New AP / Award Changes Feedback

[Zaon]

Got this for a level 21 character with 700k in bank.

So that's 5 times less than needed for a minor award. How is this fair. Ok, forget fair, there's no fairness in this world I'll be first to acknowledge that, same rules apply to me.

But how is this considered good system for people like me.

[Iceborn]

The adventure XP accounted is the one that is noted in the changelog. The only one that is technically infinite per character is the one from named mobs kills.

@Zaon: What would you consider "people like you?"
I'll admit that hitting 60 hours a month may be challenging, or outright impossible for some people, which you aren't forced to do.
You can play less and still accrue points.

One of the goals of the new award system was to put an end to a gameplay that favored milling an endless stream of personality-less characters with the sole purpose of rolling them for an award. If you are in this demographic, I'd advise to reconsider your approach with the game.

[AnselHoenheim]

The adventure XP accounted is the one that is noted in the changelog. The only one that is technically infinite per character is the one from named mobs kills.

@Zaon: What would you consider "people like you?"
I'll admit that hitting 60 hours a month may be challenging, or outright impossible for some people, which you aren't forced to do.
You can play less and still accrue points.

One of the goals of the new award system was to put an end to a gameplay that favored milling an endless stream of personality-less characters with the sole purpose of rolling them for an award. If you are in this demographic, I'd advise to reconsider your approach with the game.

Aren't the ones who have been rolling characters for storing awards the ones who has been more benefitted of this system anyway?

[But Will It Blend]

The adventure XP accounted is the one that is noted in the changelog. The only one that is technically infinite per character is the one from named mobs kills.

@Zaon: What would you consider "people like you?"
I'll admit that hitting 60 hours a month may be challenging, or outright impossible for some people, which you aren't forced to do.
You can play less and still accrue points.

One of the goals of the new award system was to put an end to a gameplay that favored milling an endless stream of personality-less characters with the sole purpose of rolling them for an award. If you are in this demographic, I'd advise to reconsider your approach with the game.

I'm sorry. You need to stop and take a think. This last sentence is completely unacceptable.

Edit: It's one of the most arrogant things I've literally every read. And is incredibly out of touch. If you seek to alienate your player base by saying 'Lmao you're playing the game wrong because it's different from how I intend it' then I don't know what to say if you don't think that's how that reads.

[Cnaym]

The last two posts perfectly sum up my issue.
Given that your average roll cooldown was 2 months seeing adventurers and visitors just passing through for 2irl months always made sense to me. Sure there are people who make full on ten year plans for their new characters but if someone just wants to try spellsword it's not really a big issue. They might even enjoy them and stick with them.

As for the right and wrong way to play. The thing I now learned was that -using- the awards was the wrong way to play

[Xerah]

I'm sorry. You need to stop and take a think. This last sentence is completely unacceptable.

Edit: It's one of the most arrogant things I've literally every read. And is incredibly out of touch. If you seek to alienate your player base by saying 'Lmao you're playing the game wrong because it's different from how I intend it' then I don't know what to say if you don't think that's how that reads.

This is not unacceptable or out of touch or arrogant. That's a really wild leap.

The goal of this system (any system) is to promote playing in certain ways. You can play other ways if you want, no issues there. But this system is trying to reward specifically playing in a way that is not just creating a character and pushing it to 26 to roll. If you want to optimize your AP, yes, you might need to take a different approach to the game than you did before to optimize your reward potential. I think Ice, and every one of the Admin staff, will double down in saying that they wanted to limit the character grind of playing characters just to roll and there have been many things done trying to limit that (for example adding a rolling timer)

I do say this as someone who almost always had a level 26 character to roll on cooldown.

That said, it seems "better" to be playing a new character all the time since you'll get more AP quicker at the start of a character's life (based on me getting 45-50k, not just 36k from time-based gates). If your goal is optimizing AP, then you can still create your new characters every two months and roll them. You'd probably end up with your major reward in less time than you thought.

The major difference now is that you are not as far behind if you just keep playing your character instead of jumping into the 2 month cycle.

[But Will It Blend]

I'm sorry. You need to stop and take a think. This last sentence is completely unacceptable.

Edit: It's one of the most arrogant things I've literally every read. And is incredibly out of touch. If you seek to alienate your player base by saying 'Lmao you're playing the game wrong because it's different from how I intend it' then I don't know what to say if you don't think that's how that reads.

This is not unacceptable or out of touch or arrogant. That's a really wild leap.

The goal of this system (any system) is to promote playing in certain ways. You can play other ways if you want, no issues there. But this system is trying to reward specifically playing in a way that is not just creating a character and pushing it to 26 to roll. If you want to optimize your AP, yes, you might need to take a different approach to the game than you did before to optimize your reward potential. I think Ice, and every one of the Admin staff, will double down in saying that they wanted to limit the character grind of playing characters just to roll and there have been many things done trying to limit that (for example adding a rolling timer)

I do say this as someone who almost always had a level 26 character to roll on cooldown.

That said, it seems "better" to be playing a new character all the time since you'll get more AP quicker at the start of a character's life (based on me getting 45-50k, not just 36k from time-based gates). If your goal is optimizing AP, then you can still create your new characters every two months and roll them. You'd probably end up with your major reward in less time than you thought.

The major difference now is that you are not as far behind if you just keep playing your character instead of jumping into the 2 month cycle.

Know what? You might be right. I'm going to clarify and also apologize in case I assumed bad intent where I shouldn't. Iceborn, I am sorry. I saw this as accusatory towards said player when I probably shouldn't have taken it in this tone. You probably weren't intending the tone/message that everyone who is rolling these characters every 2-3 months was basically just making a meme roll character with no RP/Personality etc.

That's how I read it. I shouldn't have implied intent.

I do agree with the above being something of a problem or we'll see a lot of remakes.

[The GrumpyCat]

I feel like there's two points to consider here.

1) That pcs made before the change, who've possibly been played for a long time and are high levels, do not have the amount of points they should have under the new system. E.g. - If I rolled my level 30 in the vault now, who I've not played at all recently - I'd not get many points at all (as I understand it? Iceborn please correct me if I'm wrong!)
And you know what?
Yeah. I feel this is a valid issue. I feel bad about it. I think it's a shame. I'm not sure why it is like it is - but I'll be the first to say it kinda sucks. I don't have an answer for you guys here. It's just a little sucky it's worked out that way. But it is what it is. IF it's the price of getting a far better system in? So be it.

2) The other issue that's being mixed up with this is the system over all. If you have a pc, and leveled them to 21 post award system coming in, you'd also have a bunch of playtime points on that pc which might well actually equal a normal, if not higher, award.
Xerah's touched on this already but - ultimatly ANY system we put in place, which limits awards at all, is going to have issues with some people.
That's just a fact.
If we did it by roleplay purely - people would complain (and already have)
If we did it by leveling as prior - well that may be good for you, but for anyone who isn't willing to just roll over two months, as Xerah said, would have issues.
If we did it by recommendation - that'd be unfair to people who arn't as social
If we did it by amount of text written - that penalizes slow typers
There's always going to be something, and that's going to penalise some sort of playstyle.

It's a shame if it's yours that's been penalised, but ultimatly we have to ask ourselves - what sort of behaviour do we feel best and fairest to reward? Time to me seems the best and fairest way. Again - I am truly sorry if you feel short changed by this new system but times have changed, and this is where we are at.

[Ruzuke]

If the purpose of the system is to reduce short term characters than it failed. I will stick a pin in that thought for the moment. It was my belief that that award system’s goal was to prevent people holding onto characters for all time. In the system both old and new is not effective.

I have seen over a decade on Arelith character ride off to the sunset, return 2-3 years later. They are known for doing X and return to positions of authority and entering new storylines who are attached to world changing plots (leaving them with new legends when they leave and return once more. Neither system addresses this RP issue which the I believed the awards system was made so these types of characters would end their story for good.

Now that pin I put in above let’s address the idea the system is here to prevent temp characters. Those who have no RP for two months. I would hazard to guess the bias issue is creating a pain point to not be able to play both characters. As a result, the player joins in the fun with their friends. For non-goal orientated players this may work. The fear of missing out may keep them on one player. The goal orientated player however has a goal to play the character desired. This goal means playing, rolling and swapping characters until they have the awards needed. For this character instead of playing and switching characters, the result is just playing the temporary character until enough points is needed.

[Iceborn]

@Ansel: This is true. However, we cannot mechanically, programmatically differentiate people that played in good faith or played 0 RP characters to amass awards. In the spirit of fairness, there are only two options: Do no conversion at all, or convert them all (with the 3 million cap, which is huge). We chose the latter.
There may have been third options we didn't think about. There may have been fourth and fifths. Would they have been more fair? Feasible? Doable? Systematically achievable, bug-free? Would they cover all sorts of players in our server? We made the choice we had with the data we had at our disposal. It's not perfect, no option would have been perfect, but it's as close as we could get.

#Cnaym: One of the things that most new players do not realize is how fast our current leveling experience is. You can get to the epic range within a couple of days - it took less than a week in my last character. In the old days when the award system was originally envisioned, it took months-to-years to get up to epic range, let alone hit level 30. And that wasn't just entering a dungeon, killing the boss up, writ complete, move on to the next - it required an immense amount of time of pure, mind-numbingly boring circle-grinding.

When the award system was originally designed, sacrificing a character was a true sacrifice. It wasn't something you'd do willy nilly. You had poured blood, sweat and tears over that character, a character that was now one of the few in the server to be in the epic range (back in the days, I remember people calling them demi-gods, lmao). And you were going to kill that character, at the height of their power. That was a sacrifice.

With the modernization of the server, and the less jurassic approach to leveling, circle grinding (or choose your favorite geometric shape) became mostly a thing of the past. You can still do it... but you don't have to; a few writs a day, and you'll be 30 within a few weeks. Earlier depending how you play. As a result of this, the award system had completely lost its foundation - it never stipulated that people should roll characters weekly; we had the cooldown implemented to control this, but it was pretty much a bandaid.

That said, the new system does not penalize people from trying new characters. You can just go make that spellsword, play it for however long you want, and stick with it or roll it. Either way, all the time you played with that character will go to your account one way or another.

I apologize if I came out as arrogant or out of touch, but I do mean what I said.
The new system has an intended way to be approached, expecting to earn awards as if it was the old system will be cause for distress and disappointment.
We want awards to be a thing that are mostly obtained passively. Not something you can actively grind for.
As Xerah said, you can probably earn more AP by playing a new character and going around the server, exploring, crafting, and finding as many secrets as there are hidden, but there's a considerable effort to doing all that that necessitates an active engagement with many aspects of the game that are healthy for our world, and for varied forms of gameplay, so I don't think it's likely it's going to be exploited, but we'll keep an eye on it.

@Grumps: A) You are correct. All your historic points in that character are already converted. You will only get the points for what you accrue playing now.
This was a last second decision to control the influx of points - as we had many players with very, very long standing characters that would have immediately qualified into a major, or more (I'd have to check our database, but Backlands told me that we had a player hit the million historic threshold within the hour). If we had not converted these points, we would have seen mass rolling day 1 - I would have been okay with that, but the admins felt it was better to not cause drastic IG changes with the sudden disappearance of hundreds of characters, vaulted or not.

[Ork]

The system still rewards players who have considerable amounts of time to play, and leaves players with less time in the dust. I barely pull 20 hours a month sometimes, and because of that I'll also have to play for multiple years before I earn a major award.

The very same people who mightve 0 rp rolled characters to earn awards, are the same that still benefit under this system.

[-XXX-]

The new system doesn't actively encourige mindless grind like the old one, which I believe is the whole idea.
Playtime should be its own reward, the awards are just the gravy.

[miesny_jez]

I don't understand how this AP system is supposed to be working.. or I got the short end of a stick and got cheated out of it somehow?

I play my active characters always the same way - One character which usually is alive for 2 to 4 RL year depending on if his RP is interesting and if its goals have been reached and one Alt for occasional jumpin/jumpout short sessions. I don't flip between characters and I don't rush them.. cause I have seen everything on this server from bottom to top.

I have been actively playing on Arelith for a very long time now, long enough that I participated in Benwick destruction event as an Epic level character. Long enough to remember Mithreas as head Admin and Arcane Tower standing in a different place then today.

So I expected a large number when pressing the -awards command today.
But instead i got this:
"You have [100] Award Points in your account ready to use
You have [360] AP in this character
You have [170987] historic playtime"

???
I expected these numbers to be far higher.
Can someone please explain to me how does this work and why am I not seeing far higher numbers in this?

[Ork]

The new system doesn't actively encourige mindless grind like the old one, which I believe is the whole idea.

The yellow lieutenants shouldn't give AP.

[Xerah]

Your available points depend on how many stocked awards you have. If you've always been using your awards, then you won't have much there.

You get AP in this character by playing them each tick.

You get historic playtime AP from older characters that you log into that still exist (you need to log into them to get these points!). You can't use these points yet, but they will be available at some point in the future.

You don't get any points for awards you already used or characters that have long been deleted.

You can also get refunded AP on award characters if you played for 60h.

[Royal Blood]

I think for me the only advantage to the new system is that there is now a 'path' to one of the larger rewards as opposed to a complete lottery that does not take into account time played on a character or stuff like that. I don't like leveling enough to sit there and grind out a high-level character just to delete it later, so the idea of just rolling for chance was like meh. It's also super lame to have an older PC roll it and get like a Minor award. That sucks.

I guess for frustrations like the number of points needed is like Ooof. It can seem daunting. Even with the number of legacy points I accumulated (Which isn't many for as old as my primary character is, and is still active.) I'd need about a year(ish) worth of 60 hr months to reach assuming I wasn't also rolling a character in between there getting a complete lottery number of points.

Which I guess, like glancing at my Forum name which says I started with this in like 2018 isn't all that long given the near decade I've lingered around here.

Though I mean like I've been playing since 2018. I've rolled a fair few characters. Never gotten above a Normal award. So 7+ years, a bunch of normals. As opposed to like I know, factually after roughly 2 years, starting from 0 points I'd get a major. That's assuming I never roll a character between then and now, and like don't get any other points from Events or whatever.

TLDR: At least there's like a roadmap to the awards rather than a lottery. I guess that's an improvement. If this had been the system in place 7 years ago, I'd have a lot of points. From now going forward I guess it's an improvement that hopefully pays off the most for newer players who are just starting what may be a multi-year experience here on Arelith.

[Darkstorn42]

I don't understand how this AP system is supposed to be working.. or I got the short end of a stick and got cheated out of it somehow?
[...]
So I expected a large number when pressing the -awards command today.
But instead i got this:
"You have [100] Award Points in your account ready to use
You have [360] AP in this character
You have [170987] historic playtime"

Log onto all your currently existing characters and type -awards. This should make sure it all gets counted. (Might need to collect a server tic)
Check your account page on the Astrolabe. This should tell you everything you need to know. Total AP, legacy AP.
All of your saved awards were converted into AP. Only PCs that still exist today will have granted legacy AP.

[Zariu]

Wanted to give a suggestion. One of the concerns of the new system is people idling or afking on not their main to hit the 60 hours. I've heard more than a couple people mention a plan to do this. Which I think you mentioned on the discord as also being a concern if you lowered the time to 30/40 hours.

If you're noticing this being a legitimate problem, a consideration might be to have the points award at the end of each month timer, proportionally to the hours spent on characters. So I spent 90% on this one character, 10% on another. The hour points I earned will be allocated 90% to the first and 10% to the second.

Now obviously, this will make some people mad because it gets rid of that loophole. But, if server vision is to encourage and support a rotating cast of characters, this would ensure the build up of points on the characters people are playing to encourage their eventual roll. People obviously can and still will have their forever characters, but that would come at a cost of not freeing the points and no loophole of afking on some character till they hit the monthly timer hours. Because that just seems as unhealthy as the no rp roll characters from before.

[Iceborn]

This would require individualized character tracking into the DB, which we don't do.
We can do it, and definitely will if it becomes a problem.
So hopefully it won't become a problem.

[Keanel]

I must admit, I spent 60h "idlying" on a character I didn't have any desire to play. Why? Because when created (tested) I spent 20 min on it, decided I don't want to play it, parked it, then after award change I couldn't refund it because it had Guldurand start.

Maybe refund system should be slightly changed, full refund till certain amount of time (15/30/60h) and after it partial refund?

[The GrumpyCat]

I must admit, I spent 60h "idlying" on a character I didn't have any desire to play. Why? Because when created (tested) I spent 20 min on it, decided I don't want to play it, parked it, then after award change I couldn't refund it because it had Guldurand start.

Maybe refund system should be slightly changed, full refund till certain amount of time (15/30/60h) and after it partial refund?

Whilst I appreciate the feedback, and your situation I feel for the community I must make the following clear.

Players found to be just 'idling' their characters for long amounts of time in order to farm experience, or Award Points, may face punishments up to and including: The removal of ALL their AP and the lowering of their RPB to 0.

This is not a behaviour we want to see. It is absolutly an abuse of the RPB system, and is also, imo, an abuse of the AP system.

[Rei_Jin]

I will admit that a concern I have with the new system is that it doesn’t incentivise the gold component of rolling that the previous system did.

Now? Yes, rolling your character releases the banked AP that the character has accrued, and gives a variable small bonus amount of AP.

But with how small that bonus amount of AP is, it is easy to see that it would be more beneficial to your friends to pass off all your gold and resources, rather than going with them to your -character_delete graveyard.

As this was previously a gold/resource sink, it might be good to consider how else gold and/or resources can be drained naturally from the server, rather than circulating ad nauseum.

[Iceborn]

I must admit, I spent 60h "idlying" on a character I didn't have any desire to play. Why? Because when created (tested) I spent 20 min on it, decided I don't want to play it, parked it, then after award change I couldn't refund it because it had Guldurand start.

Maybe refund system should be slightly changed, full refund till certain amount of time (15/30/60h) and after it partial refund?

This is not part of the new system though.

In both the old and the new system you can get a full refund for your award if you are under level 11.
In the old system, if you crossed level 11 you had no refund whatsoever.
In the new system, if you cross level 11 you have a partial refund after 60 hours.

While I agree with the sentiment that playing an undesirable character to qualify for a refund is not ideal and I hope we can improve the logic in the future, do kindly adhere to the rules.

Idling in game for the sake of amassing awards is not an intended behavior and will be addressed accordingly.
That is not to say you should feel worried about getting instabanned if you spend an hour semi-afk tabbing between discord and the forum trying to decide what to take for your next level or what to craft next, but obviously and repeatedly abusing the system will result in getting whisked for a talk to the DM room.

@Rei
Gold is a tricky thing to balance, because for certain types of gameplay, it's very easy to grind for, while other playstyles may dedicate to long and rich stories that could span for months to years, but never break over a million gold. Sometimes much less.
While definitely we'd like to see more gold sinks and less infinite mass pools of gold that could go around the server, encouraging people to gold grind has many consequences that we need to consider.

[Keanel]

Thanks Iceborn and Grumpycat for your answers. I wrote a bit in good faith, as you said, as part of the feedback and to paint the problem. Trust me, I would much prefer to spend that time on the character I intended to play, but that was the only way to gather the AP I needed for the rework. I wish there were no need to spend hours on characters I don't intend to play, as that sounds counterintuitive to me. That 60 hours felt like an unnecessary burden I had to accomplish before I could go back to actually playing the game.

[LordofThunder]

Would it be too much to ask for perhaps a live stream with Irongron or someone else providing a masterclass on the new rules?

I must confess I have a hard time understanding them.