BobbyWitDatTool

IT's a poor means for progression. You have paladins and death knights, and people with Heroic Clan backgrounds starting as Untrained. There's not even any roleplay involved. You log on, buy XP, and log off. 3 months later, you're a veteran.

I still think that a lot of the systems aren't very conducive to RP, and XP just outright takes too long to get anywhere. It's sort of unhealthy for the server as well if the ONLY defense toward changing XP gain is that it's unfair to players who played through it because if it is an issue, it'll only continue to be an issue and be unwelcoming to incoming players. It promotes an environment where the old stay the strongest and when you've things in place like a 1k EXP restriction before executing, it further enforces that. Just today I saw someone brag about their 3k EXP character and boasting about how they would beat an entire group of new players.

I've spoken on this with friends a lot. The systems don't feel conducive to RP at all, that much I can agree with. I do like the fighting, but the only time I've gotten to use it is against worthless NPCs. At the end of the day, players tend to avoid PvP, especially when you've got such a big investment in a highly trained character. It only adds to the issue when the world feels stagnant due to lack of inclusive plots, and so we have a great deal of campfire RP. I've found myself logging on for RP on weekends, and using free time on weekdays to gather and dump XP.

I honestly don't see that many trained or veteran characters. Look at the Ironbound. They're mostly inactive, and that's very old characters as far as I've heard. Also, trained isn't that long. I've been here close to 2 weeks and I'm nearly trained.

Yeah, as I had said, all suggestions. At the moment, and you may not agree, but it simply is the case, people log on, dump XP, gather, and log off. The only people I consistently see playing are those who social RP among the port. You say player retention is done through events and storytelling, and while I agree to some degree, the server seems to be under the mindset that players should push all story. Players won't push story until they are comfortable with their character. The only time player pushing story actually genuinely works is when you have a big playerbase. See Phase C. I think an overall flaw might be no balance between systems and RP. I don't find that the systems are conducive to RP since most people I see/know are gathering while alt-tabbed. The idea behind the system is great and I enjoy the crafting system in the way that I can see our base spring up, but I'd say they still need work. It could be the time it takes to see things come to, or it could just be a reliance on systems. Personally, and coming from a NWN background where I was very against it, I never liked the idea of taking 3 months of IRL time to see my character get to a decent build. If anything, it promotes character attachment, which is unhealthy for the environment, although it tends to happen regardless, just on a much lesser scale when you can just pop back in game. That's not to say I don't like progression, I just think there needs to be proper balance between systems + RP and time + progression. Not really sure HOW to go about fixing this, especially considering they're already in place, but I figure its worth pointing out. Seems like you guys have a wonderful staff who are passionate about the server, so I've no doubts these things are fixable.

Yeah was just an example. Something like that wouldn't really work in practice. Regardless, not sure what can be done, but something should be done about player retention.

It doesn't even have to be killing mobs. A cool thing would be if players were rewarded EXP for taking parts in events. It'd likely encourage people to contact Keepers about potential event ideas and things they can do for themselves, a group of people, their guild, etc. Events could be grouped by their difficulty: easy, challenging, hard, and XP would increase by each one. The difficulty could be the risk of death in the event, and the EXP could be allocated evenly to everyone participating. So if a hard event gave 500, and 2 people participated, they'd get a lot of EXP, but they also survived an encounter that likely should have ended in their deaths, so they earned it.

All of this is my opinion: My suggestion is adding a method to get combat EXP outside of spending productivity. I do like the cap, and the way it works now, but it also encourages people to log in, buy EXP, and log off. Give people incentive to stay on. It'll let people who don't have much time to play progress at a decent rate, whilst rewarding those who stay on. Another gripe I have is that most story-lines seem to be player-driven, which is great, but on a server where you start off relatively weak, most people TEND to wait until they're stronger to push anything. That's another topic all together, but it's worth mentioning because I've seen it on plenty of Neverwinter Night's (The old old old 2000 game) servers. People spend 3 months leveling until they're at a decent level, and will than begin to flesh out the character and push story-lines. Until than, they do dungeons and log off, skipping out on social RP because it tends to get boring in a relatively static world.

Put me on this here roster.