30 % extra exp across the board
30 % increase in skill learning across the board

Ranking focused more into hot spots. The problem with having such a wide array of fairly equal ranking spots results in everybody always having a free ranking spot. People are so accustomed to avoiding forest areas when rangers are on, going to arial city when ragers are on, and in general going to ridiculous lengths to avoid PK confrontation while ranking that it all becomes a monotony of spamming mob kills.

I usually make a habbit of always ranking in the spot where my group matches up best with the mobs in question. It means I sometimes get ambushed by people. This usually happens in the range of 4 times during the 30 hours of straight up ranking it takes to hero. And dear god, sometimes I even die. Since Thera is currently suffering of major underpopulation and someone actually dying has become more of a freak incident than the 5 room eastern road being littered with corpses, everyone has learned to freak out when their character dies. An average character can take 60 deaths or more, and I personally think con death should be more common than age death in a PK intensive mud.

Extra exp alone would not be enough to increase my interest in cf a lot, but it would be a signal of a positive change.

If you are not interested in my general ramblings about business theory in relation to cf, stop reading here.

We could consider the value cf adds to its customers (players) as the fun derived from playing. Two distinct ways to achieve competitive advantage are price advantage and differentiation advantage, where the prior aims to create value at a lower price compared to competition and the latter creates more value (for a similar price). CF has for years now been on the path of trying to achieve differentiation advantage but failed to take into account the market. While increasing differentiation advantage by offering a wide and highly versatile environment for PK and exploration, the costs of acquiring this value has increased (as expected). By costs I mean the opportunity cost of time spent playing vs. time spent doing something else. In a market of high demand this would be an excellent strategy, when the increased value delivery will result in increased willingness to pay. However, cf operates in a declining market with a decreasing demand due to a constant decrease of time to spend.

With a declining demand, CF's cost-value ratio has blown out of proportion, where an ever increasing portion of the target segment simply is not willing to pay the price. To balance this, cf should be shifting it's strategy from a more value pov to an equal value cheaper strategy. There's a simple three step way of executing such a strategy. The first step in taking action with this new strategy is to identify core benefits which bring customers to CF. In a simplistic fashion three key elements can be identified: roleplay, PvP encounters, PvE encounters. The customers have varying preferances between the previous three. For a more scientific view these could be broken down into smaller segments, but for the sake of discussion and decision making it's not necessary. Second phase of the plan would be to make straight up improvements to the cost-reward ratio by decreasing the time it takes to achieve wanted benefits. This is done by identifying unproductive (from customer side perspective) phases in the cf value chain, and reducing them or altering them to create more value. Once a satisfying amount of changes have been made, it's time to move on to phase 3. Phase three is the hardest part, since it includes making compromises. The key aspect is to identify product features that do add value, but for a too high price. These aspects need to be either changed to create more value or reduce the cost of acquiring said features, and if neither can be done reasonably, removed.

Now, the new question to be asked when making improvements should not be how to make PK more balanced, or how to make Thera more immersive, it should be how to decrease the time spent to be competitive in PK environment, or how to make the immersiveness of CF more easily accessible.

To provide some practical examples:

30% ranking boost:
No direct effects to RP/PvE/PvP
Reduces time spent to achieve benefits
Paces up RP encounters (roughly same amount of meaningfull RP is done during 1h and 4h conversation, after introductions and group hookup + first 30 mins of ranking things get repetitive)
+ Phase 2

30% skill learning boost:
Reduces downtime of characters who need masteries
Reduces time spent to achieve level playing field
Slightly reduces realism since younger characters are often quite equal to older characters
+ Phase 2 since value reduction is greatly outweighed by cost reduction

Shortening roads (say 20%):
Reduction in time taken to reach PvE and PvP
Slight alterations in PvP balance with skills such as summon being affected
Slight reduction in immersiveness and realism of Thera
+ Phase 3 since a positive tradeoff between cost and value

Since the target segment of CF are players with limited time on their hands, a good way of assessing the productivity of a change made could be considering it from the pov of an old player. Just think, would this change work towards making cf a more appealing offer to him?