exponentially (at least in the beginning), while having experience gained per kill going down on a sliding scale as level rises make people more likely to look for loopholes like this. The amount of experience needed between levels is obscene really, especially since after a certain point, levels get you nothing more than a couple hitpoints, and occasionally allow you to add another + to your equipment.

Personally, I think there shouldn't BE base experience. Your level should be a total of your ability levels, and stop rising at a certain point. (Max out your total level, and you just can't level up anymore, in anything.)

[Craigus]

This method has been around for atleast 3 years.

[Splke]

The method has been around for 3 years, but the severe abuse in this specific case is different than just having a friend level at low levels with you. This is like back when Toran was raising Wren's wisdom level by reseting his spare account and using his lvl 1 char to give her 100k per kill in Immense maps.

It's not _that_ effective, but in essence it is on the same level of abuse.

[Craigus]

Same method but yeah its alot harder because you would need a permenant person.

[busyrobot]

This is all the result of a bad mathmatical system in leveling. As you level up, the exp that is given by a monster goes down. As you go down, your experience per monster does up.

The best solution IMO, is to completely wipe the experience/lvl modifier, and just inflate the xp needed at higher levels. That way, you have a nice clean linear system.

Example:

Current system: Lets say you need 100k exp to get from level 49 to 50 and 100k from 50 to 51. At level 49, a Slug gives you 500 ep, and at level 50, it only gives you 250 xp.

Wouldn't it be better, to have the Slug give a standard 500 xp, always, and make 50 to 51 require 200k xp instead of 100k?

That way, you don't have crazy xp inflation when a low level fellow kills a high level monster, and you can't exploit parties no matter the xp gap.

If you add two other fixes:
1) The amount of damage you do with a method of attack, determines the xp you get for the kill. If you do 20% of the damage on a creature with wisdom, you get 20% wisdom xp for your contribution to the kill.
2) The other party members get shared xp in the category you did the damage with - you use wisdom, they get shared wisdom xp.

Then, you have no more room for exploits. What I do think could be a valuable place for reducing XP by percent, is let a lvl 1 player party with a lvl 100 player, but they only get the percentage shared via the level diffference. Then, a level 5 player, and a level 50 player can party, but the lvl 5 player would get 10% of the shared amount of xp. Actually, instead of level difference, use xp difference. If the level 50 player needs 500k to get to the next level (I mean, the standard gap from lvl 50 to 51 being equal to 500k, not what they have left to lvl to get there) and gets 1k for a kill, that is 1/500th of the way. Then the lvl 5 player if the gap from lvl 5 to 6 is 10k, would get the shared modifier modified by the xp amount that is 1/500th closer to lvl 6.


The problem is if you make fixes right now, the game is still horribly thrown off. I really think a reset and general rebalance would be an exceptionally good idea.

One recommendation though: Add more role for parties...make it so if you use weapons, you have a delay to cast healing spells, so you need a cleric around to heal in the party. Make it so to use swords well, you need a wizard to cast 'entangle' to raise an enemy's AC. If the game gets rebalanced, increasing the benefits for cooperation will improve interesting gameplay by a huge factor.

[Splke]

Static EXP is stupid, honestly. *shrugs* The idea of making a class an actual CLASS seems like a taboo for GK, it's been so long since anythings had real value on there that it would be scary to see something make sense.

[Googi]

I remember back when resets were considered a last resort. Now they're the tool of your average complainer.

[Splke]

lel newbies