Star Wars Galaxies

From this thread.

The Senator responses here are total BS and show a complete disconnect from both their fellow players and reality. My primary grip is the usual blather from Badgersmacker but also the Smuggler Senator pipping in with some stats that make me ROFL my ass off.

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So, taking those numbers and adding it up to something people can relate to: XP/Hour (which would be the total grindable XP you can gain. Lets say all members of the group are same level. Ideally 1 player should be able to kill 1 mob, 8 members would be able to kill that same mob 8 times faster.

Groupsize % of XP per kill % XP "per hour"
1 100% +0%
2 100% +100%
3 87% +161%
4 78% +212%
5 73% +265%
6 70% +320%
7 68% +376%
8 66% +428%

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Are you freaking kidding me? 428% more? This person later admits to being an accountant and these are just the raw numbers. Lets consider how they actually work.

You can kill mobs in the NGE system fast enough on your own. At level 60 and level 90 it took around 30 seconds to kill a mob my own level, with about 10 seconds downtime every few mobs. Now these figures are saying that with a full group I'll kill it 8 times faster. But I'm only shaving off seconds here, not minutes. If I'm grouped with 4 people (really stretching considering server populations) instead of 30 seconds it takes 15. That's it. Go AFK long enough to sneeze once and you've lost your time advantage over soloing.

Now as anyone who as played a grouping intensive game like EQ1 will tell you, creating and managing a group is a lot of work. It takes time to find people, time to assemble, time to get to the place, and time to organize to keep everyone on the same page so you don't get people wandering off. Plus people constantly leave or go AFK or whatever.

In EQ1 this was acceptable because most classes couldn't solo and those that could took as long as 2-3 minutes to kill a single mob at the higher levels. In SWG there isn't anything that is soloable that cannot be killed in under a minute. This coupled with the XP penalty (even though it was lifted by 10%, big whoop) makes grouping entirely unfeasable and useless. The time you save with a group is lost by organizing the group.

The only way to get people to group for XP again and to actually level ATK instead of AFK is to remove the stupid XP penalty OR increase the difficulty of the mobs significantly. And I can tell you which one is going to go over better with the players. EQ1 had a grouping penalty, but you saved TONS of time killing a group and the average mob was so difficult that fighting two or more often meant death so it was a lot safer too. If these factors are not present, then the way it is now in the game is the way it will continue to be, fancy charts or no.

What is seriously bogus about all this nonsense is that it assumes that everyone in the group is at the same level, because the penalties for grouping with someone not at your level are severe.  The only time you'll find a bunch of people at the same level is when they're 90s and don't care about XP anymore.

My level 68 Jedi grouped with a bunch of people on Dant in the FS area to get a better drop rate, and her XP dropped from 900-1800 XP a mob solo to 1XP grouped.  Just to get the better drop rate on the collections crap.

The level system sucks, blows, and bites, and I'll never pay another dime to SOE for SWG as long as the level system is there.  Their stupid game will never prosper with a level system so long as the rest of it blows, which it does.

I know.  Those numbers they gave and the situations they describe are optimal, which grouping seldom is.  And the situation is worse because there are so few new players.  On Kettamor or Naritus I would have been surprised if I WASN'T the only level 50ish person playing at any given time.  Most people who play now are at level 90, but they still want to help new players even though there really isn't a decent way to do it.  In the past I brought in new players to the NGE but they all left because of this very thing.