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Scaling
#1
I know this is a big statement to make, but I feel like this actually makes the game way less enjoyable than it could be so i'll make a thread to address this issue:

I think Ray tries too hard to make the power difference between old vs new and P2W vs F2P too similar.


And this happens with a lot of systems, but not all. (for example I think levels and pets scale fine).
But some things just barely scale or scale too steeply.
I think mostly of fishing, orbs, guild buildings and challenges.

I'll start with challenges I guess:

The current system is mostly fine actually, but groups are ridiculous. IMO if the entire party has equal DPS they should be able to clear a group challenge before they reach the individual damage required to do the solo of the next tier.
Example:
If Solo Silver 5 rats requires 100B damage then the damage required for Group Silver 4 rats should be lower than 600B, but higher than the individual damage needed for duo. Currently there are several exceptions to this.
Aside from that I have no issues with them.

With the other systems I have way more issues.

Reaching goals feels rewarding, but if the goal takes too long to reach it will feel more like a chore and the feeling is no longer rewarding enough.
Orbs are the perfect example of the scaling being terrible:
On 40 sacrifices/day it takes 1.2 days to get to 2 stars. A week to get to 3 stars, a month to get to 4 stars, half a year to get to 5 stars, 2 years to get to 6 stars and 20 years to get to 7 stars. Also you'll die before you'll ever be close to reaching 8 stars on any orb.

For a system made to scale infinitely this is unacceptable.

Fish are another one:
There's 48 different types of fish. You'll reach the first 22 types in a reasonable time. The game will most likely die out before you even reach the last 23. I understand that fishing is something that's never supposed to end, but additional types of fish could easily be added within a short amount of time. Since the clam rewards are diminishing for every type of fish it makes it a lot easier to make a system that doesn't scale neither too fast or too slow.

And then there's the guild buildings.
They're nice numbers but the rewards are bad, ST maxes out at +15% which just feels really low. Shrine is also capped at 15%...
None of the buildings feel as if they even give that much, except for fortress which is amazing early on and then becomes completely useless as you get inferno levels.

I understand that Ray wants to not make the gap between P2W and old members compared to newer and F2P too big, but it's at the point where F2P users suffer from it, since they will hardcap and softcap on everything because of hard limits (like crit max level etc) and steep scaling of a majority of features. (I am saying this as a fully F2P)

Systems I think scale fine:
- Support level (aside from the pack rewards being handled weirdly month --> day --> week?)
- Levels
- Pets

And there's a few ones that I think are problematic but I haven't talked about:
- Forest areas (one third of a year for a forest area?)
- Treasure claims (hurray for 0.01% of my G/M gains 7 times a day that I can increase by 50%!)
- Mine (mostly the random diamond rewards are so rare they practically never happen) also wood/upgrade requirement rises so why does extra mine rewards scale as well? 100 for the first one but then 250 for the second one?

I really hope that some of the mechanics are thought over again so that the game doesn't feel like a standstill.
I do enjoy this game and I really want to like it more.
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#2
You're preaching the same words people have been saying for the past year, but it won't change anything. This game has problems from the core extending to nearly every feature in the game and it will never be entirely fixed.

The challenge system has something like 10-15 more difficulties that will likely never be released. If they do, you're looking at another half a year-year. The entire difficulty system would have to be completely redone to allow for it even then.

Fishing is actually a pretty solid feature but also a money pit. Good for non paying players but to truly get to the juicy stuff, expect to work on that feature for over a year or shell out a few grand.

The #1 problem in the game is the math and scaling systems. They are awful and have needed drastic changing since day 1 but he seems to be quite confident the current system works. Instead of gradual increases, they are severe jumps that make no sense.

You have to know the trends

It goes:
> Let's try an balance the game
>*opens up a part of game allowing for player growth, people are happy*
>*At the same time unreasonably nerf another part of the game, thus limiting player growth*

>Let's slow down the higher players growth to make it fairer for all
>*Nerf something that only affects the highest players, they will be slowed down now*
>*At the same time let's add 100 more inferno tiers, what difference will it make*

The pet revamp was a solid start, but still little hope that this game ever reaches it's potential.
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#3
I believe things can change, I've seen it happen before, and sometimes it just takes a long amount of time.

Ray's starting to go in the right direction which proves that he's capable of crafting well-scaling mechanics. (Via the pet changes)
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#4
I completely agree with your point on challenges, group challenges should not be so heavily carry based and s4 group should not be more than 6 times harder than s5 solo.

I don't feel that the guild buildings are useless, they all give nice bonuses (except fortress on higher levels, but that could be fixed with more ascension upgrades) and clearly Ray does not intend to make them too powerful, guilds are much more about community than guild bonuses and I like it that way.

I agree about orbs, but I don't think the situation is that bad. Starting from orb 5 they are only 4 times the price of the tier before. With my 50 orbs a day 4 star orbs take 25 days and 5 star ones will take 100 days so I will have a goal to aim for in somewhat reasonable time.

But it is much worse when it comes to fishing. Since fishing has this very slow scaling and it gives offerings while orbs also scale slowly it makes it very bad. In half a year even f2p players will reach tier 5 rod and tier 6 will be still very far for everyone. And even if they had one tier higher equipment that just means more SO which still have to go through the bad scaling of soul orbs. So yeah, it gives now (log log) based return on investment so while it is very good now to invest in fish,in the long run basically everyone will have the same orbs.
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#5
You complain about scaling, and you list off half a dozen different features that you don't think scale well, and I'm just sitting here looking at the fact that you listed off half a dozen different features.

Many of these features compound on top of the others. If they all scaled well, the effect on your personal stats would grow exponentially.

If they make it so that you can more easily get higher tiers, they'd need to cut back on the bonuses provided by each tier (if their goal is to maintain current game balance). Perhaps that would be a good idea? We'd gain bonuses more regularly; they'd be smaller, but that sense of accomplishment would be more frequent and potentially feel more rewarding (since it wouldn't drag as much). But if they increase the rate of bonus acquisition without scaling down the bonuses, your power would grow too quickly (I think -- maybe you disagree).

Note, that unless they regularly "rebalance" these features, there will always come a point when scaling feels too slow. Whether you hit a soft wall at tier 7 or at tier 14, that wall is inevitable. If they increase scaling, will you come back here in a few months and complain that it takes a year to go from tier 14 to tier 15?
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#6
(07-15-2016, 11:26 PM)Segan Wrote: You complain about scaling, and you list off half a dozen different features that you don't think scale well, and I'm just sitting here looking at the fact that you listed off half a dozen different features.

Many of these features compound on top of the others. If they all scaled well, the effect on your personal stats would grow exponentially.

If they make it so that you can more easily get higher tiers, they'd need to cut back on the bonuses provided by each tier (if their goal is to maintain current game balance). Perhaps that would be a good idea? We'd gain bonuses more regularly; they'd be smaller, but that sense of accomplishment would be more frequent and potentially feel more rewarding (since it wouldn't drag as much). But if they increase the rate of bonus acquisition without scaling down the bonuses, your power would grow too quickly (I think -- maybe you disagree).

Note, that unless they regularly "rebalance" these features, there will always come a point when scaling feels too slow. Whether you hit a soft wall at tier 7 or at tier 14, that wall is inevitable. If they increase scaling, will you come back here in a few months and complain that it takes a year to go from tier 14 to tier 15?

While this is a real issue, I think it is solvable. You can give around the same rewards but in smaller portions so it feels better, very much like you suggested. Let's say instead of orbs costing 4 times the orb before they could cost 2 times the orb before, but the new 10 star orb would be only as powerful as the old tier 5 orb (the idea is that the same amount or SO would give the same bonus but you would get unlocks more often). Or even every 100k XP could give a new unlock while keeping that the amount of Xp needed to unlock 4 star orb would give the same bonus. These all could reduce the amount of wait needed to see some value of your effort while not changing the balance.

Another thing is that there are cases where I think the scaling should actually change, as I said in my previous post even if you could increase faster your fish gains you would still have the very harsh diminishing returns on orb level prices, so it would not be a huge change in balance at all (but it would be a change, of course).
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#7
So just reading through this thread I've got a couple thoughts.

First, there are definitely balancing issues in fishing. It makes me sad to look at how far out of reach the rods are, but I still focus them because of the diminishing returns on pearls. If I dick around too much with the upgrades I can actually afford, I'm just making it take even longer to reach higher tiers of fish which will limit the amount of pearls I'm getting, etc. etc. in a vicious cycle. There needs to be some sense of reward from participating in an activity that is in itself tempered by the fact that you don't truly get anything out of it except another way to progress soul orbs. If there were tangible benefits beyond sacrifices (which of course you get in diminishing returns from your fish built up), then maybe fishing would feel less disheartening. Or even if there were a mathematical reason to upgrade things a little more equally.

This brings me to point two - I agree with the sentiment that soul orbs should level up more quickly, but not provide the same bonuses. This would lead to a bigger sense of achievement, even if in reality nothing's changed at all when you look at sacrifices spent vs bonuses provided. This is kind of a minor one for me though as I've been enjoying the orbs so far and can still see a sense of progress. I imagine that'll change soon though. Maybe even getting more of a bonus from the progress made to the next tier and lowering the bonus for achieving that tier somewhat like what happened with challenge damage bonuses? Heck, if fishing progress is sped up without decreasing the fish gut gains, this would be a time to decrease the effectiveness of the orbs as a way to balance fishing but letting people level up faster so they feel more satisfied.

Forests could probably use a slight adjustment so you don't hit this massive wall after a couple months all of a sudden (and maybe don't clear them so fast to start out), but it's not really a huge deal to me.

Mines are fine the way they are, especially after you get that lvl 4 woodcutting orb.

Treasure claims should probably scale better as you open them (and scale better based on lvl) since how many you get is dependent on how much attention you pay to the game and are willing to break up your sleep. Someone who gets the theoretical max chests in a day (whatever that number is) should get something they can feel happy about as opposed to the relatively mediocre rewards now. The mechanic is really only useful at very low levels as it stands.

Buildings are fine - except that damn altar...ugh...haha I put a moratorium on stone donations to the altar. It getting to lvl 13 was the catalyst for turning on the bank (which is a hell of a lot more efficient anyway).

Last, but definitely not least, challenges. I don't know if it's worse than fishing progress for me, but damn I think it might be since I've struggled with it for far longer. People are right, I shouldn't be able to know I can go right from a s4 b3 g2, whatever group challenge and immediately finish the single version of the next tier. That's always made me frustrated, especially since I'm generally not on par for my group challenge, I only go into them when I can do the work of at least 2 people since there are far too many folks who show up without being the least bit ready. Also, in some cases, I find the jump from solo to duo to group to be a bit much. By this I mean that the damage you need to clear solo vs the damage you need to dish out to be on par in duo and then group just increases way too much sometimes. Perhaps fixing the first issue would rectify this one as well? Another thing is that I believe the difficulty increases too much between some of the end challenges. It was fine when they were first introduced, but with the overhaul to make the system more extensible I don't know if I should be stuck on Bronze Infested and Gold rats haha

Think that's it. Them's my two cents.
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#8
Well, while I didn't read all of it, I will point out that I don't get the chests for the gold as that is pointless for me. What I getting the claims for now is for the AP/diamonds, AP especially, as there isn't many ways to gain these over time. I perfectly fine with how it is, though the gold is really just for those starting out, the AP/diamond is more for those further along in the game.

Yes, it very little AP/diamonds but for me it adds up per day, if actually consider how much is gained in a month's time, that pretty good for F2P players.
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#9
Obviously the rewards would be readjusted accordingly. I think the reward to resource ratio is fine, but anythign that takes more than a couple of months to see sizable progress in doesn't feel right.
I'd be more ok with the current building bonuses if there wasn't a level cap.


From the sounds of it a lot of people are thinking of stopping this game, Ray will need to act before he loses his playerbase.
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