Care to give an example of one of those other games that has even 1% of the complexity?
Yeah, when I think of the issues STO has I usually compare them to Diablo 2.... where pretty much every single one of them was WORSE.
Worried about AFKers getting rewards when you did the work in an STf? Well... in Diablo 2, all boss loot was a random drop that could be picked up by pretty much ANYONE on the map, even if they did no damage to the boss. Some people, just to be extra jerky, would PK the players who were fighting the boss in the process. It was bad enough that when people started games they'd password them to avoid having random people show up.
Thanks for giving an example, however I was looking for an example of a game with some complexity to the scoring mechanic. Do you have another by any chance that would actually meet that request?
I can appreciate that many games can offer a wide variety of ways to do the same thing...but that's not the same thing as offering a wide variety of ways to a wide variety of things.
If it's not a case of wanting to judge success based on the team's success and wanting to break it down into the individual member's contribution, then you need a way to measure all the different ways in which a person can contribute. How long did it take some games even to add Assist into their simple Kill/Death scoring systems? It still doesn't cover everything, and it would require the actual team - human interaction - to determine the value of what was contributed there...what's the word I'm looking for? The incidentals and just other stuff that the system is not going to record. Say there's a group approaching a friendly location - somebody heads off, draws their fire, causes the enemy to move into a position where the friendly units can maneuver into a better position to eliminate the enemy. That guy that did that little diversionary raid dies without killing anything...didn't even do enough damage to get an assist...but that enemy group is eliminated because of that player's actions. How does the system score that?
which could functionally be translated into sto so that heals and extra damage your team does caused by your use of slows/holds drains results in bonus points.
But that goes back to the metrics simply are not there for that.
That would be a case of looking at something along the lines of...
Thomas dropped out a hull debuff on the Gate.
Richard dropped out a hull debuff on the Gate.
Harold did the most damage to the Gate because of the debuffs that Thomas and Richard dropped out on the Gate. What value is attributed to the debuffs that Thomas and Richard dropped out? How much did Harold benefit from each of those debuffs? With the diminishing returns involved with debuffs, is it based on the raw value or the diminished value?
Is each and every point of damage tracked for everything that was involved in making that happen? Somebody dropped out a Tac Fleet. Somebody drained a target with shields reducing shields which resulted in increased hull damage from projectile weapons.
Say we looked at a combination of healing and damage, eh? It's possible to run with lower damage resistance to give the appearance of needing more healing done when higher resistance would require less.
You get into things like the Valdore console and whatever that DOFF's named that came with the Delta Operations Pack...
We just don't have fixed classes, roles, or the like. Hell, I once ran a Tac Healer/Support/Tank...cause the only difference between the Careers in Space are the Captain Abilities and Captain restricted Personal Traits. I utilized them in a manner which I envisioned Healer/Support/Tank might use them. APA helped hold aggro with the damage boosts. FoMM helped debuff hard targets for the DPS guys to lay into. Tac Initiative helped get APD and TT out to folks faster. Tac Fleet boosted folks damage, accuracy, and defense. Go Down Fighting with Last Ditch Effort helped me survive better as a tank. Crippling Fire helped the team by debuffing enemy accuracy. Basically I suck at DPS and doing the Tac thing, so I figured I'd try to play a Tac the way I enjoy playing - that Support sort of thing.
How is a system going to measure the contributions made there?
Just because I used an ability doesn't mean that it really helped anything. Heh, I've been known to VM a Mine or two in my time...oopsie.
That's the gist of what I'm getting with the complexity of things.
Once Command hits, we'll be looking at nearly 70 Space BOFF abilities. There are how many Rep traits of which we can only slot four? There are three Active Rep abilities currently. How many different clicky consoles? How many set bonuses and set clickies? We've got different traits on different species. There is just so much there...how many different kinds of weapons are there with their various procs and dual procs? What about the various procs we can add to weapons? We can slot up to six DOFFs, yeah? It just goes on and on how much stuff there is there.
How do you track the contribution all of that ended up making in the end?
You don't.
Pass/Fail and maybe Extra Credit. Did the team succeed and maybe do some optionals along the way?
And imho as long as the content doesn't actually require some significant level of participation from everybody on the in team to avoid failing, then folks are going to continue to AFK and leech.
Rewards and punishments based on damage dealt, the worst thing that could happen to this game ever.
I'm inclined to strongly agree. It's hard to meaningly quantify anything but dps, and there's more than simply dps that can contribute, though some base dps is required. HSE, or so we were told (before people finished upgrading their DBB's, it seemed) used to require a heavy debuffer and 4 high dps ships. That heavy debuffer would have gotten basically zero rewards - in fact, there was a recluse in RyanSTO's current record run that would have gotten the AFK penalty (he only did ~4k dps), he did so little relatively speaking. Anyone doing a non-dps role would get messed up by this.
I'm fine with the AFK penalty being based off 1% of the dps, 1% is a reasonable figure. Making dps the sole method, or even the primary method, of determining what rewards you get, though, disincentives any kind of teamwork, which is not beneficial to the game diversity or even people's overall queue success rates.
SCM - Crystal C. (S) - [00:12] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 8.63M(713.16K) - Fed Sci
quantify it, standardise it, work it.
computers are very good at maths.
...snip...
Contrary to what you may think, it's impossible to quantify how effective some things were. In rather large part because the game doesn't know what I would have done if x debuff/heal/aoe control power hadn't been done at x strength in x location at x time. No, really. Sure, the game can figure out how much damage happened to the target because it's resist was lowered than because it wasn't, but it doesn't know that that heal saved my life from incoming damage 5 seconds later. I might have flown away. I might have used a different heal or resist buff. I might have died. I don't know, and it sure as hell doesn't know either. It also doesn't know where or when I would have dropped my gravity well if person x hadn't dropped their gravity well in location z at y time.
For the game to quantify this effect of, well, about anything beyond the most basic dps (and even then I'll tell you the same thing about damage amplifiers, since I don't mash spacebar), it has to compare what would have happened without x effect, which is impossible.
And if you want to go the simple route, and say 'reward x person for doing x hps, or for using drain of x strength', or something like that, people will game that. DPS kills stuff. You can fake HPS, you can miss-apply GW's/TBr/whatever, just to game it's metric. Anytime the game rewards you for something that isn't for sure the ideal path to completing the mission, well, you can tell what the playerbase will do, and you don't want that.
SCM - Crystal C. (S) - [00:12] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 8.63M(713.16K) - Fed Sci
this is how i know, you know, you are talking nonsense.
you post walls of numbers often enough for me to know you are perfectly capable of figuring this stuff out.
This is the damage formula I tend to look at for the "big" formula:
WeaponPowerBoost is variable - subject both to self and team buffs.
SumAllStrengthBoost is variable - subject to both self and team buffs.
SumAllBonusBoost is variable - subject to both self and team buffs.
DamageResistance is variable - subject to both self and team buffs as well as debuffs.
That is calculated for each hit. In the last ISA I have there from back on the 11th, there were 14,407 attacks made. Of those 14,407 attacks there were only 79 misses. Now, this is just looking at the players and not the enemy NPCs.
So this was 14,328 hits in 346 seconds. That's 41.4 hits per second.
In order to offer a score for everything that folks are doing, you would have to track what part each player actually played in each of those 14,328 hits...41.4 hits per second.
Everything would have to be stored so it could be scored at the end of the run.
We get a bunch of the basic information and from that calculations are run to provide all the nifty stuff we've got in CLR...even pie charts!
With some of the stuff, sure - can take a look at the parse and offer likely events of what may or may not have been stacked for debuffs. Can take a look at certain hits, the base damage, and figure out what may or may not have been in play for that. It's rough because without knowing the range to the target and just the general range of damage that can take place (the tooltip is not the damage done, can't remember if it is an average or a median - was never able to find that thread again where that discussion took place).
There are certain pseudo educated guesses that can be made. If a video of the parse is handy, one can work that into it - synchronizing what's on the screen with the tmestamps in the parse to get a better idea of what may have happened. But none of that was written to the log itself.
Consider what happened (can't remember if it still does, haven't run a parse with one in forever) with the Romulan Hyperplasma Torpedo and its Plasma DoT. They run with a Parent-Child mechanic, so the system knows that the Torpedo is a child of the player - but the Plasma DoT was/is a child of the Torpedo. Because the Torpedo is consumed in the application of the DoT, there was no way to track it back to the player. The Plasma DoT damage would appear as Other damage and not be attributed to the player. If you had multiple folks running them it would be impossible to tell who the damage belonged to for that run.
After that 23.0:: there are four commas. It should read "Common Name", "Entity Identifier",,*, then get into the target info, where you see the "Common Name", "Entity Identifier" for example in that line.
The Rm7fzt is an identifier for the type of torpedo that it came from, but it does not help identify which player fired that torpedo.
The transaction cost of logging the constant state of an entity would be enormous, and you would be tracking multiple entities in each instance. Would turn into a crawl if not crash.
Then you'd also have to consider the analysis and the depth of it that could come into play, eh?
Say we had the following:
Moe the Tac.
Larry the Sci.
Curly the Eng.
Larry uses Resonant Dissipation Matrix which reduces the CD on Larry's Emergency Power to Auxiliary. With his higher buffed Sensor Scan, Larry debuffs the target. He also tosses Transfer Shield Strength to Moe. Moe has an Exotic Particle Field Exciter and receives the buff to weapon power. Curly drops out EPS Power Transfer to Moe, taking Moe from 3x [AMP] to 4x. Moe pops Tactical Fleet, which increases the Defense of Curly enough that his Reciprocity kicks in and he's ready to use his Beam Overload with an Energy Weapon Officer Penetration DOFF. Curly also benefits from the increase to Accuracy allowing for the Beam Overload to hit. The hit increases the bleedthrough of the Torp Spread of Neutronics Moe has sent toward the target. Meanwhile, Larry has previously sent his Load Viral Torpedo buffed Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo toward the target.
And if I had more caffeine, I could keep going. There are so many triggered buffs/procs that are triggered by something else that can be buffed or even made ready because of something else...and...at the end of the day, how is that going to be tracked?
A group of players playing the content together over and over can learn what works best for them through experimentation - when to trigger things taking into account everything that is involved...and that's something that an experienced premade will be able to do that a random PUG will not. Even then, the premade is likely to have comms ready to make sure they're coordinating in a timely fashion as they work it out.
Just how far back should the system track something as being beneficial? It would start to get into artificial intelligence for it to try to make those decisions, no? Would go beyond standard logic processing, eh? And then...could it end up being wrong in what it thought was beneficial?
congratulations. thats the single player RPG experience people are so desperate for isnt it?
its the same one in voth zone with the command credit.
strange how "reward party for being there" is a trope of RPG games, but a game breaking mess in an mmo.
That's a skewed over-simplification. The core of D2 was a game that worked reasonably well in single player and ok when you were teamed with friends. It simply wasn't coded to deal with malicious players.
It sounds like what you REALLY want is a shooter game where you don't even have gear at all. But games like that are either A: only fun for PvP, or B: boring once you finish everything.
LOL this is exactly the same as the thread started in Season 5... did they listen then??
Too busy creating new icons for abilities. I miss the original Devs who actually listened to the players.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] INQUISITOR CRUSHER Director of Marketing
ELITE FORCES COMMAND
can you get any more dissonant? you are flat out directly agreeing with me that the systems inplace are not fit for perpose
this is utterly and completely irrelevant to the point.
what the heck does gear have to do with AFKing and leeching others efforts? or if this just a red faced attempt at red-herring?
Heh, Virusdancer was right. You really DON'T read. The point was that the D2 system for loot was WORSE. The STO system is actually relatively good by comparison.
Now if you have an example of something better.. Please do explain it. And I mean explain, not just pointing at a different game and saying it's better. EXPLAIN what makes it better.
Also you should consider the implications of it as it relates to STO. My second point was addressing the end result of the sort of thing you seem to be advocating.
@Skaldra: are you sure? Was it that they actually listened or were you confusing lip service with what you really wanted?
would mean no more open rollover rewards in voth ground to be ninja'd by people standing around chatting, waiting for other players to do the work.
it would mean no more need for a FalsePosing ban hammer for afk, since the motivation to AFK would not be there anymore, on account of being AFK meaning no score
As SarcasmDetector pointed out.... your idea would give pretty much everything to the people with the best builds.... Thus killing teamwork by giving players an incentive to only team with people of their skill level.
Comments
Care to give an example of one of those other games that has even 1% of the complexity?
Worried about AFKers getting rewards when you did the work in an STf? Well... in Diablo 2, all boss loot was a random drop that could be picked up by pretty much ANYONE on the map, even if they did no damage to the boss. Some people, just to be extra jerky, would PK the players who were fighting the boss in the process. It was bad enough that when people started games they'd password them to avoid having random people show up.
My character Tsin'xing
Thanks for giving an example, however I was looking for an example of a game with some complexity to the scoring mechanic. Do you have another by any chance that would actually meet that request?
I can appreciate that many games can offer a wide variety of ways to do the same thing...but that's not the same thing as offering a wide variety of ways to a wide variety of things.
If it's not a case of wanting to judge success based on the team's success and wanting to break it down into the individual member's contribution, then you need a way to measure all the different ways in which a person can contribute. How long did it take some games even to add Assist into their simple Kill/Death scoring systems? It still doesn't cover everything, and it would require the actual team - human interaction - to determine the value of what was contributed there...what's the word I'm looking for? The incidentals and just other stuff that the system is not going to record. Say there's a group approaching a friendly location - somebody heads off, draws their fire, causes the enemy to move into a position where the friendly units can maneuver into a better position to eliminate the enemy. That guy that did that little diversionary raid dies without killing anything...didn't even do enough damage to get an assist...but that enemy group is eliminated because of that player's actions. How does the system score that?
But that goes back to the metrics simply are not there for that.
That would be a case of looking at something along the lines of...
Thomas dropped out a hull debuff on the Gate.
Richard dropped out a hull debuff on the Gate.
Harold did the most damage to the Gate because of the debuffs that Thomas and Richard dropped out on the Gate. What value is attributed to the debuffs that Thomas and Richard dropped out? How much did Harold benefit from each of those debuffs? With the diminishing returns involved with debuffs, is it based on the raw value or the diminished value?
Is each and every point of damage tracked for everything that was involved in making that happen? Somebody dropped out a Tac Fleet. Somebody drained a target with shields reducing shields which resulted in increased hull damage from projectile weapons.
Say we looked at a combination of healing and damage, eh? It's possible to run with lower damage resistance to give the appearance of needing more healing done when higher resistance would require less.
You get into things like the Valdore console and whatever that DOFF's named that came with the Delta Operations Pack...
We just don't have fixed classes, roles, or the like. Hell, I once ran a Tac Healer/Support/Tank...cause the only difference between the Careers in Space are the Captain Abilities and Captain restricted Personal Traits. I utilized them in a manner which I envisioned Healer/Support/Tank might use them. APA helped hold aggro with the damage boosts. FoMM helped debuff hard targets for the DPS guys to lay into. Tac Initiative helped get APD and TT out to folks faster. Tac Fleet boosted folks damage, accuracy, and defense. Go Down Fighting with Last Ditch Effort helped me survive better as a tank. Crippling Fire helped the team by debuffing enemy accuracy. Basically I suck at DPS and doing the Tac thing, so I figured I'd try to play a Tac the way I enjoy playing - that Support sort of thing.
How is a system going to measure the contributions made there?
Just because I used an ability doesn't mean that it really helped anything. Heh, I've been known to VM a Mine or two in my time...oopsie.
That's the gist of what I'm getting with the complexity of things.
Once Command hits, we'll be looking at nearly 70 Space BOFF abilities. There are how many Rep traits of which we can only slot four? There are three Active Rep abilities currently. How many different clicky consoles? How many set bonuses and set clickies? We've got different traits on different species. There is just so much there...how many different kinds of weapons are there with their various procs and dual procs? What about the various procs we can add to weapons? We can slot up to six DOFFs, yeah? It just goes on and on how much stuff there is there.
How do you track the contribution all of that ended up making in the end?
You don't.
Pass/Fail and maybe Extra Credit. Did the team succeed and maybe do some optionals along the way?
And imho as long as the content doesn't actually require some significant level of participation from everybody on the in team to avoid failing, then folks are going to continue to AFK and leech.
I'm inclined to strongly agree. It's hard to meaningly quantify anything but dps, and there's more than simply dps that can contribute, though some base dps is required. HSE, or so we were told (before people finished upgrading their DBB's, it seemed) used to require a heavy debuffer and 4 high dps ships. That heavy debuffer would have gotten basically zero rewards - in fact, there was a recluse in RyanSTO's current record run that would have gotten the AFK penalty (he only did ~4k dps), he did so little relatively speaking. Anyone doing a non-dps role would get messed up by this.
I'm fine with the AFK penalty being based off 1% of the dps, 1% is a reasonable figure. Making dps the sole method, or even the primary method, of determining what rewards you get, though, disincentives any kind of teamwork, which is not beneficial to the game diversity or even people's overall queue success rates.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
Contrary to what you may think, it's impossible to quantify how effective some things were. In rather large part because the game doesn't know what I would have done if x debuff/heal/aoe control power hadn't been done at x strength in x location at x time. No, really. Sure, the game can figure out how much damage happened to the target because it's resist was lowered than because it wasn't, but it doesn't know that that heal saved my life from incoming damage 5 seconds later. I might have flown away. I might have used a different heal or resist buff. I might have died. I don't know, and it sure as hell doesn't know either. It also doesn't know where or when I would have dropped my gravity well if person x hadn't dropped their gravity well in location z at y time.
For the game to quantify this effect of, well, about anything beyond the most basic dps (and even then I'll tell you the same thing about damage amplifiers, since I don't mash spacebar), it has to compare what would have happened without x effect, which is impossible.
And if you want to go the simple route, and say 'reward x person for doing x hps, or for using drain of x strength', or something like that, people will game that. DPS kills stuff. You can fake HPS, you can miss-apply GW's/TBr/whatever, just to game it's metric. Anytime the game rewards you for something that isn't for sure the ideal path to completing the mission, well, you can tell what the playerbase will do, and you don't want that.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
This is the damage formula I tend to look at for the "big" formula:
Damage = Base * (1 - WeaponEnhancementBaseModifier) * (1 + WeaponPowerBoost) * (1 + WeaponEnhancementBoost) * (1 + SumAllStrengthBoost) * (1 + SumAllBonusBoost) * (1 - RangePenalty) * (1 - DamageResistance)
WeaponPowerBoost is variable - subject both to self and team buffs.
SumAllStrengthBoost is variable - subject to both self and team buffs.
SumAllBonusBoost is variable - subject to both self and team buffs.
DamageResistance is variable - subject to both self and team buffs as well as debuffs.
That is calculated for each hit. In the last ISA I have there from back on the 11th, there were 14,407 attacks made. Of those 14,407 attacks there were only 79 misses. Now, this is just looking at the players and not the enemy NPCs.
So this was 14,328 hits in 346 seconds. That's 41.4 hits per second.
In order to offer a score for everything that folks are doing, you would have to track what part each player actually played in each of those 14,328 hits...41.4 hits per second.
Everything would have to be stored so it could be scored at the end of the run.
We get a bunch of the basic information and from that calculations are run to provide all the nifty stuff we've got in CLR...even pie charts!
With some of the stuff, sure - can take a look at the parse and offer likely events of what may or may not have been stacked for debuffs. Can take a look at certain hits, the base damage, and figure out what may or may not have been in play for that. It's rough because without knowing the range to the target and just the general range of damage that can take place (the tooltip is not the damage done, can't remember if it is an average or a median - was never able to find that thread again where that discussion took place).
There are certain pseudo educated guesses that can be made. If a video of the parse is handy, one can work that into it - synchronizing what's on the screen with the tmestamps in the parse to get a better idea of what may have happened. But none of that was written to the log itself.
Consider what happened (can't remember if it still does, haven't run a parse with one in forever) with the Romulan Hyperplasma Torpedo and its Plasma DoT. They run with a Parent-Child mechanic, so the system knows that the Torpedo is a child of the player - but the Plasma DoT was/is a child of the Torpedo. Because the Torpedo is consumed in the application of the DoT, there was no way to track it back to the player. The Plasma DoT damage would appear as Other damage and not be attributed to the player. If you had multiple folks running them it would be impossible to tell who the damage belonged to for that run.
Apparently it is still an issue...
15:01:11:22:23:23.0::,,,,Nanite Transformer,C[76 Mission_Borgraid1_Comm_Array],Plasma Torpedo,Pn.Rm7fzt,Plasma,,735.905,262.455
After that 23.0:: there are four commas. It should read "Common Name", "Entity Identifier",,*, then get into the target info, where you see the "Common Name", "Entity Identifier" for example in that line.
The Rm7fzt is an identifier for the type of torpedo that it came from, but it does not help identify which player fired that torpedo.
The transaction cost of logging the constant state of an entity would be enormous, and you would be tracking multiple entities in each instance. Would turn into a crawl if not crash.
Then you'd also have to consider the analysis and the depth of it that could come into play, eh?
Say we had the following:
Moe the Tac.
Larry the Sci.
Curly the Eng.
Larry uses Resonant Dissipation Matrix which reduces the CD on Larry's Emergency Power to Auxiliary. With his higher buffed Sensor Scan, Larry debuffs the target. He also tosses Transfer Shield Strength to Moe. Moe has an Exotic Particle Field Exciter and receives the buff to weapon power. Curly drops out EPS Power Transfer to Moe, taking Moe from 3x [AMP] to 4x. Moe pops Tactical Fleet, which increases the Defense of Curly enough that his Reciprocity kicks in and he's ready to use his Beam Overload with an Energy Weapon Officer Penetration DOFF. Curly also benefits from the increase to Accuracy allowing for the Beam Overload to hit. The hit increases the bleedthrough of the Torp Spread of Neutronics Moe has sent toward the target. Meanwhile, Larry has previously sent his Load Viral Torpedo buffed Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo toward the target.
And if I had more caffeine, I could keep going. There are so many triggered buffs/procs that are triggered by something else that can be buffed or even made ready because of something else...and...at the end of the day, how is that going to be tracked?
A group of players playing the content together over and over can learn what works best for them through experimentation - when to trigger things taking into account everything that is involved...and that's something that an experienced premade will be able to do that a random PUG will not. Even then, the premade is likely to have comms ready to make sure they're coordinating in a timely fashion as they work it out.
Just how far back should the system track something as being beneficial? It would start to get into artificial intelligence for it to try to make those decisions, no? Would go beyond standard logic processing, eh? And then...could it end up being wrong in what it thought was beneficial?
It sounds like what you REALLY want is a shooter game where you don't even have gear at all. But games like that are either A: only fun for PvP, or B: boring once you finish everything.
My character Tsin'xing
You know, as much as I don't like memes,
This is bull**** - you're oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
I have pugged this game 24/7 and there is no routine afk problem
the only time I've seen this is during the mirror universe event, where people would afk the whole first stage
as it is now I see an afk-er maybe once a month
Too busy creating new icons for abilities. I miss the original Devs who actually listened to the players.
INQUISITOR CRUSHER
Director of Marketing
ELITE FORCES COMMAND
Now if you have an example of something better.. Please do explain it. And I mean explain, not just pointing at a different game and saying it's better. EXPLAIN what makes it better.
Also you should consider the implications of it as it relates to STO. My second point was addressing the end result of the sort of thing you seem to be advocating.
@Skaldra: are you sure? Was it that they actually listened or were you confusing lip service with what you really wanted?
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing