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Originally Posted by Cyber_naut
I don't have a problem with the TF being hard to set up and requiring good players, team makeup and coordination, but the rewards should be something that makes players jaws drop - but not in the current 'that's all?!' manner...
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An appropriate reward for this trial IMO is 50 merits and 20 million inf. The devs just need to put in a real lockout timer on this so a character can't earn a reward for the trial more than once every [X] days. Where X equals what the devs think is fair.
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Personally I think from what I heard, the "buffs" also should be "buffed" up a bit >.>
I agree with EvilGeko's idea the most. The CoP is relatively difficult, especially without nukes. Being an individual who leads them once a week on Live server Freedom, I know it requires a large amount of careful team building and organization, especially if you intend to succeed without nukes and other possible temps. And even without temps (assuming strong team synergy) - it can be beaten in fifteen to thirty minutes. As the current system stands, it makes sense how low the reward is relative to the time the trial takes - but not relative to the difficulty.
Making it a reward you can only get once every 3 to 4 days, or once every 7 days per individual toon - would allow the rewards to be made notably more substantial and ultimately worth the trouble of fighting for them.
Perhaps a small pile of side appropriate merits - 5 hero merits, 5 villain merits. Another might be a large amount of influence - say 50 million. (arbitrary number, insert what you think is fair.)
I also agree that the temp buffs should be increased a bit. As they are, I find them both underwhelming and a bit annoying in live server because you just choose the reward and the buff is randomly given. What buff an individual wants should be their choice so it actually applies to their playstyle.
Of course, all the reward revamp and increase would hinge on that reward only being available every so often and essentially Unfarmable.
I just tested this internally.
Defeating the Aspect and selecting Reward Merits gave me 21 merits, which is what it should be doing, and should have been doing since launch. Repeating the CoP within 24 hours reduces the reward to 10 Merits.
EDIT: As for why we don't put a hard limit on repeatability, such a thing would dramatically reduce the number of potential participants, due to lockout conflicts.
One thing I've been wondering - why doesn't the reward merit formula take into account the completion rate? Being based purely on completion time makes "hard" tasks like the CoP trial, Recluse SF, etc, seem undervalued. If rewards were be scaled on average completion rate, as well as time to complete, it might help towards alleviating this issue.
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Because there's all kind of reasons why a TF isn't completed that have nothing to do with its difficulty. If you consider how many people finish in your metric for reward, your numbers will be skewed in a different and undesired direction. Completion rate can also be skewed by looking at the same character finishing multiple times. That doesn't mean the task is hard or easy. It could simply mean that character either has a trait/powerset that just trumps what the TF throws at it, or the player has learned the trick of the TF and prefers to only play that character through it. Neither one fairly looks at whether the reward correlates to the task.
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Originally Posted by azile
One thing I've been wondering - why doesn't the reward merit formula take into account the completion rate? Being based purely on completion time makes "hard" tasks like the CoP trial, Recluse SF, etc, seem undervalued. If rewards were be scaled on average completion rate, as well as time to complete, it might help towards alleviating this issue.
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Originally Posted by azile
One thing I've been wondering - why doesn't the reward merit formula take into account the completion rate? Being based purely on completion time makes "hard" tasks like the CoP trial, Recluse SF, etc, seem undervalued. If rewards were be scaled on average completion rate, as well as time to complete, it might help towards alleviating this issue.
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At the very least failures should factor into time spent, instead of using time to successful complete, use total time spent to achieve success.
I.E. 5 teams
2, Succeed in 25 minutes.
3, Fail in 1 hour all spent in mission .
Total team time 230 minutes, average time 46 minutes
There would also need to be a setup time in there as a factor as well.
If there isn't going to be an idea of inherent difficulty used to set rewards but a throttling of reward flow to whatever rate is desired, the content should be balanced so its not outrageously undesirable.
As far as I am concerned, reward merits should be based on the median, not average, time to complete (CoP being an exception). Maybe the mode (most frequent time). This would account for powergamers that skew the average down lower than what most people experience.
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By completion rate, I mean specifically: number of task force x completed / number of task force x started. There's precedent for this as well, the devs have used this metric in the past to balance difficulty. Off the top of my head, they talked about the completion rate of the hero respec trial, and ended up toning down the difficulty shortly after it was introduced. Similar comments were made when the Heroes on the final mission of the Lord Recluse Strike Force were lowered to level 53. You'd also want to throw out outliers in the time-to-complete, and time-to-quit-without-completing when figuring out the success/failure rate. But again, this is data mining the devs have done in the past.|
Originally Posted by White Hot Flash
Because there's all kind of reasons why a TF isn't completed that have nothing to do with its difficulty. If you consider how many people finish in your metric for reward, your numbers will be skewed in a different and undesired direction. Completion rate can also be skewed by looking at the same character finishing multiple times. That doesn't mean the task is hard or easy. It could simply mean that character either has a trait/powerset that just trumps what the TF throws at it, or the player has learned the trick of the TF and prefers to only play that character through it. Neither one fairly looks at whether the reward correlates to the task.
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I'd expect the completion rate to be very close to 1 for most tasks (with outliers thrown out), and slightly lower for the "hard" stuff like CoP, RSF, STF, and so forth. I don't think this should be the only metric, I just think it is one that should be considered in the mechanism for determining rewards. There's others, as well: Organization time for events like CoP and Hamidon. A suggestion here would be to factor in number of people required to complete.
It's worth noting that *any* reward metric will be skewed by power gamers. Thus, it's important to choose as robust a metric as possible.
What they should have done with every tf is go back and add task to either pad the tf or give extra merits if you kill 90% of the mobs prior to mission complete. Also overall difficulty needs to be factored in some how because as it stands alot of tfs simply dont get run more than once and only then its for the badge.
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I wish we could simply walk away from the "time" metric which seems to be the center and critical aspect for determining worth. As a result good tactics and teaming would by their own nature result with reduced times; which as a consequence is punished because it took less time.
I agree with the poster that a number of merits should be awarded based on the size of the group required to successfully do the mission, I am thinking of Hami for instance, its gonna take a lot of folks and leaders to manage the effort, and there is much pre-planning and discussion that can not be measured in the so called time metric; because its not happening within the mission itself.
I posted elsewhere a few go-bys to calculate merit rewards independent of time to accomplish the task. But I did not factor a player number required to do this. It may be a good thread to be started on what actions earn merits and by how much, in fact how to price missions in a non time based metric.
Stormy
Haven't read everything posted in this thread, but just wondering if it's worth me pointing out that the Merit Rewards for every task in the game that awards them has what I have previously referred to as a "jigger factor" to account for the developers' perception of the difficulty of the task?
So, the current "time metric" for calculating merit rewards isn't a simple "1 merit per 5 minutes mean average to complete task" or whatever. It's actually that "plus or minus developer-set difficulty bonus/penalty merits".
Now, the calls for a time-independent method of determining merit rewards gets two big thumbs up from me, and here's my thoughts on factors that could be included:
Number of players required to start
Number of players who start
Number of players who complete
Mob-type (we all know that KoA and Malta are a pain in the proverbial, and a hypothetical TF that uses them would be a lot harder than one that uses Council)
Map size
Number of Objectives required per mission
Number of AV's (possibly with a special factor that includes a modifier for the particular AV's in question - after all, Reichsmann is tougher to beat than Dr Vahzilok)
Those are all good, solid, calculable things (for mob type, their XP modifier is probably the most suitable number to use) that can be datamined or already exist in the game. The sums of the factors involved then would be used to calculate an overall modifier that would be used as a multiplier for merit rewards.
Anyway, just thinking aloud (well, thinking through my fingers).
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This would skew it in the opposite direction from how I am reading it that you want it to be. Must remember the average speed TFer/"powergamer" runs the TF about a kajillion times more than the "average player".
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Originally Posted by Agonist_NA
As far as I am concerned, reward merits should be based on the median, not average, time to complete (CoP being an exception). Maybe the mode (most frequent time). This would account for powergamers that skew the average down lower than what most people experience.
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because that would make sense.|
Originally Posted by azile
One thing I've been wondering - why doesn't the reward merit formula take into account the completion rate?
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and because they would have never had to use it for anything before CoP because nothing has been overly difficult for it to affect the rewards. everything is so easy its more effective to say "okay, its not a matter of if they finish, but when they finish our numerous overly simplistic tasks". even in pasts events were the reward and difficulty don't match up, they've just toned down the difficulty.
pure brilliance if you ask me.
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Well if more than 50% of the people running a given TF were speedsters, then that would be appropriate (if time-to-complete is a valid metric, which I am not sure of myself). If it really were a problem of a small number running it a huge number of very short times, one could calculate a median for each account for say the last 10 runs, and then have each account only count once for the overall median. I don't really think you would have to do that, but then I don't have the data either.|
Originally Posted by Gaderath
This would skew it in the opposite direction from how I am reading it that you want it to be. Must remember the average speed TFer/"powergamer" runs the TF about a kajillion times more than the "average player".
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The median is less affected by extremes in the data set, so even just that would be an improvement, even in the presence of a large number of speed runs...
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I disagree that time should be completely taken out of the equation, but the current system is highly subject to the Ecological Fallacy. The more factors used to determine the rewards, the more robust the system as a whole. Complex problems often require complex solutions. Using simple solutions means that the problem has been simplified by making assumptions that may or may not be valid.|
Originally Posted by Shadowe
Haven't read everything posted in this thread, but just wondering if it's worth me pointing out that the Merit Rewards for every task in the game that awards them has what I have previously referred to as a "jigger factor" to account for the developers' perception of the difficulty of the task?
So, the current "time metric" for calculating merit rewards isn't a simple "1 merit per 5 minutes mean average to complete task" or whatever. It's actually that "plus or minus developer-set difficulty bonus/penalty merits". Now, the calls for a time-independent method of determining merit rewards gets two big thumbs up from me, and here's my thoughts on factors that could be included: Number of players required to start Number of players who start Number of players who complete Mob-type (we all know that KoA and Malta are a pain in the proverbial, and a hypothetical TF that uses them would be a lot harder than one that uses Council) Map size Number of Objectives required per mission Number of AV's (possibly with a special factor that includes a modifier for the particular AV's in question - after all, Reichsmann is tougher to beat than Dr Vahzilok) Those are all good, solid, calculable things (for mob type, their XP modifier is probably the most suitable number to use) that can be datamined or already exist in the game. The sums of the factors involved then would be used to calculate an overall modifier that would be used as a multiplier for merit rewards. Anyway, just thinking aloud (well, thinking through my fingers). |
In addition to the what's mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'd love to see the reward formula also take into account:
The number of task forces run on a monthly basis.
The total number of merits intended to be injected into the economy on a large timescale (measured in months).
Other global economic metrics.
I doubt this approach would be feasible without using relatively complex machine learning. If I were to tackle the reward problem, I'd train a Bayesian Network to estimate rewards based the data given by all these factors (and more), then update the reward table with each new issue release. However, programmer time would probably be better spent doing other things.
Even under the current reward scheme, reward values need to be looked at again. There have been some systems which dramatically changed the amount of time it takes to complete a task since the last time the task reward table was updated. Specifically, super side kicking made a huge difference. I can imagine the inherent fitness changes having a similar effect - especially for low level activities.
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This is a notion that I think is very relevant. If the devs need a reason to stop and look at the reward system again, inherent fitness is a darn good one. Even beyond the low level activities, it's going to change how things work for every character -- ones that didn't use it will now be benefitting from Health and Stamina, and ones that did use it are going to have extra powers once the slots open up. That's a big change.
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Originally Posted by azile
Even under the current reward scheme, reward values need to be looked at again. There have been some systems which dramatically changed the amount of time it takes to complete a task since the last time the task reward table was updated. Specifically, super side kicking made a huge difference. I can imagine the inherent fitness changes having a similar effect - especially for low level activities.
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
No AT/powerset, AFAIC, is "undesirable." Give me a halfway competent player - or at least one willing to listen and go with the rest of the team - and we're good.
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If this is true, then the review won't happen for at least a month until after I19 is out yet.
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Originally Posted by NorvellDevelopment
This is a notion that I think is very relevant. If the devs need a reason to stop and look at the reward system again, inherent fitness is a darn good one. Even beyond the low level activities, it's going to change how things work for every character -- ones that didn't use it will now be benefitting from Health and Stamina, and ones that did use it are going to have extra powers once the slots open up. That's a big change.
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Setting the reward at a pitiful 21 merits for a tf that requires 3 teams and careful team planning is severely reducing the number of potential participants, due to not wanting to go through the PITA of just setting one up. I play this game a lot, and I've gotton on this TF once since release, and had one other opportunity. The incentives to play this TF are clearly ridiculously too low.
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Originally Posted by Castle
I just tested this internally.
Defeating the Aspect and selecting Reward Merits gave me 21 merits, which is what it should be doing, and should have been doing since launch. Repeating the CoP within 24 hours reduces the reward to 10 Merits. EDIT: As for why we don't put a hard limit on repeatability, such a thing would dramatically reduce the number of potential participants, due to lockout conflicts. |
Eh, I think the rewards are fine now. I don't think they calculate start up time in their formula to decide the reward amount. Personally, I haven't been on a CoP that took longer than 30 minutes.
[U][URL="http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=251594"][/URL][/U]
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have you ever done the work of setting one up? Why not?
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Originally Posted by Fiery-Enforcer
Eh, I think the rewards are fine now. I don't think they calculate start up time in their formula to decide the reward amount. Personally, I haven't been on a CoP that took longer than 30 minutes.
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Lots of 50's yada yada. still finding fun things to do.
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I think they should add a new badge for successfully running the CoP ten times, as follows:
"A Slap in the Face"
"You've fought weird extradimensional creatures, gods, the clock, and your own limitations over and over again, and what do you get? A Slap in the Face."
It's highly likely that the combination of too much allergy medication and not enough caffeine prompted this, but in general there needs to be some incentive for multiple runs. By comparison, it requires far more advance planning and pre-organization than a ship raid, plus is more hassle and less fun for the participants; yet on smaller servers, not even those happen very often. (Besides, once they did this, in the future every time someone pointed out that that the reward for something else is a slap in the face, people could respond snarkily with "No, that's the reward for completing the CoP ten times." Endless amusement!
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