Add Skill Limits, Fix Skill XP Amounts, & Add Back Worker Islands

[reef marten]

I think setting island farming limits once again. as well as bringing back worker islands that give the island owners skill XP (whether reduced or 1 to 1 XP) could be a great thing for the server. It would not only limit the bigger groups from getting too over powered too fast and controlling the economy, But it would (at least for me and my group) increase the enjoyment we are getting from playing the server over time rather than just doing 80% of what is available in 2 days and quitting.

 We started burning out very fast because we just finished all the mining challenges and farming challenges extremely fast not because they were easy or hard just because there wasn't anything actually stopping us from finishing it. 

 The amount of XP gained from a skill that goes towards said skill is more than the amount of farming required to farm that next skill. if that makes any sense.

meaning that you can farm 5000 wheat to unlock farming potatoes but by that time you do not unlock the recipe for the tools or the armor or the pets needed to farm that next tier.

 On multiple occasions I had checked our skill XP and noticed I had multiple tiers higher than where I was unlocked before I could even mine them 

(one example is having obsidian mining skill unlocked before I could even make a diamond pickaxe to mine emeralds)

 Regarding the#polls that were just posted, it is nice to see that the team is thinking about balancing and attempting to balance everything out but I really feel like the main issue isnt the fact that the woodcutting /ch to unlock the next tool is too high, its more that people are able to progress faster than they should not because the challenges are too easy or hard just because there isn't a limit on the actual grinding skills making it simply boring since there is no struggle.

[fossil idol]

in addition to your last point i think it is a case of progression being too linear. if in foragings case oak was to be reduced but then they get exponentially more difficult would bring back more of a grind. this would allow new players to feel like they are progressing especially if they are learning game mechanics and allows solos an enjoyable game experience while still adding a challenge to higher level grinders.

additionally island quests/goals e.g hafts should be reflective of the number of island members you have. it is hardly balanced if you have a team of 10 vs a team of 5 if the goals are the same but still rewards bigger islands with more members with faster progression. this way limits do not need to be placed so people who want to hardcore grind are able to do so but so adds a more definitive progression curve

and then if this doesn't sit then even just adding xp reducers to specific grinds. lets say you have earned an amount of xp in farming today. for the rest of the day that xp gain should be reduced by a multiplier e.g 0.2 that increases the more you grind, while not completely cutting off the xp. maybe a system encouraging more cross progression, so if a skill has been grinded for a long period, adding a negative multiplier and then adding a positive one to another skill to encourage spreading out the grind

or if the main concern is the economy just add a sell limit it again negative multiplier to economy sales. if you sell x compact bedrock the sales on compact bedrock are reduced by y

[small marten]

Openables being the main source of most nodes and giving basically unlimited hafts also makes grinding weird

[reef marten]

i think you put it very simply and i thank you for that. i agree the progression feels very linear no matter what you are grinding. coal through diamond are all just as easy to farm and grind as the last or next ore. and what @small marten said aswell having openables be the main source of nodes is kinda understandable but at the same time its still a bit odd. Its like you said its not balanced for the smaller groups. if there is a 10 man team who grind the game yes they obviously should be getting rewarded for their work but at the same time its almost to the point where its too rewarding... openables (in specific i mean node spinners) are very easy to get. almost too easy to monotonously farm. you can go to the wheat farms or any farm really and just walk around holding w and left click and get a stack of node spinners in idk like an hour if you have discover which is easier to get for the big groups because once again they can split up their time more efficiently and its just an exponential growth kinda thing. which is fine it just seems a little too exponential.

i also find that its very demotivating that the farming areas (slayer and woodcutting) are so limited. i get that no matter the size of them there will always be a clan farming them but its almost to the point of not being able to farm them at all. i remember i think it was day 3 of the server being up and call it my own fault but i went to farm foxes at spawn because there is no other way to farm them, i was obviously using a wooden sword because i didnt have anything else unlocked from slayer challenges yet. there was people who had swords that could kill them in 1 or 2 hits already. i stood genuinely no chance against them while they used /fly and flew at mach 100 from one side of the island to the other killing all the foxes but maybe 1 or 2 that i could get. this is the same with the woodcutting areas. i had a friend whos whole job on our island was to do woodcutting. he spent the entirety of 3 or 4 days just doing woodcutting and only getting to acacia on the 4th day because on each spawn there was at least 1 person who had either the ravager disguise or the wither disguise (which does block other players because it has a large hitbox) and who had maxxed out tools aswell as flight. they had just been flying back and forth over and over swapping between spawn 1 and 2 for hours on end. this actually was not an issue on the birch forest because the birch forest is massive in comparison. jungle has 10 trees and dark oak only have 8 and acacia has 12 trees per spawn while birch has over 30??? why is this the case, i get making the trees more sparse the higher rarity they are but going from 30 down to 12 all the way down to 8 is quite insane. assuming they were making them have less spawns because they are more rare trees you would think spruce trees would have more than birch. no this is not the case spruce has only 14 trees per spawn. yes i get that you can go to /wz and farm trees. BUT you cannot do this unless you have pacifist set, or drifter set. the amount of players in wz and groups roaming in warzone you are almost certain to lose your tool that you just farmed over 5k of a single tree just to craft then lose because a 5 man all roaming with OP Ikits waiting for the next leggy drop to pop.

relating to the openable portion of this, a simple fix would be changing the way the /challenges are setup. here's an example: a diamond ore node takes 7.5k total times mined over all island members, BUT you only unlock the ability for diamond slivers to drop from nodes once your island has already mined 3k of the node... by the time you get to 3k ore mined assuming its a solo players island, you can already craft the armor and the pet upgrade. getting to 5k only gives you the pickaxe and at that point you can move on to the next ore.. so whats the point of getting to 7.5k to craft the node?

[reef marten]

Allowing you to get node slivers earlier would make it more meaningful to actually unlock node crafting. Also for the coal through diamond nodes there is almost ZERO reason to craft them. They are genuinely useless with how easy it is to farm them at spawn and the fact that we are missing worker islands does not help. This goes for all farming nodes aswell from wheat to beets, the only one that might be slightly useful to craft is sugarcane because similar to the issue with woodcutting sugarcane takes a very long time to respawn aswell as being very limited in the amount of nodes there are to farm at spawn while being heavily contested because of the amount of crafting recipes that require it. Otherwise the rest if the nodes that are farmable at spawn are useless to craft and place on your island.