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Honor system, based on contributions in TFOs
sleepwalker
Member Posts: 128 Arc User
the idea
..for the honor system, is based on a discussion, i have recenty opened in this forum, which caused quite some interrest
"players not contributing in TFOs (ps4 only??)"
https://arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1260467/players-not-contributing-in-tfos-ps4-only/p1
feel free to share your oppinions on TFO issuses in the already existing topic (link above) ..and lets have this new discussion related to the honor system only - thx
the problem (in summary)
..is, that in a TFO some players (like me) are trying to complete optional targets (for higher marks-payout and a little bit more exitement), while other players trying to complete a TFO quickly as possible. this often does not get along very well, since the "speedrunners" can END a que, by their actions, before the other players have a chance to complete the optional tasks.
p.e. in "undine assault" one or two players can destroy the boss quite quickly, when the rest of the team just managed to close 5 of 6 errant rifts. their work was for nothing then..
another problem are AFK-players ..or people which are not even going for the basic mission-goals, p.e. in "gravity kills".
while some players seems to be ok, with all those issuses.. others are definitely NOT and feel frustrated from this relative unfair system. also rude messages back and forth in the chat are not a rarity.
the honor system
..could be a solution, to bring players with the same mindsets together, in TFOs (incl. random TFOs!).
the way i imagine this system is, that players get positive or negative honor, based on their contributions in a TFO.
the tfo-system should bring people with the same honorlevel together, if enough players are around..
..and mix up players, if there is a lack of people qued for a particular tfo.. then the honor-system could be temporary taken offline, but inform the players with a message(or an icon)!
+) people going for optional targets, will get positive honor
-) people NOT going for ANY optionl targets, will get negative honor
-) afk-players, will get negative honor, per minute!
-) people not activley contributing, to even mission goals, get negative honor
-) players attacking bosses, while there are still optional targets to do, get negative honor
/) optional targets, that are somehow time related, should be excluded from the honor system, but still reward marks
**) players with positive honor, will have a better chance to archieve their goals
**) a benefit from having VERY HIGH positive honor, could be a temporary granted access to random elite TFOs - how about that?
**) the benefit from negative honor, would be that they could do whatever they want in a TFO, and possibly complete their "speedruns" even quicker! ..without beeing bothered by people, which are taking TFOs more serious
I WANT TO POINT OUT, THAT THERE SHOULD BE NO REAL DOWNSIDE FROM HAVING NEGATIVE HONOR. the game will basically stay the same for them - so dont worry about that
i can imagine, that the terms "honor" or "negative honor" are not everyones taste. this are just terms, i am using here, to explain everyone what the system is about. maybe some creative people can come up with better terms.
..for the honor system, is based on a discussion, i have recenty opened in this forum, which caused quite some interrest
"players not contributing in TFOs (ps4 only??)"
https://arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1260467/players-not-contributing-in-tfos-ps4-only/p1
feel free to share your oppinions on TFO issuses in the already existing topic (link above) ..and lets have this new discussion related to the honor system only - thx
the problem (in summary)
..is, that in a TFO some players (like me) are trying to complete optional targets (for higher marks-payout and a little bit more exitement), while other players trying to complete a TFO quickly as possible. this often does not get along very well, since the "speedrunners" can END a que, by their actions, before the other players have a chance to complete the optional tasks.
p.e. in "undine assault" one or two players can destroy the boss quite quickly, when the rest of the team just managed to close 5 of 6 errant rifts. their work was for nothing then..
another problem are AFK-players ..or people which are not even going for the basic mission-goals, p.e. in "gravity kills".
while some players seems to be ok, with all those issuses.. others are definitely NOT and feel frustrated from this relative unfair system. also rude messages back and forth in the chat are not a rarity.
the honor system
..could be a solution, to bring players with the same mindsets together, in TFOs (incl. random TFOs!).
the way i imagine this system is, that players get positive or negative honor, based on their contributions in a TFO.
the tfo-system should bring people with the same honorlevel together, if enough players are around..
..and mix up players, if there is a lack of people qued for a particular tfo.. then the honor-system could be temporary taken offline, but inform the players with a message(or an icon)!
+) people going for optional targets, will get positive honor
-) people NOT going for ANY optionl targets, will get negative honor
-) afk-players, will get negative honor, per minute!
-) people not activley contributing, to even mission goals, get negative honor
-) players attacking bosses, while there are still optional targets to do, get negative honor
/) optional targets, that are somehow time related, should be excluded from the honor system, but still reward marks
**) players with positive honor, will have a better chance to archieve their goals
**) a benefit from having VERY HIGH positive honor, could be a temporary granted access to random elite TFOs - how about that?
**) the benefit from negative honor, would be that they could do whatever they want in a TFO, and possibly complete their "speedruns" even quicker! ..without beeing bothered by people, which are taking TFOs more serious
I WANT TO POINT OUT, THAT THERE SHOULD BE NO REAL DOWNSIDE FROM HAVING NEGATIVE HONOR. the game will basically stay the same for them - so dont worry about that
i can imagine, that the terms "honor" or "negative honor" are not everyones taste. this are just terms, i am using here, to explain everyone what the system is about. maybe some creative people can come up with better terms.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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because what you are asking is about as... well i won't say what I'm thinking,
except I'm getting pretty tired of "Elite" players trying to dictate HOW I play the game
That's exactly what this is.. and it's a terrible idea.
I'd say no to any system that directly and clearly punishes players for playing a certain way the system's designer didn't like (only exception being "I like to be AFK and let others do the work")
at no point did i try to force anyone playing in any way, and i want to enourcage you to read my initial post more carefully..
it is neithter a punishment nor a real rewarding system - it is just grouping mechanism - everyone would just get grouped together with people sharing the same playstyle.. so where exactly do you guys see any punishment?
i think you are taking the term "honor" too seriously..
maybe see it more as a speedrunner/completionist system.
EDIT:In WoW if queued up in the LFG system I could end up with someone who just started doing random dungeons or someone who did high end mythic keystone dungeons (Mythic or Mythic Keystone difficulty dungeons are not in the LFG system), no subdivision of playerbase via "contribution" there, same for FF14 no subdivision via anything up difficulty chosen, I can't remember any such subdivision in Guild Wars 2 or SWTOR though I've not played those in ages.
With the possible exception of Guild Wars 2 all those those have or had bigger development teams and possibly bigger player bases then STO yet none of them did what you suggest, what does that tell you?
you're right, i am not saying, the honor-system can only work the way i suggested. there is room for improvements and changes in all directions.
this is why i opened this topic.. to have an open discussion, and possibly find ways to make the system work for everyone.
in "borg disconencted" (and other TFOS) the attempt to rescue a ship, could be already counted as a positve contribution
-) players attacking bosses, while there are still optional targets to do, get negative honor
I'm sorry, exactly HOW is that not forcing me from playing the way YOU direct? if i go into a TFO and I head straight to the boss to kill him and don't give a TRIBBLE about the minions, thats the way I want to play, and you want to punish me for it by giving me this negative honor bullsqueeze.
No, not only no, but EFF NO. you are not going to force me to play the way you want. whats next, you don't like the way gravity wells look so those are banned in your STO game? everyone has to run around in vaadwar dreads? what's after that, gear checks like WOW had (has)?
if you want to play your little game find 4 others who think like you and leave me to play the game the way I enjoy playing it
This is the entire reason I love PvP but hate the idea of preset configurations for PvP. I don't like being forced into other peoples playstyles. I don't tend to follow meta or even established build norms but come up with my own out of the box thinking. Systems like this tend to punish people like me. Systems like this try and force everyone into a cookie cutter setup.
EDIT: Don't have time now, but I can give some examples of where this honor systems doesn't work later if you like.
But what about the people with exploit builds that can one-shot all enemies they come across, and most bosses?
They are gonna end up punishing everyone else on the team even more than they usually do.
"Oh you didn't do enough damage to the boss! ENJOY YOUR MINUS!"
"How am I surpose to do damage when he flew ahead of everyone else and killed it in ONE shot?"
Seeing too many of these types of players, I wouldn't want a system that ends up claiming people are bad players when others can exploit the game like that.
So a BIG no to any system that have the option to give minus points.
Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
actually the ilevel check WoW has (which FF14 has as well) is much more sane then this system, all it check is that you have the minimum gear needed for the dungeon it does not divide the playerbase based on play styles, the thing is that "playstyle" is by its very nature arbitrary and highly subjective so you're bound to get people who are upset as they consider they're being punished for "not playing the right way".
That's why the only checks I really support are "are you theoretically capable of doing this task" and "are you present and not AFK".
if there are not enough people around, the honor-system temporary would be taken offline, to fill a team - as i already wrote in my initial post
@pottsey5g
you can still play with your friends.. in mixed honor groups, the system again would temporarly taken offline.
and i ask you, where is the balance, when a speedrunner is ENDING a TFO, when others are still working to complete an optional task?
@claudiusdk
i did not write anything about dps, that gives negative honor. also attacking a boss gives no positive honor..
also you're not loosing honor, if a boss is alread dead, before you reach him.
minus points have no negative effect! i basically simply marks you as someone how is not going for optional targets
what are those rewards you would loose?
are you talking about the payout from optional targets? are you saying you want a payout for optional targets, even if you're NOT CONTRIBUTING torwards to their completion?
is this not.. uhm.. leeching?
i would not mind, if the devs would adjust certain TFOs, to encourange people to play them more serious
..but that would require quite a bit of work from devs.
the honor system, on the other side, would be very easy to implement. almost all the work the devs would have to do then would be, to add a counter on certain activatable optional targets.
this entire thing could even run in the background, since there is not realy a user-interface needed.
people could even not realize, it is there and only would think stuff like: "wow, we finished that TFO realy quickly" or "wow, everyone is doing his job"!
this can be a win-win situation for everyone!
Lets just say Seaofsorrows ends up in a mission with me. We are doing the Breach. I run a Drag Race Mine layer Carrier. What will happen is I end up 400km ish ahead of Seaofsorrows who will be missing the secondary objectives and losing honour as Seaofsorrows has no chance in hell of being anywhere near the secondary objects due to my ship speed and might not even get into the boss fight room before I kill it. If we keep playing this I will end up with high honour, Seaofsorrows with terrible honour as they are not taking part in the objectives.
Now Seaofsorrows joins another mission with me and we end up in the Gauntlet and the reverse happens. Seaofsorrows is an excellent pilot while my ship turns like a drunken barn and my pilot skills are less refined. Before I would have even got to the 2nd satellite Seaofsorrows will have done 10 satellites and completed the secondary objects forceing me to have negative honer and Seaofsorrows high honour. The entire honour system via you rules falls apart based on who is in the mission and which mission is being played.
Very often I run oddball setups and very often don’t contribute to the group in a traditional way. But I do contribute to the group indirectly which in your system would punish me.
Bringing up Seaofsorrows. When we team up in the gauntlet Seaofsorrows will get the satellite doing the optional objectives. I avoid doing the optional objectives because that is the best thing for the group.
A: I am an engineer and just about everyone prefers the Tactical or Sci to get the optional satellites.
B:My ship turns like a drunk barn, plus I will apply speed boosts to Seaofsorrows
C: I am a mine layer who goes to the spawn points and setups ambushes while Seaofsorrows is doing the optional objectives. In your system Seaofsorrows would get honour and I would be punished because I am off doing a different task getting us ready for the later in mission. Why should I get punished for doing zero optional when that is what is best for the group?
D} My ship will attack boss’s even if I am 40km away while I am doing secondary objectives. Your system will punish me with negative honour for doing something I cannot avoid. Its like in the Breach where people shout at me for blowing up the fake wrong cores, I cannot avoid it. So why should I get negative honor?
But on the subject of DPS... the thing you forget is, you do have to do DPS to count as active.
To count as active in an instance you need to do a certain amount of damage. You can literally be marked for the AFK-penelty even if you are attempting to shoot at enemies and your overall DPS per isn't enough.
I've attempted to just go around and only heal team-mates and got marked with an AFK-penelty since I never did any DPS.
Also, was using the term boss as a example of a powerful enemy that your surpose to take out as a team, but some people can oneshot... Ive literally seen the Endeavor for "kill dreadnoughts" not tick in Hive Onslaught due to someone else one shotting both dreads, dispite i've managed to shot at them for a few seconds, meaning you can miss out on being active in the kills.
And you did techically include bosses even if you didn't write the word "boss"...
"-) people not activley contributing, to even mission goals, get negative honor"
Bosses are a mission goal.
And honestly I've seen more and more people with exploit-oneshot-builds than AFKers lately.
Truely the only points I kinda agree on is the...
+) people going for optional targets, will get positive honor
and
-) afk-players, will get negative honor, per minute!
Give people something for going after optional things, and punish true AFKers.
The rest get a "no" from me.
Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
ESO tried to use a rather sophisticated random que system that ended up with the machine overthinking the matches so even when a lot of people were on the wait would drag on forever (sometimes literally when the que stalled completely). It did not work as expected to say the least.
Even after a long string of repeated streamlining attempts it is not too unusual for a DPS character to wait for 45 minutes or more for it to pop. That even lead to an exploit where some people who don't want to wait as long que as tank or healer when they are actually DPS so the group ends up with no support classes at all which made it harder to get the objectives done.
I do understand the frustration with speedrunners btw, it is not as bad as it could be in STO because it generally happens in open space and not a linear maze but it can be highly annoying. In ESO it is far worse because it uses significant random boss drops and often the speedrunners just want to hit the final boss run after run and ignore all the others in order to get that last piece of gear they need to complete their set, and their running through rooms sets off all the mobs which in turn swarm anyone who falls even a little behind or don't notice them ducking into a shortcut exploit the devs missed blocking off.
The thing is, an honor system that could recognize patterns in each player's behavior over time well enough to anticipate that they might be joining a particular que for considerations outside of the que itself and tends to lack group empathy would be insanely complicated and resource consuming. And nothing short of that would be accurate enough to make the honor system work effectively.
thank you very much for your post, you are pointing out some interresting things..
random elite TFOs are just an idea.. they are not in the game (yet), but i think and honor sysdtem would be the perfect thing, that kinda prooves that players are qualified for it. as you might know, optional targets are a REQUIREMENT in most of them.
positive honor groups only would have a better chance to complete optional targets, since there wouldn't be speedruners around, that ends a TFO to early.
there is no need for the honor system to be grindy! the sooner the system knows what kind of player someone is, the better.
maximum honor could be like 100.
rescuing 1 ship could reward like +10(or20) honor.
so there is no need to someone be greedy with farming honor.
not going for ANY optional target could be only like -5 honor.
about your example for the breach
in that case, yes, the slower player would loose 5 honor, but if he is someone that usually goes for optional targets, this should not matter. he probably would have started the TFO with 90-100 honor anyways, and in your worst case szeario, he would leave the TFO with 85-95 posiive honor, which i still would consider as high positive honor.
also if someone has already like 100 honor, there could be something like a buffer, of like 50 honor.. so he loses only 5 from his buffer and ends the TFO still with 100 honor (and 45 in his buffer).
the honor system NEEDS to be very forgiving for sitations like that, which would not be any problem if the numbers are tweaked right.
as i wrote in my initial post, time related optional targets should be excpluded from the honor system. otherwise speedrunners would accidently gain positive honor.
positive honor should only come from things, that realy proove, that someone is activly going for optional targets. p.e. rescuing a ship, closing an errant rift, etc..
i think the gauntlet (along with some other TFOs) should not reward positive honor at all.
thank you for your post
in ESO i never realy had any problems joining a group-dungeon, even during those times, when people have been complaining about waiting times. i am dps btw.. we usually wait the longest.
they also have the problem with fixed roles (2dps+1tank+1healer), that is probably complicating things.. and who knows what else is part of their grouping system.
the honor system in STO wouldn't be that complicated - basically its just a counter, that goes up or down. it would be a way more simple system, than the one from ESO.
i am a programmer myself, and already have all the code-lines in my head.
its technical aspect is realy not a big thing
thank you for your post
i play on console (ps4) and we dont have any penalties for low dps, so i cant realy say anything about that..
but everything i wrote in my initial post, of course is open to debate! i realy look forward to any additions, corrections etc, that you guys can make
"-) people not activley contributing, to even mission goals, get negative honor"
this actually would very rarly be the case. i think, it is realy hard to not contribute to ANY goal in a whole TFO.
i am not saying, that people have to contribute to EVERY goal
one situation for this would be p.e. in "days of doom", where people maybe only attack the planetkiller, and neither deliver warpcores nor protect the station
Most TFO’s cannot be ended early anyway due to all the hidden time gates so I am not even sure what you are trying to archive. In things like ISA/E it’s the so called “speed runners” that do the optionals and would get high honour while it’s the so called normal players (not speed runners) that tend to fail the optional so end up with negative honour.
I just don’t understand how this honour system can work in a fair positive way with how you describe it.
Which is the problem. That’s not fair. I don’t do that because
A: my ship is to slow before its even turned in the right direction the Escort has done the task
B: as an Engineer many of the optional are preferred to be done by other class’s.
C: If I am off doing the optional I am not benefiting the group doing my task.
D) Due to my playstyle I cannot interact with more then 80% of the optional's in game. Why should I get punished with negative honor due to that?
What if my role is the nanny or healer or agro management? your system in its current form will give all them negative hour for being helpful and benefiting the group.
The other problem is many of the optional’s need 1 person to do them. So in each run 4 people will get negative honour, 1 person gets positive. This isn't as simple as it looks once you dive into different playstyles and different TFO's. Plus who gets to decide which playstyle's are classed as high honour and bad honour?
second issue related to this is that STO playerbase isn't that huge and console playerbase is even smaller (as STO start on PC). To explain why this is an issue lets say there's 9 players at certain "honor bracket" now if all of them want to play random TFOs the first 5 get to play while the 4 others need wait until the TFO group is done since they're permanently 1 short of a queue pop, now queue times for randoms are what 15 mins at max at least on PC and generally more around 1-2 mins. TFOs can be anything from 10 to 30 minutes long not that much when playing but that's a long time to wait all the time.
Also depending on how narrow or wide the "bracket" in which people can queue together is this can be even worse, if you can queue with people with exactly the same amount of "honor" as you, no one gets to queue as Pottsey pointed out what you do (or even can do) depends on both the TFO and your playstyle (of which there's several not just 2) so everyone would get just a little bit different amounts of "honor" so finding 5 players with the exact same amount of "honor" consistently is pretty much impossible.
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