[Arilou]

Originally Posted by Durango

I have some thoughts on this and would like to leave them here.

The times seem ok, but I would suggest more times on the week days that are like 5 PM pacific time that would be 7 PM central time 8 PM eastern time and most people will be home from work and school, I don't think many are home from work at 3 PM 4 PM 5 PM and 6 PM (US time zones). Extending it to two hours would widen the range a little.

The records show that people were on the most during that time of day, so people not on the West Coast, at least, were coming home around then and taking the time to play the game. But, you're right that some people on the West Coast may miss out out for part of it. So I'll see how things go this go this week and check some of the older records. Thanks.

So from what I understand the whole point of this suggested playing times is to let the lower levels catch up to the level 30s and such. Personally I don't think 10% xp is really going to make a difference because the ones that benefit the most from this are the level 25s and 30s. The lower level player will not be able to progress any faster than the gold that can be gotten to train skills.

The point is really just to provide a focal point for when people should play so that they can enjoy the company of others if that's what they're interested in. The actual bonus is secondary and isn't at all about low levels - It's about those people in the 20s who are struggling to catch up with those in the high 20s/early 30s and are finding it difficult. There are some people, like Betty, who are retired and yet still dominate the high score list, while people play each and every day and stand no chance of bumping her off her spot so that they can achieve a position of importance on the high scores (even Catty, who hasn't played since 2003, is still in the top 50 - it shouldn't be like that, but she heavily benefited from the enchant bug and the extreme amount of gold that used to exist). Then there are those that some people play with every day, who have these accounts with more skill points and they just dominate them in arenas and lqs, while they trudge along behind. In that case, the bonus will help them both equally, but since it becomes so much harder to level, the higher you are, it gives those slightly lower level players a little bit more of a chance to close the level gap, if not the xp gap.

Also 10% bonus xp for one hour isn't going to make a big difference. I would suggest either making it a % increase in gold that can be gotten or make it a period of 4 hours or just increasing the % that it is for one hour.

Well, mind you, we expect this to go on for a little while as we still have a lot of work left to do. So over a prolonged period of time it should absolutely make a difference. But, we'll see. The suggested hours are based on when we think players would be willing to play as our main goal is to provide times that the most amount of players can band together behind. If people show us that they're willing to play for longer periods of times (in significant numbers, of course) we'll make the proper adjustments to accommodate them.

As for the percentage of bonus experience - It's 10% for right now while we test it out, but we may increase the amount, as mentioned in the news. We're not giving out more gold, but we do need to work on the gold-xp aspect of the game apart from this update. The game was supposed to be designed so that you have to make a choice - Go get experience or go get gold. In this system, there would still be some places where you could do both, but you'd never be able to get as much experience or as much gold as you would if you went somewhere for just one of those things. However, this system is severely underdeveloped and as we've been reducing the amount of gold you can find, we haven't been putting in enough places where gaining gold is the focus. So we'll be working on that in the future.