City of Rewards

(Yes, this is long. I've broken it down so I don't consider it a wall of text, but be prepared for some reading.)

XP, AE, SK--OH MY THE ACRONYMS!
I believe most players that have been around the game for a while have seen a signficant shift in the way progress is achieved and measured. Some complain, some take advantage, some shrug their shoulders and keep playing, some say "deal with it", some say "yippee!", some quit, some ignore large portions of content, and some have stopped reading this post already since they don't care. The expanding options in the game and past/future changes to reward systems have unquestionably changed the way the game looks; it is most certainly not the same as it was several years ago. This is of course to be expected if City is to avoid stagnancy. However, I often feel that many discussions (read: complaints/calls for changes/dismissal of those complaints etc.) miss the larger point of what rewards mean to this game.

Let's take a second there: rewards are kind of important are they not? The game is structured around levels, so experience is probably the first in-game reward people think of, but of course there are a huge variety of rewards people can find. After experience you probably think of influence, followed by recipes, salvage, enhancements and other "drops", though we can continue from there to prestige (for those people who care about and/or use bases), temporary powers, and even rewards from RMT and other out-of-game activities such as booster packs and veteran rewards. While not all of these rewards can be or are meant to be tied to levelling speed, most all of them can be tied to character potency. I believe it is a critical point that short-term gameplay experience is meant to be supplemented with a long-term sense of accomplishment, improvement and change.

Perhaps my search fu is weak, but it seems many discussions (and yes, I'm looking at you AE) dance around the subject of rewards without really ever looking at it. I believe this is a mistake, and as such I feel it is worthwhile to discuss rewards in a broader sense without focusing on any particular source of content in the game or particular change to the system.

DISPROPORTIONALITY OF REWARDS, OR THE "IT'S MY $15" ARGUMENT
Let's get this out of the way right now. This is a multiplayer game, and the actions of one player--and most certainly the collective actions of a significant block of players--can and do affect the experience of others. A fairly easy example is the market, where major shifts in the population's activity and associated rewards can have a huge impact on prices. Other influences may not be felt as directly and yet be at least as significant, such as datamining on experience earned.

When a selection of activities has a substantial disparity in the value of rewards earned, there better be a good reason. There are many cases of players pursuing activities with the full knowledge that they won't "get as much" doing them, often for the challenge and subsequent feeling of accomplishment (or bragging rights), such as AV or pylon soloing. Since these are not "intended" to be regular activites with commensurate rewards, there is no issue. On the other hand, I know of no convincing argument that progressing through regular story arcs, repeatedly taking radio/paper missions, going through an AE arc with a variety of maps and enemies, and repeating an AE mission with a single type of critter should have highly disparate rates of rewards associated with them, but it should be clear that they do to varying degrees.

I sometimes wonder if the time has come to allow players to make characters at higher than first level. This is, of course, not unheard of in MMOs. One could certainly make the argument that the option should be tied to a veteran status or simply reaching high level through a prior character, and perhaps certain tangible or intangible rewards should be associated with starting at 1st level (such as a badge...cue Frank singing "I did it my way"). It seems worth considering at this point, so that we can completely eliminate the desire to use powerlevelling to get to the "good" levels.

REWARD METRICS, OR ASKING "HOW MUCH STUFF WILL I GET?"
It's difficult to talk about rewards without trying to measure them in some way. While one could try to discuss the relative value of experience, influence, prestige and so on, this is likely to be highly personal and likely fruitless. Rather I will focus on how players customize their experience to get the particular rewards they want.

When the subject of rewards comes up, most people try to weigh it against risk. This seems ridiculous to me, since there is essentially no risk at all. No one is going to come to your house flashing firearms and badges (the government agency kind, not the "I squished lots of toxic tarantulas" kind--though that might work too) and drag you out to the street because you failed your mission. In a less silly example, you don't risk your current level of experience or your enhancements, or have your character deleted (unless we're talking about risk of moderator wrath vs. reward, which this term is pretty clearly not mean to apply to). Even accolade bonuses or future content that are tied to the successful completion of your activities can practically always be reached some other way.

Players may take on more difficult content with the possibility of the occasional faceplant because they know the short-term losses of debt or recovering from a defeat are outweighed by the generally increased rate of rewards. Time vs. reward is thus a much better metric than risk. Players don't ask "what will I have to give up if I'm unsuccessful?", they ask "if I do this thing over a sufficient period of time will I get more than doing that other thing instead?".

From a theoretical standpoint I believe challenge vs. reward is a better metric than either risk or time, though much more difficult to quantify. This becomes increasingly true as players are given greater power to customize their experience. The argument is often made that all-boss AE missions come with greater challenge, so there's nothing wrong with getting greater rewards for your time as compared to other content. Difficulty settings, whether what exists on live now or the proposed I16 version, really provide the same function. While some people ignore the time aspect--leading to such misconceptions as "the best enemies are always the ones worth the most xp" or "confuse steals xp"--challenge is perhaps the most important variable people adjust in order to increase their rewards.

MANIPULATING REWARDS, OR "WOOHOO! LOOK AT THAT XP FLY!"
The ability to customize your experience with the intent of increasing rewards is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is the creation of huge discrepancies between the actual value of an activity's challenge and reward system's assessed value of that challenge. This is nothing new; players have been doing this for as long as the game's been going, though it is probably more visible now than ever before. There are many methods of doing so.

One of the easiest examples is when the burden of challenge is shifted from one character or group of characters to another. Sometimes this is done with consent, such as the use of bridging, and sometimes it is nothing more complicated than unannounced afk's amounting to leeching. The proposed super sidekick system is likely to heavily mitigate this.

Another method is to fight enemies that are easier for you than for the player population as a whole. This is usually done by matching up certain statistics between a character and their enemies, in either direction, such as damage types to defense, mezzing to mez resistance, ranged/melee preference and so on.

A very important method that is rarely if ever discussed is consistency of challenge. In many cases players are not even aware this is what they are doing. This has been around to some extent for a long time, but an example that has come into high profile through AE is the all-boss/lt/whatever mission. Other content has a mixture of these enemy types. Minions may deal their damage early on but be quickly wiped by area powers. Lts frequently go down in another wave, followed by bosses. It may be rare to see very clear delineations between these "waves", but the challenge faced by the team tends to be more staggered through the fight. With all enemies being of the same class, the number of them tends to remain stable longer, allowing the team to take more advantage of their area damage. Similarly, with only a single critter type to face in every group the opposition is predictable. Consider a large group of carnies with a disproportionate number of illusionists against a team with little mez protection, or seneschals against masterminds vulnerable to area attacks. With a single enemy type the opposition is predictable from one group to the next. The consistency of challenge throughout the course of a fight and through a mission is not talked about nearly as much as the ability to tailor the general stats of that opposition, but it may be equally as significant in explaining the reward rates associated with these missions. Perhaps more so.

PLAYER CAPACITY TO CUSTOMIZE CONTENT, OR "WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?"
Giving players the option to select and customize their content is not only a good thing, but it's inevitable in a game that continues to expand. The important thing is maintain a diverse selection of content that is appealing to the player base as a whole. As I have already suggested, outliers in reward earning rates tend to be the enemy of variety when it comes to content; players should never feel that they are unduly punished because they enjoy particular story arcs, zones, enemy groups, ATs, and so on.

In many cases when players create AE missions to fit certain criteria they are creating content quite similar to what already exists in game, whether their goal is to manipulate reward rates or not. There are plenty of examples of "core" content which contain a very limited selection of enemies on ideal maps--these have become the famous farmed missions over time. Even when the new difficulty settings are introduced it will not be that different from what players do already. They use anchors to make the game consider the team size different from what it will actually be; a less referenced but equally valid example is the clearing of larger enemy spawns in hazard zones. The power to customize content in these ways is a good thing; very simply, players should be able to participate in activities they enjoy as much as possible. That's pretty much why we play, I would think.

When people express dissatisfaction with the disproportionate rewards received from certain activities, they often wish to police the content itself. This tends to have limited success.

Some suggest restricting AE to certain level ranges, restrict the number of levels you can gain there, or require veteran badges to access it. Why take characters away from a major source of content?

Some suggest banning AE missions that only use a single critter type. Is it really unreasonable to have such a mission? Requiring custom groups to have at least one minion, lt, and boss isn't realistic given the current mechanics. Though one could require that the primary custom group selected for a mission meet this criteria, it would still be necessary to regulate the placement of groups in custom objectives.

In the past, people suggested limiting the number of times a mission could be started to prevent farming. This is a moot point now of course.

In these cases and many more, the suggestion to police content is often unwieldy and counterproductive. If reward earning rates are the issue, why not look at the system of calculating rewards instead?

There is a danger in this of course. When blasters were seen to be underperforming, no one suggested we just give them an experience boost. At least, I don't think anyone did. However, this makes apparent the importance of differentiating between content problems (blasters get their behinds kicked more often than other people) and reward problems (I earn stuff a lot faster fighting group A than group B).

VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF...EXPERIENCE?
Do you earn the same amount of experience each time you defeat a particular enemy? The answer is obviously no. If damage was done to that target from a source outside your team or from confused enemies, you receive a reduction. If you have teammates, the experience is split between you. Is there anything else we should be taking into consideration? Perhaps.

As I mentioned above trying to quantify challenge when examining reward rates is difficult at best, and may have undesireable consequences. If you're playing a fire armour tanker, should you receive less rewards from defeating fire-using enemies than, say, an invulnerable tanker? It was less challenging, right? My instinct is to say that's a horrible idea, though I'm not completely sure I could explain why. Perhaps because the strengths and advantages of a character should always be treated as such.

In general, however, homogeneity in content is a likely sign of manipulating the reward system. Should variety be a factor in determing rewards? I believe that this is, at the very least, worth investigating. In many cases it may be difficult or impossible to measure in any automatic sense. If you complete missions from several different contacts or that contain different enemy groups, should you be compensated for it? Actually, you are to some extent already through story arc bonuses.

What about variety within an enemy spawn? This is one metric that I am coming to firmly believe should be experimented with. When a spawn is generated, the variety of enemies that are selected from in its creation can be examined and an experience modifier applied to each of its members. Among variables that could be considered are: access to all of minion, lt and boss ranks; selection of principal power/damage types (if the enemies all select from fiery assault, fiery melee and fire blast, that isn't real variety, but toss in assault rifle and ice control and there you go); melee/ranged preference and so on. Could such a system be manipulated? Of course, but it could provide a more accurate assessment of real challenge than a system looking at a critter independent of its companions. We've already seen that a comm officer is more dangerous (and should be worth more experience) sprinkled in to a normal group of rikti than appearing en masse.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE LOOK FOR IN THE FUTURE, OR "WILL MY BLASTER SUCK MORE THAN EVER?"
I kid, I kid. I wouldn't have said that blasters "sucked", but they were shown to lag behind the curve. If players are given the power to dramatically increase their spawn size on a regular basis, we may see the balance of power skewed in different directions than in the past. In particular, the ability to deal area damage and survive substantial damage over a period of time may become more of an advantage than it currently is.

AoE is already called the king of PvE, though its impact does tend to be diluted over a team. That is, if you have a ST specialist and an AoE specialist on a large team, they both benefit from the efficiency the AoE specialist brings against large spawns, a benefit that is severely limited or nonexistent against current solo-sized groups. The ability to routinely face large groups in solo/small-team play without the need for herding, anchors or similarly artificial devices may heavily skew reward rates in favor of certain ATs and/or powersets from what they are now.

Just as before, this doesn't mean players shouldn't be given this control, nor does it mean we should reexamine all powersets for ways to give them more AoE damage. What it does mean is that reward rates may need to be adjusted to compensate. For example a greater percentage of rewards could be moved to the completion of mssions and story arcs to help those who defeat smaller size groups along the way. Issues such as this will become apparent through beta and continued datamining, but I believe they are issues that are likely to appear.

WHAT THE FUTURE THEREFORE HOLDS, OR "UUHHH...WHAT WAS THE POINT AGAIN?"
When people see problems with changing activities in the game, the kneejerk reaction is to police those activities. Really, though, we need to keep in mind that the system of rewards--and the ways that system can be manipulated--are integral to our understanding of such shifts in the player population. Often, the best solution is to consider how players are compensated for their accomplishments than to change what they're allowed to do. One thing is for sure: the options for content in this game are continuing to expand, something which should be in the best interests of the game's players and longevity.

Good analysis.

I had the same insight a while ago regarding variety producing challenge. My conclusion was that perhaps AE rewards should be reduced overall, with increased rewards for playing missions selected at random rather than ones specifically chosen by the player. This didn't go down too well, for obvious reasons. I think an algorithmic scaling of variety of challenge to reward would be, if not unexploitable, at least less so.

Of course, the cynical TL;DR is NERF AE AND FARM MISSIONS LOL, but I think you're onto something more interesting.

Yes its a great idea to ruin other peoples fun and chase away paying subscribers.

Did I miss something?

:edit:

BTW, I think the AE should give 1/16th exp

:edit:

Hypocricy at its finest?
Irony?
Two faced?
You cant think like that?
It doesnt work both ways.

You make a lot of valid points Pyromantic. The biggest problem is an aspect of "too late" to all this. In other words, you've presented something with thought but since this is now and not 5 years ago there will most likely be too many complaints and gripes about it.

Personally have no idea what the point of the OP's post; read the first couple sentences of each "bullet point" but other than OP's opinion of the game really have no idea what is being asked or how I respond. Umm pie?

So, in other words: people should be able to do whatever they want to do, but the best rewards should be reserved for things that are difficult to the most people, and variety is one way to measure that breadth of difficulty?

I can get behind that.

this is a good, well-reasoned post
if you read three sentences and complain about not understanding it, you should be banned

perfect pain remains as lucid as always

so wait, does all that boil down to "players will by and large go where the best rewards are?"

Because I've been beating that drum for years now.

You my want to consider adding some sort of executive summary at the beginning here.

So what you're saying is, instead of limiting the ability to farm nothing but bosses for rewards...

We should evaluate the reason why all bosses give greater rewards, and if that reason is justified?


Beating up a minion gives you two dimes.

Beating up a lieutenant gives you two quarters.

Beating up a boss gives you a dollar and one quarter.

The point you're making, is that the money we got from beating these people up used to be balanced by the fact that there was only 1 boss per 20 enemies, and around 5 lieutenants.

Instead now, you can walk into a room and there are now is nothing but groups of bosses. Your income rate has increased dramaticly because now you have the same number of enemies as before, but now they are all rewarding you the best possible rewards.

Maybe I'm just confused.

I thought it was really long and could have been cut to a shorter paragraph or two.
It's so long, I kinda got bored reading through it.

But I am thankful, there was punctuation and breaks instead of the ginormous wall of text it could have been.

Here's an odd question for you number crunches with regards AE farming.

Now everyone wants to run 'boss farms' since it apparently awards the best XP.

Wouldn't lts of the same level as said bosses be better, aren't they in bigger groups and die quicker (nullifying the disadvantage inherent in not getting as much XP from a single kill) and also the group SHOULD die less (though...lets face it...not always)?

Therefore the Reward Per Minute ratio would be substantially higher than a boss farm?

It's just something I've wondered recently and not really found a topic to be able to post it in.

The concept of challenge vs. reward as opposed to risk vs. reward is, well, a bit revolutionary, I think. Honestly, I don't expect you'll get what you're looking for in this particular thread, because I don't think that the forums are ready for the idea. We're still hung up on whether or not farming is a good idea, while your model rather elegantly makes it a non-issue.

But, I think it's the correct idea, and I think you should keep mentioning it, now and again, and allow it to build momentum.

How about if we had a lookup table (derived from live data, refreshed occasionally) which we could feed in team size and spawn composition and get an estimate of 'challenge' to a random team.

We also have another lookup table (produced in the same manner) that we can feed in team composition and spawn composition, and get a second estimate of 'challenge'.

We take some combination of the two measures of challenge and adjust reward (XP, insps, salvage, etc...) for defeat of the spawn accordingly.

I think it is fair to include some degree of how well-tuned a particular team is to the enemies they're facing in the adjustment, as a team of the appropriate makeup for a particular type of enemy essentially faces no real challenge. On the other hand, the act of assembling an appropriate team, picking the right powers, or choosing the correct enemies to face is in itself worthy of reward.

What would be an appropriate measure of 'challenge', though? Is it likelihood of defeat of the whole team, how many defeats a team, on average, will suffer during the removal of the spawn, time spent to defeat the spawn, ... or perhaps some weighting of all the various factors?