225 replies to this topic

[MaddMaxx]

It is important to remember that those folks that do the Suicide and AFK etc etc aren't doing it for the money to get ahead quicker. If they were we wouldn't see post with screen caps showing some butt-hole running a bot and going to bed. They do it to spoil the game for others as it is the only way they can feel some level of importance in their otherwise miserable existence.

Instead of railing against them, we should pity them. Offer them a hug, find a way to make their lives better so they will no longer need to grieve others to feel important.

If that doesn't work, well then BAN the ignorant "C U Next Tuesday"'s

[Garrand]

Teralitha, on 30 November 2012 - 01:40 AM, said:

EDIT : I have the solution to the problems with your whole rewards system and suiciders, etc.. see below.



If we do away with re-arm and repair, and we also do away with win/loss reward and just go straight up performance only, with salvage being the extra bonus for winning(excluding trial mechs, only performance reward for them)

Kills/assists = 2000
Spotting = 2000
Damage done = x10
Salvage = 2.5%
Base cap = 5000
Base cap assist = 2500
Oh yea.. Team Kill = -15000(you could even make them lose cbills for the damage done to a friendly if it doesnt end up a TK, for example just legging your teammate without killing is still a grief.)

With these numbers you might see an average of about 30k-40k per win and around 5k-15k for a loss. Max possible for a win being around 150k with salvage being the majority of that. Maybe damage x15 or x20.

You know, players make money win or lose now, with repair-rearm, so why even have it. You can still make the game a grind without it by simplifying the other variables.

If ppl afk, they get nothing but a salvage bonus if the team wins(but even that could be fixed by forcing discon for inactivity). Suiciders get zero. Team killers could actually lose money. Everyone has to participate if they want to make cbills and advance in the game. If you do nothing, you get nothing system.

Anyone see a problem with this? if not... lets do it. Honestly I can only see positive outcomes from this....

I did your work for you PGI, now get it implemented ASAP so this drama can end and we can ALL enjoy the game again.

So winning doesn't count? I can just kill ***** and go run off in a corner and shut down and not care if you capture my point or not? 5k isn't worth the potential of being blown up so yeah, there's no way I'd go for their point. That's a terrible system. Why are you so against banning players who are clearly griefing their own team? Are you one of them? Ban the troublemakers, lock your entire mechbay until your mech is out of the game, problem solved.

[Corvus Antaka]

Pretty easy fix - stop rewarding this behaviour with cbills, start paying more for performance. If players actually made good money by performing well in matches, there might actually be an incentive to perform well.

[Teralitha]

Jason Parker, on 30 November 2012 - 06:51 AM, said:

I know it was poointed at JPsi. But since you told me my posts had ZERO points to discuss I just repeat what I said in my first preply: I agree with your premisse that the reward and R&R systems cause the problem.

I just don't agree with R&R and base rewards being removed completely. R&R should be tweaked and base reward along with it so that getting out of the match without taking damage does mean something aswell, because it's not a rare occasion that when I am scouting I do very little damage and net no kill at the end of the match. In your proposed system that would mean I get very little while still being usefull for my team and the win.

Yes this would still leave open a small window for AFK farming, but the alternative would be to punish players that are useful but do not much of the stuff that get's reflected in rewards.

Im sorry. the troll responses were getting on my bad side.

[Teralitha]

JPsi, on 30 November 2012 - 06:59 AM, said:

I have no problem iff it was all positive, unfortunately you seem to fail to recognise the negative along with it.
Ok.. you still missed the most important parts and actually haven't answered with anything besides "it rewards performance". I'll try repeat those. It HURTS the legitimate players.

Your "performance" rewards, give c-bills to individual performance, yet potentially hurt team performance. As I've stated yet you haven't replied to. Kills/assists, caps and scouting are NOT good measures of performance. Sometimes they are, others they are rather inaccurate.

Measuring performance on ONLY those factors, is a poor measure of performance. There are many small factors in team play that contribute towards a win. Now, I can give individual examples repeatedly for many different situations, but it becomes hard to cover them all. However I'll give one very simple example so hopefully you can understand the point I'm trying to make.

Scenario : 7 of your team-mates have gone up one side of map. They meet with 5 Opposing Units. You are in a reasonably well armored mech and see the other 3 moving in to flank. You know via the weapons loadouts, that iff you intercept them, you will die, however it should take them quite some time to kill you. In the mean time this would lead to a 7v5 situation which unless something drastic goes wrong, your team should win, leaving the advantage of the match in your teams favor.

Now, decision time, should I intercept, or let them flank? If I let them flank, I have the potential of getting in on all 8 of the kills, thereby potentially getting far more kill assists/kills yet have hurt my own teammates in doing so. Iff I intercept, I'm limited to at most 3 kills/assists total, yet I've made a potentially game winning move.

Now.. under the Current system, the 20k win reward (difference between loss and win) is far greater than than the potential earnings from the extra kills/assists I personally get. I have the incentive to intercept. Under your proposal, the incentive would have been to let them flank.

Now, I've just shown you a very clear example of how your system promotes screwing over your own team for personal profit.
Long post, sorry about that also. I have difficulty in trying to explain this in a short and simple manner. This is only one example of many. Its for these reasons that I'm advocating many of the other ways of dealing with the grief being caused than this proposal.

Seems you have an issue with performance based rewards... why would you not want to be rewarded for good performance?, and why would you expect to be rewarded for doing nothing?

AlexEss, on 30 November 2012 - 07:06 AM, said:

two wrong does not make one right. Exploiting and intentionally disrupting the gameplay for other (yes i have seen matches with 3 or 4 of these "poor farmers" both on my own side and the opposing side.) is wrong no matter how you try to spin it. So no i fully support them being kicked to the curb once the game goes live (for now they are in a way providing a service as they expose flaws in the system) and there is no way you can paint that kind of behaviour in a good light, it is selfish and anti-social and ruins this game more then anything the devs does, because not only do the ruin the matches them self the behaviour can have a ripple effect as someone loosing a few matches due to these people might give up them self.

In short, banning them will be a proper way to deal with the problem

yes banning is a way to deal with them, and changing the economy is a way to "prevent" it from happening.

[Teralitha]

Sprouticus, on 30 November 2012 - 07:35 AM, said:

I think you are all missing one point


By making it clear and drawing a line in the sand, PGI will stop the behavior. Being banned is a HUGE deterrant. These people have (for the most part) already made some money and have time invested. If it is clear that they will lose that money, they will stop their behavior, so as to not lose their money.


As for fixing the system, the post says they are making efforts. I applaud those of you who have posted suggestions, and I hope PGI uses some of them. But in the end it WILL take time (and remember priorities) to modify such things. They dont want to break the economy trying to fix this. I believe they have income/RnR is a good spot now, and screwing it up wiuld cause more problems than it would fix. So yea, they have to be really careful.

And there will be many false reports generated as well(just look at league of legends) Its better to remove the exploitable parts of the game because really, we dont need them.

Bagheera, on 30 November 2012 - 07:43 AM, said:

Yes, there would be drastically fewer of them..

Sounds good to me. make the changes.

Garrand, on 30 November 2012 - 08:38 AM, said:

So winning doesn't count? I can just kill ***** and go run off in a corner and shut down and not care if you capture my point or not? 5k isn't worth the potential of being blown up so yeah, there's no way I'd go for their point. That's a terrible system. Why are you so against banning players who are clearly griefing their own team? Are you one of them? Ban the troublemakers, lock your entire mechbay until your mech is out of the game, problem solved.

yes winning counts. if you read closely, you would see the winner gets salvage. Thats the reward for winning.

[Taryys]

These idea are not good.

The first one screws new players completely, or players like me, who even though I have been playing a while do stoopid stuff.

The second one will cause no end of rage, and just slightly prolong a botters progress.

My thread-which-shall-not-been-named and is in my sig has fixes for this.
Ban their ***** and fix the system.

SicksGunz, on 30 November 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

1) award no Cbills for deaths in the first 2 minutes of the game, or for suicides or disconnects.

2) login with one of those hard-to-read-for-bots password thingies, and require a mini-re-login every 5 games or so, where you re-enter a new hard-to-read-for-bots password thingy.

[Daekar]

Quote

Quote

Players exploiting the system isn't the problem, it's the system's fault for being exploitable - is this what you're saying?

Yep

The fact that you actually believe this terrifies me. Seriously. Did Mommy and Daddy ever explain that a person is responsible for their actions? Are people to be held to no greater standard of behavior than "the ends justifies the means" or "might makes right?". Holy crap. The philosophical implications of this perspective on human behavior are staggeringly dire. All I can say is, may you never vote in an election that affects me and mine...

[Angel Dust]

Just wanted to point out again that not all players standing around doing nothing are exploiters. Alot of them are just DC (involuntarily) due to client or a network crash.
Happens quite frequently, or rather it does on my side.

[p4r4g0n]

While I applaud OP's good intentions, I wonder whether the proposed tweaks to the rewards would not make things a lot tougher for new players than they are right now and incentivize the development and use of even more sophisticated bots.

After seeing bots running around grinding mobs in an MMORPG, I have no trouble believing someone can come up with one for this game that would do the minimum necessary to get some kind of reward.

Once a more reasonable new user experience is put in place, I favour hard coding a maximum number of launches / hour (set at a reasonable level) and implementing a block list for community self moderation. Why? Because there will always be people looking for some way to exploit the system or make a buck off it.

In the mean time, the only option is banning, particularly for certain overheating suiciders who are basically just doing it as a big FU to PGI.

[Felicitatem Parco]

SicksGunz, on 30 November 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

I would just do two things:

1) award no Cbills for deaths in the first 2 minutes of the game, or for suicides or disconnects.

That would create an environment where Scouts shouldn't scout for the first 2 minutes, for fear of receiving administrative punishment...

Rules to stop the farmers that include "death within so many seconds" and that kind of stuff needs to be implemented in a manner where you get a point added to your account for instances of bad behavior, and points removed after durations of good behavior... and you receive administrative action after receiving so many points within a certain duration of time.

So, you don't punish a scout who dies in the first minute of a match.. unless that pilot did that X number of times in the last 20 matches.

[Wun]

If you die by overheating, going out of bounds, disconnecting or leaving the match

AND

you did no damage to an enemy

AND

you got no spotting points

THEN

you get no reward.


I think that takes the benefit out of everything except the kamikaze charge suiciders.

In any case, it should be pretty easy to implement some rules to remove the benefits of emergent behavior (IMO the term exploiter is reserved for those using methods to get around the rules, not those who follow the rules in a undesirable fashion)

[PineappleKush]

Grits N Gravy, on 30 November 2012 - 02:09 AM, said:

Niko, it's your cousin Roman, lets go bowling.

**** it, Dude, let's go bowling...

Edited by PineappleKush, 30 November 2012 - 02:54 PM.

[Clay Pigeon]

Bloody Moon, on 30 November 2012 - 03:01 AM, said:

-1 @ OP

There is no reason to defend players who are intentionally ruining the games for their team.

But if you only address the symptoms, the cause will never go away.

[Coolant]

Teralitha, on 30 November 2012 - 01:40 AM, said:

...Yea, I know your getting complaints. People love to complain about anything and everything no matter how insignificant it is. The... oh my god its so terrible!!!! whiners. I get the same border suiciders and afkers, and disconnects, and macro players in my games too, and you know... I dont care, because the problem isnt them, its your system. They are merely a symptom of the real problem...

Now ur complaining...

[Teralitha]

Daekar, on 30 November 2012 - 12:57 PM, said:

The fact that you actually believe this terrifies me. Seriously. Did Mommy and Daddy ever explain that a person is responsible for their actions? Are people to be held to no greater standard of behavior than "the ends justifies the means" or "might makes right?". Holy crap. The philosophical implications of this perspective on human behavior are staggeringly dire. All I can say is, may you never vote in an election that affects me and mine...

let me put it this way... there will always be dummies in the world, you cannot change it. But you CAN make things dummy proof. That... is what I am suggesting. Why should PGI have to create an whole new division in their company just to deal with dummies of which there is no end? When a simple to change to their program can make it dummy proof, and they never have to deal with the dummies ever again. Logic wins.

Edited by Teralitha, 30 November 2012 - 04:27 PM.

[Teralitha]

p4r4g0n, on 30 November 2012 - 01:22 PM, said:

While I applaud OP's good intentions, I wonder whether the proposed tweaks to the rewards would not make things a lot tougher for new players than they are right now and incentivize the development and use of even more sophisticated bots.

After seeing bots running around grinding mobs in an MMORPG, I have no trouble believing someone can come up with one for this game that would do the minimum necessary to get some kind of reward.

Once a more reasonable new user experience is put in place, I favour hard coding a maximum number of launches / hour (set at a reasonable level) and implementing a block list for community self moderation. Why? Because there will always be people looking for some way to exploit the system or make a buck off it.

In the mean time, the only option is banning, particularly for certain overheating suiciders who are basically just doing it as a big FU to PGI.

A good point to discuss. An RPG bot only requires a few simple commands to run endlessly. Can someone actually program a bot to "think" though? Because if there are only performance rewards, then a well programmed bot would have to be as smart as any human player to work. This is the 'thinking persons shooter' after all. A bot would have to think. Currently they just run in circles.

Also why spend even more resources trying to implement new restrictions or timers etc when you have a perfectly simple and effective solution right here in my OP. Yall are just inventing **** that makes no sense just to argue.

Edited by Teralitha, 30 November 2012 - 04:51 PM.

[Teralitha]

Wun, on 30 November 2012 - 02:20 PM, said:

If you die by overheating, going out of bounds, disconnecting or leaving the match

AND

you did no damage to an enemy

AND

you got no spotting points

THEN

you get no reward.


I think that takes the benefit out of everything except the kamikaze charge suiciders.

In any case, it should be pretty easy to implement some rules to remove the benefits of emergent behavior (IMO the term exploiter is reserved for those using methods to get around the rules, not those who follow the rules in a undesirable fashion)

You want them to create new lines of code that predicts negative human behavior? Honestly why cant people just accept the easy solution ive outlined in the OP instead of trying to concoct silly ideas of their own with huge flaws or are simply inefficient and time consuming that only create an endless amount of unecessary work for PGI. There is no better, easier, or faster or more permanant and effective solution than the one I outlined. All forms of griefing would simply cease with the exception of team killing, you cant stop people from doing that ever. But those will be the rare few that you will need to report and have banned. So much time an effort saved by following my outline.

[JPsi]

Teralitha, on 30 November 2012 - 12:07 PM, said:

Seems you have an issue with performance based rewards... why would you not want to be rewarded for good performance?, and why would you expect to be rewarded for doing nothing?



yes banning is a way to deal with them, and changing the economy is a way to "prevent" it from happening.

Ok.. Let me put this really simple for you. As you actually still miss or deliberately ignore my point.

Kills/Assists and Damage are NOT performance!

You aren't rewarding performance! I just explained how and why, with example. You have not actually responded to the issue.

I'm all for something that rewards performance, currently the best indication of a teams performance is actually winning. Whats to now stop a player from just doing a full MG build, hitting every mech then dying? They get a hit on all so get counted for assists on all the players. Did they perform? NO

Edited by JPsi, 30 November 2012 - 05:36 PM.

[Chrithu]

I have to agree with Teralitha once more. Any solution that does not simply change the root of the problem, which provable is the way how rewards and R&R work, is unnecessarily complicated additional code work that also is likely to produce false positives and hurt people that might die early for doing their job as a scout.

So once again here's what needs to change in my view to offer a pretty failsafe way to not allow exploiting and still earn CBills:

*Edit: added a few more points as I found a flaw in it myself*
*Edit 2: added some points from Taryys' thread about new user experience that originally were proposed by Hayashi (for completion reasons)*

• All Trial mechs are locked until match over (because they got no R&R and thus cycling them provides a money making advantage)
  
• No free Repair. No free Rearms.
  
• Base reward for winning match depends on your mech weightclass and loadout and is exactly the amount of CBills needed to fully repair and rearm your mech. The less damaged you get your mech out of a won match the more of bonus it provides. This mainly gives scouts a chance to earn money when they do a good job, which is keeping an eye on the enemy's movement without getting killed/hurt.
  
• Base "reward" for losing is base reward for winning - X%, Not sure about what X should be. But in my view losing should hurt at least a little. Especially if you did nothing.
  
• If you get killed in a match you have to pay FULL R&R, meaning in case of a won game you come out with no base reward, in case of a loss you come out at a loss of CBills unless you gained money through the performance rewards.
  
• If you suicide you get a penalty, so you gain not much from suiciding in a winning team and profiting from salvage and/or cap boni.
  
• Rewards for Kills and kill assists should be equal and be increased.
  
• Reward for Damage done and Salvage should be increased.
  
• Damaging the same mech as one or more of your teammates should multiply the damage reward you get for that particular mech in order to reward focusing fire.
  
• Add a reward when a mech you narced or tagged is damaged by another teammate.
  
• The losing team gets no salvage reward.
  
• Reward for a capping win should be as high as a kill reward + the average damage and salvage for a kill. Then it should be multiplied with the number of mechs that are still alive in the opposing team. This way the system rewards it if you had the better tactics and makes going for a fast cap as desirable as killing the other team. After all Basecap is an objective driven gamemode and no deathmatch and thus fulfilling the objective should be rewarded accordingly.
  
• The reward for cap assist should be increased if needed to balance things.
  
• Being the teammember that initiates the cap should give a reward but not a high one. It shall reflect that initiating a cap causes distraction to the enemy as at least one of them has to go for defense. But it should not create a too high desire to run ahead instead of doing a proper scouting job.
  
• The reward for spotting should be substantially increased so scouts have a way to get rewarded for doing a good job.
  
• Being the first one to lock on a particular enemy should also net a substantial reward so that scouting is worthwhile. This also encourages people to actually use the damned R key.
  
• Locking on to a mech targeted by someone else should net a small reward for reflecting teamplay.
  
• Add a reward for breaking the opposing team's capture attempt by standing on your own base.
  
• Rewards for trial mechs should be 75% of the normal rewards as is. Except for base rewards. They should not get a base reward so there is no trial mech bot farming.
  
• New players get a license to get one light mech for free along with some starting CBills for customization. with the change above there is no way around this in my view. Of course the trial mechs in that case should involve more than just one light variant. Maybe make all light variants testable in parallel to the usual trial mech cycle.

Those changes should kill any suicide/run into enemy and get killed farming right away aswell as trialmech farming. With no free repair and rearm that is also not exploitable anymore. With performance rewards being the main source of income it encourages actually playing the match and doing a good tactical job towards either capping or killing all enemy mechs.

As there stays a base reward those changes leave a small window open to afk farmers. But in order for afk farming to be useful the afk mech would need to survive the match, which I believe would be a rare occasion especially in lost matches. We could also create some kind of code of honor to allow the enemy team to kill an afk player to fight them actively. With scouts in mind the alternative of killing R&R and base rewards completely seems undesirable though. So we should rather take the risk of having a few unteachable afk farmers left. But i guess their number would be small enough to make them manageable through bans.

Sorry for the long read.

Just one more thing to add as this comes up pretty often in such discussions: It makes absolutely no sense to account for DCs caused by bugs when discussing such changes and measures as those will hopefully be fixed. Is it bad for the person affected? Of course. But as it happens to everybody alike this stuff levels itself between the players. It also makes no sense to account for "legit" suicides, as those are rare and easily avoidable. Also in my view hitting your override buttton is the same as putting your money into one-armed bandits. It's a gamble and you either get out a gain or a loss.

Edited by Jason Parker, 01 December 2012 - 05:57 AM.