(Pre-LL) tagging sucks - replace with XP bonus

[boho]

Thesis:

Pre-LL tags go from a fun guided tour to a pain in the ass chore to something that actively makes people avoid making new characters, which slowly kills off player population, perhaps quite literally, as people get physically ill when they think about making alts.

Fix:

1.) Make Pre-LL tags CD-key wide. All bonuses unlock immediately.

2.) The first time a character (not CD-key) gets a tag for the first time, that character gets a chunk of bonus XP. Thus there's still an incentive to help other players and tour the original module, and XP rewards can be tuned to even out the Pre-LL XP curve, propping up periods of drought like 10-20.

Notes:

1.) Characters still need to get tags like Lolth and the Immortal to wear the gear they drop.

2.) LL tags and beyond are not included as they're largely used to gate gear, and in the case of Sissy/Illithids/Hells, keep lower-level runs alive.

[rainbowdash]

There is always the option of not doing the tags

[chirality]

i still recommend the traditional time-tested fix: just pretend they don't exist, until you either a) care enough about min/maxing to complete them; and/or b) get good enough to complete them without it ruining your day

in other words, !delete tags, but don't really, just imagine they've been deleted/given free. then someday when you're a pro, you can imagine they've been un-deleted, and go do them for those tasty lil extra stuffz that over time you realized were suuuuuuper important.

i mean seriously, just pretend you get the bonus xp and voila, problem solved. it actually literally worked that way for years: you imagined you got it, but you actually didn't, and never noticed.

as for the imm%, never will make a life-or-death difference, or a win-or-wipe difference; randomization is a thing.

as for the skills, what's next, everyone gets free +skills from tags, but then crap! we're missing the prince fight (er, asmo win) +skills! guess what's a lot harder and more demanding of time and organization to complete then L1-40 tags? nessus, prince fights, hell cycles, abyss cycles. should we give demi boni and prince fight benefits for free too, before people quit playing cuz acquiring the next set of --completely unnecessary extra goodies-- is too hard/takes too much time and makes the game more trouble than it's worth to play?

what about subraces, boy my character really isn't competitive without an XR, but the thought of grinding canos literally makes me physically ill, i need them unlocked cuz my toon sux compared to everyone else's

[dopplegang]

TLDR: skip the PreLL tags and never look back.


Meh. I get it. Pre-LL is boring after your 10th toon. I like to think I have some experience with that, I have currently 86 immortal toons, all but 5 or 6 of those have all PreLL tags completed, I've done the full preLL tag runs at least 75 times. But still, the story is there, the tags are there to bring you into the world and keep you interested and allow you to enjoy some low level fun and explore this new world. Once you get used to that and get bored with it, its easy enough to skip. All of the alternatives to Pre-LL storybased tags and runs all seem like "just give me 40 levels so I can start the fun content on this really uber idea I just came up with". There is at least one basic reason for the grind. So that maybe you will possibly think twice before actively employing that 22 druid 13 assassin 5 harper scout idea you been thinking would be so cool to try out. Otherwise like Chain said you can make the same argument across the entire content of the server. Why do we have to earn anything, why not just give immortal to us at 40 and workshop at 55 and demi at 60 et al. So then we can all just play it once and go find something more challenging to play that doesn't pander to us like we are a bunch of children.

[boho]

Reductio ad absurdem and slippery slope in three posts, anyone want to go for the hat trick and Godwinize this bad boy?

Fallacies aside, you've missed the point.

Incrementally improving your dude is fun. Going from Open to Secret/Rare/UR/BUR/XR is part of the same journey as levels, gear, etc.

Tags sure look the same, but they don't smell the same, and they simply don't *play* the same. Why is that? Why can we all agree "It's satisfying to upgrade my character" and yet all loathe pre-LL tags?

Sure, you'll have the status quo brigade show up and sarge the hell out of your thread. All we get are literal logical fallacies, or "then don't do them lol," or "but that would slow down EE release/quasiclass buffs/next Post-Hell zone 10 people might see." I'd much rather use family unfriendly terms to describe this interest- and hence population-killing behavior, but let's go with "that's nonsense."

Since no one can seem to muster an actual argument to the contrary, let's flip this around. Tell me why pre-LL tags are a good idea. Or fun. Or tell me the smart bit of design I'm missing about them. So far the closest I've seen is "the grind (not tags, mind you, just the grind) prevents you from trying dumb things" which actually sounds like a really bad thing that makes for a clannish, elitist community and a calcified meta-game. Which, gee, kind of sounds familiar, no?

[Deleted]

I find them to be purely annoying. That's it. Clearing them isn't hard. I just run a sorc and clear all the tags, and then I reinc the sorc into whatever toon I actually want it to be right before Immortal if I don't have a toon boosting the characters I am leveling. I like the benefits and perks I get for the rewards. But, as previously mentioned, none of it is required. It's just nice. So, either find ways and go through things to do it if you want it, or don't. Or, skip it for now, and proxy later. That is just as viable. Plenty of opportunities and routes for players to go, also ways to improve their experience.

Go to thids, get thids rods, and then steam roll all the lowbie tags to 30 as an example.

[Enius the White]

Oct 15, 2018 23:19:57 GMT boho said:

Since no one can seem to muster an actual argument to the contrary, let's flip this around. Tell me why pre-LL tags are a good idea. Or fun. Or tell me the smart bit of design I'm missing about them.

I think the tags provide an incentive for all players, including vets with other leveling resources, to play the lower level ranges again. This is useful for lower level run formation, new player interaction, and accordingly longer term server health. XP alone will not incent this, considering the high rate of XP gain at higher levels, with end-game loot as the additional driver offered there.

[Deleted]

I like doing them. They are fun to do. Lock thread!

[dopplegang]

There is a reason why I stayed here past lvl 5, and level 20, it wasn't cause I knew about legendary content or the end game content. It was because the tags were fun and the world was fun. The tags have an old school rpg aura about them as well, you go out and hunt bounties for profit, I am just glad its not mandatory. Or it could be worse its cumbersome and confusing like the quests. I like the tag system. its light weight, but profitable. you can just skip it completely and slog your way through plains of war all the way to 40 if you want. when you get bored with doing that youll probably come back to doing tags. Personally, to take your own words on it, I would MUCH rather the dev team work on new content than fix an already functional system that has no problems, has already been tweaked "again", and is completely voluntary anyway. What is wrong with the prell tags besides your impatience?

[woqued]

I hated them every single time after the first time I did them. Feels bad to miss out on them (missed out on bard, ended up regretting lacking those skills at a few points during that playthrough) yet doing them feels bad. Not sure what it is about them, I mean it's just doing content on level appropriate zones. Guess it's mostly just being forced to do so much of stuff you don't want to and since it takes a decent chunk of time it also works as a deterrent to not do the stuff that isn't around tags like rak coven, golem sanctuary, some other stuff.

Would love it being so that you only need to do some of them to get the full benefits, or having some variation and less tags to do there. Doing it every time more or less the same way (due how they are level locked and how xp farming locations are distributed across 1-40 / how quests and which of them are near tag locations) to receive some fairly minor yet annoying to miss benefits. I liked doing different things in the 1-40 portion of the game but I hate being pushed to doing it more or less the same way every time. Maybe a few of my toons could skip Gaobin and Grey Renders but would do Rak Coven and Golem Sanctuary instead without missing out.

There's just so god damn many of them. So many. Dragon after dragon after dragon and that's the best part. Then there's the killcounts. Gotta kill those spiders, and if you don't know which ones you'll just kill even all of the 0 xp rewarding ones. Boh.

.. Pretty sure people would complain at this hypothetical situation where if you weren't allowed to level up past 45 before you had done myconids, ssithraks, maze and desert and you'd not be allowed to level beyond 49 unless you'd already tagged toyshop, uroboros, took a trip to feywild and killed dustbone and not go beyond 54 unless you'd done PoM + Behos + Thids + Loca.. 57 for black pyramid and rona.. I mean you just don't want to run everything in a specific way on every character every time. Sometimes you farm toyshop a lot. Sometimes you really do do it all. But lowbieland doesn't give you that choice if you want to optimize your character.

[boho]

Oct 16, 2018 2:55:00 GMT woqued said:

But lowbieland doesn't give you that choice if you want to optimize your character.

This is, I think, the reason why tags are so repugnant despite being no different than any other incremental upgrade on the surface. Unless you're going to skip them (which you shouldn't), you have to do them in a very limited window - or else. If you change your mind later, you get to start over.

I do like your example of having to do all the LL zones, though it misses the exclusionary aspects of pre-LL tagging, and the inability to ever go back and fix your mistake (unless you explicitly make a new character to do so -- a dramatically strange hack that should have been a major red flag that something was very wrong with this idea).

Really the use of the word "mistake" also illustrates the notion that missing a tag isn't really a CHOICE. You can skip it, but you also can make that a Druid/Assassin/Harper Scout.

Pre-LL tags are just another inventory slot, except unlike literally every other inventory slot, if you fail to upgrade your tag slot in time, you lose the ability to ever get that upgrade again unless you start over and do it right this time. This is incredibly punitive to the player, and if there was actually best-in-slot loot in the game that behaved this way, it'd roundly be ridiculed and decried as player-hostile design.

Because tags have an extra layer of abstraction on top of them instead of an empty slot on the paper doll, human psychology is sabotaged and it becomes "OK" to write them off as "optional." Don't fool yourselves -- they're about as "optional" as a ring slot.

They just need to go. Keep them in place to guide newbs (it was actually fun doing it the first time) and throw an XP boost in to make it worth veterans' time to help newbs, but for god's sake, please move these to CD-key. "Do this or else" design is not the least bit fun, smart, or compelling.

[sabregirl]

Okay so Im going to give the long long ago version. Long ago, these tags didn't exist. The areas in question went unusued and getting to 40 and immortality was an exercise of super boring level grinding. I still have characters with no tags. They work fine. They're not missing a ring slot. If i want to improve them I make a proxy and slowly pick away at the tags when there aren't many people on or I don't have much time to play. It takes a while but that's fine, it's not an essential bonus and I find most of the tags relatively relaxing.

I do think the idea of adding some variation in which tags you do might make the experience more fun. Perhaps we could do something that adds more character customization - ala Gaobin. Maybe reduce the total number of tags you need for full benefits, but force you to choose which benefits you want. But i would suggest making those kinds of suggestions (make the tag experience better) rather than asking to make them account wide or deleting them. I would guess that to be highly unlikely.

For my part, my least favorite tags are shadow pontiff, shadow lord, and lolths handmaiden. I like the shadow pontiff quest but getting there takes a while and the boss is more annoying than bossish.

-S

[chirality]

i never minded them (to the contrary i very much like them) but then i'm prolly not the same player personality archetype as many (most?). even when annoying and rage-inducing, they were fun for me. i did a lot of lowbie play, solo or in party, and i tagged a lot of toons. i never once hated them or felt like the game was broken for "making" me do them. i never felt like anything was unfair, or rigged. poorly-designed or -balanced in some cases, sure, but to me that's a charming thing to learn to cheeze, not a hateful thing to rail against.

maybe that statement itself admits they're broken...but uhhh...if anyone thinks that poorly-balanced lowbie tag mobs/bosses with BS imms or abilities that must be/best be cheezed/abused, or can't be easily played by any class/party makeup, is a thing unique to lowbie content, i'd challenge them to show me how exactly any other part of this game is dramatically different. these dynamics are one of the identifying features of this game (and virtually inherent to any PvE game, i'd argue). you cheese a lowbie tag boss with grabs, you cheese dustbone or alienists with grabs. you mass bandits or taro with instakills, you mass desert or thids with instakills. you spam endless damage or use death magic on angus until he fails, you spam endless damage or use iom on orwantz until he fails. you rest mid-fight to spam enough exotic dmg nukes to kill MoC, you rest mid-fight to get fresh nukes and epics to kill asmodeus. you pick specific spells for a specific mob for a specific tag, you do the same in endgame. you switch to a specific weapon with specific damage types and get it buffed to kill the lowbie dragon, you switch to a specific weapon and get it buffed to kill a demon prince or elite baddie. you use gs and mords. you use BBoD to pull archers, you memorize spawn points, you use evards and soup on orcs, you use evards and soup on abishai. you use PP for matrons or immo pots, you use PP for surrogate or keeper. about the only thing that doesn't exist to a pretty much identical extent in LLs is 25 greater ruin spams, but there's enough that's similar, aka situations that you are best off just GSing and letting a BBoD soak until it's smart to "fight" again.

again, i'm prolly (obviously?) a different gamer type than many, but hands down, my best memories are of lowbie tags, either solo or with friends, as a guy who learned the ropes or as a clueless newbie. yeah, i have a lot more great memories of funny accidents or zomg super sick plays or crazy situations in endgame runs, endless memorable moments there, but my most treasured and no-question pure "fun" memories are from doing terrible lowbie tags. it's probably because like doppelgang said, there's an old-school rpg aura about them. the feelz of some OP bs-statted dragon or goofy frost orcs after running down a road from the crappy little town is a different vibe than porting to a slick interplanar adventuring batcave and rolling out with a party that runs like a well-oiled machine (or, not) with a bunch of buffs and possums and epics and leet gear.

sure, tags may suck (so does a lot of LLs tbh, in various ways), and i'll be the first to say that PoA content is pretty bad. really bad, even. newbies should skip it and come back later if/when they ever want; tags aside, it's really a joke compared to HG's real content. but yes, i like it.

one of the first vets i ever met in this game made a point of ignoring tags (granted this was before L80 where the zomg %xp bonus suddenly becomes zomg so gud) if/when they conflicted with his fun/enjoyment/progress to LLs at any point. there's being a completionist, but there's also just being reasonable. and if you're being unreasonable, and not having fun (as well as hindering your own progress into the "real" game), then that is exactly what it is: being unreasonable.

hard to say this without being a troll, but seriously, get over it. this isn't about elitism or newb-shaming or being jaded or not understanding the plight of people that didn't share my career trajectory or have fun in the same way as me, it's just about giving some solid advice on the one hand, and some honest opinion on the other hand.

get over it, play the game, if you don't like something don't do it. if anyone thinks lowbie tags are hard or BS or broken, i can't wait to hear what they say about a lot of other stuff after L40, cuz it's pretty much the same thing: designed to be a real pita, annoying as hell or "impossible" without either having a full party, or getting good. i mean if smacking a dragon or 30 kurai for half an hour is too obnoxious, i'd recommend avoiding about 80% of LLs, cuz this entire game is full of stuff that reallllllllllllllly sucks if you don't know what you're doing (prolly why it's so satisfying and fun when you learn what you're doing?). it's really not a complex game-theory issue, or a smarmy "this community is an inbred, closeted group of jaded elitists and that's why your game is dying" issue. there's game-theory issues here, like this game is not produced for mass consumption to sell units, therefore it's only appealing to a tiny fraction of gamers; and there's community issues, like it's a very old community with very few people left, and most of them have been here for a long time. but check the expiration date on NWN: pretty sure it's about as relevant as compact disc players. so it's no surprise when people that enjoy this game are a dying breed and the community is dying, and the game seems outdated, cumbersome, and full of poorly-designed "gotchas" or headaches for newbies.

you want the tag boni, do the tags, if that means you have to start boxing, or you only play a mage till L40 and reinc, or you grab some friends on discord and meet up, then do it. if you can't do that, understand that you better git gud if you want to solo them with any class. if you can't/won't git gud enuff to solo them with any class, and can't/won't only play a class that can, or have friends, or box a helper bot, then don't do the tags. it's not the end of the world. incrementally increasing your character's power is indeed fun, but giving tag boni as a free unlock doesn't seem incremental or fun, it seems like it defeats the entire purpose inherent in "challenge" of doing them. that said, i definitely understand the view of someone like woqued in above post (feels bad that you feel like you "have" to do them but they're not fun), but honestly i don't think a lot of other stuff that you feel like you "have" to have is fun, like PH, PW, BUR subs, ego items, demihood, prince wins. that's where my inner "agree with deso" comes out, cuz what burned me out wasn't friends leaving or community getting smaller or cano grinding, it was just the sheer amount of time and effort for hell and abyss cycles. so i'd pretty much equate "i feel like i have to do lowbie tags to get the boni even though they aren't fun and take forever" with "i feel like i have to do 5 prince and asmo cycles to get the boni even though they aren't fun and take forever".

tldr, honestly i feel like this thread has been done to death in several different forms. there's really nothing to gain from it.

[desocupado]

Oct 15, 2018 16:15:29 GMT boho said:

Thesis: ...   Fix: ...  Notes: ...

Extended Thesis:

Pre-LL tags go from a fun guided tour to a pain in the ass chore to something that actively makes people avoid making new characters, which slowly kills off player population, perhaps quite literally, as people get physically ill when they think about making alts.

LL tags as gear gateways are pointless between randomized UR and BUR gear.

Different Fix:
1.) Move (most) Pre-LL tag bonuses to LL tags. Group similar bonuses in a single tag (i.e. Toyshop grants bonus to several skills)
2.) The first time a character gets a tag, that character gets a chunk of bonus XP (a level worth). Thus there's still an incentive to help other players and tour the original module.

Even more notes:

1.) Characters don't need to get tags like Toyshop or Uro to wear the gear they drop. (Instead they require immortality or level 50)

2.) Pre-LL Tags only grant xp towards next level (if you are holding level you don't get any xp). LL tags also grant a chunck of xp worth a level up, for players in the adequate level range (a level 45 could get 400k-600k xp, tagging toyshop).

3.) The tag itself is always granted upon killing the respective mob, regardless of level.

4.) The XP bonus for Pre-LL areas is blocked if the are people outside the 6 level range in the party.

[boho]

It's better than what we have now by removing the "do this right now or else" aspect but is still just delaying the problem, not solving it.

Oct 16, 2018 4:41:41 GMT sabregirl said:

I still have characters with no tags. They work fine. They're not missing a ring slot.

Are you sure about that? Here's the tag slot, fully upgraded, taken right from the wiki:

All combined this doesn't compete with a top-end ring, but no one in their right mind is going to say (and I'm eyeballing it here) that there is a realistic choice between a fully-stacking +5% to all non-esoteric resistances, +5 to all skills, +5% XP gain, +2 Damage, +3 Regen, and +3% Spell Damage versus... none of those things. After all, this is a game where character builders seriously debate five skillpoints here or there -- let alone resistances and raw damage.