Suggestion: Completely Preventing Foundry Exploitation implementation

eldarth

Core Concept

"Earned Time Spent" - Preventing “Artificial Time Extending” Exploits
Currently total “Time Spent” if used for experience/loot maximum cap calculations can currently be artificially extended by macro usage where player merely jumps up and down or runs in circles for hours and vacuums up loot from portal spawns.

• “Earned Time Spent” could accrue only every 20 seconds(?) following an experience Milestone (Objective Complete, or Encounter Complete, or Dialog Complete). Once per completion. An easy way to calculate this would be to deduct the previous milestone from the current time and only add a minimum time between milestones occurred:
  • Seconds = Current Time - Last Milestone
  • If Seconds > 20 then ...
    • Earned Time Spent = Earned Time Spent + 20
    • Last Milestone = Current Time
• Loot/Experience “earned” could then be calculated/capped based on the non-exploitable “Earned Time Spent.”

This would also enable allowing many long desired author requests:

• Skill nodes – budget limit 5?
• Non-combat objective rewards (deduct an Encounter, drop equivalent loot/experience).
• Increased Encounter Budget? Experience and Loot won’t ever exceed Earned Time Spent distribution calculation.
• Improved end-chest rewards
• Improved encounter rewards
• Maybe easier to allow authors to use “Bosses” since experience/loot is no longer exploitable?
• Might allow an author to “place” a specific reward item?
• Eases future foundry development??

“Loot Value”
Each item dropped by an event (encounter, skill node, etc) must have an associated Loot Value.
This part really needs internal knowledge of what/how values are associated with items
– i.e. things like…

• Item Level?
• How much a Vendor would purchase it from player (gold price?)
• Value in Astral Diamonds, or Zen store price
• Campaign/Event Token price
• Salvage Price, Item level/quality. Etc.

This could be just some simple calculation, such as:

QualityMultiplier = (White=1, Green=1.2, Blue=1.75, Purple=2.5, Gold=5)
LootValue = (ItemLevel *1000) * QualityMultiplier

…or, there may already exist some internal valuation that players don’t know or see.

“Loot Funds” (Foundry Tokens?)
This would be the maximum treasure/items value that each player could receive for playing (partially, or completing) the quest. Upon Loot Distribution (below), each player would receive however many Loot Funds they are allowed to “spend.”
This would also require some developer/designer knowledge and be “relative” to the Loot Values.
But, could also be something simple, such as:

FoundryTokens = (PlayerLevel * 25000)
So, relative to the LootValue calculated above, this would allow the player to “purchase” from the Foundry Sack:

1 Purple quality item (5,000 tokens), leaving 20,000 tokens
5 blue items (5 * 1750 = 8750), leaving 11,250
3 green items (3 * 1200 = 3600), leaving 7,650
7 white items (7 * 1000 = 7000), discarding remaining unused 650 tokens

…or how about:
FoundryTokens = (PlayerLevel * 15000) * (EarnedTimeSpent / 10 minutes)

(See EarnedTimeSpent above -- There go any treasure hauls from “instant” or 1-2 minute foundry quests!) ​​

joocycuzzzzzz

I admire your dedication to the foundry (No, really, seriously).

But it's almost.... literally a lost cause.

charononus

eldarth wrote: »

Foundry quest "Loot Sack"

ALL Encounter drops, treasure chests, and experience are added to a Loot Sack.

When quest is completed (or disconnected*, exited*, or abandoned), Cryptic calculates an acceptable "Loot Limit" and maximum "Experience Limit". Minimum of the quest experience for the quest, or the maximum Experience Limit is added to characters Experience.

If Loot Value calculated for the Loot Sack exceeds maximum "Loot Limit" then a dialog is presented allowing player to "drop" items from Loot Sack until it's value falls below the calculated Loot Limit.

This should be extremely easy for Devs to implement, it being a single inventory/dialog type window.
There are already existing loot values associated (level, vendor value, gear score, rarity, salvage value, etc).

This would completely free up the Devs to allow foundry authors to place skill nodes, non-combat rewards, individual treasure items, etc.

*If disconnected or exited, either re-entering/continuing the foundry quest, or abandoning and resolving Loot Sack contents would be required before entering another foundry quest.

It's a possibility but I'm not sure about it. Part of the problem is such low rewards from the foundry, and the fact that the dev's seem to find that acceptable. I'm afraid whatever numbers they put in for such a system would make the problem worse not better.

bardaaron

Yeah this COULD work, assuming that the Devs also increase the amount of loot we can get (or the quality) so it that is high enough to make it worth players' time. Level 60s are looking for purples and oranges now, when they MIGHT get a blue from an encounter drop and best, and end chest is a guaranteed green that will be of no use to them.

evikro

This could work, assuming such limits are reasonable.

eldarth

Explicitly detailed ideas and added fix for time-wasting exploits.

eldarth

Clarified "Core Concept" in initial post a bit:

"Earned Time Spent" - Preventing “Artificial Time Extending” Exploits
Currently total “Time Spent” if used for experience/loot maximum cap calculations can currently be artificially extended by macro usage where player merely jumps up and down or runs in circles for hours and vacuums up loot from portal spawns.

• “Earned Time Spent” could accrue only every 20 seconds(?) following an experience Milestone (Objective Complete, or Encounter Complete, or Dialog Complete). Once per completion. An easy way to calculate this would be to deduct the previous milestone from the current time and only add a minimum time between milestones occurred:
  • Seconds = Current Time - Last Milestone
  • If Seconds > 20 then ...
    • Earned Time Spent = Earned Time Spent + 20
    • Last Milestone = Current Time
• Loot/Experience “earned” could then be calculated/capped based on the non-exploitable “Earned Time Spent.”

reiwulf

My only gripe with this system Eldarth is that it doe require indeed a lot of coding, and that means actual care for the foundry, something I haven't really seen in a long time.
If we still don't even have the armor sets for HR! (who was released like a bazillion modules ago) much less SW or OP now, I don't really see them caring at all for the foundry.
I hope they'll someday prove me wrong though.

eldarth

reiwulf wrote: »

My only gripe with this system Eldarth is that it doe require indeed a lot of coding, and that means actual care for the foundry, something I haven't really seen in a long time.

A lot of coding??? I pretty much wrote the main 4 lines of code for them. The exploit prevention Earned Time Spent would allow them to completely control and make rewards and experience actually relevant for a change. That should be simply changing the experience/calculation they already have coded. An entry level programmer could do it in a week.

The enhancements below that would simply allow people to pick-n-choose loot they can actually use from what was dropped -- that would require some coding, although they could pretty much just use the bank/inventory interface or a vendor interface where they "bought" dropped loot with the total loot reward points available.

bardaaron

reiwulf wrote: »

My only gripe with this system Eldarth is that it doe require indeed a lot of coding, and that means actual care for the foundry, something I haven't really seen in a long time.

And it looks like it's only going to get worse; we lost spirals and akro. Unless they bring in some new blood who will fight for the foundry, we're on a downward slope.

antonkyle

They should just make a stand alone foundry game in my opinion and go back to the D&D roots (A digital version of the tabletop game). I think the target audience of NW is not in line with the idea behind the foundry.

You wouldn't need to worry about loot/rewards then. Which is what holds the foundry back in just about every way imaginable. When you think about all the mods being created for many, many games and all the excitement over things like Landmark, minecraft etc.. there is a huge market that is just untapped. I'm surprised it's not been done well.

Imagine if people could create whole little worlds, so you put all your quests into one area full of stuff that grows with your builds. That's what dreams are made of.

The NW foundry came so close to being all that I could ever hope for, but in the end it's failures are a constant reminder of how restricted it is. Not good..

dragoness10

The portals were already adjusted to reduce exploit farming. You can already place non-combat objectives. I made a completely non-combat Foundry myself awhile back just for that purpose of time spent vs loot gained.

Omgthe thought of further coding needed to do constant checks of time spent in a foundry itself is... OW. I just hurt my brain.

Same goes for loot choice. Random drop is easier on the server.

Reworking the whole Salvage system to include items OTHER than Epic is an arduous task too. You'd be salvaging normal loot that you didn't get from Foundry. You'd need a whole Foundry specific loot table with Foundry specific items!

As for loot sorting you can already set Loot threshold for a party before entering any dungeon or Foundry.


Sorry, I see a lot of request for already existing things, and then more request for some project on it's own that'd need 6 months to work on for Foundry alone. The Foundry Mod 7.

reiwulf

antonkyle wrote: »

They should just make a stand alone foundry game in my opinion and go back to the D&D roots (A digital version of the tabletop game). I think the target audience of NW is not in line with the idea behind the foundry.

You wouldn't need to worry about loot/rewards then. Which is what holds the foundry back in just about every way imaginable. When you think about all the mods being created for many, many games and all the excitement over things like Landmark, minecraft etc.. there is a huge market that is just untapped. I'm surprised it's not been done well.

Imagine if people could create whole little worlds, so you put all your quests into one area full of stuff that grows with your builds. That's what dreams are made of.

The NW foundry came so close to being all that I could ever hope for, but in the end it's failures are a constant reminder of how restricted it is. Not good..

This, this would solve so many things, and it's true, the few foundry authors seems tp be a very different public that most of the NW playerbase who mostly care about getting their artifacts to legendary as soon as possible, and don't care about stories or NPCs, they just want epic l00tz

antonkyle

reiwulf wrote: »

This, this would solve so many things, and it's true, the few foundry authors seems tp be a very different public that most of the NW playerbase who mostly care about getting their artifacts to legendary as soon as possible, and don't care about stories or NPCs, they just want epic l00tz

Imagine how more in-depth a stand alone game could be too.

You could make your own races, clothes/armor, weapons. Wildlife could be so much more varied, the same as building and general architecture. Bosses could have unique skill sets. You could team up with friends to create and explore other peoples maps. Teams of artists working together.

Instead of creating stories developers could be permanently creating more and more props, buildings, animals.


Seriously, the more I think about it the more I think, why the hell has this not been done. It would be like minecraft but without the blocks and digging, but then also so much more.

They could even start taking players work and instead of a feature board, start building a chain of quests to build a type of user made mmo.

Oh the possibilities!

Edit: They could even set up a kickstarter campaign just to be absolutely certain that it would indeed be very much wanted.

I'm starting a trend (hehe) #foundrystandalone #makeithappen (yeah, I've been watching South Park)

eldarth

antonkyle wrote: »

Edit: They could even set up a kickstarter campaign just to be absolutely certain that it would indeed be very much wanted.

I was thinking something similar -- imagine a kickstarter campaign to "hire" a dedicated foundry only developer.

antonkyle

eldarth wrote: »

I was thinking something similar -- imagine a kickstarter campaign to "hire" a dedicated foundry only developer.

I'm not sure that an already existing game would create enough hype to be honest. Neverwinter foundry had it's chance. Creative people flocked here at one time and most have gone now. Most left for silly reasons too, such as maps and items changing so peoples months of work went down the drain.

Then again, there is nothing to lose. I still think a fresh start would be best. Learn from mistakes here and move on. Not that they can't use some of those idea's to make Neverwinter better in the mean time.

One day someone will make it and then there will be a whole load of games like it. Maybe.... once survival zombie games die out...