We’ve continued to watch the rates in which players earn experience on servers like Phinigel, Ragefire and Lockjaw. Based on what we’ve seen, we’ll be improving the XP for killing monsters on these servers (yes, even Phinigel!), but reducing the XP for doing quests.
When creating these progression servers, the team adjusted experience gains to be much closer to the classic experience when killing NPCs in the world. This created a significant imbalance between combat and the experience granted by completing quests, because quest experience was not adjusted for these servers.
"Those Fire Beetle Eyes!"
Because we didn’t properly adjust quest experience, we found that people were encouraged to kill low-level creatures. Many characters would level by collecting and turning in hundreds of items rather than fighting challenging content with other players.
In February's patch we're fixing this oversight. Quest experience will be brought back in line with kill experience and the game will play a bit more like it was at launch.
So, Experience Is Better?
Yes. After this patch, the overall experience gains on Phinigel, Ragefire, and Lockjaw will be better, while making leveling up via fueling Lokar To`Biath's alcoholism or Xelha Nevagon's coleoptericide less effective.
Ragefire and Lockjaw experience will still be slower than live servers, but faster than Phinigel.
This will be included in our February patch, scheduled to go live later this month. We appreciate everyone’s support, and our goal is to continue to foster the awesome community that has become an attribute of our progression servers!