Troubles tweaking XP on a multiplayer server - PlayerExpGain sending players backwards!

[trevorjd]

Hi folks,

 

Executive summary: I'd like to customise the XP on our server so that players get less XP for various activities, but not actually get negative XP at all. I just want to encourage risky activities, not penalise anyone. I'm hoping that someone here can offer insight on how to best achieve that. I've tried using PlayerExpGain but that may not be the best way. Open to ideas.

 

Details:

 

For our latest playthrough, a "hard mode", we thought it would be nice to tweak the XP bonuses for various activities to encourage to get out and get slaying rather than mine and build themselves to the end game in a few days.  To that end, I did some searching and reading then went into entityclasses.xml and tweaked the PlayerExpGain settings, using perc_set to set most somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0.  For the most part, things are going fine. 

 

A couple of days later, someone reported that their XP was actually going backwards when they're mining! So I did some more searching and asked in Discord. As a result of that, I changed harvesting to perc_add with a negative value.  Then it seemed they were only going backwards with Coal & Nitrate so I bumped the base XP in materials.xml from 6 to 8. Testing seemed OK.

 

Today I get a ticket to say that things were fine last night but today they're losing XP. I haven't touched the configs in 10 days! So, it seems that Harvesting in particular must have extra black magic happening under the hood and in some special circumstances can go backwards. Following are my current settings that seemed to be working OK until today when they strangely don't, but just for Harvesting. (Just to clarify, initially Harvesting was tested with perc_set with various values from 0.1 to 0.8 but that always sent them backwards.)

 

        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.75" tags="Kill"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_add" value="-0.4" tags="Harvesting"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.5" tags="Upgrading"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.1" tags="Crafting"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.1" tags="Selling"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="1.0" tags="Quest"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.5" tags="Looting"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="1.0" tags="Party"/>
        <passive_effect name="PlayerExpGain" operation="perc_set" value="0.5" tags="Other"/>

 

Can anyone suggest a reason why it might suddenly start behaving differently?  Can anyone suggest a better way on how I can nerf XP on Harvesting? I'm open to ideas!

 

Thanks

Trev