20 hours ago, Roland said:The diminishing returns is an interesting idea. This was also proposed during the days of LBD by people looking for ways to make unlimited grinding less effective but TFP ultimately dropped the feature without trying diminishing returns-- although I think they did it a bit with crafting xp and maybe they still do? Can't remember.
I'd be good with that but it would be about the same result as simply adding more quests needed to graduate to the next tier.
Currently you need 7 quests to reach the next level, as RipClaw corrected me. In that case you would reach lvl5 quests after doing 28 quests. Lets see how this works out now, with more quests and with diminishing returns. I will look at John Turtle, who actually does just 1 quest per day, Ken Normalo, who does 2 and Ren Speedrunner, who does 5 per day.
Now:
John Turtle needs about 28 days, Ken Normalo 14 days and Ren Speedrunner a whooping 5.6 days for this. The fastest player needed only a fifth of the time that the slowest player needed.
So TFP changes this and simply adds more quests to level up. You now need 10 quests to the next level (a bit less than 50% more). Result:
John Turtle needs about 40 days, obviously too much. Ken Normalo looks better with 20 days, but Ren Speedrunner is hardly slowed with 8 days. The difference between John and Ren is still a factor of 5 in playtime!
So TFP uses diminishing returns with the original 7 quests per level instead:
John Turtle needs 28 days again, Ken Normalo needs 18.6 and Ren 14.45 days. Notice that the speedrunner is still faster, but the factor is just 2 compared to John Turtle and as much as Ren speedruns through his quests, he is just 4 days ahead of Ken Normalo.
(I ignored here that players do not do quests in such a regular way, sometimes they do 3 on a day and sometimes none. But since one still gets some reputation even for the second or third quest on a day, the effect of this is not dramatical and can be ignored for this demonstration)