New efforts!

[Arcana]

Coming up next, Doritos are really the Illuminati

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

I like my Doritos with Pinot Noir, which is French for "peanut of the night."

[Arcana]

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.

I'm pretty sure the scientific community would view the world differently if they heard his theories.  I would rather they continue to think the world was worth saving.

[Golden Aurora]

To me challenge is synonymous with difficulty in this context.
It is a situation which requires either more time, more attention, or more skill to deal with in regards to some other situation.
Soloing a GM is more  a challenge than putting brawl on auto and punching a lvl 1 minion to death.
Increasing the lvl 1 minion to lvl 1111 might make it more a challenge than a  GM, however.

[MM3squints]

I like my Doritos with Pinot Noir, which is French for "peanut of the night."

I like Doritos with kimchi. Don't know it until you try it.

[Arcana]

To me challenge is synonymous with difficulty in this context.
It is a situation which requires either more time, more attention, or more skill to deal with in regards to some other situation.
Soloing a GM is more  a challenge than putting brawl on auto and punching a lvl 1 minion to death.
Increasing the lvl 1 minion to lvl 1111 might make it more a challenge than a  GM, however.

There's two problems with that, both worth investigating.  First, you're defining "challenge" in terms of a subjective experience.  There seems to be no way to objectively determine if something is more or less difficult, because it is difficult to objectively know if something takes more or less skill or more or less attention.  Second, you're defining challenge in terms of an individual player.  When designing a game, do you pick one?  Do you, say, pick yourself to be the "standard candle" of players?  Do you survey a group?  Do you try to determine what the average player of your playerbase is?  What if that changes over time?

When you say that challenge is synonymous with difficulty, you're basically saying that challenge is a redundant term.  I'm assuming you're implying that the game should be designed around the difficulty of specific tasks.  For any two tasks A and B, if A is more difficult than B then A should grant more rewards than B, and if A is essentially identical in difficulty to B then A should have materially identical rewards to B.  But you've defined "difficulty" in terms of three separate independent factors: time, skill, and attention.  Time is the relatively easy one to handle.  We can tell, at least in theory, when something takes twice as long as something else.  We can quantify that.  What we do with that number is a separate problem.  But we don't have a good way to judge what it means to take twice as much skill or attention, and even if we did we don't have a good guide for how to compare them together.  Is having to expend twice the skill comparable to twice the attention, or is having to expend twice the attention somehow "harder" than having to use twice the skill?  Not to nit pick the specifics, but there should at least be some governing rule.

And is the dynamic range of these things continuously significant?  In other words, is there a point below which the amount of skill you use irrelevant?  Is there such a thing as "insignificant skill" below which it really doesn't matter anymore?  Should the rewards for something that takes three seconds be worth less than something that takes four?

I think the most significant question, though, is this.  We've apparently managed to sidestep the question of what is risk, by saying it should really be difficulty that determines things not "risk."  But how do we adjust difficulty?  Sure, we can have critters deal more damage or have more health, but in what objective way do we know that these things actually make things more difficult?  Are you certain we've managed to escape the claws of risk here, or have we buried it implicitly in what we're calling "difficulty?"  The explicit definition (here) of difficulty doesn't derive from risk, but when we try to define difficulty operationally by how we would adjust it, risk seems to start to creep in.  When we make a change that we *think* makes things more difficult, we shouldn't just assume it does.  We should have some rational basis for knowing that it does.  Can we do that without estimating the probability that certain things will or will not happen which can affect either the time it takes to perform the task, the attention it will ultimately demand, or the skill level that will ultimately be required?

In other words, do we just take it axiomatically that when we turn this knob or push this slider that "difficulty" goes up or down, or do we try to find a magic ruler that allows us to measure how much we're actually changing difficulty?  And when we look at that ruler, will we see "risk" printed on the side of it, in teeny tiny letters?

[Joshex]

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.

so you believe that it's ok for a news program to broadcast their opinion on happenings as fact without actually broadcasting all data about a happening? you believe it's right in a News context for them to grammatically support a political candidate (endorsement)? you believe it's right for news reporters to entice violence and other happenings because they make for better reporting? do you believe it's right for a news medium to reword people for political gains of the persons they endorse?

The purpose of news was to tell us whats happening, now we just get opinions from all sides with little scatters of truth rephrased and worded in between, and not even the whole story at that. They don't tell us whats happening, they tell us the parts they found interesting or they thought could get more viewers. Even worse is usually the source that revealed what happened to them under the freedom of information act laws is not required to nor will reveal the information directly to a citizen, and that is the real dastardly part of non-neutral news reporting; what they say may be the only public copy of the data, if they omit things; the public can never know the full truth. it's Selective Media Censorship. I'm pretty sure that's against some US law.

Freedom of Speech is how they get around it, however that doesn't work that way, outside of the newsroom they are an individual citizen and have a right to say what they personally support etc., in the newsroom they have legal obligations to the truth, anything else (opinions etc.) is pure propaganda and ideological conditioning of the viewers. you must understand it is a position of trust with data! failure to be neutral is a violation of that trust and a condition that should cause the public to label that news outlet legally non-credible, AKA fake news.

they have been testing the water for years, pushing the envelope to see how far they can go into non-neutrality and still be accepted, I agree, but it still doesn't make it right.

Theory Obligations; if the scientific breakthrough you have contains the blueprints for the death star or could lead to the production of such a thing, is it really an obligation to release said information "for the good of humanity"?

it's one of those things, the world needs to quiet down a bit before things like that come out. Offensive 'defense' tech can always be used for offense by bad people.

The positive portion of the information needs to be considered against the negatives and the probability of the negatives needs to be compared against the state of the world. one such actor is the media, another one politics, another; risks such as terrorists.

we will see how the state of the USA will be under the next president, much less the state of the world, if still bad, it's best to wait another 4 years.

the dangerous part is current scientists are on the verge of figuring these things out for themselves without me, but I'm not too worried, the current scientific model is standing between them and achieving that and they seem to have a bias in favor of it that overpowers their desire to explain new happenings otherwise explainable.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Joshex I don't think anyone here is under the illusion of journalism being entirely ethical 100% of the time.  However, you claim to have knowledge that will change the way our greatest mind's think about science.  But you also say you refuse to share it because of the media.  They aren't really related.

In the spirit of the internet.  Pics, or it didn't happen. (In other words. Prove it, or stop making that claim)

[Arcana]

Joshex I don't think anyone here is under the illusion of journalism being entirely ethical 100% of the time.  However, you claim to have knowledge that will change the way our greatest mind's think about science.

I don't think that's true.  I don't think Joshex has ever claimed any scientific mind was great.

[Arcana]

On the subject of difficulty, I tried to formulate a difficulty model for City of Heroes back in the day, and elements of that leaked into the Architect custom critter stuff.  The cornerstone of the model was a metric I called threat  The idea behind threat is best illustrated by example.  Imagine something I call the base player.  The base player has the health of a blaster, no defenses, and about 80-100 dps of damage output (lets call it 100 to be simple).  I stick an NPC in front of this standard player.  It has health, defenses, and offense.  Now start shooting at each other.  At some point, hopefully, the player defeats the NPC.  After that much time, the NPC will have dealt damage to the player.  The average such damage, net over regeneration, expressed as a percentage of health, is what I basically defined as the threat rating of that critter.

What can we do with that?  Well, with the proper equations, we can guestimate how much damage any group of critters will do to the baseline player, and by extension how much damage they'd do (again, as a percentage) to other standards, like the average scrapper or the average tanker.  But if we're assuming that blasters were statistically the most likely to be defeated, it is reasonable for me to use them as the proxy for the baseline of difficulty.  If it should be doable, the baseline blaster should be able to do it.  How many critters should spawn in a single mob spawn point in a standard difficulty mission?  Well, in City the answer is three minions.  But is that the right answer?  We can quantitatively explore that question.  How much threat do three average minions possess in City?  How much damage will they do to the blaster before they are defeated on average?  How much should they do?

If we are designing City to allow players to continue from spawn to spawn with a minimum amount of rest, and that's the target for the design, then we can estimate the *maximum* threat a spawn should contain, given how much damage they will do and how much health the blaster will recover moving between spawns, given the average spacing of spawns.  We can calculate if three is in fact the right answer.  We can ask what the best and worst reasonable cases are.  We can even ask related questions like "what should the correct value of endurance reocvery be, given this model?"  We can ask what increasing base regen will do.  When players ask questions like "how hard is this AV" we can actually answer quantitatively.  We can immediately tell if we've buffed them too high, or made them too weak. 

We also have a quantitative basis for how much rewards individual critters should grant, based on what our target baseline reward earning rate is intended to be.  We now have a hard, numerical definition for what is "risk."  Risk, in this model, is replaced conceptually by threat, which represents the statistically likely cost in health points that it takes to defeat a critter, normalized to the difficulty of the archetype.  Blasters with no defenses are archetypally more difficult than scrappers, say.  Notice that in this model, you're forced to be honest.  The devs were never able to admit that their design deliberately made blasters intrinsically harder to play.  This model forces you to admit that quantitatively.

Take this concept and expand it to all combat, and you have a difficulty model that connects threat to reward rates for all combat-related activities.  That still leaves you with non-combat activity rewards, but it is a start.  And the math to tie it all together is not always straight forward given City of Heroes mechanics, particularly regeneration.  It is not a simple model to get right in all respects.  But I believe it does ultimately work.  It is how I would approach designing an MMO from scratch, although if I'm starting from scratch I would try to make the mechanics and the difficulty model meet in the middle better.

[Pyromantic]

Ok.  It's late.  I can't guarantee everything I write here is what I'll still want to have written tomorrow, but I think this is worth an attempt, so here we go.

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.

I was speaking mildly in jest when I used the word "risk" the first time in that paragraph.  My point, which may not have come across, is that when discussions of reward rates came up on the City boards and the ubiquitous response of "risk vs. reward" appeared, people were using risk to mean "an increased probability of failure (death)," and using that to justify an increased rate of rewards.  While an increased probability of death may be the result of higher difficulty settings, I think that's a lousy justification.  There's no genuine sense of risk because there's no genuine sense of the possibility of loss.  There is the possibility of a short-term loss of time invested, or debt which has to be paid off, but the expectation in City is that you will undergo many similar combat encounters--enough experiments that you will likely approach the expected reward-time ratio for your activity.  In essence, the justification "increased risk, increased reward" would be better replaced with "I'm justified in getting a higher reward rate because I'm capable of earning it."

Which brings us to this:

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?

It's problematic of course. 

Firstly, I think a distinction between challenge and difficulty in the sense I would use them here is necessary.  Difficulty, to my mind, will vary from player to player and situation to situation.  As an example, let's go back to the AE fire farm.  It becomes less difficult for your fiery aura scrapper, so should we reduce the rewards from each enemy defeated?  I will state my own opinion here as a definitive no, though I'm sure some will reasonably disagree.  As a design goal, I think it's unwise to give players a sense that they are being punished for what they or their characters are good at.  For that reason, if we want to use challenge as a metric for rewards, it needs to be separated from the context of the particular players facing the encounter.  Challenge must be inherent to the encounter itself.  But saying it's separate from what the particular players can do doesn't mean I have to separate it from players as a concept.  I think that may not be possible.

Suppose for a moment that we think about challenge as the capabilities needed to overcome the encounter, whether that represents skill, investment in build, access to particular powers, use of limited resources, or what-have-you.  I would first ask "can the difficulty of this encounter be reduced with limited capability?"  In the case of the fire farm, the challenge is relatively low because a very narrow capability (fire resistance/defense) dramatically reduces the effective damage.  That is to say the fire farm enemies shouldn't be worth less rewards because you are currently playing your fiery aura scrapper and they're easy for you; they should be worth less because their challenge is low--you need limited capability to make it easy.

Context thus becomes key.  Not the context of what character you're playing, but the context of what else you are facing.  If all the enemies you face deal fire damage exclusively, then the challenge of each enemy is reduced.  But if one enemy deals fire damage exclusively among enemies that deal diverse damage types, then the challenge that enemy represents is greater because you require greater capabilities to reduce the effective damage of the enemies as a whole (resistance/defense to many damage types).  In a similar vein, the increased challenge represented by the fifth minion isn't necessarily as large as the challenge represented by the fourth minion.  In an AoE world, you don't really need much more capability to defeat that fifth minion, as you're likely doing so with the same power activations as the fourth.  The point being that group make-up (damage types used, size, and potentially a host of other variables) influence the challenge that any particular enemy represents, and could be used as a modifier on its experience value.  I am unaware of any MMO that does this, but I absolutely think it's worth exploring.

So I'm left with a bit of a conundrum.  How do we measure any of this?  Maybe this is just my own limitation, but I don't see how it could be done in any absolute sense.  I think we start with a baseline--something like "this encounter represents a challenge that a typical character can overcome in X amount of time, and we want said character to earn Y experience in X amount of time, so it's worth Y experience."  From there, challenge can only be measured in a relativistic fashion.  There is subjectivity for sure, but it comes back to this question: "If players are capable of modifying an encounter in some way, does the change in rewards correspond to the change in the challenge of the encounter, the change in the capabilities needed by the player to overcome this encounter?"  If you can change an encounter in a way that you increase its rewards disproportionately with the (subjective evaluation of the) capabilities you need to bring, then the reward system is failing.

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?

I really need to think about this one more.  When you say "should not affect the reward earning rate of the game," do you mean that the change by itself would not result in a measurable difference of reward earning rates, or that rewards should be modified to compensate and maintain the going reward earning rate, or something else?  As I am using the language above, the challenge of any particular encounter may not be affected by this change, since the capabilities needed to overcome it remain the same.  But the availability of that capability to players has been reduced, so whatever you determine as your baseline would be affected.

[Twisted Toon]

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 would say that it was the risk of defeat. Not that it really mattered all that much. As you said, rewards were shared across the team. They were still getting xp while I was still standing beating on the bad guys...and getting xp. And, we all had fun anyway.

I understand what you're saying. I just don't like to lose, so to speak. So, the risk, for me, is failure accomplish my goals on the first attempt. That doesn't mean that I won't try , try again. I just don't want to have to try again, if I can help it. Other than that, xp debt, time running back to the mission and all that other stuff isn't all that much of a detriment to me.

When it comes to AVs on the other hand, I'm not as irritated at failing to take them down on the first attempt.

Coming up next, Doritos are really the Illuminati

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

What flavor would they be? I prefer my Doritos Nacho flavored...and crunchy. Not stale, but crunchy.

[Victoria Victrix]

Re:Aggro cap...

I joined the game late, right after I16 launched, so I only heard (herd?) about the zone herding exploits.

That said, I always assumed the aggro cap actually required MORE skill than not having it.

Let's say for the sake of discussion, that you're a tank teamed with a squishy of some flavor, let's say Blaster from I23.  You have the mob size cranked up, and you leap into a pile and throw a taunt, run around a corner, grab another group, and herd them into a corner for the blaster to AoE to dea... er, arrest.  But you've now exceeded the aggro cap, so not everyone is focused on the tank. 

So rather than the blaster having to sit there and just "pew, pew, pew" the mob to death, they have to deal with thugs in their face wanting to do bodily harm to that toon.  The tank can't just sit there and take a smoke break while the blaster blasts away.  The tank needs to now worry about getting the aggro off the blaster and back onto the tank.

The aggro cap makes (made?) the game less simple and actually more fun for everyone, at least to me.  Everyone now had a part to play and players couldn't just take a tank, wait for them to pull all the mobs on a floor to a spot and have the ranged character take them out.  Rinse, repeat, hit the 'vator.

That is actually how my fire tank worked, and the reason I had Taunt in her Fire Aura and combat jumping.  I'd bounce her all over the place like a Mexican Jumping Bean to get aggro back after having lost it.

[Victoria Victrix]

so you believe that it's ok for a news program to broadcast their opinion on happenings as fact without actually broadcasting all data about a happening? you believe it's right in a News context for them to grammatically support a political candidate (endorsement)? you believe it's right for news reporters to entice violence and other happenings because they make for better reporting? do you believe it's right for a news medium to reword people for political gains of the persons they endorse?

The purpose of news was to tell us whats happening, now we just get opinions from all sides with little scatters of truth rephrased and worded in between, and not even the whole story at that. They don't tell us whats happening, they tell us the parts they found interesting or they thought could get more viewers. Even worse is usually the source that revealed what happened to them under the freedom of information act laws is not required to nor will reveal the information directly to a citizen, and that is the real dastardly part of non-neutral news reporting; what they say may be the only public copy of the data, if they omit things; the public can never know the full truth. it's Selective Media Censorship. I'm pretty sure that's against some US law.

Freedom of Speech is how they get around it, however that doesn't work that way, outside of the newsroom they are an individual citizen and have a right to say what they personally support etc., in the newsroom they have legal obligations to the truth, anything else (opinions etc.) is pure propaganda and ideological conditioning of the viewers. you must understand it is a position of trust with data! failure to be neutral is a violation of that trust and a condition that should cause the public to label that news outlet legally non-credible, AKA fake news.

they have been testing the water for years, pushing the envelope to see how far they can go into non-neutrality and still be accepted, I agree, but it still doesn't make it right.

Theory Obligations; if the scientific breakthrough you have contains the blueprints for the death star or could lead to the production of such a thing, is it really an obligation to release said information "for the good of humanity"?

it's one of those things, the world needs to quiet down a bit before things like that come out. Offensive 'defense' tech can always be used for offense by bad people.

The positive portion of the information needs to be considered against the negatives and the probability of the negatives needs to be compared against the state of the world. one such actor is the media, another one politics, another; risks such as terrorists.

we will see how the state of the USA will be under the next president, much less the state of the world, if still bad, it's best to wait another 4 years.

the dangerous part is current scientists are on the verge of figuring these things out for themselves without me, but I'm not too worried, the current scientific model is standing between them and achieving that and they seem to have a bias in favor of it that overpowers their desire to explain new happenings otherwise explainable.

I found your hat.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Tin_foil_hat_2.png

[Arcana]

I was speaking mildly in jest when I used the word "risk" the first time in that paragraph.  My point, which may not have come across, is that when discussions of reward rates came up on the City boards and the ubiquitous response of "risk vs. reward" appeared, people were using risk to mean "an increased probability of failure (death)," and using that to justify an increased rate of rewards.

My point was that that is a guess, and not an accurate one.  There were many cases where the word "risk" wasn't used in a way consistent with that definition.  In fact, it wasn't even, by my estimation, the most common one.  And that's the point surrounding the word "risk."  It meant different things to different people, and even different things to the same person at different times.  I recall once when a single player used the word risk to mean three different things in a single sentence.  And that's hazardous right there.

Firstly, I think a distinction between challenge and difficulty in the sense I would use them here is necessary.  Difficulty, to my mind, will vary from player to player and situation to situation.  As an example, let's go back to the AE fire farm.  It becomes less difficult for your fiery aura scrapper, so should we reduce the rewards from each enemy defeated?  I will state my own opinion here as a definitive no, though I'm sure some will reasonably disagree.  As a design goal, I think it's unwise to give players a sense that they are being punished for what they or their characters are good at.  For that reason, if we want to use challenge as a metric for rewards, it needs to be separated from the context of the particular players facing the encounter.  Challenge must be inherent to the encounter itself.  But saying it's separate from what the particular players can do doesn't mean I have to separate it from players as a concept.  I think that may not be possible.

I would paraphrase this as saying challenge (as you're using the word) refers to the intrinsic difficulty of performing a task, while difficulty refers to the subjective experience of playing through content of that challenge.

Suppose for a moment that we think about challenge as the capabilities needed to overcome the encounter, whether that represents skill, investment in build, access to particular powers, use of limited resources, or what-have-you.  I would first ask "can the difficulty of this encounter be reduced with limited capability?"  In the case of the fire farm, the challenge is relatively low because a very narrow capability (fire resistance/defense) dramatically reduces the effective damage.  That is to say the fire farm enemies shouldn't be worth less rewards because you are currently playing your fiery aura scrapper and they're easy for you; they should be worth less because their challenge is low--you need limited capability to make it easy.

That's fair, but returning to the context of the discussion it is difficult to work from that definition to a game design goal, because it is very difficult to directly measure "what's necessary" to complete content when it is being created.

The metric I discussed above was engineered not just to create very precise definitions of terminology, but also to create a framework that could both guide game designers' intuition and also quantitatively double check their work.  The metaphor of thinking about hit points as a kind of "currency" players have to spend to complete content is something that I think is very powerful.  For example, suppose your calculations determine that the combined threat of a set of NPCs compared to a specific kind of player character, like say scrappers, is zero or even negative.  In effect that means scrappers get to run that content "for free" - they pay nothing in Hit Points.  Because tankers are likely to be in the same situation, they will also pay nothing to run that content - tankers have no advantage over scrappers.  It also suggests the rewards for such content should be either zero, or whatever the floor is for reward earning rate.  This may not be the easiest content but in this model all content of that level of threat or lower is "free."  This is one way to look at the "grey to me" content.  Below a certain threshold, the player pays nothing and thus should get nothing.

So I'm left with a bit of a conundrum.  How do we measure any of this?  Maybe this is just my own limitation, but I don't see how it could be done in any absolute sense.  I think we start with a baseline--something like "this encounter represents a challenge that a typical character can overcome in X amount of time, and we want said character to earn Y experience in X amount of time, so it's worth Y experience."  From there, challenge can only be measured in a relativistic fashion.  There is subjectivity for sure, but it comes back to this question: "If players are capable of modifying an encounter in some way, does the change in rewards correspond to the change in the challenge of the encounter, the change in the capabilities needed by the player to overcome this encounter?"  If you can change an encounter in a way that you increase its rewards disproportionately with the (subjective evaluation of the) capabilities you need to bring, then the reward system is failing.

I suggested a way above, but I want to add that there's no guarantee that for a given set of game rules there's always a "perfect" way to do this.  You may be forced to compromise to get a "good enough" solution.  In fact, my specific solution to the problem of not having any way to create a precise solution for the Architect custom critters was to realize that perfection wasn't necessary, the system only needed to be about as good as the rest of the game itself.  If it was exploitable, but no more exploitable than standard critters (which you could also use in the AE), that was close enough for City of Heroes.

I really need to think about this one more.  When you say "should not affect the reward earning rate of the game," do you mean that the change by itself would not result in a measurable difference of reward earning rates, or that rewards should be modified to compensate and maintain the going reward earning rate, or something else?  As I am using the language above, the challenge of any particular encounter may not be affected by this change, since the capabilities needed to overcome it remain the same.  But the availability of that capability to players has been reduced, so whatever you determine as your baseline would be affected.

Hmm.  It is the second one, but perhaps this will make the question's intent more clear.  Suppose I were to create a bunch of critters that debuffed recovery.  They didn't drain endurance, just suppressed recovery.  Let's ignore existing critters in CoH that did that and ask this question.  If I were to say that since these critters take no more time to kill, take no more skill to kill, and take no more attention to kill, they should award no more rewards than any normal critter would you buy that argument, or would you object?  And suppose all those statements were actually true statements in our hypothetical: playtesting confirmed they were no more difficult to kill, it is just that at the end of the fight you would have significantly less endurance than for a normal fight.  That will have a significant impact on gameplay.  Should it have any impact on the rewards earned from that encounter?

[Arcana]

What flavor would they be? I prefer my Doritos Nacho flavored...and crunchy. Not stale, but crunchy.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.fritolay.com%2Fimages%2Fdefault-source%2Fblue-bag-image%2Fcheetos-crunchy-cheese.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMhGv.png https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.fritolay.com%2Fimages%2Fdefault-source%2Fblue-bag-image%2Fdoritos-nacho-cheese.png

[Vee]

I was going to brush up on some stuff to chime in on this whole conversation but the guy on my risk management audiobook had an annoying voice.

[Twisted Toon]

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.fritolay.com%2Fimages%2Fdefault-source%2Fblue-bag-image%2Fcheetos-crunchy-cheese.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMhGv.png https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.fritolay.com%2Fimages%2Fdefault-source%2Fblue-bag-image%2Fdoritos-nacho-cheese.png

I agree. Cheetos beat Doritos any day. Except when BBQ Pringles wins out.

[Joshex]

On the subject of difficulty, I tried to formulate a difficulty model for City of Heroes back in the day, and elements of that leaked into the Architect custom critter stuff.  The cornerstone of the model was a metric I called threat  The idea behind threat is best illustrated by example.  Imagine something I call the base player.  The base player has the health of a blaster, no defenses, and about 80-100 dps of damage output (lets call it 100 to be simple).  I stick an NPC in front of this standard player.  It has health, defenses, and offense.  Now start shooting at each other.  At some point, hopefully, the player defeats the NPC.  After that much time, the NPC will have dealt damage to the player.  The average such damage, net over regeneration, expressed as a percentage of health, is what I basically defined as the threat rating of that critter.

What can we do with that?  Well, with the proper equations, we can guestimate how much damage any group of critters will do to the baseline player, and by extension how much damage they'd do (again, as a percentage) to other standards, like the average scrapper or the average tanker.  But if we're assuming that blasters were statistically the most likely to be defeated, it is reasonable for me to use them as the proxy for the baseline of difficulty.  If it should be doable, the baseline blaster should be able to do it.  How many critters should spawn in a single mob spawn point in a standard difficulty mission?  Well, in City the answer is three minions.  But is that the right answer?  We can quantitatively explore that question.  How much threat do three average minions possess in City?  How much damage will they do to the blaster before they are defeated on average?  How much should they do?

If we are designing City to allow players to continue from spawn to spawn with a minimum amount of rest, and that's the target for the design, then we can estimate the *maximum* threat a spawn should contain, given how much damage they will do and how much health the blaster will recover moving between spawns, given the average spacing of spawns.  We can calculate if three is in fact the right answer.  We can ask what the best and worst reasonable cases are.  We can even ask related questions like "what should the correct value of endurance reocvery be, given this model?"  We can ask what increasing base regen will do.  When players ask questions like "how hard is this AV" we can actually answer quantitatively.  We can immediately tell if we've buffed them too high, or made them too weak. 

We also have a quantitative basis for how much rewards individual critters should grant, based on what our target baseline reward earning rate is intended to be.  We now have a hard, numerical definition for what is "risk."  Risk, in this model, is replaced conceptually by threat, which represents the statistically likely cost in health points that it takes to defeat a critter, normalized to the difficulty of the archetype.  Blasters with no defenses are archetypally more difficult than scrappers, say.  Notice that in this model, you're forced to be honest.  The devs were never able to admit that their design deliberately made blasters intrinsically harder to play.  This model forces you to admit that quantitatively.

Take this concept and expand it to all combat, and you have a difficulty model that connects threat to reward rates for all combat-related activities.  That still leaves you with non-combat activity rewards, but it is a start.  And the math to tie it all together is not always straight forward given City of Heroes mechanics, particularly regeneration.  It is not a simple model to get right in all respects.  But I believe it does ultimately work.  It is how I would approach designing an MMO from scratch, although if I'm starting from scratch I would try to make the mechanics and the difficulty model meet in the middle better.

is this concept of threat Intellectual Property? or can I use it and give you credit for it?

[Pyromantic]

My point was that that is a guess, and not an accurate one.  There were many cases where the word "risk" wasn't used in a way consistent with that definition.  In fact, it wasn't even, by my estimation, the most common one.  And that's the point surrounding the word "risk."  It meant different things to different people, and even different things to the same person at different times.  I recall once when a single player used the word risk to mean three different things in a single sentence.  And that's hazardous right there.

I don't think it's fair to call it a guess; at least not in the "pick a number out of a hat" sense.  It's an interpretation, for sure, since it's not something that people would actually define very often.  And yes, it's anecdotal.  I was not trying to encapsulate every conversation around the subject, but what was, in my experience, the general sense of its use--at least when people actually used it to mean anything rather than a buzz-phrase to justify more loot.  For what it's worth, it's very close to the definition Twisted Toon provided, both anecdotally and explicitly.  I will certainly grant that you draw from more experience than I do in this regard, and so perhaps it is not reflective of what you encountered.

I would paraphrase this as saying challenge (as you're using the word) refers to the intrinsic difficulty of performing a task, while difficulty refers to the subjective experience of playing through content of that challenge.

That's the gist.

That's fair, but returning to the context of the discussion it is difficult to work from that definition to a game design goal, because it is very difficult to directly measure "what's necessary" to complete content when it is being created.

The metric I discussed above was engineered not just to create very precise definitions of terminology, but also to create a framework that could both guide game designers' intuition and also quantitatively double check their work.  The metaphor of thinking about hit points as a kind of "currency" players have to spend to complete content is something that I think is very powerful.  For example, suppose your calculations determine that the combined threat of a set of NPCs compared to a specific kind of player character, like say scrappers, is zero or even negative.  In effect that means scrappers get to run that content "for free" - they pay nothing in Hit Points.  Because tankers are likely to be in the same situation, they will also pay nothing to run that content - tankers have no advantage over scrappers.  It also suggests the rewards for such content should be either zero, or whatever the floor is for reward earning rate.  This may not be the easiest content but in this model all content of that level of threat or lower is "free."  This is one way to look at the "grey to me" content.  Below a certain threshold, the player pays nothing and thus should get nothing.

I suggested a way above, but I want to add that there's no guarantee that for a given set of game rules there's always a "perfect" way to do this.  You may be forced to compromise to get a "good enough" solution.  In fact, my specific solution to the problem of not having any way to create a precise solution for the Architect custom critters was to realize that perfection wasn't necessary, the system only needed to be about as good as the rest of the game itself.  If it was exploitable, but no more exploitable than standard critters (which you could also use in the AE), that was close enough for City of Heroes.

I was writing my previous post when your description you refer to went up, but I was talking about something similar I believe.  We establish a baseline by looking at the "typical character" and what is required of that character, the combination of offense and defense necessary to defeat the "typical encounter" (whether that be three nondescript minions, or something else).

But while you were talking about measuring changes in threat based on changes in the hit point cost, I'm thinking about changes in capability necessary to defeat that enemy.  The question I have, is "are you measuring that cost in hit points against the archetypal character?"  For the sake of simplicity, let's suppose our archetypal scrapper has 50% resistance to all damage types, of which there are four.  How would we compare minions if their damage output is the same, but the first does an equal amount of all damage types and the second does all damage of type A?  Against the archetypal scrapper the difference is irrelevant.  Against variations in the scrapper though, they are very different.  In the first case, some quick algebra shows that a total of 200% resistance across the four damage types will produce the same result as the archetype, but in the second case you need less capability to achieve 50% resistance--only 50% resistance to a particular type.  And, if you have more than 50% resistance to type A, you can have a lot more effective mitigation than the archetypal scrapper, even with less total resistance*.

Measuring challenge only against the archetype is unsatisfying to me, because we know from experience that it doesn't capture the ease of varying the subjective difficulty.  By limiting the second minion to a single damage type, you have introduced a particular weakness: the ability to mitigate more of its damage with a narrower set of capabilities relative to the first minion.  I would propose then that challenge cannot be measured solely against the archetype, but also against the possibility of deviation from the archetype.

*I am momentarily sidestepping the issue here of defining what is "more" or "less" total resistance.  The claim that having more than 50% resistance to type A and 0% resistance to the other types is "less" than 50% resistance to all types would be satisfied by simply taking the sum, but that isn't necessarily the right measure of "total" in this context.  Which is precisely the issue.  How do we measure capability?

Hmm.  It is the second one, but perhaps this will make the question's intent more clear.  Suppose I were to create a bunch of critters that debuffed recovery.  They didn't drain endurance, just suppressed recovery.  Let's ignore existing critters in CoH that did that and ask this question.  If I were to say that since these critters take no more time to kill, take no more skill to kill, and take no more attention to kill, they should award no more rewards than any normal critter would you buy that argument, or would you object?  And suppose all those statements were actually true statements in our hypothetical: playtesting confirmed they were no more difficult to kill, it is just that at the end of the fight you would have significantly less endurance than for a normal fight.  That will have a significant impact on gameplay.  Should it have any impact on the rewards earned from that encounter?

Short answer: I would object, and yes, it should have an impact.

Longer answer: Is it really possible for those statements to be true in our hypothetical in the general sense?  I've been talking about challenge as a collective measure of the capabilities needed to overcome the encounter, including the expenditure of resources, which in turn includes endurance.  Is there some possibility of running out of endurance against these critters?  What if you don't start with a full blue bar?  The statements could be true within particular constraints, but I'm not immediately convinced they can be true within all constraints that naturally exist inside the game.  Not if the management of endurance is actually a relevant factor, which presumably it should be if developers bothered to include it in the first place.

But I think this ultimately comes down to how we factor in time as a resource that is spent, ultimately the most important resource of all.  I initially took the question to be asking about reducing recovery across the board for players, rather than recovery debuff as an ability for a critter.  In the latter case, you require more from the player to overcome the encounter relative to an encounter with minions that lack this ability but are otherwise identical.  Perhaps not measuring it from when I start the fight to when the last enemy falls, but probably measuring it from the start of the fight to when I return to the same status, capable of overcoming the same encounter again. 

[Felderburg]

so you believe that it's ok for a news program...

The purpose of news was to tell us whats happening, now we just get opinions from all sides with little scatters of truth rephrased and worded in between, and not even the whole story at that.

Theory Obligations; if the scientific breakthrough you have contains the blueprints for the death star or could lead to the production of such a thing, is it really an obligation to release said information "for the good of humanity"?

I don't recall saying what I believe the news should do. I'm just noting that there's not too many actual laws that obligate them to be unbiased. Besides, people who watch the news tend to be aware that news can be biased.

At this stage, humanity would benefit from a Death Star level of tech, since it would mean, in effect, a second planetary body to live on, and the ability to travel to other planets (and blow them up, I guess, but why?).