More questions on Bots

[Angelox]

Originally Posted by Congdar

On my server I cranked the bonus exp down due to fast leveling with bots, but it is still higher than Live. I also added more experience loss on death to help balance it out. This code has a different way of mitigating the exp but what you said about ease... maybe a different solution than what either of us did is to make the npc's harder. Looking at the npc entries in the db, except for bosses it looks like theres a pattern to npc level and stats. Maybe Cavedude can tell us how to make it more difficult overall.

Since I spend more time coding bots than actually playing the emulator, do those that play in a full group of equal level players find the emulator reds super easy and do you level so fast that you feel you would reduce exp more to balance the game? Are the regular groupers on TGC 65 and max AA real quick? I use the peq database. I believe that the bots are no different than a group of equal level players. The bots have some advantages, but many disadvantages as well. Experience is calculated by the same code as a group of pc's as it is for a pc with a group of bots.

This thing with exp and leveling fast, is a real touchy situation. The majority of the players in EqEmu do not want exp to be Eq like, they want to level fast, easy loots, easy everything. Something with this game or many other RPGs; leveling and exp are at the heart of it all. Once you get to max level, or get all you want from the game, you grow tired of it. All this work everyone is doing, not just bots, but everything else seems like a waste if you can breeze through the whole game in a few days. Everything is part of the game; finding parts to make spells, finding better weapons, questing, etc., but if I can level up in a few days, I blow past all that.
Even if we did fix the game to where the exp, leveling were eq-like, then we'd have the problem of server ops upping exp in their servers. If you had a server with legit exp, no one would come, for a few reasons; one is the player base we have does not want this, and they will go to where it's all easy. Another is the player base we could have for this type of game play, have long since gone since they are under the impression 'EqEmu is too easy'. We could promote the 'New EqEmu', but then when they came to the mayhem of servers in public loggin, they would get frustrated again.
We'd have to do a lot to get things to where they should be; for example get a few totally legit servers (legit exp too) running and being watched over by a group that will maintain quality. We would need to set up a system in the login server that breaks down the servers into groups, something like 'legit', 'non-legit', custom, etc. But we have no say on the log in server, so scratch that.
Many of the servers in public log in, probably shouldn't even be there, not because they have anything wrong, but simply because they are new ops and learning, most of which will be gone in a few days (imagine starting a player and not finding you server a few days later?).
The new servers need to be at the bottom of the list in a group of their own.