Daily Credit Feedback

edited October 2019 in Common Grounds
There was some concern voiced that demigods need to work 4x as hard as novices in order to complete their daily credits. I don't believe this is the case.

There is a 'scoring' discrepancy as you will between novices (lvl 1-59), players (lvl 60-99) and demigods (lvl 100+). The reason for this discrepancy isn't because we want demigods to work harder, but because we want novices to get their daily credits in the same time span as demigods.

With comm-quests and things like scholars/bards - we want to discourage demigods from using these things to get through their credits. We want it to be something that a novice/player can do pretty easily and we don't want the quests and scholars/bards to be constantly gone because demigods zip around with their auto-say triggers to collect them all. We want to push demigods to participate in other activities for their credits.

With hunting/influencing - Demigods, in general, are hunting/influencing things that are much higher in point value and much faster than novices are.  We have the same tiers for the Great hunt and the scores are always much much higher for demigods than they are for the others. Even if you take a novice astral bashing, they likely getting a lot fewer kills than the demigods of the group. 

Is it 100% accurate that a novice and a demigod put in the exact same amount of work to earn their daily credits? No, it never will be, but we want to give them a fighting chance to earn their daily credits in the same amount of time as demigods would.

This is our outlook on the subject, but I'd be interested in hearing other's thoughts on this. Maybe there isn't something I haven't considered or thought of, or seen. I realize that someone is probably going to say 'but 99 and 100 are close!!!' and I'm just going to reply that we used the Great Hunt tiers because we had to draw the line somewhere.
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Comments

  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    The problem with making Demigods do more for these is that it means when demigods do them, there are less of these resources for non-demigods.
    Let's say even 2 demigods try to get 2 ticks each via comm-quests.  That means they're soaking out 160 comms that 16 newbies could have used (or 8 not-so-newbies).  This would make more sense if there was an infinite supply of the things (so it takes longer), but when demis need to collect so much, repeatedly, they are constantly stealing the resource from others.
    I'm fine with the scaling that you have on hunting/influencing, because it helps even things up a lot.  Novices hunt creatures worth many fewer points so they need the help, and there isn't a limitation on "what you can hunt" really (everything in the game counts).  But for limited-resource things, making demigods have to put in more work ends up meaning that any demi who tries to do it is messing up everyone else.
    My suggestion back at the beginning was to do a scaling thing for demis.  EG: The first comm tick takes 10 comms, the second comm tick takes 20 comms, the fourth comm tick takes 40 comms, etc.  Basically: "You're all right doing it one time, but it's a good idea to move along to greener pastures instead of grinding a lot of this one thing."  I think I got a reply of "We'll think about feasibility," so it may just not have worked out... but yeah.  That's my issue with ramping it up.  You do successfully discourage a lot of us from pursuing these tasks any more, but the few who aren't discouraged still soak all the things anyways.
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  • tbh I think the best way to help out the daily credits as is would be to convert more quests over to the quest ranking system, wherein they will gain a credit reward! Those are always good and I've basically come around to performing at least one quest I'm proficient at as part of my routine. It helps immensely and makes my absence from every timequake and most domoths nearly negligible.

    The more options for questing there are, the less impact/reason anyone needs to bother with comm farming at demi.

  • DaraiusDaraius Shevat The juror's taco spot
    What about making those things that "a novice can do pretty easily" to get their dailies more valuable to novices and less valuable for demis? For example, a demi turning in 10 rockeaters gets 1 credit, whereas a novice would get the full 5. 
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  • Demigods with lots of bashing artis bash incredibly faster than titans, but not so for those without, not to the point of another doubling in effectiveness. I flat out didn't engage the daily credit mechanic because my impression was that for demigods bashing was intended to be a big part of how you get your points and it was totally miserable and would take me ages to get even half of a day's credits that way.

    Rotating through a quest or three happens so much quicker and easier than bashing, and if I complete at least 16-17 cr from quests I don't ever go "just bash out" the last few credits because I've found myself taking far longer to get a single tick than to do my several quests.
  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    Enya said:
    Demigods with lots of bashing artis bash incredibly faster than titans, but not so for those without, not to the point of another doubling in effectiveness. I flat out didn't engage the daily credit mechanic because my impression was that for demigods bashing was intended to be a big part of how you get your points and it was totally miserable and would take me ages to get even half of a day's credits that way.

    Rotating through a quest or three happens so much quicker and easier than bashing, and if I complete at least 16-17 cr from quests I don't ever go "just bash out" the last few credits because I've found myself taking far longer to get a single tick than to do my several quests.
    That is a fair point, actually, and something to keep in mind.  When I say it feels reasonable, I am looking at it from the standpoint of someone who does have all that stuff.
    Note that I wouldn't actually be upset if we did make Demigod bashing ticks equal Titan- ones.
    Something that also hasn't been pointed out yet is that influencing takes a lot longer than hunting to earn the ticks, because mobs are worth the same kill/influence point rate but it's generally a lot faster to murder them.
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  • edited October 2019
    I agree about influencing! I get at least one hunting tic most days, but I've never got a dailycredits influencing tic, and the last time I tried, I was less than 100 points after a long bout of influence and gave up.

    (Edited for typos)
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  • Enya said:
    Demigods with lots of bashing artis bash incredibly faster than titans,  
    By that same stroke, a level 92 character that is well outfitted will be much better off in that regard than someone who rode the astral train up to demi early on and didn't have time to accumulate things. The extra crit rate/vitals are no where near as nice as damage boosting, damage mitigation to stay in the right rooms, having the right damage types, etc.

  • Personally, I'd love the IRE membership to be updated to skim the top, say, 10 of your 20 daily credits and give them to you just for logging in while your subscription is active. So I can choose to pay a monthly sub and not feel like I have to grind quite as much to hit the same daily cap. Is that an unpopular opinion? Probably.

    The prospect of eventually having to do these daily activities for twice as long to get the same reward if I ever hit the next great hunt tier certainly does not seem like fun.
  • edited October 2019
    I am not understanding the reasoning with comm quests, bards and scholars. I would do none of these because of daily credits but would do those either for the conflict mechanic or player given rewards. Even before daily credits bards/scholars would be scorched by demigods.

    For influencing, your reasoning is false. A demigod will not be influencing areas a level 50 can’t because outside some leader mobs there are no high level influencing areas. In general there is a lack of influencing areas, especially after guards fix but that is a discussion for another topic.

    You can get 20 credits a day max, so I am not seeing the issue with a fully artied  out Demi gaining those 20 faster then a novice. As long as the novice can gain creds in a reasonable time. I am even going to say you are forcing a demi with limited time into novice hunting territories to gain their max credits.

    In a similar vein I don’t get this system of if you were in a time quake hunting is suddenly worth less. I would kinda get the reduction for just hunting or influencing to force you to do other shit and open up areas to the rest but weren’t TQs and domoths specifically made to have us participate.

    Also yes to giving credits for more quests, having quests like icewynd give no credits despite its grindyness while quests like stewartsville do give them is annoying.
  • edited October 2019
    If influencing needs a boost to make it more competitive with bashing, we can certainly look into that. What are people thinking here for tiers?

     We realize that not all players have all the same toys/tools etc and that there are people who will gain things much faster because they're decked out more so than others. Again, the goal is to have it take ~2 hours for anyone to get those credits. We can't have it faster than that for anyone and we think it's unreasonable to have it longer for those that aren't decked out. We, unfortunately, we have to draw the line somewhere to try and even things out the best way possible so everyone has a reasonable chance to gain their credits in those two hours. That's also why we have things like Quests give daily credits, so there should ideally be multiple avenues of completing them, so if you don't want to bash, don't, go quest or do other stuff.

     And we're trying to update Quests and get them moved. It is a time-consuming process that takes time away from performing and working on other things and it falls pretty far down the priority list. We even had someone volunteer (someone familiar with progging in another IRE game) to work on them for us, but due to what's involved, it's not a feasible option.
  • I'm not really following this thread heavily, but I'd like to urge support for increasing the desire to complete comm quests. 

    I don't know if this would require more comm beasts (rockeater, chickens, cows, whatever) to keep them from being "empty" 24-7, better rewards/less completions for rewards, or what, but with the advent of aethertrading, our stocks of comms are plummeting.

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  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    Orael said:
    We can't have it faster than that for anyone and we think it's unreasonable to have it longer for those that aren't decked out.
    What does this mean?  I have 7cr, 11cr, and 4cr quests scoped out that I can do in 10 minutes or less each.  If I just do them I can get my dailies done in 30-40 minutes.  I intentionally slow myself down by getting things other ways (hunting ticks for family honour, etc).  These quests involve a lot of running around, but because I have a high celerity and a lot of curio travel artifacts / other blixes, I can pop wherever I need to go pretty quickly and it takes a fraction of the time & effort for me to do these quests than others.
    I think that this "balance to the fastest someone can possibly do it" is doomed to failure, because if you balance to the top it will take everyone else many, many more than 2 hours.
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  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    Ideas on changes:
    1) Add a new hunting tick at 250 points.  Leave the remaining at 500-point-intervals.
    - This won't have a dramatic effect on top hunters anyways.  It puts things much more in reach for the lower.  If someone tries to get all of their points via hunting ticks it will still take forever.
    2) Reduce influencing tiers (maybe somewhere between 250/350 points per tier?  It is hard for me to gauge this since I am at 13/13 all influence types with max prestige, etc).
    3) Add a new influencing tick at half whatever the tier is that you pick for the same reason as 1.
    4) Lower demigod comm collection to 20 comms (or just set everyone to 10 comms).
    - Consider a different manner of throttling that does not leave demis scooping up all the resources.
    - Maybe even just a hard cap (you can only get 2 comm ticks a weave, go do something else?) or scaling up comms needed ("first ticks easy, later ticks not, I will go do something else").
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  • Maybe balance the daily credit ticks around the total value of artifacts on the character?
  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    So someone who has a gnome weapon as their artifact would hunt better than someone with a pile of trade artifacts, AND get better ticks to boot?
    Just having artifacts != having hunting artifacts, different people buy different things.
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  • edited October 2019
    Imo it's okay if hunting ticks stay as is right now (since it's the same measure used in great hunts etc) while the comm quests can be made equal value regardless of level (I like Xenthos' idea of first comm tick takes 10 comm, second takes 20 comm etc) so that demigods and artied people won't take away the comm availability from newbies.

    I do quests for dailies if I have less time to play and hunting/comm quests when I get a little more time. I don't usually take part in Timequakes. 
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  • Xenthos said:
    Orael said:
    We can't have it faster than that for anyone and we think it's unreasonable to have it longer for those that aren't decked out.
    What does this mean?  I have 7cr, 11cr, and 4cr quests scoped out that I can do in 10 minutes or less each.  If I just do them I can get my dailies done in 30-40 minutes.  I intentionally slow myself down by getting things other ways (hunting ticks for family honour, etc).  These quests involve a lot of running around, but because I have a high celerity and a lot of curio travel artifacts / other blixes, I can pop wherever I need to go pretty quickly and it takes a fraction of the time & effort for me to do these quests than others.
    I think that this "balance to the fastest someone can possibly do it" is doomed to failure, because if you balance to the top it will take everyone else many, many more than 2 hours.
    What it means is that if 3 quests are getting your 20 daily credits in 30-40 minutes, we need to change those ratings to reduce their credit rewards. The goal is to get people logged in and playing for 2 hours. We've been pretty open about this two-hour requirement from the beginning.

    We can look into the other things - we can certainly adjust influencing tiers if it's really that much worse off than bashing.


  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    Orael said:
    Xenthos said:
    Orael said:
    We can't have it faster than that for anyone and we think it's unreasonable to have it longer for those that aren't decked out.
    What does this mean?  I have 7cr, 11cr, and 4cr quests scoped out that I can do in 10 minutes or less each.  If I just do them I can get my dailies done in 30-40 minutes.  I intentionally slow myself down by getting things other ways (hunting ticks for family honour, etc).  These quests involve a lot of running around, but because I have a high celerity and a lot of curio travel artifacts / other blixes, I can pop wherever I need to go pretty quickly and it takes a fraction of the time & effort for me to do these quests than others.
    I think that this "balance to the fastest someone can possibly do it" is doomed to failure, because if you balance to the top it will take everyone else many, many more than 2 hours.
    What it means is that if 3 quests are getting your 20 daily credits in 30-40 minutes, we need to change those ratings to reduce their credit rewards. The goal is to get people logged in and playing for 2 hours. We've been pretty open about this two-hour requirement from the beginning.

    We can look into the other things - we can certainly adjust influencing tiers if it's really that much worse off than bashing.


    Influencing is MUCH slower.
    If you rebalance quest rewards based on people having fast travel / fast killing of quest-required NPCs, then you drastically slow down the people who don't and make their life worse.  I don't think it is reasonable to "punish" people for not having specific artifacts (obviously not your intent, but I am not sure how else players could be expected to take that).
    It simply is not possible to say "it will be 2 hours for everyone" unless you delete all current daily credit options and just give people 1 credit every 6 minutes when not in a manse.  I think the better goal is to say "for our average player this is our goal," because balancing to the top will mess up everyone else.
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  • I guess I just don't get the rationale for everyone taking two hours - it seems there is no progression in the game. The better you do, the more of a grind we will make it for you. No point in buying artefacts, we will just make quests take longer. I don't think this is replicated in other IRE free to play game so why dump it on us?

    If it is supposed to take 2 hours, why get tick for spending 1 minute in a timequake?

    But actually if you give me that time back, i will spend it helping novices learn about quests, taking them hunting, being the all round great guy that I am - because I don't have to spend two hours getting those credits
  • edited October 2019
    Yeah when I login with the intention of getting daily credits, I don't just get them and log off immediately. The grindier the daily ones are, the more frustrating it is for me when I want to also spend time in game doing things like designing, talking to other people etc. Just because I take less than 2 hours (sometimes) for dailies doesn't mean I don't spend 2 hours in game. In my case, if I have to put up defences to do things (like daily credits tend to do) I tend to stay online longer.
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  • edited October 2019
    If 2 hours is the requirement, why not actually just make it 2 hours of meaningful play? Use the current daily credits activities plus maybe some other activities as a heartbeat that indicates some level of engaged play and just distribute credits in some pro-rated fashion throughout the 2 hours so long as the heartbeat keeps beating at some regular-ish interval?

    I think the "plus maybe some other acitivies" bit is where it could get fun and less grindy; interacting with possessed mobs would count, combat, arena events, domoths, exploring new rooms, maybe even some level of player-to-player interaction. Just ideas, but that way no one gets to buff it, it doesn't matter if you're a demi or newbie, and the 2 hour objective is met.
  • Generally speaking, the things I enjoy either don't provide daily credits (stocking my shop - enchanting 15 cubes at once, anybody?) or provide them at terrible rates (aetherhunt, influence). I just... don't bother more often than not. It's not because I don't want them, it's because I don't like doing something for an hour and seeing I got one tick. If I really want my daily credits, I'll go sit on Astral with my favourite people and bash. The rest are either too highly contested (either with people doing them or people trying to kill me) or pointless.

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  • I would love aetherbashing to at least approach what a 6-7 man astral bash would produce. I don't go on astral bashes super often, but if solo UV trash hunting will get me a daily tic in 30-45 minutes (depending on how many others are doing it too and how distracted I am), I don't imagine it takes very long. And aetherbashing requires other people to do, which is a feat of coordination itself!
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  • I'm with @Xenthos; add more activities that don't make it quite so much a grind and as others have indicated, add things that support playing the game a bit more broadly and build the community of the game, rather than heads down and often siloed activities. 

    My only point with the 2 hour suggestion is that if that is and has to be a primary objective, then just make it explicit in the mechanics, which it is not right now.
  • edited October 2019
    Recalibrating the 2 hours isn't in the cards and isn't really in our hands. This isn't something that is Lusternia only, Imperian is intended to follow the same time goal (Yes, I've heard over and over that people can do it faster there, but the point remains that this isn't the stated goal).

    I think something that is being missed is that it's a hard cutoff for 2 hours. I think as long as it's right around there, we're good. We're not going to scramble to make adjustments because one person made it in 1 hour and 52 minutes for instance. If people are finishing faster than an hour though, we'll have to look at that.

    Timequakes being 1 minute for participation was to encourage participation in timequakes more than anything else. They are also an activity that you don't really get to choose when to do them. There has to be a timequake active in order to participate (same as revolts/flares/nodes). Maybe it's worth increasing the required time for them at this point? 

    I'll look at adjusting influencing and aetherhunting up. We could potentially add ticks for watching/participating in a play (though theatre code is a pain to sort through). Some of these other suggestions just really aren't feasible. For instance, it's going to be super involved to track interaction with a possessed mob, or player to player interaction. I'm all for promoting activites that build the community and get people interacting positively with each other. The issue is more in how to track it and reward it in a meaningful fashion.


  • I don't understand the intent behind this design at all. Surely enticing players to commit to two hours of dedicated play every day, 7 days a week is not a good thing (with no means of eventually streamlining/reducing that time so they can instead play for fun or relaxation)?

    That kind of fixed time window for key monetary rewards just seems really unhealthy as a design goal, not to mention hardly a paragon of ethical consumer behaviour.
  • I have to wonder why so many orgcredit level things don't give dailycredits as well. What's the reasoning there? If I spend an hour backstage performing a play, shouldn't that be 10crs right there, for playing the game? If I submit a book, shouldn't I get dailycredits because I would have to have spent time writing it ( and 2 hours is nothing on writing a story)? Psychodrama seems largely ignored until Roarkian, where its a mad scramble of throwing games to get the top 3 spots. Why not make non-tournament play (or all forms of play!) give a daily credit per game, even if it's capped? Why say "you have to play this game for 2 hours!" but then only reward certain avenues of playing, which makes it harder to do the other ones because omg I don't have time to write cool stories today because I have to run around collecting cows for 2 hours?
  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    Daily credits as an incentive are a great thing.  They get people the ability to work for stuff in-game, make progress towards goals, etc.
    I am just really concerned by the statements here that if people like me complete quests "too fast," then the rest of the game is going to get nerfed too.  Most quests can be done much faster when you know how to do them vs. the first time.  For example, you can shave nearly half the time off the Frosticia quest if you start murdering things for their corpses during an earlier stage (cutting out having to wait for their respawns).
    A quest like PresidioBeauty might take me 15 minutes.  It is all corpse collection, so I just go pregather all the corpses really fast and hand them in as needed.  People with less travel stuff than me actually encourage others not to bother with it because of how time-consuming it is otherwise and they have other, faster options for them.
    If you nerf quests because I can do them quickly... it just seems like you're not going to make anyone happy.
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  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    @Merlose I definitely added plays because sometimes, you are on the stage, the weave has passed, and you are missing out on the time that you could be out there collecting your dailies (despite doing something that is very much an interactive part of the game).
    Writing books is harder because as far as the game is concerned, when you are writing you are just sitting there.  The book all gets plopped in in one go.
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