A long time ago on the CoX forums I posted an essay covering (in addition to other material) something similar to what I'm about to write. Some of the current discussion on the forum got me thinking about this stuff again so I thought I'd revisit it.
The first main point I'd like to address is this: people often talk about measuring rewards against the risk faced in earning them. At least in the context of CoX, and presumably in the context of CoT, I believe this to be a mistake for the simple reason that there is no meaningful risk. You never really lost anything when defeated in CoX except for time: time invested in the venture, time required to get up and running again, and time to erase debt. In other words the only risk was a reduction in your over-time rewards, and therefore the chance of defeat is just something that could be factored into determining the average rate at which you earned rewards rather than presenting a genuine risk. Considering the enormous number of encounters faced over the course of a typical character's career in an MMO like CoX the chance of minor setbacks here and there doesn't have any significant impact beyond that.
A better determining factor for rewards is to consider the [I]challenge[/I] faced in earning those rewards. An encounter that is more challenging should give more rewards because it requires more from the player (whether that be in the form of greater play skill, greater build skill, greater investment of resources into the build, or whatever) rather than because it has some kind of direct correlation to something being put at risk, which was never really an accurate portrayal of the situation. Consider, as a case in point, that an encounter can become more challenging without having meaningful impact on the likelihood of a character being defeated (if that character in the hands of its player will overcome the encounter practically every time), and it should provide greater rewards despite the lack of any corresponding increase in risk.
Now, CoX and most/all the other MMOs I've encountered tend to measure challenge of encounters by assigning rewards individually to each enemy (presumably based on how challenging that enemy is considered to be) and providing them to characters in an additive fashion. While that's all well and good, I believe there is a really important aspect of challenge behind missed here: diversity.
Consider two tasks presented as options for players to attempt: one in which you face encounters made entirely of enemy A, and one in which you face encounters made entirely of enemy B. Assuming enemies A and B provide roughly equivalent rewards players will tend to gravitate towards whichever task his/her character is better suited to accomplishing. If you have the "right" build to defeat groups of A, or groups of B, you will likely choose that path. However, if there was a third option that provided encounters that mixed A and B the challenge is increased because having the "right" build for one enemy doesn't preclude you from having to deal with the other. A typical MMO would provide you the same rewards for this third option because it doesn't account for the diversity of challenges faced, and that's something I believe could be improved upon.
This is one of the big problems CoX faced with AE. It was commonplace to design enemy groups that provided rewards commensurate with anything else in the game but were trivialized by certain builds (fire-damage dealers against fire tanks, for example), allowing one to crank up the difficulty in a way that increased rewards in a manner disproportionate to challenge. Worse yet, this could easily happen without actually being the intention of the designer. You didn't have to be [I]trying[/I] to break the rewards system for it to get broken. There could be a lot of reasons to restrict the diversity of enemies in a mission (lore, player investment, or even technical limitations for example) separate from any attempt to game the system. This also isn't meant to suggest this issue should only be considered if CoT players are given access to something like AE, but I think it was AE in CoX that really highlighted the issue.
Diversity can of course come in many forms, but some examples inspired by looking at CoX include:
[list][*]Damage types dealt.
[*]Defensive properties like resistance and defense.
[*]Class (e.g. minion, lieutenant, boss.)
[*]Secondary effects such as (de)buffs and controls.[/list]
How exactly the game could implement a measure of diversity is an extensive topic that is difficult to explore in much depth without knowing more about how its systems work, but what follows is a possibility put forth to illustrate the concept.
Suppose we want to measure the diversity of damage an enemy group deals, and that the enemies in consideration are:
[list][*]Enemy A: 120 fire damage per second.
[*]Enemy B: 60 cold damage per second and 20 lethal damage per second.
[/list](Note: calculating an enemy's baseline damage potential can itself be a fairly extensive undertaking, but I'll set that aside for now, in no small part because this isn't meant to be an overly-precise process.)
Now consider the distribution of damage of the following groups:
[list][*]A only: 100% fire.
[*]B only: 75% cold, 25% lethal.
[*]Equal distribution of A and B: 60% fire, 30% cold, 10% lethal.[/list]
There are any number of ways you could measure the diversity of these distributions (Google "diversity index" for some ideas) but for now what I'll use is the reciprocal of the Minkowski distance formula for the length of each vector. That is, the
Diversity of damage = (Sum of (the weight of each damage)[sup]p[/sup])[sup]-1/p[/sup]
for some order p. One of the advantages of this is that you have some solid control over how much value you place on damage diversity by changing the order p. For example, with p=2 the diversity for each group would be measured as:
[list][*]A only: 1
[*]B only: 1.26
[*]Equal distribution of A and B: 1.47[/list]
If you want to value diversity less you could use a lower order such as p=1.5, yielding:
[list][*]A only: 1
[*]B only: 1.19
[*]Equal distribution of A and B: 1.32[/list]
I'd envision these numbers acting as a multiplier of some kind. For example, if using p=1.5 the experience reward of each enemy in the last group might be multiplied by 1.32 to account for the fact they exist in the context of more varied damage types being dealt to the characters, which provides a greater challenge. The purpose here is to allow for groups of enemies with a range of diversity, while acknowledging that the diversity of a group increases its challenge and providing appropriate rewards.
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I like this idea. The fact that the A and B groups might have synergistic powers might complicate things beyond the formula as such, or maybe it just changes the "p"value, but this is at least a start. Also, I don't know if this solves the problem of people trying to counterfit the AE missions by only bringing toons immune to the mob's attacks (or worse, making AE missions designed for such exploitation), but it makes it harder, or at least it could if you deployed it right. For example, if I have an Ice Blaster who for whatever reason has some kind of Fire resistance, I'd naturally make my AE mission some kind of "go into the cave and defeat all the red dragons" (which are presumably immune to fire attacks and vulnerable to ice attacks and breather fire at you as their most dangerous attack on offense). If the AE software penalizes the rewards for this mission based on the diversity level alone (with the assumption that less diverse = more exploitable), that would work, I would think. On the other hand, if the cave contained red dragons AND blue dragons, which your Ice blast guy is presumably not so good against, the diversity level would be higher, as would the rewards. If you can't affect the rewards for missions based on player powersets AND mob type, you could at least make more narrowly specialized bad guys less valuable in general and more diverse ones more valuable in general. Then, you could sell inspirations that give, say, Fire resist, but only for a short time and EXCLUSIVELY, in the sense that you can't take the Ice Resist pill AND the Fire resist pill at the same time, or even within a few minutes/hours of each other.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Certainly things can get more complicated, and this is intended to be nothing more than a start. However, the most important element here is the general argument that rewards should be measured against challenge rather than risk, and that diversity is an important aspect of challenge that is often ignored. Of course that can be generalized further by saying that the context in which an enemy appears influences the challenge that enemy poses, including the possibility of synergistic effects. To my knowledge the kind of thing I'm talking about here hasn't been done in MMOs before, but I think it's a very worthwhile consideration for CoT, especially if we end up with the ability to fine-tune difficulty settings or create content in a manner similar to AE, both of which are reasonably likely.
This method isn't meant to be overly precise of course, but one of the advantages of it is that it can be fairly invisible to players. (How many CoX players worried about the precise mechanics involved in determining xp rewards of enemy defeats?) My [I]instinct[/I] is to say that it should not take into account particular character builds in any way, and that the calculations should be done by looking at the pool of enemies encounters are drawn from rather than the particular spawn, but I haven't thought about that in enough detail to have a solid opinion yet.
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I don't think that this will be as much of change as you think it will be.
I can forsee the controllers/defenders/low resistances to damage being most unaffected by these changes....
It would be as much of a change as you wanted it to be.
In saying that those ATs/builds would be most unaffected by it, I think you might be interpreting the system as only measuring diversity of damage dealt. Were that the case I agree such builds likely wouldn't see a dramatic difference in challenge from that kind of diversity, but that particular measure is only meant to be an example. You could also look at diversity in terms of damage resistances, buffs, resistance to particular controls and so on.
The idea here is that diversity in a general sense increases the challenge because a single tactic or attribute--whether in the form of a particular resistance, AoE hard control, debuffs, or whatever--wouldn't allow a character to dominate a particular challenge for which it was suited.
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I just finished school so the Math portion of my brain is currently in a box on my bookshelf. Could we try it again in Captain Dummy Talk please?
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Are you trying to say that missions should be more varied (in terms of mob setup) so that no one set of players would have an inherent advantage to steam roll it for easy XP,
Or are you saying that those that CAN steam roll it for easy XP would end up getting less XP (due to an overall modifier)?
Hopefully the former and not the latter used here.
Strictly speaking neither. There are other considerations than challenge for how diverse the abilities of a particular enemy group should be. It's also quite possible that players will have some say in the matter through difficulty settings, AE-like content or something else. I just think it should be a consideration in determining rewards.
At the same time I wouldn't base the reward on whether a particular character or group of characters can steamroll the encounters, but on whether the encounters are inherently more "steamrollable"--a subtle but important distinction.
I'm thinking of another example that might explain. In CoX, if you were playing a plant controller Nemesis was likely to be one of your least favourite enemy groups, since plant control relied heavily on confusion and Nemesis had status protection against it. In practice that status protection [I]by itself[/I] presented a reasonably small increase in challenge because few builds relied upon confusion and those that did would likely just avoid them.
Now, suppose in CoT we have two enemies. Enemy A has status protection against confusion. Enemy B has status protection against stun. In other respects the enemies are comparable, and the status protection is considered to be of roughly equivalent value, so the XP reward assigned to defeating each enemy is the same. For the sake of argument we'll also say we have plant controllers (or a build that relies heavily on confusion for control) and fire controllers (or a build that relies heavily on stun for control).
A group of enemy A is a problem for the plant controller, but the fire controller can walk over it with relative ease. A group of enemy B is a problem for the fire controller, but the plant controller can walk over it with relative ease. A group mixing both enemies A and B is, however, something of an issue for both. This encounter has a greater inherent challenge because neither controller has an easy time controlling the whole group. In practice each would have to use additional tools (ST controls, getting help from others, or something as simple as targeting particular enemies with damage effects first). Traditional reward mechanics would value all of these encounters the same, but they aren't.
The point here is that a one-trick pony is less dangerous than a two-trick pony--but further, two one-trick ponies with the same trick are less dangerous than two one-trick ponies with different tricks. The greater the diversity present in a task the less likely it is for someone to come along and trivialize it, and with the resulting increase in challenge should come a corresponding increase in reward.
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I'm hoping the previous post or earlier examples illustrate the basic idea, but just to reiterate the highlights of my argument are: rewards should be measured against challenge rather than risk, increasing the diversity of abilities among enemies increases the challenge of the encounter, and so reward mechanics should measure such diversity (while a more traditional rewards system would ignore such diversity and measure only the challenge of each enemy in isolation and the number of enemies defeated.)
Once you get into [I]how[/I] the system measures diversity, some reasonably complicated math is unavoidable. However, I think it's worth repeating here that any ideas I've presented in this regard are intentionally vague as I would need a pretty accurate account of how the game mechanics work to figure out specifics; also that the system is one that can almost certainly be largely invisible to the players, so I wouldn't worry much about the math appearing complicated to a typical player.
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Just read the previous post and I completely agree. Sorry that a clarification was needed but I'm trying to cut out unneeded word usage in my life ;)
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
You mean, a custom mission with enemies that do only, say, fire damage, would reward less than one with enemies that do several kinds of damage? ;)
Captain of Phoenix Rising
That's what I'm proposing, yes, all other things being equal. Not based solely on damage types dealt, and not limited to custom missions, but otherwise that's the idea.
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Just musing out loud, here, but...
I almost wonder if it wouldn't be better to have XP rewards be a function of actions per minute (APM) and resources spent on a fight. The reason for having both is so that just standing around and letting something beat on you won't elevate the XP. Still, it would have truly bad decisions (which inherently make the fight harder) cause the XP reward to increase.
The more APM and the more resources you burn, the higher the XP will be. The less resources you burn (including hp) and the slower your APM (representing, theoretically, less tension and engagement in the fight), the lower the XP rewards.
By the same token, of course, higher APM will generally result in fights ending faster and with fewer resources ultimately spent.
Again, this is just musing; some of the base assumptions may be deeply flawed.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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It would definitely be interesting, however I can see some classes such as pet classes (dominators/Masterminds/Controllers), where the character doesnt actually have to do all that much being penalised for playing that way.
Of course, this means tracking what the pets are doing as well into the calculation towards XP rewards...
Also, how would DOT's be treated? because you would have to track *every single* tick as an action that could be counted...
Also, what about tankers on a team, where their primary and quite useful contribution is to stand around and get beat upon?
Spurn all ye kindle.
I see what you're angling for, but I fear that the assumption is deeply flawed, as you say. What you wind up with is a system that rewards "buzzsaw" styled builds designed to crank out as many attack animations as possible in the shortest amount of time in order to generate the maximum reward. Longer animation time attack Powers are thus viewed as being Reward Nerfs, and you start falling into the "Confuse usage reduces XP earnings" oversimplification that some Controllers had to fight with for years.
The objective is noble, but the means to get there is fatally flawed I do believe. I'd recommend an alternative scheme if those are the ends you want to achieve.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Segev,
I have and still do called for all combat mechanics to be weighted so that the situation Redlynne has shown does not happen.
DPS is measured in HP.
Healing is measured in HP.
But what about Debuffs, Slow, Mez, Knockback, Confuse, and any other number of combat related issues?
My suggestion is to measure those mechanics too.
MPS = Mez per second
BPS = Buffs per second.
TPS = Threat per second
etc
This way you can give "win" credit to those builds who are not focused on dealing out the most DPS or being the highest damage mitigation on the field.
Counting the actions themselves does not solve the problem but giving weighted combat mechanics not only solves this problem but it keeps many of these same mechanics from feeling so binary (Held/Immune.. Mobile/Immobile) because you can put weight to the debuffs being used.
Obviously using "slow" mechanics is only as valuable as the game encourages mobile combat, and mobile combat quickly becomes twitch without tab targeting..
I say this simply to say that none of these decisions live in a bubble I'm glad you ask for feedback on the farther reaching applications of your suggestion.
Overall I like that you're encouraging players to stay active in the game for credit. I still and always think "missions" are the best way to gain XP in a game and kill credit should be a distant second. Missions can even be repeatable kill 150X missions if you give repeatable missions a cooldown (12 hour?). This also means pop-up missions (not Champions Online style alerts but missions that come TO YOU.. like a robbery in progress as you are in the area or a supervillain attacking a police station or even just a supervillain roaming the streets) are welcome. Participation is key but overcoming objectives (more missions) has shown to be a great influence on player retention.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
It's an interesting idea, though I think you've spelled out some of the reasons that would give me pause.
One of my fundamental assumptions in broaching this subject is that player agency (in terms of what build they have selected, how well the character is built, how well the character is played, and so on) should not be a variable in determining rewards. This is based on the further assumption that those variables begin on an equal footing (e.g. all build combinations are considered equally valid, even if that's an intentional simplification), and so differences in rewards should only come from absolute factors such as team size or character level. The alternative, I think, is that you would necessarily end up with the situation where playing the "best" in terms of efficiency and likelihood of success will sometimes be at odds with efficiency of rewards earned. If players end up handling content better because they're more suited to it or because they're playing better (in one sense or another) then I think they deserve more rewards. However, I think that what became really evident in CoX (especially through AE) is that players often have the most success in terms of rewards earned not by raising their own effectiveness but in finding content for which the game overvalues the challenge.
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What about the effect of long-cool-down powers, like Nova, possible maintained powers, buffs and Debuffs, Toggles, and DoT/HoT powers, where they have effects that are not tied to APM? Would you then count Ticks of Effect?
Be Well!
Fireheart