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I'm all game for changing the job system and towing down the Xp farm it is but could you list the changes made to it?

Thanks!

We put a cooldown between nodes to prevent people from getting unintentionally high amounts of XP without any delay, that would replace the need to go hunting. The job system was never meant to replace hunting in the XP system, which is what some parts of it was doing.

I'm honestly a bit confused at this point, some say it is a not so fast alternative to grinding...while other say it's not supposed to be like that.

There was always a certain limit of XP that could be gained, thus it still remained weaker than hunting.

And after grinding a few character to 30, It would have been really nice to keep this as an alternative to leveling, you can only see a dungeon so often before it gets old.

I don't know who said that, but to me, it's a borderline exploit. I mean, you receive somewhere around 380 XP in the abyss for killing a pack of very hard monsters.

Then you go to 10 resource nodes 5 feet apart from eachother can earn 720 XP. Zone out, repeat the process. Not only is the XP disproportionate, it shouldn't really be like that at all.

I get that you might not like the hunting system as much, but...

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The job system was never meant to replace hunting in the XP system, which is what some parts of it was doing.

I agree with you about the xp reward, but we have to keep in mind that those are timed resources, you can only do them once in -8- real hours... let's take the hospice...that's around 3000-5000 XP in eight hours...

Let's take the Abyss with an average group, that's 5000-9000 xp in 30~ minutes, and most people are willing to run it over and over again for XP.

What I am trying to say is that: Grinding shouldn't be the only way to advance, Nerf the xp from the job system, but don't punish every single job who harvests resources because of those that use the herbs to level.

Edit: Amia is quite old as you probably know... and the dungeons remain the same, and DC leveling isn't an option for everyone...so there -must- be some kind of alternative.

Except now, since Areas unload when no one is in them, you can theoretically harvest resources all day! BEST SIDE EFFECT OF DYNAMIC AREAS, muwahahaha! I love clicking things. *_____*

LetumLux wrote:

Except now, since Areas unload when no one is in them, you can theoretically harvest resources all day! BEST SIDE EFFECT OF DYNAMIC AREAS, muwahahaha! I love clicking things. *_____*

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Edit: Amia is quite old as you probably know... and the dungeons remain the same, and DC leveling isn't an option for everyone...so there -must- be some kind of alternative.

I don't disagree, but leaving this bug in wasn't really the answer.

LetumLux wrote:

Except now, since Areas unload when no one is in them, you can theoretically harvest resources all day! BEST SIDE EFFECT OF DYNAMIC AREAS, muwahahaha! I love clicking things. *_____*

Is that an actual thing? that sounds unintended.

But it certainly would explain why the resources refreshed themself.

Boost the job xp for most jobs, and leave things like herbalist alone. Jobs like big game hunter and vigilante need a fat boost, for all the time and effort it CAN take. Herbalist is fair xp, if you hit all places on a non xp penalty character, you can get around 10k/reset (assuming non dynamic). but that's after, like... 2 hours of mind numbing, gun in mouth job grind. Which is no better or easier. Leave that as is, please. As painful as it may be, it's a nice alternative every so often to the even more suicidal normal grind in epic levels. Would be nice if the hunter jobs could come close to matching that amount of xp. Makes more sense, ICly. I mean, it's a neat little random quest system that nobody uses for that reason. Just does not pay off, not even close.

More like... 22k-25k xp... but... yeah.

ASIDE MY POINT SERA. I dunno how u gettin that xp, maybe i'm not the master exploiter I thought. Anyway, the point was, boost other jobs to be on par. Don't knock xp in a old as hell game with a dwindling population, on any front.

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Herbalist is fair xp, if you hit all places on a non xp penalty character, you can get around 10k/reset (assuming non dynamic). but that's after, like... 2 hours of mind numbing, gun in mouth job grind.

If you are going to spew out numbers, at least have them correctly.

On a lvl 3 herbalist, since you mentioned the grind on epic levels, the average XP is 79.56 XP every click.
10 nodes on a 2 min cd means 397.8 XP a minute.
Given exiting a dynamic area and going back in resets the nodes, that means 23868 XP an hour.

BasicHuman wrote:

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Herbalist is fair xp, if you hit all places on a non xp penalty character, you can get around 10k/reset (assuming non dynamic). but that's after, like... 2 hours of mind numbing, gun in mouth job grind.

If you are going to spew out numbers, at least have them correctly.

On a lvl 3 herbalist, since you mentioned the grind on epic levels, the average XP is 79.56 XP every click.
10 nodes on a 2 min cd means 397.8 XP a minute.
Given exiting a dynamic area and going back in resets the nodes, that means 23868 XP an hour.

way to not get my point. God forgive me for I have sinned.

This is the worst change on the server since that time gold drops were removed from monsters.

This is ridiculous, please undo it.

I'm sorry that you can't get 24000 xp an hour doing nothing. That was an exploit.

I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what has changed in the job system.

Can anyone cleverer more clever than me give me a quick update? Me is

right now. Or link me where the changes are posted.

So the main problem I see with this update is that it adds dire punishment for the characters who use this job system for its intended purpose, crafting items...It adds another layer of artificial scarcity so extreme that realistically, a modest streak of bad luck can nullify hours of invested OOC time even for the master laborers.

The other side of the coin is rather straightforward...if the jobs provide too much xp then they should not have been placed in such abundance throughout the entire server. It's not like the players planted them (at all, or;) specifically because they knew they could exploit the abundance as well as the new (and previously unforseen, for most of us) dynamic areas system. Based on the attributed lack of foresight, I would hesitate to call it an exploit, especially when we could have all chosen to roll shifters and make easily twice that amount of experience/time.

Punishing everyone except for the powergamey cheesebuilds who don't need the job system in the first place is not the way to fix this unfortunate mistake.

Faded Wings wrote:

I'm sorry that you can't get 24000 xp an hour doing nothing. That was an exploit.

I don't know nothin' bout this. I haven't tried it since dynamic stuff. but back when I was rompin the herbs, best I could get was 10-11k xp, depending on rolls. and that's also what I meant, when talking about the other jobs that need boosting.

Last edited by Karradon on Tue, Jan 05 2016, 17:31 PM, edited 1 time in total.

Guardian wrote:

I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what has changed in the job system.

Can anyone cleverer more clever than me give me a quick update? Me is

right now. Or link me where the changes are posted.

Nodes share a cooldown now, you can't pick more than one at a time.

edit: Aka it punished those that used the job system to farm for materials for buildings and the likes because of those that abused the herb job and the number of nodes, which isn't really their fault as they didn't place the nodes.

I'd have to agree about the "scarcity" idea... why not just reduce the herbalism xp by a factor of 5, or 10?

The quantity might be able to be looked at. The XP reward is not going back to the way it was though, not even close.

Cheers Karr. :mrgreen:

Anyway, I was just curious. Being the...

GuysWeHave2BeatMisty wrote:

powergamey cheesebuild

... I really don't care about jobs at all. Mostly I have picked the coolest sounding ones that fit the cheese powergamey concept of my characters (aka Templar for my pally and so on), but I do not think I ever actually used it.

I know you might not find this funny, but the 'cheesy powerbuilds' you're talking about were the very people abusing the XP from this herb system. Ironic. :lol:

Side Note: I personally don't believe that "powerbuilds" exist as a concept. But that's neither here nor there.

About the "scarcity". It is true the amount of herbs picked up per time unit will be less now.

However, on other gathering jobs. The number of nodes per zone is supposed to be 2. They were on a 2 minutes cooldown, so 2 "picks" every 2 minutes. Now the cooldown is global and one minute, so one pick a minute.

If you are after a specific material, it is now faster to focus on a single node to get that specific material.

Where were the changes posted, link please?

Faded Wings wrote:

I know you might not find this funny, but the 'cheesy powerbuilds' you're talking about were the very people abusing the XP from this herb system. Ironic. :lol:

Side Note: I personally don't believe that "powerbuilds" exist as a concept. But that's neither here nor there.

I'd have to disagree Faded, many a time I've seen "powerbuilds" rolled out and roleplay correctly, my aurelite palemaster was one, as is a few others I can name.

It's just the way it's perceived, everybody has a bit of power to their build.

I've rolled out builds based on roleplay and gosh it was hard to level, thankfully my experience in the servers quests and knowledge of hunting the right mobs for hours helped but woe betide any who don't know.

In my humble opinion, some concepts such a salandrans that don't go out hunting may use the job system to.mitigate the lack of going out hunting, it seems like levelling is getting tougher and that's coming from someone who used to roll on average a different build a week in my primes of levelling stuff.

Edit: maybe it's helpful to point out that those with builds that rely upon the job system to level that they can still use it to level instead of looking for hunting parties.

There are no link(s) to the changes, as there is no existing public documentation of the job system in this facet anyways.

@WOTN: It's not like it's impossible to level with the job system now. It's just more in line XP reward wise with the other jobs. It was a design oversight/flaw with the area and how the job system elements were integrated within. When this was designed, 2 jobs per zone was the envisioned quantity. Somewhere along the line, someone forgot that, and voila, free XP machine.

Faded Wings wrote:

@WOTN: It's not like it's impossible to level with the job system now. It's just more in line XP reward wise with the other jobs. It was a design oversight/flaw with the area and how the job system elements were integrated within.

That sounds reassuring, so is it simply herbalism that has changed then or has the job system as a whole changed?

I do remember that the alchemy job produced as much as herbalism, but you needed the materials from herbalism to carry on.

Not to be a pain I'm the ass, but is there any possibility of a breakdown of xp per reset with the revised changes for transparency? More for players benefits really.

Yes - mostly herbing and orcharding, and gathering has changed here. It actually buffs the acquisition of rarer resources like ore that don't come in flocks.

We don't do XP breakdowns publicly, as once again, that's not something we've ever done, but you're free to go ingame and do the math yourself!

Given the scarcity validity, we'll be augmenting the gathering rate to give 2 resources instead of 1 on the extra roll. Thanks for the feedback.

Is this new system adjusted to certain jobs that spawn more than one node? a Spider keeper for one will spawn +1 Spider per rank up to 3.

Does the new system mean he wasted 2 points as he can only harvest one or was this taken into account?

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There are no link(s) to the changes, as there is no existing public documentation of the job system in this facet anyways.

Apologies if this comes off as blunt and abrasive, but we DO have public documentation on the entire job system...

http://www.amiaworld.net/about/ds_j_system.html

"Many resources have a cooldown time of 2 minutes. Examples: you can harvest a crop you planted after you have waited for 2 minutes, you can mine an ore deposit once every 2 minutes, and you can massage one client every 2 minutes. Some jobs or resources have a 5 minutes cooldown time."

This entire paragraph section of that page is now fundamentally outdated.

Not being originally intended doesn't mean it was bad. Lots of good inventions and discoveries were unintentional, dismissing it as an "exploit" is such a witless statement I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it. Sure, the job system wasn't "intended" as an alternative to combat, but it bloody worked as an alternative. It enriched the server, and as far as xp gains go, it's sure as hell more ICly consistent than popping Dream Coins. Experience is such a vague and abstract concept anyway, why should killing goblins be better training for a rogue than robbing houses? Aven is as much a brewer and alchemist as she is a fencer, why shouldn't those activities be part of her development? Calling it "doing nothing" is utter crap, and you know it.

What you've done is gutting an avenue of leveling and RP for subjective reasons. The fact that many people feel that leveling is tedious enough already just adds to how terrible a decision it was.

And for the record, screw your bullshit assumptions about me, Faded.

@Larsaan - I'm not sure where I made assumptions about you.

Also, experience as a whole is something that should be discussed in another thread. This is a specific case of a design flaw. Whether or not experience should be increased as a whole is independent of this change.

I'm sorry that you're unhappy with the change, but I'm not sorry I fixed an exploit.

Lastly -- we'll update the job system page when we're tidied up with the final changes. Didn't know that page existed! It's pretty out of date.

What you call an exploit, I call an unintended bonus. There are areas in the game that have pretty obviously been designed with job grinding in mind, I'm not sure how you got it into your head that it somehow was a negative thing.

Unfortunately, the people who design the areas aren't always scripters themselves. That is quite evident as there are upwards of ten plants in some zone, when they were designed for a max of two.

If someone put a slot machine that had faulty math that gave you infinite gold when you played because of how the math ramp worked, then that slot machine should be taken out.

Last edited by Darkblade on Tue, Jan 05 2016, 18:23 PM, edited 1 time in total.

This is in no way ment to be insulting, and said with the utmost respect for the DM/Dev team

Wow this got allot of response in only a couple of hours... what i'm more curius about is if you guys knew it was overpowered, then why did you only change it now and not years aggo, even better why did you keep on making new area's swarming them with nodes if you knew the jobs system was getting exploited on a global scale ?
Can remember a couple requests for Orchander job wipes getting refused cause they used it to powerlvl , you knew and didn't change it.
If it was broken and an exploit then why did so many of us use it , why did so many good rp'ers today use it to lvl to 30? Did we all cheat?

I used it on two toons as it was faster then hunting on my own, So i cheated?

Seriously do why did you suddenly decide to change it now after it getting knowingly exploited for years? We all knew, you knew, you had/have folks who could have changed it years aggo, why now??
And i agree that this was changed!!

If 10% of the players here think its an exploit and the other 90% use it to lvl shouldn't you just leave it alone?
I'm worried this will make allot of folks rather angry
Do a poll or something before changing something this mayor!

1. The resource-rich orchards were cut down to just two pretty right away.

2. Because no one was doing the updates to those areas to pull out the amount in the other cases.

3. Some of us on the Team protested the stinginess and preferred a more 'realistic' distribution.

4. Mix and serve.

Alright, just strikes me as odd this was left alone for so long, and now out of the blue gets a huge nerv (again i agree)

If you have no multiclass penalty, and you zoned out and in over and over to level to 30, I won't say you cheated but you have to think objectively, that you're earning over 30k XP an hour doing something an autoclicker can be programmed to do in 30 seconds. That's significantly higher than hunting by 3 or 4 times.

I won't tell anyone they cheated, because its our fault it was like this, not yours.

I really, really don't see how we can even call this "unintended" considering how resource nodes have been placed since the job system was implemented. This change seems utterly arbitrary and hurts the server more than anything.

EDIT: If herbalism is so bad, then the solution is to delete or move some of the resource nodes, NOT gutting every other gathering job with it.

Larsaan wrote:

This is the worst change on the server since that time gold drops were removed from monsters.

This is ridiculous, please undo it.

This was clearly an exploit and was never an intended use of the job system.

This will not be undone.

Letum is correct on why this took time to do: We were busy making the entire server dynamic and preparing for a multitude of other things, including server stability and a potential long term re-merging of the servers back into a single A-mia, along with creating new content for the server. This was all done with a Dev Team that is severely overworked.

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If 10% of the players here think its an exploit and the other 90% use it to lvl shouldn't you just leave it alone?

No, because we fix exploits, regardless of their popularity. Exploits tend to be popular explicitly because they're an exploit, you know.

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Unfortunately, the people who design the areas aren't always scripters themselves. That is quite evident as there are upwards of ten plants in some zone, when they were designed for a max of two.

If someone put a slot machine that had faulty math that gave you infinite gold when you played because of how the math ramp worked, then that slot machine should be taken out.

Absolutely - speaking as a DM who was around when the Job System was implemented, Disco went out of his way a great deal to work with area devs to ensure there were never "clusters" of job system things in a single area that would lead to issues like this. When he became hands off, this oversight disappeared, and witjhout that hand holdin,g we got place slike Wharftown's Basement, Cordor South, and the new Salandrans.

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What you call an exploit, I call an unintended bonus. There are areas in the game that have pretty obviously been designed with job grinding in mind, I'm not sure how you got it into your head that it somehow was a negative thing.

The job system was never designed to replace grinding or to be used for grinding in any way shape or form, and it was certainly ever designed to be faster than and replace hunting entirely. I can say this with utmost, 100% confidence. Any areas that are "obviously designed" to grind the job system have been done in a way that Disco never intended, and indeed, outright worked against, fixing and removing during his tenure.

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What can you expect of this system?

These jobs are meant to flesh out a character, not to give you much of an advantage in playing the game. You will not get super weapons, great spells, decent protective auras, for instance. You will (probably) gain gold and xp and some simple items. A few jobs give ability boosts, but those are not spectacular (the jobs are, of course, the buffs are not).
You should take a job because you think it fits your character, and perform the tasks because you feel that gives your character a place in Amia. You should not take a job if you are looking for an edge in combat, it will not give you any.

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If you have no multiclass penalty, and you zoned out and in over and over to level to 30, I won't say you cheated but you have to think objectively, that you're earning over 30k XP an hour doing something an autoclicker can be programmed to do in 30 seconds. That's significantly higher than hunting by 3 or 4 times.

I won't tell anyone they cheated, because its our fault it was like this, not yours.

Yups. I (and the DM team, of which I am simply the firs tto respond) stands behind this decision 100%.

And this is why Tormak should be made mandatory to respond to these kind of things, it makes sense to me now
I'm glad me and half the folks i rp with daily wont get looked on as some kind of Cheaters by the dm team

Thanks mate

I'll just leave this here, perhaps I'll remove it later if things change to appear that more than a one digit amount of players support this specific solution to the problem:

https://www.interglot.com/dictionary/en/en/translate/power%20trip

Would it have been so hard to have a public discussion about this before surprising everyone out of the blue?

The best solutions are often revealed through crowdsourcing, after all.

GuysWeHave2BeatMisty wrote:

The best solutions are often revealed through crowdsourcing, after all.

Eh, no. I'm not commenting on job system, because as I said, it means little to me.

But to this in general - We have a staff. The staff decides. That's how it works, and how it should work always.

Wise man once said - democracy have no place on nwn servers.

Guardian wrote:

We have a staff. The staff decides. That's how it works, and how it should work always.

Wise man once said - democracy have no place on nwn servers.

True or not, it would probably bode well for the livelihood of the server to at least give the illusion that care is given to player interests, even if all the strings are pulled behind the scenes anyway.

Over the years I have met a plethora of players who have left or talked about leaving because they perceive that the powers that be in this server dictate that there is only one correct way to play. It just so happens that, to my knowledge, this server seems to be the only stable and popular RP server that has survived through the years, so there are relatively few other options and that is what grants this server the ability to run under oligarchic and totalitarian ideals...that doesn't make it right.

But everyone's awesome RP is so addicting that I could not abandon all you lovely people even in the most dire circumstances.

Such dilemma

Just as a clarification, if we perceive something as unintentional, the idea of making an announcement into a few page discussion is enough for everyone to have gotten level 30 using a bug they didn't know about before the debate, off that inaction. It's best to act on these types of things as soon as you find out about them. In my case, yesterday.

Be fair. When a major change is about to be impletemented, it's always announced prior few weeks. Imagine someone would announce an exploit and that it will be fixed "soon" - you'll find at least a handful of people who'll go right ahead and abuse it. Common sense, people!

:!:

I really can't believe we're even discussing a fact that an exploit was fixed instead of being grateful we still have people who care to improve the server still!

So sad. Let's just drop it, eh? Eh?

I don't think anyone's complaining about the exploit fix. Moreso the gutting of the rest of the jobs as well? Sorta what I gathered from reading. I dunno.

No other job was "guttered".

Faded Wings wrote:

It's best to act on these types of things as soon as you find out about them. In my case, yesterday.

Darkblade wrote:

We all knew, you knew, you had/have folks who could have changed it years aggo, why now??

With all due respect, I call shenanigans unless I completely misunderstood what you meant by "finding out about them."

Guardian wrote:

Imagine someone would announce an exploit and that it will be fixed "soon" - you'll find at least a handful of people who'll go right ahead and abuse it. Common sense, people!

Oh right, between archives and active characters, we already have a thousand level 30's running around everywhere. I forgot that the universe will implode if a handful more are added in the time-frame of a week or two, or even a few days for those obscure and extreme predicaments...

Guardian wrote:

I really can't believe we're even discussing a fact that an exploit was fixed instead of being grateful we still have people who care to improve the server still!

So sad. Let's just drop it, eh? Eh?

No. Did we forget already that this is a game and that people should be allowed to have fun with their purchased product with other people in whatever way they please, so long as they do not unreasonably disrupt the fun of others? They should be allowed to respectfully voice their opinion and be given at least a smidgen of consideration because they are human beings.

treasured memories wrote:

I don't think anyone's complaining about the exploit fix.

I won't speak for others, but I +1 this in regards to my own posts, at least. I'm not so much miffed about the fix itself, only the stark lack of prior communications between the DM/Dev team and the Playerbase who are meant to serve each other. After all, no one is going to die because a group of people talked on an internet forum about a way to balance an arguably superior form of experience gain in a video game.

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