Separately @NiKr, your response makes me think of something interesting there then. Does your reaction change according to how much of your 'competition' has the thing?
Sure, 1% of all players has it, you are in that 1%, but IF for example you barely ever interacted with the other 99%? Let's say you are a Caravan protector, but only 3% of the population even goes near the Caravan system and among them 90% of players have... idk, SOMETHING that helps them do Caravan fights, which you have to get by RNG this way, does that cause any change in your reaction?
Using the precise concept that 'By Try #11, half your opponents have this thing and you don't'. You can throw in 'half your allies have it and without it you're much less effective'.
I don't expect that sort of thing in Ashes at all, mind you. If you were the 'better fit' for it due to Role or skill, I would assume someone would give or sell you the thing, whatever it is, so that the whole group would be stronger. It might be better to think of it as 'your group is in the lower half of the curve, your opponents are in the upper half', but that's unrealistic too SORTA.
Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?
Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?
If I knew that the 90% got their "thing" within just a few tries and spent, say, 1 week to get it, while I was on my 20th try and already spent several months on it - yeah, this would probably feel really unfair. But if the scale difference was lower (as the 11th try example you gave, with only half of people having it), I'd assume I'd be fine with going twice the distance.
Though I'm purely guessing here, cause I'm used to this kind of rng system being applied to gear OE and that is the most direct powerup over anyone else around, so imo it's a completely different thing at that point.
Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?
If I knew that the 90% got their "thing" within just a few tries and spent, say, 1 week to get it, while I was on my 20th try and already spent several months on it - yeah, this would probably feel really unfair. But if the scale difference was lower (as the 11th try example you gave, with only half of people having it), I'd assume I'd be fine with going twice the distance.
Though I'm purely guessing here, cause I'm used to this kind of rng system being applied to gear OE and that is the most direct powerup over anyone else around, so imo it's a completely different thing at that point.
That was the main issue with BDO is you are taking a insane amount of time and sometimes making no gains. 0 respect for your time. If people can do things more often it won't feel as bad but then the question raises are people getting it too fast and is it not as rewarding.
Having different progressions i think would help as well where you have a much ore difficult one or one not as difficult but slightly hard. That way people are more understanding of accepting such content.
I have to agree with Nik and Davey here.
I dont think that RNG based progression is good game design at all.
If you want deeper progression and bigger sinks, then scale up the costs to the point you need it to be, but once you have all the materials required, let it be a 100% chance to succeed.
I have to agree with Nik and Davey here.
I dont think that RNG based progression is good game design at all.
If you want deeper progression and bigger sinks, then scale up the costs to the point you need it to be, but once you have all the materials required, let it be a 100% chance to succeed.
I'm not sure that point agrees with me I like, and maybe even prefer, rng in games. I see them as a good equalizer of people, cause I've seen a ton of "rich" people keep throwing resources at rng and failing, while a lucky poor person threw way less money and succeeded.
Obviously the overall stats are still a bit skewed towards the rich folk, but that's always the case. At least with rng, the poor have some chance to catch up. And I don't think that the approach of "everyone gets everything" would seem all that interesting to most people who'd be interested in a competitive game such as Ashes.
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mcstackersonMember, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I don't like rng and would prefer more control over the outcome.
In general, I think rng is fine for small things but shouldn't be used for high-value risks, at least ones with no alternatives. If there is a rng free way to get something then i'm ok if there is a possible heavy rng alternative.
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mcstackersonMember, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I have to agree with Nik and Davey here.
I dont think that RNG based progression is good game design at all.
If you want deeper progression and bigger sinks, then scale up the costs to the point you need it to be, but once you have all the materials required, let it be a 100% chance to succeed.
I'm not sure that point agrees with me I like, and maybe even prefer, rng in games. I see them as a good equalizer of people, cause I've seen a ton of "rich" people keep throwing resources at rng and failing, while a lucky poor person threw way less money and succeeded.
Obviously the overall stats are still a bit skewed towards the rich folk, but that's always the case. At least with rng, the poor have some chance to catch up. And I don't think that the approach of "everyone gets everything" would seem all that interesting to most people who'd be interested in a competitive game such as Ashes.
I've seen the opposite too.
I don't think RNG is necessary to prevent everyone from getting everything and if it is, why does anything matter? If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
I don't like rng and would prefer more control over the outcome.
In general, I think rng is fine for small things but shouldn't be used for high-value risks, at least ones with no alternatives. If there is a rng free way to get something then i'm ok if there is a possible heavy rng alternative.
In this case the question is targeted at the concept of 'when is RNG not a way to create a risk vs reward situation'?
I don't know if they intend to make a very RNG-lite game, and personally I will play it either way, because RNG of specific types factors into both my engagement and my form of Roleplaying when I do that, so RNG heavy is fine.
But the more RNG, the more it starts to feel like an unbalanced single-player game, and in this case it would be 'a game pretending to be competitive while randomly rewarding people. NiKr's perspective on this, sometimes, has been close to 'preferring equalization' and I don't mind that either, I dislike the decoupling of your outcome from your choices.
"I chose not to take the action."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that action achieves."
"I chose to take the action."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that action achieves."
I feel like the 'problem' here can be changed without removing the '1d100' part.
You seem to propose:
"I chose not to roll the dice for a chance at this goal."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to roll the dice."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to not roll the dice, and also to undertake a long process to get to the goal."
"You have achieved your goal in the end."
I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.
I don't think RNG is necessary to prevent everyone from getting everything and if it is, why does anything matter? If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
It's about "fairness". A person who has more time to earn resources in the game will always be stronger than those who don't have that time. But rng brings the average representative of both sides closer to each other. Yes, there'll always be extremes where a poor person was super unlucky while the rich dude had all the luck he might've wanted, but such extreme situations are still better, imo, than the absolute crater of a gap between the rich and the poor. In my experience, this stuff even helped out curb some of p2w on private servers.
If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
Exactly, I could care less if someone bodies me in combat if they have a RNG based power increase that is significant. Although that kind of design would definitely be a poor decision.
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mcstackersonMember, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I don't like rng and would prefer more control over the outcome.
In general, I think rng is fine for small things but shouldn't be used for high-value risks, at least ones with no alternatives. If there is a rng free way to get something then i'm ok if there is a possible heavy rng alternative.
In this case the question is targeted at the concept of 'when is RNG not a way to create a risk vs reward situation'?
I don't know if they intend to make a very RNG-lite game, and personally I will play it either way, because RNG of specific types factors into both my engagement and my form of Roleplaying when I do that, so RNG heavy is fine.
But the more RNG, the more it starts to feel like an unbalanced single-player game, and in this case it would be 'a game pretending to be competitive while randomly rewarding people. NiKr's perspective on this, sometimes, has been close to 'preferring equalization' and I don't mind that either, I dislike the decoupling of your outcome from your choices.
"I chose not to take the action."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that action achieves."
"I chose to take the action."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that action achieves."
I feel like the 'problem' here can be changed without removing the '1d100' part.
You seem to propose:
"I chose not to roll the dice for a chance at this goal."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to roll the dice."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to not roll the dice, and also to undertake a long process to get to the goal."
"You have achieved your goal in the end."
I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.
I think it's easier for me to define my preference is for rng to not perform a significant role as part of a main progression path.
An example would be the flying mounts in ashes. I see the main way to get them is through being a mayor/castle owner but the is an rng drop chance. If i could alter your BDO example, i'd prefer if you are guaranteed to get the pegasus at a certain tier but have an rng chance at previous tiers.
I'm ok with fail safe mechanics (which is what it sounds like you are describing) but they usually feel artificial to me and if not tuned well, don't feel much better. I'd prefer that once i have done what is required, i get what i was progressing towards. I'd also prefer the requirement being increased to compensate for the lack of rng.
Equalization doesn't mean no variety. Things like player builds, choices, and skill will create a lot of variety in the game. I don't think we need to make power unequal with rng to further mix it up.
That said, i also don't think it will create equalization since players' progression is also effected by level of skill, time to play, motivation, and access to resources.
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mcstackersonMember, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I don't think RNG is necessary to prevent everyone from getting everything and if it is, why does anything matter? If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
It's about "fairness". A person who has more time to earn resources in the game will always be stronger than those who don't have that time. But rng brings the average representative of both sides closer to each other. Yes, there'll always be extremes where a poor person was super unlucky while the rich dude had all the luck he might've wanted, but such extreme situations are still better, imo, than the absolute crater of a gap between the rich and the poor. In my experience, this stuff even helped out curb some of p2w on private servers.
RNG has no bias.
I'm sure you have seen a rich person get the shaft and a poor person get lucky but the opposite also happened. There are rich people who get lucky and poor people who get unlucky.
There is no reason to assume it will impact one group more.
I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.
What if the "risk vs reward" was in the mutually exclusive nature of making the choice between "slow and long, but 100%" and "faster, but <100%, and potentially a bit more expensive".
So say you want to upgrade your gear. You have a quest that gives you the resources needed for the upgrade. Within the quest you must choose to either farm out 1k mobs (just for example) and definitely get the resource or you only need to farm 10 mobs but you get a "1%" resource. You can only choose one. And that "1%' resource doesn't have an increase in chance with use, but it fills out a "meter" with each use and after, say, 120 uses you definitely get the upgrade.
So you are assured the upgrade in both cases, but one definitely takes a lot of time, while the other is potentially way faster, but could be somewhat slower. The resource itself would be available on the market and I'd assume its cost would be "somewhere between 700 and 1k kills worth" (or whatever the median rng pull would be for most people). So you could potentially go the third route of trying your luck a few times and then just buying it off the market, which would pretty much keep it in line with the "1k kills" cost
People who have the time to kill 1k mobs will be assured their resource while also saving money. People who have the money can just buy it. People who don't mind the bad feel rng will go for the riskiest path. Obviously the market price would grow if the demand was too high for it, so it's not like the market will always be the safest and cheapest bet.
Or is this suggestion literally the same thing I quoted and I just need to go to sleep because I can't think straight anymore?
I don't think RNG is necessary to prevent everyone from getting everything and if it is, why does anything matter? If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
It's about "fairness". A person who has more time to earn resources in the game will always be stronger than those who don't have that time. But rng brings the average representative of both sides closer to each other. Yes, there'll always be extremes where a poor person was super unlucky while the rich dude had all the luck he might've wanted, but such extreme situations are still better, imo, than the absolute crater of a gap between the rich and the poor. In my experience, this stuff even helped out curb some of p2w on private servers.
I'm not willing to claim it because I don't know your experience, but bear in mind that a lot of your experiences are easily explained by survivorship bias.
Playing a game on private servers is already a survivor selection pressure.
For example you make L2 sound really fun to me, but then I remember that IF I'm unlucky, I won't enjoy it as much, so I never bother to actually go try to play it despite having only two other MMOs to play, one of which I've done most of what I want to do in, no matter how much I still love it.
Consistent exposure to a group that shares one's own goals on experience is great, but bear in mind that any design that explicitly pushes out people of a particular mindset or goal, will create a community where most people don't complain about the issue of the design that pushed out those people.
This has nothing to do with the success or fun factor of the game to the people playing it, ofc. It only affects how niche the game is. The problem with Ashes though, is that MMOs can't go too niche or some of their underlying mechanics fall apart.
A fighting game only takes 2 people to care that it exists for all its mechanics to work, a MOBA, maybe 1000 (though obv it will get stale once those players all learn each other, they might not care though). Ashes requires probably 4000 per server, and 'stale' affects it faster.
The usual reasoning is that there is a big gap between rich and poor because resources, but this is weirdly an economics problem for MMOs that approach a specific aspect too simplistically or introduce certain forced-scarcity mechanics. L2 has the latter (no sign of the unmentioned former but your explanations have implied it doesn't have the problem with drops).
tl;dr, the gap between rich and poor does not have to be big in MMOs, it's counterintuitive, but because these games can have certain things injected into their economic systems, it is much more preventable than in the real world.
And to tie back to the point, oddly, RNG is usually the last thing you want to inject into the system to solve the wealth gap, because it's a small scale redistributor and the distribution spread is, obviously... random.
Oooh this is interesting, and probably explains why the "rng progression" in Lost Ark feels like gatekeeping - since everyone is expected to pass through the rng rolls - it's not an optional system.
the choke point makes you super concious of every extra attempt that fails above the statistical average
it's actually not very satisfying when you DO succeed: if you get lucky, you just think that's the normal experience. If you get unlucky, you just have this expression when you finally pass: =_=
your progression gets fractured from your friends coz it's so inconsistent
(On the flip side, it does encourage social interaction coz your friends pour their extra resources into you trying to help you get through ... this comes with emotional complexities though (pity charity))
It's interesting how you guys pointed out that this system actually works well for optional systems - I'd even say ones that are geared toward player expression: "Only a few people in the world have this, and I'm one of them"
But - could this actually indicate that "risk v reward" is more about options:
What if BDO had a secondary path to 'awaken' the horse? Say you could have saved up 120x of these items for guaranteed awakening? Would that change the experience?
Oooh this is interesting, and probably explains why the "rng progression" in Lost Ark feels like gatekeeping - since everyone is expected to pass through the rng rolls - it's not an optional system.
the choke point makes you super concious of every extra attempt that fails above the statistical average
it's actually not very satisfying when you DO succeed: if you get lucky, you just think that's the normal experience. If you get unlucky, you just have this expression when you finally pass: =_=
your progression gets fractured from your friends coz it's so inconsistent
(On the flip side, it does encourage social interaction coz your friends pour their extra resources into you trying to help you get through ... this comes with emotional complexities though (pity charity))
It's interesting how you guys pointed out that this system actually works well for optional systems - I'd even say ones that are geared toward player expression: "Only a few people in the world have this, and I'm one of them"
But - could this actually indicate that "risk v reward" is more about options:
What if BDO had a secondary path to 'awaken' the horse? Say you could have saved up 120x of these items for guaranteed awakening? Would that change the experience?
Well, I didn't mention a specific part of that, and I'll leave it to others to determine how they feel about it. I'll give more information about my personal play experience.
I want the Unicorn out of the three options because it can ride across the desert. My character 'lives' on the other side of the desert than most of the continent. I'd like to cross it faster, it would 'feel correct to me'.
Because of the system, I have at best I believe an 80% chance of getting the Unicorn specifically, because for various reasons they made it so that there is always a nonzero chance of the Awakening going in one of the two other directions. I need neither of those.
I'm much less upset about this. I can ADAPT to having the Flammen. I can SELL the Pegasus or change my playstyle a little or use it on another character. I'd have to start over my 'Unicorn Attempts' because the Pegasus was released first and is therefore 'cheaper'/more numerous and 'harder to actually sell' so I'd still fall short, but because the item supply is so low, it'd still be another 3 months before I try again, I think.
If I get ANOTHER Pegasus then, (about 2% chance I think?) I think I STILL won't be actually upset. I don't want to just buy the Unicorn, but that, at least, is 'Roleplay'. "My horses wish to fly, not cross deserts" or whatever. Choice has become part of something that can be seen as 'identity'.
But I still can't cross the Desert the way I want to until I resolve it. And I don't mind admitting that in a game like BDO where there isn't exactly a LOT of fun to be had, exactly... it's getting in the way of one of the few things I think I'd enjoy.
The 'correct' answer is to do a bunch of other things I don't like (BDO is terrible) to get the money for the horse. In fact, if you think "I don't want to be frustrated at being average" you should just always sell the materials that you CAN sell and only attempt using all the free ones they throw at you for whatever login reward is currently active, for actually raising the horse. This is what I've done mostly so far.
If I could save up 120x the items for guaranteed awakening, I would do that, because I am usually 'unlucky' (more like average or a little worse for unimportant repeated things).
I can use 'luck' to 'guide the experience', but this relies on choice and minimized effects of gatekeeping, yes. But the other aspect of it doesn't change for me PERSONALLY because of the economist thing. 120x the materials would be 'more than any average person would ever need to gather', which means that the most sensible response would be to 'try up to a certain point and then start saving'.
Except that's not sensible because it applies again. Why not try one more time with even better chances, rather than start saving up 2-3x the effort of average? What did this achieve in terms of personal experience other than making me take longer?
I'm not a good test case for this, so I leave the question to others. This is why I just poke the economy, games with poor levers for their economics always incentivize me to just exploit the unlucky so I can get stuff without experiencing their suffering.
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 won't consider your example is a risk vs reward thing, it's just a way to make player stay longer and feel there are thing can do which is a illusion and it's not a good illusion in my opinion, it's more like player vs gacha?.
To me, I won't even bother trying to awaken the mount, if I do it will be more like sorting inventory selling trashes while get back to town after adventure to me.
While i understand where you are coming from @Dizz, a market driven MMO will always need Item/Money/Ressource sinks. Otherwise, the profession will essentially be useless a couple of months into the server.
I'm not a fan of the RNG aspect myself, but question what would be a better system?
Same system without the RNG, but with a progress bar that wills up each time you dacrifice one?
All mounts being time limited?
Permadeath for mounts?
Requirement to sacrifice mounts in order to revive those who died?
While i understand where you are coming from @Dizz, a market driven MMO will always need Item/Money/Ressource sinks. Otherwise, the profession will essentially be useless a couple of months into the server.
I'm not a fan of the RNG aspect myself, but question what would be a better system?
Same system without the RNG, but with a progress bar that wills up each time you dacrifice one?
All mounts being time limited?
Permadeath for mounts?
Requirement to sacrifice mounts in order to revive those who died?
I don't know when the thing start becoming "make systems that good at keeping player stay in game", I don't understand how when why who it's very weird to me.
update: If mmos suppose to be using RNG to gate players and keep them in game and call market driven, how come this genre failed like this?(Well maybe just me think this genre failed, but to bed honest whole game industry stopped to be creative for a long time.) Is market wrong or the game developer?
No need to increase the length or stages of system like mount in order to keep player.
Get a mount is just get a mount, train a mount is just train a mount, breed a new kind is breed a new kind, how come there is a space for like 1% RNG?
It's not that what need to be changed in the mount progression, it just need the game is good, if a system in a game is designed to use RNG to that heavily gated player away from complete the progression, the game itself must not be well designed.
It's the mentality behind the design.
Mounts in GW2 for example, there are no RNGs in the progressions of mounts in GW2 the progressions are basically guide players to explore the new contents and the world, and it's fun to ride the mounts to explore the world.
That's what I'm trying to get at though - having a "high risk - shortcut" vs "low risk - guarantee" entirely changes how engaging the experience becomes:
Suddenly every roll is a concious choice, not a default
Sunk cost becomes an active factor in the decision
You can no longer place (all) the blame on the system - you KNEW the risk and accepted the terms
and yeah 120x is ridiculous.
Since the low-risk method is guaranteed, it makes sense to have some sort of penalty - but as you said not in the 99th failure percentile, maybe around 60%?
So in the BDO example, collect all the materials for 20 attempts (4000% exp) and get a guaranteed awakening. Does that sound more reasonable/tempting?
I don't want to just buy the Unicorn, but that, at least, is 'Roleplay'. "My horses wish to fly, not cross deserts" or whatever. Choice has become part of something that can be seen as 'identity'.
How do you see 'identity'?
I reckon choice gives players a sense of ownership - which then the game has opportunity to affirm their 'identity' with a reward that marks the path they chose. So to improve on the BDO example:
Say you max trained Elegance for best chances at a unicorn, and used Strength training as filler - but then the result was a Doom horse.
Now, what if all that Elegance turned the Doom horse's flames blue? That clearly marks the horse as "it was supposed to be a unicorn".
Did you get what you aimed for? No, but as a consolation prize it's cool because it acknowledges your choice - a Doom horse unique compared to other orange flamed Doom horses - and becomes a sort of collector's edition.
Point is: when a player's choices (aiming for a unicorn) are acknowledged by the game (standard unicorn/unique doom horse), the game adds meaning to the choice (it matters which method I use to get a unicorn) via player expression (my horse looks like this)
And this all relates to "risk vs reward" because the concept implies multiple options/choices with non-equal rewards.
I think this post is getting too long so I'm going to leave the RNG aspect to the side for now, but a quick summary of my thoughts would be:
Sum ( Circumstances * Choices ) = Identity
is to
Sum ( RNG * Player Decision ) = Meaningful Player Expression
as a negative example: compare the above system to a system in which players could guarantee the exact horse they get and dye it any colour they wanted. Are the choices of these player's expression less or more meaningful?
I think this post is getting too long so I'm going to leave the RNG aspect to the side for now, but a quick summary of my thoughts would be:
Sum ( Circumstances * Choices ) = Identity
is to
Sum ( RNG * Player Decision ) = Meaningful Player Expression
RNG is so huge I can't feel where is an meaning there.
If the system is that give horse a required item that rare dropped that guarantee make horse upgrade unicorn or maybe to one of few different look unicorn and a lazy extreme example: total 10 different look each one is 10% chance and the upgrade item drop rate is 1%, I can live with it.
as a negative example: compare the above system to a system in which players could guarantee the exact horse they get and dye it any colour they wanted. Are the choices of these player's expression less or more meaningful?
Better than BDO, at least I can express myself by dye the mount, not by RNG goddess stand at my side.
If we are thinking in terms of ashes of creation and their Animal husbandry how would do think of going in the risk in that kind of system and progression with creating more mounts.
Trying to think of this scenario is more of a practice sense in how AoC will work.
I just want to say this as clear as I can. RNG elements, if they are in your game, should only be on attaining an item or resource and never on upgrading or improving a resource you already have. Especially if the improving of your current resource has the potential to destroy it.
That's what I'm trying to get at though - having a "high risk - shortcut" vs "low risk - guarantee" entirely changes how engaging the experience becomes:
Suddenly every roll is a concious choice, not a default
Sunk cost becomes an active factor in the decision
You can no longer place (all) the blame on the system - you KNEW the risk and accepted the terms
and yeah 120x is ridiculous.
Since the low-risk method is guaranteed, it makes sense to have some sort of penalty - but as you said not in the 99th failure percentile, maybe around 60%?
So in the BDO example, collect all the materials for 20 attempts (4000% exp) and get a guaranteed awakening. Does that sound more reasonable/tempting?
I don't want to just buy the Unicorn, but that, at least, is 'Roleplay'. "My horses wish to fly, not cross deserts" or whatever. Choice has become part of something that can be seen as 'identity'.
How do you see 'identity'?
I reckon choice gives players a sense of ownership - which then the game has opportunity to affirm their 'identity' with a reward that marks the path they chose. So to improve on the BDO example:
Say you max trained Elegance for best chances at a unicorn, and used Strength training as filler - but then the result was a Doom horse.
Now, what if all that Elegance turned the Doom horse's flames blue? That clearly marks the horse as "it was supposed to be a unicorn".
Did you get what you aimed for? No, but as a consolation prize it's cool because it acknowledges your choice - a Doom horse unique compared to other orange flamed Doom horses - and becomes a sort of collector's edition.
Point is: when a player's choices (aiming for a unicorn) are acknowledged by the game (standard unicorn/unique doom horse), the game adds meaning to the choice (it matters which method I use to get a unicorn) via player expression (my horse looks like this)
And this all relates to "risk vs reward" because the concept implies multiple options/choices with non-equal rewards.
I think this post is getting too long so I'm going to leave the RNG aspect to the side for now, but a quick summary of my thoughts would be:
Sum ( Circumstances * Choices ) = Identity
is to
Sum ( RNG * Player Decision ) = Meaningful Player Expression
as a negative example: compare the above system to a system in which players could guarantee the exact horse they get and dye it any colour they wanted. Are the choices of these player's expression less or more meaningful?
I've thought about this a lot and decided that I personally would like this very much.
To me, this is actually the essence of RolePlay. The only reason I feel that D20/TableTop games work with their large amounts of randomness and variance is that you get to make choices around the outcomes, and more importantly, it becomes part of your character, it offers some 'consolation prize' type of experience, even if not an advantage.
So I agree with your assessment for myself. I only dislike the BDO one because the only 'choice' I am making is 'engage or don't'.
But 'raw RNG' is overall a tool that some developers feel the need to use, even if it just saves them time from building a more complex system, and I can accept that sometimes, that's the most efficient tool.
"Poking it to manipulate player perception properly" seems a much shorter task than "precisely balanced itemization", particularly when IMBALANCED itemization becomes a talking point so fast compared to the 'it is what it is' of sufficiently manipulative RNG outcomes.
So even from Intrepid, I'd expect to see some of this, and am just asking 'if they don't offer complex stuff, am I so much of an outlier that I should expect something I dislike?'
@Azherae first up your post with the 25 trys 1%chance is tecnicly wrong
cuase a chance remains a chance iven it its higher there would be also the chace that after 25 trys nooned would be happy and viceversa. your clac is more made with a 1% garantee.
risk and reward sound nice but is very unprecizely. what is the risk and what is the reward those 2 unknowns have a high range of what they could mean. does it gos into risking defeat or risking getting attacked, risking failure or risking loss some of the risks can be minimized if your doing a bossfight with a groupe and your the only mage in the groupe means you your risk upon the boss droping a item that benefits mages the most is very low but since your the only mage the risk of getting the item may also be very low. doing the same boss with a groupe of only mages doesnt increse the chance of dropping mage specific stuff but the risk of not getting it in the end is way higher.
the topic states risk and reward but most post i did read refering to rng instead.
what are the riskes that can be taken?
if i go gather at a spot with many rich minerals and also many monsters that could attack me does it increse the risk if i take of my gear do i then get more minerals or is it still the same cuase tecnicly i do risk more without gear.
so only once we know what these riskes are that may effect the reward part. thats when we realy can do clas and maths around it
@Azherae first up your post with the 25 trys 1%chance is tecnicly wrong
cuase a chance remains a chance iven it its higher there would be also the chace that after 25 trys nooned would be happy and viceversa. your clac is more made with a 1% garantee.
risk and reward sound nice but is very unprecizely. what is the risk and what is the reward those 2 unknowns have a high range of what they could mean. does it gos into risking defeat or risking getting attacked, risking failure or risking loss some of the risks can be minimized if your doing a bossfight with a groupe and your the only mage in the groupe means you your risk upon the boss droping a item that benefits mages the most is very low but since your the only mage the risk of getting the item may also be very low. doing the same boss with a groupe of only mages doesnt increse the chance of dropping mage specific stuff but the risk of not getting it in the end is way higher.
the topic states risk and reward but most post i did read refering to rng instead.
what are the riskes that can be taken?
if i go gather at a spot with many rich minerals and also many monsters that could attack me does it increse the risk if i take of my gear do i then get more minerals or is it still the same cuase tecnicly i do risk more without gear.
so only once we know what these riskes are that may effect the reward part. thats when we realy can do clas and maths around it
If I understand you correctly, your concern is that my data doesn't refer to something you consider to actually be risk vs reward?
Isn't 'rolling the dice using materials or money' a risk with a potential reward? Do you think you can clarify how it isn't? (if you think that)
Isn't 'rolling the dice using materials or money' a risk with a potential reward? Do you think you can clarify how it isn't? (if you think that)
well rolling a dice with materials and money is gamble and gambeling isnt risk and reward if the pot is small and you risk more that the pot is worth that doesnt garantee that you get the pot, cause thats not how gambeling works.
but maybe the dice that stands for rng is a bad example. i think in dbo it has the thing that rolling your chars stats is done with count of 3 dices, however you roll 4 dices and remove then the one with the lowest number. that way it would still be a gamble but since you risk more you can remove the badest roll and so ending up with a better roll.
well for ashes there is no failing in crafting you use the mats and get what you selected to craft. shuire it has maybe a chance to proc and be something better but thats only a chance. what you try to do is to increast the amount of mats to multiply the chance rate so that it becomes garanteed. if you increase the mats you use you only increase the chance the reward would be the same as if you would be lucky in the first place so you may did risk more mats but the reward isnt higher cause it isnt better than that what you would have gotten if you used the normal amount of mats and just had luck.
but what i also was heading to before is what is risk what does cound as risk and what is reward.
if you use more wheight on crafting your reward is higher cause you your wheight did drop a larger amount that would be a direct risk and reward.
but risk and reward has nothing to do with chances or gambeling. you can go into a casino with 10'000 usd and can come out with nothing even do you think you did risk a lot the dude next to you did use 1 million and lost it all.
in crafting the bonus it brings is that you can destroy stuff to get resources back so even if something may not proc in the crafting you could destroy it and getting some mats back if you destroy enouth you can do other trys.
the primarly problem with risk and reward is that theoreticly nowone can tell you what risk is and what reward is. and as long the devs doesnt say what what is all we can do i theorize and philosoficly talk abou it.
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.
Unless you make the spawn for the needed item completely random (i.e. it can spawn anywhere in the world), you risk it being farmed by some group of people that then gauge the price so high that it would've been cheaper to play the rng with a higher spawn rate.
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.
I don't know how to tell you this, so i'm just going to be straight up with it. There will be gold farmers, bots and websites that sell currency for AoC. There's no great way around it at the moment, only a lot of small systems to help thwart it. Go take a look at OSRS to get an idea of about how prevalent it will be.
Removing player traded currency and replacing it with a restrictive barter system would make a pretty decent dent in this activity but even then it won't stop it.
Another not used or under utilized method of hamstringing it is ganging up on the richest people/guilds in the game lol, which I very much intend on taking part of.
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.
Unless you make the spawn for the needed item completely random (i.e. it can spawn anywhere in the world), you risk it being farmed by some group of people that then gauge the price so high that it would've been cheaper to play the rng with a higher spawn rate.
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.
I don't know how to tell you this, so i'm just going to be straight up with it. There will be gold farmers, bots and websites that sell currency for AoC. There's no great way around it at the moment, only a lot of small systems to help thwart it. Go take a look at OSRS to get an idea of about how prevalent it will be.
Removing player traded currency and replacing it with a restrictive barter system would make a pretty decent dent in this activity but even then it won't stop it.
Another not used or under utilized method of hamstringing it is ganging up on the richest people/guilds in the game lol, which I very much intend on taking part of.
I fundamentally agree with what you are saying, but i think we need to differentiate between:
commercialized gold selling (aka. the bot-farm operators who use dozens of accounts at a time to farm money for sellling purposes)
personal one-off RMT selling (buddy found the legendary fire dragon sword and gives it to a guild mate (in exchange for 100$)
No. 2 will always happen and there is no effective way to combat that either unless you restrict trading in the way BDO does it, which is going against AoCs Core Principles. I think, this is less of an issue though, as it merely means for a third party (other players), that player B is owning the sword instead of player A.
Commercialized gold selling on the other hand waters down the efforts, achievements and time-investment of all the players on the server. Thats what you really want to combat and thats what can be fought rather easily, if the Devs care to do so. Major problems we have seen in the past were, that
Devs simply didnt care enough to prosecute the issue.
Devs tried to fix the problem by primarily hitting the sellers and botters, while being very lenient with the buysers.
Its very easy to identify commercial gold sellers. Once you identify them its also very simple to punish all accounts within that network. However, punishing them doesnt really do anything, as they have a near-limitless supply of accounts at hand.
What you want to do instead is:
Identify a commercial gold seller network through one of the botting or trading accounts (easy)
Ban all the botting and trading accounts attached to it.
Severely punish all the accounts that have purchased from that network.
Be merciless about it with scaling bans starting at multiple weeks reaching up to years, all the gold taken away + additional fines. If the account doesnt have enough money to cover it, then put it into debt with 50-90% of every gold earned going towards the pay-off of this debt.
If intermediary accounts were used for the purchase, then follow the trade log punishing all intermediary accounts and the account the money was finally used / parked upon.
Once Intrepid has a reputation of severely punishing gold buyers, the amount of gold buyers will drop significantly as nobody is willing to risk their account they have invested 100s of hours in.
Initially this will take a bit of manpower to follow the trade log, but once the majority of buyers are scared off, this will reduce significantly and be worth any penny.
Will it fix the problem a 100%? No, nothing will ever do that, but it will reduce the scale of one of the most prevalent market issues in MMOs to a minor side problem.
Then you have mostly pinoy services and irregular personal deals left as an issue, which are significantly less of an issues when talking about the in-game market as a whole.
Comments
Sure, 1% of all players has it, you are in that 1%, but IF for example you barely ever interacted with the other 99%? Let's say you are a Caravan protector, but only 3% of the population even goes near the Caravan system and among them 90% of players have... idk, SOMETHING that helps them do Caravan fights, which you have to get by RNG this way, does that cause any change in your reaction?
Using the precise concept that 'By Try #11, half your opponents have this thing and you don't'. You can throw in 'half your allies have it and without it you're much less effective'.
I don't expect that sort of thing in Ashes at all, mind you. If you were the 'better fit' for it due to Role or skill, I would assume someone would give or sell you the thing, whatever it is, so that the whole group would be stronger. It might be better to think of it as 'your group is in the lower half of the curve, your opponents are in the upper half', but that's unrealistic too SORTA.
Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?
Though I'm purely guessing here, cause I'm used to this kind of rng system being applied to gear OE and that is the most direct powerup over anyone else around, so imo it's a completely different thing at that point.
That was the main issue with BDO is you are taking a insane amount of time and sometimes making no gains. 0 respect for your time. If people can do things more often it won't feel as bad but then the question raises are people getting it too fast and is it not as rewarding.
Having different progressions i think would help as well where you have a much ore difficult one or one not as difficult but slightly hard. That way people are more understanding of accepting such content.
I dont think that RNG based progression is good game design at all.
If you want deeper progression and bigger sinks, then scale up the costs to the point you need it to be, but once you have all the materials required, let it be a 100% chance to succeed.
Obviously the overall stats are still a bit skewed towards the rich folk, but that's always the case. At least with rng, the poor have some chance to catch up. And I don't think that the approach of "everyone gets everything" would seem all that interesting to most people who'd be interested in a competitive game such as Ashes.
In general, I think rng is fine for small things but shouldn't be used for high-value risks, at least ones with no alternatives. If there is a rng free way to get something then i'm ok if there is a possible heavy rng alternative.
I've seen the opposite too.
I don't think RNG is necessary to prevent everyone from getting everything and if it is, why does anything matter? If the only reason you have a better weapon then me is because you got lucky and i didn't, then why do i care if i lose? It's nothing i did wrong.
In this case the question is targeted at the concept of 'when is RNG not a way to create a risk vs reward situation'?
I don't know if they intend to make a very RNG-lite game, and personally I will play it either way, because RNG of specific types factors into both my engagement and my form of Roleplaying when I do that, so RNG heavy is fine.
But the more RNG, the more it starts to feel like an unbalanced single-player game, and in this case it would be 'a game pretending to be competitive while randomly rewarding people. NiKr's perspective on this, sometimes, has been close to 'preferring equalization' and I don't mind that either, I dislike the decoupling of your outcome from your choices.
"I chose not to take the action."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that action achieves."
"I chose to take the action."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that action achieves."
I feel like the 'problem' here can be changed without removing the '1d100' part.
You seem to propose:
"I chose not to roll the dice for a chance at this goal."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to roll the dice."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."
"I chose to not roll the dice, and also to undertake a long process to get to the goal."
"You have achieved your goal in the end."
I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.
I think it's easier for me to define my preference is for rng to not perform a significant role as part of a main progression path.
An example would be the flying mounts in ashes. I see the main way to get them is through being a mayor/castle owner but the is an rng drop chance. If i could alter your BDO example, i'd prefer if you are guaranteed to get the pegasus at a certain tier but have an rng chance at previous tiers.
I'm ok with fail safe mechanics (which is what it sounds like you are describing) but they usually feel artificial to me and if not tuned well, don't feel much better. I'd prefer that once i have done what is required, i get what i was progressing towards. I'd also prefer the requirement being increased to compensate for the lack of rng.
Equalization doesn't mean no variety. Things like player builds, choices, and skill will create a lot of variety in the game. I don't think we need to make power unequal with rng to further mix it up.
That said, i also don't think it will create equalization since players' progression is also effected by level of skill, time to play, motivation, and access to resources.
RNG has no bias.
I'm sure you have seen a rich person get the shaft and a poor person get lucky but the opposite also happened. There are rich people who get lucky and poor people who get unlucky.
There is no reason to assume it will impact one group more.
So say you want to upgrade your gear. You have a quest that gives you the resources needed for the upgrade. Within the quest you must choose to either farm out 1k mobs (just for example) and definitely get the resource or you only need to farm 10 mobs but you get a "1%" resource. You can only choose one. And that "1%' resource doesn't have an increase in chance with use, but it fills out a "meter" with each use and after, say, 120 uses you definitely get the upgrade.
So you are assured the upgrade in both cases, but one definitely takes a lot of time, while the other is potentially way faster, but could be somewhat slower. The resource itself would be available on the market and I'd assume its cost would be "somewhere between 700 and 1k kills worth" (or whatever the median rng pull would be for most people). So you could potentially go the third route of trying your luck a few times and then just buying it off the market, which would pretty much keep it in line with the "1k kills" cost
People who have the time to kill 1k mobs will be assured their resource while also saving money. People who have the money can just buy it. People who don't mind the bad feel rng will go for the riskiest path. Obviously the market price would grow if the demand was too high for it, so it's not like the market will always be the safest and cheapest bet.
Or is this suggestion literally the same thing I quoted and I just need to go to sleep because I can't think straight anymore?
I'm not willing to claim it because I don't know your experience, but bear in mind that a lot of your experiences are easily explained by survivorship bias.
Playing a game on private servers is already a survivor selection pressure.
For example you make L2 sound really fun to me, but then I remember that IF I'm unlucky, I won't enjoy it as much, so I never bother to actually go try to play it despite having only two other MMOs to play, one of which I've done most of what I want to do in, no matter how much I still love it.
Consistent exposure to a group that shares one's own goals on experience is great, but bear in mind that any design that explicitly pushes out people of a particular mindset or goal, will create a community where most people don't complain about the issue of the design that pushed out those people.
This has nothing to do with the success or fun factor of the game to the people playing it, ofc. It only affects how niche the game is. The problem with Ashes though, is that MMOs can't go too niche or some of their underlying mechanics fall apart.
A fighting game only takes 2 people to care that it exists for all its mechanics to work, a MOBA, maybe 1000 (though obv it will get stale once those players all learn each other, they might not care though). Ashes requires probably 4000 per server, and 'stale' affects it faster.
The usual reasoning is that there is a big gap between rich and poor because resources, but this is weirdly an economics problem for MMOs that approach a specific aspect too simplistically or introduce certain forced-scarcity mechanics. L2 has the latter (no sign of the unmentioned former but your explanations have implied it doesn't have the problem with drops).
tl;dr, the gap between rich and poor does not have to be big in MMOs, it's counterintuitive, but because these games can have certain things injected into their economic systems, it is much more preventable than in the real world.
And to tie back to the point, oddly, RNG is usually the last thing you want to inject into the system to solve the wealth gap, because it's a small scale redistributor and the distribution spread is, obviously... random.
It's interesting how you guys pointed out that this system actually works well for optional systems - I'd even say ones that are geared toward player expression: "Only a few people in the world have this, and I'm one of them"
But - could this actually indicate that "risk v reward" is more about options:
What if BDO had a secondary path to 'awaken' the horse? Say you could have saved up 120x of these items for guaranteed awakening? Would that change the experience?
Well, I didn't mention a specific part of that, and I'll leave it to others to determine how they feel about it. I'll give more information about my personal play experience.
I want the Unicorn out of the three options because it can ride across the desert. My character 'lives' on the other side of the desert than most of the continent. I'd like to cross it faster, it would 'feel correct to me'.
Because of the system, I have at best I believe an 80% chance of getting the Unicorn specifically, because for various reasons they made it so that there is always a nonzero chance of the Awakening going in one of the two other directions. I need neither of those.
I'm much less upset about this. I can ADAPT to having the Flammen. I can SELL the Pegasus or change my playstyle a little or use it on another character. I'd have to start over my 'Unicorn Attempts' because the Pegasus was released first and is therefore 'cheaper'/more numerous and 'harder to actually sell' so I'd still fall short, but because the item supply is so low, it'd still be another 3 months before I try again, I think.
If I get ANOTHER Pegasus then, (about 2% chance I think?) I think I STILL won't be actually upset. I don't want to just buy the Unicorn, but that, at least, is 'Roleplay'. "My horses wish to fly, not cross deserts" or whatever. Choice has become part of something that can be seen as 'identity'.
But I still can't cross the Desert the way I want to until I resolve it. And I don't mind admitting that in a game like BDO where there isn't exactly a LOT of fun to be had, exactly... it's getting in the way of one of the few things I think I'd enjoy.
The 'correct' answer is to do a bunch of other things I don't like (BDO is terrible) to get the money for the horse. In fact, if you think "I don't want to be frustrated at being average" you should just always sell the materials that you CAN sell and only attempt using all the free ones they throw at you for whatever login reward is currently active, for actually raising the horse. This is what I've done mostly so far.
If I could save up 120x the items for guaranteed awakening, I would do that, because I am usually 'unlucky' (more like average or a little worse for unimportant repeated things).
I can use 'luck' to 'guide the experience', but this relies on choice and minimized effects of gatekeeping, yes. But the other aspect of it doesn't change for me PERSONALLY because of the economist thing. 120x the materials would be 'more than any average person would ever need to gather', which means that the most sensible response would be to 'try up to a certain point and then start saving'.
Except that's not sensible because it applies again. Why not try one more time with even better chances, rather than start saving up 2-3x the effort of average? What did this achieve in terms of personal experience other than making me take longer?
I'm not a good test case for this, so I leave the question to others. This is why I just poke the economy, games with poor levers for their economics always incentivize me to just exploit the unlucky so I can get stuff without experiencing their suffering.
I won't consider your example is a risk vs reward thing, it's just a way to make player stay longer and feel there are thing can do which is a illusion and it's not a good illusion in my opinion, it's more like player vs gacha?.
To me, I won't even bother trying to awaken the mount, if I do it will be more like sorting inventory selling trashes while get back to town after adventure to me.
I'm not a fan of the RNG aspect myself, but question what would be a better system?
Same system without the RNG, but with a progress bar that wills up each time you dacrifice one?
All mounts being time limited?
Permadeath for mounts?
Requirement to sacrifice mounts in order to revive those who died?
I don't know when the thing start becoming "make systems that good at keeping player stay in game", I don't understand how when why who it's very weird to me.
update: If mmos suppose to be using RNG to gate players and keep them in game and call market driven, how come this genre failed like this?(Well maybe just me think this genre failed, but to bed honest whole game industry stopped to be creative for a long time.) Is market wrong or the game developer?
No need to increase the length or stages of system like mount in order to keep player.
Get a mount is just get a mount, train a mount is just train a mount, breed a new kind is breed a new kind, how come there is a space for like 1% RNG?
It's not that what need to be changed in the mount progression, it just need the game is good, if a system in a game is designed to use RNG to that heavily gated player away from complete the progression, the game itself must not be well designed.
It's the mentality behind the design.
Mounts in GW2 for example, there are no RNGs in the progressions of mounts in GW2 the progressions are basically guide players to explore the new contents and the world, and it's fun to ride the mounts to explore the world.
and yeah 120x is ridiculous.
Since the low-risk method is guaranteed, it makes sense to have some sort of penalty - but as you said not in the 99th failure percentile, maybe around 60%?
So in the BDO example, collect all the materials for 20 attempts (4000% exp) and get a guaranteed awakening. Does that sound more reasonable/tempting?
How do you see 'identity'?
I reckon choice gives players a sense of ownership - which then the game has opportunity to affirm their 'identity' with a reward that marks the path they chose. So to improve on the BDO example:
Say you max trained Elegance for best chances at a unicorn, and used Strength training as filler - but then the result was a Doom horse.
Now, what if all that Elegance turned the Doom horse's flames blue? That clearly marks the horse as "it was supposed to be a unicorn".
Did you get what you aimed for? No, but as a consolation prize it's cool because it acknowledges your choice - a Doom horse unique compared to other orange flamed Doom horses - and becomes a sort of collector's edition.
Point is: when a player's choices (aiming for a unicorn) are acknowledged by the game (standard unicorn/unique doom horse), the game adds meaning to the choice (it matters which method I use to get a unicorn) via player expression (my horse looks like this)
And this all relates to "risk vs reward" because the concept implies multiple options/choices with non-equal rewards.
I think this post is getting too long so I'm going to leave the RNG aspect to the side for now, but a quick summary of my thoughts would be:
Sum ( Circumstances * Choices ) = Identity
is to
Sum ( RNG * Player Decision ) = Meaningful Player Expression
as a negative example: compare the above system to a system in which players could guarantee the exact horse they get and dye it any colour they wanted. Are the choices of these player's expression less or more meaningful?
RNG is so huge I can't feel where is an meaning there.
If the system is that give horse a required item that rare dropped that guarantee make horse upgrade unicorn or maybe to one of few different look unicorn and a lazy extreme example: total 10 different look each one is 10% chance and the upgrade item drop rate is 1%, I can live with it.
Better than BDO, at least I can express myself by dye the mount, not by RNG goddess stand at my side.
Trying to think of this scenario is more of a practice sense in how AoC will work.
I've thought about this a lot and decided that I personally would like this very much.
To me, this is actually the essence of RolePlay. The only reason I feel that D20/TableTop games work with their large amounts of randomness and variance is that you get to make choices around the outcomes, and more importantly, it becomes part of your character, it offers some 'consolation prize' type of experience, even if not an advantage.
So I agree with your assessment for myself. I only dislike the BDO one because the only 'choice' I am making is 'engage or don't'.
But 'raw RNG' is overall a tool that some developers feel the need to use, even if it just saves them time from building a more complex system, and I can accept that sometimes, that's the most efficient tool.
"Poking it to manipulate player perception properly" seems a much shorter task than "precisely balanced itemization", particularly when IMBALANCED itemization becomes a talking point so fast compared to the 'it is what it is' of sufficiently manipulative RNG outcomes.
So even from Intrepid, I'd expect to see some of this, and am just asking 'if they don't offer complex stuff, am I so much of an outlier that I should expect something I dislike?'
cuase a chance remains a chance iven it its higher there would be also the chace that after 25 trys nooned would be happy and viceversa. your clac is more made with a 1% garantee.
risk and reward sound nice but is very unprecizely. what is the risk and what is the reward those 2 unknowns have a high range of what they could mean. does it gos into risking defeat or risking getting attacked, risking failure or risking loss some of the risks can be minimized if your doing a bossfight with a groupe and your the only mage in the groupe means you your risk upon the boss droping a item that benefits mages the most is very low but since your the only mage the risk of getting the item may also be very low. doing the same boss with a groupe of only mages doesnt increse the chance of dropping mage specific stuff but the risk of not getting it in the end is way higher.
the topic states risk and reward but most post i did read refering to rng instead.
what are the riskes that can be taken?
if i go gather at a spot with many rich minerals and also many monsters that could attack me does it increse the risk if i take of my gear do i then get more minerals or is it still the same cuase tecnicly i do risk more without gear.
so only once we know what these riskes are that may effect the reward part. thats when we realy can do clas and maths around it
If I understand you correctly, your concern is that my data doesn't refer to something you consider to actually be risk vs reward?
Isn't 'rolling the dice using materials or money' a risk with a potential reward? Do you think you can clarify how it isn't? (if you think that)
well rolling a dice with materials and money is gamble and gambeling isnt risk and reward if the pot is small and you risk more that the pot is worth that doesnt garantee that you get the pot, cause thats not how gambeling works.
but maybe the dice that stands for rng is a bad example. i think in dbo it has the thing that rolling your chars stats is done with count of 3 dices, however you roll 4 dices and remove then the one with the lowest number. that way it would still be a gamble but since you risk more you can remove the badest roll and so ending up with a better roll.
well for ashes there is no failing in crafting you use the mats and get what you selected to craft. shuire it has maybe a chance to proc and be something better but thats only a chance. what you try to do is to increast the amount of mats to multiply the chance rate so that it becomes garanteed. if you increase the mats you use you only increase the chance the reward would be the same as if you would be lucky in the first place so you may did risk more mats but the reward isnt higher cause it isnt better than that what you would have gotten if you used the normal amount of mats and just had luck.
but what i also was heading to before is what is risk what does cound as risk and what is reward.
if you use more wheight on crafting your reward is higher cause you your wheight did drop a larger amount that would be a direct risk and reward.
but risk and reward has nothing to do with chances or gambeling. you can go into a casino with 10'000 usd and can come out with nothing even do you think you did risk a lot the dude next to you did use 1 million and lost it all.
in crafting the bonus it brings is that you can destroy stuff to get resources back so even if something may not proc in the crafting you could destroy it and getting some mats back if you destroy enouth you can do other trys.
the primarly problem with risk and reward is that theoreticly nowone can tell you what risk is and what reward is. and as long the devs doesnt say what what is all we can do i theorize and philosoficly talk abou it.
I don't know how to tell you this, so i'm just going to be straight up with it. There will be gold farmers, bots and websites that sell currency for AoC. There's no great way around it at the moment, only a lot of small systems to help thwart it. Go take a look at OSRS to get an idea of about how prevalent it will be.
Removing player traded currency and replacing it with a restrictive barter system would make a pretty decent dent in this activity but even then it won't stop it.
Another not used or under utilized method of hamstringing it is ganging up on the richest people/guilds in the game lol, which I very much intend on taking part of.
I fundamentally agree with what you are saying, but i think we need to differentiate between:
No. 2 will always happen and there is no effective way to combat that either unless you restrict trading in the way BDO does it, which is going against AoCs Core Principles. I think, this is less of an issue though, as it merely means for a third party (other players), that player B is owning the sword instead of player A.
Commercialized gold selling on the other hand waters down the efforts, achievements and time-investment of all the players on the server. Thats what you really want to combat and thats what can be fought rather easily, if the Devs care to do so. Major problems we have seen in the past were, that
Its very easy to identify commercial gold sellers. Once you identify them its also very simple to punish all accounts within that network. However, punishing them doesnt really do anything, as they have a near-limitless supply of accounts at hand.
What you want to do instead is:
Once Intrepid has a reputation of severely punishing gold buyers, the amount of gold buyers will drop significantly as nobody is willing to risk their account they have invested 100s of hours in.
Initially this will take a bit of manpower to follow the trade log, but once the majority of buyers are scared off, this will reduce significantly and be worth any penny.
Will it fix the problem a 100%? No, nothing will ever do that, but it will reduce the scale of one of the most prevalent market issues in MMOs to a minor side problem.
Then you have mostly pinoy services and irregular personal deals left as an issue, which are significantly less of an issues when talking about the in-game market as a whole.