I usually agree with everything you say, twg, but I just don't think it's designed well, if the player is given this choice:
"Hey you want 12 cookies? Go play a foundry mission that is at least 15 minutes long. No, you will not get more cookies for playing one of the story missions. They will take you an hour and you will get 12 cookies."
It privileges the shorter combat missions, many of which are slapped together in one evening over the missions that took months to create.
I'd be fine with them adding more reward for longer missions. I'd just as happy if authors would put estimated play times in their descriptions so I could decide myself if it was worth my click.
"Hey you want 12 cookies? Go play a foundry mission that is at least 15 minutes long. No, you will not get more cookies for playing one of the story missions. They will take you an hour and you will get 12 cookies."
It privileges the shorter combat missions, many of which are slapped together in one evening over the missions that took months to create.
Perhaps you should recognize that the player who wants the cookies in the shortest amount of time is most certainly not the player you want playing your missions and rating it:
Technically that's what the spotlight mission thing is for
That's just Cryptic playing favorites. I'm talking about a community... well at least just the upset story-types... taking matters into their own hands in a constructive way -- enabling those so inclined an easier way to find acceptable missions.
1. The current state of the foundry in regards to effort vs reward is fine as is. Much better than previously. Other choices are solutions for a different problem not part of the foundry itself.
2. The problem was lazy, self entitled players using exploits for fat loot. Then getting angry when they couldnt and blaming a shadowy cabal of power broker authors for the fallout for their own excesses. They one-starred unrelated story missions in revenge.
Nothing can be done about this since it is part of the psychological soup that makes a geek a geek. Shame doesn't seem to work.
3. Timid creatures not dropping loot would have been a better solution than what was decided upon. A more comprehensive UI would be even better. All of these require a great deal of effort from the devs, it seems.
But maybe its less work and more likely to succeed than trying to convince Star Trek fans to live up the standards of their franchise heroes. I urge this path be taken.
1. effort vs reward, thats subjective and varies by individual some never ran foundries becasue of time/reward some didnt care about rewards. I have no idea what the breakdown is but blanket staments are invalid.
2. As an author, whether literature or anything else one can nudge, conjole, and tease to modify a readers/users tastes, however insulting large swaths of potential fans tends not to broaden ones audeance. As well, trying to force an audience tends to loose one that audience. We all have an in-built trigger that when someone pushes us, we push back, even if normally we would agree.
That's just Cryptic playing favorites. I'm talking about a community... well at least just the upset story-types... taking matters into their own hands in a constructive way -- enabling those so inclined an easier way to find acceptable missions.
I can already see a flaw with the time-based reward idea: people finding a mission and just sitting there doing nothing at all to try to milk the reward as much as possible.
I think I can see a couple of solutions to that before it starts to become a problem, mainly involving a time limit, and even that's starting to branch off quite a bit as far as the 'how'.
I can already see a flaw with the time-based reward idea: people finding a mission and just sitting there doing nothing at all to try to milk the reward as much as possible.
I can already see a flaw with the time-based reward idea: people finding a mission and just sitting there doing nothing at all to try to milk the reward as much as possible.
I think I can see a couple of solutions to that before it starts to become a problem, mainly involving a time limit, and even that's starting to branch off quite a bit as far as the 'how'.
Well, it would be based on the average play time, which is the system Cryptic now uses to grant or not grant IOR rewards.
Someone could stand around a mission all night long, but only get rewarded for that mission's average play time. Maybe a fleet could work together to alter the play time and then start zooming the mission for increased rewards. But, I think they'll discover that they spent less time if they had just played the mission without going AFK.
Yes but you encode it into your mission descriptions. Almost no one cares about a game foum unless their character just can't complete the damn feature episode and is caught in a time loop, I like Tasha Yar, but this is the fifth time... ahem. Do the work and make that list almost no one sees a part of those missions.
It's just an idea, do it or not, but it seems a better use of energy than doing what the posting right above this one is doing.
Well, it would be based on the average play time, which is the system Cryptic now uses to grant or not grant IOR rewards.
Someone could stand around a mission all night long, but only get rewarded for that mission's average play time. Maybe a fleet could work together to alter the play time and then start zooming the mission for increased rewards. But, I think they'll discover that they spent less time if they had just played the mission without going AFK.
...come to think of it, there's the counterbalance to idling right there. That kind of system would go a long way towards making sure timer-based rewards don't get put into the same reward category as TF2 items before that issue got capped.
My keyboard is probably smart enough to circumvent that. It's ridiculously exploitable and very hard to design something around that which won't cripple the very system you're trying to fix.
I think it's a fabulous idea!
For any noticeable scale-tipping to take place, you'd need a ridiculous number of players AFKing in the mission to get that slider over to the 'easy money' level of exploitability.
Throwing one of the 'sit and shoot' grinders into the mix, those really can't take more than 15-20 minutes to clear, pre-patch. If the reward is set to X, you'd need almost everyone doing that mission once it appears in the list to sit overnight in there to balance out the ones who just go in and hit Fire All Weapons before getting a cup of coffee.
For any noticeable scale-tipping to take place, you'd need a ridiculous number of players AFKing in the mission to get that slider over to the 'easy money' level of exploitability.
Throwing one of the 'sit and shoot' grinders into the mix, those really can't take more than 15-20 minutes to clear, pre-patch. If the reward is set to X, you'd need almost everyone doing that mission once it appears in the list to sit overnight in there to balance out the ones who just go in and hit Fire All Weapons before getting a cup of coffee.
It really just looks like a nonissue trying to find complicated ways to TRIBBLE up a system that is fine as-is.
2. As an author, whether literature or anything else one can nudge, conjole, and tease to modify a readers/users tastes, however insulting large swaths of potential fans tends not to broaden ones audeance.
I'm not an author. I'm a player. I'm a geek. I know how geek culture works. I know how infantile it tends to be. The "Timid Grinders" were being infantile over the loss of their exploit. I've mentioned this in the other thread but I have no sympathy for this in myself, let alone in others.
To paraphrase: Their views are bad and they should feel bad.
No, no. Three people didn't like the exploit that sparked the change. Fifteen didn't like the change after it took place, i.e. the guy who wanted the Exchange completely reset and overhauled because the ship he wanted was 80M EC and he couldn't grind for it anymore.
Honestly, the patch didn't affect my own grinding in any way except for the 'hey, I wanna blow something up' mission choice and even then I got over it pretty quick. The ones who just did easy money over and over and over and repeat x500 are the ones doing all the shouting.
No, no. Three people didn't like the exploit that sparked the change. Fifteen didn't like the change after it took place, i.e. the guy who wanted the Exchange completely reset and overhauled because the ship he wanted was 80M EC and he couldn't grind for it anymore.
Honestly, the patch didn't affect my own grinding in any way except for the 'hey, I wanna blow something up' mission choice and even then I got over it pretty quick. The ones who just did easy money over and over and over and repeat x500 are the ones doing all the shouting.
That's done.
I respectfully submit and request that those interested in continuing constructive discussion simply do so, ignoring those who are obviously now trying to bait us into more banal arguments. They have a personal axe to grind. Let them grind it against thin air.
DO not give them the recognition of a reply, and rather continue this good sharing of ideas.
This is about a community, not just one part of it, but a community coming together to assist in coming up with a solution to an issue that is obviously affecting us all.
Us vs. Them, You vs. Me, Camp vs. Camp. It's totally counter productive, and honestly, all of us should be ashamed that we actually let it get this far.
I urge the entire community to let the past go.
Stop calling each other names.
Share ideas openly.
If you have it to say , say it here, but be done with the attacks.
Only by openly sharing ideas and deciding to work together as a community are we going to solve this. If you can't get onboard with that, the whole working together for a better tomorrow idea, then I kindly ask that you take your hate sandwich someplace else.
The current problem is the reward structure for the Foundry is not aligned with what the Foundry is about. The purpose of the Foundry is story. Cryptic/DStahl made this clear when the Foundry was released, and it's also reiterated whenever something about the Foundry is posted on the main page. In addition, the effort going into developing the Foundry tool set allows for a very powerful tool capable of telling detailed stories. That, once again, makes it clear that the Foundry is designed to tell stories.
Some claim that only a small fraction of the player base cares about story, but that is in fact irrelevant. The Foundry is for those who do enjoy story, just as the STFs are for a certain type of player, and other mission types are for other types of players. The attitude of the majority of the player base is irrelevant as far as what the Foundry should be for.
Unfortunately, the Foundry rewards structure currently doesn't provide an incentive for story based missions. Instead they have been made too good. When played with a missions optimized to provide rewards (short as possible, without being too short, basically nothing but combat for the most loot drops), you can get resources (dilithium, fleet marks, etc) faster than you can in other areas of the game. This should not be the case.
The Foundry should never provide a way to get resources faster than in other aspects of the game. Foundry rewards need to be decent so that people who enjoy playing Foundry missions get a decent return. But people who's primary goal is to maximize resource gathering should be steered elsewhere. Either something in Tau Dewa, the STFs, or something else, should provide dilithium and fleet marks at a faster rate when people do nothing but grind for resources.
The Foundry reward structure needs to be designed so that it encourages people who enjoy stories to play, while not causing people whose goal is to grind to come in and bury all the story missions under grind missions created in a fraction of the time (and using a small fraction of the Foundry's capabilities).
In that vein, the following changes need to be made:
1) Rewards overall should only be 80% of what you can get through other methods in the game. This is still decent, but noticeably inferior, thus discouraging people who want nothing but to maximize the acquisition of dilithium and fleet marks.
2) Rewards need to scale with mission length, and they need to be based off of the time each individual player takes to complete the mission. That would make it so that people could play at their own pace, as they enjoy, without feeling they need to rush to get a better reward for the time spent. Rewards need to scale up to 2 hours or so, after which they can be capped if there is concern about potential idle abuse. In addition, rewards could also be capped at 200% the average play time, if there is still concern with people afking.
3) The Foundry drop limit should be fine tuned. You shouldn't receive loot for killing more than 10 enemy groups every 30 minutes, or something along those lines (this number needs to be fine tuned, but I don't know exactly what the current limits are). The limit needs to be set on a shorter time scale, rather than being per day. Right now there is an incentive to just go into a mission and maximize your daily loot drops, rather than drawing them out over the course of a several hour play session. Once again, this encourages grind missions with nothing but combat, over those that spread combat encounters out with story.
4) More of the reward should be accrued at the end of the mission, rather than from combat encounters in the mission. NW has the loot chest for each map, which would be out of place in STO. Instead, additional/better random object should accrue depending on how long a mission is. Every 20 minutes in length should increase the odds of receiving better quality loot, which would be provided in addition to dilithium.
Length based loot should be better than what is dropped from combat, to allow non-combat missions to also provide decent loot. It can still be random, so that there is only a higher chance of getting a purple piece of loot, but a 2 hour mission should have a very high chance of providing some blue loot, and at least a decent (no less than 20%) chance of providing something purple.
If I were designing this I would come up with a table based on time, which generated the amount of items received, as well as their quality. For example, two green items could be received in place of a blue item, two blues in place of a purple, etc. Make it random so you're never sure exactly what you'll get.
The key is longer missions need to provide more loot/or a higher chance of receiving better loot so they're on level footing with shorter missions. For example, maybe a 30 minute mission has a 5% chance of providing a purple drop, a 2 hour mission would provide a 20% chance since you could run four 30 minute missions in that time period.
This is probably a pipe dream, but ideally, the Foundry editor would provide a place for us to create several costumes/race selections/names that would then be assigned to any boffs randomly generated by our mission. For example, in Atlas Affair, I could create a costume of Cadet Pargu, and set his race to Ferengi. Then any boffs generated by the random loot would be a Ferengi of random rarity named Ensign Pargu.
5) Ideally the IOR wrapper would be removed in place of dynamic loot based off of the time spent in the Foundry. However, for the time being, the IOR should be changed to not be more than once every two hours or so, to prevent short missions from being at such an advantage over longer missions (they still will be at an advantage, because you can hit a 20 minute mission and then spend the next hour and 40 minutes gathering dilithium elsewhere).
For the time being, until a better system can be put in place, I actually think Foundry loot should be disabled entirely, and the IOR wrapper temporarily removed. The current rewards structure is doing more damage than good. Unfortunately, much of the damage has already been done, with a number of authors removing their missions or quitting the game in frustration.
In the end, from the standpoint of reasonable application of resources, if the Foundry is not about story, and it's going to be considered OK for it to be dominated by "Kill 25X" missions, then I suggest pulling all further work on the Foundry, in both STO and NW. The current tool is already powerful enough (more than powerful enough) to create those simple "missions". If that's what is going to dominate the Foundry then you don't need to put any more work into the tool, and can instead devote those resources to some other task. I am completely serious about this. It makes sense from a business standpoint, if that is how the Foundry is going to be used.
Comments
I'd be fine with them adding more reward for longer missions. I'd just as happy if authors would put estimated play times in their descriptions so I could decide myself if it was worth my click.
I'd love both at the same time.
Technically that's what the spotlight mission thing is for
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Perhaps you should recognize that the player who wants the cookies in the shortest amount of time is most certainly not the player you want playing your missions and rating it:
1/5 Dude ther izno combat usux
That's just Cryptic playing favorites. I'm talking about a community... well at least just the upset story-types... taking matters into their own hands in a constructive way -- enabling those so inclined an easier way to find acceptable missions.
1. effort vs reward, thats subjective and varies by individual some never ran foundries becasue of time/reward some didnt care about rewards. I have no idea what the breakdown is but blanket staments are invalid.
2. As an author, whether literature or anything else one can nudge, conjole, and tease to modify a readers/users tastes, however insulting large swaths of potential fans tends not to broaden ones audeance. As well, trying to force an audience tends to loose one that audience. We all have an in-built trigger that when someone pushes us, we push back, even if normally we would agree.
3. agreed
So you mean something like this: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=286621
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
I think I can see a couple of solutions to that before it starts to become a problem, mainly involving a time limit, and even that's starting to branch off quite a bit as far as the 'how'.
There's already missions like this
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Now throw an increasing time-related reward into the mix.
Well, it would be based on the average play time, which is the system Cryptic now uses to grant or not grant IOR rewards.
Someone could stand around a mission all night long, but only get rewarded for that mission's average play time. Maybe a fleet could work together to alter the play time and then start zooming the mission for increased rewards. But, I think they'll discover that they spent less time if they had just played the mission without going AFK.
Yes but you encode it into your mission descriptions. Almost no one cares about a game foum unless their character just can't complete the damn feature episode and is caught in a time loop, I like Tasha Yar, but this is the fifth time... ahem. Do the work and make that list almost no one sees a part of those missions.
It's just an idea, do it or not, but it seems a better use of energy than doing what the posting right above this one is doing.
...come to think of it, there's the counterbalance to idling right there. That kind of system would go a long way towards making sure timer-based rewards don't get put into the same reward category as TF2 items before that issue got capped.
For any noticeable scale-tipping to take place, you'd need a ridiculous number of players AFKing in the mission to get that slider over to the 'easy money' level of exploitability.
Throwing one of the 'sit and shoot' grinders into the mix, those really can't take more than 15-20 minutes to clear, pre-patch. If the reward is set to X, you'd need almost everyone doing that mission once it appears in the list to sit overnight in there to balance out the ones who just go in and hit Fire All Weapons before getting a cup of coffee.
It really just looks like a nonissue trying to find complicated ways to TRIBBLE up a system that is fine as-is.
If it was fine as-is, why are these threads still popping up?
I'm not an author. I'm a player. I'm a geek. I know how geek culture works. I know how infantile it tends to be. The "Timid Grinders" were being infantile over the loss of their exploit. I've mentioned this in the other thread but I have no sympathy for this in myself, let alone in others.
To paraphrase: Their views are bad and they should feel bad.
No, no. Three people didn't like the exploit that sparked the change. Fifteen didn't like the change after it took place, i.e. the guy who wanted the Exchange completely reset and overhauled because the ship he wanted was 80M EC and he couldn't grind for it anymore.
Honestly, the patch didn't affect my own grinding in any way except for the 'hey, I wanna blow something up' mission choice and even then I got over it pretty quick. The ones who just did easy money over and over and over and repeat x500 are the ones doing all the shouting.
Quoted for absolute truth.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Perfect World Entertainment Community Rules and Policies . ~BranFlakes
We're not back to name calling.
That's done.
I respectfully submit and request that those interested in continuing constructive discussion simply do so, ignoring those who are obviously now trying to bait us into more banal arguments. They have a personal axe to grind. Let them grind it against thin air.
DO not give them the recognition of a reply, and rather continue this good sharing of ideas.
This is about a community, not just one part of it, but a community coming together to assist in coming up with a solution to an issue that is obviously affecting us all.
Us vs. Them, You vs. Me, Camp vs. Camp. It's totally counter productive, and honestly, all of us should be ashamed that we actually let it get this far.
I urge the entire community to let the past go.
Stop calling each other names.
Share ideas openly.
If you have it to say , say it here, but be done with the attacks.
Only by openly sharing ideas and deciding to work together as a community are we going to solve this. If you can't get onboard with that, the whole working together for a better tomorrow idea, then I kindly ask that you take your hate sandwich someplace else.
Some claim that only a small fraction of the player base cares about story, but that is in fact irrelevant. The Foundry is for those who do enjoy story, just as the STFs are for a certain type of player, and other mission types are for other types of players. The attitude of the majority of the player base is irrelevant as far as what the Foundry should be for.
Unfortunately, the Foundry rewards structure currently doesn't provide an incentive for story based missions. Instead they have been made too good. When played with a missions optimized to provide rewards (short as possible, without being too short, basically nothing but combat for the most loot drops), you can get resources (dilithium, fleet marks, etc) faster than you can in other areas of the game. This should not be the case.
The Foundry should never provide a way to get resources faster than in other aspects of the game. Foundry rewards need to be decent so that people who enjoy playing Foundry missions get a decent return. But people who's primary goal is to maximize resource gathering should be steered elsewhere. Either something in Tau Dewa, the STFs, or something else, should provide dilithium and fleet marks at a faster rate when people do nothing but grind for resources.
The Foundry reward structure needs to be designed so that it encourages people who enjoy stories to play, while not causing people whose goal is to grind to come in and bury all the story missions under grind missions created in a fraction of the time (and using a small fraction of the Foundry's capabilities).
In that vein, the following changes need to be made:
1) Rewards overall should only be 80% of what you can get through other methods in the game. This is still decent, but noticeably inferior, thus discouraging people who want nothing but to maximize the acquisition of dilithium and fleet marks.
2) Rewards need to scale with mission length, and they need to be based off of the time each individual player takes to complete the mission. That would make it so that people could play at their own pace, as they enjoy, without feeling they need to rush to get a better reward for the time spent. Rewards need to scale up to 2 hours or so, after which they can be capped if there is concern about potential idle abuse. In addition, rewards could also be capped at 200% the average play time, if there is still concern with people afking.
3) The Foundry drop limit should be fine tuned. You shouldn't receive loot for killing more than 10 enemy groups every 30 minutes, or something along those lines (this number needs to be fine tuned, but I don't know exactly what the current limits are). The limit needs to be set on a shorter time scale, rather than being per day. Right now there is an incentive to just go into a mission and maximize your daily loot drops, rather than drawing them out over the course of a several hour play session. Once again, this encourages grind missions with nothing but combat, over those that spread combat encounters out with story.
4) More of the reward should be accrued at the end of the mission, rather than from combat encounters in the mission. NW has the loot chest for each map, which would be out of place in STO. Instead, additional/better random object should accrue depending on how long a mission is. Every 20 minutes in length should increase the odds of receiving better quality loot, which would be provided in addition to dilithium.
Length based loot should be better than what is dropped from combat, to allow non-combat missions to also provide decent loot. It can still be random, so that there is only a higher chance of getting a purple piece of loot, but a 2 hour mission should have a very high chance of providing some blue loot, and at least a decent (no less than 20%) chance of providing something purple.
If I were designing this I would come up with a table based on time, which generated the amount of items received, as well as their quality. For example, two green items could be received in place of a blue item, two blues in place of a purple, etc. Make it random so you're never sure exactly what you'll get.
The key is longer missions need to provide more loot/or a higher chance of receiving better loot so they're on level footing with shorter missions. For example, maybe a 30 minute mission has a 5% chance of providing a purple drop, a 2 hour mission would provide a 20% chance since you could run four 30 minute missions in that time period.
This is probably a pipe dream, but ideally, the Foundry editor would provide a place for us to create several costumes/race selections/names that would then be assigned to any boffs randomly generated by our mission. For example, in Atlas Affair, I could create a costume of Cadet Pargu, and set his race to Ferengi. Then any boffs generated by the random loot would be a Ferengi of random rarity named Ensign Pargu.
5) Ideally the IOR wrapper would be removed in place of dynamic loot based off of the time spent in the Foundry. However, for the time being, the IOR should be changed to not be more than once every two hours or so, to prevent short missions from being at such an advantage over longer missions (they still will be at an advantage, because you can hit a 20 minute mission and then spend the next hour and 40 minutes gathering dilithium elsewhere).
For the time being, until a better system can be put in place, I actually think Foundry loot should be disabled entirely, and the IOR wrapper temporarily removed. The current rewards structure is doing more damage than good. Unfortunately, much of the damage has already been done, with a number of authors removing their missions or quitting the game in frustration.
In the end, from the standpoint of reasonable application of resources, if the Foundry is not about story, and it's going to be considered OK for it to be dominated by "Kill 25X" missions, then I suggest pulling all further work on the Foundry, in both STO and NW. The current tool is already powerful enough (more than powerful enough) to create those simple "missions". If that's what is going to dominate the Foundry then you don't need to put any more work into the tool, and can instead devote those resources to some other task. I am completely serious about this. It makes sense from a business standpoint, if that is how the Foundry is going to be used.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I liked your previous edit of this post much better. It clearly demonstrated for the devs, what you are all about.
Looks like it. I started a new kettle of popcorn; want in on this?