Most of the changes proposed in the recent blog post on Shooting Stars changes are perfectly reasonable, but I don't think you've successfully hit all of your design goals.
You state that: "High tier stars should always be better XP per hour, rather than the current 'curve' favouring tiers in the middle or at the bottom for both XP rate and 'time spent AFK' respectively."
With the proposed changes, it doesn't appear that higher tiers offer any benefit over lower tier stars, except for lasting a little longer. Given how trivial it has become to hop to the next star after one is finished, this benefit is negligible; especially when all stars now start at tier 6 or higher.
I understand why the stars now start at these higher tiers, and I think that is a good idea. But I think there should still be some benefit to mining these higher tier stars during the short window while they're available.
Tier 6 stars should be the most common to land, and tier 9 the rarest by a more significant margin. I would propose 40%, 30%, 20%, 10% chance for tier 6, tier 7, tier 8, and tier 9 stars respectively.
Finding a tier 8 or tier 9 star before it's been mined through should be a rare and special event, with a suitable reward for those who find it early. Higher tiers should probably either grant more XP per dust, or a chance at more dust per successful mine. It doesn't have to be a lot, but it should be something. Just having more tiers to mine through feels bad.
Worst case scenario this might lead to some star minters leaving a star early to go to a higher tier one on another world, but is that really even a bad thing? It would achieve the goal of helping spread out star miners across worlds. And most players will probably still just stick around through all tiers of a star anyway, because it's easier.
20-Oct-2023 02:37:49
