BRINK suggestions forum

[SockDog]

Then the goal is to make those loopholes as minor as possible so the players will at least feel like they’re wasting their time if they do it.

And the more you do so the more it impacts the freedom of players to just play the game.

Hurrah!

[tokamak]

In what way?

[shirosae]

[QUOTE=SockDog;204983]But again this is restricting possibly genuine tactics in order to yet again patch up the XP mechanic. Still for something that has XP (such as Brink) it would be interesting to see the effects of diminished returns in situations where there is not a higher priority task available.

I just think the XP system is broken and we’d be better off exploring an alternative than sticking plasters all over it and shrugging our shoulders when it still bleeds out.[/QUOTE]

I agree, but then there are a bunch of things in Brink that I’m pretty unconvinced by, and we might as well try to make them as undamaging as possible?

Some sort of system which rates the relative importance of the missions offered on the mission wheel and attributes XP based on how essential the game thinks each objective is at that moment might at least try to minimise the disruption to the game.

I agree anyway; pretty much any attempt to fix an XP system works by essentially reducing the impact of the XP system, which kinda defeats the point of having an XP system at all.

[tokamak]

The xp an average player receives per minute is not the issue here. If you mean that by fixing the xp you reduce the impact of people playing not as intended then sure, that’s exactly the impact that needs to be diminished, and really, almost any game has to deal with balancing things like this, from Monopoly to basketball.

[darthmob]

Damn guys, you wrote a lot of words in the last hours.

[QUOTE=BioSnark;204936]Okay, how about not giving permanent gameplay advantages for xp.[/QUOTE]tokamak already said it and I’m going to repeat it. I think it was Rahdo who said it will be more specialisation and less giving advantages.

That and that there will be some sort of balancing if you prefer to play that way. Eg. only players on a certain level (not skill based like QL but based on unlocks) on a server. And it has been said that skill is still the deciding factor (which is one thing that isn’t true in CoD) in a firefight.

[QUOTE=shirosae;204979]Even more so than that is the basic functionality of XP gains.

If I give you a fixed XP prize for performing a task, then your XP gain from that task rises linearly as you repeat it over and over. How many tasks benefit your team/the game in general in a directly proportional way as you grind them over and over and over? Not many.

And even if it does work somehow, there’s really no way you can make that appeal to the casual scrubs who only want to see ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: SPAWNCAMPED 6,000,000,000 SWAMP RATS, though.[/QUOTE]Healing / reviving people, killing enemies, keeping the fence repaired / mines planted / tank running are all activities that you repeat over and over again and that do help your team. And if people want to really grind XP, then let them do it on a private server.

[QUOTE=BioSnark;204984]Indeed, and my point was that the system will always have loopholes that reward players for exploiting them and that it turns off new players.[/QUOTE]Do you really think new players care? Especially the new players should appreciate seeing themselves making progress with getting XP and new clothes and unlocks. It’s not like Quake where my first months of progress were getting owned in less humiliating / devastating ways. Unlocks and character progress lure new people into playing longer. Maybe they learn to appreciate the core mechanics on the way and they’ll stick with the game even after the initial urge to unlock new stuff has worn off.

PS: A completely different question for the nerds and specialists: Shouldn’t it be possible to effectively search posts by SD employees on the forums? So many things have been said and the forum search is not really helpful. Just searching for keywords and getting a list of relevant posts would be nice.

[BioSnark]

Do you really think new players care?

Why yes, I do.

I cared when I started playing Farcry 2 multiplayer that I was running around with a bolt action hunting rifle and everyone else had a barrett… and then I stopped playing that game. I didn’t bother playing Wolfenstein multiplayer enough to care that everyone else might have the large bore, veil health regen and flak jacket upgrades.

Maybe SD will release a SDK faster than with ETQW and I can play some farming maps. Fun times.

[SockDog]

In what way?

You’re kidding right? The XP system rewards performed pre-defined actions. Deviations and new actions are therefore penalised equally. The more specific you make the earning criteria (to solve the millions of ‘what ifs?’) the more opportunities exist for you to fail at hitting them and perhaps worst, the more specific they are the more predictable the game becomes.

I agree, but then there are a bunch of things in Brink that I’m pretty unconvinced by, and we might as well try to make them as undamaging as possible?

Agreed. My original post was really just a general observation that perhaps the whole XP system itself is flawed and perhaps development time could be spent elsewhere to greater value.

Yet you’re correct, we’re getting it in Brink so perhaps suggestions would be helpful. I like the diminishing returns idea and weighting based on the mission wheel. Although again you’re at the mercy of what SD thought you should be doing. We all know how a map can evolve as tactics shift and alter.

For actual gameplay changing elements I’d still like to see them based on actual team achievements (or lack of them). Relegate XP to just the inconsequential peen candy people seem to need these days.

[H0RSE]

If people are worried that players will farm xp and wind up too powerful or unbalanced, I wouldn’t worry too much.

1. players will be matched by their level
   2.There is a limit to the amount of upgrades and awards you can use in a match.
2. You can sell back skills you don’t want, so you don’t need to worry about buying a ‘useless’ skill
3. The game is in pre-alpha and a long while away.

The goal they are aiming for is that unlocking awards and skills and whatnot will help you specialize in a combat role, and it becomes more and more fun, rather than becoming more and more powerful.

[dezerter69]

All of you have right. If some players will wont to have bigger level or more skill they find something way to do it.

Maybe serwer will have something system for do hardly this.
For example in serwer will be multiplier for use skill. On Serwer with multipier 0,5 faster player will not be so fast and difference in the level of not be thats big.
And on serwer with 2x fast player will be realy fast. Medic will be better and all game will be more fast.

Of course thats system have many defects, but thats only example

[tokamak]

[QUOTE=SockDog;205001]You’re kidding right? The XP system rewards performed pre-defined actions. Deviations and new actions are therefore penalised equally. The more specific you make the earning criteria (to solve the millions of ‘what ifs?’) the more opportunities exist for you to fail at hitting them and perhaps worst, the more specific they are the more predictable the game becomes.
[/QUOTE]

I still don’t see how making a xp reward system MORE advanced complex, and dynamic limits the player. The more specific rewards you add on top of the basic ones like killing and objectives, the more players will be rewarded for their actions.

It’s actually that the simpler xp reward systems are the ones full of loopholes to be exploited and farmed.

Sure there will always be things that will go unnoticed. Throwing a smoke grenade could be incredibly useful for the team but there’s no way you can reward that adequately. But the better fine tuned the reward system, the less exploiting there will be.

Or to talk economically: Maximalising externalities achieves the highest amount of freedom on the market.

[shirosae]

Healing / reviving people, killing enemies, keeping the fence repaired / mines planted / tank running are all activities that you repeat over and over again and that do help your team. And if people want to really grind XP, then let them do it on a private server.

Well yeah, the people who want to cheat the system will go join a farming server, but that’s really not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the effect an XP system has on regular players, who assume that an XP reward is a sign that they’re doing good.

Using ETQW as a base:

Healing/ Reviving people: And TK-reviving people? It’s faster and more effective than waiting for the enemy to kill your teammates, and makes your healing much more effective. Do we encourage it by giving more XP for it and risk the inevitable unneccessary TK-revives, or do we discourage that more effective technique by not giving it XP in order to preserve the integrity of the XP system?

Killing enemies: Should spawn camping with artillery (or whatever) give me more XP than I get from killing players when I’m playing properly and trying to win the map? Shouldn’t I get more XP from killing a Soldier planting on the objective than someone who’s just spawned?

Keeping the fence repaired: Fair enough.

Mines planted: Should I be able to get repeated XP by sitting in a corner of the map planting my three mines, getting just as much XP when my fourth mine goes down, removing my first? Or should I get XP only if I have less than three mines down when I plant a new one?

Tank running: The MCP is pretty much broken anyway, so I dunno. I suppose this would be fine if it worked more like the ET tank. I can’t help thinking that really you should get more XP for repairing the MCP if it actually moves between repairs. Or perhaps you get your XP as a lump sum at the end when the thing is deployed.

Yet you’re correct, we’re getting it in Brink so perhaps suggestions would be helpful. I like the diminishing returns idea and weighting based on the mission wheel. Although again you’re at the mercy of what SD thought you should be doing. We all know how a map can evolve as tactics shift and alter.

That’s true. All those unforeseen awesome things like indoors sniping (lol) would have a reward based on an outdated vision of what actually works on the map. If your only metric for determining how well your play is is XP, you’d be discouraged from trying anything else. It’s kinda like a satnav for gaming, except instead of people following it into lakes they follow it into the town of HUGE SCRUBSTON.

[tokamak]

Okay this is actually taking the discussion forward, gj.

The problem in TK-reviving people lies not in the (lack of an) award but in the fact that it’s more effective than normal reviving. It’s not the xp that should be balanced, the rewards are actually fine. Giving xp to tk-revives encourages a serious form of grieving.

I personally suggested a system to reward xp to kills based on whatever the victims were doing in the field. But in the end, killing a player WHENEVER you see one is always the best chose. I wouldn’t want players to hold their fire and wait until the player becomes worth more in points.

I think mines should only hand out xp if they actually kill players. Sure they can form a barrier and slow players who notice them down. But this is the same problem with smoke grenades, you can’t hand out rewards for psychology. After all, you don’t get xp for throwing a grenade at the enemy without killing that person, even though you scared the medic away from reviving half his team.

Yeah I like the idea of handing out a lump sum at the end of the MPC ride. Maybe a nice middle ground would be handing out smaller amounts whenever an MPC goes past small checkpoints. The perverse effect here would be to wait for the enemy to damage the MPC before it hits a checkpoint because otherwise you wouldn’t have any contribution made as an engineer. This one is actually really tricky.

[shirosae]

You’re kidding right? The XP system rewards performed pre-defined actions. Deviations and new actions are therefore penalised equally. The more specific you make the earning criteria (to solve the millions of ‘what ifs?’) the more opportunities exist for you to fail at hitting them and perhaps worst, the more specific they are the more predictable the game becomes.

Hang on, I just had an idea. What if the XP system awards XP based on the interactions of players, so that the goal is the important thing, not how you choose to accomplish that goal?

Imagine we’re playing Free Spirit City, on the MCP stage. The MCP is the objective, so you have a few Engineers repairing away. Because they’re repairing the objective, they gain an association with the MCP. This makes those actors part of the objective for the Strogg.

A Tormentor flies past, and shoots at the Engineers. Based on how much damage the Tormentor does and kill rate and stuff™, it now gains an association with the objective through the Engineers. A couple of Rocket Soldiers shoot at the Tormentor, and gain an association through the Tormentor, through the Engineers.

The Engineers gain more association because they’re being fired upon by that heavily-associated Tormentor, and so Medics can gain association by healing/reviving those Engineers. As such, the Infiltrators can gain association by sniping those Medics, and so on.

What you end up with as a big web where all of the interacting players and objectives are related by how they interact. Once the MCP is delivered (or the timer runs out), the game looks at all those connections, and assigns XP based on how strongly your tie to that objective was.

This way the whole system of XP gain adapts exclusively by how the game is being played. The way to gain maximum XP is to see the match objectively, understand the interaction of all the parts, and choose where to apply pressure. It’s no longer about what you as an individual choose to do with your solo-mission wheel, but how you interact with the rest of your team and the enemy. As a bonus, the increased interaction from a really furious well-played fight over an objective gives out more XP, simply because there are more interactions.

The mission generator can run off a list of the most important objective connections - like Kill Constructor XYZ because they’ve repeatedly disarmed our plants, and heal/revive Soldier ABC because they’ve managed to plant more times than anyone else. Everyone else fire on Strogg near this Medic because he’s actually reviving the objective person. The new players are literally directed to do the most pressing thing your team has, provided those levels of association are balanced. By coming up with a new strategy to accomplish something, you still gain the XP because it’s the results that count, and automatically the enemy are directed to take notice of your actions, whatever they are.

The hard part then, is working out how to assign associations, which might be fairly subtle. For example, give a Constructor an association value based on how close they are to a plant, modified by whether that plant is primary/secondary/non objective, and whether they’ve managed to successfully touching a plant, etc.

[tokamak]

Yes, that’s what I had boiling in my head but had trouble formulating. Very nice.

Doing this is really plunging down the rabbit hole though. A good tormentor pilot would kill the engineers on their way to the mcp, an xp-obsessed pilot would wait until they arrived there.

The associations shouldn’t be based on the player’s actions but on whatever mission they are on (in the wheel).

So if a defender has selected ‘defend the barricade’ as his mission, then he’ll get more xp from shooting the players that have ‘destroy the barricade’ as their mission and players connected to this, a medic that has the mission to revive the player with the destroy mission should be worth more as well.

[H0RSE]

Healing/ Reviving people: And TK-reviving people? It’s faster and more effective than waiting for the enemy to kill your teammates, and makes your healing much more effective. Do we encourage it by giving more XP for it and risk the inevitable unneccessary TK-revives, or do we discourage that more effective technique by not giving it XP in order to preserve the integrity of the XP system?

You could solve the TK-revive a couple ways. 1) have FF off as the default setting. Maybe just for campaign games? It eliminates TK-revives, and TK’s in general 2) have players LOSE xp when they TK. Or maybe the complaint system like in ET. You TK someone, they vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to file a complaint against you.

vote no - no harm done
vote yes - lose xp

You could also have the game detect when you’ve chosen medic, so when you TK-revive, even if no complaint was filed, you won’t gain xp. (you won’t lose any either)

Killing enemies: Should spawn camping with artillery (or whatever) give me more XP than I get from killing players when I’m playing properly and trying to win the map? Shouldn’t I get more XP from killing a Soldier planting on the objective than someone who’s just spawned?

I think it should have like 3 different levels:

spawnkilling, or just killing players running around the map = normal xp
killing players who are guarding the objective or protecting players who can achieve objectives = medium xp
killing the actual player(s) who are directly contributing to the objective, like planting/disarming the explosives or repairing/damaging the bridge = high xp

something like that…

Mines planted: Should I be able to get repeated XP by sitting in a corner of the map planting my three mines, getting just as much XP when my fourth mine goes down, removing my first? Or should I get XP only if I have less than three mines down when I plant a new one?

I think you should only get xp if your mines actually kill an enemy or damage/disable an escort vehicle, etc. Or, if their is a specific objective, like “plant mines at location X.” Chances are, the game is telling you to plant them there because they are going to be effective. Also removing enemy mines should reward xp.

would be fine if it worked more like the ET tank. I can’t help thinking that really you should get more XP for repairing the MCP if it actually moves between repairs. Or perhaps you get your XP as a lump sum at the end when the thing is deployed.

This one is tricky. I don’t think if I keep repairing the vehicle, and the enemy keeps disabling it, I shouldn’t get xp because it didn’t move. Maybe get reduced xp, but not zero xp. I like the lump sum idea. Maybe if you stuck with the vehicle, depending on how long (whole map, majority, little bit) you would get like a bonus ‘lump sum’ when the objective is complete.

In the videos, escorting the vehicle was an objective itself. As long as you are near it, you are getting xp. You could also turn FF off on vehicles, so engys won’t blow them up with mines/grenades, just so they can keep repairing it.

These are just suggestions, please keep flamethrowers on low.

[darthmob]

This forum needs a toggable hide-function. One that allows you to click quotes to expand them. That way you could quote whole posts without automatically having a giant wall of text to scroll through.

[QUOTE=BioSnark;205000]Why yes, I do.

I cared when I started playing Farcry 2 multiplayer that I was running around with a bolt action hunting rifle and everyone else had a barrett… and then I stopped playing that game. I didn’t bother playing Wolfenstein multiplayer enough to care that everyone else might have the large bore, veil health regen and flak jacket upgrades.

Maybe SD will release a SDK faster than with ETQW and I can play some farming maps. Fun times.[/QUOTE]You have to agree though that the sole purpose of the unlocks in those games was making you stronger. It’s the same in Call of Duty 4/5. Getting a new weapon? You bet it’s simply better than the previous ones. The top unlocks are hugely powerful weapons with no drawbacks. That’s just ridiculous!

Did you play TF2? From what I’ve heard in discussions on the forums here is that their unlocks offer more variety instead of making someone more powerful. An unlock may gain you an advantage in a certain situation but then at the same time there is some drawback in other situations. There is no “it’s simply always better and you automatically lose because you don’t have it”. The few times I played the game I didn’t have the impression of getting owned because of missing unlocks but because of less skill and experience.

[QUOTE=shirosae;205010]Well yeah, the people who want to cheat the system will go join a farming server, but that’s really not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the effect an XP system has on regular players, who assume that an XP reward is a sign that they’re doing good…[/QUOTE]Is it really necessary to overcomplicate XP rewards? A kill is a kill and a revive is a revive. In the end everyone has a different opinion on what is fair and what isn’t. Let the playerbase set up rules on how to behave on a server. No spawnkilling allowed? Put a warning in the MOTD and kick players who do it. You don’t mind it as a server admin, that’s fine as well.

You have to relate the numbers as well. What XP brings a single kill? 15 to 30XP? A mission seen as important by the mission system brings 300XP I think. The best way to rack up XP would be doing the mission and killing enemies at the same time which sounds fine to me.

[MILFandCookies]

My suggestion:

Allow players to import their own hitsounds via the game’s menu. Alternatively have a selection of hitsounds within the game that the players can choose from.

[tokamak]

[QUOTE=H0RSE;205028]You could also have the game detect when you’ve chosen medic, so when you TK-revive, even if no complaint was filed, you won’t gain xp. (you won’t lose any either)
[/QUOTE]

So only medics don’t gain xp from tk-reviving?

[Nail]

only medics CAN tk-revive

[DarkangelUK]

How about if a medic revives a fallen team mate, then the revivee gets the standard health, 50% of total HP or what ever. BUT… if the medic shoots then revives the team mate, they only get 5% of total HP or summat… rendering the TK-revive useless. I mean the only reason you do a TK-revive is because they get more HP, quicker than having to feed them health packs.