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XP Bonus Week
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November
26, 2007 - By Dalmarus
Thanksgiving has come and gone, but there were plenty of things to be
thankful for this week within Vanguard. Word came down from SOE that
the final phases of Game Update #3 may go live in the next two to three
weeks. Along with that news, the team gave everyone a 50% experience
bonus for the week. That bonus will continue until the servers go down
for maintenance and character transfers on Tuesday.
Before going any further in this discussion, let me state that I do
believe SOE was doing it as a nice holiday gift for us, not an attempt
to make life too easy and ruin the gameplay or some other insane
conspiracy theory that may come out of this newletter. The following
comments are my observations and some minor concerns. Nothing less,
nothing more.
While I really do appreciate the sentiment with which the xp bonus was
given, I have to wonder why it was done in simple game terms.
There is already a concern from a reasonable percentage of the
community that the xp is too easy to come by. Adding an xp
bonus, on top of a full rest bar for those fortunate enough, gave a
significant boost to those trying to get over any level hump they had
hit. While for the casual player, this amounted to nothing more than a
nice little push, the hardcore player made significant gains in
leveling.
The effects of this could be seen a couple of different ways. Adding a
bonus like this, especially for any new player that may have started
this week could give a false impression of the level progression as
they play. If they were unaware of the experience bonus granted, they
may feel the leveling curve is too steep after this week, having
gotten used to an easier pace when they started. That's on the extreme
end of things.
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Outside of Pankor Zhi - Future Teleport Gate Perhaps?
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On the other side of the coin, is the arguement about the hardcore
players. Would any experience bonus, no matter what the amount, really
make any type of difference in the long run for these types of players
anyway? Those that really try are going to sky-rocket to level 50 no
matter what the circumstances, and no matter what type of xp bonus (or
content) is in a game. It's just a simple fact that those that strive
that hard to be at the top of the monkey pile are going to do so.
Aside from the idea that SOE gave the experience bonus out to be nice,
I actually think they may have done it in anticipation of the Ancient
Port
Warehouse being almost ready to go live. I think they saw an
opportunity through the use of an American holiday to give us a little
boost to help those people that were "close but not quite" high enough
to hit the Warehouse as soon as it goes live.
This brings up a couple of other possible issues though. There are
concerns that the Warehouse is already going to be crowded enough as it
is simply because of the amount of level 50 players currently on the
servers as it stands. This doesn't even include the number of
characters that have level 50 characters rotting in their character
slots because they raced to 50 as soon as the game went live, and now
they've either left or have been playing multiple alts.
Maybe, and just maybe though, there are a number of level 50 characters
that are not going to hit the Warehouse as soon as it goes live.
Perhaps they'll use the "Gold Rush" mentality to their advantage and
use this time to complete quests or get rare drops from areas that are
currently heavily contested such as Rhaz. It's possible this will be a
good thing for players and the community as a whole.
What do you think?
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