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Author Topic:  Group Revamp Idea  (Read 455 times)

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Shroud

« on: 25, March 2023, 15:04:54 »
This is just my thoughts on how to change groups. Currently players almost never use groups and that's because it's more efficient from both XP and loot perspective to play solo. On the other hand from the social interactions viewpoint I think players working in groups is definitely a positive.

So my thought is that if a group kills a mob then each member in the group (within XP range) would have their own copy of the corpse with the same loot. Ideally it would be good to have it so other party member's corpses aren't visible (client filter?) so we don't get huge piles of corpses. So what would the benefits be:

1. There's no longer the requirement that a party has to kill 2x more mobs to be more efficient than a solo player. Currently a solo warrior gets more drops/player than a warrior + healer.
2. It means that monopolising camps is a thing of the past since nowadays if you see another player camping a drop you leave when in this system you can join a group and if it drops you both get it.
3. It means any loot distribution issues are resolved so any conflict over a nice drop is averted as whole party gets it. Currently if in a party and a RoA drops while party may agree to let a certain player get the RoA there are clear winners and losers while in this system everyone is a winner.
4. Lower level players joining a party aren't a drag on the party as them being there or not doesn't affect drops so it's zero cost to the higher level player but can benefit the lower level player who could even contribute. It also means that when helping players getting keys etc they can get drops and don't end up accused of trying to ninja loot.
5. It increases amount of players game can theoretically hold without territorial conflicts.

This kind of change could be quite positive as currently we're seeing a lot of congestion in GT3 for example and certain camps that have better drops. It also means that if enough players are online then it could well be more viable for a group to start raiding FT together rather than us all fighting for our share of GT3. Since currently rationale is that even if FT has better drops splitting it 3 or 4 ways makes it less viable than solo so this helps solve that.
Doesn't matter, you'd die anyway. ;D Shroud's a hacker. After many hours of deep thought I have came to that conclusion.

RoadKill

« Reply #1 on: 25, March 2023, 17:17:42 »
Yes these are my thoughts exactly.  Reward groups and make it fun to play together.  <3

I see a small safeguard, make sure a player can't log in an alt, join a group and get roa from a corpse. :D
« Last Edit: 25, March 2023, 17:19:55 by RoadKill »
Why do I always have to be the squirrel?!?

petarkiller

« Reply #2 on: 25, March 2023, 17:24:28 »
This would encourage teaming up and helping new players as long as someone doesn't get abused by people that have multiple high level characters, overall this seems like a good idea, especially now considering how many of us are in GT3.

miopol

« Reply #3 on: 25, March 2023, 19:07:44 »
Love the idea, you deserve the like Shroud

_people_

« Reply #4 on: 25, March 2023, 20:48:34 »
This has clearly made waves in-game. I'm planning a compromise:

When a mob is killed by a party player, the corpse is duplicated for every player who used a skill recently (currently set to 7 seconds). All of the party's corpses are bound to the players who earned them, and instead of eventually becoming a public bounty corpse they will disappear. "Used a skill recently" refers to any skill - slash weapons, punching, find traps, divine prayers (used when player casts a prayer), wiz spells, MD, etc.

Party corpses will always be visible on the map, but in the "below" window only your corpses (or non-party public corpses) will be displayed. The corpse is still tagged with your name so even if another player manages to see your corpse, they won't be able to open it.

The killer of a monster will always be granted a corpse, even if they haven't used a skill in the last 7 seconds (should mainly only occur for DOT effects or summoned minions).

I've just finished implementing this feature and will patch it (and a couple other changes) in the coming hours.

In-game chat for context (continued on next post due to forum character limit):

(click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: 25, March 2023, 20:51:49 by _people_ »
-- _people_ :)

_people_

« Reply #5 on: 25, March 2023, 20:49:52 »
(continued from previous post)

(click to show/hide)
-- _people_ :)

_people_

« Reply #6 on: 26, March 2023, 03:02:44 »
OK, so my "compromise" doesn't appear to appease anyone.

Some players don't like the added pressure of having to constantly heal or deal damage to get loot. Duplicating drops for the whole party regardless of contribution introduces the possibility of exploiting an alt. And the third solution, reverting the entire change, has its own drawbacks as discussed in the first post here.

Special drops have also thrown a wrench into this. Looking at the code, they've always rolled per-player which means using alts can be exploited to effectively roll twice.

So what do we do here? Allowing alts for loot advantage (special drops or corpse duplication) would result in items being found way more commonly than their intended rarity. Nerfing drop rates to compensate for this would effectively force players to play on two characters, which also isn't ideal.
-- _people_ :)

RoadKill

« Reply #7 on: 26, March 2023, 03:12:35 »
Presently we have no way of monitoring players well enough to know if they are even cheating.  There is no code in place that looks at a players account name and checks if it is unique. 

There isn't a code to fix this, my opinion is there is only one thing that can be done and that is to have a Mod watch a suspected player.

Presently we have under 10 players and I dont see the need for a Mod. 

Until there is better tracking available via website/client recognition most anyone can create 2 accounts easily and double farm.  Only a Mod watching the actions of only one character moving at a time will let them know it is infact the same player cheating.

This doesn't mean we shouldnt' have this implimented.  This is a fantastic idea that rewards team effort, far to long we have played this game solo.

  And let heads roll with starting wage of criminal cheating be 2 weeks in the jail, followed by progressive measures.  Leading ultimatly to a ban. 
Why do I always have to be the squirrel?!?

Shroud

« Reply #8 on: 26, March 2023, 03:32:38 »
I'll be honest and say that I didn't have an issue with the 7 second timer. It is a bit more pressure and intense but on the other hand you do get better drops in a party so it evens out and if you want to play more casual then you accept a decrease in drop rate. I found when playing with Petarkillerl (& Chroma) that I was a lot more active than when I'm alone when I kill for 1min then go afk for 1 min waiting for respawns. For a good hour or so Petarkillerl and I shared Lom room when before one of us would have been forced to leave so other could camp it.
Doesn't matter, you'd die anyway. ;D Shroud's a hacker. After many hours of deep thought I have came to that conclusion.

petarkiller

« Reply #9 on: 26, March 2023, 04:07:55 »
The 7 second timer is a needed to stop players from using alts, If you group up with other players you can decide how active you want to be and there's no need to be there for every kill.
Shroud and me played for an hour or so and could share lom room in GT 3 without any problems.

No one is forced to group up, they can just let the other players know that they prefer to do it alone and not engage with the group system.
What does reverting this change accomplish? Groups will not be used much like how it was before and leaving it how it is at least gives an option to players that want to engage with it.

Dolfo

« Reply #10 on: 26, March 2023, 06:22:45 »
Changing this game to a more group played game should be focused for sure.

But if we come to situations where 6 players find same time their KaotM this sounds scary to me.

Also old group logics never checked level of players in group. So theoretically a level 1 could follow the group and loot high level corpses. So we have no player level check on loot, when it comes from treasurelist i think? So from there everything is in relation to difficulty settings or monster level?

Also afk sitting players should be handled for sure. And a 7 second check sounds interesting. But its easy to let a keyboard macro outside daimonin client triggering again and again one key, casting cure poison for example.

So 100% protection against an abuse of this group loot system is not easy.

I haven't tested the group loot, only watched the chat. I don't like to be forced to do every 7 second a skill, to get my drops. This is same mechanic, like damage buffs you need to recast every x seconds. This leads to a new kind of pressure to players, i personaly don't like.

Of course this also depends on the group, how fast they fight their mobs.

...

I personaly would say:

1. There is a distance check. We have this for exp calculation. A distance check to killed monster and a distance check to player who killed. In my tries for new group exp system, i changed this to only distance check to monsters. Active healing priests must be 2 steps from their targets they wanna heal. So for sure there must be also close to the killed monster. So theoretically only players who get exp, get also the loot. Old logic has this implemented, only players close to kill or killer get exp.

I prefer priest behind me staying close, watch my back instead of spam casting priest only to get their loot. So each player close enough to kill is a candidate for exp and loot.

2. Duplicate loot. This is really bad, if all 6 players in a group have always the same loot. So this should be changed to a unique loot generation for each player. Of course this means, we need loot generation on kill and not on mob spawn. Have not looked deeper in _people_ changes there.

3. With loot generation on kill, player levels should be overwrite the difficulty level (monster levels) when they are lower. So a level 11 can not find difficulty 100 gear, when he walks gt3. He should be limited to difficulty 11 for his loot generation.

4. Activity of players. As i said above, players can easy produce activity with extern tools or hardware which is supporting keymacroing. This is very complex to work against this. At some point, there could be first bots doing stupid actions like following other players, spam healing. So mostly best protection here are other players, reporting bots or afk cheaters to game master, who can check this. As i said in chat, higher level of chars, lesser they want to risk to loose there chars by cheating.

Afk checks?

Think of this situations:

 A group have fun, one player is sitting, but talking a lot to the group, when camping. Should he get loot or not?

Other player get a phone call and is shortly afk. Same moment group kills camp mob and 5 from 6 players get their kaotm. This would be pain for one. When loot is generated random for each player, it's not that painfully.

So we can check for running players close to the kill and sitting players close to kill, but doing other actions. But as i said above this could also be bots or keyboard macros. You can also put a stone on one key of your keyboard to spam cure poison for example.

I would not focus to strong on activity on players atm and would focus more on different loot and a clean distance check and limit the drop levels in relation to player levels.

We find bots and afk players without code logics by human mind.
« Last Edit: 26, March 2023, 06:30:05 by Dolfo »
Don't believe the shit, you hear in mainstream. Believe your own body. Your body is speaking always the true to you. But you need to understand your body. Hear to your body, not to your ego. And when body is calling to you: "Hey something is wrong!" find the reason(s) for that. Man in White don't go for that, they don't want to heal you. They want earn money and sell you medicine, you should take rest of your life. You are not the patient, you are their customer. Never forget this!

petarkiller

« Reply #11 on: 26, March 2023, 11:45:08 »
The distance for obtaining exp could be used for drops, so if you are in range to get exp, you also get loot.
I am not sure what the range on this is but it should allow mages to be far away while casting AoE spells.
If the distance is too small players would be forced to follow each other instead of contributing by killing something else in the area and reflecting spells gets in the way quite often when targeting the same mob.

Duplication of loot is probably better instead of having random loot as this would encourage players to abuse the system more so that they get double the chances at the loot table while copies of items aren't that useful except for trading.
While it may feel bad if 2 out of 3 people get kaotm just because someone took a break, it may feel equally as bad or even worse when you receive kaotm and the player that is with you doesn't when you are both active.

Level requirement for groups in high level areas would be good addition.

If someone wanted to use use macro, it would not be that difficult to make one that will kill a specific mob on repeat and loot it, this isn't the only system in the game that can be abused by scripting.
« Last Edit: 26, March 2023, 11:47:05 by petarkiller »

Dolfo

« Reply #12 on: 26, March 2023, 13:50:01 »
Duplication of loot is probably better instead of having random loot as this would encourage players to abuse the system more so that they get double the chances at the loot table while copies of items aren't that useful except for trading.

Hm, strange. I see it exactily from the opposite site. If all players in team always have the same drops, this leads more to abuse. But ignoring the argument of abuse, finding 6 KaotM same time breaks the market.

Other games like wow have roll mechanics, when they have special item drops. Players can roll a dice and this decides, who get the item. Duplicate mechanics will automaticaly lead to lower drops chances in next step, because this is really to inbalanced to find 6 KaotM at same time. It's also boring, if all group members have the same loot. And for the level restricition, you need also do something, like generated different loot or totaly refuse drops for to low levels in group?
Don't believe the shit, you hear in mainstream. Believe your own body. Your body is speaking always the true to you. But you need to understand your body. Hear to your body, not to your ego. And when body is calling to you: "Hey something is wrong!" find the reason(s) for that. Man in White don't go for that, they don't want to heal you. They want earn money and sell you medicine, you should take rest of your life. You are not the patient, you are their customer. Never forget this!

Shroud

« Reply #13 on: 26, March 2023, 15:26:52 »
Well for special drops just since person mentioned rolls per players there are actually two categories so I'll describe them separately.

1. Special Drops in Corpses

For these drops the way I look at it is that it's the amount of kills needed to get the drop. So let's say a drop has a 1/100 drop rate. If I was solo on average I'd need to kill the mob 100 times to get it. Technically it's a 63.4% chance to get it within 100 kills and an 86.6% chance within 200 kills but that's a person's individual luck stat as in same way you have a 1% chance to get it on your first kill. If you're in a group your individual chance of finding the special drop is exactly the same, it's just when you do find it rest of group does too. I will however note that if loot was rerolled for each player then in a party of 6 a 1/100 drop effectively becomes a ~1/16 drop since you get a 6/100 chance per kill.

Way I looked at it if let's say hypothetically it takes an hour of grinding to get 100 kills. In old system 6 players have to each spend an hour on their own and once they've got it someone else can take over while other 5 players wait for mob to be free. In the new system the 6 players can spend an hour together to do it. Hypothetically let's say there are 6 camps and each person decided to solo a camp and switch when they get it. On average it would take 6 hours with 1 hour per camp and you get all 6 drops (in practice if one person is unlucky there could be people waiting) but 6 hours gets 6 drops. On the other hand you can do all 6 camps in a group of 6 spending the same time and at the end of the day all 6 players also have the 6 drops.

2. Special Drops in Inventory

I think this is getting mixed up by person with the above I've mentioned. In this case it is indeed rerolled for each player in a party. I've camped a few of these drops in a party to improve the drop rate with main ones being King's Cloak in Pagoda and the Crystal Ice Golem Gloves in Countryside that I believe are around 1/300 but having an alt in party can lower it to an average of 1/150 until one of the gets it. My understanding is it's legal as I've even done it on front of Joeshmo while testing if they drop and as most of these mobs require several keys and are lvl 100+ drops it's not exactly easy to do either. However all these quest based drops also have a significant limitation that is that players are limited to 1 drop per character. This is particularly painful in case of FT drops where items were buffed but anyone who got old version can't get improved version as they've already obtained their 1 per character quota. I will however note that update hasn't changed the behaviour in anyway and camping these drops was the only case previously when grouping was semi-viable until you got the drop. Helping people obtain keys is also a subclass of this type of drop.
Doesn't matter, you'd die anyway. ;D Shroud's a hacker. After many hours of deep thought I have came to that conclusion.

petarkiller

« Reply #14 on: 26, March 2023, 19:22:02 »
A small suggestion if possible reflection should be ignored when in a group, so players are allowed to cast spells while standing behind each other.

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