Get Rid Of This Asinine XP "Grind" Nerf

#1 - Oct. 25, 2014, 5:33 a.m.

I just got to Icecrown on my rogue alt and grabbed the quests from the Horde airship. Most of those quests require me to head south of the airship and kill a bunch of mobs.

I kill some mobs to farm parts off them. I kill some mobs to create an abomination pet which self destructs into quest mobs. I have to run around and pick up quest items off the ground, which means I need to clear mobs in order to get said items.

Before I had even done the first round of quests, the xp got nerfed to under 10% of what it had originally been, which I expected (though I did not expect it so soon).

Now, what I had read on the forums indicated the XP nerf for mobs would only pertain to those specific mobs, i.e. if I had been slaughtering abominations and then went to slaughter skeletons, I would no longer be nerfed.

This is not the case at all. My XP nerf for mob kills has extended zone-wide, and is now persisting even AFTER running an instance.

This is a horrible, terrible, lazy system you have implemented. You wanted to combat botting, and instead you're making normal players face a penalty for... nothing. We have done nothing wrong.

Please remove this "feature" and never bring it or anything like it back again.

Watcher

Game Designer

#466 - Oct. 28, 2014, 9:16 p.m.

This isn't intended to be an "anti-grind" mechanic. It's intended to be an "anti-exploit" mechanic that programmatically addresses power-leveling abuses, with the aim of letting us reward legitimate players more generously. In the past, we've often had little choice but to drastically reduce the experience awarded by certain respawning bosses or enemies that are locked in combat with other NPCs, because otherwise they'd be abused. That always felt bad to the regular player who was just passing through in the course of questing or exploration and got unexpectedly little or no experience for killing something. The goal was to come up with an approach that would be invisible to most players, but discourage sitting there and repeatedly farming the same mob for long stretches of time in order to gain experience. Alternatives like questing, dungeons, or PvP are all supposed to be more lucrative than that - WoW has never been a game in which mass-killing mobs for experience was the most efficient route.

That said, clearly this implementation is far too strict, and is triggering from a wide variety of normal activity. We're going to disable the functionality entirely and look into a much more narrowly targeted approach if and when we reintroduce it. Apologies for the inconvenience and the lack of response on the issue - we were working on understanding exactly where the algorithm was going awry, and now that we've done so, we'll be taking action in the near future.