Increase quest level limits of 3-7 quests to 4-8 for some.

[Providence]

A DM told me in-game these quests are meant to be capped at 7 and not intended as a chance to resupply due to the way they're balanced.
Personally I am not sure I agree. I was 8 before I even saw most of these quests. One of them I didn't ever get to do yet, hence the suggestion.

That said... making them 8 would probably encourage grinding to 9, so I am not sure if there even is a good solution.

[Howlando]

Personally I'm not sure what the solution is, and am hesitant to start yanking up quest caps prematurely - I think we are enjoying the lower level range and if we have 5 big meaty 8+ quests that can be done every reset so readily accessible we'll soon see a server filled with level 9 PCs.

However, in the meantime, if you are lacking a specific item, and are level 8, you may contact myself or another DM for the quest cap to be temporarily lifted.

[Pandip]

A lot of the conversation has been driven by the assumption that increasing the level limit to 8 would somehow make it significantly easier for players to get to 9 because of the accessibility of these quests. If this is the major fear or detriment to making the change, why give level 8 characters who take the quest experience? Allow them to take the quest but don't give any completion experience. This allows characters to continue to work towards their ringrunning goals without increasing the average level of the server.

I have personally never been extremely fond of the questing meta based on level. 2-5 being having their own quests is fine, but it gets awkward and finicky from there. The 6-7 range typically has its own quests (with sometimes max 8s thrown in), and then the max 9+ quests. I fully admit that I don't have a very thorough understanding of how quest scaling works based on party level. Nor do I have a firm grasp of the tenuous "balance" of risk vs. reward on quests based on the max level and the items that drop. But this phenomenon of hitting 8 and immediately being cut off from most of the server's content has always been strange to me.

The argument, in the past, is that people should be "doing something" once they reach a certain level because they are expected to have a certain amount of prestige or power. The reality tends to be that people hit level 8-10 and just stop logging on with the same frequency. Without something like a wage, these characters become starved for resources unless they can put together a consistent group to crush higher level quests without the risk of not breaking even. Worse, this usually ostracizes the character from groups that they were normally tight knit with; "Sorry, that's beneath me! Go take care of the problem yourself even though we've been questing for the last several weeks together." My 'group' is currently in this situation -- one of us hit 8 before the rest and now our options are incredibly limited unless we want to break from our somewhat paranoid, but fairly inclusive House loyal interactions.

Questing can be as much about socializing as it is getting supplies. I like some of the changes that v5 has made to make the experience of hitting 8+ a little less restrictive. It seems like most quests that are not accessible every reset have very high level limits despite not being on the same difficulty level as Seers, Enclave, Distant Shore, etc. But I wonder if we are stuck in a certain paradigm because it is tradition rather than healthy for the server. Things are fine now, but once the honeymoon phase of v5 is over and player count starts to dip again, I worry that we are going to have problems.

I guess my tl;dr is that I don't understand why quest level restrictions aren't higher as long as XP gain is limited at the higher levels. Questing is fun. It promotes interaction. In the past, I've hated hitting 8 or 9 and suddenly being barred from the most common way to interact with other players without chit-chatting while being hugely restricted in supply gain outside of wages and DM events.

[Grouch]

As I shovel my deck in this lovely snowstorm I puzzle over this conundrum.

I agree with Howland that 7 max should be what it is for these swamp quests aside from Trolls (Except for Lizardmen, I think 8 is fine because the rest are easy but Lizardmen can scale to be quite difficult!)

It is true that as a level 8, I pretty much have nothing to do if there are no seams, and if you are not a PC who sells things your reward from a high level quest is usually a break even or net loss if you don't bring the right kinds of characters such as, Tank, DPS, Buffs because DND is what MMORPG's traditionally are heavily based on. An adventuring party must be balanced to be successful more often than not. Like in the Trolls complaint thread I did notice the group in question had 6 people but 3 of them were pure spell casters two of which were non combatants, this is not how you prepare to tackle a swamp filled to the brim with Trolls.

I feel there are two ways to approach this problem.

1) Make 5man minimum to open Randoms that are built like deathtrap quests with good stuff inside and a sign at the entrance with a recommended level/party size and a if you ninja loot get ready for retirement
I feel like Randoms as they are, are fun little lootables to do with a buddy but there isn't really much if any 'adventure' to them, nor challenge very often and if there is it is lopsidedly difficult.
Yes I am aware that it would take someone to build all of this and no I don't know how to build anything in the NWN client this is just me spitballing.

2) Make hard quests that are level 6-10 that are again, designed to be brutal and have good rewards as most of the current quests are in fact very easy if you have some source of 5/+1 such as blur.

When you are level 2-4 you tend to make the most raw gold and this is good, as a catch-up mechanic for new characters. It slows down and is steady from 5-7 as you find equipment you might actually want to wear long term and then when you hit 8, in the current setting you fall off a cliff into poverty. You have a very hard time getting enough materials to compete with level 7 PC's if you don't ration yourself well and I have seen several level 8 PC's (Myself included) engaging in barricade madness. As for any mention of a Honeymoon player drop off I hope EFU can maintain 40 during decent hours going forward.

For one dollar a day you can stop a level 8 PC from killing themselves. Call 1-800-PLZ-HALP for more details

[Howlando]

A lot of the conversation has been driven by the assumption that increasing the level limit to 8 would somehow make it significantly easier for players to get to 9 because of the accessibility of these quests. If this is the major fear or detriment to making the change, why give level 8 characters who take the quest experience? Allow them to take the quest but don't give any completion experience. This allows characters to continue to work towards their ringrunning goals without increasing the average level of the server.

This would require rewriting and rebalancing the EFUQS (efu quest system) final XP calculator which would probably be annoying to do. Maybe some day.

My hope is to finish and complete more Seams-related content that isn't level restricted at all. My view is that what is most fun is not "daily quest trains" of the same content but rather new and randomized opportunities to do different kinds of things every day.

The 95 quests are mostly about solving that particular Ring.

Look, rather than stress about fine-tuning and balancing everything I will just make a few points:

1) Loot level is already too high IMO, too many characters with extreme levels of supplies despite the player base & dm staff pretty much universally wanting a lower supply amount this chapter

2) There are much bigger issues to worry about (like the fact that massive parts of Ring 99 aren't finished, our elite factions aren't set up yet, etc....)

3) EFU is not professional, we had the choice of either continuing to develop things endlessly in the background while simultaneously trying to DM a server (which was the case for years of EFU4) or release a little prematurely and hope that players would just be patient with us as we finished and continued to develop some things.

4) There is all kinds of content awaiting you deeper in the Rings, no reason to be so focused on Ring 95.

[bobofwestoregonusa]

Honestly even Lizardfolk aren't that hard if you have a solid group of level 7's who know what they're doing. I think the quests in 95, save for the ones that aren't already above that range, would be to easy to do as level 8 caps. The only real difficulty I've found in them is when just doing it for the first time ever on a brand new character or when dealing with the EFUQS scaling system that balances to the size of your party - in which case 8 party memebers turns it into a much different quest than 4 or 5.