by GDEXXY » Oct 30, 2003 (2:54 pm)
Actually, time taken is a huge consideration -- practically the only consideration taken into how we value experience. Simply put: your experience in your class is a direct result of the amount of time spent on character development.
A Wizard spending 10 hours on character development and a Barbarian spending 10 hours on character development isn't exactly balanced. The Wizard may have to work three times as hard or more to gain the same experience a Barbarian would. Therefor, the Wizard's time spent gaining 10,000 XP is much more than a Barbarian's time spent gaining 10,000 XP.
This doesn't say that players of either class hasn't spent considerable time developing their characters, but it does say that because of the insanely-unbalanced characteristics of Wizards and Barbarians, the experience they currently have is valued differently than other classes.
Consider this for a moment:
Joe and Mary are both miners. Joe spends 8 grueling hours mining 8 beautiful diamonds and Mary spends a full week mining out 15 pounds of silver. Mary's silver turns out to be worth $2,000 but Joe's diamonds are worth $5,000. Joe can obviously make money quicker than Mary because Joe's job and training lets him mine much easier than Mary.
What we're doing is valuing experience earned among classes differently as a measure of how much time each person has spent on their character comparitively. If Joe has $5,000 and Mary has $2,000 -- we know that Mary has spent 40 hours at her job and Joe has spent 8 hours at his. In the same way, we know that if a Barbarian has 10,000 XP and a Wizard has 10,000 XP, the Wizard has spent more time on his character than the Barbarian (as far as straight XP analysis is concerned).
The numbers I used above are very drastic and unreal -- they serve only to demonstrate my point that time consideration is playing a role.
In actuality, the bonus to Wizards isn't very strong. The penalty to Barbarians isn't very strong. Comparitively they are at the other end of the spectrum for each other while most the other classes are right in between.
Now...
Since skill development is another factor in how long someone has spent developing their character, it would seem reasonable that we would factor in skill ranking towards the reallocation process. The reason we aren't is because every time a skill is ranked, it gives you regular XP -- thus it's already factored into how much time you've spent on your character.
In fact, I know a few individuals who've earned 5-10 levels off of mostly skill ranking. Therefor if we counted skills seperately, we would be counting them twice.
While it may seem a little unfair that Barbarians (and Paladins, to a lesser degree) are penalized for their class, it is a fair and comprehensive (and exhausting!) method of balancing power between characters of different classes (since we're changing the difficulty of all the classes to be closer to the same challenge rating for each).
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