COMMUNITY

that sounds reasonable too.

the way SWG did it was the maxed out toon stole all of the xp from the lower level. i think its just a bad system.

Generally games don't really penalize you for grouping. While yes, you often get less xp per kill individually, you kill things much faster. And most games also throw in a boost to the overall XP gained per kill for the group.

For example

X mob =
100xp for 1 person
110xp for 2 people
120xp for 3 people
130xp for 4 people

or something along those lines. So really you aren't being penalized at all for grouping because guess what theoretically four people can kill four or five mobs in the time it takes one person to kill one.

So you would get 100xp for 1 kill solo or 130xp in a group assuming you only kill four. If you have enough AOE a group can easily do 5 - 10 depending on difficulty level.

One thing that I do like about EQ2 is that you can mentor other players, so basically lets say you are level 80 and have a friend that is level 25. You mentor him which takes you down to level 25 (but you keep your gear and abilities, just you have the base stats of a 25) and you even give your mentoree an xp bonus.

The downside of this is that gear should also scale down somewhat to prevent what normally happens, the mantor says "hey watch this ($%@" pulls 30 mobs kills them all and you ding.

In WoW, levelling is already faster if you group. The trick is for the group to concentrate on quests, normal mob killing xp may be divided, but quest xp is 100%. I picked up on this when I was two boxing and realized I could level two characters faster together than the total time for two seperately.

Well, you shouldn't receive 100%, after all, you're killing things a lot faster as well.

But taken that into account, I think you should earn a little bit more net XP in a group.

If the exp is the same if you group or solo, that means that grouping MUCH faster for getting exp. If you took a group of 5 players instead of one, you'd have 5 times as much firepower which will allow you to take down mobs at least 5 times as fast. If you split the exp amongst the group, that would even everything out.

I reckon increasing the experience and then dividing it would be the best choice, like most have said grouping is faster leveling then soloing in most games so even slowing them down with the simple idea like that they'll still be able to gain experience faster then a solo player because they can just move through content quicker.

I'm relatively neutral on this but keep in mind people the added penalties of splitting loot, waiting for friends, having to go out of your way to help them complete quests you may not have, etc... when grouping.

That was always the biggest downside to group leveling in wow, someone was always afk, got the piece of loot you wanted, or was begging you to go help them halfway across the map with their quest instead of doing one you both had.

I'm leaning towards no penalty on this one.

We increase the XP pool for each group member in it, and then divide that pool. I don't have the number in front of me, but its something we'll be tweaking as we play anyway.

The general gist is that we want to reward grouping, but not so much that grouping is the only way to play the game (something that is very easy to do if you tilt the table too much, and then balance the levelling curve to that rate gain). That being said, as some have mentioned, grouping with another person increases your killing efficiency and reduces your risk of death substantially, to the degree that being in a group of two is vastly more efficient than 2X killing efficiency (this is like most MMOs). Still, you want to reward grouping enough to help ensure that you overcome the friction associated with grouping (finding groupmates, getting to them, tolerating idiots, etc).

Other notes:

• Yes, we have anti-twink measures. Yes, high level players get shut out if they kill creatures too far below them. This is a fine line - you want to let high level players help their new friends, but you really don't want high level players hunting in low level areas, as that can be disruptive to the lowbies.
• Yes, compared to other MMOs, we give you more XP for completing quests and less for killing creatures. These numbers will also likely be continually tweaked.
• Yes, harder things give more experience.

Balancing it's not that easy. Instead, you need to look at XP gain per hour. A group of 3 can kill (let's say) 5X the creatures than a solo player can in an hour, which means that if you give everyone the full XP value, grouping is 5X(!) more efficient than soloing. If you balance the curve to that, the solo player gets screwed.

In our curve, we push that towards being closer to 2-3X. Still a significant advantage, but the grouper has to deal with all of the inertia of forming a group.

I agree that that is pretty hoe when it doesnt help you at all infact it might even hurt you. So maybe they shouldnt have any penalty for group. But at the same time im sure they dont want everyone just to group together and not enjoy the story so this is quite the puzzler. Oh well Im sure the all knowing bioware will figure it out *bows before a bioware idol*