Risk Vs Reward as it relates to a Very Specific type of RNG

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

But it's not the same for other people, right? Some of you get the 'hit' all the way down to 25 or higher, and I think most people don't start to feel anything negative until around the point I start to 'not feel anything positive', right?

This 'Attempt Exhaustion' kicks in differently for long chains, and I think for me it activates differently when I only have to do the entire thing once, it's just a 'roadblock' to either content, a tool for me to enjoy that content, or something for my build/playstyle. So I want to understand, even for those who also don't like this sort of system... if we stick to the 'you get nothing on failure', where do you fit in the above long thing? When do you stop feeling 'yes! I got it!' happily and start feeling 'Finally, damn...' (if at all).

To me this depends on the number of people who has the thing I'm going for relative to the overall number of players on my server. If 1% of players are going for the thing and on average get it on their 10th attempt, I'd be completely fine getting that thing on my 50th attempt, just because I'd still be in the 1% of people with that thing.

This has always been my justification for burning dozens of weapons through OE in L2. I spent weeks refarming mats and enchant scrolls just to get a +1 over the majority of people around me. And if I later see that the majority is starting to catch up to me, I'll try going further in OE.

So in the case of those BDO horses, if only some small % of players even try going for them - I'd be fine with 144 attempts. At least if I've done all the other boosting I could, cause I could definitely see this kind of investment beginning to feel real bad if I could've boosted my character much more through other means. In other words, I'd just do this thing as the "last push for greatness".

This is really helpful because it hits at a point that I think only comes up in games I consider 'better'.

The weird thing is that I don't care about this in BDO (and honestly I kinda feel like the player didn't care THAT much either other than the thing you said). But the reason, imo, is because BDO is shallow. It's not really a very good RPG to begin with.

If I'm not pushing for 'greatness' but instead for 'uniqueness' or 'specialization', this feeling is way WAY worse. If I am 'GenericHealer4292' until I get the specialized thing that completes my concept of my build, through RNG, I am far more likely to quit the game before I get it, once I hit 'frustrated'.

If it's just 'yeah lemme get a minor boost here' it's whatever, it's incidental. In short, I have to have the choice to not even try and still have a roughly similar experience. This is what I would LIKE Intrepid to avoid even if RNG itself is important to their design. Don't 'lock gamechanging options behind it' as @BaSkA13 has said.

But if we use @tautau 's numbers but assume NO 'failstacks', you get the below (this time you get spoiler tags!)

Try 1: 76 people are a little unhappy, 24 people are immediately happy
Try 2: Probably 58 people are a little unhappy, 42 people are happy total
Try 3: Probably 44 people are a little unhappy, 56 people are happy total
Try 4: Probably 34 people are a little unhappy, 66 people are happy total
Try 5: Probably 26 people are sort of unhappy, 74 people are happy in total
Try 6: Probably 20 people are sort of unhappy, 80 people are happy in total
Try 7: Probably 15 people are sort of unhappy, 85 people are happy in total
Try 8: Probably 11 people are sort of unhappy, 89 people are happy in total
Try 9: Probably 8 people are slightly frustrated, 92 people are happy in total
Try 10: Probably 6 people are slightly frustrated, 94 people are happy in total
Try 11: Probably 5 people are slightly frustrated, 95 people are happy in total
Try 12: Probably 4 people are slightly frustrated, 96 people are happy in total
Try 13: Probably 3 people are a bit exhausted, 97 people are happy in total
Try 14: Probably 2 people are a bit exhausted, 98 people are happy in total

The thing is, in the case of the 'person who got it on the 24th try in the first dataset, they spent 24x what the first lucky person spent, and exactly 2x more than 'half the population of attempters'.

In the case of the person who got it on the 13th try in this dataset, they spent only 13x what the first 24 lucky people spent, but 6x what 'half the population of attempters' spent.

As much as I seriously hate it, if you wanted to make people (as I understand them) less annoyed, BDO's system is BETTER. But I may not understand this fully, again, because I just do the math for it. If I am at try 6 of the second dataset, my reaction is exactly the same, because I'm a number crunching econ-player. After that, then apply any irritation from 'I just need this to finish my playstyle'.

It's speed of 'getting people out of irritation space' vs 'getting the average person's experience to drown out the unlucky ones faster'. I personally find it really manipulative in both cases, but that's a long story about how 'rigged' systems become acceptable when you control the 'volume' of the haves and have-nots and that leads to politics real fast, let's not do that.

Separately @NiKr , your response makes me think of something interesting there then. Does your reaction change according to how much of your 'competition' has the thing?

Sure, 1% of all players has it, you are in that 1%, but IF for example you barely ever interacted with the other 99%? Let's say you are a Caravan protector, but only 3% of the population even goes near the Caravan system and among them 90% of players have... idk, SOMETHING that helps them do Caravan fights, which you have to get by RNG this way, does that cause any change in your reaction?

Using the precise concept that 'By Try #11, half your opponents have this thing and you don't'. You can throw in 'half your allies have it and without it you're much less effective'.

I don't expect that sort of thing in Ashes at all, mind you. If you were the 'better fit' for it due to Role or skill, I would assume someone would give or sell you the thing, whatever it is, so that the whole group would be stronger. It might be better to think of it as 'your group is in the lower half of the curve, your opponents are in the upper half', but that's unrealistic too SORTA.

Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?

Azherae wrote: »

Is there ANY situation in the general region of the above where it actually affects you?

If I knew that the 90% got their "thing" within just a few tries and spent, say, 1 week to get it, while I was on my 20th try and already spent several months on it - yeah, this would probably feel really unfair. But if the scale difference was lower (as the 11th try example you gave, with only half of people having it), I'd assume I'd be fine with going twice the distance.

Though I'm purely guessing here, cause I'm used to this kind of rng system being applied to gear OE and that is the most direct powerup over anyone else around, so imo it's a completely different thing at that point.

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I'm not sure that point agrees with me I like, and maybe even prefer, rng in games. I see them as a good equalizer of people, cause I've seen a ton of "rich" people keep throwing resources at rng and failing, while a lucky poor person threw way less money and succeeded.

Obviously the overall stats are still a bit skewed towards the rich folk, but that's always the case. At least with rng, the poor have some chance to catch up. And I don't think that the approach of "everyone gets everything" would seem all that interesting to most people who'd be interested in a competitive game such as Ashes.

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In this case the question is targeted at the concept of 'when is RNG not a way to create a risk vs reward situation'?

I don't know if they intend to make a very RNG-lite game, and personally I will play it either way, because RNG of specific types factors into both my engagement and my form of Roleplaying when I do that, so RNG heavy is fine.

But the more RNG, the more it starts to feel like an unbalanced single-player game, and in this case it would be 'a game pretending to be competitive while randomly rewarding people. NiKr's perspective on this, sometimes, has been close to 'preferring equalization' and I don't mind that either, I dislike the decoupling of your outcome from your choices.

"I chose not to take the action."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that action achieves."

"I chose to take the action."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that action achieves."

I feel like the 'problem' here can be changed without removing the '1d100' part.

You seem to propose:

"I chose not to roll the dice for a chance at this goal."
"Okay you get no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."

"I chose to roll the dice."
1d100:43
"Okay you got no closer to the goal that dice roll achieves."

"I chose to not roll the dice, and also to undertake a long process to get to the goal."
"You have achieved your goal in the end."

I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.

We have not received permission from mcstackerson to share the quoted post.

It's about "fairness". A person who has more time to earn resources in the game will always be stronger than those who don't have that time. But rng brings the average representative of both sides closer to each other. Yes, there'll always be extremes where a poor person was super unlucky while the rich dude had all the luck he might've wanted, but such extreme situations are still better, imo, than the absolute crater of a gap between the rich and the poor. In my experience, this stuff even helped out curb some of p2w on private servers.

Azherae wrote: »

I don't have a problem with this, even in games where you can get more than one of the thing, so people pursue the long slow way while still rolling the dice sometimes, but it does get pretty weird if the thing is important for competition in a game where you can sell the result, which is nearly all of them.

What if the "risk vs reward" was in the mutually exclusive nature of making the choice between "slow and long, but 100%" and "faster, but <100%, and potentially a bit more expensive".

So say you want to upgrade your gear. You have a quest that gives you the resources needed for the upgrade. Within the quest you must choose to either farm out 1k mobs (just for example) and definitely get the resource or you only need to farm 10 mobs but you get a "1%" resource. You can only choose one. And that "1%' resource doesn't have an increase in chance with use, but it fills out a "meter" with each use and after, say, 120 uses you definitely get the upgrade.

So you are assured the upgrade in both cases, but one definitely takes a lot of time, while the other is potentially way faster, but could be somewhat slower. The resource itself would be available on the market and I'd assume its cost would be "somewhere between 700 and 1k kills worth" (or whatever the median rng pull would be for most people). So you could potentially go the third route of trying your luck a few times and then just buying it off the market, which would pretty much keep it in line with the "1k kills" cost

People who have the time to kill 1k mobs will be assured their resource while also saving money. People who have the money can just buy it. People who don't mind the bad feel rng will go for the riskiest path. Obviously the market price would grow if the demand was too high for it, so it's not like the market will always be the safest and cheapest bet.

Or is this suggestion literally the same thing I quoted and I just need to go to sleep because I can't think straight anymore?

NiKr wrote: »

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It's about "fairness". A person who has more time to earn resources in the game will always be stronger than those who don't have that time. But rng brings the average representative of both sides closer to each other. Yes, there'll always be extremes where a poor person was super unlucky while the rich dude had all the luck he might've wanted, but such extreme situations are still better, imo, than the absolute crater of a gap between the rich and the poor. In my experience, this stuff even helped out curb some of p2w on private servers.

I'm not willing to claim it because I don't know your experience, but bear in mind that a lot of your experiences are easily explained by survivorship bias.

Playing a game on private servers is already a survivor selection pressure.

For example you make L2 sound really fun to me, but then I remember that IF I'm unlucky, I won't enjoy it as much, so I never bother to actually go try to play it despite having only two other MMOs to play, one of which I've done most of what I want to do in, no matter how much I still love it.

Consistent exposure to a group that shares one's own goals on experience is great, but bear in mind that any design that explicitly pushes out people of a particular mindset or goal, will create a community where most people don't complain about the issue of the design that pushed out those people.

This has nothing to do with the success or fun factor of the game to the people playing it, ofc. It only affects how niche the game is. The problem with Ashes though, is that MMOs can't go too niche or some of their underlying mechanics fall apart.

A fighting game only takes 2 people to care that it exists for all its mechanics to work, a MOBA, maybe 1000 (though obv it will get stale once those players all learn each other, they might not care though). Ashes requires probably 4000 per server, and 'stale' affects it faster.

The usual reasoning is that there is a big gap between rich and poor because resources, but this is weirdly an economics problem for MMOs that approach a specific aspect too simplistically or introduce certain forced-scarcity mechanics. L2 has the latter (no sign of the unmentioned former but your explanations have implied it doesn't have the problem with drops).

tl;dr, the gap between rich and poor does not have to be big in MMOs, it's counterintuitive, but because these games can have certain things injected into their economic systems, it is much more preventable than in the real world.

And to tie back to the point, oddly, RNG is usually the last thing you want to inject into the system to solve the wealth gap, because it's a small scale redistributor and the distribution spread is, obviously... random.

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Well, I didn't mention a specific part of that, and I'll leave it to others to determine how they feel about it. I'll give more information about my personal play experience.

I want the Unicorn out of the three options because it can ride across the desert. My character 'lives' on the other side of the desert than most of the continent. I'd like to cross it faster, it would 'feel correct to me'.

Because of the system, I have at best I believe an 80% chance of getting the Unicorn specifically, because for various reasons they made it so that there is always a nonzero chance of the Awakening going in one of the two other directions. I need neither of those.

I'm much less upset about this. I can ADAPT to having the Flammen. I can SELL the Pegasus or change my playstyle a little or use it on another character. I'd have to start over my 'Unicorn Attempts' because the Pegasus was released first and is therefore 'cheaper'/more numerous and 'harder to actually sell' so I'd still fall short, but because the item supply is so low, it'd still be another 3 months before I try again, I think.

If I get ANOTHER Pegasus then, (about 2% chance I think?) I think I STILL won't be actually upset. I don't want to just buy the Unicorn, but that, at least, is 'Roleplay'. "My horses wish to fly, not cross deserts" or whatever. Choice has become part of something that can be seen as 'identity'.

But I still can't cross the Desert the way I want to until I resolve it. And I don't mind admitting that in a game like BDO where there isn't exactly a LOT of fun to be had, exactly... it's getting in the way of one of the few things I think I'd enjoy.

The 'correct' answer is to do a bunch of other things I don't like (BDO is terrible) to get the money for the horse. In fact, if you think "I don't want to be frustrated at being average" you should just always sell the materials that you CAN sell and only attempt using all the free ones they throw at you for whatever login reward is currently active, for actually raising the horse. This is what I've done mostly so far.

If I could save up 120x the items for guaranteed awakening, I would do that, because I am usually 'unlucky' (more like average or a little worse for unimportant repeated things).

I can use 'luck' to 'guide the experience', but this relies on choice and minimized effects of gatekeeping, yes. But the other aspect of it doesn't change for me PERSONALLY because of the economist thing. 120x the materials would be 'more than any average person would ever need to gather', which means that the most sensible response would be to 'try up to a certain point and then start saving'.

Except that's not sensible because it applies again. Why not try one more time with even better chances, rather than start saving up 2-3x the effort of average? What did this achieve in terms of personal experience other than making me take longer?

I'm not a good test case for this, so I leave the question to others. This is why I just poke the economy, games with poor levers for their economics always incentivize me to just exploit the unlucky so I can get stuff without experiencing their suffering.

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I've thought about this a lot and decided that I personally would like this very much.

To me, this is actually the essence of RolePlay. The only reason I feel that D20/TableTop games work with their large amounts of randomness and variance is that you get to make choices around the outcomes, and more importantly, it becomes part of your character, it offers some 'consolation prize' type of experience, even if not an advantage.

So I agree with your assessment for myself. I only dislike the BDO one because the only 'choice' I am making is 'engage or don't'.

But 'raw RNG' is overall a tool that some developers feel the need to use, even if it just saves them time from building a more complex system, and I can accept that sometimes, that's the most efficient tool.

"Poking it to manipulate player perception properly" seems a much shorter task than "precisely balanced itemization", particularly when IMBALANCED itemization becomes a talking point so fast compared to the 'it is what it is' of sufficiently manipulative RNG outcomes.

So even from Intrepid, I'd expect to see some of this, and am just asking 'if they don't offer complex stuff, am I so much of an outlier that I should expect something I dislike?'

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If I understand you correctly, your concern is that my data doesn't refer to something you consider to actually be risk vs reward?

Isn't 'rolling the dice using materials or money' a risk with a potential reward? Do you think you can clarify how it isn't? (if you think that)