New characters aren’t power-leveling thru the rock+pie technique unless they’re alts, or friends of existing characters. It takes a fair amount of game knowledge to understand why the technique is so good. New players through normal play do not stumble upon it until probably the gem wall. My opinion is that this nerf isn’t really impacting new players’ ability to level up. But it is impacting established players’ ability to power-level their alts, their friends, or themselves; and theoretical new players are being used to add an emotional appeal to their argument. So far zero new players have appeared in this thread to say how they can no longer finally reach lvl 20 like they dreamed, because the rock XP is gone. Chances are they’re leveling just fine off the starter quests like all of us did.
I figured ppl would start questioning that XP image so here’s another one posted publicly to the official discord.
People have been sharing their “high scores” on discord and forums for months. (Some to highlight the absurdity.) At 200k xp/lvl this is a screenshot showing the rock+pie technique used to gain 21+ levels on a max level character. It took 360 SS of stone, which using standard T6 mining techniques I estimate would take 12 hours to gather. That’s 12 hours of mining where the player received gems, ore, coal, tech, and XP for each seam they busted open while they were mining. That’s plenty of reward.
I don’t get why people are defending the right to take this rock home, queue it up, then log off and return to yet another 21 levels of reward. What does that have to do with the original reason this player was mining? It’s just exploit XP because the devs didn’t realize that AoE hammers and the lust for gems would lead to rock entering the economy at a rate of 7.27 rock/sec (diamond hammer averaging 4 rock per swing.) With each rock being worth nearly 15xp in crafting reward, that’s 109 XP second, for mining rock, in a game where there’s infinite rock in all directions all the time. Close your eyes, W+M1, 109 XP/second. Think about that number next time you do literally any other activity and see whether you think the effort:reward ratio is in alignment with the rest of the game. Even aiming at a sleeping cuttletrunk takes more effort and they don’t sleep in perfectly dense cubes. It would be cute if they did but I digress.