Won’t be a big description because the title says it all but let me elaborate. NPC bounty/assassination contracts grant about 360 or so experience on average from what I’ve seen on a new save file (not done the exact math). Getting bounty hunting to level 2 takes 25k experience. Meaning it would take hunting almost 70 bounties just to rank up ONE TIME! That wouldn’t be an issue if it took maybe a minute or 2 to hunt a bounty but no it takes bare minimum 5 minutes per, so you know, at least 6 hours straight of grinding at the maximum possible speed, probably closer to 15 hours to rank up to level 2. Now you might think the easy solution would be to hunt other players but not only are players much harder to track and fight, but for some reason they show up as contracts even when they have PVP toggled off.
The solution to these very serious problems is simple, make NPC bounties significantly more rewarding when it comes to exp and don’t list players with PVP off on the contracts to begin with.
Edit: May not be as simple of a fix as this as it seems that some people are getting actually reasonable amounts of experience from bounty hunting while others aren’t, indicating it’s a glitch or heinous game design. For instance my main save file makes way more experience off bounties with the same level and renown as the bounties I hunt on a new save file.
Update: After further testing it at least seems like if you have less renown the game gives you less bounty hunting experience from NPCs, to the point that it’s basically impossible to level up bounty hunting in PVE. This needs to be patched to not be the case, as that makes bounty hunting something new players will effectively be locked out of being able to progress at all.
Vaguely Related Sidenote for the Devs: The new minibosses that show up in towers don’t seem to count as criminals for the sake of quests which is a real issue because they’re taking up pretty much all the spawns for criminals on every bronze sea server which also coincidentally prevents players from being able to get a rival. That inability for the game to properly identify them as criminals could maaaybe have some small part in the exp being unintentionally low. Also Dusk is so impossible to find they might as well not exist (I could just be super unlucky but I’ve not once seen their ship) and very frequently the game says they’ve spawned at an island only for them to not be there.
The recent patch notes mentions a fix for gunpowder barrels being able to bypass the pvp toggle. I swear to god they didn’t think about any of the bypasses or problems caused by the toggle besides being unable to spawn sharks via bleed pots if you have it off (you can still spawn sharks if it’s on near someone who has it off though)
Tested PVP experience rates for bounty hunting and it definitely feels like they geared leveling this profession towards only being done through PVP which absolutely sucks for no reason. It’s a vast amount more experience even for low player bounties. Bounty hunting is a time consuming process that takes more time and effort than any other profession to engage in, why do we need to grind it for like 200 hours minimum to max out through PVE for a single save file?
The hell? No I’ve hunted like level 220+ npcs. They didn’t reduce npc bounty experience for pvp enabled players or reduce what you gain in pvp enabled servers did they? If so that would be incredibly stupid. Or maybe your rival just naturally give a lot. Wouldn’t explain you getting so much for tower npcs too.
Something here must be incredibly scuffed either intentionally or not because I’ve been getting absolutely FA when it comes to exp no matter what npc I hunt. Whatever they did they need to patch it ASAP.
I know it’s not just me because I’ve run into people in-game complaining about it too and saying you practically have to join a clan to get to really active pvp servers and just hunt people while at max level, which is definitely not a reasonable way to require people to progress bounty hunting especially as the game gets bigger and the levels higher.
Oh I’ve already hunted players, even mentioned it in the original post. PVP bounties/contracts give a ton of experience, a little more than what you said npcs were giving you even for the lower reward ones. I’ll test with PVP toggled off later and see if they really did do something as moronic as that.
I believe so, though it wouldn’t explain why I’m getting insanely low amounts of exp on a completely fresh save file when hunting very high level and renown NPCs. Is there some severe penalty to the amount of renown gained if you have low renown yourself? That would also be stupid.
Update: Just turned off PVP and hunted a level 160 assassination contract literally at the top of the renown listing and got like 440 bounty hunting experience. So evidently the PVP toggle isn’t the issue. My bounty at the moment on this slot is 4.5k.
Update 2: Switched to my main Vlad Heart save and hunted a level 255 bounty of someone’s rival and got around 1.5k experience, which to me indicates that for some incredibly stupid reason the devs have made it where if you have low renown you gain less bounty hunting experience.
Also hunted Laelus and they still gave me exactly 440 renown. There’s clearly some kind of limiters on renown or bounty hunting exp that are having some heinous effects on progression. Granted Laelus is a low level bounty but I shouldn’t be getting 440 on enemies beyond the max level on a new slot.
Update 3: Just hunted Vayne and got a similar amount of experience as the rival test from before on my Vlad Heart save.