Nexus Clash

Nexal combatants,

This is the first post in what we hope will be a more lengthy series of Developer Blog posts in which developers will try to pull the veil back on significant topics, discuss pending content, explain our process better, or provide a platform for individual devs to discuss their past and present cool projects. Today's topic is a broad one, but one that touches most players and has a wide impact on the game.

The Development Team is aware of (and making changes to) one of our trickiest subjects in the game - post-max CP, or put another way, Ranks and grinds. A lot of folks have put in a lot of input on this topic in recent months, and we've felt a need to make at least some improvements to it for some time. The current mechanism of post-max Ranks is a significant improvement over last breath, but as with many other Breath 5 features still needs tweaks and improvements.

Almost no other topic in Nexus game design brings so significantly to the fore the diversity of the Nexus player (and developer) community. Players approach Nexus with different visions of the game, different goals, and different ideas of the best play experience. Badge and grind CP highlights many of those differences, a few (but by no means all) of which we can list here:

• Some players feel most motivated to play the game when some further character progress remains (even if only theoretically) possible - but others feel that their play experience is missing something if their characters haven't reached their maximum possible capacity.
• Some players like that the progression post-max involves different activities than simple XP gain - but others would prefer if Ranks were gated only behind XP for simplicity.
• Some players would be prefer being rewarded with purely cosmetic rewards for stats and achievements (and thus wish for the elimination of CP rewards entirely) - but others only want to do activities that net their characters concrete, crunchy, game-mechanics advantages and view the existence of cosmetic features that don't do this as a waste.
• Some players feel that the rewards of grinds and badges aren't enough for the amount of effort it is - and others feel that the advantage is too much.

All of this variation of opinion exists within the development team as well - there are a multitude of opinions on how much to change the current system. There are a multitude of ideas floating around for things to replace or overhaul the system with in the long run to make the system much easier or scrap and replace it entirely with something wholly new. Still, there's universal agreement that it needs to change. The things everyone on dev could generally agree are problems in need of addressing are:

• Some of the grinds are just not fun to do. Exactly which are unfun and feel chore-like varies from player to player and we've heard many dramatically different views on this from many different people - nearly every game activity has some fans and some detractors, so it's not as simple as keeping the Grinds Everyone Likes and putting the Grinds Everyone Hates on the chopping block. But this is a problem because the current curve and cap makes the maximum reward contingent on doing all of them, even the ones you don't like.
• Related to the above - some of the grinds are things certain classes just can't do without a reset that might clash with the concept of the character. An angel is not going to be killing angels. A glass-cannon like Revenant or Void Walker is not going to be mass-killing pets. Most demons are just not going to be healing anyone. And some roleplay-minded players would like to only do things that make sense for their character, for which some grind activities simply make no sense. This is a problem again because the maximum reward is contingent on collecting all the badges.
• The curve of rewards is still too stacked to ultra-veteran characters, particularly those who took large blocks of time out for grinding, especially in the last long breath's slow period. The mechanic needs to be made more accessible earlier on with its rewards granted faster and made attainable to newer characters.

There are, as above, a diversity of opinions on what to do with this and how ambitious to go with changes - especially in Breath 6. In the short term, however, we're trying a shift to the curve and cap of the current system to alleviate the core concerns - all players would like more choice in what activities they must do to reach the cap, while the curve of rewards starts too slowly, causing the system to take too long to benefit any given character.

Currently, the curve of achievements required for Ranks is 2/2/3/3/4/4/5/5/6/6 with a cap of 40 (All The Badges). Under this system, characters have earned the following Ranks:
Rank A - 128
Rank B - 119
Rank C - 70
Rank D - 92
Rank E - 36
Rank F - 36
Rank G - 23
Rank H - 11
Rank I - 8
Rank J - 0

Under the system being deployed in the next patch, the curve will become 0/1/1/2/2/3/4/5/6/6, with a cap of 30 (Five categories are skippable). Under this system, the spread of characters eligible for Ranks will become:
Rank A - theoretically, everyone with Level 30 and the XP
Rank B - 879 characters
Rank C - 749
Rank D - 542
Rank E - 422
Rank F - 313
Rank G - 179
Rank H - 106
Rank I - 56
Rank J - 22

In addition, two new categories are being added - Transcends Killed and Infusions done - the latter representing both passive and active infusion. While these will start counting at the time of the next patch (we cannot tally transcend kills or infusions done before we started tracking it) in the long run more categories will represent more paths to advancement.

This does not preclude making more ambitious changes in the future, especially at the Breath change - and indeed, a number of more ambitious proposals exist within the dev team. But there was no one on Dev who proposed doing anything less ambitious than this. We're going to see how this change shakes out and how the experience and perception of badges feels with a less demanding and more generous curve, and hopefully revisit the topic and how it feels down the line. In the meantime, enjoy the new Ranks that a lot of folks' characters will probably be eligible for, and have fun using them to raid each other, or explode, or enchant, or any of the countless other paths you may pursue in the Nexal world.

The Development team wishes you a happy Nexmas and happy hunting!

PSA: This post is actually open to discussion, you can post replies here.

There's at least one more possible grind category. Setting strongholds and building fortifications could be a separate grind.

Minimal XP. Not a problem. But it could still be an additional grind.

Earned only with faction membership. Obviously.

Infusion won't be nearly as much of a stubbornness contest if there's a tally.

Thenixon wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 2:20 am Infusion won't be nearly as much of a stubbornness contest if there's a tally.

Not exactly sure what you mean here, can you expand?

Captain Obvious wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 1:18 am There's at least one more possible grind category. Setting strongholds and building fortifications could be a separate grind.

How about wards bashed and fortifications destroyed? Perhaps a stat only privately visible to each player but that gave a badge after sufficient damage done? Would give those who undertake those activities some reward, or even mean that strongholds were more commonly attacked when the raiding team couldn’t clear (more dynamic player interactions, more ability to ‘catch’ active raiders).

Captain Obvious wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 1:18 am There's at least one more possible grind category. Setting strongholds and building fortifications could be a separate grind.

Minimal XP. Not a problem. But it could still be an additional grind.

Earned only with faction membership. Obviously.

Setting strongholds doesn't happen enough to warrant a grind (also would encourage revoke-setting which would be silly). Better to just have a Structures Erected and Damage to Structures stat (covering glyphs, forts, and doors).

After some discussion with other devs, it's been pointed out (correctly) that the numbers earlier on in the thread aren't quite asking the same question of the old and new numbers. In both cases they included idle characters as well as nonidle characters, but for current numbers I asked "How many people are currently e.g. Rank A" and then for the new ones asked "How many people would be eligible for Rank A or a higher number?

For an updated set of numbers I asked "How many nonidle characters would be eligible for (at least) this rank?" The numbers become:
Rank A: 360 -> 432, eligibility pool grows by 72 characters
Rank B: 292->386, growth of 94
Rank C: 223->360, growth of 137
Rank D: 177->292, growth of 115
Rank E: 103->245, growth of 142
Rank F: 64->187, growth of 123
Rank G: 38->109, growth of 71
Rank H: 15->64, growth of 49
Rank I: 7->32, growth of 25
Rank J: Grows from zero active eligibles to 12