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Players Claim WAR Contribution Non-Existant - Contribution is dead, long live the dice
AmazingAvery
Age of Conan AdvocateMember UncommonPosts: 7,188
Saw this over at tentonhammer, thought it made an interesting read!
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/50025
Players assert contribution determined on random die roll.
One of the most bragged about features in Warhammer Online is the contribution system used to dole out loot in Public Quests and Keep captures. Supposedly a player's contribution is measured on various actions taken while in the public quest and the more someone contributes, the more likely they are to get loot. This is all calculated according to a secret formula that Mythic Entertainment has devised.
A group of players have now claimed that they've broken the code of that secret formula. Namely the secret is this they say - the formula doesn't exist. According to this theory, a random die roll is made when a player enters a zone. That is their contribution score, and will remain their score until they change zones. Which means, theoretically, that someone who was lucky enough to have a high roll could sit there and do nothing and win every loot until they either leave or someone with a higher roll comes along.
This theory is causing a lot of heat on both sides of the issue. Those that don't believe this is the case are upset that these players are "stirring the pot". Those that support the theory are calling it a betrayal by Mythic.
"Despite what their intentions were I am horribly disappointed in Mythic. Not that they failed to create this tool, but that they still used a roll system and named it contribution; made us believe that what we did actually mattered. Lied to. Deceived. I can think of no complimentary words for what they did. It’s another big feature that caused me to buy this game which isn’t implemented. They might have kept half the system if they would finish it at some later time, but I still can’t figure out why they would name it contribution. It makes no sense! The only word we have got about the system is the usual “working as intended”.
No word yet from Mythic about how correct or incorrect this might be. We are hoping to hear from them soon.
A full explanation of the theory behind contribution can be found here.
It is only a rumor at the moment but the link at the bottom here from the source makes an interesting read.
what do you think, is it important either way? looks pretty significant to me and makes sense about people winning loot all the time in a good way. Is it something that can be fixed easy or not?
I was reading up on WAR and I only played the first month and was thinking of getting further in to the big sieges and some videos whet my appetite.
Im not posting this to piss people off, it just seems a bit relevant from reading some of the posts here an on my guild forums.
Comments
LOL how do you "determine" it's random?
This applies only to keep taking contribution, and not to any of the other contribution systems (like pq's). I am of the camp that believes keep taking contribution IS currently messed up, and experience shows that it is based on a combination of a roll of the dice and some other value randomly determined when entering the zone. Resulting in a sort of double randomness. Though I think its pretty extremist to call the whole thing a betrayal.
For a while during beta, players complained that certain players that knew how to 'game' the system would always get top, and no one else would ever have a chance. Those of the highest level, with the most damage output, or the highest capacity for healing, would win, and everyone else was left in the dust. People could win under such a system not by being the most skilled, just by having the highest level and farmed equipment. It make participation pointless if you werent the highest you could be. So they made efforts to put in some randomization.
The bad thing of this dice rolling, obviously, is that people that work harder during a keep take dont necessary get the highest contribution. The good thing is, everyone has a chance to win if they do it enough, and there is no real way for someone to game the system.
How I would personally want it to be is that contribution is a factor but not the end all. It should provide a small bonus that increases your chances. This is how people thought it was supposed to work, but instead we got a more randomized system.
I think the system could be a lot worse, but I am not a big fan of the complete randomness.
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Playing a BW i am always in top 3 damage dealers or contributors. However my winning is 1/10. The roll is just random, there is no such thing as contribution. If we go according to contribution, i would be winning gold, purple and blue bags every single PQ, which is not true.
How would you fix it though? If it was all contribution wouldn't the damage dealers / contributors win out all the time causing more issues of unfairness? Maybe it's better to "put in what you want" and benefit from that, or is it more fair to split across the board on a number of circumstances?
To be honest I never got up high enough to give it a thorough look over, just trying to get head around it thats all.
How would you fix it though? If it was all contribution wouldn't the damage dealers / contributors win out all the time causing more issues of unfairness? Maybe it's better to "put in what you want" and benefit from that, or is it more fair to split across the board on a number of circumstances?
To be honest I never got up high enough to give it a thorough look over, just trying to get head around it thats all.
There can't be a proper fix for it because its very hard to balance roll when people who are not high damage dealers also need loot. However a small bonus just to increase your chances can be better. Maybe a system where everytime you make high contribution or damagae your chances keep improving over time. Random roll is not bad in PQ but it can be a great time sink if you want that SPECIAL gear from Keep lords.
considering that i often won the contribution meters on keep taking (repeat on keep taking) only by moving my char to follow others and not attacking or taking dmg, I support the theories floating around regarding the way contribution values are generated.
That's a bullshit claim because i've been in a zone and completed 2 full PQ's before leaving and had 2 seperate contribution rolls. Contribution is based off of damage output and healing.
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Its a bullshit claim I've been in the same party of 6 - 12 people rolling through all the PQ's in an area without changing zones and recieved different die rolls. The wins are random th econtribution is to give people a better shot so that if say two people have the same roll it comes down to who contributed the most. If you don't win in that run you can stay and do the PQ again and get an additional type of influence over the dice which will get bigger the longer you run the PQ thus making sure everyone is rewarded.
The PQ loot system is to make things more fair so that people who are participating but they're soloing, or they came into the PQ late but not at the very end or left out because a group / guild refuses to take in out siders still gets a shot at the loot for their work. The contribution is just a 'buff' to the final roll.
People who cry over the PQ loot system are just pissed off they hard core drilled through PQ's and weren't given something better over the casual players.
Honestly Avery..I'm amazed your here presenting this old topic that was discussed weeks ago and Poo'd on then too. If you want to troll go back to Failcom's boards and sit over there. I call you a troll because you have no and never had any genuine interest in this game and repeatedly flamed it in defense of Age of Lame which turned out to be 100 times worse than anyone could imagine and still defend it. Seriously...why are you here? Stirring the pot ... pot of crap.
yeah i have farmed pqs many times in a row i would usually stay till i was capped and never did i see teh same contibution points.
and as some one else said the rolls very way too much make the contibution points matter fully. i have been running through some where saw some one in trouble stopped helped kill the mob that was killing them, continued on to where i was going and saw that i had actually won and not only did i win something but actually got first place. only happend once or twice but did happen. i've seen people come in first on contibution and only roll like a 4 and get nothing at all, because the 4+the contribution points was lower than the gimp guys high roll + low contribution
I've seen guys get 1st bag who did absolutely nothing to contribute and even admitted it. The guy was like WTF? I was just standing over there waiting for you guys to reset it.
I am just going to stand here and collect loot.. k?
Worst idea ever..
I am not sure if its important but as far as keeps using contribution there is almost no doubt among anyone who is not just plain crazy that the conribution system is compltely borked.
Some people claim the best way to get the top contribution is to do nothing at all.
Maybe thats true but even if it isn't what is stopping us from just standing in an area all day afk and checking every once in a while to see if you get some free gold bags?
The theory only applies to keeps, not PQs (as mentioned above). It never occured to me until I read the blog, but yes looking back my experiences taking keeps leads me to believe the theory is true.
Shame on you MJ and mythic. If theres one thing I hate its the attitude that exists with developers of "don't worry - the stupid players will never figure it out... haha". Deception FTL
In the early PQ's I've done, the bonus points you got did seem to be from how much you helped out. If I just strolled in at the end, I got none, but as I continued playing from there, it was constantly changing from 100-500 or whatever the range is. I knew myself as I went a long that I didn't do as good a job as other times, and would probably get less points, and I was always right.
On the other hand, one time I did walk into a PQ with like 7 people at it, attacked the boss in it a couple times, and ended up getting one of the green loot bags because my dice roll was so high, though my contribution was 0.
It has happened to me (more than once) just getting out of a scenario onto the PQ they are killing the boss i got there wack him a couple of time and get 1st which seemed a bit weird at the time but didnt pay much attention but that might be why.
Avery, check out my newest article which analyses Warhammer at the 60 day mark. I talk about this exact thing as one of the major problems. I have tested this theory with my guild and I can not disprove it sadly.
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I can tell you one night at a guild PQ run i was placing first in contribution every time. I started to fell bad because i didnt need the rewards anymore, so I went afk and did zero participation. Guess who was highest in contribution again? Yup, I was and I was afk. Alot of us have confirmed this in many ways. The Contribution system has never worked. Now after reading this, it makes more sense while i placed first everytime in contribuation during that PQ run if it was based on some roll when i entered.
Honestly, they should scrap the whole thing and just give tokens for everyone there when the Keep Lord drops. These tokens can be exhanged for pieces of armor. Each piece would require a handful of them, so that you’d have to take on the Keeps more than 5 times to get your gear.
Also, when are they going to add rewards for defending? Right now, it makes no sense to defend other than pride and to get some fighting on. If as a player, I’m wanting to get my set of armor, I’m going to take the unguarded keep, not defend one that the enemy’s attacking.
this is old news, it's not about who do more DPS, it's about who is the luckiest!
We need the option to pass on these rolls. This gear is essential for tanks to allow the entire guild to progress and we would all pass to gear up a could of tanks but instead the bags go to completely random individuals….
Contribution in the city siege PQs is 100% based on the order that folks entered the PQ. This could be true of all PQs.. I don;t know... but I spent an entire nights sieging Inevitable a few weeks back and watched it happen.
Every PQ the same folks finished in the same order for contribution... The rolls varied but the contribution was the same. The only change was if someone left the instance.. then everyone below him moved up one rank.
it has nothing to do with contributing.. these greedy bastards just went AFK for 3 hours and only tabbed back in to click on their gold loot bags... It was pathetic as people got ~ 20 gold bags but wouldn;t leave to give others a shot because "they were still missing their belt" etc...
The instance we were in had no Destruction players either.. so it was really just milking gold bags all night.
(and yes I did file a report.. never heard back)
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Thanks for the read it was insightful. There seems to be more acknowledgement that something is not right than there is as working as intended.
I think that Battlekruse's 'token' idea seems pretty reasonable.
Thanks for the read it was insightful. There seems to be more acknowledgement that something is not right than there is as working as intended.
I think that Battlekruse's 'token' idea seems pretty reasonable.
Given your special status for the AoC community I must admit that I am a bit surprised you would create a thread that specifically tries to undermine people's confidence in WAR. I suppose you are just trying to get 'Payback' for all the troll threads created on the AoC boards by WAR supporters, but I thought you were supposed to be above things like that. No matter though.
The idea of being able to pass on 'PQ Bags' is interesting but could only work when the PQ was being done solely by small groups of people that knew each other. Since PQs are by definition designed to pull in passing players who feel like joining in, if someone passed on a loot bag then it might go to a complete stranger instead which would cause even more arguments. The only sure way of achieving the goal of ensuring certain people get gear upgrades would be if they could be exchanged between players but PQ bags are quite deliberately non-tradable.
Returning to the main argument though, it would be interesting if you could prove it but there isn't enough data to distinguish this theory from the usual paranoia generated by life's disappointments. People have a natural tendency to remember the bad things & often imagine that they must have been cheated when things don't go how they wanted. This is also why ridiculous superstitions persist into the 21st century.
It's pretty obvious why Mythic included a randomising element when you think about it, because unless there was a chance that they could still win something no-one would join in a PQ that had already started as their would be no chance of a reward.
The current system is a random roll where players get an increased chance of winning depending on their contribution, but the key word is 'chance' & the highest contribution players do not automatically win for the reasons discussed above. All the alleged evidence seems to be anecdotal & for almost every example of contribution being totally ignored, I can remember occasions where the exact opposite happened to me.
The problem is that the evidence will always be anecdotal because in order to statistically prove that the contribution bonuses have no effect on the random dice rolls you would need to repeat the same PQ an awful lot of times & somehow manage to do everything in almost exactly the same way each time.
I am not saying the system is perfect, far from it. For enough people to feel this way there definitely seems to be an argument for increasing the level of contribution bonuses, but even if they did there would still be people claiming it hadn't changed at all.
Just my opinions of course.
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Thanks for the read it was insightful. There seems to be more acknowledgement that something is not right than there is as working as intended.
I think that Battlekruse's 'token' idea seems pretty reasonable.
Given your special status for the AoC community I must admit that I am a bit surprised you would create a thread that specifically tries to undermine people's confidence in WAR. Just my opinions of course.
Yes you may think that but it is wrong, honestly. Like I said in the first post came across this interesting news and also on guild forums wanted to know what the mmorpg.com community thought.
Thanks for the read it was insightful. There seems to be more acknowledgement that something is not right than there is as working as intended.
I think that Battlekruse's 'token' idea seems pretty reasonable.
Given your special status for the AoC community I must admit that I am a bit surprised you would create a thread that specifically tries to undermine people's confidence in WAR.
I suppose you are just trying to get 'Payback' for all the troll threads created on the AoC boards by WAR supporters, but I thought you were supposed to be above things like that. No matter though. (Thought I would paste this back in from the original)
Just my opinions of course.
Yes you may think that but it is wrong, honestly. Like I said in the first post came across this interesting news and also on guild forums wanted to know what the mmorpg.com community thought.
LOL, obviously you must have bought the 'Bill Clinton Book of Dodgy Excuses for Every Occasion'.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
Take the Hecatomb? TCG What Is Your Doom? quiz.