TheShindig
TheShindig
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- TheShindig
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Well, yeah, I would have preferred the ranks to be a skill rating too, but ok, fair point. How about if most players beat the outpost in less than 3 deaths?
The devs can set the exact cutoffs however they want, as long as it does a better job of sorting the outposts than the current system, and that's setting the bar pretty low.
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I'm working on something you might like for social. I need to finish prestige with it, but it should be ready sometime next week.
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As a general vibe to target, I'd say anything bronze ranks are consistently beating in less than 3 deaths can go to the normal category.
As a side note: I just found out some players die repeatedly on purpose in loot farm levels to break the traps multiple times. So that would need to be addressed by the devs in some other way, otherwise their difficulty will always be overrated. I don't think that's a huge problem though, because farms seem to be a relatively small % of all maps, and people know what they're getting from the thumbnail, so they're kind of outside the scope of the problem I'm interested in.
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@CotePathos said:
I would rather play interesting maps, but the rank system punishes doing anything but cherry picking whichever base seems the weakest.
I wouldn't worry about the ranking system. Even before the update, if you play enough you'll make it to master.
At first I thought it would be fun to have more of a chess style rating where you actually have to improve to make it go up, but this game doesn't have any of the math in place to do that effectively.
The devs clarified that they want rank to just be a seasonal progress, but I agree with you now. They might as well just scrap it entirely and just say "beat X amount of outposts to get the prizes" That would be more in line with their stated goal of letting the players curate their own experiences anyway.
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@MadMoeZel said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/Meet-Your-Maker/discussion/comment/3428506#Comment_3428506
"Regarding the outpost with a single trap making it all the way to brutal, this is completely absurd."
you misunderstood me. i said what happens if you make a map you personally think is normal, and while you're offline sleeping or working, it gets enough murder to push it brutal. it can't be lowered back to difficult or normal without more plays. but to lower the lethality and adjust it back down you'd have to reduce the trap count. to quickly move it down you'd have to have no lethality, so you'd minimize your trap count to get back to the bracket you intended. but now you're in brutal, which has less total raids statistically, so you can't get your dungeon back down. death by brutal regulation.
We could use a simple kill ratio cutoff as a proof of concept. If it gets above to 2.0
how do you handle this?
https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/U0IOKR8LNCG8/image.png
i'm intentionally providing an exterme example because we need to consider them if we are to make a truly balance system. i'm not against a reorganizing of difficulty. just want to make sure we're fully investigating it's effects before it gets 'mis-implemented'
The actual function wouldn't use kill ratio directly. It would be much more appropriate to weigh kills asymptotically. For instance, 20 deaths already indicates the raider is struggling significantly. If they decide to stick around and die another 1000 times, there would be no reason to increase the weight of their run much further.
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Monitoring and adjusting outposts is the fun part of building, so I hope you're doing that anyway.
The current way the game works with its hard cutoffs encourages builders to push every outpost right up to the limit of its difficulty class. This is actually limiting creativity. Personally I would much rather see a game where people just build whatever experiences they're excited about, and let the difficulty fall where it may. If you truly do intend for an outpost to be easier, you literally have to watch replays to see what raiders are messing up. It's an iterative process. That's the only way.
Regarding the outpost with a single trap making it all the way to brutal, this is completely absurd. It would never happen. If you don't believe me, we could even construct rigorous simulations with the game in its current state. You could literally make an outpost with a single trap, then hide as many other traps as you need away from the harvester path to adjust the difficulty up and down. We could use a simple kill ratio cutoff as a proof of concept. If it gets above to 2.0 (which will never happen) hide more traps to move it up to dangerous. If the kill ratio falls back down (which it would immediately) adjust it back to normal.
The game needs a statistical sanity check for fixing outliers. There are way too many outposts that are only in "brutal" because they are big. This is frustrating to builders who just want to make something fancy and moderately challenging, and it's confusing to new raiders who are getting mixed signals about how hard brutal outposts should be.
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You actually can do this. Social outposts don't need to have a valid harvester path, which means you basically don't even need to have floors if you don't want them. I played one outpost that was basically all corrosive cubes, but some of them had hard skin so you would have something to grapple or jump off of.
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This is a really good point. The ranking system is in an awkward place right now because it's trying to be a seasonal progression and a skill rating at the same time. In addition to the point you made, I think it's also a bummer that it encourages people to try to scum out rating points in whatever way is the easiest instead of challenging them to actually get better at raiding.
Hopefully once everyone is a "master" they'll actually slow down to appreciate the game and try different kinds of outposts.
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@MadMoeZel said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/Meet-Your-Maker/discussion/comment/3427882#Comment_3427882
at what point of lethality does a dungeon stop being considered normal or dangerous?
Once there's some sort of (probably hidden) underlying difficulty score in place, the devs could put the cutoffs at 1st and 3rd quartile or whatever they think makes most sense. The important thing is that we wouldn't have outposts 2 entire difficulty levels away from where they should be.
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@MadMoeZel said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/Meet-Your-Maker/discussion/comment/3427862#Comment_3427862
what do we do about people thinking they should be in difficult when they should be in normal? how likely are players like that to flip a difficult into brutal. how do we handle the speed runners playing actually difficult dungeons and completing them quickly with few deaths? will this shift things into normal and punish newer players?
So, your first question is actually why I'm suggesting this. I think some new players raided a few outposts that were only given the "brutal" designation because they had a lot of traps, then they thought they were good, so when they played outposts that were actually brutal they felt that they had been cheated in some way. I believe that by letting new players get utterly destroyed by a brutal outpost right off the bat we would be setting expectations properly and avoiding bitterness and confusion later on.
If an outpost is consistently being aced by speedrunners, it might actually deserve to be adjusted down to dangerous. There is a deeper answer to this question that also takes into account the skill ratings of the people doing the speedrunning. For example, if a master aces an outpost it doesn't mean much because it isn't very surprising. If bronze ranks are routinely breezing in an out of an outpost, it might belong in the normal category.
To answer your last question, imagine the difficulties of outposts as being on something like a bell curve. In the case of a bunch of aces, it should be easier for a brutal outpost to be reassessed down to dangerous than for a dangerous outpost to be reassessed down to normal. On the flip side, it wouldn't take many deaths to push a normal outpost into dangerous, but it would take some serious carnage to push an outpost up to brutal. This way the 3 difficulties should feel very distinct, and I believe that will help new players learn the ropes faster.
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The weight of quitting vs dying would need to be approximated experimentally.
Editing the outpost would not reset the difficulty rating. If you've made it easier or harder, the stats will sort that out soon enough.
To address issues of taste, I would give quits lower weight if they were preceded by less deaths. To me this would indicate a lack of enjoyment rather than a struggle. It would still slightly increase the difficulty rating, but in practice I don't think any outpost would be adjusted all the way to "brutal" just because people don't like it. Accolades could also be a factor in this.
I would disregard co-op play entirely for these assessments.
The exact weights could be tweaked and tuned, or they could only address the most severe outliers. For example, a "brutal" outpost with 100% victory rate and no kills, or a "normal" outpost with a 10% victory rate and a ton of kills.
Bottom line, there will always be people trying to game the system for whatever reason, but statistical evaluation will be vastly more accurate than any hard-and-fast formula like they use currently.