by 12345 » Sat May 23, 2009 12:58 pm
I was running gold runs quite a bit in the previous version, but my characters were designed primarily to lead.
I will disagree that gold is your preferred method for slowing down players because of the curves for leveling. As greater amounts of xp and gold are needed for leveling, the higher level players will start having comparatively high concentrations of both by necessity. Xp isn't transferable and gold is. Once you introduce gold areas to allow the 7x40 and 8x40 players to keep leveling, it will filter down to the lower players.
An additional issue is that gold does not scale well to the overall playerbase. Limited numbers of gold areas means limited numbers of players have access to gold runs and can excel in the game. As the playerbase goes down, more people have this access and it becomes more limited as players go up. This leaves you with a relatively static number of players that the game can support.
The biggest issue is probably that many areas had either good xp or good gold, but not both. The good xp areas have become the standard and the good gold areas are being systemically downgraded. Both increase the need for gold. A second issue would be that there are limited egress routes for gold from the game. The major ones being leveling, rent, forges and vaults. Since forges and vaults are rather optional and most players seek to limit rent as much as possible, that leaves you in the position of trying to remove all the money in the game through leveling.
If your only limiting factor for gold is leveling, it comes down to how much gold a character is consuming on their journey to avatar (one of the imms should possess this info). You are then going to have to determine how long this journey should take (ie 730 days). That will provide you with the amount of gold that should be introduced to each player a day (roughly... I'm not sure all possible areas are in play yet). I'm guessing its going to end up being a pretty high number since there are now 9 increasingly expensive classes. You might find out that you're not in as much trouble as you thought you were. However, as soon as you end up with a character that exceeds your number of days, inflation will start creeping in on you.
Similarly, you can calculate the average xp per day that each character should be able to obtain using the same method. This is a bit more difficult since it ramps quickly in the earlier levels and eventually plateaus at some point when the highest xp areas (like the Desert) become possible for the player and are run continuously. Ideally, this number should reflect the number obtained for gold. Because of the scaling issue mentioned earlier, it is preferable for the gold needed for these levels to be obtained from either the mobs that the xp originated from or a separate area comparable to the one the xp originated from. Having common gold runs which are available to essentially all players creates a bottleneck that your xp areas do not currently suffer.
Therefore, I think your best solutions would be to either integrate the gold removed from the gold areas into the xp areas, or create comparable areas that have much lower xp but higher gold that require large groups to obtain. However, as mentioned earlier, once large amounts of gold become available, they will filter down. Your overall limiting factor must be xp, by necessity. Its the only non-transferable medium in the game.
Overall, because the leveling tables are stepped, its not unusual for players to progress quickly through the first 1/3 of the available levels. The middle 1/3 should usually be representative of the overall pace the creators intended and the final 1/3 should represent the 'challenge' phase of the game.
And that was a hell of a lot longer than I anticipated.... Sorry. Its early. My brain isn't working yet.
Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid -KMFDM