Vocation Adjustments PM Insight

Dear Tibians,

Now that the changes from the vocation adjustments in June and the subsequent nerf in early July have had some time to settle in, I wanted to share some data with you, as well as our internal perspective on the topic. I know these changes sparked a lot of discussion, and I hope this can bring a bit more clarity to the situation.

But first things first: there has been an incredible amount of feedback throughout the whole process. The sheer volume meant we could not respond to everyone individually, but we made sure to absorb as much of it as possible into the following design loop:

1. Collect player feedback and assess it.
2. Combine valid feedback with my own observations and the data provided by our balancing team.
3. Conceptualise changes.
4. Try to foresee the impact of these changes for the most common scenarios and evaluate how they address your feedback.

Tibia is sneakily complex due to the sheer number of possible scenarios that could be looked at. The impact of changes can differ greatly when looking at different level ranges, group sizes, hunting grounds, or boss fights. Your feedback often reflects these vastly different scenarios. On top of that, differences in gear and skills matter a lot.

It was clear that we needed to abstract this to a certain degree, and we decided to make some important simplifications:

• For this adjustment I decided we should balance for solo gameplay first, as these changes translate for the most part to other group sizes.
• The variance in power at low levels can be greater. While improving the lower-level gameplay was a subgoal, we focused on the level ranges where most of our players are currently spending their time (400 to 1200).
• Extreme high-level gameplay and boss fights have to be looked at separately over a longer duration.
• True balance across all areas of the game can and will never be fully achieved. Tibia is too complex a game for that, and true balance would mean vocations lose their identity, strengths, and weaknesses.

This might seem like a lot of simplification, but it still leaves tons of scenarios to consider.

Now to the actual data. Below is a graph that compares the raw XP per hour before the vocation adjustment and after the nerf for solo hunters in three key level ranges.

We have omitted the data between the release and the nerf, but the results were obviously much higher than the post-nerf values, which are significant changes themselves. Now what are our key takeaways here?

First: The progression gap of solo hunting between vocations has decreased, especially for levels 400 to 900. For levels 400 to 600, the weakest solo vocation, druid, now earns about 72% of the raw XP per hour of the strongest vocation, monk (up from 40%). For the levels 700 to 900, the same trend can be seen. The weakest vocation now earns 80% of XP, up from 45%.

Second: The overall power level has increased significantly. On average, players between levels 400 and 600 are making about 23% more raw XP per hour. The level range of 700 to 900 has seen an 18% increase, and the 1000 to 1200 level range has increased by 5%. Mind you, these are the numbers after the nerf.

Third: Monks stay ahead of the pack in lower levels. This is one area where our data and your feedback do not fully line up, and we think it is worth understanding better before we act on it further.

There are tons of other data we were looking at, like kill rates, death rates, waste, boss participation, spell usage rates, and much, much more.

We are still working on smaller changes, but we want to avoid having to walk things back again and as such are a lot more cautious with upcoming changes, which might still take some more time. This is especially true as we aim to address some issues that were of lesser consideration for the initial changes, like boss fights and impact for higher levels.

I really hope this could give you some clarity on the reasoning behind these changes, as well as an interesting look into the depth and complexity of the topic.

As always, the forum is open for your thoughts, and we are looking forward to hearing from you.

Greetings,

Niadus