Cairns

Jeremy Saunders

Okay, so these have really taken off. It only took a year.

I do not want to stifle the enthusiasm about them. I think it is cool how much people are playing with them right now.

I am worried about a couple things.

1. Giving out too much XP.
   
2. Newbies shooting through a ton of quest levels. (I am pretty sure they can only get one real level from it, let me know if that is wrong)

Thoughts?

Mathiaus

I think everyone is afraid of getting them nerfed since they do give so much experience, but it'll probably bet better if they did.

I rebooted Heirdalis maybe a week ago from level 28 and now he is an aspect.

With the amount of cairns we're producing, they could probably go down in how much experience they're giving. I believe the people who actually own the cairn should continue to get the same amount they are getting, since the endeavour does take a while.

That being said, I also like that I didn't have to bash 100000000000000000 creatures to make aspect. I consider this a pk game, so whatever pushes me quicker to being able to pk is better imo.

Edit:Side thought. Perhaps we could make defiling a channeled ability, where the owner of the cairn is alerted and given a chance to kill them? Make them work the higher experience.

Khizan

I wanted to complain about this because part of me really hates how easy it is for people to cheese up the levels of their alts.

I didn't, though, because bashing is completely goddamn miserable and I hate it and it's awful and terrible and bad, so anything that removes the need for people to trudge through hours and hours of it to hit decent PK health is okay by me. 

Wysrias

Each cairn can only give one overall level per sanctify. This means that I was able to gain 56 levels on an alt in 10 minutes by sanctifying 56 cairns. The second round got me to level 80.

I don't think this is a problem because of two major reasons:

1) The effectiveness of cairns is directly proportional to investment and interest. Maximizing your sanctification gains means doing as many cairns as possible every hour, meaning one token is consumed for each cairn per week. It also requires the entire playerbase to band together to make the gains really worthwhile. If interest dies out and/or there's no Selthis to keep an updated list ready, the whole benefit falls apart.

2) Experience is worthless on its own. When you grind to 100 by bashing, you generate a LOT of gold, which impacts the market negatively over time. If someone powerlevels to aspect from cairns alone, they'll still only have the few thousand gold earned from the innate newbie system. Being aspect only really affects your PvE health pools, and let's face it - the only time bashing becomes even remotely interesting (and I do mean remotely) is when you're playing with endgame content. Nobody likes bashing 2-99 on alts because it's a massive timesink that hurts the game economy and removes you from player interactions.

It's also worth noting that cairns also do not generate belief - the main reasons players bash nowadays are either for gold or for belief, and cairns affect neither of these. There's an argument to be made that someone could just powerlevel their experience pool with cairns and buy a ton of aspect perks, but honestly, if someone wants to drop millions of gold out of the game economy to maximize the value of their cairn gains? More power to them.

Selthis

I guess there's a couple of things here.

1. This is the best drain you've had on tokens in a while. That's a good  thing.  (change token wares please)

2. It requires a lot of effort from a group of people. You throw up a single cairn somewhere and don't beg people to sanctify it, you're gonna get crap.  They're gonna get crap. The more people sanctifying, the more value it has to everyone. This is why I made the ad and make sure to talk it up so people understand how good it is.

3. Who cares if people level too fast. They're not making gold, they're just straight leveling.  Like @khizan said, bashing kind of sucks. Even though I do a crap ton of it anyway. I do think the difference is between a year ago, the effort wasn't concentrated in one area in an organized fashion. Also, the showxp config actually lets you know how much xp you're getting which I think has made  it easier to sell.

4. I think part of me says "who cares about quest levels being gained too fast" because honestly, all it is is reserves.  But I understand some people  care about their ranking and they feel like this is cheating that ranking. Which it probably is.  I don't know any more  quests than I knew  week ago.

5. Maybe max the"sublevels" you can get per go  to 1  per.  So PK,bashing, questing levels have the same restriction as overall. That won't really stop whats happening, but it will slow it down a bit.

6. i bet Cairnae dies out in roughly a week and a half to two  weeks. I'm gonna be honest, i saw  the potential and I kind of pushed it. Other people hopped on the bandwagon as well and it grew from there. But if people aren't going to putting down tokens to replace cairns, then it will die out naturally. I don't know that I'd keep on spending tokens unless I had  really good spots after this round.  

All in all, I like cairns, but I think the nature of them will result in a natural lifecycle.

Aleutia

So I talked with @Selthis about this a little bit and decided to go ahead and post. Are cairns giving too much xp? Quite possible. But at this same time, who is it really hurting? You missed out on some convoluted quests in the novicehood areas? You now have a ton of lessons to get a better grasp for a profession you might want to play? I don’t think that’s especially a bad thing. Getting to end level is very helpful in the game, but getting there is miserable. When I hit aspect on Aleutia I literally did not bash for an entire year. I did everything I could to avoid it.

As to the xp generation thing with newbies and quest levels. I rolled a newbie the yesterday out of vast curiosity more than anything. The first round of sanctifying I went from 3 to 59. When I got a double xp bonus after that, I popped it. All told it took me 14 hours to get from 1 to 100 by logging in every hour to sanctify. These are the states of the character below.


Overall Level: 100 (9.97%)   
Bashing Level: 4   (37%)
Quest Level  : 100 (6%)      
PK Level     : 1   (0%)

An odd quirk of this system is it wholly depends on the playerbase participating. I feel strongly the reason cairns weren’t used in the past is we couldn’t see the number of xp generated, so it was frustratingly hard to see if they were worth using or not. Now we have a plain and simple readout of how much xp we’re getting and how much it takes to get to another level. If the numbers are nerfed significantly, then people just won’t use the system anymore.

I could be wrong, but I feel this will overall dwindle out in another week or so as people lose interest in leveling up their alts or new characters. I hope it stays, though.

Mercer

The most minor thing for me, is that I was 10th in the questing rankings before this, now I'm in the late 80s, but that is a whatever thing at the end of the day.



Don't really have the interest in running around the cairns every hour.  I'm just an insane person who likes bashing.

Jules

Yeah, was tempted to take advantage with my two reserve chars, because let's face it, bashing up a second char is probably going to feel pretty cumbersome, but considerations of properly situating those chars in professions and circles before shedding newbie status (and also just taking your time with a new character once the time comes) overrode.  

Jeremy Saunders

Okay. I think I will leave it. That said, let's not pull real newbies into this as much as possible. I would worry about them getting out of their depth too fast.

Jeremy Saunders

Oh, and changing up token wares is something high on my list. Hopefully I will get to it soon.

Khizan

I'm pretty sure the cat is out of the bag as far as cairns go and there's no real way to 'fix' them now. That said, these are the problems I have with them, for future reference:

1. Owning a cairn is sort of pointless because the VAST majority of the benefit of a cairn comes from sanctifying/defiling. While sanctifying has to be worthwhile to encourage people to do it, there's no real need to actually buy-in to benefit. The only benefit from buying in is that hopefully the large amount of cairns will convince somebody else to raise one, etc etc.
   
   
2. Everybody who uses a cairn benefits from everybody else using a cairn because when Khizan sanctifies a cairn, the sanctify count goes up and thusly the value per sanctify for everybody else goes up. Arguably, everybody who has cairned on more than one character violated HELP SECONDS in doing so; sanctifying Septus' cairn on my alt means that Khizan gains more experience when HE goes by and sanctifies that cairn.
   
   This is a problem because every alt who cairns makes cairns more valuable which encourages people to cairn up another alt which makes cairns more valuable which...
   
   This might not seem like much, but if I use just one alt, that's 1 sanctify each for 56 cairns, which I can do every hour on the hour. So let's say I do it three times a day. That's 168 extra sanctifies per day, and every single person in Imperian can benefit from them. That's huge.
   
   
3. The cairns stack with the +100% exp bonuses from Champion and Achievements, so the values are basically double anything intended.
   
   
4. Defiling's notable drawback isn't that much of a drawback; so many of these cairns are from non-factors in PvP and the statute of limitations on PvP reasons in Imperian is like 2-3 months for something minor, so defiling really has no real punishment. This is especially true of people who are pounding out levels on alts that they don't mind benching for a few weeks until all reasonable cause has lapsed on them.

These are the fixes/changes I would consider. It's probably too late for anything like this now, because the not-Khizan playerbase would hate you, but it's something to think of in the future.

1. Change sanctifying/defiling to a flat rate, maybe scaled by player level or cairn duration remaining but not based on total sanctifies. This will stop the "alts make cairns more valuable which..." loop and give you a reasonable expected exp-per-sanctifier value out of one cairn.
   
   
2. Make sanctifying your own cairn give you a 'cairn attunement' buff which increases the rewards of sanctifying/defiling other cairns. This encourages buying in to the system and decreases the rewards for the Legion of Alts unless a token is invested in them
   
   
3. Make the experience untyped, so that it doesn't artificially inflate an EXP category by doing nothing. I don't particularly care about quest EXP, but I would be fairly irritated if I found out that cairning dropped me from 5th PK exp to 35th entirely though people not PvPing
   
   
4. Maybe reduce the time down from a week and raise the base value of the cairn significantly; right now the cairn itself is basically worthless; Selthis got like 198 million exp from it iirc, once it the bug was corrected, which sounds like a lot until you figure that I'm getting 7 million plus per defile every hour on the hour towards the end of a cairn's lifespan. 
   

Khizan

I'd also like to add that I have no objection at all to ridiculous powerleveling via tokens, but I really think that the bashing area coins would be a better place for it. I'd have no problem with somebody going 80-100 in 10 tokens or so but I'd prefer it if those tokens weren't leveling up the entire world.

Iniar

I really love that so many people walk around Caanae now.

Jules

People in this game have an incredibly more pragmatic/reasonable approach to everything than the other IRE games.  I hope this never changes.  A matter of fact conversation where people frankly and succinctly agree that almost no one actually enjoys bashing for RL days, but that yes, newbies in particular shouldn't be accidentally rushed out of newbie status, is pretty much unimaginable in the other games.  By the way, when I returned from sleeping most of my life, I had to fend off well-intended people intent on power-levelling me, something to keep in mind.  

Kabaal

My opinion:

Cairns are more interesting than most of your other PvE formats. Generates PvP and social activity!

Eldreth

Pretty sure cairns were an AM conspiracy to ramp up production in the zerg factories. Because the only thing more fun than stumbling upon six people you have never heard of before is stumbling upon six aspects you have never heard of before. (ps for Iniar - with redemption).

Bathan

New, from Antioch! It's BUILD-A-HERO!

Jules

In addition to what Khizan said, could place a limit on the number of times I can sanctify/defile a cairn every RL day (pick a number).  That way it's still a crazy nice buff, but people aren't sitting around for 12 hours a day (or more?) and power levelling in a way I can't even comprehend (or just can't even).  

EDIT:  also I *love* the defiling message you see when you're in a room and someone defiles.  It's like they're kicking a coffee table they stubbed their toe on.  

Iniar

I guess the one thing that this shows is how many people are interested in using alts, but haven't really because of how tedious bashing is.

Ultrix

Iniar said:

I guess the one thing that this shows is how many people are interested in using alts, but haven't really because of how tedious bashing is.

I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of alt-usage though. I view this more as people see this as a good opportunity to make alts because everyone is figuring that in another week or so, this will die off and there will only be memories of how easy it was, back in the Land of Cairnae of March 2015, when you could powerlevel from newb to Aspect in about 3 RL days and with no bashing.

But it's not as if I've seen these most of the alts do anything other than stand around in Caanae and walk around once an hour.

Iniar

You're agreeing with me I didn't say use alts gainfully or use alts long-term or use alts seriously. All that it indicates is that people -are- interested in using alts, whether they be short term/long term/future planning etc.

The alternative is that if people didn't care about alts is to singularly power-level their main character (and not deal with the frustration of logging-in-out). 

Jules

Iniar said:

I guess the one thing that this shows is how many people are interested in using alts, but haven't really because of how tedious bashing is.

I *really* hope this benefit is even some fraction of what it is right now when I'm ready to play with mine.  Imperian is already much more reasonable about bashing than some of the other games, but this would really take the edge off that drudgery with a second or third character.  

Geneve

Lol, if these existed in Achaea, the players would riot.

Mathiaus

I disagree. I've been using my alts for combat. It's the only time people will fight me cause they're not too keen fighting a fully artifacted diabolist.

Krysaliss

The only thing more tedious and dull in Imperian than its pve system is its usual method of handling quests. I'm all about this. Also, admin, take this as a giant, flashing red neon sign telling you that your core advancement mechanics need to be seriously examined. Cuz they do.


Not even bitter this happened just after I finally bashed to aspect after a decade.

Bathan

I think this actually just spells out that @Khizan was right all along in that Imperian should've had a relatively low level threshold as max HP/mana/aspect goes, so that could players could just hop right into PvP in a meaningful capacity without the nagging feeling of 'if I could just finish getting to 100 from 81, then I'd really be a credit to my team!'. You could've still had extra levels, but those would've just been for crazy people like @Shou.

Iniar

You mean like GW1. (which I adored because I didn't have to sit for hours at a screen clicking at programmed bytes that represent a very shallow imitation of 'animation')

Khizan

Mathiaus said:

I disagree. I've been using my alts for combat. It's the only time people will fight me cause they're not too keen fighting a fully artifacted diabolist.

This has less to do with "artifacted diabolist" and more to do with "You were misreporting afflictions to Bellatores as your Diabolist alt and you were literally using clumsiness on every single deadeyes combination."

Mathiaus

Yeah, until beta is released to live, had to make do with what I had.

Cairn's have given me a lot of people to fight lately. I love it.

Iniar

Two weeks ago I started at 500,000+ XP points and it took me the better part of 3 days to get to 550,000+ XP points.

You currently have 1,103,170 XP points.

Shou

In relation to what @Iniar stated, I've been tracking xp gain for a bit of the cairn runs I do. My CMUD crashed and I lost a log of some of my more recent ones, but the total is at least 41 passes.

First five:
147849640 xp gained this run, totaling 147849640 xp.
192898020 xp gained this run, totaling 340747660 xp.
202786160 xp gained this run, totaling 740315930 xp.
212981010 xp gained this run, totaling 953296940 xp.
217028480 xp gained this run, totaling 1170325420 xp.

Most recent three:
398268930 xp gained this run, totaling 13547917480 xp.
398729890 xp gained this run, totaling 13946647370 xp.
379098850 xp gained this run, totaling 14325746220 xp.

(You currently have 6834936 XP points.)

edit: Also a thing to note: I haven't changed my xp bonus this entire time, the worth/amount of cairns have just increased that much.