47 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

When your game rewards a certain type of behaviour, people will tend to adopt it.
This can not always be the type of behaviour you actually wanted. For example - Trial Mech suicide rushing is something that has and is happening because it's simply rewarding. IN a very short timeframe, a player can earn a lot of C-Bills, for little work.

Now, you can pull out the thumb screws and all and ban people for this kind of behaviour, but this is just the big, obvious thing people can use to exploit the rewards. Trying to moderate this behaviour or auto-detect can get more and more complex and ultimately, you have to ask yourself, is it really worth it?

Fundamentally, you are putting your players in a bad spot - they really want those C-Bills or XP so they can advance, that they can get the "toys" they want to have - but you say that some ways are off-limits and punishable.

And even if you're not worried about people exploting the system - the reward system can introduce conflicts between players.
In short - one player may want to press on when the tide of the battle is turning against his team - but another player may prefer to retreat and give up, so his repair costs aren't that high. And we can't just say one of the players is clearly wrong - like the second player shouldn't worry about the bottom line, this is a game he's playing for fun - if he has more fun earning C-Bills and acquiring his next mech or expensive item, then he's still doing this to increase his fun. OR do we want to say the first player is dumb because he's risking his money - but isn't this game about fighting eahc other in battle mechs, and retreating from a battle isn't really doing that?

So what you should instead look at is - how can you reward the kind of behaviour you really want people to show? How can we ensure that people push in the same direction in a team?

In my opinion:
Fighting hard and giving everything you got should be rewarded. Just getting yourself killed as quickly as possible so the match is over should not be rewarded.
Fighting despite the odds turning against you should be rewarded, so that everyone has a reason to push on and people don't conflict with each on whether to push or to retreat.

(It is possible you have a different opinion - you may want that the game is also about cutting your losses and knowing when to retreat, that it's about minimizing your risks. If you do so, that's fine - you will have to set up a reward schema for that)

So, what would I do:
1) Everyone should work for a win.
So winning must be rewarded better than losing - even if that makes it harsher on new players that are likely to lose at first.

2) The longer the battle was fought, the better it should be rewarded.
You may simply reward just the time, basically giving some C-Bills or XP for every minute played. There are two perspectives on this
But if you reward the time itself, on a per match basis, it is better if the battle is drawn out. This may be exploitable - some people may deliberately lengthen the match with retreats and hiding and deliberately not capping despite the possibility to do so. If this is an issue, one would need that in a series of matches, it would still be better to have more matches per time. I think this is likely inherently to happen, because in a longer match, you still can only win once, and you can still only kill each enemy once, so there is a strict limit to it.

3) The harder fought the battle, the better it should be rewarded.
Now, how do we measure "hard fought". This can be difficult. But a simple measure could simply be - give team-wide rewards for damage dealt, damage taken as well as kills. That means for every point of damage your team took, and every point of damage you dealt to the other side of the team, every team member gets a reward (even if they didn't inflict or take the damage themselves). And additionally - kill rewards should also be granted to all players (in addition to assists and kills). Ideally, the rewards for killing should be set so that an "objective win" (in Assault, that's capture), may still be very competitive reward-wise with an "all-enemy kill" win - simply so that there is always a reason to fight for the mission objective.
Having a reward for damage taken is also an indirect compensation for people that have high repair cost after a match - the cost is still there, but the damage taken reward may lower the cost. But it should probably not alone be sufficient to cover the repair cost - if it did, then suiciding would again be financially interesting.

A Possible Reward Scheme
I do not use C-Bill and XP rewards here - I just assign "points" that will need an XP/C-Bill conversion rate. This does not include salvage rewards.

General Reward
Wins: You gain a +50 % extra points from all other sources
Loss: You gain only 50 % points from all other sources
Tie: You gain the points from other sources.
Match Length: 1 per second
Salvage: You gain 5 % per enemy mech's remaining worth (e.g. after subtracting all damage and destroyed components) as direct C-Bill award.

Player Rewards
Your Kills: 500 Points
Your Assists: 500 Points
Spotting Assist: 150 Points
Your Damage Dealt: 10 Points per Point of Damage Inflicted
Your Damage Taken: 5 Points per Point of Damage Taken
Component Destroyed: 500 Points
Team Kill: -750 Points
Damage Dealt to Team Mate: -5 per Point of Damage Inflicted
Objective Assist: 500 Points
Time Alive: 1 point per second.

Team Rewards
Kills: 250 Points
Deaths: -50 Points
Assists: 100 Points
Spot Assists: 50 Points
Damage Dealt: 5 Points per Point of Damage Taken
Damage Taken: 2 Point per Point of Damage Taken
Objective Achieved: 4,000 Points
Total Time Alive for Team: 5 point per minute

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 17 November 2012 - 04:00 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Seems I haven't hit a nerve here exactly.

[Vlad Ward]

The problem with the vast majority of these threads is the fact that most people have absolutely no idea how the Salvage bonus system works. Hell, it wasn't even mentioned in your OP.

Rewards for dealing damage make absolutely no sense in the context of Battletech, and the game already rewards high performance in the form of massive Salvage bonuses for accurate pilots/teams.

Short version: The game already rewards the kind of play that the Devs want to encourage. The problem is that most players lack either the skill or inclination to perform to those standards.

This will become even worse for the average pubbie once Matchmaking is fixed and they no longer have random super-elite pilots padding their whole team's Salvage score.

Edited by Vlad Ward, 17 November 2012 - 09:19 AM.

[Kdogg788]

It's really just the win/loss Cbill rewards that need to adjusted, and way way down, and make any in game action worth more Cbills. I've seen people literally wait around on our base with an unrepaired mech and reap the benefits of their victory after I've died for the cause.

-k

[MustrumRidcully]

Vlad Ward, on 17 November 2012 - 09:11 AM, said:

The problem with the vast majority of these threads is the fact that most people have absolutely no idea how the Salvage bonus system works. Hell, it wasn't even mentioned in your OP.

Rewards for dealing damage make absolutely no sense in the context of Battletech, and the game already rewards high performance in the form of massive Salvage bonuses for accurate pilots/teams.

Short version: The game already rewards the kind of play that the Devs want to encourage. The problem is that most players lack either the skill or inclination to perform to those standards.

This will become even worse for the average pubbie once Matchmaking is fixed and they no longer have random super-elite pilots padding their whole team's Salvage score.

I obviously disagree:
If we hear reports of people doing suicide runs or people powering down while other players want them to urge to continue to fight, I don't think the system is were is giving the right incentives.

The Salvage System isn't in my system because translating it into point values would be... odd. It would sitll come back to setting C-Bill Values already now, and that wasn't my goal. The Salvage system as is basically a combination of two factors - the state of a defeated mech, and its worth, and some more or less arbitrary multiplier (so that killing 8 Atlases with XL Engines and the most costly enhancement doesn't give you a Millions of C-Bills.)

[Stardancer01]

Trial Mechs should do as much damage as their tonnage or suffer a 75% profit loss
This will not only stop Trial Mech suicide rushing but encourage newbs to use the smaller mechs rather that assaults all the time

[Kdogg788]

Stardancer01, on 17 November 2012 - 09:24 AM, said:

Trial Mechs should do as much damage as their tonnage or suffer a 75% profit loss
This will not only stop Trial Mech suicide rushing but encourage newbs to use the smaller mechs rather that assaults all the time

Excellent. Simple and precise. I wish they'd implement this.

-k

[Vlad Ward]

I think you're assuming too much about the general population.

People who want to play well and be rewarded for it already have a system in place that does just that. People who just want to watch a movie on Netflix and grind out c-bills will still find ways to do that regardless of how Devs set up their reward system.

The Devs could just base nearly all of the per-match rewards on performance, but the forums would explode. Why? Two reasons:

1) New/Bad players would never, ever make any money whatsoever. They're already practically indistinguishable from farmers.

2) Most players, even the good ones, are straight "doing it wrong" from a BT standpoint and would make significantly less money than they're making right now.

The problem isn't that performance isn't rewarded more than win/loss (performance rewards can well exceed the 100k/win reward). The problem is that a large number of players are too set in their perception of what "Performance" means to take a step back and actually "L2PBattletech'. If they did, they'd find that this game actually has a very high skill/reward ceiling.

Edit: And the (directly) above suggestions are positively awful.

Edited by Vlad Ward, 17 November 2012 - 09:35 AM.

[Starslayer]

Stardancer01, on 17 November 2012 - 09:24 AM, said:

Trial Mechs should do as much damage as their tonnage or suffer a 75% profit loss
This will not only stop Trial Mech suicide rushing but encourage newbs to use the smaller mechs rather that assaults all the time

I like this, though I have another idea for Trial mechs:

Dramatically reduce the passive rewards (e.g. the flat victory bonus) while boosting the "contribution" rewards (assists, kills, capture, etc.) by enough to cancel out the passive reduction for people who try to contribute. This way, people who AFK or suicide their way through a match will get almost nothing, while people who do their best will come out ahead. This could also be altered to take total matches (or lifetime c-bills, etc.) into account so that newbies are far less likely to be penalized than actual farmers.

Also, giving Trial runners some kind of incentive to choose a not-Assault mech might be nice.

Edited by Starslayer, 17 November 2012 - 10:12 AM.

[197mmCannon]

I like the OPs idea.

A battle that lasts longer should give a bigger bonus to both sides.

I remember a game where someone was capping our base so I ran back only two find 2 cicadas on our cap. I fought the cicadas, killed one of them, stayed on our base to stop cap while fighting the other one, while our team went on to cap and win.

I spent almost the entire match by myself fighting an epic battle for our cap against 2 enemy mechs. It felt awesome when we won.

I was at the bottom of the list for XP gain...

Which sucked for me because our team literally would not have won if it wasn't for me.

The system should reward base defense as well as a slew of other things.

Edited by Daemian, 17 November 2012 - 10:19 AM.

[SaberCut Moffat]

Nice post OP. If I may point out the elephant in the room: Give new players their first real mech, a playable tutorial (sans the 3rd person crutch), and a fighting chance. Problem solved?

[Bagheera]

Vlad Ward, on 17 November 2012 - 09:34 AM, said:

I think you're assuming too much about the general population.

People who want to play well and be rewarded for it already have a system in place that does just that. People who just want to watch a movie on Netflix and grind out c-bills will still find ways to do that regardless of how Devs set up their reward system

This. While I will never understand the point of playing a game that you find so uninteresting that you'd rather find ways to grind the fake currency than play the actual game, Vlad is right. No matter what PGI does to discourage farming, people are going to find some way to do it. Every game has it, its just more annoying in this one because it affects a PvP match and its not just some guy running the same instanced map by himself 10000 times.

@saber. Unfortunately no. There will still be people who use the trials/no-repairs system to farm up their c-bills. Another way to say it is that there are players for whom the accumulation of FakeMoneyUnits is more important than playing a match. Game code cannot change human nature.

For the record, I do think that it is worth the time/energy for PGI to consider ways to mitigate the farmers, but I understand the reality that they will never really be completely successful in eliminating farming altogether.

Edited by Bagheera, 17 November 2012 - 10:37 AM.

[StandingInFire]

I made a similar post in suggestions, going a bit more into the mechanics, got no replys (http://mwomercs.com/...35#entry1375235).

The current reward system is very skewed to heavily encourage bad behaviour, and has minimal reward for good behaviour.

[Relic1701]

Global XP for trial mechs, gives a reason to fight.

[MustrumRidcully]

Bagheera, on 17 November 2012 - 10:33 AM, said:

This. While I will never understand the point of playing a game that you find so uninteresting that you'd rather find ways to grind the fake currency than play the actual game, Vlad is right. No matter what PGI does to discourage farming, people are going to find some way to do it. Every game has it, its just more annoying in this one because it affects a PvP match and its not just some guy running the same instanced map by himself 10000 times.

@saber. Unfortunately no. There will still be people who use the trials/no-repairs system to farm up their c-bills. Another way to say it is that there are players for whom the accumulation of FakeMoneyUnits is more important than playing a match. Game code cannot change human nature.

For the record, I do think that it is worth the time/energy for PGI to consider ways to mitigate the farmers, but I understand the reality that they will never really be completely successful in eliminating farming altogether.

THe problem is - you need C-Bills if you want ot play something else but Trial Mechs. You need C-Bills to play something else than a stock mech.

Would you only play this game in one of 4 trial mechs for days or weeks? I doubt it. THe game is more than that, and people want to get there. So some will optimize for getting to the point where they have the mech and gear they want - and then start playing "seriously": If the optimization to get C-Bills is not the same optimization as having the most interesting and entertaining matches with your current mech, then... too bad. Some will optimize so that the future will hold more intersting play.

[BoomDog]

OP is right. The system needs changed.

I'm a fairly new player. Currently I'm playing my second centurion variant. I've already maxed out XP on both the -A and -AL, but I need 9 million credits to buy the crazy expensive -D so I can move on to elite skills.

Best way to make 9 million credits? Play in trial mechs.

Now, I'm not one of those that jumps in the game and suicides. I'll try my best. But my damage is easily half what it is in my centurion. Sadly, I've been in matches where I did very good, but only made 10K to 20K. In a trial mech, I'm guaranteed at least 60K, win or lose, or more depending on my teams performance.

Personally, I think the grind should've been for XP not money. Start with an intial variant, and then unlock the others with XP. But it's probably too late for that.

Bottom line is, I should always make more money playing my custom mech than using a trial mech. How they do that is up to them.

[Vassago Rain]

Vlad Ward, on 17 November 2012 - 09:11 AM, said:

The problem with the vast majority of these threads is the fact that most people have absolutely no idea how the Salvage bonus system works. Hell, it wasn't even mentioned in your OP.

Rewards for dealing damage make absolutely no sense in the context of Battletech, and the game already rewards high performance in the form of massive Salvage bonuses for accurate pilots/teams.

Short version: The game already rewards the kind of play that the Devs want to encourage. The problem is that most players lack either the skill or inclination to perform to those standards.

This will become even worse for the average pubbie once Matchmaking is fixed and they no longer have random super-elite pilots padding their whole team's Salvage score.

Maybe if there was an actual guide, or manual, or some kind of in-game resource that told them you want to leg people for maximum profit...

You know, just maybe it'd be good to get the information out there, rather than keep it with only the most active of past closed beta min-maxers.

[Kaziganthi]

MustrumRidcully, on 17 November 2012 - 09:23 AM, said:

If we hear reports of people doing suicide runs or people powering down while other players want them to urge to continue to fight, I don't think the system is were is giving the right incentives.

I would like to address the underlined section as your post only yalks about rewarding for fighting.

Example..You drive a LRM boat, twin lrm 20's and twin small lasers. You've blown all your ammo and are down to your lasers. Only 2 members of your team are left alive, but the rest are watching telling you to go and defend your base against 4-5.

Why would I risk a bigger repair cost to my mech, which I know for a fact will be blown to bits only to give the opposing team more salvage. In this case, any sane pilot would power down and surrender. Or if in a mech fast enough, turn tail and get the hell out of there. Neither of these are rewarded in any case. In fact the mech that turns tail and runs, if he hits out of bounds is classed as a suicider.

[MustrumRidcully]

Kaziganthi, on 17 November 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

hy would I risk a bigger repair cost to my mech, which I know for a fact will be blown to bits only to give the opposing team more salvage. In this case, any sane pilot would power down and surrender. Or if in a mech fast enough, turn tail and get the hell out of there. Neither of these are rewarded in any case. In fact the mech that turns tail and runs, if he hits out of bounds is classed as a suicider.

Exactly - why would you risk it? There is no reward for it. So make it more rewarding to risk it instead!

A fundamental problem of course is that the repair cost are as high as they are, compared to the winnings. Sure, repair is all fine and dandy, but I don't think many MMOs have repair cost that will seriously set you back. But it can happen in MW:O - not likely perhaps, but much more likely than in many other games. And that's a fundamental issue. Most games aren't trying to balance equipment around repair cost - they just use it as a bit of a money sink (and not a major one.)

The problem PGI may have here is that there is so little in Battletech that fits that "money sink" bill. There aren't teleports or other convenience items you could offer.

MAybe it could be with a galaxy-wide warfare system - where you need to spend hefty fees on transporting your mechs to different planets to gain access to new missions or some such. But... Such things don't exist right now, and who knows if they ever will exist?

Maybe it would have been better if acquiring equipment and installing it wasn't just an instant action - if instead the Mech Lab was a mode you spend some time in, and then, at the end, when you're satisfied (maybe after some simulated test runs), you click "build" and it takes a few minutes or hours to be finished - and you can get "overnight delivery" and buy an "expert mechanic" to make it go much, much faster. So you have the option to spend money on things you will over and over again want to spend hefty fees on - but you don't have to, it's convenience, not necessity.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 17 November 2012 - 01:29 PM.

[CrazyPenguin]

There needs to be rewards for fulfilling more objectives than are currently in the game. Some examples are attempting to cap the enemy base. Have the capture assist reward apply at a rate determined by how long you stood on the cap, instead of 2,500 cbills for standing on it right as it is captured. Perhaps 100 cbills for every percentage point you stood on the cap for?

As well, you should get cbills and xp for blocking an enemy capture, perhaps based on the amount of time you spent fighting on the base with the enemy trying to capture. To prevent people from peaceably blocking each other's captures to farm cbills and xp, there could be a system in place which only gives the rewards if you are actively engaged in battle. Damage taken inside your base's capture zone could be reimbursed, perhaps.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had an experience system which gave you experience based on the length of time you were in battle, and how furious the battle was. Dealing damage gave some experience, dealing and taking damage gave more. This should not be too hard to program into MWO, perhaps every 10 seconds the system could check if the player was dealing and/or receiving damage and give an amount of xp for each.

A long, drawn-out battle in which you lose after sacrificing two torsos and a leg to defiantly hold the enemy from your base should give more experience than a several minute match where you spotted two mechs for some LRMs, legged an overheated mech, and stood next to the enemy's base for a couple of minutes. Currently, the system does the opposite.