TF/SF Merit rewards: An observation.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-04-19 24:37 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Quote:
It's a Catch-22: since Merits are based on the median time to complete content, they reward speed runs. If you penalize speed runs, then you are actually basing Merits on the actual time to complete content: you are now rewarding people not for completing more of the content, but for taking longer to complete the same content.|
Originally Posted by Clouded
But why should a team that skips content get the same merit reward for a team that does not?
Remember Merits are the reward for median time is takes to complete a TF/SF. So if someone is skipping the content to get a faster merit/hour ratio why should people who don't skip the content be subject to the same merit reward because they choose to actually experience the full TF/SF? Basically, what I'm seeing is that speed runs (stealth + TP) are the norm (especially on the ITF) and normal runs are what seem out of place. If anything, people running normal TFs/SFs should be a bonus merit(s) for not skipping content. In short, merits stay the same, but completing certain % of content rewards additional merits. That way speed runners aren't being penalized and normal TFs get their just merit rewards. |
To base Merits on the amount of content completed, there would have to be a seperate Merit reward for each piece of content, thus meaning that all goals in a mission just became mandatory...
...unless partial completion of more missions in the same amount of time is better rewarded than full completion of fewer missions in that time. If that happens you are right back to where we are now.
Also important is the fact that the Devs are currently moving toward more of an arc being optional rather than mandatory as story branch tech enters the game.
Basically, you have to decide: is a Merit reward a reward for acheiving Mission Complete at all, or should certain goals within a mission have their own Merit rewards?
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Quote:
The issue is that the devs have decided that "time completed" is the proper metric not for rewarding merits, but for how many merits are rewarded. This is the issue. |
Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
I feel merits are awarded for the task. "You stopped Vandal. Hooray!" Whether you did it in 20 minutes or 20 days, the end result is the same.
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A strike force should have an amount of merit award based on some metric set by the devs - not player performance - and stay static there. How slow, or fast, one team or another completes that task should not play into it at all.
If another team completes tasks faster and thus earns more merits/minute than another, that's fine. So long as the slower team is not being penalised because the faster team is doing things faster, which is currently the case.
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I can't think of a more accurate way to measure the difficulty of a task than to look at the median time to completion.
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
If another team completes tasks faster and thus earns more merits/minute than another, that's fine. So long as the slower team is not being penalised because the faster team is doing things faster, which is currently the case.
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Where to now?
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Quote:
Because the content being skipped carries its own reward (XP, infl, drops). Overall, the TF/SF has a primary objective - how you achieve that is up to you.
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Originally Posted by Clouded
Why should someone skipping content receive the same merit reward as someone completing all the content?
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
Quote:
If you're looking for a simple, one-look never-worry answer that requires no thought and can be simply plugged into a spreadsheet for an answer, maybe.|
Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
I can't think of a better way to measure the difficulty of a task than to look at the median time to completion.
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Median time ignores a large swath of factors, however - success rate (it ignores failed attempts altogether), repeat success (the same team doing the same task five times is going to bring down the median time without really being reflective of relative difficulty), preparation time (if your speed run takes an hour of prep in Warburg or Bloody Bay to result in a half hour run, the task really takes an hour and a half) - that all factor into the "difficulty" of a given task.
Median time is a pretty poor metric, especially as it over-represents repeat success by a large margin, and as median time is lowered, those that would produce off-sets on the longer side to bring up the median time are increasingly discouraged from even starting the task, let alone finishing it, because their time is poorly rewarded.
Median time is a simple, but not particularly effective, measure of difficulty.
And yet, median run times is a better metric than "one size fits all". Which is what we had before Merits.
You could base the merit reward for a TF on the number and kind of mandatory objectives: merits are rewarded for doing exactly what is needed to complete the TF, and everything else is its own reward. This would be much more rigorous and complex than simply calculating median times. It would also bias the merit rewards more toward speed runs, as it wouldn't even take into account the higher run times of those who complete non-mandatory objectives.
Or, again, you could make everything possible mandatory, or mandatory for full rewards. Is that really, really what you want? Because people will still complete TFs faster than you do, and get more rewards per time than you do, and the devs will still have to account for this in the reward rates, because they can't ignore it.
@SPTrashcan
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Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
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Because of the wide disparity of possible teams and builds in this game, there is no real way to gauge 'difficulty', only 'tasks completed' and 'time'.
Everyone who has ever created a Mission Architect arc realizes this. On the exact same mission, you will get feedback from players saying, "It's impossible to complete! You should warn people how deadly it is!" and "It's far too easy. No challenge whatsoever."
Besides, you can't just decide a given arc is worth 10 merits and be done.
When you discover that players are farming that arc for 60 Merits per hour (while others are taking 2 hours to complete it), you have to do something.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Quote:
Why? |
Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Because people will still complete TFs faster than you do, and get more rewards per time than you do, and the devs will still have to account for this in the reward rates, because they can't ignore it.
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This game isn't a competition. Why do the devs have to account for the fact that some people play the game faster than others? For some reason this is always taken as a given in game design, and yet I've never understood why. Why does it matter than someone else can get twice as much stuff as I can? Why do I have to get half as much to compensate for them doing so?
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That's because it's not a measure of difficulty. It's a measure of number of missions, type of goals needed to complete missions, zone size, mission placement, and a lot of other things that were treated differently as design factors when the game launched than when updates and new TF/SFs have been added.|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Median time is a simple, but not particularly effective, measure of difficulty.
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You will always win the argument that median time isn't a good measure of difficulty, so long as people let you conflate those two terms.
My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.
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I didn't conflate them. Dechs, to whom I was responding, did.
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Originally Posted by EarthWyrm
You will always win the argument that median time isn't a good measure of difficulty, so long as people let you conflate those two terms.
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In a phrase: "Speed Katies"|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Why?
This game isn't a competition. Why do the devs have to account for the fact that some people play the game faster than others? For some reason this is always taken as a given in game design, and yet I've never understood why. Why does it matter than someone else can get twice as much stuff as I can? Why do I have to get half as much to compensate for them doing so? |
The Katie Hannon TF was designed with a certain reward level for time to completion ratio. People found ways to complete the missions in roughly a quarter to a tenth of the time. It became far more reward efficient than intended, and the fast way became the standard way of doing it.
Remember: there is always a speed of reward/progress that breaks the game because the game wasn't designed for it. Also, people will burn out and stop playing when they delude themselves that they have to adopt methods they don't enjoy in order to get rewards 'fast enough': you may not do it, but many players gauge their success by their peers. Apparently, a financially significant number of players.
The Devs changed the TF to curb this, but also conceived of handling things the other way: adjust the rewards rather than the mission.
Katie Hannon is just an example, but the idea is clear: A Merit is worth 3 minutes of your time spent on a TF. However, we can't just measure how long each person spends doing it, that would lead to abuse. So, we can base it on the slowest people (leads to the fastest people getting rewards that are too high), the fastest people (most people's rewards are too slow, or we are forcing them to adopt the faster methods) or the median.
They chose the median.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
I can't think of a more accurate way to measure the difficulty of a task than to look at the median time to completion.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by EarthWyrm
You will always win the argument that median time isn't a good measure of difficulty, so long as people let you conflate those two terms.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
I didn't conflate them. Dechs, to whom I was responding, did.
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I cannot think of a more accurate measurement of required effort expended to complete a task than to look at the median time to completion.
Where to now?
Check out all my guides and fiction pieces on my blog.
The MFing Warshade | The Last Rule of Tanking | The Got Dam Mastermind
Everything Dark Armor | The Softcap
don'T attempt to read tHis mEssaGe, And believe Me, it is not a codE.
Quote:
So it's a bad idea for you to play closer to my or Eiko's slower style, but it's okay in the current system where your speeder style forces us to match how YOU play to get decent merit rewards? No. Try again.
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Originally Posted by PumBumbler
Are you suggesting people adhere to your style of play simply because you don't find theirs valid? I'm not sure that speeders are that small of a minority, but I am sure they get over represented in the data mining.
In my experience, I can get a full team and start a task force in about 5-10 minutes, including recruitment on public channels. Basically I only do task forces and I always speed. I usually have more people (non-globalfriends/non-SGmates) asking to join my team than I have spaces as well. The demand for fast TF/SFs is there in the general population and not as small as you've stated. Just remember that whatever system you want to devise, like a defeat half, the speeder will always do it the fast way and then get out. To be honest, that's kind of the reason why I play. I like teasing apart the hard points of the game and working around it. The (merit) rewards don't even matter to me anymore. A change to a grading system reminds me of figure skating, would be complicated to (re)program and would confuse the casual player. ... I can only suggest that you come over to Justice and take a peek at what we're doing. I'd be more than happy to describe our strategies and show you what we do. Then you can decide where best to optimize your TF/SFs and then you can decide if you want to skip parts or defeat all or try for the lowest time. I've never had anything to hide and you can always ask me what/why I do the things I do in a TF. Sorry for the long response, I just don't want to come across as being glib. |
Tales of Judgment. Also here, instead of that other place.
good luck D.B.B.
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This game isn't a competition, so how are you so sure you're losing?
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Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
Why?
This game isn't a competition. Why do the devs have to account for the fact that some people play the game faster than others? For some reason this is always taken as a given in game design, and yet I've never understood why. Why does it matter than someone else can get twice as much stuff as I can? Why do I have to get half as much to compensate for them doing so? |
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
Quote:
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Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
This game isn't a competition, so how are you so sure you're losing?
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Really?!
You're saying this game isn't a competition, so there's no need to min/max and speed through content to get rewards at a faster pace?
Tales of Judgment. Also here, instead of that other place.
good luck D.B.B.
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I'd agree with that statement. Desire is not need. |
Originally Posted by Agonus
Really?! You're saying this game isn't a competition, so there's no need to min/max and speed through content to get rewards at a faster pace? |
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
CoV's SF's are designed better yes, you have to do far less zoning and have less "defeat x in zone y" filler missions.
Like Underworld? Then take a look at! http://moonid.net/account/recruitmen.../monstersgame/
And don't forget to join the fight for our City! http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ard,134.0.html
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I'm having trouble understanding what you're asking. I am saying that this game is not a competition. I am saying that it is not necessary to obtain rewards at a faster pace. If you do want to obtain rewards at a faster pace, you do have to employ strategies - in building, in teaming, in combat tactics and in mission strategy - that get you those rewards faster. For the most part, I see this as a feature - note that I did state that unguessable methods for shortening speed runs, strategies that can only be discovered by accident or by word of mouth and that circumvent objectives that the devs intended to be uncircumventable, are serious issues that need to be dealt with at a design level and not at a reward level. But at the most general level, I do support the idea that choices have consequences. I don't mind that speed runs are possible, and I don't mind that they have an effect on rewards. |
Originally Posted by Agonus
You're saying this game isn't a competition, so there's no need to min/max and speed through content to get rewards at a faster pace?
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I do mind that they have an unequal effect on rewards across the diversity of content, but I see that as an artifact of the evolution in design philosophy between when the TFs were designed and when the SFs were designed, and as TFs get revamped this will go away.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
Quote:
My experience is exactly the opposite of yours on the ITF. Every team I've been on that runs ITF, pretty much just steamrolls everything in its path. There isn't really anything on that TF that can be stealth/TP'd and avoided.|
Originally Posted by Clouded
Basically, what I'm seeing is that speed runs (stealth + TP) are the norm (especially on the ITF) and normal runs are what seem out of place. If anything, people running normal TFs/SFs should be a bonus merit(s) for not skipping content.
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Mission 1: Team has to free all 10 Sybils, then get Sister Solaris to the altar.
Mission 2: Team has to destroy the 10 Shadow Cysts.
Mission 3: Team has to defeat the generals, the computer, Romulus and Requiem.
Mission 4: Team has to defeat Romulus and 300 Cimeroran Traitors.
Stealth and TP aren't going to allow the team to avoid any of those objectives.
Too many folks in this thread are assuming that fast & efficient teams are somehow 'cheating' and skipping most of the content during TF/SF runs. It is much less of that, and much more of them simply being players leveraging their strengths such as regularly playing together & lots of experience running TF's, combined with an excellent understanding of game mechanics, team composition and builds.
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Not my assumption at all. I think Task Forces have approximately the right Merit rewards - including the co-op task forces. My group runs on the ITF tend to be around two hours* - slower than the median, but not grossly outside the curve. |
Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
Too many folks in this thread are assuming that fast & efficient teams are somehow 'cheating' and skipping most of the content during TF/SF runs.
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On the other hand, our runs on the BSF and LRSF both tend towards three+ hours of time, with the same players and more-or-less the same characters as the ITF runs. If the SFs are simply "better designed", rather than poorly measured, why such a difference in performance for what, according to Merit formulas, should all be approximately equal tasks?
* Assuming we win; the Nictus Romulus fight has mechanics that make things tougher if you have MMs on the team, which we, as villain players, tend to like playing.
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The difference is that I didn't propose this system, the developers did. I'm sorry that it is not congruent to your style of play. I never asked them to do it and I always thought it would overly reward speeders at the expense of the casual player. |
Originally Posted by Agonus
So it's a bad idea for you to play closer to my or Eiko's slower style, but it's okay in the current system where your speeder style forces us to match how YOU play to get decent merit rewards? No. Try again.
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I think the original intent was to normalize the reward/time per TF relative to the other TFs, ie. Doc Q (~3 hours) giving a random recipe drop versus KHTF (~15 min) giving the same drop roll. The method they chose to compare them was by using the median time.
I kinda liked the old system better.
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Your claim that the slower players don't get 'decent' merit rewards is false to begin with. The Positron & Synapse TF's didn't change at all with the introduction of merits, yet suddenly their rewards were essentially tripled. That benefited the average player just as much as it did the efficient player. It seems to me that your claim that your rewards aren't 'decent' is based on nothing more than your seeing a certain subset of other players gaining them at a faster rate than you are, and not being happy about that.|
Originally Posted by Agonus
So it's a bad idea for you to play closer to my or Eiko's slower style, but it's okay in the current system where your speeder style forces us to match how YOU play to get decent merit rewards? No. Try again.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Agonus
Really?! You're saying this game isn't a competition, so there's no need to min/max and speed through content to get rewards at a faster pace? |
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What I'm reading is that folks want teams to be penalized for being more efficient. Despite the possibility of those team members having spent time working on their build and building a team to move through a TF/SF easily and efficiently. |
Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
My experience is exactly the opposite of yours on the ITF. Every team I've been on that runs ITF, pretty much just steamrolls everything in its path. There isn't really anything on that TF that can be stealth/TP'd and avoided.
Mission 1: Team has to free all 10 Sybils, then get Sister Solaris to the altar. Mission 2: Team has to destroy the 10 Shadow Cysts. Mission 3: Team has to defeat the generals, the computer, Romulus and Requiem. Mission 4: Team has to defeat Romulus and 300 Cimeroran Traitors. Stealth and TP aren't going to allow the team to avoid any of those objectives. Too many folks in this thread are assuming that fast & efficient teams are somehow 'cheating' and skipping most of the content during TF/SF runs. It is much less of that, and much more of them simply being players leveraging their strengths such as regularly playing together & lots of experience running TF's, combined with an excellent understanding of game mechanics, team composition and builds. |
mean time is a horrible metric to base merit rewards on as you end up penalizing the entire community. I would much prefer merits being based off of types of objectives, number of missions, and a "projected" time that does not change based on average completion, as well as difficulty settings.
On consideration, there actually is one way in which median time heuristics are vulnerable in a feedback loop: it tends to lock in a low initial value. This is more likely when the pool of data points is smaller, such as on redside. GR will help with that. Occasional TFer bonuses and badge bonuses would help too, both in the short term by rewarding slower approaches, and in the long term by attracting more slow data points to push the median higher.
(Yes, I am rather attached to the occasional TFer bonus! It's simple, elegant, addresses many aspects of the problem, and the fact that I'd be claiming it almost every time doesn't hurt.)
@SPTrashcan
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Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
Allow me to make my position perfectly clear:
I feel merits are awarded for the task. "You stopped Vandal. Hooray!" Whether you did it in 20 minutes or 20 days, the end result is the same.
XP, inf, drops are all rewards of defeating enemies. Since these 'optional objectives' have their own rewards, skipping them already incurs a penalty.
The people who are efficient at saving the day should not be penalized for this. They've already penalized themselves by not receiving the other rewards.
All defender teams that tear through the game at blinding pace should not be penalized either. They're better at this game than we are. Typically, the people better at a sport end up winning the trophy.
Where to now?
Check out all my guides and fiction pieces on my blog.
The MFing Warshade | The Last Rule of Tanking | The Got Dam Mastermind
Everything Dark Armor | The Softcap
don'T attempt to read tHis mEssaGe, And believe Me, it is not a codE.