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Guaranteed Token Reward vs Random Chance Reward
tilarta
Member Posts: 1,798 Arc User
While I was playing Champions Online yesterday, the subject of endgame loot collection came up and whether it was worth time in doing.
One viewpoint that was the low drop rate/random chance factor caused disinterest to the level of players not wanting to do it because it takes up too much time.
The other viewpoint expressed was that earning an endgame item should be difficult and not easy.
I was attempting to explain to them how STFs work in STO for acquiring endgame loot and how it is different from CO's method.
In CO, you have to play a queue every day for 1 week to maybe get their equivalent of a Reputation Gear Token.
This has to be done 5 times for 5 tokens before the item can be obtained, just like our Reputation gear projects.
In terms of total playtime, what takes us 2.5 hours in STO is 5 weeks in CO.
One viewpoint that was the low drop rate/random chance factor caused disinterest to the level of players not wanting to do it because it takes up too much time.
The other viewpoint expressed was that earning an endgame item should be difficult and not easy.
I was attempting to explain to them how STFs work in STO for acquiring endgame loot and how it is different from CO's method.
In CO, you have to play a queue every day for 1 week to maybe get their equivalent of a Reputation Gear Token.
This has to be done 5 times for 5 tokens before the item can be obtained, just like our Reputation gear projects.
In terms of total playtime, what takes us 2.5 hours in STO is 5 weeks in CO.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Guaranteed Token Reward vs Random Chance Reward 42 votes
Guaranteed
88%
37 votes
Random Chance
11%
5 votes
0
Comments
You can model random chance on a binomial distribution. It's like a bell curve, but generated from a discrete function. It's also skewed to the right at median-to-lower values. That's important for game design because if you actually model the probabilities what you'll find is that three scenarios of getting the item sooner than expected, exactly as expected, or longer as expected aren't necessarily evenly distributed.
If you apply popular wisdom to a loot drop (ie. put in N games for a drop rate of 1/N, so the mean expected take is 1 item (N*(1/N)), the hunt for gear will more frequently take longer than expected than shorter (by a consistent ~4:3 margin). You have to put in more games than the odds would dictate (via mean expected value) for the outcomes to balance out.
So random loot drops are nuts. There's also no skill involved with gaming the system because while your grinding away, putting effort into gameplay, the probabilities of each draw are completely independent of one another. So go 10 runs without a key loot drop and your odds of winning next time are exactly the same as when you started. Your input changes nothing in the moment. Hence, no skill, no game, it's just confronting probability head-on. That's incredibly frustrating and add to that the issue above where the hunt will tend to drag on longer than expected than shorter and you have a system that was rightfully cut from STO.
Guaranteed loot drops are simply better. Someone in the loot drop camp may not get the same thrill from a neural processor as an old deflector token but that's just a statement of the contrast between the binomial hell they've subjected themselves to and the nominal reward they've just earned. It's a subjective rise but going from negative to neutral is not the same as enjoying a positive asset (objectively). And that doesn't need to be replicated in loot systems. Look for alternatives in gameplay.
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The "intrinsic value of gameplay" is also monetized (since "how much we earn" is what we're talking about here, not the actual moment-to-moment thrill of combat, story telling, or exploration) by guaranteed loot drops. Furthermore, it's monetized at a set rate. That's the difference. The value of gameplay under a drop rate is set by a binary variable whose behavior is dictated by a simple frequency. It does, in practice, exactly the same thing that any system of earned gear will do, just less consistently (particularly at small sample sizes, which incidentally makes up the user's experience.)
Remember that your "enjoyment" at random loot is a contrast of expectation set by a dull grind. Something else happens (ie. you get what you want) and you're happy for it. But put that in context. What a random loot system does, mechanically, is offer a moment's relief from itself, typically at low frequencies. There's a pleasurable sensation, yes, and in isolation that's all that matters. But leading up to that moment is a long slog that's absolutely necessary to set your expectation that's broken in the loot drop. If it's not there (at least in anticipation), then the drop has no impact. There's no contrast, no relief, just another item.
The big drop is a false hit that demands so much more than what you're getting out. This holds regardless of alternatives. If you make another path available, the range of experience is between complete irrelevance of either the alternative (worst case) or the loot drops (best case). It's one or the other in simple or partial substitution. There's still no benefit here (or additive effects between a single simple probability and a cut-off to a binomial problem.)
Easier solution: don't add major random loot drops in the first place, focus on improving and expanding gameplay if there's an abundance of time on the schedule and a desire to make old content (in particular) more fun.
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Well firstly, that's got to be one of the most insightful and well thought out posts I've seen in a long time. And I really quite agree. Unfortunately, we humans aren't entirely logical. We don't necessarily prefer the better option (see the J.C. Penny's effect). While I wouldn't choose random rewards over guaranteed ones, partially because I've got terrible luck and partially because it 'is' the better option. I know a lot of people get more enjoyment out of hitting their head against a wall until it works than watching a gauge fill up over time. (and of course the converse is also true) This is the main reason I think there should be some kind of (at least apparently) random rewards alongside a guaranteed one so as to have the psychological benefits of having random drops while mitigating some of the pitfalls. Of course all of this is subjective, so any given solution isn't going to work for everybody.
That would of course be the best choice. I also don't think there should necessarily be 'major' loot drops (like unique rep gear), but right now there's nothing worthwhile at all so it's functionally an indirect source of energy credits. (and salvage now, so that's nice)
This has certainly become a more interesting topic than anticipated. Guess I'll have to give some more thought.
Many have guaranteed drops behind such hard quests only the best can even complete them. You may have to acquire long list of equipment to prepare for hard quests, that may itself be hard to get. And of course the traditional raid boss drops only one of it's rewards so the party has to divide them amongst themselves. And not a party of just 5 either, in most cases.
STO's stuff is easy to get because the gameplay is easy, everything gives the same currencies and you don't need much of it for anything. Then again, you don't need any of the gear for anything either so why bother at all.
There is such a thing as too easy and it's called Star Trek Online.
The thing is, grinding currency feels like work while getting lucky with a drop feels like winning a game. If you make a guaranteed item take a year to get, it's boring. People are gonna thing "I might not even be playing this a year later." A random drop could come any time. Nor do all random drops necessarily need to be ultra-rare. There's a range, just like currency grinds.
And tradeability makes rares better, by smoothing the acquisition curves, balancing the relative value of different drops and incentivizing gameplay even after having personally acquired a particular drop.
Ideally, then, there would be a diverse range of differently acquired items. Guaranteed easy stuff to get people started, currency grind stuff to improve with and tradeable rares to aspire for, to keep up interest long-term. Maybe even some of those super-hard raid drops, if Cryptic ever feels like it.
But ultimately the most important thing is that different gameplay have different rewards, not everything the same like there is now. And all that stuff people are getting should be needed for something. One item best for X another best for Y. Not just an ever-growing stack of frivolous "options" that's all just as good for everything, all the time, everywhere. Otherwise, there's not much point even trying to get it.
Got my first two MK12 tech drops from ground within a week, so thought, okay, maybe this isn't that bad.
6 months later, going with a friend who was always getting duplicate tech drops and I still didn't have my last piece until the end of that month, my enthusiasm dropped significantly.
Did just enough to get my Omega costume on my KDF character and then stopped going to STFs.
Fortunately, they revised the system to guaranteed after that disaster and I got interested in STFs again.
For me personally, I feel more of a sense of accomplishment with the guaranteed rewards because I can actively see I'm getting close to my goal.
With a random reward drop system, all I felt that was happening was that time was being wasted that could be better spent on a more productive task.
I know from personal experience having played games are exclusively random drop reward based that as soon as my character reaches the level cap, I stop playing.
Because in the game I played most, I dedicated at least a years worth of gameplay and was always coming away from the battles with nothing to show for it.
That's when I made the conscious decision that if a game ever had a random drop system to determine if a player got endgame gear, I was not going to participate in the scavenger hunt at all.
The above rule also applies to STO, if the guaranteed reward system hadn't been implemented, I'd rarely be in the game at all.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
The major way gameplay is monetized for the player is through Dilithium. Everything offers it and it scales not per unit time but per unit completion. It's a perfectly functional way of doing the same thing even it doesn't offer that immediate sense that "these last 30 seconds of gameplay got me X more resources." I'm experiencing that in Warframe at the moment and while there's that thrill of pushing just a little further to get just a little more...it's so easy to lose a focus on gameplay for fun given the power of the neurochemical feedback involved with a well-set [with reward firmly in view] skinner box.
(Which IMO we should be making every effort to distinguish in language from an interactive sense of fun/exploration/manipulation. They're diametric opposites [down to the neurological processes involved; fun involves complex learning, investigation and reprocessing. Grinding loot involves simple dopamine stimulation] and result in correspondingly polar design strategies.)
Using resources earned from in-game activities. The principle behind reputations is that rather than forcing players onto an indeterminate and unforgiving grind (modeled on a binomial distribution, and everything that entails as explained above) they're given resources for PVE completion which feed directly into a project whose cost corresponds to a set effort (including Dilithium.) That way, you know every moment of gameplay is contributing to a prize and can responsibly manage the grind with complete information at hand.
That's not part of an RNG-based system, even if you know the odds (which we didn't under the old STF gear scheme) because of the inherent uncertainty. You can never predict when a given reward will be earned by a given player. That makes effective grind management impossible over the scale of the population (ie. the full distribution). Direct result: burn out or dejection as players on the right side of the distribution fail to meet targets within comfortable limits because they couldn't possibly judge what their chosen grind would necessitate. Anecdotes and estimates aren't deterministic (all they can do is clue to an average) and while a portion (~65%, from previous calculations) of the community is fine under this nominal scenario (earning gear as expected or sooner than expected), the comparison is still hideously mismatched. Reputation projects have a set target, their rate of effective completion is intrinsically 100%.
Thus the argument for major loot drops can be more directly expressed as: make the game function worse to sell players on a faked (ie. maladaptive) dopamine high when they unexpectedly relieved from further RNG grinding. Direct response: no.
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A system that gives you varying amounts of stuff at random is fine.
The way you can buy elite marks in STO for regular marks is good IMO.
My character Tsin'xing
Another way of putting it is that the RNG rewards are not "fair" because some people get the shiny in 1 try, while others never get it after 1,000 tries.
People argue that about lock box ships too, but in that case the ships are not character-bound, and you *can* buy them with 100% success from the Exchange for a known price, even if that price is higher than you want it to be. So you have a choice between gambling and not gambling.
There it goes again, work. I don't play videogames to "responsibly manage the grind." Thank you for demonstrating why random drops are more fun.
Uncertainty and risk is where the fun is. What's the point of playing a game if you already know you're gonna win? Personally, I'm not the least bit interested in most reputation projects, precicely because you can do them at any time and you never actually need any of it. Getting them at all is just a boring chore. Or if you already have the resources, a waste of said resources.
Using pseudoscientific technobabble to disparage other people's fun doesn't make it any less disparaging other people's fun.
For example when I played wow my guilds raids never seemed to get the tier gear for warlocks although because of using a dkp system it did mean we had the pick of any other loot we wanted. Couldn't find enough pallies to take the tier stuff that did appear. Thats the flaw of an RNG which is moreso in group settings as the games never checks to see who has what and adjust the drops. I did thousands of strat baron runs for the mount on my lock and never saw it while a barely used DK got it first run.
Tokens stops the game being about earning gear and all about mindless grinding. Bosses or whole instances get skipped because they don't fit a token per hour metric. Being enjoyable or having interesting fights very quickly becomes a minor aspect.
This is something that STO has failed to address which is why people stick to specific queues and go back to them within a week of a new queue coming out. Battlezones kind of fall under this issue as well although that shift from the new is more down to being put out broken to the point where you can't complete them.
I favor the guaranteed drop over random drops myself. I guess I'm just a very laid-back person who plays to escape RL for awhile and not to 'test' myself to see how 'good' I can get. I don't care if I'm never good enough to join the DPS League, I just want to have fun, and if that fun is grinding out dil, I'll grind out dil.
But I'm one of only a few, compared to everyone else. And that's fine with me too.
BTW, how does this DKP system work?
It's not just the tokens. Events with tokens do just fine for the most part. It's that almost all standard content rewards the same. It's the lack of differentiation that leads to the "token per hour metric" that kills content. It doesn't really matter for that if the reward is fixed or random.
Random rewards make things more interesting and allow designing for higher acquisition difficulty without turning into a chore, but can't in and of themselves prevent reward/effort math from taking over if the same reward is available from multiple sources. The only way to do that is to have different rewards.
As I said, ideally there would be many different reward paths. Token grind and random drops and everything in between (they are not binary options, but the endpoints of a linear scale). Of different acquisition difficulties. The biggest problem with STO's reward structure is everything's the same. Sameness is boring.
With the random drop system, it was not, so I felt there was no reason to play as all was I doing was endlessly repeating the same queue for no reason.
And when that fact becomes evident, that's when I stop going to the queue.
Also, this method of acquisition is more appealing to the casual gamer and I am one of those.
I only have to do a few queues, I have my gear prize and then I can go do something else for a while.
Then come back the next day to get the next prize for the set and so on.
As to the popularity of queues, perhaps it's the actual gear rewards themselves that denote the popularity.
For example, if someone is really interested in Omega reputation gear, they're not going to be doing one of the others because it doesn't provide the tokens/marks they need to fill the projects.
Sponsorship can also decrease the amount of time needed to advance Reputation, since it doubles the XP of each completed assignment.
And not every queue is the same, each one requires different tactics to succeed.
If you just go in blasting without knowing how to play to meet the objectives, it's going to result in failure or a lot of time wasting.
Me personally, I only fill up a Reputation if there's a Trait or gear item I want.
Because there are so many, it takes a lot of time to go through all the queues in succession.
And in some cases, I don't even have to take the Reputation to Tier5, sometimes 2 and 3 is enough.
I suppose a side issue might be that certain players are using the special drops as a means of stating they are better then other players, for egotistic purposes.
It's common in mmos for those with low-self esteem to go around telling everyone they have this great piece of gear that nobody else has.
I have seen a post from a STO player who apparently has this issue, because they were ranting angrily that the random drop system needs to be reinstated because they wanted the Omega costume options to be only for the special few and it wasn't fair to give it to every player in the game.
They were angry that the costume wasn't unique for them anymore.
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 every queue offers exactly the same, marks/dilithium, players will always gravitate towards the highest payout/time investment ratio and abandon the others. The result being dead queues within a few weeks of their release.
The Reputation items do not cost real world money, unless one is paying to C-Points to purchase Dilithium for the Requistion Projects.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
If I wasn't getting a drop after playing dozens of times then no, I would stop trying and move on. Not worth it.
This is nonsense. Rewards being metered out by a medium of exchange is a perfectly viable way of distributing said rewards based on a rough approximation (at least) of individual effort. This is how human civilization, broadly speaking, works. What you do gets rewarded based on a set valuation for the effort, nature, and context of that labor. That's an ideal in the real world but thanks to the simplified nature of the system that's a reality in how we get reputation gear. You put so much in, you get so much out. This is good.
If you play a queue, you get a reward. If you don't play a queue, you don't get that reward. This, incidentally, also applies to STO's old model random loot for queues. Every moment of gameplay leading up to completion contributed to that reward, be it consistently or inconsistently delivered at the end of a match. This is basic.
Reputations have a fixed price point which you can use to reliably judge the requirements of any given reward (see. above). What does making that a market-driven variable do besides add unreliability to grind management? The best case scenario (for maintaining the place of rep gear in the game, as well as its current accessibility) is that the market happens to arrive at a comparable price to what reputations require ATM (translating resources of course). Any other scenario, either design targets aren't being met or gear's drifting out of the reach of the population.
Add to this the aforementioned problems associated with rewarding individual effort through a binomial probability distribution (these don't go away simply because you've let a few individuals bankroll their way to end-game loot. Remember, you're advocating for population-level changes.
Absolutely nothing is gained except the risk of breaking a perfectly functional system and (most definitely) subjecting about 35% of the population who participates with loot grinding to a frustrating experience. Hence: keep the system as is.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Based on the poll here, 80-90% would be frustrated by this change not just 1/3 of players.
With the rep system you know up front exactly how much grind an item would cost.
I would not grind 100 STFs for the chance at the last piece of a space or ground set. That would be anti-fun. I'd live without the set and spend that time playing either other parts of STO or some other game.
I don't open lock boxes for ships, either. I buy them off the Exchange. 100% success, known cost.
Interesting idea and might be worth a shot but I doubt it's gonna solve the dead queue problem. They tried something like that by adding the R&D packs with specific materials to the queues (was it sometime during season 9?) and that didn't really help either. Sure there are more reasons why that (mostly) failed but adding more RNG stuff just won't cater the casual majority.
Considering how most games handle RNG it's safe to say that less is better. Not saying that there aren't games that do it right but there sure aren't many that hit that sweet spot.
The system was also much better back then. There were no choice marks, no marks to elite marks trades, no daily bonus that covers two days project cost all by itself, etc. ISE wasn't yet an exercise of shooting fish in a barrel (there was still 10% rule and it usually lasted around 10 min) and CC was still the original impossible-to-pug 20-man that didn't reward marks at all. Even so, the change immediately reduced the ground STFs into "private Accolade runs only" and CSE/KSE to "only when ISE is on CD." The STF's CD was 1 hour back then so the other two space ones would still run quite a bit thanks to that.
Having the reputation system is good (though the choice marks really, really, really need to go). Having unique drops in addition to the reputation system would be better.
The "harm" comes from the contradictory nature of the two systems. The minute someone plays queue X for the Yth time (the exact amount to have "earned" enough marks to "buy" the prize), if the RNG hasn't coughed it up, there's gonna be a complaint about why the item in question wasn't added to the Guaranteed Buy (reputation) system in the first place.
If the item is added to an existing reputation system, what's the driver pushing them to "deader" queue instead of sticking to the "one true queue that pays the necessary mark the fastest/easiest"?
So, the only remaining thought would be to have a "currency bloat" on a level that STO hasn't ever seen before, because each queue would need it's own mark to drive play of that queue for the queue-specific reward.
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