Scale minerals needed in construction
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 09:49
I think the minerals needed to build a block for a gate should scale. Right now it seems to start at 100 minerals per block, and (needs testing) goes up as more rings are added.
A server that has 100 people playing, and a server that has 1,000 people playing, will have different levels of mineral generation. Something that is designed and scaled to work well during a preview event won't work in release, and visa versa. As the population of the server changes (game becomes more, or less, popular), the need should also change.
Basically, the difficulty for the player base to do "joint effort X" should be about the same, whether the player base is 200 or 15,000.
(A straight implementation of YPP's dynamic spawn to determine the difficulty of the next block is abusable by hoarding. In fact, all the "easy to think of" ideas I have are abusable by hoarding.)
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 14:11
#2
At the moment? No..
At
At the moment? No..
At launch? Unknown.
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 15:46
#3
Beta not get too attached
I was given to understand that requirements were already being monitored and adjusted behind the scenes to better accommodate differently sized player communities. For now, I've found that good mineral deposit gains can be had through education efforts: talking to new players about the importance of creating new and better gates.
It's enormously important to realize that this is still an early preview. The game has expanded quite a lot since previous alphas, but given the massive changes to item availability, balancing, and the economy, I wouldn't get too caught up in trying to optimize around the current system (economic or otherwise). It's almost certain that additional, major modifications will be made to various aspects of gameplay before anything goes live to the general public.
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 18:35
#4
☺
The minerals required to produce gate content does scale, based on mineral acquisition over the prior seven days.
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 18:41
#5
Aaaaaaaaaand the monkey
Aaaaaaaaaand the monkey wrench.
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 19:30
#6
Woot!
That will ruin all
Woot!
That will ruin all sorts of theories that we've had. Thank you.
===
How to abuse: Horde minerals for 8 days. Then, dump large amounts of un-accounted-for minerals into the system, producing bigger gates for cheaper costs.
Do this inside a large guild. Massive mineral mining for a week or two, without spending, to make it harder for others to build; then, wait, deposit majority shares and near 100% construction bonuses. Create floors that have little to no chance of clockwork tunnels, to reduce the amounts of minerals that others can obtain. Use your storehouse.
Fri, 11/05/2010 - 19:45
#7
Or we could wait until more
Or we could wait until more information is released. The current system is a work-in-progress anyway.
Sat, 11/06/2010 - 08:07
#8
Before Curtain gets too
Before Curtain gets too excited, I should point out that if you wait 8 days to build a gate (roughly the time it takes for a full cycle), then you'll have to wait several MORE days in order for one of the gates you build to go live. Do you really want to go several days without being able to adventure out of emberlight? The rewards for gate construction aren't so large and mighty as to counterbalance the loss you'd take from not playing at all for a while.
Sat, 11/06/2010 - 19:44
#9
Alright, lets consider.
SMAG
Alright, lets consider.
SMAG (super massive alliance guild) along with others produce lots of minerals. SMAG keeps minerals, while others spend. SMAG adventures in gates built by others. Due to the cost of construction, half of the gates are built full, and the others are barely. There is stuff to explore.
THEN, after more than 8 days, SMAG stops collecting with its huge stockpile. The construction costs go down slowly over the next week; the rest of the players still make some gates.
After an 8 day gap, SMAG can cheaply produce gates from their stockpile. Using knowledge of the gate construction system, they produce gates that will minimize mineral supply, while giving them the construction bonuses.
At no point is it necessary for dungeon supply to be zero. The expected result is fewer deep gates, not zero deep gates.
8 days will cycle 4 gates, that's half of the arcade.
Now, this might not be a big issue. This might not be a serious problem. This might be the least problematic solution of all the potential solutions. I don't know.
I do know that I couldn't think of a dynamic system that did not have potential abuses.
Sat, 11/06/2010 - 23:30
#10
SMAG would have a hard time
SMAG would have a hard time convincing all of its players to *NOT* play the game, at all, for an extended period of time. Can you think of anyone in their right mind who would join a guild that told them not to play the game about a week? Not going to happen :|
If you assume general population will grow over time if SK is successful, that growth may offset a little of the guilds shennanigans resulting in an even less effective scheme.
This is a very very silly plan.
The net affect of their manipulation even if successful is ridulously low as well.
Sun, 11/07/2010 - 09:43
#11
> SMAG would have a hard time
> SMAG would have a hard time convincing all of its players to *NOT* play the game
When did I say "Don't play the game"?
I said "Horde; Don't add to the gate construction. Don't mine new minerals, so we'll have easy construction later." There's 5 gates (at least) open when the plan begins. After 8 days, if no minerals are added at all, then you'll have one gate open and one or two about to open. Far more likely, the other players (not in SMAG) will have managed to open one gate (keep in mind that after 6 or 7 days, the construction costs will be almost normal, there will be a gate about to open, and there will still be one more gate not yet cycled out).
A gate is there for 16 days (8 gates, two days in each slot). Gates that arrive with "3" open after 6 days, and are around to play for 10 days.
So "Don't add any minerals for 8 days" can be easily timed in such a way as to not kill off all of the gates. Especially if a gate arrives with "2" (which I cannot rule out -- can you?).
===
Keep in mind that you earn heat as well as crowns from gate construction. Heat is tradable in the form of an upgraded (but bound) item that is alchemized (and now unbound).
So SMAG can get crowns for its treasury for guild activities AND special items, wasting none of the bonuses from majority construction of a gate, as well as making levels that its members voted for on the guild forum.
Good? Bad? Better than most plans? Worse than some plans?
No clue. No idea if this is good or not.
Sun, 11/07/2010 - 15:23
#12
I'd settle for ONE gate
The current crop of gates is looking really sad and anemic; could the dynamic spawn adjustment be tweaked with some more pessimistic assumptions?
Specifically, it appears that far fewer minerals are being deposited than actually are gathered. As a result, gates take a lot to create, but the burden falls on the few people who are actually depositing things- this results in huge "globs" of minerals deposited in a desperate effort to get any playable levels, and seriously hinders any organized effort to try level creation with a specific (subset) of minerals.
To recap: after heavy campaigning today, there's a CHANCE that we'll see one of the new gates go down to the core. Of the others, at the present rate.... it's not likely that they'll even make it to emberlight. Too few minerals are going in, and the ones that are deposited aren't enough to create healthy gates, much less enable any real testing. The gate creation system could in theory be one of the coolest additions to this beta, and we'd love to test it more thoroughly under realistic game conditions.
Sun, 11/07/2010 - 21:31
#13
Alright, I just saw in
Alright, I just saw in another thread that minerals are not tradable. That means that my primary method of abuse -- a large guild funneling all gate construction through one person -- cannot happen. So never mind.
There is a flaw in the "scale by minerals produced", but I don't see a solution. Minerals produced can vary from one per person per spawn level to 4 per person per spawn level.
As soon as people are running in groups, they will generate so many minerals that they have to keep on running in groups or they can't build big for a week. It also means that running in groups will move to "Oh, look, I can do lots of building" to "Darn, I'm back to only normal building".
Fri, 11/19/2010 - 21:24
#14
> The minerals required to
> The minerals required to produce gate content does scale, based on mineral acquisition over the prior seven days.
I want to suggest that this is changed to scale based on player-levels containing minerals that have been played over the last seven days.
If you scale based on minerals acquired, then as people pick up bigger chucks, it becomes harder to build gates, and the bigger chunks wind up just making the same depth, not deeper.
("Player-levels" means the sum of number of players on a level that has minerals. Players times levels, in other words.)
Sat, 11/20/2010 - 02:35
#15
You do know after creating
You do know after creating one cheap level you'll be stuck at having the following gates being incredibly expensive if you put through with your plan?
Sat, 11/20/2010 - 18:55
#16
No, I don't understand what
No, I don't understand what you say.
If anything, it will make it easier to make bigger gates. Right now, if you pull a lot of large mineral piles, you find that the "total minerals produced" has gone up, so to make even the same depth, you need more minerals.
And, since the number of minerals gained goes up as minerals * players ^2, and this proposal goes up as minerals * players, suddenly finding your population going solo instead of in parties doesn't hurt the game.
(4 people, each going in solo, pull 1 mineral each for a total of 4.
4 people, going in one group, pull 1 mineral each, but gain 4 per person, for a total of 16.
Then, if you're deep down, you're pulling six instead of 1, so the scaling really makes it hard to keep up.)
Sun, 11/21/2010 - 02:09
#17
Ah, I misunderstood something
Ah, I misunderstood something then. I thought you meant in your plan that only actual mineral deposits would affect the cost of a new gate.
I don't think there's multiple servers, though.