Looking for Your Feedback

Want to see a new room, venue, or something else to help improve the game? Suggest it here so that the community can discuss it and staff can gauge interest in the suggestion.
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Hecate
Posts: 657
Joined: Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:32 pm

Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Hecate »

Greetings EN Players,

The Admin team and the rest of Staff are looking for feedback on our current experience policy and cap.

Please provide any thoughts and feelings you have below for our staff to take into account when we discuss any potential changes to the XP policy.

If you have any plans or recommendations for changes specficly please include those too.

If you prefer to offer anonymous feed back we have this form for you: https://forms.gle/arrACfUCAt31HEZWA

-The Admin Team and ST Staff
Dark Soul
Posts: 45
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2021 1:41 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Dark Soul »

I think how Xp works here is fine save for it not rolling over when you hit the cap. That would definitely force me to only play in big scenes to avoid hitting cap and having my time playing be a waste afterward. I don't really want two characters, personally; the cap being a hard cap makes it so once I do hit the upper limit I'll just stop playing, wait for scenes and come back when the cap raises. And probably lose interest in the character and completely forget what they were doing, what was going on and so on.

I'm also a chat admin myself who did this same thing. It ended up with people having (in one case) seven or more characters because they played so much. It was to the point where what I said above is exactly what happened: people hit cap, then quit for months or just left.
Capybara
Posts: 283
Joined: Mon May 03, 2021 1:31 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Capybara »

Personally, I play to play, beats/XP, cool, love it, helps growth. But, I'm just as happy to coffee shop and not get XP from it. But I know, I'm one of the minority in this.

I'm not sure what to suggest that doesn't cause a ton more work for the staff and the admins. Dark Souls idea is cool, but it creates a bunch more paperwork for the ST teams.

The main idea I have, is raising the cap slowly, instead of quarterly, a little bit each month. But again, that's a ton more work for the staff.

But I'm also, not bothered by my PCs hitting cap, if/when they do, cause again, I play, to play. Not to get beats.
Blackthorne
Posts: 272
Joined: Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:56 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Blackthorne »

I do worry about the chilling effect that many people hitting cap will cause; I suspect this is going to not be as much of an issue after the New Friend beats trickle off a bit, but for now - it feels like a long way to a cap raise right now.

Possibly, as Capybara suggests, a smaller monthly raise rather than a larger quarterly one would help, or potentially moving the cap up to the next increment for this period only to absorb the New Friend beat rush (within two scenes on my Changeling I'd ended up with close to 20% of the current cap, for example).
Sharlo
Posts: 113
Joined: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:13 am

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Sharlo »

I'm pretty satisfied with the current set up for the most part. While beats are a notable incentive, I think many of the other reasons you get beats are also big enough incentives in and of themselves. I've gained far more XP in ST scenes than tea RP ones, and I think that'll only increase as beats for meeting new PCs begin to dwindle. Things like sharing plot, engaging with Drop-In scenes, and interacting with other PCs are all big draws to going IC as well.

It's unlikely someone would avoid ST scenes simply because they hit cap, so I look at those as a moot point. And given you can only earn 1 or 2 beats for tea RP once you've met the majority of PCs, I don't think modifying the cap is going to create an arms race to gain more XP. A lower cap also encourages more thoughtful Aspirations rather than easy to check ones to farm beats. The current cap combined with new friend beats also means that new players likely won't feel as put off jumping in to catch up. That being said, a monthly incremental schedule could work if it wasn't too much of a logistical burden.
TheAlex
Posts: 160
Joined: Sat Sep 18, 2021 1:00 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by TheAlex »

1st Suggestion for the XP Floor:

The XP Floor and Auto XP features seem redundant. They both achieve the same goal, making sure players with less time to play do not fall too far behind. The Floor however comes with 2 downsides.

1 - It adds extra work for the Staff to update a lot of sheets as the floor moves up.
2 - It makes a good chunk of a player's early XP effort "redundant" as the first 4 XP a month (roughly) you gain you'd have gotten anyways just from the floor and auto xp doing nothing, limiting a casual players incentives to post Scene Logs, Blue Book and such.

Proposed System:
Scrap the XP Floor. Increase Auto XP to 3.5 XP per Month (or 3XP or 4XP exact number doesn't matter depends if you want to hit that 90 XP at year 2 floor exactly or not).
New Players start with the same amount of XP as if they'd only gained Auto XP from June 2021 until the time they join.

Advantages:
- Any beats you gain you gain extra on top of the auto xp, so every bit of work you do to get beats you actually get those beats.
- STs don't have to update floors across all chars every 4 months.

2nd Suggestion for XP Cap:
Currently if you do some maths, a player who plays very actively and really drives the site can only gain, on average 2.08 XP more a month than a player who does nothing. While over the long run that adds up to 50 extra XP over a 2 year period it's a little underwhelming.

In lieu with the simplified XP Floor System above, The XP cap should be double the Auto XP number. This achieves some of the sugestions above to gradually raise the cap, and thus every month you have an incentive to play a little and get some xtra xp.

This is not really a major change or substantially different than the current floor system, but it just simplifies things. Auto = 4 XP a month, Cap = 8 XP a month. Done. :) Again the 4 and 8 are just a suggestions exact numbers you end up with can be different.
Randomim
Posts: 45
Joined: Wed May 12, 2021 7:02 am

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Randomim »

As is works just fine for me! I'm glad for the xp floor being in place to not make new players irrelevant so fast and the cap being in place as well keeps the game in a more manageable sweet spot where most characters aren't overwhelmingly powerful too fast and most characters are relatively close to even which is easier for both players and STs. I would rather have that than people who have been here longer and have more time to play just have more and more xp to the point where when you do have time it's pointless to try and contribute to plots because those handful of characters will always do everything and make everyone else redundant
TheAlex
Posts: 160
Joined: Sat Sep 18, 2021 1:00 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by TheAlex »

Randomim wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 5:09 am As is works just fine for me! I'm glad for the xp floor being in place to not make new players irrelevant so fast and the cap being in place as well keeps the game in a more manageable sweet spot where most characters aren't overwhelmingly powerful too fast and most characters are relatively close to even which is easier for both players and STs. I would rather have that than people who have been here longer and have more time to play just have more and more xp to the point where when you do have time it's pointless to try and contribute to plots because those handful of characters will always do everything and make everyone else redundant
Agreed but my proposal doesn't remove the XP floor or new player XP, it simplifies the mechanism to achieve it and it ensures the first beats you earn aren't wiped by the floor.
Sharlo
Posts: 113
Joined: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:13 am

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by Sharlo »

I think having beats from the month prior to a floor XP increase count on top of floor XP is a good idea, the current floor and cap are pretty good, and adding date based coding on the sheets could remove a lot of the upkeep. That is, having the auto XP update based on the current date in the code. This could also be done with an =IF statement to update floor XP automatically per the current system to avoid time spent updating sheets each month.

I also think the average amount of beats one gains in a month compared to someone that does nothing isn't consistent between venues and is a tricky thing to base policy off of.
LucienFeres
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:56 pm

Re: Looking for Your Feedback

Post by LucienFeres »

I think the above breakdown makes a fairly compelling argument that the system is probably 98% fine as it is and functioning as intended. With flat XP costs, a 25/year difference between a constantly active and minimally active character makes a significant difference; that's potentially 6 Attribute dots, 12 Skill ranks, 25 Mert points etc.. I don't think time gating that is an unreasonable approach to maintain some level of parity between characters.

Automating the XP is certainly a good idea. I know it can be done, but spreadsheets and I are mortal enemies. Other than that, certain Beats might be exempted from the cap - GueSTing, community contributions, and the like. It might make a nice little bonus to encourage these contributions without creating a huge difference.
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