I like LBD okay. I enjoy the freedom of using a central pool of xp for whatever I want to improve a bit better. I like playing how I like and focusing on what I think is fun but still being able to improve in the areas that I'd rather not grind up. The LBD in A16 was pretty good because you could grind or spend skill points as you chose.
My first choice would be to award xp based solely on time survived and not tie xp to any specific action at all. Simply have it be a reward for not dying. If you do die, the timer starts over for when you will earn your next xp payout. The problem with xp based on actions is that it incentivizes those actions in unnatural ways and instead of the focus being to live and survive in the world, the focus becomes doing specific highly effective actions to slurp up xp. The game becomes all about leveling up instead of living and surviving in the world. Remove the xp carrot and suddenly the only actions a player needs to do are the actions they want to do in order to survive. Without zombie kill xp you would only kill zombies when needed instead of hunting them down and farming them for precious progress currency.
The problem I have with LBD is that it exacerbates that distraction from natural play even more by encouraging players to grind unnaturally or even finding ways to set up an automatic process to level up while AFK. For a great look at the power of LBD to overwhelm the game and plunge players into an xp centric mindset just look at the current state of the trader quests. Trader quest progression is currently an LBD model. By doing quests you go up in quest tiers and progress. Look at how much questing now dominates the game and how players often feel compelled to spam multiple quests a day so they can grind up their "quest skill" with the trader and move from T1 to T5 as quickly as possible. Can anyone really point at grinding multiple quests a day to the exclusion of most other activities and call that natural and normal?
People used to explore POI's just because it was fun to clear them and explore. Since questing for the traders became LBD-like there seems to be a lot less exploring and clearing a city like there used to be and a lot more ignoring all POI's except the ones the traders send you to. People complain that they keep getting sent to the same POIs as if they couldn't go and explore a new POI without a quest. But the power of the LBD model for progressing up the quest tiers is so strong it wouldn't occur to most people to "waste their time" on non-quest POI's.
Do I have fun questing and rising in the ranks? Yes. So I don't hate LBD. I just recognize how XP-centric models change the player focus from living and surviving in a virtual world into a focus of simply acquiring xp and leveling up and I think it is too bad. I hear that
@Boidster is possibly working on a cool time-based xp alternative. I wonder how that is coming along....?
