Rich Waters responds to player concerns; hotfix possible Thursday morning.

As Game Update 57 went live this morning players were experiencing what appeared to be an experience nerf.  XP was just going slower than they remembered.  Rich Waters, EQII Lead Designer, and Greg "Rothgar" Spence, EQII Lead Programmer, were quick to respond with assurances that an experience slow-down was not intended and ask for help pinpointing the issue.  At the same time players noticed that experience potions had doubled their experience bonus.

After much player speculation, discussion, and bug-location assistance Rich Waters posted on the official forums both an explanation behind the experience bonus calculation changes and some changes to the Recruit-a-Friend experience bonuses specifically.

The short version:  Yes, there is an experience bug in the live game right now that will be hotfixed out this week, hopefully Thursday morning.  Before this change experience bonuses were multiplying your experience, which caused some unintended insane XP.  Because of this the way XP bonuses are calculated was changed. The Recruit-a-Friend Bonuses were especially exploitable, and were also changed.  To quote Waters: "After this week's hotfix, you will gain experience as fast, or slightly faster than you used to if you play exactly the same way."

We are republishing Waters' entire posts after the jump to keep them accessible when they get buried in the forums.  It's highly recommended reading.

Waters' first post was in regard to experience bonus changes:

A few key points, if you don't read the whole post:

• We don't plan to slow down the average player's experience gain at all.  This is true whether you use experience potions or not.
• There is an experience bug on live servers that we plan to hotfix this week.  Some intended bonuses are not working.
• Before today's game update, the experience gain rate was where we wanted it in most situations. 
• If you do not use experience potions, you will get at least as much experience as you did before the game update.
• If you do use experience potions, you will get at least as much experience as you did before the game update.
• The only exception to this is Recruit-a-Friend experience bonuses.  This bonus has been significantly reduced.  I’ll post a new topic for this one.

This game update, we made a change to how we calculate experience, mainly to make experience gain more intuitive and consistent.  Briefly, the old method took the experience you received from killing a monster and multiplied it several times.  For instance, if you killed a monster worth 100 XP, it would take that 100 and multiply it if you were mentored.  It multiplied it again if you had vitality, and again if you had max level character bonuses, or a potion, or a server bonus experience weekend.

In most cases, that was fine and we liked the amount of experience that it awarded.  It wasn't easy to explain though, because multiplying the experience at each step made it overly important to stack as many different bonuses as you could, regardless of how big those bonuses were individually.  It made it hard to predict how much experience bonus you'd really get from vitality or being mentored, because those bonuses varied a lot depending on how many other bonuses you were getting.

So with this game update, we changed the formula to take all the bonuses and add them up instead.  Say you killed that 100 point monster again - if you have vitality, you get an extra 200 points, essentially the same as killing that same monster twice more.  With an experience potion on, you can get another 100 points.  Being mentored adds in some more points, as do max level characters.

With a little math though, it's pretty obvious that multiplying will give bigger numbers than adding in many situations.  We wanted your experience gain to be the same though, so we're changing many bonuses to be bigger:

• Vitality is going to give +200% experience, up from 100%.
• Bonus experience weekends will give +100% experience in the future.
• Mentoring bonuses were doubled.
• Potions (veteran rewards, LoN, and station cash) were all doubled.
• Max level character bonus is going up from 10% to 20% per character, and we're increasing it to work with up to ten max level characters. (+200% bonus from the previous cap of 50%)

So that's a lot of details, but what does it mean to your experience gain now compared to last week? 

After this week's hotfix, you will gain experience as fast, or slightly faster than you used to if you play exactly the same way. 

This is true in every case, except Recruit-a-Friend, which I’ll post about below.

For now, we'll keep an eye on the forums and our own play characters and make sure the new experience calculations are working correctly. Sorry this wasn't working right when we put it on live servers today, and we should have a fix out for you quickly.