New efforts!

[Pyromantic]

I keep thinking that if we rethought the whole "risk/reward/time/gameplay" equation, a lot of problems get simplified or eliminated.  Suppose we just eliminate rewards for minions.  Period.  No more XP, inf, or drops for them.  We can then put as many of them as we want in a mission, and we can make them as strong or as weak as we want, because they aren't exploitable anymore.  We can let casual players with crap builds still have the feeling of fighting off a room full of minions if the difficulty is downscaled enough.  Put those rewards into the bosses and mission completions.  Stalkers can stealth past those worthless minions, tanks can herd them, blasters can vaporize them, and the game doesn't care.   Simply adjust the leveling curve to match.

Going back in time--I wrote a (looong) post on the old CoH forums to describe the thesis that risk was a fairless pointless metric against reward for the game, despite the fact that it was raised all too often as justification.  The problem being that risk was intentionally very limited in the game.  It wasn't like we were playing Diablo on hardcore mode, where there would be a legitimate threat of loss if you failed.  Death in the game was a speed bump, and if you were going fast enough then you could just factor in the occasional death to your reward-earning rates and still come out way ahead.  In no way do I want a game in which death is more punitive; I find that just leads to overly cautious gameplay, because you have to be secure in your ability to handle the most difficult spikes in gameplay that might occur (such as having two groups right next to each other when an ambush wanders by). 

I proposed then that a better measuring stick would be challenge vs. reward.  In particular, there is no reason that a spawn with twice as many minions has to award twice as much xp.  It doesn't necessarily represent twice as much challenge if they're going to be obliterated in the initial volley.  They represent a greater challenge, but perhaps not twice as much.  There is also the issue of diversity.  Enemy groups that rely on very narrow sets of abilities (e.g. the infamous fire farms) represent less challenge than groups with variety.  The challenge of a particular enemy could be contextually adjusted by the enemies it is faced alongside.

Lots of questions to be raised about handling the specifics of course, but that's the basic premise.

[worldweary]

the question is, is this a game that a large number of people would pay to play? probably not. Most people dont want to have a second job once they come home and log on. wildstar made a game that few people actually wanted and now most of their dev staff is laid off. COH had the ability to change difficulty which worked very well. you still had people trying to play at way over their ability just to maximize xp gains. many groups spent way more time running back from the hospital at +4x8 than they should have. +2x6 or 8 would have been better returns in the long run. many gamers are convinced that they want a bleedingly frustrating game until they actually try playing it and realize that it just annoying, not fun.

This^^^CoH had content for people who could min/max but most of it was for casual players.This made it fun for people who were not "gamer's" to join in as well as kids who could play with their parents and others that had disabilities who could play and still do well.

[Arcana]

Going back in time--I wrote a (looong) post on the old CoH forums to describe the thesis that risk was a fairless pointless metric against reward for the game, despite the fact that it was raised all too often as justification.  The problem being that risk was intentionally very limited in the game.  It wasn't like we were playing Diablo on hardcore mode, where there would be a legitimate threat of loss if you failed.  Death in the game was a speed bump, and if you were going fast enough then you could just factor in the occasional death to your reward-earning rates and still come out way ahead.  In no way do I want a game in which death is more punitive; I find that just leads to overly cautious gameplay, because you have to be secure in your ability to handle the most difficult spikes in gameplay that might occur (such as having two groups right next to each other when an ambush wanders by). 

I proposed then that a better measuring stick would be challenge vs. reward.  In particular, there is no reason that a spawn with twice as many minions has to award twice as much xp.  It doesn't necessarily represent twice as much challenge if they're going to be obliterated in the initial volley.  They represent a greater challenge, but perhaps not twice as much.  There is also the issue of diversity.  Enemy groups that rely on very narrow sets of abilities (e.g. the infamous fire farms) represent less challenge than groups with variety.  The challenge of a particular enemy could be contextually adjusted by the enemies it is faced alongside.

Lots of questions to be raised about handling the specifics of course, but that's the basic premise.

The problem with risk wasn't that it was a poor metric, rather it was no metric at all.  It was at best a fuzzy ill-defined description of situational combat.

But the real problem with risk/reward though wasn't the risk, it was the reward.  The problem was that City of Heroes, like most MMOs, isn't balanced around rewards.  It is actually more precisely balanced around reward rate.  20,000 XP is a reward.  It isn't a good reward or a bad reward.  20,000 XP/hour is a bad reward rate (for a level 50).  20,000 XP/minute is a really good reward rate.  I think even the devs would forget this principle, saying things like soloing a giant monster "breaks" risk/reward.  It doesn't, because actually the reward *rate* for soloing a GM was in general horrible.  Because it was horrible, the devs shouldn't have cared about it, at least from a reward perspective.

Some things were intended to be challenging for multiple players regardless of reward and that can create problems when one player can do it all by themselves.  But strictly from a game design perspective, it isn't a reward problem if it doesn't exceed the nominal reward rate.  Herding exploits the dumb critter AI put there to make life easy for players to allow vastly superior reward rates.  And it only existed for the most part because the devs were trying to make the game not too difficult for everyone else.  In my mind, that's what makes an exploit specifically undesirable.  The whole "if players can do it they should be allowed to do it" is a bad mindset because it forces the developers to behave as if the players were the enemy.  If the devs don't want something to happen in their game, they have a responsibility to crush it out of them.  There's no sense of cooperation where the devs do their best to make as many things possible as they can, with the understanding that when they make mistakes it will likely be in allowing more than intended, which they should then have the right to fix.

This failure to consistently distinguish between rewards and reward rates caused no end of problems for the devs and no end of confusion for the players.

[blacksly]

This failure to consistently distinguish between rewards and reward rates caused no end of problems for the devs and no end of confusion for the players.

I wonder if this hearkens back to the time when it was HARD to keep the character at top-level SOs in all powers, and defeating an AV or GM gave you a guaranteed SO. It wasn't too many issues after game start that this was irrelevant, but I'm pretty sure that it was a relevant issue at game start, and I wonder how long the thinking persisted without realizing that the original reason was no longer valid.

[Golden Aurora]

There's the point, and then there's the point.  The obvious point of the aggro cap was to prevent players from aggroing unlimited numbers of NPCs into easy to kill clusters.  But there's a deeper point that is necessary to understand that one, and it goes to your statement about skill.  You say if players can do it, they should be allowed to do it.  There's a presumption that the game's design reflects that standard: that if it is possible, players should be allowed to do it.

But game developers don't obey that standard, and there's a good reason for that.  Sometimes, the only reason something is possible is because the devs made something else possible, and the other thing is an unfortunate side effect.  If you forced the devs to live by the rule "if the players can do it, you should let them do it" you force them to design and implement gameplay rules that are far more difficult than intended.  To avoid allowing players to do ridiculous things, the devs would have to make it hard to do anything.

You might think that this is anti-meritocracy, but it is not.  The question isn't whether higher skill is rewarded with higher rewards, the question is whether the game does so in a proportional way.  The truth is that if you could build and assemble a team capable of map-herding, then the whole notion of proportional rewards goes out the window.  It isn't twice as hard to herd twice as much with unlimited aggro caps, but you get twice the rewards regardless.  It doesn't take twice the damage to defeat twice the foes when you have unlimited target caps.  Let's face it: if players were only getting proportional rewards for those activities, most wouldn't do them because it wouldn't be profitable to do so.  They were doing them because they were getting radically disproportionate rewards for that activity.

Basically, things like caps and limits exist so that the devs could give us the most freedom possible within those limits.  Without those limits, the devs would have to resort to making everything more difficult, to fit the standard of "if the players can do it, they should be allowed to do it."  Under that standard, everything would have to be a lot more difficult.  With limits and guardrails you can make things very easy for casual players without allowing experienced players to gain unlimited advantages within the game.

In City of Heroes, you have the extra problem of the teaming system.  You can basically team anyone with anyone in almost any content.  If you create a system where stronger characters have wildly disproportionate ability to earn rewards, you disincentivize playing at any level other than that one.  You incentivize compelling players to participate in degenerate play like herding even when they *aren't* built to do it, when a higher percentage of teams are doing it.

If you can do it then you should be allowed to do it wasn't necessarily the point.
See as a developer if I had been in charge of that the thing I would have done wasn't to implement an aggro cap.
It would have been to implement the power effect target cap.
That way if you want to herd you can but you had better kill damn fast otherwise they will kill YOU!

And that's sort of the reason I hated that. I don't consider it either an exploit or unproportional rewards if the target cap is in place.
What it saves on is legwork running back and forth from mob to mob while your aoes with a 16 max or whatever target cap only hit 4 or 5.

It really is utilizing your character far more efficiently in terms of capabilities, damage, and inspiration usage.
I know there are some people who say *HISS* Farming. EVIL!
But a lot of the game's fun points came across as that exact thing for me.
I loved the risk and that moment of glory when you're killing as fast as possible trying to remain alive.
I was a min maxer. I loved cooking up new ways to get the most out of both my time, my enjoyment of the game, and the game systems in place.

City of Heroes was an interesting game where you could find a plethora of things to find enjoyment from. I can't think of a good reason that it kills the fun for some builds because they can't do something as efficiently as another build. The reason is because just because that fire/kin can't pull the herds that some tanker can and eventually kill them all, they have team buffs, mez, and all sorts of things that that tanker doesn't. So bluntly, if you sucked at farming that was because you were good at something else.

Also, I can't think of any game in existence in which as a higher level you were equally as powerful as a low level. That sort of defeats the point of levelling.

[Pyromantic]

The problem with risk wasn't that it was a poor metric, rather it was no metric at all.  It was at best a fuzzy ill-defined description of situational combat.

Well, I think in large part that's a slightly different perspective on what I mean.  Risk was pointless as a metric because nothing was put at risk except a relatively small amount of time, during which you're not earning rewards.  So making things more difficult doesn't increase the "risk" if it ultimately just results in faster rewards.  I believe that a change in perspective to consider how challenging a task is as opposed to how risky it is would prove beneficial.

[MM3squints]

Well, I think in large part that's a slightly different perspective on what I mean.  Risk was pointless as a metric because nothing was put at risk except a relatively small amount of time, during which you're not earning rewards.  So making things more difficult doesn't increase the "risk" if it ultimately just results in faster rewards.  I believe that a change in perspective to consider how challenging a task is as opposed to how risky it is would prove beneficial.

Ha that reminds me of the argument of DoTA 2 vs LoL

[ivanhedgehog]

This^^^CoH had content for people who could min/max but most of it was for casual players.This made it fun for people who were not "gamer's" to join in as well as kids who could play with their parents and others that had disabilities who could play and still do well.

the changes we are seeing here would eliminate that. the way it was, average or poor players could set it to -1 or 0 and work their way with slow, but steady progression. they werent going to power level but they werent going to quit in disgust. all these AI changes would give them the finger and recreate the game for min maxers. herding was not some horrible exploit. sometimes it was a group of friends doing radio missions while talking on voice chat, just having fun. Wildstar showed that the hardcore, minmax people cannot financially support an MMO. coh gave you the ability to ramp up the challenge, without mandating that everyone conform to that level of challenge. any other system would not be COH, and I feel would not have had the success and following that COH had.

[Codewalker]

the changes we are seeing here would eliminate that. the way it was, average or poor players could set it to -1 or 0 and work their way with slow, but steady progression. they werent going to power level but they werent going to quit in disgust. all these AI changes would give them the finger and recreate the game for min maxers.

Very minor changes to the way the aggro cap works would have absolutely zero effect on people playing at -1 or 0x0...

[Arcana]

Well, I think in large part that's a slightly different perspective on what I mean.  Risk was pointless as a metric because nothing was put at risk except a relatively small amount of time, during which you're not earning rewards.  So making things more difficult doesn't increase the "risk" if it ultimately just results in faster rewards.  I believe that a change in perspective to consider how challenging a task is as opposed to how risky it is would prove beneficial.

Define "risk."

[Arcana]

If you can do it then you should be allowed to do it wasn't necessarily the point.
See as a developer if I had been in charge of that the thing I would have done wasn't to implement an aggro cap.
It would have been to implement the power effect target cap.
That way if you want to herd you can but you had better kill damn fast otherwise they will kill YOU!

The devs did both, because those two changes implement different game constraints.  They don't address precisely the same problem.  Target caps with aggro limits wouldn't actually work in two very common situations.  The first is the classic single player fire tanking where you're killing things (particularly minions) so fast that the presence of more targets attacking you than you can hit yourself isn't meaningful.  The second case was the team map herding situation where the tank would herd up a big pile and then a couple blasters would nuke the pile.  In that case, target caps alone would also have very limited impact on the situation.

I was a min maxer. I loved cooking up new ways to get the most out of both my time, my enjoyment of the game, and the game systems in place.

Technically, a min/maxer is someone that attempts to maximize something while minimizing something else: in the case of builds it generally refers to maximizing desired capabilities while minimizing the compromises necessary to achieve them.  Someone who wants to get the maximum possible outcome without limitations at all isn't a min/maxer, they are a maxer.  Game rules and game limitations shouldn't impact the ability for a min/maxer to continue to min/max the game.  The rules and limitations are the only things that make min/maxing possible at all.

I would call someone that wanted to perform the function of min/maxing a build once, and demanded that no game change alter the function of that build after that fact to be an optimizer, not a min/maxer.

[Twisted Toon]

Define "risk."

I was going to say that risk means different things for different ATs, let alone different people.

I recall one mission I was in with 3 other friends. I was on my tank, we had a blaster and 2 defenders. I took aggro for the first mob we ran across and we proceeded to wail on them. Little did I know, one of the defenders was wandering the rest of the floor pulling mobs back to me. We ended up clearing the entire floor and I never moved from the first room. However, there ended up being way more than 17 enemies, and I was just learning to tank. So, the spill over dropped the rest of the team. I was in no danger, it seemed.

So, the risk to me was negligible. The risk to the rest of the party was a little more.

[Arcana]

I was going to say that risk means different things for different ATs, let alone different people.

I recall one mission I was in with 3 other friends. I was on my tank, we had a blaster and 2 defenders. I took aggro for the first mob we ran across and we proceeded to wail on them. Little did I know, one of the defenders was wandering the rest of the floor pulling mobs back to me. We ended up clearing the entire floor and I never moved from the first room. However, there ended up being way more than 17 enemies, and I was just learning to tank. So, the spill over dropped the rest of the team. I was in no danger, it seemed.

So, the risk to me was negligible. The risk to the rest of the party was a little more.

Even in this extremely limited scope context, risk is still incredibly slippery to define.  You say the risk to you was negligible.  Risk of what?

I'm not being facetious.  They died and you didn't.  They got debt and you didn't.  However, reward earning in City of Heroes is team-shared, not individualized in teams.  All of you continued to earn the same rewards, alive or dead.  All of you continued to earn the same drops, alive or dead.  And being dead means your team's kill speed dropped: that cost everyone reward earning speed, including you.  The only difference, then, at least in reward terms, was debt.  Is risk just the risk of acquiring debt?  If all those team mates were debt protected would they then be playing risk-free?  Do we define risk to be the statistical amount of debt expected from an encounter?  What about encounters that have no risk of debt at all?  Should they reward nothing?

These are important questions to ask (and answer) when thinking about how games are supposed to work.  If you believe risk is supposed to be a part of the equation, risk has to be carefully and explicitly defined.  If it is not, and you replace it with something else, the same rules apply.  What is risk?  What is challenge?  How do you quantify those things?  If you can't, how can you incorporate them into a game design where actual rewards with actual numbers will be attached.  You can't balance 1000 Inf against "kinda risky."  You end up with your players thinking you're brain dead, and they'd be right.

I'm reminded how many times when someone said on the forums that something was "balanced" or "not balanced" that I would reply "compared to what?"  Because the word "balance" implies a comparison between at least two things.  A single thing cannot be "balanced."  Even when colloquially talking about balanced "things" there is the presumption that the person saying that at least understands, even if they are not always saying, which two things are being balanced against each other.  Except: that was rarely a safe assumption.

[Joshex]

And you have to unveil your scientific model about dark matter and gravity that will change everything

Nice try, I would like to but there is too much media distortion of facts at present, no doubt they would move a few commas and emphasize parts that don't need emphasis to make it sound like I were saying something I'm not. gonna wait it out till people realize they broke media neutrality rules and therefore are not credible. may take a while, and definitely wont happen under the people supporting the media non-neutrality from the government side.

[Pyromantic]

Define "risk."

In most contexts for City of Heroes?  The only thing at risk is the loss of rewards due to the time required to recover from death, and future rewards going to pay off debt.  But, if your overall rewards over a significant time frame are greater from the activity you doing, then you didn't really risk anything at all.  Not in any practical sense.  (There is some irony in the fact that the risk of death put more intangible rewards in jeopardy sometimes, such as when attempting Master runs.)

That's what I mean by thinking about challenge.  If I increase the difficulty in CoH, I don't deserve greater rewards because of increased risk.  I didn't introduce more risk except a higher potential for a reduction in my reward-earning rate for periods of time.  But presumably I have confidence that I can handle the difficulty often enough that my reward rate will see a net increase.  No, I deserve greater rewards because I increased the challenge that I faced.  Quantifying that may prove just as difficult, but I think it's a better question to ask when considering whether rewards from a particular activity are justified.  It leads to, for example, justification for saying that an AE enemy group that only deals one type of damage is inherently less challenging, and as such should see a reduction in rewards.  In the grander sense, the challenge of a particular enemy is partly dependent upon the capabilities of the other enemies around it.

[Arcana]

Nice try, I would like to but there is too much media distortion of facts at present, no doubt they would move a few commas and emphasize parts that don't need emphasis to make it sound like I were saying something I'm not. gonna wait it out till people realize they broke media neutrality rules and therefore are not credible. may take a while, and definitely wont happen under the people supporting the media non-neutrality from the government side.

I can, of course, prove that Joshex's dark matter theories are completely false, but the Illuminati cabal that controls the world's supply of keyboards have placed special censors in the switches that would alert the mind control nanobots laced in aircraft chemtrails to genetically reprogram the language centers of the brain to alter the meaning of the words.  Even when I try to rabbit plex of barbecue sandcastle, swizzle cookies rotate saddle triceratops creamy jump toad perennial sadly ampersand.

[darkgob]

I can, of course, prove that Joshex's dark matter theories are completely false, but the Illuminati cabal that controls the world's supply of keyboards have placed special censors in the switches that would alert the mind control nanobots laced in aircraft chemtrails to genetically reprogram the language centers of the brain to alter the meaning of the words.  Even when I try to rabbit plex of barbecue sandcastle, swizzle cookies rotate saddle triceratops creamy jump toad perennial sadly ampersand.

"Sadly Ampersand" would be a good album name.

[MM3squints]

Nice try, I would like to but there is too much media distortion of facts at present, no doubt they would move a few commas and emphasize parts that don't need emphasis to make it sound like I were saying something I'm not. gonna wait it out till people realize they broke media neutrality rules and therefore are not credible. may take a while, and definitely wont happen under the people supporting the media non-neutrality from the government side.

Coming up next, Doritos are really the Illuminati

https://imgflip.com/readImage?iid=22464428

[Arcana]

In most contexts for City of Heroes?  The only thing at risk is the loss of rewards due to the time required to recover from death, and future rewards going to pay off debt.  But, if your overall rewards over a significant time frame are greater from the activity you doing, then you didn't really risk anything at all.  Not in any practical sense.  (There is some irony in the fact that the risk of death put more intangible rewards in jeopardy sometimes, such as when attempting Master runs.)

Careful.  You say the only thing "at risk" and "didn't really risk anything."  The question I asked was "define risk."  You seem to be implying with your words that "risk" is synonymous with "a material thing you could lose" but I don't think you actually believe that.  Your words are saying it, though.

That's what I mean by thinking about challenge.  If I increase the difficulty in CoH, I don't deserve greater rewards because of increased risk.  I didn't introduce more risk except a higher potential for a reduction in my reward-earning rate for periods of time.  But presumably I have confidence that I can handle the difficulty often enough that my reward rate will see a net increase.  No, I deserve greater rewards because I increased the challenge that I faced.  Quantifying that may prove just as difficult, but I think it's a better question to ask when considering whether rewards from a particular activity are justified.  It leads to, for example, justification for saying that an AE enemy group that only deals one type of damage is inherently less challenging, and as such should see a reduction in rewards.  In the grander sense, the challenge of a particular enemy is partly dependent upon the capabilities of the other enemies around it.

Okay.  Define "challenge."  I know you say it can be difficult to quantify with any precision, but ignoring that problem define what a challenge is, in terms you could design a game around.  You say increasing the difficulty slider in CoH doesn't increase risk (without defining what risk is) but it does increase the challenge.  I know that may sound like it should be obvious, but can you actually explain that with specificity?  It is not that I don't understand the gist of what you mean, but it is precisely in the specifics that game designs work or fall apart.  I can't say I know what you mean exactly.  If we're on the same dev team, and you say "this has more challenge" and I agree, are you certain we actually do agree?  Are you certain that when I do my thing and you do your think, we're actually in sync on what sort of changes we'd make to a game?

Suppose I say that reducing endurance recovery doesn't increase the challenge of the game, and thus should not affect the reward earning rate of the game.  Would you agree?  This decision will have a strong material impact on how the game plays.  Is it obeying the correct reward earning rules?

[Felderburg]

gonna wait it out till people realize they broke media neutrality rules and therefore are not credible.

Just gonna throw it out there that there are no "media neutrality rules," really. The Fairness Doctrine ended a while ago, and media has always been biased, since before the founding of the US.

Edit: Also, if you actually have a theory that would change the way the scientific community views the world, you may have a moral or ethical obligation to share it, but I'm not certain.