This is a continuation of my thoughts that began back in April with the release of patch v80 in relation to the interim changes made by Bluehole to address the grind from level 65-70. I will say that it was anti-climatic because I had at least 56% more XP to go towards hitting 70 and well, they really decreased the amount of XP required to hit 70 since I ran Pit of Petrax and the boss gave me enough XP to finally ding 70 (* – see note below).
I’m not complaining; I’m just saying that after months of slow progress, I didn’t expect the reduction in the amount of XP required to level to be that much where a solo dungeon boss would finally put me over the top (I normally record once I get close to leveling up so that I can grab a frame with the level up graphics).
So what does this mean? It means alts are at least a thing again in terms of at least hitting max level. I’m also presuming the changes made to Frostmetal and Stormcry enchanting (item XP/material reduction and increased success rate) will at least reduce the progression wall. Leveling skill XP is still a per character thing though (and still costly in terms of the amount of gold required to completely level all 3 advanced skills and unlocking all three options for the two skill optimizations.
(*) – This was probably a bug since I ran Pit of Petrax on a level 66 character and received 180K XP from Withered Petrax. My client crashed before I managed to check the system messages tab to see how much XP I had received at level 69. My last screen shot was from last week where I am just a little over 4 bars into 69 (cropped below). Level 69-70 required 40 billion XP before todays update (I am not sure how much they squished this by).
So there is probably an error in whatever scaling they use for calculating experience percentage rewarded at level 67, 68, and 69 where I got way more XP than intended. I’m not complaining (I just don’t believe this was intended).
I did a set of Exodor dailies (70 and 71 zones) and while they did reduce level 65+ mob HP and attack damage, it still is time consuming and not very engaging (considering the rewards for completing the objectives are XP if below 70 and the credits for reputation NPC’s). They need to rebalance these dailies, the rewards, the gear enchanting RNG all at once in order to dial in a more appropriate effort/reward ratio. They also need to have a system for level 70 where the XP is converted into EP.
EME is also running a daily login event called Exodor Supply Drop (rewards 6 times per day with 45 minutes of total play time and six cumulative rewards at 5 hour intervals from 50-75 hours) until December 17th. The rewards are primarily Exodor focus (token/badges, feedstock, ores, and armor chests). Translation? The second row of accumulated hours is telling; it’s to boost the login and concurrency metrics back up to more reasonable levels (these are several core metrics normally used for determining if the product managers will end up retaining their positions or not).
This is also supposed to intersect with their Black Friday sales event which is in conjunction with their EMP bundle promotion (so basically a revenue bump which is another important metric that has probably taken a significant hit over the course of this year). I usually purchase Elite vouchers when they tend to be discounted heavily during this event (though I’ve been playing without Elite since I am rarely playing nowadays). I still have 15K EMP left from the last time I purchased the limited 35K EMP bundle (which is normally either during this holiday period or during their anniversary week).
Most all of my goodwill has been exhausted where I have reason to be cynical in this regards due to EME’s conscious decision to eliminate their community teams (having them to take on other non-community facing tasks) and to effectively have very little engagement except Discord (which I do not consider proper community management/interaction since I feel that it is a low grade effort to rely primarily on a chat based platform). I know this is something other publishers have also done (including Gamigo) where their forums are echo chambers. If these publishing companies handled things a lot better, I would have no problems spending way more and in the case of EME, doing things like EMP giveaways on my own (and being a better recommender instead of having to be more critical of the overall poor handling of these titles).
