+150 DB, they do next to nothing (in General)

They really don't do that much, if anything, practically.
Sure, in theory, they're great, but naaaah.

coolstorybro

It is, isn't it ? :P

Let me tell you the other story about why it's next to pointless to have a melee weapon (regardless of size) alongside a big ranged one, even if it adds no PR at all (due to getting all the + from the ToA but not the weapon) and you're way below the encumbrance limit (so there's no downside)...

Just wait till you become exbow fodder from characters 1/2 or less your MPR.

http://i.imgur.com/5lzI2.jpg

That why you keep DB
Valvalis defeated Occam's Razor (death by jabberwocky) after 8 rounds of combat

DBs can be somewhat useful, +65's were enough to shave off a hit a round in ranged against some of the larger weapons for me, useless if it was an exbow against a tank but handy in other circumstances. My build is centered around taking damage though so I switched back to BoFs and SBs.

I couldn't beat you before, but I beat you now. Did you change something else as well?

Removed:

An Elven Long Sword [80x3000] (+0)
NW 23.46 mil ; 0 PR addition

A Pair of Displacement Boots [0] (+150)
NW 42.13 mil ; PR 6,937,120 -> 7,471,274

___

Of course, I could use them purely defensively, and always take them off when *I* am fighting but putting them back on afterwards.
Offensively, they don't add nor remove any targets from my list.

I'll take your DBs if you care to donate them :)...or insta yours with my +135 ones!

They do help but some tanks and weapons are nowadays really huge. I put my DBs back on my "tank" after a long absence - helped me marginally against Joel but effect was otherwise negligible against others that are crushing me.

And,yes,as you stated,their "aid" was only for defensive purposes..the EBs I generally used were more useful to boost tank's stats..

The problem is not in the DBs...

The problem is in PR

Back in the day its was possible to run a decent tank team without usd so there were much more physical dommage done overall. Now its all ROBF, GA. Reason why heavy tank are doing so much better as AC work again ROBF GA DD physical dmg and give some protection again drain. DB help only again physical dmg.

Like Titan said, the PR addition is just bordering on the ridiculous.

P.S. @ Duke : You seem to be mostly beating me with them on too :P

There are a number of opponents that would be on my kill list if they were not wearing their DBs. Knocking off 1.5 hits per round is VERY significant. Particularly if you put them on a major minion. Even worse if that minion has 400 or so armor class.

And, as Ranger said, they definitely help against low level ExBow or AxBow specialists. Typically they have low dex and count on the + to hit. A good pair of DBs nixes any chance of having your stats burned.

So, I think I'll be keeping my pair. They may not KO all tanks and archers like they used to, but they still are very valuable.

The only thing I don't like about them is that the PR boost is overrated.

Excellent analysis Miteke.

If an archer does 1M damage a hit with their bow, not unreasonable at the upper levels, 1.5 hits a round is 9 hits total. That is 9M less damage over the missile portion of the fight.

And if you get to melee, it can nullify all their PTH and most of their CTH due to the penalty they have in melee rounds.

Even with my bow, vs +200 DBs, I miss completely in melee rounds.

The NW/PR aspect of the game is a joke now. But to say 150 DBs do not help is just shortsighted.

Yes. DBs are great, weapons are great, losing 20% of your CB for the rest of your opponents just b/c you want to wear DBs for 1 opponent is what's the joke here.

This is a post to signify my agreement with the three posts above me

The alternative is to not fight that one person, and only equip the DBs for defense.

And I personally hate defensive setups.

Yeah.. or remove everyone else and just fight that person. I think it's ridiculous forcing someone to make a choice between those decisions. If you have armor, it should help you, not hinder you.

I would have thought that ENC would have made NW/PR obsolete.

At least that was my hope.

While ENC is skewed more towards lower minion characters, it is a balance between the power of multiple minions/kill slots and fewer minions/few kill slots/available spell slots.

There's still some merit to PR. For instance, a base item like a HOC adds very little ENC, but it definitely adds power to your team. That is signified in the PR increase.

A base HoC adds nothing to PR. Yet gives quite a lot of additional power.

It is when you upgrade it, then the PR shoots up.

There's merit to PR, just not in it causing items to be a hindrance to your team b/c they lower your rewards :)

isn't that exactly what the challenge bonus was created for though?

Idk, wasn't here then. All I know is, when I'm farming six people, and putting on a pair of DBs allows me to add 2 more people. However, in doing so, it lowers the CB of my other 6 opponents by 10-15%. Basically making it a bad decision to put on the DBs. It makes for poor economy and game design to disincentive owning armor and increasing its power.

It adds strategy though and that's what I thought this game was mainly about.

That's not strategy in my mind, that's minimalism. But, to each their own I guess.

Also, there's a lot more to this game then just strategy. Players should rewarded with their money, using it in the way they want. Forcing them down one path b/c it's the only strategically viable way is bad design.

if it weren't for challenge bonus as it is now implemented, then wouldn't the same thing occur? it would just be throw as much money at it as you can as the only path rather than upgrade intelligently?

No, the upgrade intelligently part would be upgrading the items intelligently in a way that maximizes the size of opponents you can beat with your limited funds. If we're talking about unlimited funds, that's what ENC should be there for.

Yeah, the HOC was a bad example :)

The phenomena you are describing, Titan, is similar to how armor in Diablo has minimal strength requirements before you can wear it. Practically every game has some similar mechanism to restrict that kind of abuse. CB's is pretty forgiving.

jon stated himself that encumbrance wasn't good enough to replace pr at the top which is why we still have it. he also asked for input on how to unify something but it never happened.

But, at the top it doesn't matter... no one is receiving CB anyway...

It does seem to be a different game at/near the top then in the lower/mid ranks.

Once you pass a certain point, and receive little/no CB, anything goes only subject to ENC loads.

Whether this is a good thing is up to individual interpretation.

am i at the top?

PR is beneficial at the top. There, the more you have the better it is to have more.

There's like 2 people at the top 10 scores getting CB. You and Xeno, both are getting it b/c your wall sets on on small minions. Yet people like me get penalized, b/c I put my stuff on my large minion...

I could make changes, probably receive a CB, but would it be a better strategy, no! There's currently 2 people in this game that can beat me at 100%, 2! Yet, I'm not getting a CB b/c I'm not worrying about strategy? Hmph, no I'm worrying about winning, and not being a minimalist and doing the most with little. I'm just worrying about doing the most. And that's what we should be incentivizing, doing the most, however it's done.

in my opinion, just looking at the name challenge bonus tells me all i need to know about which theory jon was working off of.

the system already gives you an inherent bonus by having more pr by being able to defeat higher pr opponents doesn't it?

Base rewards are affected by it as well.

Challenge bonus 1%

Don't leave me out Titan, I'm hurt.

Only if one could actually FIND other people with scores higher than their own PR... which you can't exactly do that easily.
It's a combo problem, really... one part the oddness//weirdness of the NW-PR link, one part the nigh-arbitrary//unbalanced nature of the score system.

We have endlessly debated the NW-PR link before, and it has been beaten like a dead horse in the past, with opinions split either way (it's only been getting worse ever Encumbrance was introduced), HOWEVER what's usually swept aside and normally discussions about it die down rather suspiciously fast is the decrepit relic that is the SCORE SYSTEM.

So... how about we talk a bit about the score system.

One would expect (since the "challenge bonus" is linked to one's own PR and the opponent's SCORE) that one SHOULD at least in theory be able to manage a rather high (or maybe even maximized) challenge bonus if only one was to fight (and actually manage to WIN AGAINST) the top score person in the game if only one decided to do it "naked" (i.e. with PR equal to MPR - that also means NO TATTOO, by the way).
Let's look at the top 10 scores... well, they're NOW hovering somewhere in between 9.5 and 10.3 million. Which would basically mean one would need to be LESS THAN 4.75-5.15 mil MPR to even be able to get a 100% challenge bonus against them, assuming one could win against them with no NW at all (which is basically next to impossible). And I also mean no tattoo (or only a RoE). It's worth mentioning again.

But... hey... how much PR do those guys have anyway ? Well, the top score of 10.3 has... wait a second... over 14 mil PR ?
That can't be right, can it ? Well, apparently, it can.
So who's beating him ? Wait, what ? A SINGLE OPPONENT IN THE ENTIRE GAME ? And that guy has... hmm... 10.3 mil PR ? And a score slightly below that ? What the...

If anything, I expect a person that barely gets beaten by anything to have a score ABOVE double his MPR, closer to double his PR, actually.
So, yes, I would fully expect "The Immortals" to have a score somewhere closer to 25 mil if not 28+ mil, but barring that, heck, AT LEAST a 15.3 mil (double his MPR), preferably 16+ mil... not the pathetic 10.3 mil he has now.


The entire system is rotten to the core and needs to be re-evaluated from scratch.

If you want to start with some "quick and dirty" fixes, start with these:

* RIGHT NOW, for one time only, if any person has a score lower than their PR, boost the score up to their PR ; this is just to "kickstart" a slightly less pathetic overall score situation

* boost the score gains of the attacker when the attacker's current score is lower than his double his own MPR (but do not increase the losses of the defender)

* lower score losses smaller against "repeat taps" (both in quick succession and in the past few hours) but do not lower the gains of the assailant

* increase the "score gained by training XP" top cap to 2*PR instead of the current pathetically low value ; yes, that is not a typo, increase the cutoff to 2*PR, not 2*MPR, nor 1*PR nor 1*MPR

Brain fizzy, required is sleep, redundant words are occasionally sometimes repetitive every now and then before in the previous post. Adjust as reading for own better comprehension. Blargh. Cough. Snore.

Score is specifically not designed to do that.

Resetting score to PR has been done before.


I believe this is already part of the system.


This can be abused.


This is set to less than PR which can potentially (though not likely) be more than 2*MPR.


Score system is designed so that the top player can only possibly reach their PR in score. It would take forever to get higher than that. With just 1 person beating them consistently I would expect score to be exactly where it is unless that 1 person were unbeatable themselves.

The abuse potential is minimal as long as the cap is reasonabe.
The only actual, noticeable and harmful abuse happened when there was no cap at all, and people could create millions of score out of next to nothing for next to no "cost".

Indeed that is right but you are forgetting one important thing. All score increases are basically capped at your PR. One other thing. Challenge bonus is exactly that. Its a bonus, not something everyone is expected to get.

Or, better still - drop this whole challenge bonus concept of "score" and "PR" - just make it score-vs-score, and only update score at cache flush based on overall fights in the day (most adjustment) AND whole week (least adjustment).

So why has my character consistently been getting a score well in excess of its PR for pretty much its entire lifetime ? And why are so many N*Bs running around with scores many times their own PR ?

Just admit it - the current score system is a pretty pathetic way to determine who gets a challenge bonus or not.

You might consider it pathetic but it actually works fairly well.

PR vs PR is easily abusable and score takes that change into account. The reason you've had more score than your PR is because the people at the top have less score than their PR. They lose score so you get more score. Score vs score wouldn't do work for a challenge bonus at all.

Why not MPR v Score?

There are 2 changes needed to the score system though. One is for stalemates to not change score at all. The second is for draws to work like loses/wins in that it closes the 2 scores together but not as much and it both lowers the higher score and raises the lower score.

MPR is less accurate at portraying the true strength of your team.

Not in my mind....

Weapons and your money should be independent of your char progression. You can keep PR as a simple Token of a chars power just for assessment, but it shouldn't factor into CB.

What game is a strategy game where we *literally* incentivize people to take as many things off as possible, fight smaller people, and beat a few % of people, so long as they can get a higher CB... No that's not what a good game does. A good strategy game incentivizes strategies that beat the most of people, or the largest of characters, no matter what the path.

That punishes lightly equipped characters far far too much Titan. Right now the game does it's best to both reward and punish teams for having equipment and also for not having equipment. For instance stat boosting items will add less PR to your team than the actual level increase through training the same amount. Another thing is that tattoos make up a huge portion of your team. A base home grown tat still has 1/3 of the total levels of your team in tattoo levels.

Weapons aren't very accurate at the moment though in several ways.

Tell me what I said isn't true and I'll take back all I said, tell me we don't encourage people to be smaller people with smaller items, and I'll eat my words.

Are you sure this is truly the case? This may be the impression a lot of people have but in actuality the game is not so clear cut as that. Often times for me, there are times when its better to go for the lesser CB, other times the CB is what is better.

CB is like the strong nuclear force ... where as PR base rewards increase is something along the lines of gravity or EM... yes I'm sure this is the case.

Easy example: At the upper game unless you are getting above a 5% challenge bonus it is better to slap on the gear.

At the low game getting up 1 base reward tier is worth several points of challenge bonus.

Yes I agree, but I always speak about midgame, games like this it is always important to have a very strong midgame. Right now, 4-6M MPR, you're 90% of the time better of taking off half of your armor. What kind of strategy is that... that's not strategy, that's minimalism.

To be specific at the low game each base reward tier is worth on average 9% or more of challenge bonus. Basically this means even if it will cut your challenge bonus by 9% increasing your PR to the next tier will not lower your rewards. By low game I mean 1 1.5 mil and below. The lower you are the more its worth. At 7 mil MPR each tier is worth about 3-4% of challenge bonus.

The bottom line for me is that when NW-PR came into being the item market died, whatever other factors may be at play, it's the single biggest contributor in my opinion. The notion that it somehow makes a purer game makes me want to rip out the three hairs I've got left.

One thing is true though. The longer the game lasts the more important challenge bonus becomes.

You've got more than 3 hairs.

This is one of the many bad things about the current system.


Why is this true?

That's because base rewards increase at a flat rate on a non linear scale.

Yes, no one is saying you should get rid of CB...

The CURRENT score system, sure, it wouldn't.
The one I was proposing (only changes at cache flush, once a day, all the fights in the last week mattering, later days carrying more weight, only slowly changing either way) would make a whole lot more sense.

So, you mean, to YOU, it makes sense that when comparing somebody beating me (8,731,424 score, 7,482,379 PR, 5,339,996 MPR) vs somebody beating "Incompetent Misfits" (Score 9,921,921 ; Power 11,552,550 ; MPR 7,678,237), they should only get only a measly 14% additional challenge bonus at best ?!?

So, do you dislike MPR v Score?

Or, let's put it another way...
Incompetent Misfits Max Tattoo Level 25,094,163
Me, Max tattoo 15,324,593
Most likely difficulty beating them compared to beating me : radically higher.
Additional challenge bonus : negligible.

I do because its inaccurate. Plus PR vs score leaves you with more freedom. MPR vs score would force tattoos to become far more indispensable and also make it a much more USD wins game.

I dislike the way score is calculated, hence I dislike score vs anything as long as the score system remains the same way it is now.

ENC should be there for USD, if it's not doing its job already, fix it. Tattoos are already required in this game if you want to do well, unless you're just going for character growth, but hey, that's one of the problems right. Forcing you not to use good items so you can grow faster :P

You and I have very different definitions of the word "inaccurate."

Half all tattoos in the game (level, not necessary to half nw), half max tattoo and half enc. This is a ballpark estimate of what would be needed in order to disassociate from PR.

Nice to see that you think 14% challenge bonus is negligible sick0ne.

This also means halving the speed of tattoo growth.

I don't see why the tattoo thing needs to be done, I've rallied against tattoo blender for years, but I see those as to separate things.

I guess you don't see a problem of adding half again as many levels (actually its probably more as that's just tat level not how many levels per tat level the tat gives, which is usually more than a 1 to 1 ratio) as you have total levels with absolutely no drawbacks or change in your relative level.

Tattoos should grow AS FAST OR FASTER than your MTL, making USD far less relevant for THAT. It would also curbstomp the idiocy that is running NCBs to grow tattoos.
Ideally, you'd do that by lowering MTL to 66% of its current value OR EVEN LOWER, not by making tattoos grow faster. This means you can't earn more CB$ growing/selling tats to stores, there is no reason to ever run a NCB to grow one that's below max, and the additional power granted by them is also lower (making buying a really big one a useless thing, so USD matters far less).

Besides, they're already as good as indispensable in their current form and at the current limits. The only reason to NOT wear a "regular" tattoo (if you can manage//afford to buy one) is if you want to wear a RoE "tattoo slot" item instead, and even that is only useful in the MID-WAY OF THE ACCELERATED N*B PHASE, after which anything other than a regular tattoo is 99.9999% of the time at best borderline stupid.

Negligible COMPARED TO THE DIFFICULTY of defeating the presented opponents.
It's like saying "lift 20 pounds, earn 100$ ; lift 800 pounds, earn 114$".

Well, most of the game is like this:

lift 100lbs 5 times = $500

then you work out, lift 120lbs 5 times = $480

...

I wonder if real competitions should work that way. Umm, we're sorry sir, but this man actually lifted just slightly less than you with weaker muscles, we're going to have to give him the trophy, he did more with less.

allowing the real world competitors to immediately do better with cash expenditure seems just as silly in my mind! ; )

how would you change enc to limit usd influence?

the item market was doomed for many reasons: population decline, salvage yard and the ability to disenchant are additional factors.

Money doesn't appear out of thin air in CB dude, unless you use USD, in which case ENC should take care of that instance.

enc was never designed to do that though and thus historically isn't broken. the pr/cb mechanism was designed for that and thus historically isn't broken either since it accomplishes this.

as i asked above if you want to unify the two, how would you do it?

but if you fight an enemy, u get CB.. ._. and u cant steal money from others, so it does come out of thin air? :D

Ideally:

* on ENC limits vs CB$ earned vs XP gained : you would need to be earning slightly more CB$ than you could use due to ENC (initial "free ENC" aside) if you ran a NW-based strategy perfectly (no backtracks, no waste, no disenchants) while only purchasing BA twice a week (XP times) ; MAYBE also raise the "free ENC" from 100k per minion to 1 mil per minion or even 5 mil per minion - you don't really want to totally discourage CASUAL USD spending, only slightly reduce the importance of heavy-duty USD spending

* on tattoos : "regular" tattoos grew faster than MTL (via drastic reduction of MTL, not via tattoo growth rate changes), and even lesser tattoos would be somewhat of an option (for instance, if MTL was halfed, that would mean (with unaltered tattoo growth rates) that a lesser tattoo would grow at 2/3 of MTL growth, while a regular tattoo would grow 33% faster than MTL

* the salvage yard and disenchant thingy should accept ALL items not just "valuable" ones (maybe even boost the disenchant return rate to 66% instead of 50%) ; the shops should only sell BASE items however (to prevent exploits), the only exceptions being items sold by other players to the shops (if they were silly enough NOT to disenchant first themselves)

Would you mind explaining why? I've never seen a need to conserve CBD as an issue in this game.

Occam's Razor - single minion archer
PR / MPR : 7,482,812 / 5,340,306
Max tattoo : 15,325,702

Net Worth: $201,873,338
Encumbered at: 816,359,506

It discourages newbies from investing into base or near-base gear (which DOES get radically better with early upgrades)... or rather said, it doesn't make it clear enough to them that they're wasting a lot of CB$ on essentially junk for doing this, then you end up with a situation where they go "screw it" and either quit or start buying CB$.

You do not want to have a system where most newbies essentially squander a large portion of their money almost certainly.

Also, the higher up you go, the harder it is to switch strategies without wasting CB$, due to the fact people are unlikely to want to (or afford to) purchase a huge NW item with cash up front (especially since very few people even have that kind of cash on hand) and due to the fact you quite often may want to switch NW on armor pieces around (and also maybe from weapons to armor or vice-versa)... although I SUPPOSE that if you also introduced armor to the salvage yard AND MAYBE even made it all common (a single "salvage yard" for all items - ranged, melee and armor), that would be far less of a problem (especially with that second option).

It's not like the XP penalty for retraining wouldn't be harsh enough already.

Alternatively, you could make disenchanting grant back 95%-98% of the NW (just like XP retrains) with the same caveat (you must completely disenchant an item, not gradually).
You would have to remove forging from the game then though. Or at least either noticeably raise forge fees or reduce forge effectiveness (at least that of some items).

The XP penalty for retraining isn't very harsh anyway. We're just on a */20 BA system where every BA is extremely valuable.

Whoops, what's that on the bottom of my shoes? Looks like a soapbox. Sorry!


And honestly, I think the weapon problem you referenced could be solved if new players weren't restricted from Chat until they finished the tutorial. Ugh. Let them into chat immediately!

Challenge Bonus always existed, Jon just choose to publish it during fights at some point, so it used to work JUST FINE before NW-PR

There's a difference between "working just fine" and "not being aware why things are cruddy".
This is the latter, not the former.
It NEVER worked fine. We just never knew what the problem was exactly beforehand.

It worked well enough that on CB1 players were able to take top MPR spot without a bonus...

This would kill USD in this section of the game, not just reduce it. It would also have the added affect of killing the economy for tattoo's. But it wouldn't curbstomp the NCB growing tats. It would just mean those tats would be sold at store price.

Asking for enc to be based on how much money you make including some of the bought ba deducted and then also making disenchant so return so much more money is going to smash the economy into nothing.

Just so you know these don't just affect USD. This would affect all players and make it meaningless to be economically strategic (which is a reason some people play this game). You'd be taking a huge chunk of the strategy out of the game.

Meh, who cares anymore, not like anything will ever change for the better anyway.

And yes, I am serious about that statement.
There is next to zero chance of any actual GOOD revolutionary new system coming into place because the "old guard" hang on to all the "good ole' stuff" that's not really any good at all to begin with, just because that's what they got used to from the get go.
Basically, coming down to "if you don't like it, maybe CB is not for you, find another game or make your own game".
Then the same people wonder why the attendance is down in the crapper and keeps going down.

No, it's NOT the graphics, presentation or whatnot. Stop telling yourself that lie. It's the core gameplay, and it's FLAWED. The same way CB1 was flawed beyond redemption and CB2 came along, with the hopes of _IT_ being a longer-living thing (ideally, thought to be perpetual). Now CB2 is due for a bit of euthanasia and CB3 is up for a lease on new life. But CB3 will never come. CB2 will maybe slightly recover for a while, but its end fate is sealed because nobody who CAN do anything about it has the guts or disposition to do any of it.

You may hate that fact, and you may even claim it's not a fact (it's actually denial, but whatever), but that doesn't change reality.

And you feel that destroying the economy completely will make the game better?

one person's flawed game mechanic can be the sole reason another loves the game just as one person's reality may or may not hold for everyone.

Rebuilding from scratch would be a better term, but eh.


Total subscriber numbers. Just saying.
Hey, how about a poll ?

Options:
* total rebuild of the game's economic system (lowered ENC, lowered MTL, universal salvage yard, 95% disenchant and drop forging)
* mostly against ENC changes
* mostly against MTL changes
* mostly against forge removal
* totally against any changes
* other (write in comments)

you would find out more by not doing a poll based on what your pet peeve of the week is.

i would suggest creating a thread that asks what others see as the main flaw for cb2. i feel there would be many answers which is why it is virtually impossible to embrace development by democracy.

i know what flaw i would choose! ; )

Pretty sure over 70% of the public would say the bonus system. Especially if I could get the dozens of people on here who left b/c of it.

A game like CB (even if it's by far not the most complex one) is a rather complicated system, and "fixing" any particular individual system in a way that will improve satisfaction momentarily is not guaranteed to actually be a step in the "right" direction (namely, the best it can be within some loose constraints) because of the interconectedness of things.
One may perceive as _issue_A_ to be the "main flaw" in that changing it in a certain way would be beneficial in the short run, but it may well be that overall, that single improvement will lead to a drastic decrease in quality in the long run when combined with whatever the next "main flaw" short-term best solution might be.

THE FLAW is not a single formula that can be tweaked, it's not a single subsystem that when altered it will magically make everything better. It's the sum total of ALL of those things, working in concert, with each individual change if enacted separately actually being more likely to be leading to a worsening of the situation in short term for sure, but maybe also long term, and even if all of them would be enacted at the same time, it's still not guaranteed the short term situation would be noticeably better, and maybe people would not have the patience or foresight to "stick with it" until it actually gets a chance to get better.

Basically, CB2 has been neglected and slowly dying for a long time, it's on life support now, and every little tweak one could make at this point is more likely to only provide palliative care instead of a cure.
It is high time for CB3, where the lessons of the failings of both CB1 and CB2 can be addressed and countered pre-emptively.

The IDEAL situation for CB3 would have a few over-arching principles that need to be followed as closely as possible. HOW you do it doesn't really matter all that much, as long as the end effect is as close to the desired one.
Following ALL of them precisely and at the same time might as well prove next to impossible, but it can be a radically better system overall compared to whatever we ever had at any time in the past.


Here's a list of SOME of those design guidelines, as far as they come to mind right now:

* If not downright forbidden, THE IMPORTANCE//RELEVANCE OF PURCHASING CB$ OR ITEMS WITH CASH *DIRECTLY* FROM OTHER PLAYERS SHOULD BE MINIMIZED, while the importance of doing the same from the game itself could even stand to be ever so slightly increased ; most importantly, this would mean NW should matter less in terms of who is able to beat whom and MPR/tactics should matter a whole lot more

* a highly granular server-side real-life cash equivalent currency to be used for paying the services that are now paid only via cash (supporterships, item namings, special item store, etc) ; think "facebook credits" if you want a rather well-known example ; item namings should be also made more granular (in that you could name one item for one month if you wanted to, at 1/24 of the current price, using this more granular currency)

* loyalty to the game should be rewarded more often and more than symbolically - think rewards for achieving milestones (battles challenged, CB anniversaries, MPR big round numbers reached, etc) in CB$, novelty items, special item or naming store "credit" and so on and so forth ; supporters should get amplified//additional benefits for the same rewards ; supportership "cost" could be radically lowered but transformed into a subscription type service rather than a one-off deal (or we could keep both methods)

* WITHOUT luck or time-sensitive circumstances being a factor (in other words, they should always even out in time), ANY player who matches any other player in strategic skill and perseverance (REGARDLESS of USD spending) should be able to get within 90% of the other's MPR within a reasonable timeframe (say, two years tops)

* STICKING WITH AN EXISTING TEAM OF NON-NEGLIGIBLE MPR SHOULD ALMOST ALWAYS BE A RADICALLY BETTER THING THAN STARTING A NEW TEAM FROM SCRATCH ; whether that happens via some form of adjustable bonus for rewards or BA to burn or anything else is of a distant secondary importance

* one should be able to VERY SLOWLY but surely build up something that used to be a 1-minion team into a 4-minion team AND VICE-VERSA a 4-even-minion team into a 1-minion-plus-3-almost-killslots team at very little COST in terms of CB$/USD ; practically speaking, this is the most realistically achievable by having a RoE-like non-tattoo item (preferably even a shirt item so it does not interfere with the strategies) and also allowing people to hire 0 XP minions at a token price

* FROM THE FIRST DAY, people should NOT NEED to login more than once a day in order to at least theoretically be able to reach nearly their full potential ; however, logging in more often should be far more CONVENIENT and only slightly better (not flat out the best choice by far)

* people should be able to take a vacation (of even up to a month or so) and upon their return, they should be able to recover the lost ground in the immediately following timeframe (which could be just as long or even double length, as long as it can happen) ; the following directive is linked to this one

* the game should lose its only "negative" PvP element - the clan score loss ; simply make the clan point gains more granular instead, to compensate for the fact nobody will actually lose any points (you will still have a pretty good incentive to fight clans that are better-scoring), and even boost the gains of top scoring clans higher than the current 15% max, say even as high as 30%, to entice teamwork and clan participation ; also, INSTEAD of limiting clans to a certain number/strength of team members, simply alter scores based on the system-perceived strength of the clan much more than the current +/-10% (heck, make it even -90% up to +50%)

* ENC, challenge bonus, PR and the NW-PR link should be conflated into a more streamlined system
*** ENC should essentially CAP the top NW of gear, reducing their effectiveness - for instance, a 50% ENC should leave you having an effect of ending up with almost the same (as close as possible, rounded down) final effect as if you would only wear 50% of the NW spread evenly across whatever items you are wearing (thus making any additional NW over ENC limit useless BUT NOT POTENTIALLY SIGNIFICANTLY DAMAGING)
*** the rewards for beating a target should ONLY depend on how well raked the target is compared to how well ranked you are in the overall fighting patterns of the entire game
***the ranking system should NOT permit a too rapid ascent nor descent for any one team, and the higher you go the slower the ranking changes should happen (ties as far as ranking goes are not only welcome but actually encouraged)

* there should never exist a part of the game that makes any player feel "cheated" out of a significant part (like, say, over 20%, preferably not even 10%) of their progress (and hence, potential ranking) whenever they wish to alter their current strategies ; whether you do it through an universal salvage yard or higher disenchant rates or even a blacksmith discount upon disenchant instead of CB$ (so that you will not be able to directly convert NW into cash too efficiently, but you will be able to move NW around with far less overall losses), the details don't really matter all that much



and I bet you could come up with even more

Sickone, please in the future, not so much caps. I know you strongly believe in this; but it makes it hard for me to c&p this stuff into chat :P

agree


agree, and I like the idea of getting item namings as milestone rewards. This would also encourage spending, as a user who got a naming and it expired may want to pay to renew it - kind of a "try to see if you want to buy" deal. It shouldn't come around often, though.


agree


disagree, most would then go single minion and hire 3 killslots for defensive purposes when they finish burning their BA; think the AS/PL minion with AoF and a familiar for the best example of why. Moreso if they decide to hold onto 3 armor sets, so they can essentially pick up and drop 3 walls as they like without having to dilute exp.


disagree, unless we're going to make this a full on cellphone game or browser add-on.


stupid


agree if you can present some method for clanning to actually work without it


agree


disagree, this is really more a personal definition of "cheated." Losing exp prevents constant retraining, monetary penalty at the salvage yard works the same way but with weapons. Think about the implications to this.

I'm not spending 3M 3x a day just for a good defense. Also, 0xp minions could not equip armor sets, or anything of value really. They would literally just be kills slots.

An "exploit" that is trivially fixed by having a rapidly escalating "cooldown" timer on retiring minions (with a very slow recovery down towards nominal levels).
Basically, people could do that once for the whole set almost instantly, twice for the full set somewhat conveniently (to accommodate people that might genuinely be experimenting with minion setups), third set becomes problematic for anybody going for the exploit angle, fourth set and any more after basically useless for any sort of exploitation, unless you really wait a long, long time between "exploit" attempts (this to allow people to re-experiment some time later).

No need to even fix an exploit that cost someone 6-9M a day; they'll go broke in less than a month :P

Does not compute.
If anything, the CURRENT timings of the game are better suited to a "cellphone" game or whatever else you want to call it.
The "once a day" approach is ideally suited for people with a job and even a family, because it lets them select a time of day they might be around a computer and have some spare time... if they can check in more often, sure, why not, but they should have nothing significant to lose by ONLY checking in once a day.

Right now you NEED to check in 5 times a day early on (BA cap reached in 5 hours 20 minutes from zero and not everybody will check in at the max interval if they want to lose no BA), which means you not only have to lose sleep, but also neglect work or maybe even family time... and then ONLY MUCH LATER ON it can potentially become a 3 times a day thing (check in every 8 hours 40 minutes to not lose any BA from scratch), which even that can be problematic - when you wake up you hardly have time to burn BA if you hurry up to get to work (and you probably DIDN'T burn BA as the last action of the day before going to sleep), you maybe can't login from work, then you have to commute home and maybe do some shopping, then who the heck wants to burn BA first thing you get home... so you may have 2 hours after BA burn to sleep, 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour commute, 8 hour job, 1 hour commute, 2 hours chores and rest before getting to a computer... that's 20 hours minimum between logins to really make it a WORKING-MAN-FRIENDLY GAME. Preferably 24 hours or even longer.

This is tied to the above post about once a day vs many times a day, cellphone type games and so on.



How exactly is not wanting to think about the CHORE that is CB during your family holiday exactly so stupid ? And why should a CB-less vacation mean a PERMANENT loss of position ?
Oh, wait, daddy can't come to the <insert_fun_location> with you right now, please wait 15 minutes while daddy burns some BA. No, sorry honey, we can't go to the <insert_fun_event> right now, I need to get to a place where I can connect to the internet because I'm getting close to my BA cap.

Sickone, not everyone can be on top.

If you removed the -2 score penalty of the clan fight user RIGHT NOW and did absolutely nothing else, how exactly would it significantly and *negatively* affect "clanning" RIGHT NOW again ?
All clan scores will be positive (if you count 0 as positive, or, well, at least non-negative), and that's about it.
Still only the top 25% clans will gain any bonus at all (not unlike what happens on Saturdays already), and the largest bonus would be for clans nearer to the actual top, with the bonus dependent on RANKING, not absolute score value.
You still have competition over bonus values.

Sure, without additional changes, it would mostly be a competition over who burns most BA, but let's face it... in the vast majority of cases, isn't it basically what we already have anyway ?

The changes would involve a higher granularity of clan score earnings, and it could actually IMPROVE the clan fighting system.
For instance, you could introduce 5 separate clan point target clan score tiers (top 5%, top 10%, top 25%, bottom 75% and lowest non-clanners) earning you 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 points and on top of that, an ADDITIONAL set of up to 6 points for fighting challenging clan targets (based on target MPR / your MPR), with 0.6 or below granting no clan points, between 0.6-0.9 only 1 point, 0.9-1.1 with 2 extra points, 1.1-1.4 with 3 extra points, and over 1.4 with 4 extra points.

So, for instance, fighting a target of roughly your own MPR in a clan placed in between top 10% and top 25% would earn you 3 plus 2 equal 5 points ; fighting a target of 40% higher MPR in a top 5% clan earns you 6+4 = 10 clan points ; fighting a non-bonused clan target of around 80% of your MPR would earn you 2+1 = 3 clan points, and so on and so forth.

I agree that not everyone can be ON top.
However, it's one thing to have a relatively even spread from top to bottom (or, worse, have the vast majority clustered near the bottom with very few near the top), and another completely different thing to have a good deal of people eventually end up clustered CLOSE TO the top with mostly just the quitters littering the middle and lower rankings.

The fun comes from a challenging but fair competition.
That's why you see boxing being fought on weight classes as opposed to all people together (the heavyweights will almost always win in that case).
The more people you get within a "FAIR SHOT" range of the top, the more fun and challenging the game becomes for more people (especially those ON top).
Sure, you still need some differentiation, but it doesn't need to be the interval between 600 mil XP and 200 mil XP for the top 20% when it could just as well be 600 mil XP vs 500 mil XP for the top 60%, if you catch my drift (intentionally exaggerating numbers just to make a point).

Please tell us how you'd like the impact to be minimized and implemented.


Don't we have this in the form of a N*B? Though I'd prefer a rolling bonus...


I'm not sure this would help keep more people around. Also, comparing cb to pretty much any other online game, we have far less requirements of a player than an online game, especially since reaching "full potential" would require 24 hour gameplay.


If you're worrying about a game so much that you don't want to lose a top spot due to vacation, I think there are bigger problems on the horizon. Yes, it's work, but it's a game. And in the end, there comes a point when you won't want to, or can't, continue playing cb. It's not about seeing all your effort melt away; it's about enjoying yourself while watching your own progress.


The problem I see with this is simply that cb isn't a ranked game; it has score, but noone is number 1.

The blacksmith charges only an item which costs what 100K? And retraining costs like 2% exp. Free retrains could easily be problematic as people continuously retrain so that they don't get beaten by everyone else.

Titan, you seem to have misunderstood; he said hire 0 xp minions for a token cost. You're equating this to 1M as a "token" amount, and then using that as the basis for an argument that it would be too expensive. That's building a strawman out of salt blocks on cups of water. It's awful. :|


Interesting, it seems I can dump an armor set on a created minion on Safety Deposit Box with 0xp and it retains its AC value. Not that it matters, 3 kill slots against any of the archers in the game is incredibly significant for ranged damage reduction. You were saying?


Because you are removing everything that makes it possible to compete in the game. Your suggestions are equivalent to removing BA altogether, giving everybody a team with exactly equivalent everything, and just letting them fight it out. What's the point? Including both of your suggestions, how exactly do you advance your MPR standing against anyone?

If you can just disappear and come back to be exactly where you were, what did you achieve?

I highly suggest reading some articles on how gaming companies use specific hooks to draw players into their game.

By token, he was meaning relative I'm sure... 1M is commonly accepted as reasonable in any suggestions related to that that I have heard suggested.

So, 6-9M a day.. not worth it.

Hm...I see the problem. That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/139973-token-amount.html

1/170th is token.

Again, you're taking a word that means small, symbolic, or close to zero and using it as the basis in an argument for how expensive it is.

One of Sickone's actual suggestions in a previous thread. Trust me, you're taking his idea and twisting it incorrectly. If you don't believe me ask him yourself.

Btw, with that suggestion, to hire 3kill slots every time I used my BA, it'd cost me 63M CBD a day... you were saying?

A suggestion that would not be the same as hiring for a token amount.

I was under the assumption that Sickone knew what the words he was using meant. If the two suggestions were equivalent, that would not be the case.

I also did not see anywhere where Sickone referenced his previous idea as equivalent to the current one.

And yes, I agree, if it would cost you 63M then that would not be a token amount, and would be expensive.

Using it as small relatively. In hiring terms, 1M is rather small. It costs me >50M for the small minion, like 160M for the large one. 1M is tiny in comparison. It's the fact that you would be hiring 9 times a day, 270 times a month that adds up.

It can mean EITHER small AND/OR symbolic AND/OR close to zero, not necessarily ALL of them combined.
In this context, the word was meant to convey the desire for the hiring option to be "cheap enough" so that a person that wishes to do it would not be noticeably inconvenienced without actually naming an amount, leaving the discussion open as to the actual//exact amount it should cost for another time.

Right now, the cheap XP hiring option at my MPR all in a single minion cost roughly 50 mil CB$ for 10 mil XP, and the expensive option costs around 123 mil CB$ for around 41 mil XP.

In comparison, even 5.some mil CB$ (roughly the MPR) could be considered a "token amount", and that was just a very high ballpark number thrown around as a high limit for it that would still be borderline convenient.
Even compared to THAT "token amount", a much more trivial 500k could open up the road for exploitation.
And compared to both of the above, a nearly insignificant 50k would almost certainly be begging for abuse indeed.


Whether you combat the exploitation of this mechanic via adjusting what a "token amount" means, or by limiting the number of times you can do it in a certain timespan, OR ANY OTHER WAY, it is of much less relevance to the discussion than the fact you do want an everyman-affordable option to slowly adjust your team's composition and XP distribution no matter what situation you are currently in.
The fact that all the "exploit" scenarios can easily be countered in more than one way makes me think of people trying to find fault with the idea out of general (and misguided) principles rather than out of an actual concern.

Simply put : I don't really care HOW you do it as long as you do it. I give some ideas, whether anybody takes any of those into account or designs a completely different setup is irrelevant, what IS relevant is the need for it to happen.

If you would read the rest of the thread before that post, you would see a number of things I propose that could/would contribute to that, but they were objected to for being too specific and not quite to the liking of some of the commenters due to wider-reaching implications, or any other number of things.

For instance, the ENC changes.
Reducing the ENC slope value (but optionally, with more grace amounts for low-XP minions), which would reduce the total amount of NW people can stick on their minions without penalties.
Having ENC work simply to reduce the NW//effect of equipped items instead of altering base stats and AC, which is a much more straightforward way of doing it AND has the added benefit of no longer exempting certain classes of minions from feeling any relevant negative encumbrance effects AND also has the benefit of not needing to find "rightsized" gear (you can get oversized gear and just "grow into it").

Stuff LIKE that, and a few other things.



Sorry, but you're just failing to see the big picture, and it's been kind of staring in your face and shouting at you.
That particular system (the N*B) would satisfy that one particular guideline, yes, but it completely flies in the face of another more important and heavily emphasized guideline, the one concerning the disposability of teams (and the undesirability of that situation).

Remember, I stressed the fact that while one may not be able to exactly follow all those guidelines (as in, some guidelines may actually conflict with eachother and a compromise must be reached), one needs to try to get as close as possible to the spirit of each and every last one of those guidelines, not completely neglect one while following another to the letter.

Again with the big picture and you completely failing to see it.

No, there SHOULD NOT EVER come a point where you feel you HAVE to abandon CB because you can't put in the time.
It's all about NOT driving away users just because they no longer feel they can compete JUST because the LOGIN SCHEDULE they need to keep to compete at a level they feel content with is getting too demanding for their free internet time.
It's about being able to attract a long-term following of as many people as possible, and maximize their average lifespan within the game.

CB should be bending over backwards to accommodate you to the best of its abilities as long as your requirements are fairly normal as far as the average composite white/blue collar employee free time requirements go.

One could argue that whoever has the top score already is the current "number one".
Sorting by score you get a rank that is somewhat relevant to your ability to fight well. There you go, CB is already a stealth-ranked game. We actually have quite a few other ranks too... score, PR, MPR, MPB, highest level in any particular training field and so on and so forth.

The problem has a simple solution - if it isn't a ranked game already (doubtful, as per the above statements, but that's more a matter of semantics than actual substance) then MAKE it a ranked game.

Granted, sorting by score and getting that as rank... it's a pretty pathetic ranking system because score is a pretty poor indicator of actual combat performance, but that was exactly my point.
What was my point ? That it SHOULD become a pretty good indicator of combat performance, or barring that, create a different data field in which you calculate a value that would be able to do that.

Also, read the fine print - ties as far as ranking goes (especially near the top) are not only welcome, but actually encouraged.

Are you being intentionally obtuse here or did you just not have the patience to read through the early part of the thread ? Actually curious about that.

That particular section was referring to things like newbies picking up a particular piece of gear and upgrading it, only to later find out they screwed themselves in the process. You know, one that would NOT be accepted by the salvage yard, or for which a salvage yard does not even exist. Can you say "Heaumehead" ?

And it;s not limited to that only. What if you have invested in a 450 AC wall set and find yourself not needing it anymore but in dire need of CB$ ?
Who are you going to sell that gear to at nearly what it cost you to make it ? You'll be LUCKY to be able to insta-down it in several steps, at pretty poor rates, and out of those rates, you also need to be paying transfer fees... and by that time disenchanting at a 50% loss compared to the blacksmith fees you paid (because, hey, forging would have screwed up your progress and you could not afford to wait for a forger even if somebody else would have been doing it) sounds like an almost acceptable alternative compared to all the hassle you need to get through to actually only get something like 70% back, or maybe not even 60%.

THAT is the kind of stuff I am talking about.
HOW you decide to alter the system (or create a new one) in order to follow that guideline, again, NOT MY PROBLEM.
Sure, I gave some ideas as to how that would be possible, but you don't have to follow THOSE.
As for what ideas those were ? Stuff like an universal salvage yard (where you could exchange any piece of gear for any other piece of gear of similar NW, no longer limited to the same type), or maybe an alternative to disenchanting for CB$ in form of disenchanting for blacksmith credits (so if you reinvest them in NW from the BS into a different item, you could get, say, even maybe 95% of the NW back, for instance).


To re-stress the issue : I DO NOT CARE HOW ANY OF THE ABOVE THINGS ARE DONE, I CARE THAT THEY BE DONE.
If you have some pet peeve with any particular way of doing any of those things, don't do it that way ; if you have a pet project of how to do one of those, as long as it does not interfere significantly with the rest of the guidelines, heck, why not, do it. And so on and so forth. I don't care about the details, only about the big picture.
Whether we walk to the goal, drive to it, teleport there or simply wait for the goal to slowly roll towards us, whatever works, don't really care that much, as long as we DO get to the goal.

How about this for a comeback...
Am I to assume you are ALSO against tournaments that start off with all BA one would need and have a BA cap ? Are you saying that all such tournament would end in a tie, as opposed to a wide range of end results and a pretty clear winner ?
Or, hey, how about chess games ? What if in a long-running game, if the other guy goes to sleep, the one that stays awake gets to keep the clocks running or maybe even make an extra move while the other one slumbers ?

...

So, how would you advance your MPR standing ?

Pretty simple, actually.
THE SAME FREAKING WAY YOU DO IT NOW TOO.

Fight more challenging opponents and beat them.
Join a better clan or improve your current clan's standing.
Burn more natural BA than your opponent (hope your opponent misses logging in as often as needed to not lose any BA).
Spend more CB$ on BA than your opponent (hope your opponent doesn't).

Yes, the same way you do it now too.
Just with a less sleep schedule and vacation time wrecking



Reading comprehension challenged or yet again intentionally obtuse ?
No, you DO NOT "just" come back to where you damn well were before, you still have to put in the same level of effort as usual to recover the lost time, and all of that will take as much time or even a multiple of that away time. The important thing being that you EVENTUALLY CAN. Without needing to "reset". And without having to worry TOO MUCH that you'll be TOTALLY SCREWED if you go on a vacation without finding some person to transfer your character to and trust him to "level it up" while you're gone (and also pay transfer fees twice).
And you don't need to come back EXACTLY where you would have been if you never left, could still leave the whole "about 90% of that" in place, so there still is some penalty to leaving, but not a completely situation-wrecking one.

i truly like what we have in cb now more than what you describe, but if you created that game i would definitely try it!

it does seem to me to be similar to if someone went to a car dealer to buy a car and then proceeded to tell them their cars would be better if they had all of the properties of a boat. however, when told to go buy a boat the customer just rails at them about how their cars suck and how they should give the customer what they want.

when other customers say that they really don't want their car to float on water and pull a tube, they are then told that they are deluded, complacent or just plain stupid.

More like a boat dealership and they get you to buy a car instead, but yeah, in general, you would be right :P

Who abandons a game because they can't reach the top spot?

He doesn't want to be the top spot, he wants a game with a strong upper middle game; so that's there's more competition all around.

Such tournaments tend to include challenge bonus, as you are starting from the bottom, and that makes a particularly large difference in how far you can grow. Yes, if everyone has 0% challenge bonus and the exact same range of targets to pick from, I feel that the end results will be very similar because nobody will miss any BA. (also, I don't like those tournaments, I think they are boring.)


Making an extra move while the other guy sleeps isn't "the advantage of staying awake," it's being a douchebag. If this is your idea of how competition works...well, I can't really say I'm all that surprised. :)


Slowly, painfully, inch-by-inch with absolutely no measure of leniency for missing a BA? How does that fit with "vacation mode?"


To be fair, I do tend to respond to your posts more in the interest of watching you explode into capslock fury than because I actually have some concern for the game.

Hey here's a suggestion regarding vacation:
Maybe it might be possible to actually freeze the account for extended period of time? Like freeze BA regen etc...but the most important thing is that N*B and N*B are also frozen so that the player could come back later and continue from where he left off?

I mean that allows players the chance to take their mind off the game for a while and not have to worry about wasting a week of bonus and not been able to catch up right?

This is coming from personal experience cause there was a period of time where i couldn't use my com and it was pissing me off that i was burning away my once and only N*B. So yea i definitely feel shortchanged on my N*B :/

OB, you're not seeing the overall picture, for example, above you say gaining ground "inch-by-inch" the way you do now, is ridiculous and it doesn't fit well with a "vacation" time. This isn't want Sickone wants, he wants a game that is more lenient with the time you spend, but also more fluid so that a player who misses a month, and comes back and grinds for a long time effectively can compete, not win, just compete. Then, I believe he also wants a game where you're success is not measured in short 6 month spurts, but rather by long term commitments, meaning if you miss a month of BA over 6 years, you're doing better than someone who takes off 5 years and plays for six months. The current system we use not favors the latter.

Sickone be sure to correct me if I'm wrong. OB, you have to remember, if you're going to argue his suggestions argue them as a whole. You can't look at the great work of art and be like "I don't like her eye..."

Basically the first question anyone should ask themselves should be this.

Should a player who has played five years, missing maybe six-nine months of BA, be ahead of a player who has played five years, took four years off, and came back for a year solid?

If you answer yes then I urge you to think:

- Which does our system do?
- Which one is lazier?

How is the game more lenient with the time you spend by making each BA much much more valuable? That is what is gained by making it a log-in once a day. Nobody misses any BA, and you can't expect to gain any ground in this fashion. Since nobody is missing any BA, every single one counts as a point towards potentially advancing, and it is more valuable.

This simply doesn't fit with the concept of "vacation mode." If you're going to make players strategise and obsess even more about how to spend each BA, how are you going to incorporate a system that allows someone to catch up after missing tons of said valuable BA?


Yes I can :)

In case you hadn't picked up on this OB, Sickone is in favor of a RB, which would fix the problem you have with his suggested "vacation" time. Although I think with a well designed RB vacation time would be redundant.

I fail to see how this is supportive of Sickone's suggestion. It is only critical of our own system, which we can all agree is a piece of crap. Quite frankly, simply dropping the N*B from the game altogether is a solution to the question you've just posed.

I'm in favor of a RB. I agree with that totally. But that's contradictory to the concept of -decreasing- further the amount of playability available. I'm trying to explain why this is so.

What do you mean here?

As a little aside.

[quote]Also, 0xp minions could not equip armor sets, or anything of value really.[/quote]

Not strictly true. ;)

You could run 3 zero XP minions and put quite a bit of useful gear on them. AoI, BoF, AoL, AoF, MGS and SoC (probably more, but I'm rusty!) all provide their benefit regardless of minion stats, so work just fine on zero xp minions.

I once ran an 4 minion RoE team with three base minions (well two, I tried two different set ups), and used either PL or AS to leverage use out of the items held.

Like having an invisible 20 HP minion with a MGS and BoF backed by PL. Or using AS with three base minions and a mixture of AoI and AoL for targeting purposes.

An added benefit is as they are base minions, no matter how high you up their gear, it adds absolutely zero PR. ;)

I mean the two ideas contrast.

On the one hand, you have decreased login times and number of BA spent. Each BA becomes more valuable, because there is less of it and nobody is missing any, so the only way to get ahead is to make optimal use of each BA.

"Vacation mode" posits that you can leave for an extended duration, and then come back to competitive mode after a while. But in order to do this, you have to put the player back within competitive range of the others who have not been using vacation mode, which means their obsessively careful use of BA has been for naught - you're right back up there with them, despite having disappeared for a month or two. The rare chance of gaining ground because someone might miss BA, which was already reduced heavily by decreasing playability, disappears.

Essentially, the game becomes extremely stale at the top - similar to gameplay now where you can log in once every 9 hours and remain competitive, but to a greater extent due to increased BA value.

Either the vacation mode bonus puts you back at the bottom of the pack and you ARE still at a huge disadvantage for missing that extremely valuable BA, with a long, careful, obsessive grind ahead of you in order to regain position

or it puts you back in competitive play, and makes everyone else's hard efforts for naught, causing a disgruntled loyal playerbase

Does this make more sense?

I don't think you understand how RB works then...

RB would essentially allow players who take of time to catch up at a reasonable amount to those players at the top. RB is essentially a built in Vacation mode. NCB is a vacation mode, just it's one that incentivizes 6 month sprints, and disposable chars, while a RB rewards long term play and makes larger chars more valuable, even if they are not top 10.

I understand how RB works. You don't seem to understand how decreasing playability doesn't work with any form of vacation mode. They are two separate and opposing goals.

Tell me how RB differs from Vacation mode in the trouble you described?

come on Titan

Please, explain?

What would you like me to explain?

You're asking me to differentiate between two things I am not separating out for the sake of this discussion.

If you can't explain, I can understand your opinion, and therefore can argue against it, or for it if I end up agreeing with you.

Fine, I'll try again.


I posted this. You responded with:


I answered you in the post beginning with:


In that post, I used the term "Vacation mode," though both RB and Vacation mode accomplish the same thing in terms of trying to bring lower MPR characters back to the top, though Vacation Mode is assumed to work in the same manner and has not been fleshed out to the same extent as RB. You then posted:


And I responded with:


Which referenced back to my earlier post. Then you posted:


Which asks me to differentiate between two terms I was using interchangeably for the purpose of this discussion. I even said so:


So, again, Titan. What would you like me to explain? Either you want me to differentiate between two terms that I am using interchangeably for the purpose of this discussion, or you would like me to explain something else and I would gladly do so.

But in any event, before I do anything else, I'm going to go get a haircut now. :)

I think you guys are confusing two related but potentially independent things : a) on one hand, any form of self-adjustable/"rolling" bonus (which makes "disposable teams" a thing of the past) and b) on the other hand, a vacation mode with a recovery period afterwards.

A rolling bonus of any kind (be it in XP, extra BA or any other form) ensures that it's better (easier, more convenient, cheaper, etc) to grow a middle-ground character/team towards the top rather than dumping that character/team and starting a fresh one from scratch.
The rolling bonus would be ALWAYS active on ALL characters in the game, and would only depend on the ratio between your MPR and that of the top character (doesn't need to be linear, can have caps, can be tweaked higher or lower in certain areas, basically it can have any shape you want).

A vacation mode would place you TEMPORARILY out of the game (with some limitations/conditions to prevent abuse, like, say, a delayed start and a minimum period, maybe even also a limited total amount of time per year too if deemed necessary), and when you come back, you gain an ADDITIONAL bonus (on top of any other bonus you might have at the moment) to your growth rate.
The duration of the bonus and its magnitude are up to debate, but as a general rule of thumb, if you go away X days, you could either have a 50% bonus for 1.8*X days, or 90% bonus for X days, or 45% bonus for 2*X days, or even 30% bonus for 3*X days (basically, bonus duration multiplier times bonus equals roughly 90%), which means you act AS IF you were only gone 1/10 of the time you were actually gone.

How is that any worse than wrecking some of your "other stuff" time every now and then to login (to burn BA, lest you lose it) ?

At just about ANY time of the day I would be completely FOR a system that rewards EFFICIENT use of BA and mediocre online presence much more than another system (i.e. the current one) where simple frequent PRESENCE with a mediocre efficiency in combat is rewarded more instead.

Sure, you can have people that are both efficient burners and frequent loginners, but that's another story (and THEY are the people that WILL end up at the very top).
We're only talking of what should be rewarded more - a person that devises a strategy to beat more difficult opponents but can only login once a day, or a person with a cookie-cutter (or worse, a pretty lousy) strategy that just has so much free time so that he can log in 4-5 times a day or even more frequently.
Right now we're giving better overall rewards for the latter, and I personally consider it fundamentally wrong, the former should be rewarded a lot better instead.

Loyalty, sure, reward that, by all means.
But loitering ? Heck no. Why in the world would you want to reward that, ever ?

The truth is they are about equally rewarded right now.

Unequal effort for equal rewards... sound fair?

A person logging in only once a day will only be able to use between 1/2.5 (for a person above 40% of the top MPR) to only 1/4.5 (for a person below 1.5% of top MPR) of their natural BA.

A person with a rather crappy strategy can still rather easily find at least some targets with a positive challenge bonus (and even if he does get negatives he gets less of it the higher up he goes due to reduced penalties), whereas the awesome strategy guy is capped at double of regular earnings.
Sure, you get some extra rewards for fighting higher PR targets, but that hardly compensates for the difference, especially later on and into 6/20, when even the perfect strategist will find it difficult to get anywhere close to max challenge bonus while the other will not get any penalties at all.

AT WORST, a person with a junk strategy and a pretty poor but not completely horrible target selection but near-perfect ATTENDANCE that just logs in many times a day and keeps "ENTER" pressed until he's out of BA will progress at about the same pace as a person with an awesome strategy that cherry-picks opponents and grudgingly fights a very small list to maximize rewards, but sadly can only log in once a day.

At "best", the crappy player with perfect attendance will end up noticeably surpassing the great player with poor attendance.
And THAT is crap.

HOLY CRAP. I literally thought that was a quote of mine that Natasha quoted; lol. I thought she was quoting this:


3 hours of sleep is bad mmkay?

Because you keep the focus of the player on the game, you prevent their attention from wandering away from it, and you prevent the player from leaving the game.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php

The whole point of creating a successful game is preventing the player from leaving it for an extended period of time or losing their focus within the game. CB grasped this for a while, when you had to come back frequently in order to keep from losing BA and maintain your standing, and also had camping, chat, and forums to keep your attention between these. BA also regenerated every ten minutes, which meant there wasn't such a long pause before the player could fight again.

Honestly, the article basically describes *why* CB is failing as a game. It doesn't provide the proper motivation. One thing I really think CB should do:


Make a smaller set of BA for forging or something. Find a way to bring camping back. Bring back other game-related activities that the player can do while they wait for their BA.

That works for a game where you almost CONSTANTLY can or have to do something. That DOESN'T work for a game where you have 10 seconds of actual interaction followed by 20 minutes of waiting if you stick around.
What you end up with is the exact opposite effect.


As for the rest of your post, yeah, sure, you COULD pad CB with a lot of tiny barely relevant things to do, but that will either turn into a chore or into something you must do to "keep up with the Joneses" and therefore an annoyance for most.

The only reason CB1 was a moderate success IN SPITE of that was that the selection of similar games was rather underwhelming, which is absolutely NOT the case nowadays, where games of comparable complexity are a dime a dozen, so only those that DO NOT keep hitting their own users with a barbed wire glove have a chance of thriving. The constant and steady decline of population of CB should give you all the proof you need for that.

But CB wasn't always 6/20. Once upon a time, CB regenerated BA every 10 minutes, and you could get to 7/20. That's just under four hours for every BA set, and there was camping, the forums, forging, chat...it was very, very easy to just stay and play. CB is not that game anymore, and I blame /that/ along with the N*B as the reason for its decline.

I mean, we're talking about a game where - currently - you log in for five minutes every 9 hours, if you are at 6/20, to burn through BA in about 5 minutes.

What you end up with is the exact opposite effect.

So yeah, I totally agree. How is it a good idea, then, to change that model to being a once-a-day thing, plus the ability to just leave on vacation? It's like...enabling people to quit.

someone playing the devil's advocate could argue that the population decline would follow closely parallel to the the trend of making it more casual-friendly.

Exactly, dudemus.

Or the trend of development time put in. Starting a spiral that is out of control!!!! AAAAHHHH!

JK JK; but really, we could make tons of correlations, but none of them necessarily imply causation. Isn't that right Sickone? :P

my point exactly...correlation does not imply causation! ; )

Yuppppp

It's not enabling people to quit, it's attracting a different demographic.

You have on one side the type of people that want to "advance per click/presence", and for that crowd, a high rate of BA coming in alongside a nearly impossible to solo-fully-burn schedule gives them the "drive" to persevere, UNTIL THEY BURN OUT or resort to cheating (multiple users per character has been deemed against the ToS, so that's cheating ; so is botting it up) then ragequit when caught.
If you want to use a derogatory term, you could call it "the ADHD crowd". In less derogatory terms, you can call them "power players" or "thrill seekers".
You can't keep those types of people interested for long without constant and significant changes if they're NOT on top (and even then, some degree of change might be needed, but only as long as it does not cause them to lose to much).

On the other side, you have the people that play it for the slow and long haul but DO NOT like having a nagging feeling from their game, they want to come check in at a leisurely pace, they like to take a short break every now and then (and would prefer not to lose too much, or be able to recover when they come back).
Again, if you are to use a derogatory term, you could call it "the old farts". In less derogatory terms, you could call them "community builders" or "investors".
You CAN keep those people interested even with minimal or even next to no changes, as long as the general system is perceived as fair in the long run. In fact, the less changes you make (and those you do are changes that make chores easier or balance things perceived as unbalanced), the better they like it.


Obviously, this is a sweeping generalization for simplicity's sake.
In reality, there's a bell curve as far as the "alignment" to each of those arbitrary categories goes across the potential player population, and any individual player may have a bit of both in him, and their preference might swing as time goes on.

Bottom line, think of the shape of a suspension bridge, something like this
_/\-/\_
the first "bump" being the former crowd, the second one being the latter crowd.
Right now, the environment of the game appeals to something in between those two. YOU MAY NOTICE that that particular area is actually somewhat lower than either of those peaks. Going too far in either direction would be bad, but going just the right amount in EITHER direction would be noticeably better.

Or you can fine those fine line solutions where it bumps out the center which is what i like to look for. (Meaning it manages to shift towards both humps of players at the same time and be good for all)

To put it in different words, we're just about smack-dab in the middle of the sweet spot for maximum suckage factor as far as both "camps" are concerned.

Either go far back towards a "no normal freaking human being could manage to burn all this BA, but two college kids might" or well towards "my very busy colleague could easily find the time to try and compete in this", just DO NOT remain wherever we are now.

Yeah, I'd totally like this very wet and hot climate where it's always dry and cool, but I just can't seem to manage to find it anywhere no matter how hard I look, but I bet there's a place like that somewhere if I only look hard enough.

I might have just found one such magical place, but there's a problem with it... it's called Microtransactionland, I think I heard some legends about it a good while ago, they say there's a catch.

To put it in easy to understand terms... sure, you can always buy as many extra BA as you like in any given day, but only if you pay cash DIRECTLY TO THE GAME ITSELF (and it gets more expensive the more you buy in any particular day - quite cheap at first, barely noticeable, but it gets more expensive rather fast).
That gets you XP, CB$ or even NW on demand, without having to go through the hassle of interacting with other people all that much. Want to go to the top ? Heck yeah, that's easy, just whip out that credit card and burn them BA ! Disposable teams ? What ? Are you crazy ? Do you have any idea how much cash I paid for this baby ? Better spend more cash to get it closer to the top after I took that vacation. Daddy has enough disposable income anyway.

I think Sickone you have phrased the situation very well indeed. Maybe we should just divide the game into 2 server:
1) For the more competitive players running fast BA cycles with fast growth potential (maybe as tournament server?)
2) A more relaxed version for the casual gamers with vacation, rolling bonus or whatever it is to keep players coming back

Cause right now whatever suggestions one side suggest will just be shot down by the other camp.

Well, as this is really about the bonus structure, I'd just like to link the old poll about it.

http://www.carnageblender.com/poll/poll-results.tcl?poll_id=464

Out of 111 votes, 86.5% want(ed) a change to the current N*B system.

86.5% of CBs players are not happy with the current design. Obviously, you can't cater to everyone, but surely you'd want to cater to the majority of your playerbase.

i really dislike polarizing our community into two factions with their goals at odds. as sickone said that was a very broad generalization. i think this one is better:

we have two camps here in cb, those that want change but are powerless to do anything about it. this causes much frustration which comes out in the forums and likely impacts the way new players view the game.

the second camp is the voluntary dev staff. i count ns in with them as i don't think he's gotten a check in some time. they all have lives and try to do the best they can as they want changes as well.

this view isn't as intriguing as two opposing factions but i feel it is much more descriptive of where we are at.

as a community i think we would do better to have realistic expectations as to the changes that are possible. expecting a game-wide overhaul is not based on our current reality, or if it was it would take years to implement.

new items are doable, tweaks, bug-fixes and some new content are also possible, at least along the lines of clan rituals and such. these are my best guesses as a long-term player and not based on any special "admin" insight. ; )

if my former post was too long:

this is not sparta! ; )

Supporter item?

It's been on the cards for years, would generate interest and income. It would seem to be a no brainer.

Well, in the oldest thread I've seen about it, the rolling bonus was suggested at least as far back as early 2007. We're looking at 4-6 years of being aware that there was a problem without any fix being implemented. (disregarding, of course, the awareness from the very start that the N*B was not calibrated correctly and had to continue increasing in bonus % and duration until it would be ridiculous.)

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002BqM

First suggestion of a rolling bonus.

But, of course, since I suggested it, I must have had a nefarious reason such as only hoping it would benefit myself only.

As Ranger only see it, in Ranger's only world according to Ranger.

I was thinking of this, actually, Ranger

it is what it is. that is my basic point.

my wife and i have a little joke between us when people ask how we have stayed happy together for a quarter of a century. we both say "low expectations."

The key paragraph from GL's post:

All charcaters would receive an XP bonus based on thier MPR compared to the highest MPR in the game. Starting large, and getting increasingly smaller until you hit the top spot, in which case you lose whatever remains of the bonus. This would mean the MPR would have to fight just that little bit more, or gain just a little better rewards than the number two MPR in order to stay at the top.

Enough said. I would like to finally see some action on it.

There have been plenty of "low expectations" [LE] suggestions regarding GAMEPLAY too, but so far, ALMOST only gameplay bug alleviations and cosmetic LE improvements have been implemented.

What about triggering NUB only a while after joining, after the player either wishes to activate it or after a certain time has passed or after a certain amount of battles or after reaching a certain MPR ?

What about slight score system adjustments so that "dead zones" have less of a chance to develop and persist, and N*Bs are less likely to run around with hugely over-inflated score, while older tougher opponents no longer have minimalistic scores ?

How about the variable N*B duration suggestion ? You know, the one where YOU can select the duration/bonus combo to be to your own liking, so that you can make it 9 months or 1 year or even 2 years (at lower effective bonuses and BA costs) ?
And how about if you could RE-TRIGGER A NCB EPISODE ON AN EXISTING TEAM, with the bonus lowered by the amount of MPR you already have towards the "ideal NCB MPR target" ?!?

What if you remove item auction taxes "up front" and make them payable out of the sales price ; and what if you make it a fixed cost regardless of duration ?
What if you removed the unequipped number of items on a character cap or at least drastically altered it ?

How about an universal salvage yard, one that takes ANY piece of gear and transfers its NW onto ANY OTHER base item ? If the target is a weapon, how about if it let you decide how much of the NW to put on x vs + ?
Or instead, or maybe even alongside, how about a "blacksmith voucher" option for disenchanting instead of CB$ ? One that would return far more than just 50% of NW (not quite 100%, but close enough, with some minor caveats), but only for use at the blacksmith ?

OR HOW ABOUT A RAISED NATURAL BA ACCRUAL CAP ?
And what if we abolished the BA regeneration tiers altogether ?
Just have everybody fighting at 10/20, and raise the BA cap to 600 (that's 20 hours between logins for EVERYBODY).
Yes, that would make it RELATIVELY a tad bit harder for the top guys, but it's still noticeably easier overall.

And so on and so forth.

This sounds good, and doesn't seem like it would be that hard to implement.

The game could just compare your team's MPR vs the lead MPR, take that percentage and reduce the NCB period by that percentage amount.

It would definitely be better than throwing away a great team. I'd love to be using Hejin again.

J/K, apparently I got rid of Hejin instead of just retiring him. Sad day :(

All that is is a RB that you manually switch on every 6 months.

or a great way to keep tat growth at max growth by using two characters! ; )

tats are for suckers ;)

Eh, if you also adjust MTL downwards to 2/3 of its current value to match "regular" tattoo growth, that becomes a non-issue.

Keep in mind. Challenge bonus is not the only thing that affects rewards. In "most" cases having a higher power "will" have a better impact on your rewards rather then a 5-10% challenge bonus (especially if you are in 6/20)

Having high PR gives you better rewards? I didn't know this

Don't you mean if your OPPONENT has a higher PR ?

Your *own* PR increasing the "intermediate" (between base and CB-adjusted final) reward makes very little sense, since it already DEcreases your CB, so why the bloody hell would you use it twice, once for increase and once for decrease ? That's at least a waste of computing cycles if nothing else annoys you about that concept.

Well that is how it's done... PR definitely takes a roll in base rewards and CB...

Unless you mean that having a higher PR enables you to fight and win against people of higher PR/score, thus increasing your overall rewards (by increasing the base/intermediate rewards) even if the challenge bonus is roughly the same amount, in which case, yeah, THAT does make some sense.
But that's not what you said.

Base Reward = PR*(other elements)*randomFactor

CB = OppScore/PR

I am making no judgment about the above, but that's how it's done.

Also, what the snotty nether-regions of a rookie geisha after a scary party is up with the freaking secrecy regarding the ACTUAL way rewards are calculated ?

Make that bloody freaking formula public already.

And screw Jon's from-the-start obsolete policy that's parroted like a gospel by a few zealous remnant followers - secrecy regarding a core game mechanic and having to find trivial stuff out by massive data mining and reverse engineering because no-freaking-body who knows for sure can be bloody bothered to PUT IT IN THE WIKI ALREADY is NOT fun, has NEVER been fun, and will NEVER be fun.

I don't have access to the code. And I'm sure if I did, disclosing formulas would be greatly frowned upon. Best luck would be asking NS; who then would probably ask Jon, who would then probably ask Jon, who would then likely just say no like he did 6 years ago (or 11 whatever you want to say). Do you think the people who are allowed to access the code can just do whatever they want with it? Your best bet to get a very close formula is a bunch of testing, or asking someone who has already done that, like Natasha.

*Assuming* that "PR" above always refers to your OWN PR (as opposed to your opponent's PR), and obviously, considering that

Actual Reward = Base Reward * CB

...from that would follow that

Actual Reward = (other elements) * random Factor * Opponent Score

...or in other words, that your own PR is irrelevant ?
:P

Now, wouldn't it make MORE sense if what you said was actually


Base Reward = Opponent PR * other elements * random Factor
CB = Opponent Score / Own PR

and thus

Actual Reward = other elements * random Factor * Opponent Score * (Opponent PR / Own PR)

???

It's your own PR... in both instances... the reason it's not simple division is b/c CB is capped, twice at upper levels. And it might be something like PR^X; I don't know. Here's what I can say is true... Raise your PR, your base rewards will raise.

Interesting. Looks like I will finally have a good use for my enormous encumbrance limit! I can just forge my way up to 900+ mil in my items, and I'll get better rewards for doing so! :D

See, I actually think that's a good thing. The NW/PR link is stupid when it forces you to stop putting + on your weapon because you can't get a challenge bonus, but you can't beat more people without doing so. It's just a shame you have to get past challenge bonus before it's actually worthwhile to start buffing your equipment again. That makes no sense.

Yes, that's why I don't like it; b/c it discourages midgame wealth based teams, forcing minimalistic approaches until you are receiving like less than 10% CB when doing that.

TEST TARGET : Bring it on home.
His score, power and MPR all well BELOW my own MPR, let alone PR and score.
Challenge bonus does not exist, no penalty either because I'm in 6/20.


Test battery A : attacking while at 7,495,605 PR (PR roughly 7.7% above test B)

1: 426 CB$ / 351 XP
2: 681 CB$ / 398 XP
3: 596 CB$ / 500 XP
4: 596 CB$ / 553 XP
5: 596 CB$ / 500 XP
6: 596 CB$ / 323 XP
7: 341 CB$ / 529 XP
8: 341 CB$ / 421 XP
9: 341 CB$ / 384 XP
0: 341 CB$ / 406 XP


Test battery B : attacking while at 6,959,711 PR by taking off +150 DBs

1: 596 CB$ / 375 XP
2: 426 CB$ / 444 XP
3: 426 CB$ / 367 XP
4: 596 CB$ / 314 XP
5: 341 CB$ / 373 XP
6: 596 CB$ / 381 XP
7: 341 CB$ / 363 XP
8: 341 CB$ / 467 XP
9: 681 CB$ / 449 XP
0: 511 CB$ / 425 XP


There were only 5 possible CB$ rewards encountered (341, 426, 511, 596, 681) but a whole lot more Xp rewards.
The middle CB$ reward (511) was only encountered once.
You will notice that the rewards are (after rounding) 511 times 2/3, 5/6, 1, 7/6, 4/3.


The variance in the CB$ rewards, IF IT EXISTS, is below 1 CB$, most likely below 0.5 CB$ even for the lowest reward (341).
So a roughly 7.7% increase in my own PR had a LESS THAN 0.14% effect on my CB$ rewards.
As far as I know, CB$ rewards are linked with XP rewards, just that XP rewards have a much wider random spread possibility.

In other words, the effect of *MY* PR was negligible or downright non-existant when fighting the exact same target.

Fight with a 100PR char, then fight the same opp with a 10k PR char, tell me if the difference is negligible. Then you can test MPR diffs if you think that's what is causing it instead, nat did much more testing than 10 fights...

Or, if you prefer, the CB$ rewards were in both cases, even with a 7.7% PR difference:

4/6 * 511
5/6 * 511
6/6 * 511
7/6 * 511
8/6 * 511

:P

That's from a MPR difference, not PR difference.
And it's best seen in the BA cost difference. For the reference, mine is 1412$/BA right now.
Your base rewards are boosted proportional to the BA costs, which go up even inside the same BA regeneration rate.
Your own PR has no effect on BA cost, and no effect on base rewards, only on challenge bonus.
Your OPPONENT'S PR however, yeah, that matters.

Do it with the same MPR char?

Or, to put it in other words, to me it looks like you will NOT get better BASE rewards from fighting the exact same opponent JUST by taking NW off your character.

You can increase your challenge bonus (by LOWERING your PR, not increasing it) and get better overall rewards, yeah, but not better base rewards.
You need to beat a better opponent for better base rewards.

Or, you can go up in MPR enough to go up a BA cost tier, in which case your base rewards will go up.
But putting on or taking of NW to change your PR will still not matter for BASE rewards. Just for the challenge bonus (where LOWER PR is better).

That's exactly what I did in the test above.

I fought a target that would I always get the exact same challenge bonus against (zero), thus taking it out of the equation.
I also fought the target 10+10 times in a row, not training any XP, thus keeping the same MPR and having a negligible VPR difference, thus taking that out of the equation too.
The target also had a score well below mine (heck, even below my MPR), so that he would not lose any noticeable amount of score during the test sequence. Nobody else attacked him during my test sequence.
For all intents and purposes, it was as if the target was as good as frozen.

The only variable left was my own PR - 6,959,711 vs 7,495,605.
In both test runs, I obtained the exact same CB$ rewards, thus even after rounding, the variance within the reward must have been under 1$ (absolutely worst case scenario 0.9999999999 CB$ difference, and with a 0.5$ average).
For a rather sizeable PR difference (nearly +7.7%) the difference in rewards was BELOW the measurable threshold, if it even exists AT ALL.

It probably does not exist.

Sorry, but 7% over 10 tests isn't very conclusive.. try doing it with a 2-3x different MPR over a few hundred tests.

Not 14% (as in 1/7.14), but 0.14% (as in 1/714).

And that was not the actual variance.
There WAS NO VARIANCE.

0.14% was just the HIGHEST POSSIBLE variance if you ASSUME such a variance MIGHT EXIST due to rounding, given the test data was showing no variance at all.

I was referring to the PR difference, it was 7% not 14% I accidentally put 14% the first time.

That's pointless.

The one thing we DO know is that for a certain specific battle (same attacker, same defender, no change in any of their stats), the average CB$ reward is directly proportional to the average XP reward, with the only different results being determined randomly from a preset multiplier table.
The CB$ reward multiplier table has only 5 possibilities : 4/6, 5/6, 6/6, 7/6 and 8/6, with the middle one (6/6 = 1) being the AVERAGE CB$ reward.

From the test above it was obvious that the rewards were exactly the same.
The only variable in the test was my own PR (7.7% higher in one of the tests), everything else was always exactly the same (or close to exactly the same to not matter).

Any POSSIBLE variance in that test (if it actually exists) would have had to be hidden by the game's rounding of CB$ rewards to the nearest integer, and thus smaller than 0.14%.
THAT means that a certain PR difference had to have LESS than roughly 1/50 of a difference in base rewards, with a strong possibility that the difference does not exist at all.

I believe there are PR "steps" and you're not to the next one with the 7% difference... Trust me, try a 2-3X difference.

^

This!

So what, we need to figure out at what interval "PR steps" occur? x_x

Lowest I can go before not beating him is 6,603,012 PR (only the tattoo raising my PR from my now 5,349,645 MPR).

CB$ reward 596, unchanged.
That's a 13.5% increase in PR that still had no difference whatsoever.

I have no easy way to raise my PR much higher than that.

PR step, no PR steps.

Challenge bonus, no challenge bonus.

Variance, no variance.

It really does not matter.

What matters is the fact that to have a chance to compete near the top you have to:

1) Buy a high MPR character
2) Start a NCB and buy all BA for hundreds of millions of CB
3) Sell out and multi with a NUB
4) Have started a NUB and still be playing getting in most BA

For those that took time off, or do not have USD to buy millions of CB for a NCB run, tough luck. CB is not the game for you if you want to try to compete at the top.

The worst part of the game it the lack of love for those who have stuck with the game for years, took some time off and want to come back. They have mid MPR characters with little hope to gain ground on the top dogs.

It is just tragic that we cannot get a new system based upon a rolling type bonus. Letting those people who leave for a while due to RL issues come back and compete. And very sad Jon could not see the need for the RB while he still participated in CB.

While I always read "CB is just a community with a game in the background", that is just a crock. There are quite a few people that actually like the gameplay and feel "meh" about the community.

But until we get some love for those older players that really stuck around in CB though all the years, I see this game hemorrhaging people till it shrivels up and ends like CB1. With a whimper.

Thanks Ranger, that answers all my questions! :D

Sickone where did you get the 4/6, 5/6, 1, 7/6, 8/6 idea from?

Yeah, so if Natasha doesn't make a post here soon. I'm going to call her a liar and give Sickone a sincere apology :) ... b/c my results don't really back up anything I have said.

So:

From 7.3M PR to 10.4M PR 20 battles each, here's what I saw

7.3M:

Min: 312
Max: 584
Median: 227
Calculated 6/6: ~220-225

10.4M:

Min: 302
Max: 588
Median: 216
Calculated 6/6: ~220-225

Hilariously enough, I got a lot of 8/6s the first 20 battles with 7.3M MPR, so I actually got about 111% as much exp as I did with the 10.4M run.

So, now I guess we wait for Nat.

So this tells me, so far, that if PR affects battle rewards in a positive fashion it is to such a negligible degree that I really shouldn't worry about it.

But happily, it also means that I can still buff my equipment as high as I want without a penalty, and that's cool. :D

I just looked at the numbers after sorting them, and decided to divide them with the middle one, it came up almost perfectly, so I can only assume that's how it actually is.

ONLY as long as it does not affect your challenge bonus, of course (be it because you're still maxed above 100%, or because it was already zero).

If your increased PR does NOT get you any new higher score/PR targets (while making your challenge bonus against existing targets lower) since the increase in BASE//intermediate reward due to PR is negligible but the loss in CB% is not, then tacking on quite a bit of extra PR from NW would be detrimental for your growth.

Ok, I had much more variance in my numbers, like they could have easily fallen in categories like 4/6, 9/12, 5/6, 11/12, and so on. But, my range did seem to be like from 2/3 to 4/3.

The XP random pick is different from the CB$ random pick.
There's only 5 possible CB$ tiers for a specific battle, but A LOT more possible XP tiers.
All you can say for sure is that you earned more CB$, as for XP, that's unknown, you may have earned less than the average.


Also, your results are... weird. 312->584 and 302->588, they're about the same in the middle, but the "width" of the results is higher than expected. Can you please list the actual rewards you got instead of high/avg/low ?

Hmm. Intriguing. I assume your fights were those against "Control" as a target ?
Can you post the actual raw results you got ?

I was using XP, here's my list, yes I was fighting control.

Run 1 XP
156
160
179
182
192
195
199
227
236
250
251
263
263
270
270
270
276
280
284
292
Total 4695

Run 2
151
153
156
157
167
172
181
182
199
211
216
220
221
238
244
252
269
277
282
294
Total 4242

Those are per minion, so as you can see they are 50% of what I reported.

That is true once you start not getting a challenge bonus. It always has been true that way.

When getting a CB, you would want to keep your PR as low as possible and still win.

Ah. That explains it. It would have been far clearer with CB$ instead.

Let me see if I can "divine" some rules as far as XP gains are concerned...

Nah, sorry, way too much randomness in XP rewards for so few battles.
If only you would have written down the CB$ amounts too...

I'll run some more extensive tests later tonight. I'll include both xp and cash

You know what else could work instead of a "vacation mode" ?
A "SITTER" mode.

Basically, you assign another account (or several accounts) that can "SWITCH INTO" any one of your characters on YOUR account and burn YOUR BA using YOUR custom opponents list.

The characters on "sat" accounts would appear as additional choices on the "active character" list of the accounts appointed as sitters (the fact they are "sat" characters should be clearly marked).
The available BA shifts to the BA available on the sat character.
The target list will also be switched with the target account's opponent list instead of your own.
There should always be a clear and easily visible indicator (color-blind sensitive too) on screen that you're burning somebody else's BA not your own, and using his opponent's list not your own.

It would enable 12 hours after activation, automatically disables (and deactivates the enabling timer) as soon as you consume your first BA yourself (you get a warning//popup that the account sitting would be disabled if you burn the BA).
You know, to prevent multi-people-on-account abuse and also give a slight penalty for entering this mode (12h delay meaning you WILL lose some BA, but not that many as a percent if you leave for a longer period of time).

Could be for supporter-supporter combos only if you want.

Okay, finally caught up on this thread. You guys went off and started testing small sections an proclaiming this is the way the world works way too fast. I made my statements for how it is averagely done in the actual game world. That is when you're fighting an opponent with a challenge bonus, the opponent is bigger than you.

When sickone said that basing the base rewards off of opponents score would make more sense, this is actually closer to the real thing, but none of what you assumed is actually fully correct.

As for all your tests that you've done, you should have gotten no difference for all of them as there is no difference, in those particular tests. You can't say that holds true for all tests though because you haven't tested enough areas and different possibilities.

So how about you post the results of your tests you made BEFORE you became an admin, as you made them back then, before you knew for sure how things stood ?
Or how about at least just the data, not even the conclusions ?
You should be allowed to do it, but you won't, will you ?

So HOW MUCH extra PR would we have needed to pile onto any particular character fighting the exact same target (the only difference in each combat being ONLY the PR on the attacker and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE, no MPR differences, no score differences, no nothing) in order to see ANY difference in BASE rewards at all ?
15% extra ? 20% extra ? 50% extra ? Double the PR ? More ?
And how much of a difference in BASE rewards would THAT have been ?

That depends on both you and your opponent

To repeat:

* given the EXACT SAME circumstances (target score/PR/MPR, attacker score/MPR, top game MPR, attacker BA cost, attacker BA regeneration rate) EXCEPT the variable PR of the attacker,

* ignoring (//compensating for) any differences in reward due to the change in challenge bonus (if any) from the change in PR,

* and also ignoring (//compensating for) any randomness of the results by picking what should be the average reward

WHEN does the *BASE* reward change due to the change in attacker's PR (and JUST the attacker's PR), if at all ?
And when//if it changes, by how much does it change ?

and again, that depends ^_^ I gave a hint 2 posts ago.

Also, as for why I don't come straight out and say exactly how it works is because doing so lessens the strategy aspect of the game. It makes the game become more of a matter of who can log in more often, which is what I thought you didn't like sickone?

Ok, fine.
CONCRETE example.

My character Occam's Razor:

Score 8,708,222
Power 7,499,444
MPR 5,352,185
Max Tattoo Level 15,368,327

right now, when my BA cost is $1,412 apiece in 6/20, is attacking Siegehammer:

Score 7,204,116
Power 4,651,932
MPR 3,104,097
Max Tattoo Level 7,778,257

and getting a 0% challenge bonus.

...

HOW MUCH HIGHER would my PR need to be in order to see an INCREASE in fight rewards against this target ?
And how much higher would those rewards be ?

If and else statements are good mmkay.

No, it doesn't LESSEN the strategy aspect of the game.
It DEEPENS it.

The more widespread each and every rules of the game are, the more informed and challenging your opponents are, the deeper the gameplay becomes.
Unless finding out the rules would be a huge part of the game. But in this case, it isn't. It's a matter of fine-tuning. Like, say, discovering the best yield-granting forge formula (which actually requires far less investment).

If you would be constantly CHANGING the reward rules and whoever guesses best what the new rules are profits more, yes, sure, in THAT case (and only in that case) making them "secret" deepens the game.
But by having them fixed and secret you're merely penalizing newcomers and people that don't have either the resources or connections to pull off the data gathering necessary for reverse-engineering the formula.

And it already is mostly a matter of who can log in more often anyway. This would be a tiny extra drop in an already overflowing bucket into which drops already keep pouring in non-stop.

Or, even simpler.
The very first step.
A yes/no question.

*IS* there a certain *HIGHER* PR I can pile up on myself for which my rewards against *THIS* particular target at *THIS* particular point in time would go *UP* ?

nope

And that's all I have been saying so far ever since the test data was posted and you were saying I was wrong, but now you're saying I'm right.

Nope, I'm saying you were assuming it all works that way which isn't the case.

Just because you currently increasing your PR doesn't raise your rewards versus a specific opponent, that doesn't always make it true.

Or in other words, that given a particular target at a particular point in time, you can only maintain or decrease (but not increase) your overall rewards against that target at that time by raising your PR, since the base rewards are always the same and the only thing that may change is the challenge bonus.

CORRECT ?

We never spoke of OTHER targets you can probably beat by raising your PR.

So you mean to say that there are opponents of a certain score/PR/MPR combo against which I can *INCREASE* my reward for beating them by INCREASING my PR ?

If so, pray tell, anybody, give an EXAMPLE of such a SPECIFIC opponent+attacker combo for which the increase in PR of the attacker (while everything else remains the same) will lead to increased fight rewards.

You fighting me.

Then how the hell DOES it work ?

It has always been the "directive" that winning in a "harder" fight will give you better rewards.
By INCREASING your PR while absolutely nothing else changes, you make the fight against any particular target EASIER, therefore your rewards should DECREASE.

But now you are saying that it's not always the case, and by making the fight easier you can earn higher rewards against the exact same target.
Which flies in the face of just about everything that's normal.

Again, we never spoke and will never speak of a different target. Exactly the same fight, the only difference being the PR of the attacker and nothing else.
So, is there really any case where making a particular fight easier by adding/upgrading gear thus raising your PR would grant you better rewards ?
If yes... WHY ?!? It makes no sense !

http://www.carnageblender.com/inspect_opponent.tcl?opponent_id=115901

There's an example.

Ok, let's say that as far as BASE rewards goes, I could just about be convinced that an ever so slight bump in rewards would be somewhat justifiable.
But only just about.

Still, shouldn't the decrease in challenge bonus (you would already be granting me less than 100% CB) due to the increase in PR *MORE THAN* compensate for the slight bump in base rewards, leading to lower overall rewards in THAT particular case ?
In other words, maintaining the "easier fight, less reward" directive intact ?
If not, why not ?

Anyway, the only reason to do any of that would be in case you wanted to increase potential rewards for people growing fast and with good strategies, people whose rewards are capped by the 100% challenge bonus. But even there, what's the point ? You should penalize them, not reward them.

So, that's it ?

Yes, please, less info, all this deluge is deafening...

Wow, this continued debate is so stimulating...

Nerfs and buffs don't happen anymore. Your point is moot. :)

Well, why don't they happen anymore ? What's stopping them ?
It's not like Jon even looks around more than once in a blue moon anymore, and even if he did (he logged in about 40 days ago, but as usual, said nothing ; last words he said were in May, and the previous-to-last words were a year ago), I doubt he'd argue against any balance changes made by any of the people that have the software rights to enact them, given the slow but steady decline in user numbers we're experiencing.