Rested Experience

Was thinking while I was sleeping about rested experience, the system in World of Warcraft on which this idea is based. For those who don't know, the story goes like this: the developers wanted to discourage people from playing too long. They added a penalty for killing a lot of mobs. People really disliked it. So the developers changed it from a penalty for killing a lot of mobs, to a bonus for killing smaller numbers of mobs, after reducing the base XP from mobs. According to developer descriptions of the change, it was the exact same system, but presented in a different way. (It would not be the exact same system if the original penalty was based off of time played, not number of mobs killed; I don't know if this was the case.)

In the system in WoW as it launched, rested experience is accrued by being in a safe area, an inn or a capital city, including while a character is offline. Going from normal (no bonus) to rested (bonus) from being in an inn is the same as going from tired (penalty) to normal (no penalty), so it's plausible the original mechanics could have been the same, other than the different baseline.

So why did players hate it so much? Because it was clearly an additional system; you didn't interact with it in your first moments in the game, just later on. If the system was removed, would players benefit? In the original system, players would benefit it it was removed; with the 'new' system, rephrased as a benefit with no actual gameplay changes, players perceived that they would be harmed if the system were removed.

What if this idea was described in the same way? "A bonus for lower amounts of work; all work after that is normal pay." This seems dishonest. Many businesses cannot afford to just pay everyone more; if they did, they would go out of business. Grocery stores are often said to have very thin profit margins, like 1%.

If you say, "work after X hours is paid at a reduced rate", then people feel like they're being discouraged from working. And that's the point. People should feel like they wouldn't want to work if they only get 0.7x the normal rate, just as they should feel like they don't want to work if they get 0x the normal rate (aka salary).

In Why overtime is bad, I described two ways of calculating someone's wage rate, to give people the choice of deciding which one is 'better'. Obviously, a business would prefer the calculation that gives the lower wage rate, while an employee would prefer the higher wage rate. This argument was not successful.

Instead, add a single line to the description: "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged." For anyone working less than 40 hours per week, it would take a decrease in the base wage rate for total wages to be unchanged: people who are bad at math might not realize this. But the objective, to avoid changing total wages, is easy to understand and clearly stated.

Is 'undertime' a stupid name for extra pay for early hours? I don't know. The system is also supposed to be something that can work off of hours worked per year for an employer (like seasonal agricultural workers), not just hours worked per week, and connecting it too strongly to the overtime system through its name might be bad.

The flaw with the original concept of 'tired XP' was that people saw that they were harmed by the existence of the system. Adding "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged" to the description avoids this perception, for this idea.

___

Update 20 Apr 2026, 11:13

Somehow I never realized this before: in World of Warcraft, it was not the exact same system, just presented in a different way. A new character does not start with any 'rested XP', which is when the experience bar at the bottom of the screen turns blue instead of purple and mobs give double XP. So the change from 'tired XP' to 'rested XP' made the early game harder (unless the experience required to level was also reduced, but that would also affect quest XP etc.). The change in baseline, of halving XP from mobs, was a real change in difficulty that made leveling with 'rested XP' twice as hard as leveling with 'tired XP' had been, and people still liked it.