Infinite dog fighting & unbalanced (easy) insect fight - very exploitable

[Omni]

Playing on Expert, and currently level 9. I've noticed a couple very exploitable activities for too easy money and XP.

The first is one of the random overworld encounters with 3-4 flying insects and 2-3 rats. Even at level 9 this laughable encounter that poses zero threat is still giving me 200+ XP and some meat and insect parts. I have noticed an uptick in difficulty of other random encounters but not this one. Given how easy this encounter is at my current level, 200+ XP and ~100 rubles is way too much and cheapens the XP awards of appropriately-leveled content.

Honestly, why aren't the XP rewards from low-level enemies downscaled based on your level like pretty much all other RPGs?

The other exploitable activity is the dog fighting in Peregon. My Dzhulbars is level 6 with 136 Martial Arts and a basic piece of armor and he handily wins every dog fight with minimal damage sustained. The bit of damage he does take I can heal with a couple 12-hour rests. And since you can loot the dog you killed for its fangs and 3x meat, the fights are sustainable indefinitely with the only limiter being 25 Poison gained from eating raw meat (removed via water that I would have to go periodically retrieve from Otradnoye). The fights themselves reward 270 net rubles (plus fangs) and 50 XP and appear to be never-ending as the dog names and "warning" text from the fight organizer are recycled.

The dog fighting is especially disappointing as I expected there to be a max of 4-6 fights that steadily increase in difficulty and have a unique reward at the end. Instead, this activity is exploitable for infinite rubles and XP, which cheapens the rest of the game.

[InEffect]

when you are done you can shoot the dog and get all the exp he stole from you back.
really though, there are much easier ways to make exp/money. if someone really wants to spend all that time for a few thousands R - I don't see the problem.

What really is exploitable early-game is book burners quest. They are all melee with good armor and the encounter is perfectly farmable.

[Omni]

Originally posted by InEffect:

if someone really wants to spend all that time for a few thousands R - I don't see the problem.

I do. "All that time"? You can easily amass ~10k+ rubles and ~1000-2000 XP in less than 30 minutes, indefinitely and 100% safely. Considering main quest activities are giving like 200-700 rubles and 100-200 XP, this dog fighting setup greatly cheapens the rest of the game.

Originally posted by InEffect:

What really is exploitable early-game is book burners quest. They are all melee with good armor and the encounter is perfectly farmable.

I haven't gotten to this yet but if it is as you say then it should be rebalanced as well.

Honestly this game is quite good, especially at $15. But the exploitable nature of some of its encounters and side activities do a very big disservice to it.

[Neyreyan_Youtube]

The dog is not exploitable since the garden variety bandits/cultits give a lot better lot and sometiems experience.
I agree they should reduce experience from bugs to almost 0 after level 5.
I hope the devs fix these glitches, i never used them but it's clear what they do, especially the dog fights.

[kooto]

But why fix "exploits" in a single player game? If you consider this as an exploit, just dont do it :) Also, dont craft or roast meat, cause it gives even easier and faster xp.

[Omni]

Originally posted by Neyreyan:

The dog is not exploitable since the garden variety bandits/cultits give a lot better lot and sometiems experience.

The dog fighting is exploitable regardless of other exploitable things in the game. More than one thing can be exploitable in the same game.

And I disagree that bandits/cultists random encounters are more exploitable than the dog fighting, at least early game. The dog fighting is fast, consistent, safe, requires no extra inputs besides water to clear poison from eating raw meat, does not take precious bullets, and does not require carrying and selling dropped items to a vendor. Each dog fight grants 270 rubles and 50 XP, and can be performed two times a minute. If you decided to optimize and power it out for an hour, that's 32,400 rubles (plus fangs and meat to sell) and 6,000 XP. I highly doubt relatively dangerous (and slow to encounter) bandit/cultists fights are that lucrative.

[Omni]

Originally posted by kooto:

But why fix "exploits" in a single player game? If you consider this as an exploit, just dont do it

Because it cheapens the rest of the game. I've chosen not to exploit the dog fighting but why should I be happy with 100-200 XP and 200-500 rubles from completing a portion of the main quest when I know I could farm dog fighting for 30 minutes and get 10x that? The NPCs act like it's a big deal if I talk an extra 50 rubles out of them after investing a ton of skill points into Barter/Speechcraft but in the back of my mind I just think "but my dog could earn 30x that much in an hour without spending any of my character's skill points."