Hi folks.

Well, in the end it's my duty to provide a little bit of bad news. While it's not totally necessary to explain what's going on, I've always felt it was better to communicate honestly with players than give the silent treatment - so I will.

Players who have petitioned a GM and found that they are denied skill points because they have already returned to their previous skill from before the patch are receiving the proper response from the guidelines I requested based on our Customer Support policy. Specifically, the intent of petitioning a GM was to get back skill points you lost, up to 5. This does not apply if you already worked your way back, which a lot of players have.

Players who logged in between the patch and the hotfix will find they received only 2 points when they logged back in, which resulted in a net loss of points. This is a result of anti-exploit code that prevents a player from earning more than 2 skill points per experience gain event. It was an unintended consequence of this code. The intent of GM reimbursement is to get you back to your original skill level. A few players (a fraction of a percent of our character base) will have still lost a point or two with a five point reimbursement.

Changing things on a live product carries a risk. Even though a number of eyes looked over this experience upgrade, the risk was considered more than acceptable because overall it increased the accessibility of the Diplomacy sphere. Simply put, the net gain in interest in Diplomacy due to it being much less "grindy" was worth the risk of changing the experience curve.

In my final look at the numbers, there should have been no situation in which a player will have lost more than 5 points total. While we regret the setback, it is what it is.

The final details of the experience curve WILL place some groupings of ten skill points as requiring more parleys as before. I will provide some examples.

Pre-patch, a player would need 40 parleys to gain a skill point from 374 to 375. Now, that number is about 36.5.

Pre-patch, a player would need 10 parleys at skill 60 to get to 61. Post-patch, this number is now 4.

Pre-patch, a player would need 17 parleys at skill 121 to get to 122. Now that number is 11.

Here's a couple spots where the number actually HAS increased:

415 to 416 was: 40, now 41.
466 to 467 was: 45, now 46.

Overall:
The number of intended parleys, with no other rewards (quests) against even-skill opponents has gone down by 10% over 500 skill. At skill 100, it went down by almost a third.

These are not numbers or progression we ever intended to "hide" from the player base.

As a result of this, I've put in a request that was accepted to piggy-back code time for Diplomacy experience gain messages on top of other experience message code changes. When this code hits, when you complete a parley you will receive a message that says "Parley experience reward is XXXXX" when you complete a parley. Dev clients already had this ability, so it was a minor code change to make it available to all.

The connection between these two situations is that there is too great a lack of information in what happens when you complete a parley - feedback that is needed so you can gain a greater understanding of how you progress in Diplomacy, and to start to make better decisions on how to spend your time (for instance, the amount of experience you gain from a skill 50 quest compared to how much you earn at a skill 400 parley).

I want you guys to see these numbers, despite the anticipated second-guessing of how we chose them :P .

I appreciate the honesty and restraint this community shows toward setbacks like these, and find this honesty something I wish to respond to in kind by coming to you guys when things go right and occassionally wrong.

o
A


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