That surely sounds counterintuitive, so it needs a lot of explanation. I'll add the caveat that it must only reward failures that were good-faith attempts with a meaningful chance of success, not just starting something and going AFK.
People sometimes talk about challenge in terms of death penalty, and cite early MMORPGs that had harsh death penalties. If every death means that you lose 5 hours of progress, and you play content with a difficulty such that you only die once per five hours, you're just treading water and not making progress. You'll quickly learn to seek out easier content. If you're playing content easy enough that you only die once per 50 hours, that's not challenging. So harsh death penalties are actually antithetical to challenging games.
So why reward failure? Let's suppose that you have choices of higher level content or lower level content. You get 50% more rewards for beating the higher level content, but nothing if you fail. However, you have only a 50% chance of success if you attempt the higher level content, but a 98% chance of success for the lower level content. Which content should you do? Some quick arithmetic reveals that you'd expect to get 31% better rewards from doing the lower level content where victory is nearly assured.
But even that assumes that they take the same amount of time, which they surely won't. Higher level mobs will take longer to kill, and will likely require players to spend longer recovering between battles. So if you go after the higher level content, you expect it to take longer to get those reduced rewards.
This can sometimes get so absurd that, instead of doing easy content that you'll beat 100% of the time, it's sometimes better to do easier content that you'll also beat 100% of the time, and only gives 2/3 as large of rewards, but you can do it in 1/2 of the time. And people wonder why so many games seem so easy.
The solution is to scale the rewards such that the most rewarding path involves doing content where victory is far from assured. I'm not saying that everything needs to be only a 50% chance of success, but I am saying that if doing content where you have a 99% chance of success gives markedly better rewards per unit time than content where you have only a 98% chance of success, your game is not going to be challenging.
This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure. Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure, how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot you get.
But if a close failure where you had a 50% chance of success gives about the same rewards per unit time as an easier victory where you had a 99% chance of success, and succeeding at the harder content gives considerably better rewards yet, then we're on the right track. You can rescale things such that the optimal rewards involve players attempting things where they'll succeed 70% of the time or 80% or 90% or whatever, but keep it out of the high 90s if you want any semblance of challenge.
This, of course, ignores the problem of scaling challenge to group content, in which some group members are much stronger than others. But that's another topic for another time, and this post is long enough.
I posted this before the recent forum downtime. The transition seems to have eaten everything that happened for about two hours before the forums were locked, so that thread is apparently gone. As such, I'm posting it again. Feel free to repeat your comments made on the previous thread. Including the guy who came in to argue that even Care Bears think that anyone who disagrees with him should die and then got banned, and then had his ban eaten by the forum rollback.
I think the main point to consider, is "what is challenge?"
Challenge can be facing a opponent with a 50/50 chance to win/lose, Challenge can also be a Jump Puzzle, Challenge can also be finding 100 coins from all over the game world.
Now some people may call that last one a 'grind" but grinds in their own way are a challenge, one of perseverance.
There are all kinds of ways to make things challenging, so when you talk of challenge, you need to address what kind of challenge you are talking about.
Then you have to ask "Who is this challenge for", when people talk of Challenge, often what they really want, is something that is easy enough for them to, but too hard for those they feel are below them.
The harsh truth is that when people discuss challenge, they seem to forget that No one really wants to get stonewalled by a game.
If it's not plausible that you could lose at an activity and have it be your fault that you lost, even while trying to win, then that activity isn't challenging.
As far as not getting stonewalled, that's one of the key reasons to reward failure. The first game I saw do this was Super Mario RPG. You go out, fight for a while, and die, and keep any experience you got before dying even after you last saved. That way, you're stronger when you go out and try it again. If it takes several tries doing slightly better each time, eventually you just barely win and it feels like you've accomplished something. Even if you had to be 3 levels higher than someone else did.
I feel like most people read the title of this thread, didn't read the OP and then responded.
I get it, the OP is long (@Quizzical - You may want to consider using headers and bullet points to breakup the wall of text.) but if you don't bother reading what's being discussed why respond to the topic at all? You can skip on to the next topic without making a response. That is allowed.
Would you believe that I actually shortened what I wanted to say quite a bit for this thread?
As for people responding to thread titles, welcome to the Internet. People will do that even if the content of an original post is two sentences.
UO already has a system much like this in place , The more difficult the mob the higher reward for Karma/Fame and Loot tables ...
The problem, as explained in the original thread, is that if you rely solely on stronger loot for harder mobs in a game with progression, you have to scale the loot up really, really fast.
For example, suppose you can fight mobs your level and beat them 98% of the time. Or you can fight mobs 2 levels above you and beat them 50% of the time. The mobs 2 levels above you also take you 50% longer to kill. In order to make it barely more profitable to fight the higher level, harder mobs, they have to offer triple the loot of the lower level mobs. If you got your reward for fighting them even if you lost, you only have to offer 50% more loot.
But look what happens to the loot tables if you chain that. If loot triples every two levels, then mobs 40 levels above you must offer about 3.5 billion times as much loot as mobs your level. If it's only 1.5 times the loot per 2 levels, then 40 levels higher only takes 3.3 thousand times as much loot.
That kind of loot scaling really breaks things when you bring grouping into account. You could easily end up with the Vanilla WoW problem in which most non-endgame grouping is a high level running low levels through stuff. Why not get some friend 60 levels above you to help you kill mobs 40 levels above you? One mob alone might get you more loot than you'd get over the course of the next 30 levels cumulatively on your own.
Now, you could try to disable grouping with characters that far apart in level. But if someone 10 levels above you grouping with you lets you beat mobs 6 levels above you, getting 27 times the loot from loot tripling every two levels is sure a whole lot more than getting 3.3 times the loot. And if you can only group with players that match your level exactly, you fix that problem but create other problems of trying to create groups.
Even apart from the problems of grouping, think about the beggars. If a trivial amount of gold to max level players is more than a new character can expect to earn cumulatively until he gets within 10 levels of the cap, why not beg for it? And then all but the endgame turns into a matter of begging, not playing the game. Surely that's not what we want.
This problem is greatly mitigated if a game has only pretty mild progression. If two newly created characters are together stronger than a single max-level player in full best-in-slot gear, you don't need to scale rewards so hard. A lot of players want more progression than that, though, and games that do have progression need to work, too.
Now you realize , that most games , at least those that have even the slightest sense of rules , Does not reward loot or xp when grouped with someone so much higher , At leats any game i have ever played worth a dam .. And that is most likley a contributing factor .. So most all of this wall of text is irellavent..
Also , in UO for instance .. again , Many High lvl raid encounters are for super rare Deco items and scrolls that are highly prized not just Loot ...
And who the hell wants to sit around beggin for shit .. Seriously who pays any attention to these people , but a topic for another thread i would think
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
I'm not talking about participation trophies.
Imagine that you're a professional athlete. You can play in the top league in the world and be a slightly below average player at that level of competition. Or you can play in a much lower league and be the best player in the league. Incentives shouldn't be skewed to encourage everyone to try to do the latter. Backups in the top league tend to get paid more than stars in the minor leagues.
But for most PVE and some PVP in MMORPGs, the incentives are very much skewed to push people to do trivial things and not to try things that are harder. And that's what I'm trying to address.
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
The reward for beating challenging content is the feeling you have after beating challenging content. I don't agree with getting rewards before you beat stuff. It sucks being stuck on things but the feeling you get when its all done is much sweeter because of it.
During this year my favorite game experience so far is Furi, a game with zero rewards. It was brutal, frustrating but so damn worth it.
That's fine for some games. For games with progression, ignoring what you need to do to progress cripples you. If you want to argue that games shouldn't have progression at all, that's a different argument entirely. I'm basically arguing, if a game is going to have progression, don't let it wreck the game.
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
He absolutley does say that ...
quote from OP "This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure.
Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing
at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things
far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure,
how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot
you get"
By not defeating (winning) the encounter he still is promoting rewards for Failing (losing) the encounter ... this is the very definition of participation reward..
Hey you played kid and good effort but you failed ... heres a brand new shiny Trophy for ya , Now its not as nice and shiny and large as the the Trophy the group that actually completed and Won the encounter got .... But thx for tryin...here ya go for Participating ..
But it's not an automatic, everyone gets a trophy type of thing. If you fail badly enough that it looks like you had no real hope of success, you should get no reward for that. People who start something and AFK should especially get no reward. But if you fight your way through a dungeon and get the boss down to 10% before you wipe, and all you have to show for it is a hefty death penalty, then in most MMORPGs, most people aren't going to try something where failure is decently likely.
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
He absolutley does say that ...
quote from OP "This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure.
Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing
at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things
far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure,
how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot
you get"
By not defeating (winning) the encounter he still is promoting rewards for Failing (losing) the encounter ... this is the very definition of participation reward..
Hey you played kid and good effort but you failed ... heres a brand new shiny Trophy for ya , Now its not as nice and shiny and large as the the Trophy the group that actually completed and Won the encounter got .... But thx for tryin...here ya go for Participating ..
But it's not an automatic, everyone gets a trophy type of thing. If you fail badly enough that it looks like you had no real hope of success, you should get no reward for that. People who start something and AFK should especially get no reward. But if you fight your way through a dungeon and get the boss down to 10% before you wipe, and all you have to show for it is a hefty death penalty, then in most MMORPGs, most people aren't going to try something where failure is decently likely.
Well , listen tho Quizzical we are with this system taking into consideration , that on most any Raid on the way to the Boss , there is usually mutiple Loot drops , that re desired/required/and need to progress to Boss and be succesful and sometimes takes several runs for a group to aquire all the things necassary ..
So with that understood .. . If your group try X dungeon and makes it 80% thru on its raid nite that week ... And aquires 3 useful items but fails to drop the Boss .. We are already being rewarded for partial success ...
Then you regroup/discuss during the week and try again .. we have all done this and been thru this scenario Im certain of..
As I said before the forum reset, what is really needed is better scaling of rewards - both XP and loot - that takes difficulty into consideration.
Most MMOs only do this for extreme cases and the rewards are typically just items exclusive to that content. I'm thinking of raids vs. less difficult group dungeons and the overworld.
But even in the mostly solo overworld of themeparks they could do a better job of rewarding content of varying difficulty in more appropriate ways.
For example, ESO has a range of mob difficulty from trivial to slightly challenging in the overworld but they make the XP and loot rewards so that it's far more efficient to grind packs of the trivial skeletons or bandits than to seek out the more challenging ones like trolls, mammoths, giants, etc. If they wanted to reward players who choose to do the harder content they could easily do it by using a better loot table and giving more XP for success when fighting those.
Dying while tackling harder content is just a byproduct of the increased risk. It doesn't need to be rewarded at all if they make the reward for the eventual success worth the trouble.
Mostly agree. Titling the problem "rewarding failure" distracted from the point. Catchy, but distracting.
The problem is multifaceted.
guaranteeing success
punishing failure
rewards for arbitrary content
A long time ago Arena Net pushed out a patch for Guild Wars 1 that inadvertently supercharged the NPC hirelings you could bring along to fill out a party. Previously they were a sketchy choice and there mostly as extra HP sponges. Suddenly players couldn't defeat them. The NPCs could carry the entire group. They fixed it in a couple of days and Gaile Gray explained that they had just made an error in tweaking the AI when it was updated. She continued to explain that balancing a game is really challenging because the developers can tune the AI so no one would ever win. She pointed out the developer challenge is making the fights "challenging" enough to fool the players into thinking they'll lose, but actually letting them win most of the time. A lot of the challenge in MMOs is an illusion.
People don't take risks in mmos if the death penalty is too high. Lineage had this problem. So even though challenge existed at the time people always took the safer route because no amount of success could cover a few failures.
On top of that developers choose to arbitrarily reward content based on their design preferences. Do they want people to play in groups? Then tune that a little bit so that solo or small groups can't meet the dps/hps/mit checks but a slightly larger group can easily overcome it and suddenly you have perceived challenge. Reward that a little more and it's a win win for both. Players feel like they're challenged more and developers get to make content that covers 6 - 8 people instead of 1 - 3. Hey, it's a group challenge success! ...on the surface. Underneath it's still the same.
Sometimes the arbitrarily rewarded content is raids, not group content (dungeons). Sometimes it's arena pvp, not open world pvp. Review the long list of games we've played and each has a few content approaches that the developers reward more.
Thus there is no reason to try challenging content. Not only that, but a point Quizz missed is that players don't want challenge. They want the illusion of challenge and then victory. Start messing with that formula and players will revolt.
Players won't perceive something as challenging if they never lose. Players want to feel like something was challenging and they won anyway. Having some occasional losses in which players see what went wrong, adjust their tactics, and win the next time can go a long way toward this.
The problem is that players really, really don't want to get stuck. Feeling like you're stuck and cannot proceed is one of the surest ways to get players to quit and never come back. If you have 1000 small pieces of content in your game and try to tune each one so that players win 95% of the time, but make one mistake and players only beat that one piece 1% of the time, that can wreck your game if players aren't able and willing to skip it and move on. Developers trying to avoid that can end up making it so that for most of the content in a game, players win 99.9%+ of the time, with most of the losses coming to disconnections or other real-life interruptions.
Just showing up does not define participation .. thats weak ...coomon sense says so , and reducing it to that doesnt make it right ...
And there is No % of Success when you Fail ...
Failure is Failure , dam half a sissy fuggin attitude and approach .. "Well i would like a Trophy to i mean i did try .. wahhh "
This attitude is also what as deteriated the genre as well .. lets make it worse now ... Fuck it why not hand everyone a trophy for loggin in .. I mean wtf that is a challenge for some .....
And im not missing any point .. This system wants to reward for failing ... Thats a bad idea imo .... Maybe you are missing the point
Sorry Scorch. You're pretty off target. It's not nitpicky. Reward is there just for participating. The bar for success is so low that just showing up for most group content gets you through. The "challenging" stuff requires that you read the skills rather than randomly pressing buttons, but is in no way a real tactical challenge. At the very most all anyone is doing is memorizing encounter choreography (raids and challenge dungeons) because encounters are always the same. High end guilds put raids on farm mode because they memorized the scripting, not because they suddenly got that much better in a week of practice.
The same is true for pvp. There is an illusion of challenge because the character is human controlled and "could do anything". Except the players can't do anything. They can do the few things their character is designed to do and not much more. In most every pvp encounter there is a right way and multiple wrong ways to approach the conflict. In deep pvp there are 3 or 4 ways and multiple wrong ways.
It's rote. I'm not sure Quizz's way fixes it, but it's on the right track. What really needs to change is the design paradigms but that's risky and no guarantee of success.
No imo im not now you can argue with IMO all day but you would still be wrong .. There should be no rewards for failure ...
A normative statement of what "should be" does not lend itself to being right or wrong.
Well lets see, when I talked about challenge, there are all kinds, like for example, there are Challenging Puzzles (as in the cut our board with the picture on it), and while, failure is more a matter a matter of simply not having the patience or the skill to complete the puzzle, there is nothing you could do that would jinx it, but.. it's still a challenge.
on the flip side of that, when I was in college, I watched my room-mate, umm screw it.. I myself, slipped getting out of bed and fell on the floor. The fact that by my own actions I failed to be able to get out of bed, does not suddenly make getting out of bed a challenge, (Well it became more a challenge as I got older and needed to deal with work every day, but that was again, more a challenge of perseverance and needing to get the rent paid, then one of skill, luck, or ability)
So again, if you only view challenge as "Twitch Combat", the problem is that becomes an issue of innate ability, and skill. The thing is Twitch skill for a person can cap, this having to do with a array of factors, from something as prohibitive a physical limitations (Like Arthritis), to simply having very bad had-eye coordination, which makes it vert hard for them to attain the skills needed to overcome the challenge.
Which is why Twitch skill is a really poor metric to use to establish "Challenge" in an MMO, not only is it highly limiting, in a massive game like an MMO, something as simple as a Logic Problem could be put in and be equally daunting to some people (à la "the cake is a lie")
This is why when we discuss "Challenge" it is important to know, what kind of challenge we are discussing, and who is this challenge designed for.
However, I agree with you to a point, taking the risk should be rewarded, simply because they took the risk, as opposed to playing safe.
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
He absolutley does say that ...
quote from OP "This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure.
Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing
at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things
far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure,
how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot
you get"
By not defeating (winning) the encounter he still is promoting rewards for Failing (losing) the encounter ... this is the very definition of participation reward..
Hey you played kid and good effort but you failed ... heres a brand new shiny Trophy for ya , Now its not as nice and shiny and large as the the Trophy the group that actually completed and Won the encounter got .... But thx for tryin...here ya go for Participating ..
But it's not an automatic, everyone gets a trophy type of thing. If you fail badly enough that it looks like you had no real hope of success, you should get no reward for that. People who start something and AFK should especially get no reward. But if you fight your way through a dungeon and get the boss down to 10% before you wipe, and all you have to show for it is a hefty death penalty, then in most MMORPGs, most people aren't going to try something where failure is decently likely.
Well , listen tho Quizzical we are with this system taking into consideration , that on most any Raid on the way to the Boss , there is usually mutiple Loot drops , that re desired/required/and need to progress to Boss and be succesful and sometimes takes several runs for a group to aquire all the things necassary ..
So with that understood .. . If your group try X dungeon and makes it 80% thru on its raid nite that week ... And aquires 3 useful items but fails to drop the Boss .. We are already being rewarded for partial success ...
Then you regroup/discuss during the week and try again .. we have all done this and been thru this scenario Im certain of..
Who said anything about raids? In the original post, I even specifically said that I was focusing on solo content, as grouping presents other complications. Raiding presents its own bag of problems that have nothing to do with challenge, and I really don't want to get derailed into another discussion of raiding.
Just showing up does not define participation .. thats weak ...coomon sense says so , and reducing it to that doesnt make it right ...
And there is No % of Success when you Fail ...
Failure is Failure , dam half a sissy fuggin attitude and approach .. "Well i would like a Trophy to i mean i did try .. wahhh "
This attitude is also what as deteriated the genre as well .. lets make it worse now ... Fuck it why not hand everyone a trophy for loggin in .. I mean wtf that is a challenge for some .....
And im not missing any point .. This system wants to reward for failing ... Thats a bad idea imo .... Maybe you are missing the point
Sorry Scorch. You're pretty off target. It's not nitpicky. Reward is there just for participating. The bar for success is so low that just showing up for most group content gets you through. The "challenging" stuff requires that you read the skills rather than randomly pressing buttons, but is in no way a real tactical challenge. At the very most all anyone is doing is memorizing encounter choreography (raids and challenge dungeons) because encounters are always the same. High end guilds put raids on farm mode because they memorized the scripting, not because they suddenly got that much better in a week of practice.
The same is true for pvp. There is an illusion of challenge because the character is human controlled and "could do anything". Except the players can't do anything. They can do the few things their character is designed to do and not much more. In most every pvp encounter there is a right way and multiple wrong ways to approach the conflict. In deep pvp there are 3 or 4 ways and multiple wrong ways.
It's rote. I'm not sure Quizz's way fixes it, but it's on the right track. What really needs to change is the design paradigms but that's risky and no guarantee of success.
No imo im not now you can argue with IMO all day but you would still be wrong .. There should be no rewards for failure ...
A normative statement of what "should be" does not lend itself to being right or wrong.
It does when it s someones opinion .. as in ... Under no circumstances Should you receive a reward for failure ..............imo
Well lets see, when I talked about challenge, there are all kinds, like for example, there are Challenging Puzzles (as in the cut our board with the picture on it), and while, failure is more a matter a matter of simply not having the patience or the skill to complete the puzzle, there is nothing you could do that would jinx it, but.. it's still a challenge.
on the flip side of that, when I was in college, I watched my room-mate, umm screw it.. I myself, slipped getting out of bed and fell on the floor. The fact that by my own actions I failed to be able to get out of bed, does not suddenly make getting out of bed a challenge, (Well it became more a challenge as I got older and needed to deal with work every day, but that was again, more a challenge of perseverance and needing to get the rent paid, then one of skill, luck, or ability)
So again, if you only view challenge as "Twitch Combat", the problem is that becomes an issue of innate ability, and skill. The thing is Twitch skill for a person can cap, this having to do with a array of factors, from something as prohibitive a physical limitations (Like Arthritis), to simply having very bad had-eye coordination, which makes it vert hard for them to attain the skills needed to overcome the challenge.
Which is why Twitch skill is a really poor metric to use to establish "Challenge" in an MMO, not only is it highly limiting, in a massive game like an MMO, something as simple as a Logic Problem could be put in and be equally daunting to some people (à la "the cake is a lie")
This is why when we discuss "Challenge" it is important to know, what kind of challenge we are discussing, and who is this challenge designed for.
However, I agree with you to a point, taking the risk should be rewarded, simply because they took the risk, as opposed to playing safe.
In that regard, I fully agree with you.
I tried not to be too specific of "in this exact case", as people will use that to derail the thread. If I specified a solo, instanced, quest area, then I'd get replies saying that the problem is questing is bad, instancing is bad, or whatever, and not engaging with the topic of the thread.
Just showing up does not define participation .. thats weak ...coomon sense says so , and reducing it to that doesnt make it right ...
And there is No % of Success when you Fail ...
Failure is Failure , dam half a sissy fuggin attitude and approach .. "Well i would like a Trophy to i mean i did try .. wahhh "
This attitude is also what as deteriated the genre as well .. lets make it worse now ... Fuck it why not hand everyone a trophy for loggin in .. I mean wtf that is a challenge for some .....
And im not missing any point .. This system wants to reward for failing ... Thats a bad idea imo .... Maybe you are missing the point
Sorry Scorch. You're pretty off target. It's not nitpicky. Reward is there just for participating. The bar for success is so low that just showing up for most group content gets you through. The "challenging" stuff requires that you read the skills rather than randomly pressing buttons, but is in no way a real tactical challenge. At the very most all anyone is doing is memorizing encounter choreography (raids and challenge dungeons) because encounters are always the same. High end guilds put raids on farm mode because they memorized the scripting, not because they suddenly got that much better in a week of practice.
The same is true for pvp. There is an illusion of challenge because the character is human controlled and "could do anything". Except the players can't do anything. They can do the few things their character is designed to do and not much more. In most every pvp encounter there is a right way and multiple wrong ways to approach the conflict. In deep pvp there are 3 or 4 ways and multiple wrong ways.
It's rote. I'm not sure Quizz's way fixes it, but it's on the right track. What really needs to change is the design paradigms but that's risky and no guarantee of success.
No imo im not now you can argue with IMO all day but you would still be wrong .. There should be no rewards for failure ...
A normative statement of what "should be" does not lend itself to being right or wrong.
It does when it s someones opinion .. as in ... Under no circumstances Should you receive a reward for failure ..............imo
Have you considered dropping your usage of consecutive periods? Using multiple periods consecutively should be used very sparingly, and virtually never in the middle of a paragraph. A single period ends a sentence, not two or three or eight in a row. It would make your posts easier to read.
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
He absolutley does say that ...
quote from OP "This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure.
Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing
at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things
far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure,
how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot
you get"
By not defeating (winning) the encounter he still is promoting rewards for Failing (losing) the encounter ... this is the very definition of participation reward..
Hey you played kid and good effort but you failed ... heres a brand new shiny Trophy for ya , Now its not as nice and shiny and large as the the Trophy the group that actually completed and Won the encounter got .... But thx for tryin...here ya go for Participating ..
But it's not an automatic, everyone gets a trophy type of thing. If you fail badly enough that it looks like you had no real hope of success, you should get no reward for that. People who start something and AFK should especially get no reward. But if you fight your way through a dungeon and get the boss down to 10% before you wipe, and all you have to show for it is a hefty death penalty, then in most MMORPGs, most people aren't going to try something where failure is decently likely.
Well , listen tho Quizzical we are with this system taking into consideration , that on most any Raid on the way to the Boss , there is usually mutiple Loot drops , that re desired/required/and need to progress to Boss and be succesful and sometimes takes several runs for a group to aquire all the things necassary ..
So with that understood .. . If your group try X dungeon and makes it 80% thru on its raid nite that week ... And aquires 3 useful items but fails to drop the Boss .. We are already being rewarded for partial success ...
Then you regroup/discuss during the week and try again .. we have all done this and been thru this scenario Im certain of..
Who said anything about raids? In the original post, I even specifically said that I was focusing on solo content, as grouping presents other complications. Raiding presents its own bag of problems that have nothing to do with challenge, and I really don't want to get derailed into another discussion of raiding.
The same logic will/does apply to solo content now .. How many of us have gone into a dungeon or zone over the years (Solo) to get a specific drop or 2 ... .. An have walked away with a couple items that will help on your next attempt /after you died 3 times only getting 60% thru ...
I don't agree on having participation trophy for content. The reason why you give them out in tournaments is because you are dealing with kids and you want to hook them into activating themselves. With mmorpg you are mostly dealing with adults and we play because we enjoy playing.
The first part of the problem is that you will have to give out a lot of rewards and I find that current mmorpg already give out way too much rewards which undermine the feeling when you get stuff. The other part is that people are likely to abuse the living shit out of it.
I would rather see developers focus on making fun content for more types of players instead of focusing so much on rewards.
Thats not what OP said - he is NOT talking about participation trophies at all.
He absolutley does say that ...
quote from OP "This nearly requires offering substantial rewards for failure.
Obviously, succeeding at content should be more rewarding than failing
at the same content. And players ought not be encouraged to try things
far above their level with no real hope of success. So even in failure,
how close you came to success should matter tremendously to the loot
you get"
By not defeating (winning) the encounter he still is promoting rewards for Failing (losing) the encounter ... this is the very definition of participation reward..
Hey you played kid and good effort but you failed ... heres a brand new shiny Trophy for ya , Now its not as nice and shiny and large as the the Trophy the group that actually completed and Won the encounter got .... But thx for tryin...here ya go for Participating ..
But it's not an automatic, everyone gets a trophy type of thing. If you fail badly enough that it looks like you had no real hope of success, you should get no reward for that. People who start something and AFK should especially get no reward. But if you fight your way through a dungeon and get the boss down to 10% before you wipe, and all you have to show for it is a hefty death penalty, then in most MMORPGs, most people aren't going to try something where failure is decently likely.
This is the part that is just not true in any of my experience from UO thru every dang MMO since .. And i have done this plenty where i wiped on a boss.. But ya know what i picked up a couple items on the way ,a nd some valuble knowledge and expereince .. Not Just a hefty death Penalty .. thats just throwing the heaviest ugliest blanket you can on the experience the player had ...
Just showing up does not define participation .. thats weak ...coomon sense says so , and reducing it to that doesnt make it right ...
And there is No % of Success when you Fail ...
Failure is Failure , dam half a sissy fuggin attitude and approach .. "Well i would like a Trophy to i mean i did try .. wahhh "
This attitude is also what as deteriated the genre as well .. lets make it worse now ... Fuck it why not hand everyone a trophy for loggin in .. I mean wtf that is a challenge for some .....
And im not missing any point .. This system wants to reward for failing ... Thats a bad idea imo .... Maybe you are missing the point
Sorry Scorch. You're pretty off target. It's not nitpicky. Reward is there just for participating. The bar for success is so low that just showing up for most group content gets you through. The "challenging" stuff requires that you read the skills rather than randomly pressing buttons, but is in no way a real tactical challenge. At the very most all anyone is doing is memorizing encounter choreography (raids and challenge dungeons) because encounters are always the same. High end guilds put raids on farm mode because they memorized the scripting, not because they suddenly got that much better in a week of practice.
The same is true for pvp. There is an illusion of challenge because the character is human controlled and "could do anything". Except the players can't do anything. They can do the few things their character is designed to do and not much more. In most every pvp encounter there is a right way and multiple wrong ways to approach the conflict. In deep pvp there are 3 or 4 ways and multiple wrong ways.
It's rote. I'm not sure Quizz's way fixes it, but it's on the right track. What really needs to change is the design paradigms but that's risky and no guarantee of success.
No imo im not now you can argue with IMO all day but you would still be wrong .. There should be no rewards for failure ...
A normative statement of what "should be" does not lend itself to being right or wrong.
It does when it s someones opinion .. as in ... Under no circumstances Should you receive a reward for failure ..............imo
Have you considered dropping your usage of consecutive periods? Using multiple periods consecutively should be used very sparingly, and virtually never in the middle of a paragraph. A single period ends a sentence, not two or three or eight in a row. It would make your posts easier to read.
To be fair @Quizzical , I believe they are attempting to express pause as if it were spoken word. They aren't wrong by doing that. It's just not a commonality in essay form. In narrative writing it's completely acceptable. If it were an essay form it would be in quotations, mimicking the spoken word. Example: "Hello there... Umm... How's it going?" Though proper punctuation is only "..." three dots. And I shouldn't have used upper case following, that is improper in narrative or not. "Hello there... umm... how's it going?"
Or maybe. Just maybe. They're collecting snippets for use in an index? Day One...........................Total Failure Day Two...........................I Sat On My Lunch Year Twenty-Eight............Where Was That Cheese Curler?
Just what we need right. You get a reward for doing pretty much showing up. I still believe in "no risk, no reward". That doesn't mean I should be rewarded if I fail. The reward is the prize for success not failure.
Just what we need right. You get a reward for doing pretty much showing up. I still believe in "no risk, no reward". That doesn't mean I should be rewarded if I fail. The reward is the prize for success not failure.
The problem is that most MMORPGs have ended up with a system where risk lessens your reward, as the best rewards are for sticking to things where you're essentially guaranteed to succeed, precisely because you're basically guaranteed to get those rewards.
Well lets see, when I talked about challenge, there are all kinds, like for example, there are Challenging Puzzles (as in the cut our board with the picture on it), and while, failure is more a matter a matter of simply not having the patience or the skill to complete the puzzle, there is nothing you could do that would jinx it, but.. it's still a challenge.
on the flip side of that, when I was in college, I watched my room-mate, umm screw it.. I myself, slipped getting out of bed and fell on the floor. The fact that by my own actions I failed to be able to get out of bed, does not suddenly make getting out of bed a challenge, (Well it became more a challenge as I got older and needed to deal with work every day, but that was again, more a challenge of perseverance and needing to get the rent paid, then one of skill, luck, or ability)
So again, if you only view challenge as "Twitch Combat", the problem is that becomes an issue of innate ability, and skill. The thing is Twitch skill for a person can cap, this having to do with a array of factors, from something as prohibitive a physical limitations (Like Arthritis), to simply having very bad had-eye coordination, which makes it vert hard for them to attain the skills needed to overcome the challenge.
Which is why Twitch skill is a really poor metric to use to establish "Challenge" in an MMO, not only is it highly limiting, in a massive game like an MMO, something as simple as a Logic Problem could be put in and be equally daunting to some people (à la "the cake is a lie")
This is why when we discuss "Challenge" it is important to know, what kind of challenge we are discussing, and who is this challenge designed for.
However, I agree with you to a point, taking the risk should be rewarded, simply because they took the risk, as opposed to playing safe.
In that regard, I fully agree with you.
I tried not to be too specific of "in this exact case", as people will use that to derail the thread. If I specified a solo, instanced, quest area, then I'd get replies saying that the problem is questing is bad, instancing is bad, or whatever, and not engaging with the topic of the thread.
Well, I brought this up because it seems that when talking of challenge in an MMO, everyone's mind goes straight to combat and winning a fight, and this is why rewarding failure becomes nigh impossible for them to understand.
However, in the case of say, Putting together a Puzzle, each piece that you fit in, can be it's own reward, even if you never finish the whole puzzle.
So there are all kinds of ventures, and way to make your idea happen.. Explore them.
Furthermore , what you are also promoting is the further bastardization of a genre that already suffers from the Solo mentality ..
We dont need to developers spending Time/Money/Resources to develop content in MMORPG that further degradates the group mechanics the Genre has its roots in .
What we need is Developers to spend there Money/Time/Resources on finding better ways to cultivate group activties that are rewarding ..........Not Solo activities ..
The Genre has suffered enough from this sort of mentality and approach to MMOs...
This is one of the big reasons the genre has stalled somewhat , But imo for the good as all the indie devs currrently workin on noteworthy projects are keying those towards Group Play ..... What the genre was always intended to be for
There are plenty of Solo games out there that will reward this approach to a game ..
Just what we need right. You get a reward for doing pretty much showing up. I still believe in "no risk, no reward". That doesn't mean I should be rewarded if I fail. The reward is the prize for success not failure.
Way to completely misunderstand what OP was talking about.
Reading and understanding the concept before posting is helpful
lmfao .. now thats the pot calling the kettle black ... Stop it man .. Stop massaging yourself ..
You did that last week in the Wizardry Vikings thread ..
Comments
As far as not getting stonewalled, that's one of the key reasons to reward failure. The first game I saw do this was Super Mario RPG. You go out, fight for a while, and die, and keep any experience you got before dying even after you last saved. That way, you're stronger when you go out and try it again. If it takes several tries doing slightly better each time, eventually you just barely win and it feels like you've accomplished something. Even if you had to be 3 levels higher than someone else did.
As for people responding to thread titles, welcome to the Internet. People will do that even if the content of an original post is two sentences.
Also , in UO for instance .. again , Many High lvl raid encounters are for super rare Deco items and scrolls that are highly prized not just Loot ...
And who the hell wants to sit around beggin for shit .. Seriously who pays any attention to these people , but a topic for another thread i would think
Imagine that you're a professional athlete. You can play in the top league in the world and be a slightly below average player at that level of competition. Or you can play in a much lower league and be the best player in the league. Incentives shouldn't be skewed to encourage everyone to try to do the latter. Backups in the top league tend to get paid more than stars in the minor leagues.
But for most PVE and some PVP in MMORPGs, the incentives are very much skewed to push people to do trivial things and not to try things that are harder. And that's what I'm trying to address.
Well , listen tho Quizzical we are with this system taking into consideration , that on most any Raid on the way to the Boss , there is usually mutiple Loot drops , that re desired/required/and need to progress to Boss and be succesful and sometimes takes several runs for a group to aquire all the things necassary ..
So with that understood .. . If your group try X dungeon and makes it 80% thru on its raid nite that week ... And aquires 3 useful items but fails to drop the Boss .. We are already being rewarded for partial success ...
Then you regroup/discuss during the week and try again .. we have all done this and been thru this scenario Im certain of..
The problem is that players really, really don't want to get stuck. Feeling like you're stuck and cannot proceed is one of the surest ways to get players to quit and never come back. If you have 1000 small pieces of content in your game and try to tune each one so that players win 95% of the time, but make one mistake and players only beat that one piece 1% of the time, that can wreck your game if players aren't able and willing to skip it and move on. Developers trying to avoid that can end up making it so that for most of the content in a game, players win 99.9%+ of the time, with most of the losses coming to disconnections or other real-life interruptions.
Ok.
Well lets see, when I talked about challenge, there are all kinds, like for example, there are Challenging Puzzles (as in the cut our board with the picture on it), and while, failure is more a matter a matter of simply not having the patience or the skill to complete the puzzle, there is nothing you could do that would jinx it, but.. it's still a challenge.
on the flip side of that, when I was in college, I watched my room-mate, umm screw it.. I myself, slipped getting out of bed and fell on the floor. The fact that by my own actions I failed to be able to get out of bed, does not suddenly make getting out of bed a challenge, (Well it became more a challenge as I got older and needed to deal with work every day, but that was again, more a challenge of perseverance and needing to get the rent paid, then one of skill, luck, or ability)
So again, if you only view challenge as "Twitch Combat", the problem is that becomes an issue of innate ability, and skill. The thing is Twitch skill for a person can cap, this having to do with a array of factors, from something as prohibitive a physical limitations (Like Arthritis), to simply having very bad had-eye coordination, which makes it vert hard for them to attain the skills needed to overcome the challenge.
Which is why Twitch skill is a really poor metric to use to establish "Challenge" in an MMO, not only is it highly limiting, in a massive game like an MMO, something as simple as a Logic Problem could be put in and be equally daunting to some people (à la "the cake is a lie")
This is why when we discuss "Challenge" it is important to know, what kind of challenge we are discussing, and who is this challenge designed for.
However, I agree with you to a point, taking the risk should be rewarded, simply because they took the risk, as opposed to playing safe.
In that regard, I fully agree with you.
It does when it s someones opinion .. as in ... Under no circumstances Should you receive a reward for failure ..............imo
All of us .. many many many times
Or maybe. Just maybe. They're collecting snippets for use in an index?
Day One...........................Total Failure
Day Two...........................I Sat On My Lunch
Year Twenty-Eight............Where Was That Cheese Curler?
Let's party like it is 1863!
However, in the case of say, Putting together a Puzzle, each piece that you fit in, can be it's own reward, even if you never finish the whole puzzle.
So there are all kinds of ventures, and way to make your idea happen.. Explore them.
We dont need to developers spending Time/Money/Resources to develop content in MMORPG that further degradates the group mechanics the Genre has its roots in .
What we need is Developers to spend there Money/Time/Resources on finding better ways to cultivate group activties that are rewarding ..........Not Solo activities ..
The Genre has suffered enough from this sort of mentality and approach to MMOs...
This is one of the big reasons the genre has stalled somewhat , But imo for the good as all the indie devs currrently workin on noteworthy projects are keying those towards Group Play ..... What the genre was always intended to be for
There are plenty of Solo games out there that will reward this approach to a game ..
You did that last week in the Wizardry Vikings thread ..