Hi folks,

Today I'm introducing a bit of an overhaul to how we calculate experience gained from PK.

The big aim of these changes to satisfy three specific criteria:

a) Increase the reward you can earn for getting involved in PK.
b) Increase the reward for being victorious as a solo fighter or in a small group.
c) Fix some old tether-based rules for assist experience sharing.

To explain, there are two scenarios in which experience gets distributed. The first is the general PK scenario, which is what generally happens by default when you kill a player, and the shared PK scenario where experience is shared out between your group in certain circumstnaces.

In the general PK scenario, the usual default, the person who gets the last hit is the person who claims all the experience. Experience is not shared between those that assist.

In the shared PK scenario, currently only triggering when either at a foci, flagged with hostility aura, or an open PK area, the person who gets the last hit receives some experience, and then some of it is shared out between those who assisted in the kill.

The changes below seek to try and boost the rewards that you can earn in PK overall, but at the same time better rewarding those of you who put time into the deeper strategy of PK and perhaps feel more confident in tackling a conflict opportunity alone.

Alongside these reasons, I've also made some miscellaneous changes to the experience system that I felt could use improvement or rebalancing to deal with the larger rewards now on offer.

It's a bit hard to explain every detail in a single post, so I highly recommend jumping into the notes below and reading through them carefully. If you have any further questions afterward, feel free to ask me in a message.

Enjoy!

General PK experience scenarios
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- PK experience gained is now double what is lost from the victim, up from equal.
- PK experience gained soft cap has been increased to 15 mil, up from 4.5 mil.
* This can be increased to a hard cap of 30 mil via experience bonus modifiers.
- For each person that assists in a kill, PK experience is now divided by the amount of people in the group.
* For example, three people killing someone would cause the experience gained be reduced by two-thirds.
* So 15 million (the max) would become 5 million instead for the person who scores the last hit.
- Experience loss in PK has not been increased.

Shared PK experience scenarios
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- Like above, PK experience is doubled and the soft cap is increased to 15 mil.
- In order to obtain shared experience, you must now need to be in the same web as the killer.
* In the past, it was based upon your tether.
- Killing someone from your own web will result in no PK experience being given out.
- PK experience is now divided by the amount of people who assist, then a little bit extra is added.
* If you want the maths, it is 100% divided by the number of assistors, then 1% is added back per assistor.
* So if you were part of a four person group, you would get 29% of the original amount.
- PK experience is then further scaled depending on your player level versus the group.
* This already happened previously, but I just want to reiterate it.
- The person who scores the final blow in a shared experience scenario no longer gets full PK experience.

Miscellaneous
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- In foci, if you wish to gain shared PK experience the victim cannot be from your city in addition to the above.
- Foci no longer applies double experience gain, since it's now done to all PK experience.
- Big numbers are big! Experience is now displayed in its full non-divided glory for those above level 100.
* On the back end, we still divide by 100 for overflow reasons, but for your eyes it'll show the original number.
* As such to note, after level 100, you won't see numbers between multiples of 100.
- The LIST_XP_RANKS command has been updated with a bit more information about each level.
- Fixed a bug where the 'soulbind' artifact on the victim would reduce the amount of experience you could gain in PK.
- The warpaint consumable now provides a 25% PK-only experience bonus, down from 150%.
- The warpaint consumable PK-only experience loss reduction now acts as a level 3 'soulbind' artifact while applied and does not stack with it.
- Fixed hostility aura capping experience loss much lower then it should be for those under level 100.
- The Fortress city research ability now only provides a 20% PK-only experience bonus, down from double.
- The SCORE command will no longer erroneously show on occasion that you've completed over 100% of the level.
- Those with CONFIG NEWSCORE OFF or screenreaders will find that SCORE will show your percent to next level complete within two decimals now.
- Fixed the effigy consumable sometimes proc'ing and being consumed when you lose no experience.

Penned by my hand on Closday, the 16th of Niuran, in the year 504 MA.
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