So to kill time while water boils or I'm waiting to go shopping while m bunny finishes a pod cast I started a new tablet game. Having 4 Nexus 7's and a smart phone I downloaded the same game on all five devices. The one I play on my phone gets easily 10 times more love then the tablets. One of the tablets however, it has the most powerful creatures, amazing items and got several rare bonuses. It makes the one I put 10x more effort into seem pointless to even touch because it's so much worse.
This problem will exist in any system where RNG rules the loot table. X item has a 1/512,000 chance to drop. Each roll being independent of each other. This leads to an item literately being impossible to get by a single person even those with no life if they have bad luck. So, what can be done?
I personally feel that each time X enemy is slain any "named" or "rare loot" drop should have it's odds improved until the item has dropped at least once for that "Character" So If I kill the "Snake of Kicking" for his "Boot of Biting" which has a 1/512,000 chance to drop then the 2nd time I kill him the snake's boot will have a 2/512,000 or 1/256,000 chance. Kill him 10 times and it's now 1/51,200 a much more reasonable number to be sure but still up to RNG. If I manage to reach 400 kills for that single named boss that now 1 in 1,280 chance almost feels reachable.
You could say just making the item drop more often would solve this but again I say not true. A player with bad luck can be after an item with a 75% drop rate and get no drop for 30 kills and then get their 1 drop. Each roll is independent.
I get most of my named loot from others personally cause RNG universally hates me. I have a lot of experience with the 75% drop rate example.
RNG = Random Number Generator or the god thereof
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
I like this idea, but it will require adjustment of the starting odds.
Imagine 2[sup]19[/sup] people defeating 10 Snakes of Kicking each. If one gets the Boot of Biting (as expected by the odds of 2[sup]-19[/sup]), and the rest now have odds of 2[sup]-18[/sup] when they defeat their next Snake of Kicking. With very nearly 2[sup]19[/sup] people still trying, by the odds we now expect almost 2 more Boots of Biting to drop... By the time those who are still trying defeat their tenth Snake of Kicking, almost 55 Boots of Biting have dropped, about five and a half times what would be expected without the odds increase.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
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Very valid concern. In general, I really despise RNG playing too much of a role (heh) in gameplay. The Rarer something is, the worse I hate the RNG.
However, if they stick to something similar to the CoH system, it shouldn't be an issue since IIRC, every participant got a "special" loot of some sort for completing the major events (Task Forces, Hamidon, ect.).
Even if they didn't want to keep with that particular level of drop, they can still drop "components" from which the superwhamodyne items can be assembled.
Overall, I agree. Consistency is better, and the RNG god frequently needs a boot up its ass.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
I liked the ToHit streakbreaker in CoH, and would have zero issues with a similar concept applied elsewhere, such as raid reward drop rates, "gambling box / card pack" pets and costume piece drops. Even CoH's merit rewards functioned as a partial backstop for the RNG, so if CoT has an equivalent guaranteed reward (for practically every activity) that can be trading in at a reasonable rate for the drops withheld by the RNG, then I'll be pleased.
The auction house, of course, serves as another backstop, but only if items are not bind-on-pickup...or even better, not even bind-on-equip! CoH did far better than most games in that regard; only incarnate stuff really ventured seriously into BoE / BoP territory, and at least there was lore-driven justification for some of it. Few games bother to justify why I can't give Sword#344583 to my friend, but any random vendor will give me 64 silver for it.
I think a lot of good points have been brought up.
Just a side-note to be semi-devil's advocate: I really didn't like, well, actually very much disliked, how absolutely EVERY attack hit in Champions Online. There was no missing at all. I guess because people whined so loud and often on the CoH forums about "whiffiing"? But never missing at all was no fun and just... weird. Very unrealistic and immersion-breaking. I just kept thinking "man, Spider-Man and Batman would be screwed in this world."
Personally, I liked it when I was against an opponent with high defense, because they wouldn't have high resistance, and when I finally tagged them hard I would think "HAH! Gotcha ya slippper little bugger!"
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Our resident math guru has some interesting thoughts on how to handle many aspects of the RNG so far as rewards go. Our combat model has this covered pretty darn well. Details unfortunately are not forthcoming for quite some time. Sometimes you have to keep your cards close to your chest.
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- Combat Mechanic -
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The whole "whiffing" thing came about because of a ... peculiarity ... in how City of Heroes did its math for Accuracy and To-hit. Took Arcanaville a good long time to puzzle out, only to yield a [i]YOU DID WHAT?!?!!?[/i] answer because of the behaviors it produced, rewarded and encouraged.
To be fair, I had the same problem with the pen & paper RPG system that Palladium used in many of its game books back in the 90s. It basically came down to "roll a 5+ on d20" to HIT anything, and then it was the target's responsibility to do ... something about it. Because it was of course all too easy to rack up +to hit modifiers in the game (and was in fact the standard practice), this essentially turned into a "don't roll a 1 on d20" system to be able to hit pretty much anything, and then the defender needed to waste actions actively trying not to get hit (and usually failing). Because of this fundamental underlying "reality" of how the game engine worked, you wound up with "Big Bag Of HP" characters and mecha and everything else that could effectively "soak" all of these automatic hits you could never do anything about.
City of Heroes started out with a 75% chance to hit / 25% chance to "whiff" as its baseline at game launch. The thing was, for most Powers, all you needed to do was slot a single Accuracy SO and that turned into a 100% chance to hit which got hardcapped at 95%. Essentially, a "don't roll a 1 on d20" system to hit things. This meant that hitting stuff was the Expected Normal, while missing stuff was the "broken" behavior that lay outside of Expectations. Plus there was that whole Wasted Endurance And Recharge For No Damage problem rolled into it as well, because "whiffing" wasted resources for zero DPS.
So people hated "whiffing" ... and the Devs obliged by making a system in which it was "roll 1 on d20 to whiff" against NPCs.
Later on, they tried to rebalance everything around 50% instead of 75% ... and THAT did not go over well ... which was exactly what it sounds like ... a NERF. There were a few rounds of jiggery-pokery, which ultimately meant that the behavioral dynamics just went back to being what they had been before (ie. "roll a 1 on d20") while the absolute numbers in use switched from being based on 75 to being based on 50. The reason this was done was because of the Conventional Wisdom about how all of this ought to work had calcified into total rigidity among the players, and any "nerfs" to it simply weren't going to be tolerated. After all, it isn't thrilling to see the word [b]MISS[/b] popping up a lot instead of Big Damage Numbers that make you feel powerful.
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Our resident math guru has some interesting thoughts on how to handle many aspects of the RNG so far as rewards go. Our combat model has this covered pretty darn well. Details unfortunately are not forthcoming for quite some time. Sometimes you have to keep your cards close to your chest.
This might be so, but it means I have to keep wondering if I will have to spend 5 years after 1 item killing the boss every 3 days. (Raid timer) situation. It has happened to me, 530ish kills to get my piece of loot with a 1 chance every 3 days. Fortunately someone else finally passed me theirs. I was slacking a bit or I'd have likely be able to try about 75 more times over those years.
The fact the item was character bound on looting and very rare did not help matters however when a items, enhancement, salvage, ect is a corner stone of a build concept then my play ends up turning into, disable monthly sub, log in once every 3 days, try for item, fail, log off. Every 6 months see if I can get re-interested in the game again without my cornerstone piece.
There will come a point in time in every game I play where I am after X for whatever reason and I was X to the exclusion of all else. This could be a badge, a pink dress, a rare gem. It is not always something with mechanical value. However, when they item I drive for is directly influencing my ability to do combat in a noticeable way, every mission / quest / ect I feel it.
In summery, as you can not let me know what you plan. I ask that you ensure that every time I fail to get my mcguffin, I'm actually closer to getting it, even if just a little. More so if that mcguffin effects my ability to take on the most challenging tasks in the game.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
First, great and informative post. I will say that since CoH did a good job of keeping PC's and NPC's from having lots of BOTH Defense AND Resistance, when you did finally hit them in CoH, you usually rocked them. And in Champoins, all those little "1's" felt even less heroic than whiffs.
I liked CoH Defense and ToHit because, in Champions, whether a PC or NPC had Resistance or Defense, you always felt like you were just chipping away at them, because, well, since there "Defense" was RNG influenced Resistance, that's what you were doing. And this got soooooo boring.
In CoH, when you had a mountain of HP with Resistance, you felt like you were chipping away. When you had less HP and Resistance but high Defense, you felt like you were chasing a canny fly around with a flyswatter. And man, all those misses made it feel good when you finally got em.
Anyway, this led to variety of feel in opponents that I've missed greatly in other games. Often, the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they whine for. This is why Devs should listen, but not obey in every case. Majoritarianism, or "the tyranny of the majority", has a really bad track record.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
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As long as a mission doesnt have Every other enemy Group with MoG! >:(
ME NO LIKELY! :{
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whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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I definitely prefer the CoH ToHit versus Defense system over most games' autohit attacks and mezzes that can only be resisted or healed. The occasional enemy with a special "can't hit me" power - so long as it cannot be triggered when mezzed - creates a great situational heroic moment for anyone with a control power. It's a nice, rewarding feeling to land the hold/stun right before the enemy can trigger their MoG or similar trick.
I have to echo Cute Kitsune's point about "Item X" that to me feels like a necessary part of a character concept / power suite. Repeated RNG failures or a predictably awful % chance at these items are a major reason I've given up on some MMOs and been pushed into bored grinding in others (when I couldn't let go of the character concept). Steady progress toward Item X with the potential for a lucky early drop and a fun auction house system with minimal BoE/BoP is the best way to avoid this feeling and keep me playing.
I'll be interested to see more details of combat / reward math as we get closer to launch.
*grins*
So the whole problem could have been solved by simply printing random numbers over the enemy's head instead of the word Miss?
9999×10⁻¹⁷
Or as in the case of my Cold/Ice Defender having a character who'd just chew them up anyway after boosting his own To Hit to somewhere in the neighborhood of the Hard Cap for To Hit (up around +188%) and often by supplying PBU'd Tactics + Sleet + Benumb watching the team chew them up as well.
Flip side, of course, was learning on my various /SR characters to watch out for DE Quartz and bosses who could use BU and Aim type powers before using their nukes (with the inherent accuracy of nukes)
Well, when my character is the type who dodges everything...yes...seeing all thoses missed pop up is exactly what I want to see and exactly what I intend to see when I've (to use CoH terms) softcapped my defenses.
Players and NPCs shouldn't see some better and better accuracy bonus until they hit their target. because it messes with those who build around the idea of a character who can dodge.
One of the things I hate about CO is their dodge mechanic. I'm not dodging anything, I'm getting hit with a chance to absorb some/most of it, but never all of it.
Brand X ... you're talking to someone who believed in the power of [b]NO GET HITSU!![/b] since Issue 2. I know *exactly* how powerful softcapped Defenses were, and deplored the Global Defense Nerf being combined with Enhancement Dysfunction so as to yield a "double whammy" that actually looked more like Start Taking 5x As Much Damage As You Used To, kthxbye.
But that's a Protection Scheme. It's something where you've INVESTED your powers/enhancements in a specific way to bring about a relatively reliable circumstance that you desire (because it protects you). The value changes when you switch things around to talking about an Offensive Scheme, and how now you're wasting YOUR resources, instead of just merely wasting the resources of the Foe you're fighting against.
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Maybe I'm weird, but when I chased one of you slippery little bastards around, it felt sooooooooooooo good to finally tag you. Like Juggernaut vs Spider-Man. I found it a fun mechanic even when I was on the Offense.
HOWEVER, had it been possible to get both really high defense AND really high HP or Resistance, that would have sucked because then I'd never get my good satisfying hit that really threatened you. But then that would have also been crazy imbalanced.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I thought this quote applies:
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Though surprisingly irritating to program, the concept of a deck of cards rather than a set of dice would lead to a guaranteed-over-N-attempts ratio of values.
If the standard mechanism is a model that is "roll a d100" to generate a random number between 1 and 100, and compare that to a %-chance to succeed as determined by all the various mechanics in place, that would be a "true random generator." Each roll is independent, and has an independent chance of success or failure, regardless of what the last die roll was. The "Gambler's Fallacy" that you're "due" after you've missed a lot in a row (or hit a lot in a row) is, as stated, a fallacy.
If, instead, you model it as a deck of 100 cards, each labeled with a single number between 1 and 100, and you draw a card (without replacement) each time you want to generate a random number, you instead will see each of 1-100 exactly once in every 100 generated numbers. (We'll assume you reshuffle the deck when it's emptied and start over.) The gambler is actually right: if you're down to 1 card and you haven't seen that 100 yet, it is "due." You know it MUST be that last card.
This is why Blackjack is a game you can actually play with skill and win just on mathematical and memory mastery: you know the odds as the deck is depleted based on what you've seen. It's the reason card counting works.
If that were implemented in an MMO, it would still likely look very random to most human observers. Especially if the value of the randomly-determined number were obscured, and all they saw was "hit" or "miss." They would only be able to tell after a longish streak that they are, in fact, due for a change in their luck, because few players will be able to count all of the random numbers drawn, and even then they can only approximately guess when the actual breakpoint of a "reshuffle" would be happening.
I will note that I am not speaking as a red name, nor necessarily advocating this, here. I am merely puttting forth an interesting - to me - way to construct "streak breaking" and FORCE actual ratios of "chance to hit" to match reported hit/miss ratios over a specified number (in this example's case, 100) of attempts. If you had a 90% chance to hit, you would literally hit 90 times out of every 100, and miss 10 times out of every 100. If you missed 10 times in a row, you would be guaranteed (assuming you'd started counting with the last reshuffle) 90 consecutive hits.
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By the same token, you'd be guaranteed to get that 2 on your 'random' roll, as well.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Oh, definitely. From the perspective of a player operating with imperfect knowledge, he could merely state on the last hit of his current set - assuming he knew which hit is starting or stopping a set - is going to hit or miss. (Well, he could theoretically know whether the last N hits would, where N is the point at which he knows he HAS to get all of a certain result to get the right ratio.)
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I'm going to go ahead and toss my support toward the "Deck of Cards" plan if its technically feasible. Perhaps reset the deck upon leaving combat for a set period of time to prevent too much abuse?
I know you stated that it's a PITA to program, but it does seem like a relatively elegant means of dealing with the RNG god.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
I would like to support the idea too.
But there could be an impact on the auction house. If you really know that you will get what you are farming for sooner or later, the motivation to do it yourself is higher. Therefore you would be less likely willing to pay high prices for rare items offered by other players. At least it would be the case for myself.
I'm actually not sure you could reasonably apply a "deck of cards" approach to random drops. It works for "to hit" rolls and the like because the chances are binary: you succeed or fail. Doing it for random drops...has a number of problems. Amongst them being that you'd either have to maintain a memory of a "deck" for every kind of monster in the game for every character, or you'd be using the RNG deck for all of them and comparing to a table. In order to ensure the "streak break" effect, a player would have to fight the same monster - and nothing else - at least as many times as there are numbers in the RNG deck. In a row. Again, without fighting ANYTHING else.
This wouldn't have the practical effect desired, while maintaining a "deck" for every monster on every character would be ludicrously memory-intensive.
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Or at least for every possible thing that could drop. But still not very doable, indeed.
Oh well, as long as there will be multiple ways of obtaining these extra rare drops so we get the feeling of at least having a chance, it will be fine. Something like waiting for the random drop, buying it from the market and spending time and effort on obtaining tokens like those alignment rewards we had. It was very repetitive and I gave it up pretty fast but it was there and I felt better for simply knowing that.
I never kept much track of these types of things when I played CoX, but one thing I liked was that there were not many "named items" that were linked to a particular boss. There were the Hami Os, but as someone mentioned before, you were guaranteed to get one if you wanted upon killing the hamidon. But other than that, I thought the recipes and whatnot were random as in not linked to a particular boss or enemy. So if I wanted a particular recipe, I didn't have to grind the same boss over and over again, but I could just play a variety of missions and task forces while waiting for that item to drop.
I realize this could be annoying for players looking for a particular item, as it would be more convenient to have to grind less but on the same monster to have the highest chance of getting a particular item, but I like the idea that any recipe could drop from any monster. It made it feel less like you had to grind when you could do anything you wanted. In fact, knowing that no matter what you do, your odds are not any higher against any particular monster, it would almost make it feel more like a "dream" than a "mission" to get a particular item. While that philosophy seems much less active and sort of helpless, it also frees up the player to think about what they want to do in the game rather than what they want to find in the game.
I liked the very generic form that enhancements took as opposed to items. With up to six slots that can be slotted separately, one did not have to find "the best item" but could instead find the best combination for their particular character. I do not like some games where there is one item that is objectively better than all other items of the same type, and therefore anyone who does not have this item is not living up to their potential. But then again, I was always more of a casual player anyway, so my perspective might not be so relevant to the hardcore number crunchers.
As I understand it, those ultra-rare items were typically present on the market...just ludicrously expensive. I do not know what this will wind up looking like, price-wise, in our game, because we haven't yet got a benchmark for comparison. However, the player-to-player market will be there for you to buy these items on. Furthermore, because we're intentionally allowing the trade of Stars on the market, it becomes possible to either buy them through currency...or by spending real-world money enough to get the Stars to buy them from players who want to sell them for Stars. (I recognize that this is not encouraging to those who don't WANT to pay for in-game items. But it's an option precisely because there are those who DO wish to do that. Like I said, I have no clue how many Stars "ultra-rare" items will go for; that will be between the players to determine. MWM will not be selling such items directly for real money; if such items are being bought with real money, it's through the medium of Stars, and there's a player who's getting to buy Starmart items or microsubscriptions because of it. At least two players will thus benefit from such transactions!)
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