What is at stake here that would make the system 'exploitable' ?
If players knew their score, and that of their friends, they could set up matches and pre-determine the winner(s) to artificially boost their PPS rating (move up in any sort of publicly visible ranking). Overall accuracy of the rating would be blurred; PPS would be unreliable.
PPS is not a ranking system with which players can compare their “skill” against one another; it’s up to the community to create leagues and tournaments for that.
A place for race pilots in STO: /channel_join Racing
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
What is the difference between a "competitive" and "non competitive" pve?
In both cases you just fight some NPCs.
The station has been set up with holo-emitters to provide challenges for each team. Both teams must reach the Station Core, which contains two Core Regulators – one for each team. Each team must destroy the other team’s regulator while defending their own. The first team to do so will be victorious!
I like the PvP in this game. That being said, this is 100% pointless. Let me ask this simple question: "Why do very few people PvP?" And the answer is simple. There is literally no reward. Adding a system to make PvP matches more "fair" does nothing to solve the real issue...the complete lack of motivation for people to participate in PvP.
I believe most people don't PvP because they don't enjoy it, not because of perceived lack of reward. Speaking for myself, the concept of PvP is very "non-Trek" and have always wondered what it is doing in the game at all. It's what Star Wars is all about, but not Star Trek, in my opinion.
I hope the system works well for those that enjoy that sort of thing.
Is it?
What do you think Khan vs Kirk, Chang vs Kirk, Kor vs Kirk, Romulan Commander vs Kirk, Spock vs Romulan Commander, Picard vs Shinzon, Sisko vs Dukat and many more are? Two powerful and capable individuals, fighting for their side.
And if you think "but Star Trek is about team work to overcome your challenges" - STO's PvP is usually team-based, and team work is critical to success. Peaceful solutions are usually preferred in Star Trek, but Star Trek also allows conflicts to be resolved with violence if the other options fail.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I think there are some people that are assuming that everyone is going to jump into Cryptic's sandbox and play nicely.
Let's say we have a person who doesn't care about PvP and with that, this new match making system in general. What's to stop that person from taking the lowest tier ship possible, loading it up with the crappiest gear they can and playing (and I use that word loosely) enough rounds to signifcantly establish their rank as Uber Noob. Then that same person takes their best ship, loads it to the gills with the best Epic gear and jumps into another match. There's a good chance that they'll absolutely obliterate their opponent. And if that opponent happens to be someone checking out PvP for the very first time, I can only assume it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Now it seems the only way around that is for Cryptic to put a TRIBBLE-ton of importance on gear that it would bump that person's level back up to something even remotely appropriate. If that's going to be the case, I'll leave it to everyone here to come to their own conclusions about what kind of statement that makes.
Am I the only one who sees the potential pitfalls of this new system?
I think there are some people that are assuming that everyone is going to jump into Cryptic's sandbox and play nicely.
Let's say we have a person who doesn't care about PvP and with that, this new match making system in general. What's to stop that person from taking the lowest tier ship possible, loading it up with the crappiest gear they can and playing (and I use that word loosely) enough rounds to signifcantly establish their rank as Uber Noob. Then that same person takes their best ship, loads it to the gills with the best Epic gear and jumps into another match. There's a good chance that they'll absolutely obliterate their opponent. And if that opponent happens to be someone checking out PvP for the very first time, I can only assume it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Now it seems the only way around that is for Cryptic to put a ****-ton of importance on gear that it would bump that person's level back up to something even remotely appropriate. If that's going to be the case, I'll leave it to everyone here to come to their own conclusions about what kind of statement that makes.
Am I the only one who sees the potential pitfalls of this new system?
Even if people find fun in griefing others like that, we just don’t know how the system behaves in this regard. The system on it’s own does not provide incentive to grief. It’s entirely possible that low-end gear will generate a gear score so low, that no average player would ever be matched with them, regardless how bad they try to get rated, effectively creating “weight classes”. But that’s just speculation. Even if there are no “weight classes”, Glicko will always know how consistent a player’s performance is, and will have less “confidence” in scores with high volatility or long inactivity—and might decide to queue those players against more predictable players instead of unrated newbs. Again, just speculation.
A place for race pilots in STO: /channel_join Racing
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
I like the PvP in this game. That being said, this is 100% pointless. Let me ask this simple question: "Why do very few people PvP?" And the answer is simple. There is literally no reward. Adding a system to make PvP matches more "fair" does nothing to solve the real issue...the complete lack of motivation for people to participate in PvP.
I believe most people don't PvP because they don't enjoy it, not because of perceived lack of reward. Speaking for myself, the concept of PvP is very "non-Trek" and have always wondered what it is doing in the game at all. It's what Star Wars is all about, but not Star Trek, in my opinion.
I hope the system works well for those that enjoy that sort of thing.
Is it?
What do you think Khan vs Kirk, Chang vs Kirk, Kor vs Kirk, Romulan Commander vs Kirk, Spock vs Romulan Commander, Picard vs Shinzon, Sisko vs Dukat and many more are? Two powerful and capable individuals, fighting for their side.
And if you think "but Star Trek is about team work to overcome your challenges" - STO's PvP is usually team-based, and team work is critical to success. Peaceful solutions are usually preferred in Star Trek, but Star Trek also allows conflicts to be resolved with violence if the other options fail.
You make a good point. If PvP is integral to a story line it could me more palatable (to me, at least) than PvP just for it's own sake
What is the difference between a "competitive" and "non competitive" pve?
In both cases you just fight some NPCs.
Competitive PvE isn't against NPCs, you are competing against other players to "win and not lose".
The group race and the Phoenix event queue are cPvE.
I personally saw how bad emotional investment in winning can get, because two players had full purple rockets and one of them screamed something offensive because their rocket didn't beat the other rocket!
In any case, since I dislike it when games have players compete against each other in scenarios where there can be a winner and a loser, I find it distasteful.
An additional concern is that inevitably, egotism and antisocial/offensive behavior are involved as well, I've personally seen many examples of how unpleasant a competitive player can get over their obsession with winning/defeating other players.
So I just stay out of any competitive gaming for that reason alone.
You make a good point. If PvP is integral to a story line it could me more palatable (to me, at least) than PvP just for it's own sake
I honestly hope they don't go down that road, because it would lead to a very unpalatable scenario!
Hypothethically, you've got a player just muddling along, playing their story missions and then the whammo mission appears, the one that insists you go to a PvP match in order to progress the mission chain.
For a player who doesn't enjoy PvP, they'd resent being forced to go there to get their mission rewards and progress to the next stage of the mission chain.
PvP and cPvE must always remain optional, so players aren't being compelled to do something they dislike.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
It will be optional, if you don't want to PvP don't queue up. If you don't like the crowd turn chat off. During the mess that DR made, I used to go in cap and hold sessions without fighting anyone because it was pointless. I just captured the points and if I got fired on I'd sit still because the quicker they took me out the quicker I could get back to capturing.
I like the PvP in this game. That being said, this is 100% pointless. Let me ask this simple question: "Why do very few people PvP?" And the answer is simple. There is literally no reward. Adding a system to make PvP matches more "fair" does nothing to solve the real issue...the complete lack of motivation for people to participate in PvP.
I believe most people don't PvP because they don't enjoy it, not because of perceived lack of reward. Speaking for myself, the concept of PvP is very "non-Trek" and have always wondered what it is doing in the game at all. It's what Star Wars is all about, but not Star Trek, in my opinion.
I hope the system works well for those that enjoy that sort of thing.
You may not see a need for a reward, but the majority of people do. It's very evident in looking at the queues in this game. There's nothing "fun and exciting" about Borg Red Alerts, but tons of people do them. And why? They're relatively easy. They have nearly no possibility of failure. They're short. They give a reward as large as the reward you get from a PvE queue that is longer, harder, and can fail. The same holds true all throughout this game. Very few people do any of the queued events in this game because they're fun. They do them for the reward. No reward in PvP means most people will choose to spend their time elsewhere.
My only criticism of this Power Level system is that we can't see other people's Power Levels or our own.
It would be way more interesting if you could.
I've been a part of gaming communities where devs have tried this. It's not pretty. With a visible "truskill rank" (Halo reference, it's basically just this) players will inevitably try to guess when (and to what degree) they'll rank up or down based on recent matches. When inevitably they find themselves with an unexpected outcome, they complain (given that it's easier for people to assume that the devs have created a bad system, rather than that they themselves have incomplete information and faulty guesses.)
For example: "My friend and I were on the same winning team, but he just went up two levels while I stayed the same. OMFG THIS IS SO BROKEN!!!" (a FCT in Halo 3)
Basically, while interesting there's far too much potential for arm-chair guess work. That can easily turn from academic analysis to random raging. It's far better for matchmaking skill factors to be left hidden (in similar fashion to the current live population of STO; the possible discussion outcomes are either neutral or negative, not positive [enough to justify the trouble].)
Enh, the system in Avengers Alliance showed you what your rating was and how much you gained or lost from each match.... nothing more. It did have glitches, but it didn't seem to create an unreasonable amount of raging. Now raging about "OP" gear? That was incessant.
I made this pic because of a weird glitch that made it display a -4 when I won. Apparently it somehow remembered I'd lost a match, but not WHO I lost to, so it added that to someone else in the list.
Also... I wasn't really THAT good at PvP. This was at the beginning of a tournament and they'd reset everyone's rating to 800 at the beginning of each tournament. So I was fighting a bunch of people who were utterly outclassed by me. Example:
Yes, that's right, so many passive effects that they don't fit on the screen. Scary huh? this is actually BEFORE the fight started. After things got going it got even more interesting. I wasn't actually a top-tier player. I was basically in the second best tier. but at the beginning of each season the rankings got reset, so I'd go around curbstomping people who didn't really have a chance at beating me(it's hard to see in that pic, but the enemy team I was fighting did not have such amazing powers, and got rekt shortly after)... until my ranking went back up and then it went from easy wins to actually trying to win.
But a similar approach in STO would make PvP a lot more fun because you'd see less matches like this pop up:
Yes stuff like that happened every season, but it was the exception, and unusual(hence why I felt the need to record it for posterity).
I like the PvP in this game. That being said, this is 100% pointless. Let me ask this simple question: "Why do very few people PvP?" And the answer is simple. There is literally no reward. Adding a system to make PvP matches more "fair" does nothing to solve the real issue...the complete lack of motivation for people to participate in PvP.
I believe most people don't PvP because they don't enjoy it, not because of perceived lack of reward. Speaking for myself, the concept of PvP is very "non-Trek" and have always wondered what it is doing in the game at all. It's what Star Wars is all about, but not Star Trek, in my opinion.
I hope the system works well for those that enjoy that sort of thing.
I'm pretty sure Picard and Riker did PvP periodically. We even saw it in one of the episodes!
I like the PvP in this game. That being said, this is 100% pointless. Let me ask this simple question: "Why do very few people PvP?" And the answer is simple. There is literally no reward. Adding a system to make PvP matches more "fair" does nothing to solve the real issue...the complete lack of motivation for people to participate in PvP.
I believe most people don't PvP because they don't enjoy it, not because of perceived lack of reward. Speaking for myself, the concept of PvP is very "non-Trek" and have always wondered what it is doing in the game at all. It's what Star Wars is all about, but not Star Trek, in my opinion.
I hope the system works well for those that enjoy that sort of thing.
You may not see a need for a reward, but the majority of people do. It's very evident in looking at the queues in this game. There's nothing "fun and exciting" about Borg Red Alerts, but tons of people do them. And why? They're relatively easy. They have nearly no possibility of failure. They're short. They give a reward as large as the reward you get from a PvE queue that is longer, harder, and can fail. The same holds true all throughout this game. Very few people do any of the queued events in this game because they're fun. They do them for the reward. No reward in PvP means most people will choose to spend their time elsewhere.
Well, the rewards were the reason to play PvP in Avengers Alliance. It was kinda like a rep system, but where the rep store changed each month...
I think there are some people that are assuming that everyone is going to jump into Cryptic's sandbox and play nicely.
Let's say we have a person who doesn't care about PvP and with that, this new match making system in general. What's to stop that person from taking the lowest tier ship possible, loading it up with the crappiest gear they can and playing (and I use that word loosely) enough rounds to signifcantly establish their rank as Uber Noob. Then that same person takes their best ship, loads it to the gills with the best Epic gear and jumps into another match. There's a good chance that they'll absolutely obliterate their opponent. And if that opponent happens to be someone checking out PvP for the very first time, I can only assume it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Now it seems the only way around that is for Cryptic to put a ****-ton of importance on gear that it would bump that person's level back up to something even remotely appropriate. If that's going to be the case, I'll leave it to everyone here to come to their own conclusions about what kind of statement that makes.
Am I the only one who sees the potential pitfalls of this new system?
It's not really a pitfall, because the system will correct the player's scoree quickly, and he has to get through the tedium of a bunch of PvP battles where he intentionally sets himself unp to fail, to then set himself up to win for a few matches. If griefing requires you to engage in a lot of setup work, it's rarely done. It must be easy, like equipping one piece of gear, activating a power and blocking a path for players easy.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Getting PvP right is always a pain as there are often too many variables and trying to mechanically break it down is fraught with complexity. We don't know what the engine for this is, the Glicko Rating System has been mentioned in this thread and is a likely candidate based on the information given so far (which isn't much) and that it is Open Source. Or it could be a more bespoke version tailored so that it is an even bigger black box to the player base not that will stop people speculating, running tests, seeing results, determining input variables getting new output variables and so on to see if they can guess how it works, even if only out of curiosity. Human nature.
A lot of this stems from design decisions eight or nine years back, where the Klingons were to be an exclusive PvP faction baked into the main game and the sudden rapid shift to make them a bit more fully PvE friendly kinda holed the PvP experience a bit from then on in. For those not dedicated to proving that they are better than other players it was and still is a bit of a chore and a niche activity TBH. That is the question really regarding this new system, will the average player who is happy doing whatever missions on the way to level 60 be interested in it long enough to get meaningful data to make their experience fair? Or will they still be happy to get to the top of the PvE pole? Only time will tell. I'll also mention that this will likely be aied more at the new player, making PvP more manageable in any way will be another way to keep any interest in the game going for anyone who might be interested in a seven year old game.
This isn't in isolation, the balance passes are almost certainly aimed at making this system more effective by reinforcing the basics since recently their have been very little difference in things (whether they have succeeded is debatable) - PvP basics in any game are:
1. Know you species, class and EQ, how they work and how you use them in both PvP and PvE.
2. Know your opponents species, class and guess their EQ. Harder than for your own but that's why you have more than one character slot and a test server to do this, can then apply what knowledge you have to try and figure out what they may do.
3. Think out of the box, combining what the above two tell you in order to create a surprise.
1&2 Sounds a bit like the black box Cryptic is likely to use doesn't it? Only difference is that they are relying on an algorithm, you won't be and there are many who will bet on human inventiveness over a logical mashup of numbers. A guess may defeat a certainty of fact.
The two best PvP systems I have used and seen are the ones used in Dark Age of Camelot about 12 years ago and Lord of the Rings. DAoC as it has PvP at every level groups into battleground areas great preparation for taking on the enemy factions and gave a simple ranking system and bonus spec points only really usable in PvP. LotRO as it let you play the Monster Races in a separate mode from the main game they were pure PvP, different powers abilities and so on not baked into the main game like the Klingons were intended to be - and IIRC ranked them based on ability.
Lastly, the new Power Core mission, am I the only one who has had the UT2K4 music running through their mind?
As long as it stays out of Normal PvE and Private PvP, I couldn't care less about this, as I don't care about Comp PvE or Pub PvP.
It being in normal PvE would be a disaster, as it would make actually building your ship irrelevant, because as long as one member of your team did, you could roll in with a mk x white equipped (or whatever junk you've found) garbage scow having not spent a single Energy Credit and still be powerful. Such a system would also reduce income, as less people would use Dil (bought via Zen, because you need so much of it for upgrading) to upgrade items if they knew they would just be buffed up anyway.
Also seems to be very bad for 1v1 private PvP matches (which I very occasionally do with a friend), as those are primarily for seeing whose ship is better, not who has been buffed up the most.
Seems like a very niche update. At least there is a new FE (that's short for Featured Episode, not Featured Event (which drag way too long, and pretty much stop any other content coming for a month)) with it (can we keep them coming monthly from now on?) to keep us going.
From what I understood as part of what you said you believe that as you increase in player potential that your gear magically increases in performance which is not what cryptic is describing. They are describing a system that teams you with people of equal ability and gear, but the real problem from this is if a player with lower gear gets boosted in player performance by joining with friends who are stronger and can always win 4v5. When they try to solo queue they will get smoked, most likely.
Given how "the system" calculates your tier of rewards in battlezones I don't have much faith in this player potential calculation system either.
Comparing two things that have no correlation ... and btw, battlezones have missions that give you rewards, not just the tiers (which aren't the main reward).
No but I have never figured out the Tier Reward given to a player after the Terran counterattack phase in the Badlands Battlezone. I blast ships, fight throughout the five minutes, fire on the ISS Enterprise, throw Gravity Wells and end up with a Tier I Reward. I suspect that it may be based on DPS.
Regardless, the point is relevant. Based on how they do things like calculating the Tier level, the AFK penalty, etc. one must be somewhat skeptical of how PPS calculations are going to turn out.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
One has to be skeptical of the whole system. It's actually kind of ridiculous on its face. They took STO free-to-play, which we all know is just "pay-more-to-get-ahead". It's essentially the old Pokemon card system. Make the better stuff artificially rare in some way, charge money for it, and let those who want to pay more have a better deck. Or, in this case, a better ship. I raised several children when this was in its heyday, and it's unfortunate that the kids who grew up thinking this was the way to get ahead are now the adults who are funding STO.
Ok, so the sytem is what it is. Fair enough, roger out. But it is flabbergastingly astounding to me that Cryptic first creates this system, actively encourages people to spend more and more money to get the best Stuff™, and then creates a system that will then go over and assess the quality of your gear and dial your combat effectiveness back in direct proportion. Not only based on your gear, but based on, they claim, your skill level - so that the better you do, presumably the more you get dialed back?
It's not actually surprising that this type of system is necessary. Of course it's necessary. What is surprising is that this is brought in as a "fix", and that they didn't see it coming back when they took the game F2P in the way they did. This fix is basically an admission that their entire system is broken. And it is. Their model is something that is profitable in the short term, but has the interesting feature of where the more profitable it is the more skewed the game gets and in the end becomes more and more unworkable. The player base is so skewed it's unworkable. And the old fix, the system of offering free bits to people if they jump through daily time wasting hoops in order to populate the game with enough lemmings to keep it playable for the ones who are paying big $$, is obviously itself breaking down. You can tell this is the case because of the greater frequency of those events. The system is become so unworkable that artificial mechanisms like this new system are required to fix it.
Here are some gems from the official description:
Quote: "It’s important to note that the system is intelligent enough to know if you don’t belong where you are currently ranked. Losing a lot, or winning a lot in quick succession will cause your Player Potential to drastically change, as the system becomes less confident in your current position."
The system is intelligent enough? Isn't this saying that they aren't actually confident it's intelligent enough to correctly assess a ship's capability based on its gear and have to tweak based on win/loss ratio? So what happens if two people are in identical ships, doesn't that mean that the more skilled player is going to get dinged?
Quote: "Up until now, the matchmaking system would be unaware of relative skill between players, and a match could end up being consistently one-sided."
*blink*
But isn't this the way it's supposed to be? Isn't skill supposed to be the deciding factor in a match? Or is "skill" in this case just a euphamism for "the matchmaking system would be unaware of the relative amount each player has paid for gear"? I don't know, and you can't know either because...
Quote: "It should be known that this system will not be directly exposed to the player."
Translation: "We are not going to tell you what we're doing, how we are doing it, or what factors affect it. We are going to apply our secret sauce, just trust us." But... aren't you the guys that broke the sytem... on purpose... in the first place?
Suggestion: Just take the pain and ditch the F2P model that currently exists. There are two ways to make the game work in way that is sustainable both financially and game play wise. 1) Retain F2P but alter it so that the charges are only for aesthetics. Ship looks, ship models, weapon effects, clothes, races, pets, etc. 2) Ditch F2P in favour of returning to a subscription model. There is also the third option of a hybrid system. Yes, this will make the game less profitable in the short term, but it will become must more systainable in the long term.
The current system is reaching end of life and will only survive in its current form by either adopting increasingly artificial mechanisms to patch it, or by going through a reboot. Either method alienates those that pay the most, the first slowly, the second all at once. Since you are faced with this anyway, just go back to a system that levels the play field by design, then you won't need to alienate anyone to fix inequalities that are baked into the system.
@stol#4062 I'm a little surprised by your interpretation of what's going on, given how thoroughly you seem to have read the blog.
At no point do they even mention changing the way a player's equipment acts - it's just a matchmaking system, like the ones in, say, StarCraft. The system tries to balance team composition by the players' ratings, not artificially punish a player for performing better than his peers.
For instance, let's imagine this scenario:
I am the best pilot in the game by a substantial margin, with the very best equipment money can buy. (Anyone who has fought me knows that neither of these assertions are even remotely accurate, but it makes it easier to explain what will happen.) For the sake of giving example numbers, let's say my rating is 1000.
I, being this godlike entity of universal destruction, queue up for a PvP match. 9 other people queue up for it.
6 of the others have fairly similar ratings to each other - decent ratings, I should point out. Let's go with ratings in the 90-110 zone, shall we?
The remaining 3 have consistently shoddy performance and a correspondingly low rating. I'm going to rate these in the 20-30 zone.
Now, taking these facts into account, the system would form the following teams, attempting to ensure that the sum of the teams' ratings were as similar to each other as possible:
My team, with a total rating of 1160:
Me with my 1000.
The worst-rated of the competent players with his 90.
The three useless players for, say, a total of 70.
The enemy team, with a total rating of 530:
The remaining five competent players, with a total of 530.
Mind you, because I was extremely generous in exaggerating my potential, the ratings are still not balanced - but this is more an issue of not having enough players in the 800-1200 region than a flaw in the system's core principles.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
> @stol#4062 said: > One has to be skeptical of the whole system. It's actually kind of ridiculous on its face. They took STO free-to-play, which we all know is just "pay-more-to-get-ahead". It's essentially the old Pokemon card system. Make the better stuff artificially rare in some way, charge money for it, and let those who want to pay more have a better deck. Or, in this case, a better ship. I raised several children when this was in its heyday, and it's unfortunate that the kids who grew up thinking this was the way to get ahead are now the adults who are funding STO.
>
> Ok, so the sytem is what it is. Fair enough, roger out. But it is flabbergastingly astounding to me that Cryptic first creates this system, actively encourages people to spend more and more money to get the best Stuff™, and then creates a system that will then go over and assess the quality of your gear and dial your combat effectiveness back in direct proportion. Not only based on your gear, but based on, they claim, your skill level - so that the better you do, presumably the more you get dialed back?
>
> It's not actually surprising that this type of system is necessary. Of course it's necessary. What is surprising is that this is brought in as a "fix", and that they didn't see it coming back when they took the game F2P in the way they did. This fix is basically an admission that their entire system is broken. And it is. Their model is something that is profitable in the short term, but has the interesting feature of where the more profitable it is the more skewed the game gets and in the end becomes more and more unworkable. The player base is so skewed it's unworkable. And the old fix, the system of offering free bits to people if they jump through daily time wasting hoops in order to populate the game with enough lemmings to keep it playable for the ones who are paying big $$, is obviously itself breaking down. You can tell this is the case because of the greater frequency of those events. The system is become so unworkable that artificial mechanisms like this new system are required to fix it.
>
> Here are some gems from the official description:
>
> Quote: "It’s important to note that the system is intelligent enough to know if you don’t belong where you are currently ranked. Losing a lot, or winning a lot in quick succession will cause your Player Potential to drastically change, as the system becomes less confident in your current position."
>
> The system is intelligent enough? Isn't this saying that they aren't actually confident it's intelligent enough to correctly assess a ship's capability based on its gear and have to tweak based on win/loss ratio? So what happens if two people are in identical ships, doesn't that mean that the more skilled player is going to get dinged?
>
> Quote: "Up until now, the matchmaking system would be unaware of relative skill between players, and a match could end up being consistently one-sided."
>
> *blink*
>
> But isn't this the way it's supposed to be? Isn't skill supposed to be the deciding factor in a match? Or is "skill" in this case just a euphamism for "the matchmaking system would be unaware of the relative amount each player has paid for gear"? I don't know, and you can't know either because...
>
> Quote: "It should be known that this system will not be directly exposed to the player."
>
> Translation: "We are not going to tell you what we're doing, how we are doing it, or what factors affect it. We are going to apply our secret sauce, just trust us." But... aren't you the guys that broke the sytem... on purpose... in the first place?
>
> Suggestion:
> Just take the pain and ditch the F2P model that currently exists. There are two ways to make the game work in way that is sustainable both financially and game play wise. 1) Retain F2P but alter it so that the charges are only for aesthetics. Ship looks, ship models, weapon effects, clothes, races, pets, etc. 2) Ditch F2P in favour of returning to a subscription model. There is also the third option of a hybrid system. Yes, this will make the game less profitable in the short term, but it will become must more systainable in the long term.
>
> The current system is reaching end of life and will only survive in its current form by either adopting increasingly artificial mechanisms to patch it, or by going through a reboot. Either method alienates those that pay the most, the first slowly, the second all at once. Since you are faced with this anyway, just go back to a system that levels the play field by design, then you won't need to alienate anyone to fix inequalities that are baked into the system.
As someone who's spent thousands on this game, I wholeheartedly agree with the above.
It would nuke there current player base, but diminished returns on new pve content and new reputations have been evident for a while.
I am wondering if the Player Potential System is going to start getting the PvP experts isolated from the casual players in PvP matches.
I mean, if dedicated players with high scores are matched to the other players in that ballpark, then it'll become a narrow selection of the playerbase who can compete against each other.
Also, there was an incident in Binary Assault Elite I didn't fully understand, but I think it may have been related to the PPS.
A player in the team called the rest of the team "potato team" because this team lost the match to the other team.
I don't know what they meant, but I think they'd been on a unbroken winning streak and were getting snitty it was broken.
I don't even understand the context of their insult, if it can be explained (politely), please do so.
Do CPvE matches contribute to rising or falling within the PPS?
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Comments
If players knew their score, and that of their friends, they could set up matches and pre-determine the winner(s) to artificially boost their PPS rating (move up in any sort of publicly visible ranking). Overall accuracy of the rating would be blurred; PPS would be unreliable.
PPS is not a ranking system with which players can compare their “skill” against one another; it’s up to the community to create leagues and tournaments for that.
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
Isn't that PvP rather than fighting NPCs?
Is it?
What do you think Khan vs Kirk, Chang vs Kirk, Kor vs Kirk, Romulan Commander vs Kirk, Spock vs Romulan Commander, Picard vs Shinzon, Sisko vs Dukat and many more are? Two powerful and capable individuals, fighting for their side.
And if you think "but Star Trek is about team work to overcome your challenges" - STO's PvP is usually team-based, and team work is critical to success. Peaceful solutions are usually preferred in Star Trek, but Star Trek also allows conflicts to be resolved with violence if the other options fail.
Let's say we have a person who doesn't care about PvP and with that, this new match making system in general. What's to stop that person from taking the lowest tier ship possible, loading it up with the crappiest gear they can and playing (and I use that word loosely) enough rounds to signifcantly establish their rank as Uber Noob. Then that same person takes their best ship, loads it to the gills with the best Epic gear and jumps into another match. There's a good chance that they'll absolutely obliterate their opponent. And if that opponent happens to be someone checking out PvP for the very first time, I can only assume it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Now it seems the only way around that is for Cryptic to put a TRIBBLE-ton of importance on gear that it would bump that person's level back up to something even remotely appropriate. If that's going to be the case, I'll leave it to everyone here to come to their own conclusions about what kind of statement that makes.
Am I the only one who sees the potential pitfalls of this new system?
Even if people find fun in griefing others like that, we just don’t know how the system behaves in this regard. The system on it’s own does not provide incentive to grief. It’s entirely possible that low-end gear will generate a gear score so low, that no average player would ever be matched with them, regardless how bad they try to get rated, effectively creating “weight classes”. But that’s just speculation. Even if there are no “weight classes”, Glicko will always know how consistent a player’s performance is, and will have less “confidence” in scores with high volatility or long inactivity—and might decide to queue those players against more predictable players instead of unrated newbs. Again, just speculation.
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
I don't know. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses aren't significantly tinted enough.
You make a good point. If PvP is integral to a story line it could me more palatable (to me, at least) than PvP just for it's own sake
Competitive PvE isn't against NPCs, you are competing against other players to "win and not lose".
The group race and the Phoenix event queue are cPvE.
I personally saw how bad emotional investment in winning can get, because two players had full purple rockets and one of them screamed something offensive because their rocket didn't beat the other rocket!
In any case, since I dislike it when games have players compete against each other in scenarios where there can be a winner and a loser, I find it distasteful.
An additional concern is that inevitably, egotism and antisocial/offensive behavior are involved as well, I've personally seen many examples of how unpleasant a competitive player can get over their obsession with winning/defeating other players.
So I just stay out of any competitive gaming for that reason alone.
I honestly hope they don't go down that road, because it would lead to a very unpalatable scenario!
Hypothethically, you've got a player just muddling along, playing their story missions and then the whammo mission appears, the one that insists you go to a PvP match in order to progress the mission chain.
For a player who doesn't enjoy PvP, they'd resent being forced to go there to get their mission rewards and progress to the next stage of the mission chain.
PvP and cPvE must always remain optional, so players aren't being compelled to do something they dislike.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
If you don't like the crowd turn chat off.
During the mess that DR made, I used to go in cap and hold sessions without fighting anyone because it was pointless. I just captured the points and if I got fired on I'd sit still because the quicker they took me out the quicker I could get back to capturing.
You may not see a need for a reward, but the majority of people do. It's very evident in looking at the queues in this game. There's nothing "fun and exciting" about Borg Red Alerts, but tons of people do them. And why? They're relatively easy. They have nearly no possibility of failure. They're short. They give a reward as large as the reward you get from a PvE queue that is longer, harder, and can fail. The same holds true all throughout this game. Very few people do any of the queued events in this game because they're fun. They do them for the reward. No reward in PvP means most people will choose to spend their time elsewhere.
I made this pic because of a weird glitch that made it display a -4 when I won. Apparently it somehow remembered I'd lost a match, but not WHO I lost to, so it added that to someone else in the list.
Also... I wasn't really THAT good at PvP. This was at the beginning of a tournament and they'd reset everyone's rating to 800 at the beginning of each tournament. So I was fighting a bunch of people who were utterly outclassed by me. Example:
Yes, that's right, so many passive effects that they don't fit on the screen. Scary huh? this is actually BEFORE the fight started. After things got going it got even more interesting. I wasn't actually a top-tier player. I was basically in the second best tier. but at the beginning of each season the rankings got reset, so I'd go around curbstomping people who didn't really have a chance at beating me(it's hard to see in that pic, but the enemy team I was fighting did not have such amazing powers, and got rekt shortly after)... until my ranking went back up and then it went from easy wins to actually trying to win.
But a similar approach in STO would make PvP a lot more fun because you'd see less matches like this pop up:
Yes stuff like that happened every season, but it was the exception, and unusual(hence why I felt the need to record it for posterity). I'm pretty sure Picard and Riker did PvP periodically. We even saw it in one of the episodes!
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
It's not really a pitfall, because the system will correct the player's scoree quickly, and he has to get through the tedium of a bunch of PvP battles where he intentionally sets himself unp to fail, to then set himself up to win for a few matches. If griefing requires you to engage in a lot of setup work, it's rarely done. It must be easy, like equipping one piece of gear, activating a power and blocking a path for players easy.
A lot of this stems from design decisions eight or nine years back, where the Klingons were to be an exclusive PvP faction baked into the main game and the sudden rapid shift to make them a bit more fully PvE friendly kinda holed the PvP experience a bit from then on in. For those not dedicated to proving that they are better than other players it was and still is a bit of a chore and a niche activity TBH. That is the question really regarding this new system, will the average player who is happy doing whatever missions on the way to level 60 be interested in it long enough to get meaningful data to make their experience fair? Or will they still be happy to get to the top of the PvE pole? Only time will tell. I'll also mention that this will likely be aied more at the new player, making PvP more manageable in any way will be another way to keep any interest in the game going for anyone who might be interested in a seven year old game.
This isn't in isolation, the balance passes are almost certainly aimed at making this system more effective by reinforcing the basics since recently their have been very little difference in things (whether they have succeeded is debatable) - PvP basics in any game are:
1. Know you species, class and EQ, how they work and how you use them in both PvP and PvE.
2. Know your opponents species, class and guess their EQ. Harder than for your own but that's why you have more than one character slot and a test server to do this, can then apply what knowledge you have to try and figure out what they may do.
3. Think out of the box, combining what the above two tell you in order to create a surprise.
1&2 Sounds a bit like the black box Cryptic is likely to use doesn't it? Only difference is that they are relying on an algorithm, you won't be and there are many who will bet on human inventiveness over a logical mashup of numbers. A guess may defeat a certainty of fact.
The two best PvP systems I have used and seen are the ones used in Dark Age of Camelot about 12 years ago and Lord of the Rings. DAoC as it has PvP at every level groups into battleground areas great preparation for taking on the enemy factions and gave a simple ranking system and bonus spec points only really usable in PvP. LotRO as it let you play the Monster Races in a separate mode from the main game they were pure PvP, different powers abilities and so on not baked into the main game like the Klingons were intended to be - and IIRC ranked them based on ability.
Lastly, the new Power Core mission, am I the only one who has had the UT2K4 music running through their mind?
From what I understood as part of what you said you believe that as you increase in player potential that your gear magically increases in performance which is not what cryptic is describing. They are describing a system that teams you with people of equal ability and gear, but the real problem from this is if a player with lower gear gets boosted in player performance by joining with friends who are stronger and can always win 4v5. When they try to solo queue they will get smoked, most likely.
Comparing two things that have no correlation ... and btw, battlezones have missions that give you rewards, not just the tiers (which aren't the main reward).
Regardless, the point is relevant. Based on how they do things like calculating the Tier level, the AFK penalty, etc. one must be somewhat skeptical of how PPS calculations are going to turn out.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Ok, so the sytem is what it is. Fair enough, roger out. But it is flabbergastingly astounding to me that Cryptic first creates this system, actively encourages people to spend more and more money to get the best Stuff™, and then creates a system that will then go over and assess the quality of your gear and dial your combat effectiveness back in direct proportion. Not only based on your gear, but based on, they claim, your skill level - so that the better you do, presumably the more you get dialed back?
It's not actually surprising that this type of system is necessary. Of course it's necessary. What is surprising is that this is brought in as a "fix", and that they didn't see it coming back when they took the game F2P in the way they did. This fix is basically an admission that their entire system is broken. And it is. Their model is something that is profitable in the short term, but has the interesting feature of where the more profitable it is the more skewed the game gets and in the end becomes more and more unworkable. The player base is so skewed it's unworkable. And the old fix, the system of offering free bits to people if they jump through daily time wasting hoops in order to populate the game with enough lemmings to keep it playable for the ones who are paying big $$, is obviously itself breaking down. You can tell this is the case because of the greater frequency of those events. The system is become so unworkable that artificial mechanisms like this new system are required to fix it.
Here are some gems from the official description:
Quote: "It’s important to note that the system is intelligent enough to know if you don’t belong where you are currently ranked. Losing a lot, or winning a lot in quick succession will cause your Player Potential to drastically change, as the system becomes less confident in your current position."
The system is intelligent enough? Isn't this saying that they aren't actually confident it's intelligent enough to correctly assess a ship's capability based on its gear and have to tweak based on win/loss ratio? So what happens if two people are in identical ships, doesn't that mean that the more skilled player is going to get dinged?
Quote: "Up until now, the matchmaking system would be unaware of relative skill between players, and a match could end up being consistently one-sided."
*blink*
But isn't this the way it's supposed to be? Isn't skill supposed to be the deciding factor in a match? Or is "skill" in this case just a euphamism for "the matchmaking system would be unaware of the relative amount each player has paid for gear"? I don't know, and you can't know either because...
Quote: "It should be known that this system will not be directly exposed to the player."
Translation: "We are not going to tell you what we're doing, how we are doing it, or what factors affect it. We are going to apply our secret sauce, just trust us." But... aren't you the guys that broke the sytem... on purpose... in the first place?
Suggestion:
Just take the pain and ditch the F2P model that currently exists. There are two ways to make the game work in way that is sustainable both financially and game play wise. 1) Retain F2P but alter it so that the charges are only for aesthetics. Ship looks, ship models, weapon effects, clothes, races, pets, etc. 2) Ditch F2P in favour of returning to a subscription model. There is also the third option of a hybrid system. Yes, this will make the game less profitable in the short term, but it will become must more systainable in the long term.
The current system is reaching end of life and will only survive in its current form by either adopting increasingly artificial mechanisms to patch it, or by going through a reboot. Either method alienates those that pay the most, the first slowly, the second all at once. Since you are faced with this anyway, just go back to a system that levels the play field by design, then you won't need to alienate anyone to fix inequalities that are baked into the system.
At no point do they even mention changing the way a player's equipment acts - it's just a matchmaking system, like the ones in, say, StarCraft. The system tries to balance team composition by the players' ratings, not artificially punish a player for performing better than his peers.
For instance, let's imagine this scenario:
Now, taking these facts into account, the system would form the following teams, attempting to ensure that the sum of the teams' ratings were as similar to each other as possible:
Mind you, because I was extremely generous in exaggerating my potential, the ratings are still not balanced - but this is more an issue of not having enough players in the 800-1200 region than a flaw in the system's core principles.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
> One has to be skeptical of the whole system. It's actually kind of ridiculous on its face. They took STO free-to-play, which we all know is just "pay-more-to-get-ahead". It's essentially the old Pokemon card system. Make the better stuff artificially rare in some way, charge money for it, and let those who want to pay more have a better deck. Or, in this case, a better ship. I raised several children when this was in its heyday, and it's unfortunate that the kids who grew up thinking this was the way to get ahead are now the adults who are funding STO.
>
> Ok, so the sytem is what it is. Fair enough, roger out. But it is flabbergastingly astounding to me that Cryptic first creates this system, actively encourages people to spend more and more money to get the best Stuff™, and then creates a system that will then go over and assess the quality of your gear and dial your combat effectiveness back in direct proportion. Not only based on your gear, but based on, they claim, your skill level - so that the better you do, presumably the more you get dialed back?
>
> It's not actually surprising that this type of system is necessary. Of course it's necessary. What is surprising is that this is brought in as a "fix", and that they didn't see it coming back when they took the game F2P in the way they did. This fix is basically an admission that their entire system is broken. And it is. Their model is something that is profitable in the short term, but has the interesting feature of where the more profitable it is the more skewed the game gets and in the end becomes more and more unworkable. The player base is so skewed it's unworkable. And the old fix, the system of offering free bits to people if they jump through daily time wasting hoops in order to populate the game with enough lemmings to keep it playable for the ones who are paying big $$, is obviously itself breaking down. You can tell this is the case because of the greater frequency of those events. The system is become so unworkable that artificial mechanisms like this new system are required to fix it.
>
> Here are some gems from the official description:
>
> Quote: "It’s important to note that the system is intelligent enough to know if you don’t belong where you are currently ranked. Losing a lot, or winning a lot in quick succession will cause your Player Potential to drastically change, as the system becomes less confident in your current position."
>
> The system is intelligent enough? Isn't this saying that they aren't actually confident it's intelligent enough to correctly assess a ship's capability based on its gear and have to tweak based on win/loss ratio? So what happens if two people are in identical ships, doesn't that mean that the more skilled player is going to get dinged?
>
> Quote: "Up until now, the matchmaking system would be unaware of relative skill between players, and a match could end up being consistently one-sided."
>
> *blink*
>
> But isn't this the way it's supposed to be? Isn't skill supposed to be the deciding factor in a match? Or is "skill" in this case just a euphamism for "the matchmaking system would be unaware of the relative amount each player has paid for gear"? I don't know, and you can't know either because...
>
> Quote: "It should be known that this system will not be directly exposed to the player."
>
> Translation: "We are not going to tell you what we're doing, how we are doing it, or what factors affect it. We are going to apply our secret sauce, just trust us." But... aren't you the guys that broke the sytem... on purpose... in the first place?
>
> Suggestion:
> Just take the pain and ditch the F2P model that currently exists. There are two ways to make the game work in way that is sustainable both financially and game play wise. 1) Retain F2P but alter it so that the charges are only for aesthetics. Ship looks, ship models, weapon effects, clothes, races, pets, etc. 2) Ditch F2P in favour of returning to a subscription model. There is also the third option of a hybrid system. Yes, this will make the game less profitable in the short term, but it will become must more systainable in the long term.
>
> The current system is reaching end of life and will only survive in its current form by either adopting increasingly artificial mechanisms to patch it, or by going through a reboot. Either method alienates those that pay the most, the first slowly, the second all at once. Since you are faced with this anyway, just go back to a system that levels the play field by design, then you won't need to alienate anyone to fix inequalities that are baked into the system.
As someone who's spent thousands on this game, I wholeheartedly agree with the above.
It would nuke there current player base, but diminished returns on new pve content and new reputations have been evident for a while.
I mean, if dedicated players with high scores are matched to the other players in that ballpark, then it'll become a narrow selection of the playerbase who can compete against each other.
Also, there was an incident in Binary Assault Elite I didn't fully understand, but I think it may have been related to the PPS.
A player in the team called the rest of the team "potato team" because this team lost the match to the other team.
I don't know what they meant, but I think they'd been on a unbroken winning streak and were getting snitty it was broken.
I don't even understand the context of their insult, if it can be explained (politely), please do so.
Do CPvE matches contribute to rising or falling within the PPS?
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad