Topic

What is all this about leveling not being "worth it?"

I don't really understand the argument against leveling. I realize it gets more expensive to teleport and such - but what is the real argument against increasing your level? You do gain more energy - is it because we don't receive skill level multipliers that affect our productivity along with the energy penalties? I'm just wondering why people seem to be so anti-leveling.

LT

Posted 11 months ago by LimberTwig Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I don't have a comprehensive answer since I'm not sure about the interaction between levels and icons at this time, but basically it comes down to this:

    Higher level means more energy, which means higher teleport costs.  If you are going to teleport a lot then you are going to spend more energy per day if you have more energy to begin with.  If your energy pool is only 1000 and you have teleportation 5 then you can eat an Awesome stew and get enough energy to teleport twice.  When you are level 60 and you have 2860 maximum energy an Awesome Stew doesn't give you enough energy to teleport once.

    That being said, I would wager that for most players a larger energy pool is just better.  Unless you teleport enough to spend more than 100% of your daily energy on teleportation, higher maximum energy means more energy.  If you have a low rank of teleportation then you could easily do this, but with teleportation 5 it would mean teleporting at least 10 times a game day.  If you are concerned about teleportation costs, learning higher ranks of teleportation is better than avoiding levels.

    Also, a larger energy pool can get you more than just the one daily refill.  If you teleport to the ancestral lands and collect energy quoins until you are full, you the amount of energy you walk out with is limited by your maximum pool, so you could get that pool twice or three times a day.  If you make a crab happy you are going to get more energy with a larger pool, generally speaking (though this is rare enough that it probably isn't worth counting).

    I think it's hard to make the case that being higher level is worse than being lower level.  With a full set of icons I think higher level is probably substantially better.  It's just that it's not nearly as much better as being higher level is in other games.
    Posted 11 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • And we soon won't have levels anyway, so don't worry about it.

    Do what you enjoy doing and if you level up you level up and if you don't you don't.
    Posted 11 months ago by IrenicRhonda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Stoot said there will still be levels in this forum post: www.glitch.com/forum/genera...

    "Also, since it has a come up a few times, I should note: there WILL still be levels in the new system, but the importance of levels is going to be de-emphasized in the UI/profile pages, etc. You can think of them as a lifetime measure of imagination earned (as they are now a lifetime measure of XP earned)."
    Posted 11 months ago by Cleops Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The only way to NOT level is to NOT play.  So, I'm not sure how you avoid leveling, unless you only collect Guano, fertilize crops and chase butterflies (without catching them).

    also, re:Icons.  You have to "tithe" more at higher levels.  I say "tithe" because in Glitch it's really not a tithe.  A tithe IRL is a percentage of your income.  In Glitch, a tithe is not connected in any way to how much you make, only to your level.  So, if you level up, you have to pay more, regardless of whether your income grows or not.  At level 50, for example, you have to pay over 1,000 currants for each "tithe", for each Icon, which can come as often as every day.  If this was truly a tithe in the real world sense of tithe, (meaning 10% of your income) then you'd need to be earning about 110,000 currants each real world day to justify this "tithe" to your icons.
    Posted 11 months ago by Mablem Tiipot Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There is a small minority of players who teleport a LOT and dislike leveling because of the penalties mentioned by Humbabella.   They contend that leveling is 'bad' and are frustrated because they have to keep their mood low in order to avoid leveling.  My contention is that if teleportation is such a central part of their game they should just admit it and start buying tokens to support how they want to play, rather than telling everyone else that the game is broken.  
    Posted 11 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • As I levelled up, I didn't find the increasing teleportation costs to be a significant factor. Whilst the energy cost went up, it remained a fixed proportion of my total tank so, if I plan on teleporting a roughly constant number of times per day, then I've still got more energy for other things when I've levelled up.

    One thing I DID find a significant drag was the cost of tithing my icons. But then I was using all my icons every day, so they were very needy... sometimes it felt like they were standing there with a stern look on their face pointing at the door and saying "To the mines with you young man! And don't come back until you've got lots of lovely money for us"
    Posted 11 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Also, the energy rot, in absolute terms, increases so it's marginally more costly to continue playing at a higher level.

    The mood cap increases bothered me more than the energy, to be honest...
    Posted 11 months ago by Aoi Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Teleporting is a percentage of your total energy.  At TP 5 it's 10% at level 1 and at level 60. Being level 60 I can tell you the only downside is not teleporting, its that food and drinks don't scale so you have to consume a lot more to recover. But in the update I think they are also addressing new food items and quality of food items as well (at least that what I got out of the Q&A sessions).

    I personally don't worry about it not scaling, one of the ways I got to level 60 is by maxing out my skills, so I can make food and drink items easily and make up that gap.
    Posted 11 months ago by Mithax Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Many things scale to level, some good, some bad.

    The bad things include teleport costs, energy and mood drain rate, icon tithes.

    The good things include, energy and mood pool, icon blessings, and coin multipliers.
    Posted 11 months ago by Melting Sky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think a nice potential "fix" for the teleportation complaints would be to invent a higher energy food. A food that gives 500 energy maybe? It would make sense to me that at a higher level you might be able to concoct a more satisfying food to make up for the more expensive TPs.
    Posted 11 months ago by Penelope Sue Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm level 60 now and a lot of activities are now pointless.  Whether I enjoy them or not, there's no longer measurable gain for them in the game.  I expect the new system to remedy this so I'm holding on.
    Posted 11 months ago by So sorry Subscriber! | Permalink
  • At lvl 47 I notice the biggest drain from the icon tithes... Hell's Tomatoes! I'm working hard for the giant love. I haven't been scientific about it but it seems that there was a tipping point in the lower 40's.
    Posted 11 months ago by Ooola Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Dr. Hackenbush wrote, "At level 50, for example, you have to pay over 1,000 currants for each "tithe", for each Icon, which can come as often as every day."

    The "tithes" are expensive at higher levels, but they only come after 4 uses of the icon. If you don't use them then you won't get any tithe requests. Because there are only 3 icon uses each day I'm pretty sure the frequency of request maxes out at 3 requests every 4 game days.

    As understand things, anyway.
    Posted 11 months ago by Credulous Ralph Subscriber! | Permalink
  • tl:dr; Only things that use percentage of maximum energy count if you want to know if going up levels is good.  Energy decay costs you 25% of your maximum energy per hour played (varies slightly with level because of rounding).  Mood doesn't matter when figuring out if levels are good.  Icons get better as you get higher level.  The increase in the value of quoins is significant.
    If you want to know if you should keep going up levels, use the following formula:

    (1 - [hours played per game day played / 4] + [#icons x 0.042] + [#quoins collected x 0.01] - [#teleports x 0.1 x <6 - level of teleport skill>])

    If that is greater than zero then going up levels makes you better, if it is less than zero then going up levels may be hurting you.  The formula above probably undervalues icons and quoins - especially if you go to the Ancestral Lands, but could overvalue quoins if you grab a lot of xp and mood quoins.  And overall I still think usually if you feel like going up levels is hurting you it probably means you need to up your rank of teleport, or collect more high value quoins.

    ---

    Details:
    Things that don't use percentages of total energy - Only things that cost percentages are worth considering when you figure out if a larger energy pool is bigger.  If I spend all my energy petting piggies then having a larger pool is of no advantage or disadvantage.  If I have a maximum of 1000 energy or 100 energy and I want to nibble piggies 500 times, either way I get 2000 meat.  In one case I need to each 100 of that meat at the end to get my energy back, in the other case I need to eat 10 meat 10 times to get my energy back.  So needing to eat more food to fill up from zero doesn't matter because you got to spend more energy before you got to zero.  Eating food increases the amount of energy you can spend, but it does so in w ay that is independent of your level.

    Energy Decay - If you play for an entire game day then you lose close to 100% of your maximum energy in decay.  Because of this, you could see a larger energy pool as being effectively worth zero, but only if you consistently play for an entire game day at once.  If you regularly play an hour at a time a larger energy pool is worth 75% of it's value, if you play for four hours a night but those four hours happen to span more than one day (very likely) then you, again, get 100% of your maximum energy pool to spend.

    Mood - Having a larger mood pool is definitely just worse than having a smaller one, there is no advantage to it at all.  That being said, the only thing mood affects is how fast you level up. Because of this, I can't consider it a penalty for being higher level anymore than simply needing more experience to go up levels is.

    Icons - Icons are better the higher level you are.  Tithing costs currants equal to about 53% of your maximum energy and gives around 3.7 reveres which each return about 25% of your maximum energy.  Since icons are effectively letting you buy energy for .58 currants a piece, you should, rather than eating, sell food to a vendor and tithe then revere the icon.  If you do this at a normal vendor (since travelling to the tool vendor costs time or energy) you net 21% more energy from the food.  So if you sell food you otherwise would have eaten to tithe and then revere icons, each icon effectively nets you about 4.2% of your maximum energy a day.

    Quoins - The base value of a quoin is 1% of your maximum energy.  High value coins are worth some multiple of that.  So when you go to the ancestral lands and grab a quoin worth 200 energy and your maximum energy is 1000, that quoin would have been worth 400 if your maximum energy was 2000.  Because you can grab 100 quoins a day, if you grabbed "normal" quoins you would get another 100% of your "energy" to spend (though that "energy" might be mood, xp or currants - if you play enough to use all your energy you should avoid mood and xp quoins)

    So energy available per day is linear with respect to: Maximum Energy x (1 - [hours played per game day played / 4] + [#icons x 0.042] + [#quoins collected x 0.01] - [#teleports x 0.1])

    Of course if you make one or two trips to the ancestral lands to grab quoins or know other good locations to find high value quoins, the multiplier on quoins could go up from 0.01 to as high as 0.1 (though I haven't gathered data on AL quoins, so this is a rough estimate).  Also, icons might be a little undervalued here because I used a lower bound on their worth.

    Example: You play about 2 hours at a time when you play, sometimes this spans two game days (say 20% of the time) but most of the time it is in one game day.  You have three icons and teleport 3.  You rarely make trips to the ancestral lands, typically hit your quoin limit and collect about 70% energy and currant quoins:

    (1 - [1.66 hours played per day played / 4] + [3 icons x 0.042] + [70 x 0.1] - [teleports x 0.2])
    = 1.41 - (teleports x 0.3)
    so if you teleport 5 times in a typical play session you should avoid going up levels.  However, if you level teleport 5 then you would have to teleport 14 times a day (so about every 7 minutes).

    Example: You play 4 hours a night, spanning two game days, carry 11 icons with you, make a trip to the ancestral lands the first time you run out of energy each day collecting about 20 quoins with a value averaging 10 times that of a normal quoin, have teleport 5, and are fastidious about avoiding xp and mood quoins.  You average about 70 quoins a day in total.

    (1 - (2 hours a day / 4) + (11 icons * 0.042) + (50 quoins x 0.01 + 20 quoins x 0.1) - (teleports x 0.1))
    = 3.462 - (teleports x 0.1)

    so you'd have to teleport 35 times to not want to be higher level.  Here you see how important high value quoins are to the calculation.
    Posted 11 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I find the mood rot the least appealing part of leveling. I don't like the frowny faces!
    Posted 11 months ago by Stuv Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella — wow!
    Posted 11 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oops - I didn't mean to post
    Posted 11 months ago by Science Genius Girl Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Now I feel special.
    Posted 11 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella, I... wow... I mean... wow.
    Posted 11 months ago by SkyWaitress Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Although I've already found some errors in my post - energy decay is actually around 128% of maximum energy per day.  At level 60 you decay 3680 over four hours an have only 2860 max energy (unless something fishy happens, but the 0.8% every 90 seconds seems to work).  Anyway, don't take the formula too seriously, it's probably off a bit in a number of ways (just because I decide to use two decimal points on things doesn't mean I actually know what I'm talking about).
    Posted 11 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • O.O You truly are a monster, Humbabella.
    Posted 11 months ago by Palindrome Subscriber! | Permalink