NW - PR Link 2 (in Debates)

Revisiting this again, is more than I can take today... I'll try and formulate a coherent argument tomorrow maybe.

The quote you've got at the end there was me saying that if NW-PR remains (so as to have an arbitrary method of measuring power) I'd like to see it removed from the calculations that rewards are based on. It's basically the same thing as removing the NW-PR link.

GL in all honesty I agree there should be a line between pumping USD in to be the best and not having anything to show for working your butt off. Pushing it to a new level is just wrong no matter which way you slice it.

Right now there is a lot of ppl starting to hit a wall which shouldn't be regardless of USD Expenditure or plain out hard work. In other words I am saying that a rescale needs to happen to make the Link work like it should again or it needs to be replaced with something better.

Correction: Increase your DD, your MPR goes up. Increase your Defensive skills, your MPR goes up. No exception.

MPR brings with it a whole bunch of perks. PR is purely a negative thing.

What makes you think this? As it may be far less true than you think.

MPR determines BA regen tiers, BA price/rewards, and forging ability. Maybe some more things that I've forgotten, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.

BA price yes, rewards no.

The game is set in such a way that playing in a consistent manner will result in an almost completely linear MPR growth, as can be easily observed from looking at longer-playing characters.
It's also fairly obvious that MPR growth is NOT linear with XP rewards (which are on average directly proportional to cash rewards, after randomness evens out), so in fact, yes, with higher MPR there _DO_ come higher rewards, no exceptions.

PR however, especially PR that doesn't let you beat higher characters (as a percent of PR, that is) sadly _is_ a purely negative thing.
What makes things even worse is that benefits at low NW values are also relatively low (as far as PTH or AC is concerned anyway) but quickly increase your PR, whereas higher NWs (especially with AC) increase your performance faster, while PR growth rate is the same (but as a percentage, ever smaller).
This peculiarity makes it so that low-NW characters are actually punished the most, while high-NW characters are punished the LEAST, especially in the very high echelons, where they already had to fight targets with score mostly below PR anyway.

MPR good, PR bad. There's no ifs and buts about it.
Also, a lot of NW per item = awesome, same NW spread across items = not that great.

PR can decrease challenge bonus, but if there isn't a challenge bonus to decrease it is purely a good thing.

You should talk to Natasha' about PR increasing rewards Sick...

You mean, a neutral thing, don't you ?

nope.

Care to write a few paragraphs explaining, preferably with some math in it too instead of just a couple of one-liners, just so that other people without personal experience in what you mean can understand it ?

Rewards are based off of PR. The higher your PR the higher your base rewards.

Since when ? AFAIKnew, it's based on MPR, not on PR.

Since I thoroughly tested the rewards system. Of course I never went out and announced it as keeping this knowledge to myself gives me an edge.

Sorry, VPR, not MPR nor PR.
At least according to the wiki.

You wouldn't really think that if you look at the evolution of the PR/MPR graphs on your character, the Immortals and also Incompetent Misfits.

Oh, well, I suppose if you are correct and that is indeed true, you kind of would have had the right to keep it to yourself. But now, you're no longer keeping it to yourself, since, well, you let the news slip just now if not earlier.
So why don't you actually prove what you claim with numbers too ? Because, you know, you might have just got it wrong. I'm not saying you did, but then again you are claiming something rather unusual, so I hope you can understand the skepticism.

Yes sickone, it is VPR.

you hinted that to me in some other threads but i still beg to differ.

if higher pr gives higher rewards, then why when ranger and i tested attacking the same target did we get the exact rewards. it wasn't close it was exact.

you have also said in the past that my test was flawed but i see no other way to test your statement that pr increases rewards than for two different teams to fight the same target.

i am with sickone on this one, please give us more details to prove your theory.

Didn't you use the method from the wiki to get average rewards?

when ranger and i tested it we did use the wiki method to get average rewards.

I would steer away from that method if I were you.

why is that?

It's not very effective. Taken the average of abunch of battles is much more effective.

what proof can you offer that it isn't effective? multiple battles would be less accurate in my opinion unless you fought many, but then you will lower the opponents score thus changing the rewards. it would be a situation where you are trying to hit a moving target.

all of the data i have ever seen says that the wiki method works perfectly.

I just took a look at the wiki formula for rewards and it is off, though not by much. It looks like there used to be 1 more multiplier above the highest one we have today.

i think it is close enough that you can compare two people with vastly different pr's fighting the same opponent to compare rewards. this is what ranger and i did way back when and he had a much higher pr than i did at the time.

we got the same exact reward even though we were both in 6/20 but we paid different amounts for bought ba.

i cannot see how this could happen and we could also have pr affecting rewards?

also nem, if you have had such an advantage with this information and you and i have pretty close the same amount of clan points and use most of our ba and you fight a pretty small list, our growth lines for the past 130 days or so are nearly parallel, at least by just eyeballing it?

It depends upon the target. I am not surprised that whatever target you were both hitting gave the same rewards to both of you. Rewards are determined by both your own PR and your target's PR. If only 1 person has a huge PR it won't really help them at all except in higher score generation per fight. If 2 or more people have huge PR then all of the people with huge PR are likely benefiting from it.

Also, I updated the wiki rewards formula. It will give you your correct average rewards now.

thanks for that. i have assumed that this is why you maintain such a small fight list. again though our mpr growth lines are almost parallel for 130 days or so. do you keep track of your weekly mpr growth by chance?

No, but I keep track of my growth compared with Incompetent misfits who have a very similar PR and MPR. With almost always a lower clan bonus I have been able to maintain the same amount of growth. If you think I have fallen behind recently take a look at our respective MTLs.

you aren't falling behind at all recently. what i was saying though is that if you are getting better rewards due to a concentrated fightlist of high pr opponents, why when i am at the opposite end of that spectrum, are our growth lines parallel? the better rewards should be shown as a higher mpr growth rate, no?

i say i am at the opposite end of the spectrum as i go through each sunday and hit the button to add clan opponents close to my score. i then select all of them and add them all. i then fight through my list and remove everyone who i cannot beat consistently. sometimes this method adds some pretty low level opponents.

would you mind tracking your mpr growth once a week around the same time each week? i have been doing that since i started this ncb and have kept doing it, so i have months of data. you can set up a google spreadsheet as it makes it quite easy to maintain then.

Using the history graphs is a very vague way to tell unless the lines are very close together so that you can see small differences. A difference of even 100k mpr in growth on our lines wouldn't be very noticeable at all.

This graph is slightly better at showing the difference.

yep, but it is pretty simple to set it for 120 days and then hold a 3.5 X 5 inch photo up to one line and thus make the lines much closer! ; )

actually a 4 X 6 photo works much better even. your line is pulling away from mine a bit but i am not convinced that it is due to pr affecting rewards and it is likely more due to the fact that you are also higher on the clan mvp list for that time than me and thus fighting more.

nem, your pr is 8,744,456 and my pr is 6,569,197. the highest pr opponent that i can beat is the travelling man at 6,983,022 pr. should that be enough to give you higher rewards than i when fighting him?

yes, I would get $6 more than you. Not counting clan bonus.

which would work out to 3.6 more xp?

also if you can tell me that precisely then you are confident you have the reward formula all figured out?

About 95% figured out. There are a few aberrations at the lower levels, but anything in the upper regions I could predict easily.

how much difference in rewards are we talking about then if say i fight a 6m pr opponent while you fight a 9m pr opponent?

$30 base.

Or if you would prefer a % difference, I would be getting about 9% better rewards.

which would be about 18 xp then per fight.

did you use equal score for both opponents and that 9 percent is all based on the pr difference?

Yes, though any difference of score isn't going to change anything under almost all circumstances.

so would you say that opponents pr to your pr is much more of a factor than opponents score to your pr as we have always believed?

Opponents score to your PR determines challenge bonus. For most people that is the main factor in rewards.

we have pretty close clan bonuses atm, would you fight the travelling man and figure out your average reward using the formula you posted in the wiki and i will do the same?

i did it twice to make sure and got 588 one time and 586.5 the other.

Are you sure you used the updated version? I didn't delete the old version just put the new one underneath until people feel satisfied that it is correct.

yep, my numbers are below:

first pair was 392 & 783

second pair was 587 & 391

Never mind I see the difference. You are getting a bit of challenge bonus off of him.

i failed to check for that but will in a few minutes when i get more ba.

1% challenge bonus.

Interesting, you don't get the hidden 5% bonus if you fight your own clan member. That is good to know.

Dude, check the average rewards of the rest of your fightlist and compare with their PR.

So the two positives to high PR (apart from giving you more 'power' to either potentially fight up more, or stop others beating you) are;

1: Increased Rewards
2: Increased Score generation

score and pr often go hand in hand though and as i have always stated checking against multiple opponents only tells you that something affects rewards, not which something that is.

just to make sure that i understand fully, you are saying that if i am in 6/20 and no challenge bonus is involved and i am fighting the same opponent if he has score equal to his pr or score drained much lower the rewards will be the same because his pr is the same.

that seems to me the way to test it for certain. if you are right then as score is drained off average rewards would remain constant.

i am more inclined to believe you are correct than ever before but i just want data to prove it. i am still reluctant to believe it due to several factors:

you didn't post your results against the travelling man.
you haven't posted your formula for testing.
if you are correct and you should be getting an advantage, why are our lines so close on history.

i am not asking you to post your formula, you did the work and can do with it as you choose, but i am trying to find a way to test it and prove you are correct.

All results are fighting vs Exodia, Power 3,476,647 ; MPR 2,360,823, clan target.

Occam's Razor ; PR / MPR : 5,379,424 / 3,879,388
1. $498, 473 XP
2. $332, 377 XP
3. $498, 362 XP
4. $498, 540 XP
5. $581, 335 XP

unequipping +125 DBs
Occam's Razor ; PR / MPR : 5,055,205 / 3,879,388
1. $581, 472 XP
2. $498, 380 XP
3. $663, 444 XP
4. $332, 442 XP
5. $498, 368 XP


It's obvious that * MY OWN PR * has absolutely no effect whatsoever on rewards in this case.

P.S. Exodia, Score 4,595,988
So obviously 0% Challenge Bonus in both cases.
My PR changed -6%, the CB$ reward hasn't changed, if it did change at all, it was by less than 0.17% (so that the 581$ reward remained unchanged).

unequipped everything except tattoo and weapon
Occam's Razor ; PR / MPR : 4,790,937 / 3,879,654
same Target, Exodia, still 0% Challenge Bonus
1. $498, 336 XP
2. $498, 446 XP
3. $663, 371 XP

Even reducing my PR from 5,379,424 to 4,790,937 (in other words a -11% drop) didn't manage to change the 663$ reward to 662$, so the effect, IF ANY, would be less than 0.15% for rewards.

I move to say that it's been pretty conclusively proven YOUR OWN PR has absolutely no effect on combat rewards whatsoever, and that the wiki's mention of VPR is the only one that actually matters.

I'm at work and don't have time to go through this entire thread just yet, but it sounds like my complaint of being punished for investing in large gear is invalid.

If so, I like this very much.

You're still being punished, just rewarded a tiny amount as well

If your Challenge Bonus is already zero, how are you being punished?

because it wouldn't be zero without NW-PR

You want a change to rewards, and I want Score removed from reward calculations.

So why don't we just remove the 'challenge bonus' all together?

That way, you're never penalised for increasing your PR, it actually only increases your rewards as it increases. Score becomes nothing more than a value to determin how much your 'winning' CB, and gaming it becomes a thing of the past. As does the 6/20 exemption.

Of course, we'd need to look at character growth, but then a rolling bonus based on the top MPR could go a long way to helping that.

Win/Win for everyone?

i have a hard time believing that pr (attacker & defender) is the main factor for base reward calculations. it seems very counter-intuitive for the game to both reward you for attacking high pr with high pr all while penalizing you for gaining pr.

it would make much more sense in my mind to reward people for doing more with less pr rather than the opposite. i just don't see how it cannot be buggy as it would be crazy for jon to set it up to encourage high pr and then later decide to punish it. it would have been easier at that point to just reverse the mechanic.

i surmise that either we still don't have it right for reward calculations or there is a bug in the formula.

You're "rewarded" for PR in the base calculations and penalized in the bonus calculations... doesn't seem all that insane to me.

challenge bonus is the final multiplier, if i understand it so instead of increasing rewards for high pr in the base reward calculation and then negating that in the challenge bonus phase through nw/pr linkage it would have been simpler to just reverse the base rewards so that the smaller an attacker's pr was in relation to the defender's pr then the larger the reward. in effect why have two steps that directly contradict one another?

Long journey home tonight, due to signal failures on the central line.

I thought a lot about my above suggestion of removing the challenge bonus, in it's entirety, and am beginning to really like the idea.

So to flesh it out;

No challenge bonus. Either way. Score is divorced from rewards totally, leaving it as the 'win' metre of CB. NW-PR link remains, as it has too.

Rewards are based off of PR. Yours, and your opponents. Your opponents provides the base rewards, yours provide a bonus, as they do currently. No 6/20 exemption needed.

But GL, there won't be a penalty to fighting down.

Not mechancially there won't, and this took me alittle while to get my head aorund. But there will be kind of penalty.

Imagine this (all numbers made up). You face an opponent of 100K PR. He gives you a base rewards of 150xp. Your strategy is a good counter to his one, and allows you to beat him when your PR hits 75K. You earn that 150 base xp per win. All the time.

Even when you pass his PR, you still get the same reward. Why wouldn't you? You're still able to beat him, it doesn't matter if you do so in 49 rounds, or 4.

Your next target is 500K MPR, and would give you 600xp base rewards. But his strategy is a good counter to yours, and you can't beat him until you match or even surpass his PR.

All this time, you could still be hitting that smaller opponent for his 150xp rewards (assuming he doesn't grow at all...).

So where's the penalty?

Well, if you were good enough to beat him while smaller, than when you reach his size, you sohuld be able to beat someone else, who's larger, for largers base rewards.

IF you don't, every BA you spend on your smaller target is earning you less rewards than you *could* or *should* be getting, and in essence, giving you a penalty for fighting down.

But it's not a mechanical 'minus'.

This I feel would go a long way to easing some of CBs problems, and bringing the desires of the playerbase closer together.

You could upgrade your items without worry of being penalised. Score couldn't be gamed. There woudln't be the need for artifical exemption zones.

What am I missing?

Apart from massive ELbows on new teams. Well, use ENC to counter that. Tweak it if necessary. That's what it's there for...

But for accurate portrail of characters, especially for rewards, the NW-PR link needs to remain (and as I have said before, using too small a weapon in comparison to your trained STR should give you a reduction in PR).

What do people think about this?

Good idea GL.

How do people catch up? Against the top people the best you could ever hope for is to match their growth, though chances are you wouldn't even manage that.

What Nat said. At least, with the right tweaks to your strat, right now you can catchup albeit very slowly. With your system it is not possible, make a way for ppl to catchup and this may have some grounds.

Or you pump your NW, to get a higher PR than the guy above you, to give you a slight bonus over his rewards when you're hitting the same target.

But the rolling Bonus would not only sort this issue, but resolve all the problems with the current Bonuses, and again, bring the playerbase closer together.

All that's left is for some score injection back into the lower game, to make actually playing a new character fun, and we're nearly there.

So, anything I've missed?

if anything is changed i would much rather see people rewarded for doing more with less than for spending usd.

Then we stil have the "why bother with gear at all, let's all just run tat-less mages" issue, and the divide in the players who like gear and upping it.

For accurate presentation of a teams power, NW-PR link must remain. The issue is then rewards, and being 'penalised' (for everyone who isn't the top team in the game) for using your gear.

And I think the problem lies int he bonus and malus of the Challenge Bonus. Dude, you've posted above questioning why is it here, when we already have the calcultation in game. And by the design, if you're rewarding people for doing more with less, you have to penalise them for doing the reverse.

And the counter to USD should be ENC. ;)

Ideally, your rewards would be based on two things, and two things alone : your score and their score.
Everything else would be irrelevant... MPR would be purely informative, and PR either wouldn't even exist at all or also be mostly informative.

Of course, this means we need a different way to calculate score, which results in a far more stable and fair score for everybody.
For starters, we need to not have it going up and down like mad in a single day, for starters - in fact, it shouldn't even CHANGE at all during a single day, and is best recalculated and changed during cache flush.
On top of that, we need to limit the amount of score gain and score loss, so that you can't either gain nor lose score too fast.

Optionally, so that PR and MPR don't become completely pointless, you could have score TOP-capped at 2*MPR (or something like that), and have PR determine how fast your score can alter at a maximum (higher PR, wider maximum per-day score variation possible).
The score changes should probably not be linear, but accelerating... the more your score changed recently, the more it CAN possibly change if there's any change that needs applied. If you're fighting under the same conditions for an entire week, and your current score is far from the score of your opponents (on average), then the first day would see the least change in your own score, second day a bigger change, third day a huge change, and so on until your reach the "proper" score area and stay there with minor fluctuations for a while. Then, because your score changed minimally recently, even if somebody new attacks you, again, it starts slow. An so on and so forth.

Of course, all of this opens up some exploiting potential with "let me attack you after you just dropped some gear so I can beat you" possibility (which becomes quite feasible with the stable, limited-changes score system), so we need some rules about equipping and unequipping gear.
For instance, there could be a "shadowed" period when unequipping gear, where (for purely auto-defend purposes) you actually keep on yourself the gear you used in the most of the recent attacks made by you for a good while. So, say, even if you changed from "weapon X" and "gear Y" to other weapons/gears (or nothing, naked char), it could take one day or even two for this change to register for those attacking you.
So, if you unequipped everything and wanted to defend like that sooner rather than later, you'd want to not have any recent fights with the big gear, so you'll have to fight yourself for a while like that, and they'll be losing battles almost certainly... so your score would probably already be dropping.


Or something to this extent.

We used to have a cooldown period for equipping and unequipping gear in the past.

Straight cooldown timers for equipping/unequipping would suck, make a tiny mistake, then have to wait a lot. Nah.

Sickone's suggestion would work a lot better than removing challenge bonus.

Why's that?

He said it himself already, no problems with massive fluctuation in Score, and keeping MPR and PR relevant. I think those are good reasons. Find a way to make the equipment "Cooldown" period relevant and this is a MUCH better idea.

Why, when divorcing Score form rewards is far better? And using PR for the basis of rewards gives more emphasis to PR and NW.

GL: It's very simple in case you have not seen it yourself. Your system while applicable is VERY exploitable and gives FAR to much emphasis on PR and NW without even having Score be relevant at all. I honestly feel that having all 3 of these involved in the rewards system would be better from a Char Growth Perspective.

Please explain Zen.