Weekly Newsletter 11_26_07: XP Bonus Weekend

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Updated Fri, Jan 02, 2009 by Dalmarus

Weekly Newletter

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XP Bonus Week

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.

Statues Outside of Pankor Zhi - Future Teleport Gate Perhaps?

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?