Risk Vs Reward as it relates to a Very Specific type of RNG
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Entirely a community question now, I'll try to keep it short and hopefully not end up failing and writing essayworths of explanations.
I think a specific form of RNG isn't actually Risk vs Reward and I think I finally have the example. If your response is 'just don't do it that way', great, lmk what you'd do instead in the same example.
Scenario:
In BDO you can 'awaken' a fully trained, Tier 8, level 30 Horse, into a more powerful version, by giving this horse special food, and then appealing to the RNG. Base chance of success is around 1%, chance goes up by around 0.4% every time you fail. The additional chance gained only applies to this activity. (insert long set of specifics about why this isn't easy to do or dependent on money, demand for these items is so much higher than supply as to be ridiculous, etc).
I personally think that 'when your only risk is not getting your reward', and when your reward is (in a roundabout way, depending on goal) 'having the thing you are working towards and not losing any more resources', you, the PLAYER, are not experiencing the same 'feeling' of Risk vs Reward that I think this game might be intending to foster. It's on YOU, you made the decision 'to even try', but your experience is still affected this way. I believe this because it feels like 'the way to minimize risk here is to avoid engaging with the system'.
Recently while hanging around in that game, a specific player mentioned in Global chat that they were on their 144th attempt.
Average number of attempts is, I think... 37.
This player has no reward. The system has no 'consolation prize'. You just lose the items and try again. They are 144 tries in.
In my mind, the 'risk' you are at when you are 144 tries in, is 'not being able to keep trying (financially or emotionally or whatever), stopping, and accepting the loss of 144x the average cost of one attempt, for nothing'. The 'reward' would be 'not having to try any more'. Again, subjectively.
I see this as different from 'spending your time being able to influence your chances or by choosing your activity based on your preferred role', but that's a long story about how bad BDO is.
Would you want this to be done any differently in any way? Whether you consider it a valid 'risk vs reward' or not.
I think a specific form of RNG isn't actually Risk vs Reward and I think I finally have the example. If your response is 'just don't do it that way', great, lmk what you'd do instead in the same example.
Scenario:
In BDO you can 'awaken' a fully trained, Tier 8, level 30 Horse, into a more powerful version, by giving this horse special food, and then appealing to the RNG. Base chance of success is around 1%, chance goes up by around 0.4% every time you fail. The additional chance gained only applies to this activity. (insert long set of specifics about why this isn't easy to do or dependent on money, demand for these items is so much higher than supply as to be ridiculous, etc).
I personally think that 'when your only risk is not getting your reward', and when your reward is (in a roundabout way, depending on goal) 'having the thing you are working towards and not losing any more resources', you, the PLAYER, are not experiencing the same 'feeling' of Risk vs Reward that I think this game might be intending to foster. It's on YOU, you made the decision 'to even try', but your experience is still affected this way. I believe this because it feels like 'the way to minimize risk here is to avoid engaging with the system'.
Recently while hanging around in that game, a specific player mentioned in Global chat that they were on their 144th attempt.
Average number of attempts is, I think... 37.
This player has no reward. The system has no 'consolation prize'. You just lose the items and try again. They are 144 tries in.
In my mind, the 'risk' you are at when you are 144 tries in, is 'not being able to keep trying (financially or emotionally or whatever), stopping, and accepting the loss of 144x the average cost of one attempt, for nothing'. The 'reward' would be 'not having to try any more'. Again, subjectively.
I see this as different from 'spending your time being able to influence your chances or by choosing your activity based on your preferred role', but that's a long story about how bad BDO is.
Would you want this to be done any differently in any way? Whether you consider it a valid 'risk vs reward' or not.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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I'd probably just increase the "pity" % increase and maybe add another difficult to get item that increases the chance by a fair bit of %. Ideally that item would have several ways of acquiring it (i.e. boss drop, high artisanry, pvp reward, the likes), but all at the same perceived difficulty, so that different people could get it, but the value itself was still fairly high.
To me, mmos are all about grinding for that one additional percent of whatever power I need, so I see this work as justified. I know this is kind of a boomer outlook on the genre, so maybe Intrepid would want to get away from that.
Explanation #1 then:
The items in question have no other purpose.
Half of them can't even be bought and must be obtained by doing other specific activities (depending on which horse you want).
The thing it is 'sinking' is often only the player's time. The result is that the player in question has probably spent around 500 hours/equivalent on just this activity, when the 'average' is 70.
In Ashes, I would expect and hope that the player could just buy what they need from others consistently whilst focusing on something else they enjoy.
In a weird and COMPLETELY personal and probably illogical outlook, I view this sort of thing as... making it less MMO, actually? That might be BDO specific, but I think Ashes has the potential to feel the same sometimes (because if you were relying on friends, they might 'give up on your quest' after the 100th attempt, y'know?)
Here is how I would change this sort of system. Rather than place the RNG on the chance that something is upgraded, you would want to put it on the chance that a resource/mob appears in your world. For example, lets say your horse can "evolve" if you get a rare herb and feed it to the horse. In my system you would have to find the mob or resource that drops it.
The higher tier the evolution/upgrade is, the harder this resource/drop will be to find. Here you would make the choice on drop chance, but I believe if something is already a low chance of spawning, there's no need to make the chance for it to drop an already rare resource even lower.
There's also the difficulty scale that can be adjusted. If it's a rare mob and you really want the resource rare, make it difficult to kill. If its a higher tier material from gathering a node, put it behind a jump puzzle or hidden in a cave with hazards and dangerous creatures protecting it.
Edit: One more thing, Adding amount dropped variation also controls rarity. If you have a chance for 1 to 3 items dropping opposed to something else dropping 3-10, the former now has more value.
All of the above create rarity for such items without devaluing the players time and skill. They directly play the game for their upgrades rather than hoping the rng gods smile upon them and randomly upgrade their horse because a tiny chance said so.
Though even if you make it truly random, you'd have to have a network of friends in all places of the world that would track the markets daily for the off chance that the item pops up and they'd be able to buy it before the same group from the first example gets it and resells it for insane amount of money.
Rng is an equalizer in a way. Yes, there's always someone who's gonna be lucky and someone who's gonna be unlucky. And yes, those who have more resources by default will have "more luck". But a lucky poor person could suddenly become as powerful as an unlucky rich one, which would put them at equal lvl. A non-rng system favors the rich, unless you just give out the items to everyone equally.
Now I have to say i don't think it should be thought of as rich vs poor. Everyone has the same opportunity in the game to make money. Some people can get it quicker than others, thats it. If you are poor in a game its on you to go make money. Those "Rich" players aren't sitting on their hands doing nothing. If you cant farm the item yourself, you save up money through other means to buy it off the market. Either way, the casual and the hardcore can get the items they need through playing the game and not through a convoluted rng system designed to waste your time.
People get rich by being lucky. So I understand 'not rewarding the rich more'.
But I see the two things as going together. If your game 'can make someone richer by luck', decent chance that many of the 'rich people you want to equalize against'... just got there the same way. Remove it all?
Which kinda brings us to the current mmo design of instances everywhere with participation rewards. There's no competition, there's no need for trading, there's no difficulty in acquiring the base lvl of items.
Now I'm not saying that's the wrong way to design your game (wow/ff14 have obviously shown that it's the right one), but to me that's shitty design, just as for you a game with shitty pve and shitty pvp balance would be uninteresting.
Note that I'm in no way arguing against the RNG aspect in this case. I'm specifically against the result of 'your failures mean nothing whatsoever'.
You can't pivot, you can't gain anything, you're just flushing time down for nothing EXCEPT the 'feeling that you might as well keep going until you succeed. I'm familiar with your opinions on RNG, obviously, and in this case, I'm not arguing against RNG in general, just this particular one feels like it wouldn't even be a positive for the risk vs reward goal.
It's like saying 'the risk is committing to doing this at all'. To 'believe that you have a decent chance' and therefore even try, is a risk.
@SirChancelot For clarity here's the numbers, I was wrong on both counts, hadn't checked it in a while
https://grumpygreen.cricket/dream-horse-failstack/
It's 0.2% per failure, and honestly, 'most people would have it by the 37th' attempt was entirely shoddy imprecision on my part, what does 'most' even mean there, right?
So let's use the value from there, that math, I can confirm easily.
50% of players have it at or before the 21st attempt.
I'm bringing this up because I KNOW that a lot of this is my bias and I'm asking others to help me examine it. I don't have a strong reasoning for this other than 'it feels unfair and ALSO like a negative for the game experience of non-gamblers'. But it can't be THAT pure of a negative, or games wouldn't continue to get away with doing it.
In other words, everyone's a gambler at least to some extent. And all the non-gamblers wouldn't even participate in such games so there's relatively fewer people complaining about these practices. And even less people vote with their wallets on this issue, so the companies see no losses when they participate in such practices, which just leads to their increased prevalence.
Ya if anyone brings up anything BDO related besides most most elements of combat it is designed as a hardcore gambling simulator pretty much. It is one thing to have enhancing and rng in a game but BDO elements takes it to the next level.
So if it’s a 1% to gain 100% power, it’s a 2% chance you might destroy your mount. That’s risk.
If that’s too much, you could also make the resource necessary to gamble on your mount also an important currency (or component resource) for other critical gains / tasks. So now, the RNG gamble has more risk because that same resource could be used for idk increasing your weapon effectiveness.
To me, the gambling in and of itself doesn’t seem a proportion risk to the reward.
I do like @Sathrago’s general idea - but agree with @NiKr that you’re now in an almost unobtainable ow pvp sock out to tap that mob.
Interesting, the fact that the latter seems like a reasonable idea to me highlights a flaw in my thinking, I can feel it, but not quite there yet.
"Time" is the 'currency' for the other critical task... and in a game where time spent (to gain currency) has no guaranteed rewards until someone ELSE has the item (everything else is RNG too, basically) I should feel the same, but I don't. Probably.
Your answer is to make the risk higher and more destructive, is this to make the feeling worse, to make players more averse, or simply to equalize the number of people 'having the option to succeed' in some way?
I want to equally limit the frequency of the mount advantage. If it’s just mats lost, it becomes trial and error with the advantage to whales (be it time and/or resource). If you add a real risk of losing your mount entirely, it advantages those players willing to take the risk.
Not following just yet.
Whales would still have advantage because they could just buy a new mount to try with, right? (again, some of this is inextricably linked to BDO and that's unhelpful, I know, but a whole new mount that you can try with costs about as much as maybe... 3 attempts)
Also the mount is unusable while you're trying this anyway. Did I mention how bad this game is?
I definitely see how it is creating a serverwide Mount sink. But I view that as moreso 'bad' here? Eventually the costs of this go up to the point where only the most economically powerful can even afford to buy the mount itself, and we're back to the start, aren't we?
Is it meant to affect the individual player experience in a way I don't understand yet?
I only played BDO for a bit then dropped it.
A fully leveled mount can be bought, so I hope that answers the first question.
It's a onetime upgrade that is on the level of converting 'This horse is very fast' to 'This horse is now a double-jumping gliding mount'.
Which is why it's so hard to do, but that's why it's weird to me. I get the idea that some things are supposed to be exclusive, rare, hard work... I just don't see the point of connecting them DIRECTLY to zero-reward-on-fail RNG.
That's a bunch of statistics, in my mind, though, and I don't think the odds and stats are relevant to your answer, let me know if they are.
If a whale can buy the mount at a state just before this massive RNG upgrade, I’d hope that the market forces would pressure the price higher. The whale may be able to buy the mount instead of tame then upgrade, but my bet would be they would disinvested you buy 10 if their luck sucked.
For ashes, I’d rather have a high chance to succeed once you have the mats, and make the mat acquisition incredibly difficult.
Edit: For gear I would not enjoy grinding for an RNG chance for a major upgrade, like a double jump gliding mount vs a really fast one, that kind of upgrade should be locked behind cost / rarity of mats. Ashes has indicated not everyone will have the top tier of gear therefore i can assume their tactic is to limit the availability of the mats instead of creating a resource gateway for the gear. Release roughly 5 world bosses a year that drop 40 of the required mats for the super awesome stat upgrade on your gear is a better way to gatekeep players than to require players to sink time into mats for RNG.
I am also notoriously unlucky for RNG, I am one of those people who try 144 times with odds of success at 90% and then try again cause it failed.
Did I understand what you were going for correctly?
Yes, that would definitely alter the primary 'problem' here, in a way that I personally wouldn't complain about. I would say 'that's already how it works' but, as noted, I think you can't actually sell the higher tier ones at all, their only purpose is to upgrade.
On the other hand, I don't think you actually receive those from anywhere you don't intend to (there's always another option to choose instead of those materials in those spaces, I think), other than 'the giant pile of login rewards and special events they use to keep people playing their game'.
I guess there's less Risk when the developers reward you for showing up.
What if the mats required were difficult to obtain, but not overly difficult, say an investment of 20 hours, on average.
If you had the mats you have a 5% chance (or whatever) of success. But...
If you put in double the mats, then you have a 12.5%. Double the mats and have more than double the success chance (5%x2.5).
If you put in triple the mats, you have 18% chance (5%x3.6). Four times the mats for a 23.5% success rate (5%x4.7).
Of course, you can work with various formulas all you want, but the basic idea is that the more mats you put in, your odds of success increase even more? Would you all like that?
rng is simply luck and yes i seen peoples getting a full gear set in only 10 dungeon runs in games and other didnt compleat it after 200 runs. but thats simply rng
risk and reward is hard cause how can you enlarge your risk in order to enlarge your reward or reward chance?
in game if i offer to quit the game on a risk and reward system then i sould get theoreticly a 100% chance. however as a player i cant change the risk part. but as long a chance is a chance i can allways loose only once i would have a 100% chance its nolonger a chance since 100% is garanteed and so isnt rng at all.
well a incresesing chance system is the wrong way in my opinion like the foreposter mentioned.
if you use rare item to craft you chance if 5% that it will be better than what you would get normaly (no failing possible)
however if you use diamond instead of gold your chance may be 50% to get the better one and 5% to get an even better one that the better. but you will risk more so the possible rewards should rise up as well an the chance of getting it but the cance never should be added together over time.
how it is handled (risk and reward) on skills hard to tell like if you would use a skill that deals a lot of dmg but takes some time to cast where you should not be interupted, but if you get interrupted by certain cc you fail to cast and may even dmg yourself or the mana for the skill is used. so you would have the risk on cast time the condition to cast and the chance to be interupted but if you manage to cast thru your reward is the reward equal to the risk you have taken. if its fails then its bad for you.
What games usually do is have a 1% rate of success for something that makes your gear/mount/weapon/etc. 10% better in some way. And I know it sounds right: if you have a 1% chance of success, you want it to be very rewarding.
However, in my experience after having played a variety of games with low RNG in a variety of systems, that kind of power gained from pure luck is not healthy for games in general. Luck already plays a huge role in MMOs: the best loot from monsters usually has a very low drop rate. That should be enough "impactful" low RNG rewards for a game.
In my mind, an upgrade with a 1% rate of success should make whatever you're upgrading marginally better, barely noticeable. Will some people try to achieve that and succeed? Absolutely, and good for them, they will be rewarded. However, that won't make them so much stronger than the others who weren't so lucky that they can't compete. It also won't make people who, for any reason, would never be lucky enough to achieve that, feel demotivated because of nothing other than being unlucky.
TL;DR: I feel like if the success rate of anything is 10% or lower, the rewards shouldn't be great. Luck (or RNG) is a part of MMORPGs in the form of monster drops, and that should be enough. What are the most fun MMOs you ever played: the ones with or without RNG based gear upgrades (other than drop rates)?
i played several high rng games where it mattered a lot how many hours you invested into the game. and where you could enhance gear with manastones or enchantment stones however the more stone on the weapon the higher the risk to fail and afer a certain savepoint fails would mean you loose all stones that you allredy managed to get on the weapon or all enchantments allredy on it. while each enchantment made the weapon only about 2% stronger but the limit was entchanment 20 but after enchantment 10 fail ment all is gone.
i would like not to see such systems in ashes.
I think I would also like to focus on this potential solution.
For me, I'll just crunch the numbers and hope for the best all the time, so here, I'd do the math, but that's because I don't have the experience of the same feelings as others (so I'm told) because I do that math most of the time (sometimes subconsciously).
The important thing I want to focus on therefore is, does this make people FEEL better?
I'll clarify why this is 'important using some of that math in a different sorta-obvious way, I think.
Start with 100 people who all want this upgrade. 1% chance, and it goes up 1% every time you fail to be even easier. Let's be fairly literal, not how probability works but whatever.
Try 1: 99 people are a little unhappy, 1 person is immediately happy
Try 2: Probably 97 people are a little unhappy, 3 people are happy total
Try 3: Probably 94 people are a little unhappy, 6 people are happy total
Try 4: Probably 90 people are a little unhappy, 10 people are happy total
Try 5: Probably 85 people are sort of unhappy, 15 people are happy in total
Try 6: Probably 80 people are sort of unhappy, 20 people are happy in total
Try 7: Probably 74 people are sort of unhappy, 26 people are happy in total
Try 8: Probably 68 people are sort of unhappy, 32 people are happy in total
Try 9: Probably 62 people are slightly frustrated, 38 people are happy in total
Try 10: Probably 56 people are slightly frustrated, 44 people are happy in total
Try 11: Probably 50 people are slightly frustrated, 50 people are happy in total
Try 12: Probably 44 people are slightly frustrated, 56 people are happy in total
Try 13: Probably 38 people are a bit exhausted, 62 people are happy in total
Try 14: Probably 33 people are a bit exhausted, 67 people are happy in total
Try 15: Probably 28 people are a bit exhausted, 72 people are happy in total
Try 16: Probably 24 people are a bit exhausted, 76 people are happy in total
Try 17: Probably 20 people are annoyed, 80 people are happy in total
Try 18: Probably 16 people are annoyed, 84 people are happy in total
Try 19: Probably 13 people are annoyed, 87 people are happy in total
Try 20: Probably 9 people are annoyed, 91 people are happy in total
Try 21: Probably 7 people are frustrated, 93 people are happy in total
Try 22: Probably 5 people are frustrated, 95 people are happy in total
Try 23: Probably 4 people are frustrated, 96 people are happy in total
Try 24: Probably 3 people are frustrated, 97 people are happy in total
Try 25: Probably 2 people are frustrated, 98 people are happy in total
I ask about this partially because I want to understand other people's perspectives on frustration or negativity toward outcomes. Some of us are very Zen about these things, some of us get mad as soon as we are not the average.
I went all the way to Try 25 because if you 'multiply the numbers by something' .e.g. at 17, multiply by 10, and then 'subtract the number at that point from every following result' (so basically subtract 800 from every number after that) you can quickly check nearly any value from 1% to 25% chance.
To cut this short and get to the point then... I put in a bunch of 'happy' and random slowly increasing negative feelings, but where are yours? There's a point where I stop being 'happy' even when I get the thing and just feel 'relief'. Interestingly, it's also at exactly try 17. Any point beyond that where I succeed I don't get the 'dopamine hit'. No more 'wow I got it finally!' just 'glad that's over'.
Pretty sure it's connected to all the time I have to spend watching the other 80% of people having the thing.
But it's not the same for other people, right? Some of you get the 'hit' all the way down to 25 or higher, and I think most people don't start to feel anything negative until around the point I start to 'not feel anything positive', right?
This 'Attempt Exhaustion' kicks in differently for long chains, and I think for me it activates differently when I only have to do the entire thing once, it's just a 'roadblock' to either content, a tool for me to enjoy that content, or something for my build/playstyle. So I want to understand, even for those who also don't like this sort of system... if we stick to the 'you get nothing on failure', where do you fit in the above long thing? When do you stop feeling 'yes! I got it!' happily and start feeling 'Finally, damn...' (if at all).
Sorry for the long post as always.
This has always been my justification for burning dozens of weapons through OE in L2. I spent weeks refarming mats and enchant scrolls just to get a +1 over the majority of people around me. And if I later see that the majority is starting to catch up to me, I'll try going further in OE.
So in the case of those BDO horses, if only some small % of players even try going for them - I'd be fine with 144 attempts. At least if I've done all the other boosting I could, cause I could definitely see this kind of investment beginning to feel real bad if I could've boosted my character much more through other means. In other words, I'd just do this thing as the "last push for greatness".
This is really helpful because it hits at a point that I think only comes up in games I consider 'better'.
The weird thing is that I don't care about this in BDO (and honestly I kinda feel like the player didn't care THAT much either other than the thing you said). But the reason, imo, is because BDO is shallow. It's not really a very good RPG to begin with.
If I'm not pushing for 'greatness' but instead for 'uniqueness' or 'specialization', this feeling is way WAY worse. If I am 'GenericHealer4292' until I get the specialized thing that completes my concept of my build, through RNG, I am far more likely to quit the game before I get it, once I hit 'frustrated'.
If it's just 'yeah lemme get a minor boost here' it's whatever, it's incidental. In short, I have to have the choice to not even try and still have a roughly similar experience. This is what I would LIKE Intrepid to avoid even if RNG itself is important to their design. Don't 'lock gamechanging options behind it' as @BaSkA13 has said.
But if we use @tautau's numbers but assume NO 'failstacks', you get the below (this time you get spoiler tags!)
Try 2: Probably 58 people are a little unhappy, 42 people are happy total
Try 3: Probably 44 people are a little unhappy, 56 people are happy total
Try 4: Probably 34 people are a little unhappy, 66 people are happy total
Try 5: Probably 26 people are sort of unhappy, 74 people are happy in total
Try 6: Probably 20 people are sort of unhappy, 80 people are happy in total
Try 7: Probably 15 people are sort of unhappy, 85 people are happy in total
Try 8: Probably 11 people are sort of unhappy, 89 people are happy in total
Try 9: Probably 8 people are slightly frustrated, 92 people are happy in total
Try 10: Probably 6 people are slightly frustrated, 94 people are happy in total
Try 11: Probably 5 people are slightly frustrated, 95 people are happy in total
Try 12: Probably 4 people are slightly frustrated, 96 people are happy in total
Try 13: Probably 3 people are a bit exhausted, 97 people are happy in total
Try 14: Probably 2 people are a bit exhausted, 98 people are happy in total
The thing is, in the case of the 'person who got it on the 24th try in the first dataset, they spent 24x what the first lucky person spent, and exactly 2x more than 'half the population of attempters'.
In the case of the person who got it on the 13th try in this dataset, they spent only 13x what the first 24 lucky people spent, but 6x what 'half the population of attempters' spent.
As much as I seriously hate it, if you wanted to make people (as I understand them) less annoyed, BDO's system is BETTER. But I may not understand this fully, again, because I just do the math for it. If I am at try 6 of the second dataset, my reaction is exactly the same, because I'm a number crunching econ-player. After that, then apply any irritation from 'I just need this to finish my playstyle'.
It's speed of 'getting people out of irritation space' vs 'getting the average person's experience to drown out the unlucky ones faster'. I personally find it really manipulative in both cases, but that's a long story about how 'rigged' systems become acceptable when you control the 'volume' of the haves and have-nots and that leads to politics real fast, let's not do that.