Dealing With Quitters

(Voxie) #161

I’d rather see people ragequit and get replaced by bots than have them lurking in spawn doing nothing to make sure they get their XP (admittedly this would hopefully be far from commonplace, but certainly not unheard of).

(DarkangelUK) #162

/callvote kick xpwhorechops?

(tokamak) #163

Waiting around in the spawn doesn’t seem like something someone interested in xp would do.

(BioSnark) #164

What he should have wrote was people who want or need to leave, not rq. You can’t make a system that knows why people are leaving and punishing everyone is like dropping draconian DRM on all players because of them durn pirates…

I’d rather have an empty bot than an afk filler bot when someone has to leave for who knows how long as the latter allows another person to join. This already can be a bit of a pickle in l4d and would probably be much more so if the game included xp and a system like what’s being suggested.

@SoZ: Indeed, quite sure I’d rather have someone leave than bitching at their team the remainder of a map.

(tokamak) #165

I want both. I want there to be an incentive to stay the full match and a bot to fill in the player who had to leave. Frankly I don’t care why you leave, it’s up to the people themselves where they consider their accumulated xp worth leaving.

(LyndonL) #166

As All games, there will be an XP cap, and therefore after a couple weeks playing, that incentive will no longer be there…

(BioSnark) #167

^I certainly hope so.

I don’t care why people leave, either. I just want them to leave and not be a locked bot for an indeterminate time period.

(tokamak) #168

Yeah but I think that’s a problem by itself and not the xp distribution at the end of the map. ALL xp-incentives will be lost when players hit the cap.

It’s something that came up in my geeky contemplations. Xp is starting to become a dated concept already. Eventually you gathered your chestnuts and there’s no meta progress anymore.

A better system would be to start with a fixed amount of ‘resource’ all distributed around center skills. From there on you can ‘smear’ the resource into more specialist niches. The freedom you have in redistributing your resource pool is dictated by your in-game performance.

Or explained differently:

You start with all-rounder skills, in order to get new skills, which are already all unlocked, you need to gather xp to buy them. But the moment you replace the skill, your old skill becomes lost and you’ll need to gather new xp to buy it back again (and destroying your current one again).

The system that comes closest to this is adding gems to the sockets in your weapons in WoW. If you want to subtly change your performance, you need to buy new, expensive gems, the moment you replace it the old gem is destroyed.

This means your meta game has no end. Every time you want your characters to have new assets you’ll need to work to replace them.

[QUOTE=BioSnark;226340]^I certainly hope so.

I don’t care why people leave, either. I just want them to leave and not be a locked bot for an indeterminate time period.[/QUOTE]

You either consider your built up xp worth continuing to play, or you don’t. This means that in emergency scenarios you give it up without a thought but to a rage-quiter it most likely doesn’t seem to be attractive to leave (and join a next server).

(Voxie) #169

It’s clear that Splash Damage wants their game to be as beginner friendly as possible, and the system you’ve outlined seems too harsh for me to fit into their way of thinking. Players who accumulates a sizable amount of XP before the round has ended have earned it already by helping their team, and with all other aspects of Brink being about positive encouragement (“if you complete that objective we’ll give you loads of XP, if you try and play online we’ll give double XP”), this way of forcing people to stay does in my opinion contradict their design philosophy.

(tokamak) #170

They hardly help their team by bailing out on them now do they? Again, I’m not advocating a xp penalty, I’m advocating no xp-gain.

(Voxie) #171

They’ve helped their team through the progress they’ve made on the match thus far, whether or not they stay for the duration of the match is irrelevant. And taking away something a player has rightfully earned due to an arbitrary rule seems like a penalty to me. My point is that you won’t effectively stop people from ragequitting no matter how draconian your system is, if anything you’ll just cause unnecessary grief for players who leave either because of personal reasons or due to a server timeout.

Edit: The only difference in reasoning we have is that you want to reduct all XP earned during a round if you leave prematurely, while I’m advocating that you always keep all your XP, and instead encourage players to stay through a bonus at the end of the round. Though both ideas have their pros and cons, I feel like my system is more fitting for Brink, with its design goal to be as newbie friendly as possible.

(BioSnark) #172

I agree with voxie.

Not sure what you mean by that but I’m simply pointing out that what can be annoying in l4d might be worse when you incentivise its use.

if there’s an xp counter on the HUD and you loose that xp by leaving before map end then it is a penalty. If xp is tallied up only after the map end then perhaps it isn’t.

(AnthonyDa) #173

Yeah, and you’ll see mass of teamkill because objectives are rewarding much more XP than everything else. :stroggbanana:

(BioSnark) #174

friendly fire is off by default. The thing I wonder about is lemming spam…

(tokamak) #175

[QUOTE=Voxie;226347]They’ve helped their team through the progress they’ve made on the match thus far, whether or not they stay for the duration of the match is irrelevant. And taking away something a player has rightfully earned due to an arbitrary rule seems like a penalty to me. My point is that you won’t effectively stop people from ragequitting no matter how draconian your system is, if anything you’ll just cause unnecessary grief for players who leave either because of personal reasons or due to a server timeout.

Edit: The only difference in reasoning we have is that you want to reduct all XP earned during a round if you leave prematurely, while I’m advocating that you always keep all your XP, and instead encourage players to stay through a bonus at the end of the round. Though both ideas have their pros and cons, I feel like my system is more fitting for Brink, with its design goal to be as newbie friendly as possible.[/QUOTE]

What a player rightfully earned is defined within the game, a player has no intrinsic right to xp.

Shattered Horizon only adds the xp after you’re done with the match, it also dresses it up in a fun evaluation chart and it would really fit brink.

An xp bonus isn’t really define, that’s my problem with it. The beauty of giving xp at the end means that players who have invested the most in the game will feel the most compelled to stay until the end. This means that key players have a bigger incentive to stay than unimportant pawns or players who only recently joined.

(AnthonyDa) #176

You mean this chart > http://stats.shatteredhorizon.com/stats/playerStatistics.action?playerId=14990 or something better ?

(tokamak) #177

Something less actually.

The point is, I’d like to see players play per match, not per period of time. You don’t join the game to complete a couple of small missions and then log off, people should be focused on the final goal, and yes, that IS pushing people into a specific behaviour.

(Voxie) #178

I think we’re defining bonus XP in two different ways. I get the impression that you see bonus XP as a flat rate and all players get the same amount. The way I see it the bonus you get depends entirely on how much XP you’ve accumulated during the round; if you’ve got several hundred XP you’ll get loads of bonus XP, if you just joined if won’t be as much. This will have the exact same effect as the method you’ve outlined, with the added perk of not aggravating any players who didn’t get their leveling progress saved due to being forced to leave for whatever reason.

An addendum: I think that’s really all that needs to be said by me. We both know where we stand, and it’ll be interesting to see what the mechanic in the actual game will be. So let’s agree to disagree for now, seeing how all topics here derails faster than a runaway train. :slight_smile:

(BioSnark) #179

heh, good one.

Perhaps contrary to some people’s thoughts, I did not think shattered horizon’s xp/stat/rank system added anything beneficial to the game. During the free weekend it congregated the experienced players together as is prone to happen when giving out shinies for ~ time played. Hope for better in Brink.

(tokamak) #180

[QUOTE=Voxie;226357]I think we’re defining bonus XP in two different ways. I get the impression that you see bonus XP as a flat rate and all players get the same amount. The way I see it the bonus you get depends entirely on how much XP you’ve accumulated during the round; if you’ve got several hundred XP you’ll get loads of bonus XP, if you just joined if won’t be as much. This will have the exact same effect as the method you’ve outlined, with the added perk of not aggravating any players who didn’t get their leveling progress saved due to being forced to leave for whatever reason.

An addendum: I think that’s really all that needs to be said by me. We both know where we stand, and it’ll be interesting to see what the mechanic in the actual game will be. So let’s agree to disagree for now, seeing how all topics here derails faster than a runaway train. :)[/QUOTE]

Right like endurance. SH had both, you build endurance by staying in the game through mulitple sessions and your score is only handed at the end of the match as well.