TF/SF Merit rewards: An observation.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-04-19 24:37 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Organization and a team that can focus for 5-10 minutes help a lot. You don't have to kill fast if everyone is killing and people have spatial awareness to stay safe and not duplicate efforts. If everyone is killing evenly, you don't have to kill particularly quickly.|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Blueside trial does not require killing fast - yes, you can get overwhelmed, but you also get tools (heals) to help make up for doing poorly.
Redside trial requires killing fast or you fail, period full stop. There are no tools to help you make up for lost ground. I've never completed a redside trial because of this difference. |
It's just a matter of sustained effort.
Sorry you've never succeeded, but your anecdotes (about this and other SFs) are clearly not the norm. Most people do, and do well once they know the ropes.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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Why, then, are my TF completion times pretty much on par, but SF completion times so far below par? If I did poorly on both sides, I'd see a point that it's me, but I only perform "below par" redside, where I spend most of my time.
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Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
Sorry you've never succeeded, but your anecdotes (about this and other SFs) are clearly not the norm. Most people do, and do well once they know the ropes.
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Tarikoss can be done in 17 min. 8 min KHTFs were done by failing the first mission, which was then changed, resulting in 17 minute KHTFs. No real difference to most speeders.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
Except that they didn't have it better, because of the speedruns of Katie prior to merits - unless you're going to tell me that an average completion time of 8-15 mins is longer than 20-30.
I'd also say that the "minimal effort" 45 minute Tarikoss (which by its merit reward has a median completion time of 39 minutes, so that's still too slow) is also doing their best to skip as much as possible - sure, it takes about as much time as an ITF (which can also be finished in 20 mins if you skip all but the objectives), but it rewards half the merits of an ITF. The rewards are simply unbalanced. |
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The red side trial is definitely harder. |
Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
There's nothing particularly harder about the Red Side respec. The case you cited (lowbies with bad builds) is something that fails on EITHER side, and honestly the trials weren't designed around such teams. You're SUPPOSED to be bringing some people tough enough to do well.
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Redside:
Mission 1: defeat CoT (either 25, 40, or 50). Typically just time consuming.
Mission 2: Either you fight Wyvern, Longbow and Legacy Chain foes with a couple EBs IIRC (1st) or you fight DE (2nd) or Malta (3rd)
Mission 3: Orenbega Map of Circle of Thorns. Then more CoT around tree. Then kill all vines ASAP to avoid them respawning without getting one shot (plus DoT) by the AV. Then kill AV.
Blueside:
The type of missions differ from contact to contact but the mobs never differ.
1st Respec: Sky Raiders. Hunt, door mission then reactor.
2nd Respec: Freaks. 2 Door missions, then reactor.
3rd Respec: Rikti. A hunt, door mission, patrol then reactor.
Blue side has easier factions, less 'work' and no AV. The only complaint I hear about the blue trials is the waiting for the reactor spawns. There is NOTHING hard about blue side trials, but there are several items that can be difficult for redside trials.
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Blueside respec trials used to be fun like the redside ones are, in that the core was a lot more exciting.|
Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
There's nothing particularly harder about the Red Side respec. The case you cited (lowbies with bad builds) is something that fails on EITHER side, and honestly the trials weren't designed around such teams. You're SUPPOSED to be bringing some people tough enough to do well.
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Currently the waves are spaced out so far as to create a yawnfest. I never do bluespecs anymore unless I have a gun pointed at me. If there was a big red button in the Terra Volta reactor that spawned all the waves at once I would push it. Repeatedly.
However, it must be said that the *reason* on why you'd need to go on a respec trial is because your toon is not optimally configured, so requiring tough people was always a bit of a conundrum for me to grok.
Of course the spacing out the waves had the unintended side effect of increasing the merit rewards by lengthening the time it took to complete the trial.
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Redside trial requires killing fast or you fail, period full stop. There are no tools to help you make up for lost ground.
I've never completed a redside trial because of this difference. |
The trick to the vines is that they do not respawn individually, they are grouped into bundles. Depending on how cautious you want to be you can adopt this strategy:
1. Clear the CoT around the room surrounding the vines.
2. Use your ranged attackers and tough melee toons to go around and damage all the vines but not defeat them (bring their health low).
3. Cull a select number of vines in a spaced out fashion. Vines will not reappear individually. A respawn of the entire bundle happens only after the last vine in that bundle has been defeated, pending a delay. This means you can prune out a few vines, probably 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 without triggering any respawns. Usually you won't need to do this at all if you've done step 2, but it also means that accidentally defeating a few vines in step 2 won't trigger any bad consequences.
4. Spread the team out and basically go in and one shot the vines. Put the tough toons in the front where the tree can't one shot the squishies.
5. The Tree AV is just like any other AV at this point. The vines will not respawn. Make sure to watch out for the ambushes incoming, although at this point faster is better since fewer mobs will need to be dealt with if you can get out quickly.
Depending on how strong the team is, you can skip 1, 2 and 3 and just zerg the vines and then defeat the tree.
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A tip for this mission is that the CoT counted are universal. That is, it does not have to be CoT in a specific area or even in the same zone.|
Originally Posted by Clouded
Redside:
Mission 1: defeat CoT (either 25, 40, or 50). Typically just time consuming. |
A very fast way to do this mission is to station a couple of people at the ferry. Once the trial is started have them zip into Cap Au Diable and just zap the low level CoT on the hill just left of the ferry (near the BM).
The leader of the trial shouldn't have to leave the contact for this mission.
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Still harder than the blueside trial. The reactor doesn't take "strategy", it just takes sitting there and bashing spawns as they come in.
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Originally Posted by PumBumbler
The trick to the vines is that they do not respawn individually, they are grouped into bundles. Depending on how cautious you want to be you can adopt this strategy:
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Originally Posted by Neg_Let
tl;dr:
Couldn't help but notice that when comparing the Hero Merit Rewards and the Villain Merit Reward pages from ParagonWiki, heroes tend to have higher amount of rewards per TF then villains per SF. Discuss. |
Yup.
Been that way for a long time. Devs seem to have no intention on fixing the disparity. Heroes are happy. Par for the course.
The claim is that Villains can run all of their SF's in the time it takes for heroes to do some of the longer ones. I still laugh at that. Villains are penalized for the game design regardless of difficulty. Heroes can earn more merits by level 35 than a villain can by 40 without ever touching a story arc.
I don't see it changing any time soon.
Grabbing some popcorn now.
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"Silly villain, CoX is for Heroes!" -Saicho
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The blueside trial contains an unavoidable time sink. No matter how good you are you can't speed up the trial. The redside trial's completion time depends entirely on how good and how fast your team is.|
Originally Posted by JJDrakken
Respec trials:
CoH: 28 merits, 20 merits, 20 merits CoV: 14 merits, 14 merits, 15 merits |
As far as I'm concerned, handing out what essentially amount to free merits for running laps around the core is poor design. Not to mention that the blueside trial is horrendously boring because of the unavoidable time sink. Add a "next wave" trigger and the completion times, and thus the merit reward, will be more on par with the villain-side trial.
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Is that a good thing? Isn't having new types of missions and spawns adding to the richness of the game as opposed to just hack and slash?
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Still harder than the blueside trial. The reactor doesn't take "strategy", it just takes sitting there and bashing spawns as they come in.
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Speeders are not hurting merit rewards for Strike Forces. The merit reward formula is hurting Strike Force rewards. The merit reward formula for TF and SFs need to be reworked so it uses expected time and challenge level instead of median time.
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
That's pretty much exactly my point. Speeders are skewing numbers low and hurting the rest of us.
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This is false. By limiting the amount of players on a team, speeding up the recharge rate on high DPS ATs, Stealth TPing and the use of ATT; you can sweep through a tf at a very fast rate and avoid most of the TFs time sink.|
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
The blueside trial contains an unavoidable time sink. No matter how good you are you can't speed up the trial...
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Unfortunately villain players tend to be smarter with the Time vs Reward ratio when running their content and we are penalized for that.
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She said Trials, not TFs. The Trials have a built in time sink at the reactor.
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Originally Posted by Tokyo
This is false. By limiting the amount of players on a team, speeding up the recharge rate on high DPS ATs, Stealth TPing and the use of ATT; you can sweep through a tf at a very fast rate and avoid most of the TFs time sink.
Unfortunately villain players tend to be smarter with the Time vs Reward ratio when running their content and we are penalized for that. |
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Ah, that's right. sorry bout that, 's early. Reading comprehension failure on my part.|
Originally Posted by Clouded
She said Trials, not TFs. The Trials have a built in time sink at the reactor.
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Respec trials bluside annoy me at the reactors because of that ridiculous time sink.
I've still been able to get through blueside respecs in 30 to 45 minutes, despite that time sink.
For many redside players it still takes 30 minutes to complete a respec trial.
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On the plus side you can go get something to eat then.
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Originally Posted by Clouded
She said Trials, not TFs. The Trials have a built in time sink at the reactor.
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total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Perhaps rather than awarding merits based on average completion time, base it on actual completion time. Since this would obviously result in teams just idling in a TF to maximize merits, you could base the elapsed time on a log of actual power activation times, split up between team members. IOW, the game keeps a log, finding that during the TF, Mr. Fantastic activated Brawl 200 times at X seconds, Havoc Punch 300 times at Y seconds, etc. Then add a set allowance for travel time between missions, clicking any glowies, leading hostages out, or other non-combat events.
Sure, there's probably lots of ways to 'game' a system like that. And it'd be a coding nightmare. But it would directly correlate the reward to the time spent actually defeating the mobs.
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I don't like the idea of being penalized for being able to speed through a TF or SF.|
Originally Posted by Tyrrano
Perhaps rather than awarding merits based on average completion time, base it on actual completion time. Since this would obviously result in teams just idling in a TF to maximize merits, you could base the elapsed time on a log of actual power activation times, split up between team members. IOW, the game keeps a log, finding that during the TF, Mr. Fantastic activated Brawl 200 times at X seconds, Havoc Punch 300 times at Y seconds, etc. Then add a set allowance for travel time between missions, clicking any glowies, leading hostages out, or other non-combat events.
Sure, there's probably lots of ways to 'game' a system like that. And it'd be a coding nightmare. But it would directly correlate the reward to the time spent actually defeating the mobs. |
I want them to actually calcualte some form of Risk vs Reward component into the merit system. They are always spouting this "risk vs reward" mantra and yet I never see anything that supports it.
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It depends. Should a team that can stealth and TP most missions get the same rewards as a team that steam rolls the same content and does not skip any?
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Originally Posted by Tokyo
I don't like the idea of being penalized for being able to speed through a TF or SF.
I want them to actually calcualte some form of Risk vs Reward component into the merit system. They are always spouting this "risk vs reward" mantra and yet I never see anything that supports it. |
If I had the choice to make between a system that rewards people more for figuring out how to do things faster, or a complex cumbersome metric that you can only derive maximum benefit from by doing profoundly counterintuitive things... I'll take the speed runs, thanks. At least "faster = better" is a heuristic anyone can understand. The only thing that bugs me about speed runs is when getting a faster speed means doing things that you wouldn't be able to guess might work.
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Besides doing it faster is rewarded in freeing you up to do it again or something else.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
The current Merit rewards are already based on 'expected time to finish', it's just that it is expected that 'your' time to complete will be sufficiently close to the Median time.
Not always the case, and requires frequent recalculation, but I'm not sure I've seen a better idea.
In a game this flexible, where your powersets can just be way suboptimal for a given task (squishies versus armored mezzers, fire damage versus fire resistant foes, etc) any task you set up will have some team that is just the best at it. That team will complete the task quickly, and everyone else will lag.
If you base rewards on the people that are best at it, then everyone else changes to do things like the fast people (or doesn't and grouses about it), and that becomes the new 'standard'.
If you base rewards on the people that are worst at it, then the people who are best get over rewarded, everyone emulates them anyway, everyone gets over rewarded, and nerfs result (see Speed Katies).
What I mean by over rewarded should be obvious, but here's an explanation anyway. If the Devs design a TF to give out, say 10 Merits and be 30 minutes of play, then they are probably okay if everyone actually does it in 15 and gets 40 Merits/hour instead of 20. But if someone figures out how to do it in 5 (120 merits/hour) that's not going to be acceptable.
At that point you either need to nerf the mission (the old solution) or adjust the reward (the new solution).
There are other solutions, but most of the seem to boil down to 'put time sinks in missions so they can't be speeded too fast'.
Tyranno and Tokyo: I don't think your suggestion is workable, but at least it's a suggestion; thanks. If you want me to elaborate, I will, but this post is long enough already.
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Currently the system just looks at the last time you've done that TF and sets in to penalize you such that you receive 1x, .5x, .33x, .25x in a 1/N multiplier, where N is the number of times you've done the TF without an 18 hour gap.|
Originally Posted by Tyrrano
Perhaps rather than awarding merits based on average completion time, base it on actual completion time. Since this would obviously result in teams just idling in a TF to maximize merits, you could base the elapsed time on a log of actual power activation times, split up between team members. IOW, the game keeps a log, finding that during the TF, Mr. Fantastic activated Brawl 200 times at X seconds, Havoc Punch 300 times at Y seconds, etc. Then add a set allowance for travel time between missions, clicking any glowies, leading hostages out, or other non-combat events.
Sure, there's probably lots of ways to 'game' a system like that. And it'd be a coding nightmare. But it would directly correlate the reward to the time spent actually defeating the mobs. |
Evidently the TF/SF times are bimodally distributed: there are two populations, the speeders and the non-speeders.
If the devs wanted to equalize things a bit, they should put in a separate timer for not doing any TF at all, and put that at 4 or 5 days (or even build up towards it). If you don't do a TF between that time you can get a bonus for the next TF you do...let's say (it caps at) +15% or +5 merits (whichever is more), and then it resets itself. Consider it a day job for doing 'normal activities' as opposed to grinding TFs.
As well, reducing the range of lowest to highest rewards should reduce the amount of TF/SF 'cherry picking', and a big bonus (20 merits or so) should be given to people who get the (finishing) badge for the TF/SF. This means that first timers (toonwise) will get a bonus for running a TF/SF, since you can only get the badge once.
It would mean that KHTF and Eden trial may actually be worth something to the casual player instead of getting a poor reward because the speeder has lowered the time so drastically.
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Theoretically completists are getting xp and influence and salvage and recipe drops along with defeating mobs, counterbalancing the skipping of the mobs to just get to the end.|
Originally Posted by Clouded
It depends. Should a team that can stealth and TP most missions get the same rewards as a team that steam rolls the same content and does not skip any?
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That part of the rewards formula touches upon the fact that teaming in itself gets lesser rewards per individual than a solo person doing the same content. ie. soloing x8 or farming x6-x8 missions for drops.
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Not if the "just hack and slash" has substantially superior rewards to the richer parts of the game.
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Originally Posted by PumBumbler
Is that a good thing? Isn't having new types of missions and spawns adding to the richness of the game as opposed to just hack and slash?
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I'd also say that the "minimal effort" 45 minute Tarikoss (which by its merit reward has a median completion time of 39 minutes, so that's still too slow) is also doing their best to skip as much as possible - sure, it takes about as much time as an ITF (which can also be finished in 20 mins if you skip all but the objectives), but it rewards half the merits of an ITF.
The rewards are simply unbalanced.