Fleurs and Krakii on the officials

[Methais]

I don't think anyone ever put forth that notion that there was supposed to be.

Contests typically imply competition. And those who do best in a contest receive the "best" prize, which is the opposite of how the Lumnis "contest" works. Leaderboard would probably be more accurate.

And giving a reward to people who are already at the top would actually make the ratio worse.

Giving a reward to the top would result in more competition which would likely result in a higher average. Worst case, it gives those at the top more incentive to keep pushing which would likely raise the average some more, which everyone benefits from.

It would also make the contest a contest instead of a leaderboard.

[BigWorm]

Methais I already said I was #14. Sorry if reading is hard for you. My other character is my post-cap wizard at #27, so I have in fact played a wizard once or twice.

[BigWorm]

I don't want to get into fights with anyone over something that I've wanted to forget. It's the reason I haven't typed anything up to this point. I felt slighted by the whole thing, so my words are going to have a bitter slant to them. People were going to see my words and feel like I'm an entitled prick for putting in effort and then flaunting about how I'm better at something that I put a lot of time and effort into before it was a contest (I mentioned before that I'm an experience hungry bastard, didn't I? Ask Heartfire for a story about the lengths I'm willing to go for an RPA).

Let's just drop it, guys. Fleurs and I aren't going to multibox the next contest. It's just one aspect of the game nerfed for min-maxers. The experience count will drop a few thousand. The only ones who care will be a few people who righteously lift their noses alone in a room far away from you. Everyone else will still enjoy a bonus far better than they were getting before the contest thing even started. And, like in the last Grand Auction, Plat will make off like kings while the rest of us make off like people who have to stare longingly at someone who got the toy I wanted because I'm not Premium. God damn you Japhrimel! That flute was supposed to be mine!

I was also surprised by the results and felt like not many people must have put in very much effort and those who did didn't have many logic enhancives. I think we agree that the so called contest could have been handled better.

I guess where we disagree is that even as an exp grinder myself, I don't feel like the change from time-based to bucket-based Lumnis was a nerf. For reference:

In fact, the top 25 don't usually even hit the average (20844) every week

so at worst the average is right below the high end of what you were sometimes earning before the changes. In return, you are free to focus your minmaxing efforts on other ways of getting exp of which there are many. I think this is a positive change overall, but I get that maxing Lumnis was part of the fun of the game for some people. The results show that clearly the vast majority of the player base doesn't feel like expending that effort, but it is a totally valid way of having fun for those who do.

If the average drops significantly, which is a valid concern, then that I do agree that it will feel more like something was lost. I think it would be best for the game if Simu is able to address this proactively and find a way to encourage people to participate in the contest.

[Methais]

[Tenlaar]

I understand why the top few multi-character top-25 people would be disappointed right now. I really do. But I am having a hard time understanding why the focus is so much doom and gloom and immediate surrender. I think a few things are worth keeping in mind, and they are all based around how extreme the measures to obtain a "max" Lumnis gain are to the average player.

-The top end earners who prioritize XP gain and aren't maxed on them yet grab up logic enhancives, which means that the average player who doesn't prioritize XP gain isn't going to have the silvers to compete or the interest in investing in it in Logic enhancives. They simply are not items that average players are going to have. But do the players who have those high logic enhancive sets know people they trust who could wear them for six hours? Could even one person with a full set coordinated with a couple of friends and help them both get Logic maxed?

-Everybody admits that the process to obtain a "max" lumnis is tedious and generally regarded as not fun. A lot of people already think that spending six hours sitting at a supernode isn't much fun, but when you take the requirement beyond that to include stockpiling gems, skins, herbs, vouchers, and waivers? I can tell you that going to those lengths seems damn near obsessive compulsive to me and I would never do that every week. But over months? That is an entirely different story, and with so much time, suddenly that task is little more than inventory management!

-I think that it's been shown now that the average player who wasn't trying to max their Lumnis not only wasn't trying, but didn't even fully understand how to. Since the contest was announced it's become a more openly discussed topic. It's now a community event rather than a solitary one. People who aren't focused on XP gains still learn about things they don't focus on through the community.

-With the amount of time involved in having a proper stockpile of resources reduced drastically compared to an every week thing, people can get group events organized. Get a bunch of people together one night and rotate through the hunting grounds that will give skins needed for bounties in those cities, get them swarming like mad, and skin away! Bonus for the ones that drop treasure too, might get some of those gems put away.

I would hope that we can all agree that doing all of the things necessary to max a lumnis every single week, especially for multiple characters, sucked ass. It sucked so much ass that people who don't have a borderline compulsive need to get a few thousand more XP simply didn't even bother. They might have stopped talking for six hours to sit at a table, but that's it. It doesn't have to be like that any more! Educate people, help people understand how to plan out how many of what things they need. Run Lumnis-related events with your CHEs. Share your knowledge. It's not a monumental task any more, and I think a lot more people will be inclined to participate than are being given credit. But...

Right now there are very bad vibes with all of this, and kind of an attitude that anybody not in the top 25 is basically a piece of shit who is ruining things for the best of us. Even people in the top 50 are being shit on. Thanks for setting the floor? Be better than that. The only thing that will be accomplished by that is making the people who didn't care that much about a few thousand XP before tell you to go fuck yourself and the few thousand you may have lost.


P.S. This is for the people who already compulsively gathered everything for a max lumnis every week. There is even opportunity in this for you. You're used to gathering and collecting like that? Keep doing it, but sell the stuff you don't need personally (hopefully at a reasonable rate) to people who would still rather invest some silver into buying a proper Lumnis stockpile than gather it themselves.

[Leafiara]

I don't feel this comment is very fair. I spent the contest saturated, grouped, on a node, burned all my bounty boosts, lots of gems, and I didn't make the list, likely because I haven't invested in +40 in logic bonus enhansives.

I thought of saying that to Zarston too, but later in his post he mentioned how big an impact logic makes with his example his burghal gnome, so I think he knows.

Just for the sake of it, I do want to illustrate for anyone who doesn't see that...

I made it to #26 by taking it about as seriously as anyone could while not being capped, having no logic enhancives, and not being a race with a logic bonus. Let's say I did everything the same except that Leafi was a burghal gnome and her adventurer's guild badge could go up to 5 logic bonus instead of only 4 (at the time; I can get to 5 now), and we'll say there are 55 pulses per hour. That would be 165 base experience per hour, so 330 more bonus experience for three hours and 165 bonus for two hours. That's 1485 bonus experience and would have landed me at 22192 experience, just 47 short of #10.

[Narthsin]

I really wish I could have seen my score. I've done the math and I had to have been right around 18k. For me that's probably my top score, at least on that character. But not being near cap I'm sure makes a big difference too.

[drauz]

I really wish I could have seen my score. I've done the math and I had to have been right around 18k. For me that's probably my top score, at least on that character. But not being near cap I'm sure makes a big difference too.

I wonder if its possible for them to add a verb for that. Like the fame list, it would show everyone for the current contest group. People could opt out like the fame list. Let people compare their scores from month to month.

If they created a new boost that was only available to get from the contest it might make people more interested. Like a 30 min double exp boost.

#1 gets 4
#2-5 gets 3
#6-10 gets 2
#11-25 gets 1

[Zarston]

I am an experience junky. If there's a chance that I can get an RPA from standing in a room, you'll see my character parked there. When my weekly Lumnis came around, if I had the time to play seriously I suited up in a full logic set and I grinded. Anyone asking why there's immediately doom and gloom and surrender is because we've recognized, just like we recognized in the past how to maximize our bonus, that the amount of return we get for our effort isn't worth the investment.

Why did we participate in the first place? Because we recognized at the announcement of the contest that there was a chance here to break the system. So I broke anonymity to give myself credibility, shared how to maximize the lumnis bonus, and tried to spread the method to as many sources as I could. Some people with the proper resources did get the message and executed admirably, but not enough for us to break the system the way Plat will be able to. In this attempt, I put in three characters worth of work. Fleurs put in a hell of a lot more than me.

Like I said, it's not like I'm rage quitting. In the future I'll just participate with my main. Maybe I'll be wrong and more people will rise to the occasion and take the places or our alts. If that happens, I'll be pleasantly surprised. But I won't get my hopes up.

I don't blame anyone else for the results, so don't get your ire up thinking I hate everyone else for kicking down my castle made in the sand. We play the game different ways, and they both work. That's one of the reasons we all continue to play it all of these years later. The results of the contest are something I expected from the start, which is why I tried to whisper some increased incentives in Wyrom's ear. That failed, and here we are.