Meanwhile, back in Paragon City

Had a yen to hop back into CoX this afternoon (not surprisingly … downloads of patches …)

So aside from this being a Double XP weekend, what’s up with this whole “XP Curve Smoothing” thing?

Quoth Positron:

Well, the leveling speed “curve” looked like a jagged mountain slope more than a smooth line. There were some levels in City of Heroes and City of Villains that just took players longer to get through. This was due to a variety of reasons, mostly in the realm of available mission content. We have tried to add new content in those areas over the past few updates, but a stronger hand was needed in some of the real problem areas. We went in and, through data mining, determined how long characters “lived” (existed) at any given level. This pointed out exactly where our problem areas were and exactly how we could address them. In addition we did a near global increase to the XP earned for defeating enemies. This will have everyone leveling faster than previous issues.

That’s actually pretty spiffy. Not just the leveling-faster thing, but the idea of using data mining to load balance experience gathering. There are definitely certain levels — based both on content and on certain power set / archetype plateaus — that go more slowly, and this sounds like a way ot smooth them out.