Why is Hidden Blade not eligible for Daily Foundry Now?

skuldarn · May 2013

I've been running Hidden Blade for over a week and it was always counted for Daily Foundry, but now it is not. What happened?

keylord02 · May 2013

People got too good at speed-running through it and now it has an average completion time of less than 15 minutes.

not1nameleft · May 2013

I guess it is possible that people have over geared for it and can now finish it in less than 15 minutes maybe

EDIT hah beaten to it

skuldarn · May 2013

It gives a third of the dungeon AD, and dungeons are estimated at 45 minutes, so 15 minutes would be pretty appropriate. This nerf is turning me off to this game now.

greyana · May 2013

They don't care about anything but the time you spend, more time spent in game is supposedly money for them (even though grind turns players away).

tilt42 · May 2013

A Hidden Blade was never designed to handle the way it's currently being played. Doing the quest over and over again was never in my mind when I built it, but now it turns out it's one of people's favorite quests to farm. The new 14-minute playtime is discouraging this behavior, which makes the quest constantly jump between 14 and 15 minutes averages. This is particularly silly since a proper first-time playthrough of the quest will rarely take less than 30 minutes.

I have a small change planned for the last part of the inn sequence that might help with this. Look for this change in one of the coming days. This change will deal with two issues I have with the quest:

1) People are running it too fast (though rest assured I'm not going to pointlessly pad it or add more than a minute or so of playtime)
2) Players aren't encouraged to see what happens to the inn after the Mysterious Woman attacks. There are actually interesting things to see, but none of the YouTube videos I've seen of it even come across these things.

dzogen · May 2013

Same thing happened on mine. One non-grindy thing that I found artificially helped was setting interactions to "long." A couple of those could bring your average up a bit, then throw in a small hallway or two.

izatar · May 2013

"I am Slayer" has an average of 0 minutes. I do not understand how that could be possible.

drakedge2 · May 2013

A lot of folks complain about the long hallway in Tiaga's house... that hallway serves a time sink purpose, aside from artistic.

tilt42 · May 2013

drakedge2 wrote: »

A lot of folks complain about the long hallway in Tiaga's house... that hallway serves a time sink purpose, aside from artistic.

See, that's the kind of padding I want to avoid. People know when you're deliberately wasting their time. I'm hoping my change will feel natural.

nokturnel · May 2013

tilt42 wrote: »

See, that's the kind of padding I want to avoid. People know when you're deliberately wasting their time. I'm hoping my change will feel natural.

Yea I added the armory last minute to mine and had it be a quest objective to clear the mobs out of it. Still took the time to detail the room and hand-craft the encounters though. I'll be adding a cave built from scratch to it as well soon so once it becomes eligible for daily and the plays start to escalate there will be more encounters for the player to deal with. I always make sure each group fits the story though and craft their costumes so no 2 npcs look the exact same.

Just adding longer hallways seems to be a boring way to deal with the average duration problem, you can always add entire rooms onto the quest that are fully detailed and make interesting encounters for the players to fight that tie into the story.

nibl · May 2013

tilt42 if you want to "improve performance" of quest you should make goblin encounters impossible to avoid -> currently both encounters are avoidable by every class (also I am quite sure that rogue is able to sneak by other encounters). Honestly I never liked goblin encounters as they made quest very much zoo-like (in thins encounter we have assasins, and that encounter we have bunch of goblins, just behind that rock we have few spiders)...
Other improvement could be - making barman not giving you key, but going (walking) with you to open door. It would be more natural in RP standpoint (guy probably wouldn't want you to get through tavern patrons stuff if you were thief).
Also you could remade dialog system, and make from time to time "infinite loop" for people who push '1' or '2'.
If there is possibility, you could make timer (some doorway don't activate before) that prevents finishing quest in lets say less than 14 minutes... But that would be very artificial.

tilt42 · May 2013

The goblins and spiders were added not for padding but because they felt very right to me, as a D&D Dungeon Master. They are the type of encounter I could have tossed up against my players if I had run a scenario like this in the pen & paper game. The goblins are avoidable on purpose, though I may take a few steps to force the player to at least fight the ones on the hill.

Having the innkeeper move to the door to unlock it is beyond the capabilities of the Foundry. With that I don't mean that it can't be done, only that it would be so awkward and prone to bugs that it's way better not to do it in the first place.

I don't want to annoy my players with pointless waiting or combat. The goblins are optional because they aren't a part of the story. It's something extra for the player to have fun with if he chooses (or if he is surprised. One of them does sneak up on you, after all). If I'm going to extend things, I'm going to do this by adding meaningful content, which is what I'm planning to do with the proposed change I mentioned.

Truth to be told though, I'm fighting a losing battle. Those who farm the quest can do it in roughly 8 minutes or so. Since there will be fewer and fewer new players, and an increasing amount of people replaying the quest, my average duration will keep going down. Unless I almost double the length of the quest, it's guaranteed to keep dropping below the 15-minute mark for the average. The only thing capable of reversing this trend is for the quest to lose its status as a daily quest, which is what's been happening recently, and what has caused the quest to jump back and forth between 14 and 15 minutes.

The change I'm making will only delay this from happening again. It won't be able to stop it. Until Cryptic can make only the initial play count towards a quest's average duration, this is something I'll just have to live with.

Later quests in this campaign will all be longer than A Hidden Blade was, as you can see with The Lanaar Legacy that still resides at 44 minutes average duration despite farming. Someone's first playthrough of that quest can easily take 1 1/2 hours, so even that average is deceptively low (which again costs me ratings).

drakedge2 · May 2013

tilt42 wrote: »

See, that's the kind of padding I want to avoid. People know when you're deliberately wasting their time. I'm hoping my change will feel natural.

Yes, and I agree with you, but the original intent of the hallway was to make the portal chamber a little more dramatic. It is sad being an art major that I forget right now the term for it, but I was going more for the artistic look of it. The side benefit was that it takes players all of a minute or two to cross the bridge so to speak. It really isn't a huge time sink. But it helps me keep a 15 minute average.

I wrote the original part a bit too early in the morning lol.

skuldarn · May 2013

Unfortunately the design of the game means that AD is the only currency that matters, so people focus on tasks that provide AD, and will tend to farm tasks that give the most AD for the time invested. This is a common (if not ubiquitous) MMO pattern, of course, but this one takes it a step further than many MMOs by tying AD to real money.

I would much rather see a game structure that heavily rewarded investigating a variety of Foundry quests, but that is a dream that will probably never see daylight. If I could be more exploratory and less of a farmer and not be punished in end-game if I want to still see improvement in my character, I would consider that more in keeping with the heritage of this game.

nokturnel · May 2013

skuldarn wrote: »

Unfortunately the design of the game means that AD is the only currency that matters, so people focus on tasks that provide AD, and will tend to farm tasks that give the most AD for the time invested. This is a common (if not ubiquitous) MMO pattern, of course, but this one takes it a step further than many MMOs by tying AD to real money.

I would much rather see a game structure that heavily rewarded investigating a variety of Foundry quests, but that is a dream that will probably never see daylight. If I could be more exploratory and less of a farmer and not be punished in end-game if I want to still see improvement in my character, I would consider that more in keeping with the heritage of this game.

The best way for Cryptic to stop people from farming foundry quests as fast as possible would be to

- Not allow the same Foundry quest count more than once per day,
- Only register the first time someone runs a Foundry quest towards average duration (Once people understand the quest, they're more likely only doing it again to speed run it, which ruins the average duration for people who don't speed run)
- Allow authors to limit the amount of players that can enter the Foundry quest and give Authors more tools to design Party Foundry Quests (Bosses and encounters intended for 5 man parties)

This would encourage people to try more Foundry quests and not farm the same one every day. Allowing authors to set a limit will definitely make sure people aren't doing a Foundry quest meant for 1 person as a 5 man group (and thus ruining the average duration again) As well as allow authors who design Foundry quests for groups to make sure solo players aren't wasting their time on a quest too hard for them.

kamaliicious · May 2013

There's a parallel thread to this in gen discussion. It has quotes like: "not hugely time consuming after you've memorised the steps."

In other words, people aren't really caring about the story you've crafted, they just want something that is >15 minutes and not obviously gimped. When they find one that's eligible, they just run it daily for their daily. Judging by the missions they talk about, no one looks beyond the most played missions (heck, there's even a complaint in there that Foundry search stinks bad enough it's not worth it trying to seek out anything other than the most played ones).

It would be very interesting to see a graph of Hidden Blade's daily plays now versus when it was eligible.

tilt42 · May 2013

I've been receiving noticeably less AD in tips these last few days, but I don't know if it's related. That could also just be related to the quest now being "old", having been played by "everyone" already.

kamaliicious · May 2013

tilt42 wrote: »

I've been receiving noticeably less AD in tips these last few days, but I don't know if it's related. That could also just be related to the quest now being "old", having been played by "everyone" already.

Watch the plays. It should be east to figure out a eligible daily rate (launch to now) versus now that it's not.

tilt42 · May 2013

I honestly lost track of the plays from day 1.

lunchtimenow · May 2013

nokturnel wrote: »

The best way for Cryptic to stop people from farming foundry quests as fast as possible would be to

- Not allow the same Foundry quest count more than once per day,
- Only register the first time someone runs a Foundry quest towards average duration (Once people understand the quest, they're more likely only doing it again to speed run it, which ruins the average duration for people who don't speed run)
- Allow authors to limit the amount of players that can enter the Foundry quest and give Authors more tools to design Party Foundry Quests (Bosses and encounters intended for 5 man parties)

This would encourage people to try more Foundry quests and not farm the same one every day. Allowing authors to set a limit will definitely make sure people aren't doing a Foundry quest meant for 1 person as a 5 man group (and thus ruining the average duration again) As well as allow authors who design Foundry quests for groups to make sure solo players aren't wasting their time on a quest too hard for them.

I like all these suggestions. Kudos! But still, farming players will gravitate to the quickest dailies. Why wouldn't they create 100 different 5 minute dailies for your 8 hour AD farming work day.

kamaliicious · May 2013

tilt42 wrote: »

I honestly lost track of the plays from day 1.

Doesn't matter much, plays now divided by days since launch would be close enough for this entirely unscientific experiment.

drakesigar · May 2013

I was going to do a dialogue heavy adventure with little combat, but it sounds like I'll now have to compensate for some HAMSTER purposely trying to farm the quest and speedrun it. Dialogue counts for almost nothing towards the total time if it's being skipped.

At least this explains why the first episode of your quest From the Shadows wasn't eligible for the Foundry reward when I started playing, and then was again when I finished.

I feel kinda guilty about my review of the second episode now, where I called it 'abusively long.'

lunchtimenow · May 2013

drakesigar wrote: »

This... explains a lot. I was going to do a dialogue heavy adventure with little combat, but it sounds like I'll now have to compensate for some HAMSTER purposely trying to farm the quest and speedrun it. Dialogue counts for almost nothing towards the total time if it's being skipped.

Zovya recently posted a timer trick. You could make a 15 minute timer so that your quest could never be completed before the timer expires.

http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?158751-Foundry-Trick-Trigger-Timer

Edit: The only issue is that you can't easily change maps without disabling the timer, but you could estimate how much time maps a, b, and c would take before starting the DNF timer on map d.

kamaliicious · May 2013

drakesigar wrote: »

I was going to do a dialogue heavy adventure with little combat, but it sounds like I'll now have to compensate for some HAMSTER purposely trying to farm the quest and speedrun it.

Only if you care about it being eligible for the daily.

calamintha · May 2013

nokturnel wrote: »

- Not allow the same Foundry quest count more than once per day,
- Only register the first time someone runs a Foundry quest towards average duration (Once people understand the quest, they're more likely only doing it again to speed run it, which ruins the average duration for people who don't speed run)
- Allow authors to limit the amount of players that can enter the Foundry quest and give Authors more tools to design Party Foundry Quests (Bosses and encounters intended for 5 man parties)

- Make the daily only require a single foundry quest and give bonus AD based on the average length.
- Add encounter scaling based on group size

skuldarn · May 2013

The problem seems to be that they added a Daily Foundry task as a way to encourage people to run Foundries but then hard-coded eligibility at 15 minutes without regard to the actual content, presumably because the dev time needed to examine every Foundry that intently would be unfeasible.

So now those seeking AD (all but the most unaware) gravitate toward whatever Foundry can be run the quickest and still count, thus negating much of the effort and imagination invested into the creation of Foundries. I suppose you could lay some of the blame for that waste on the players rushing through, but they're just doing what the game encourages them to do by its very structure.

Nothing in the game rewards you for playing three different Foundries instead of replying the same one three times. Rather than simply punishing the latter by only granting AD for multiple Foundries daily, why not ratchet up the AD reward, such as giving 500 for one, 1000 for the second if different, but 500 for the second if the same. Basically, carrots versus whips (or chains). That still leaves the issue of taking time instead of running through, but it always seems to be a minority of players that pay considerable attention to NPC dialogs.

The FTP setup of this game is not the best. Most people prefer that standard core things like AH and gear improvements be available for standard game currency, while real-money-tied currencies be used for customization items. This seems to provide ample revenue while not provoking massive sense of resentment. Were that the case in this game, I would assume that Foundries would not be as regulated in their rewards, and besides that would have rewards even outside a Daily bonus that would be of more value to players.

juravian · May 2013

With all of the speed runners and drone players (People who prefer to do the same thing over and over for the AD or XP), it kills the foundry anyway. The quests that have depth, dialog, and meaning to them are the most fun to play, but due to all of the drones, they get rated poorly because they take too long to run.

It's a sad state of gaming these days.

lunchtimenow · May 2013

juravian wrote: »

With all of the speed runners and drone players (People who prefer to do the same thing over and over for the AD or XP), it kills the foundry anyway. The quests that have depth, dialog, and meaning to them are the most fun to play, but due to all of the drones, they get rated poorly because they take too long to run.

It's a sad state of gaming these days.

The drones need to go back to starcraft where they belong ;D

calamintha wrote: »

- Make the daily only require a single foundry quest and give bonus AD based on the average length.
- Add encounter scaling based on group size

I like scaling rewards based on time spent. IMO, (time:risk) vs reward needs to be taken into account.

lunchtimenow · May 2013

skuldarn wrote: »

The problem seems to be that they added a Daily Foundry task as a way to encourage people to run Foundries but then hard-coded eligibility at 15 minutes without regard to the actual content, presumably because the dev time needed to examine every Foundry that intently would be unfeasible.

So now those seeking AD (all but the most unaware) gravitate toward whatever Foundry can be run the quickest and still count, thus negating much of the effort and imagination invested into the creation of Foundries. I suppose you could lay some of the blame for that waste on the players rushing through, but they're just doing what the game encourages them to do by its very structure.

Nothing in the game rewards you for playing three different Foundries instead of replying the same one three times. Rather than simply punishing the latter by only granting AD for multiple Foundries daily, why not ratchet up the AD reward, such as giving 500 for one, 1000 for the second if different, but 500 for the second if the same. Basically, carrots versus whips (or chains). That still leaves the issue of taking time instead of running through, but it always seems to be a minority of players that pay considerable attention to NPC dialogs.

The FTP setup of this game is not the best. Most people prefer that standard core things like AH and gear improvements be available for standard game currency, while real-money-tied currencies be used for customization items. This seems to provide ample revenue while not provoking massive sense of resentment. Were that the case in this game, I would assume that Foundries would not be as regulated in their rewards, and besides that would have rewards even outside a Daily bonus that would be of more value to players.

I agree with everything except the imagination part. Sure, the players may approach any given foundry quest in a way that circumvents the intentions of its creator. But there is challenge to creating content that is at minimum 15 minutes long, and not lack of imagination. Yes, the latter might occur. But that's up to the creator. Imagine being a film producer that specializes in creating commercials and you must create a short film. Sure, as a commercial producer you can create a beautiful 45 second story, but there is a new challenge in making it 5-10 minutes to fit as a short film.

tilt42 · May 2013

lunchtimenow wrote: »

Zovya recently posted a timer trick. You could make a 15 minute timer so that your quest could never be completed before the timer expires.

You seem to be disturbingly eager to get 1-star reviews.

I will say this: Your idea is hilariously bad.

Why is Hidden Blade not eligible for Daily Foundry Now?

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