Death to the RNG!

[olhoss]

Maddoc and I spoke about it at lunch yesterday... and one thought was that when it was opened it reset a character flag on the player to 0. A particular combine would then be used to "stoke" the forge, this would set the flag to say 5 (arbitrary at this time) Then any smithing combine that does not require a special container and will fit will work and a script (still a hack!) would then check if the flag is more than 0. If it is decrement the flag (yeah not really a flag anymore... but it still works) and allow the combine. If it is 0, disallow the combine (not consuming components) Something similar could be done for the Kiln.

This was some brainstorming from another post but gives me an idea, using a similar code change, to help kill the RNG issue.

Every time you do a non-trivial combine, you add 1 to a counter. If you get a skillup, the counter is reset to 0. If the counter reaches an arbitrary number like 100, you get a skillup and the counter is reset to 0. Adding this to the regular skillup coding math would mean you would never go more than 100 combines without a skillup (or 50 or 75 or whatever). if you are lucky enough to get skillups, good for you, but this helps those of us who were repeatedly screwed by the RNG working our TS up, and would make the most difference where the combines become either very expensive or hard to come by.

[Bara]

This was some brainstorming from another post but gives me an idea, using a similar code change, to help kill the RNG issue.

Every time you do a non-trivial combine, you add 1 to a counter. If you get a skillup, the counter is reset to 0. If the counter reaches an arbitrary number like 100, you get a skillup and the counter is reset to 0. Adding this to the regular skillup coding math would mean you would never go more than 100 combines without a skillup (or 50 or 75 or whatever). if you are lucky enough to get skillups, good for you, but this helps those of us who were repeatedly screwed by the RNG working our TS up, and would make the most difference where the combines become either very expensive or hard to come by.

Add at least 2 more zeros after that arbitrary number of 100.

[Unapuma]

The max number would have to ramp up for higher end skills But it would be nice to put an end to evil RNG streak that sometimes never ends. And I wouldn't have to keep killing rangers in place of RNG in the game.

[tunr]

I like this idea, the concern I have with it at this point would be to make sure that you still dont get a skill up for something that is now trivial to your skill level.

i.e. your skill is 250 for tailoring, with this in place after '100' attempts to make silk swatches you would get a skill up.

There would need to be a trivial check to make sure that the item you are combining would still have the potential for a skill up before the counter would increase.

[Ngreth Thergn]

At this time I have to say no to that.

I would prefer real code support to change the skillup method within EQ, not a hack to do it.

Plus there is one BIG problem (to me)...

I do **NOT** get a notification on if the player gained skill on the combine. So I would just be counting to 100 and giving a free skillup, unless I stored another "flag" for every skill and then we are just going flag crazy, and we really do not want to do that.

[Itek]

I generally, over the last two years, stay away from "the RNG is broken" threads but I think something should be pointed out here.

Long ago (and by long I mean the year 1994) I was a wizard on a MUD (whose name I will not reveal as it still exists in some form) and some of my friends were still players on the MUD. I was also in the process of switching to computer science as a major, and flunking out of school. (Flunking out due to depression, not because the computer science was too hard.)

There was an under utilized "donation" room in the game, where people could donate coins and randomly get stat points. No one really used it, because on one could remember ever really getting anything out of "donations" for the amount of coins they spent.

So I decided to check out the code (as I wanted to do something similar in the area I was coding) and found it was something like this....

Each character had values stored Cur_Donation and Tot_Donation. When you donated the room would add your current donation to your total donation and then do a check like this....

if (Tot_Donation < (random-between(10,10000)+random-between(10,10000)))
...then player.Tot_Donation = 0
...player.stat(rand(6))++

So, basicly, there was a very low chance on every donation of a stat increase, unless you had a huge amount of donation banked.....

EXCEPT...

If you "seeded" it with a 1000 coin donation, then donated 1 coin a few times...

Your odds of getting a stat increase for less than 2000 coins was amazing.

(Feel free to check the math.)

I told my friend, in confidence, about how silly this hunk of code was.

Three weeks later the donation room was recoded, because of abuse, and I was in hot water with the MUD admins.

Adding a small (seemingly small) counter to ensure a skill up after a limited number of trials, is a mathematicly BAD IDEA. BAD. For the above reasons.

It is trivial to add data fields to characters ("we don't have the ability to store that kind of data in characters" -Abashi .... 6 months later over 100 new factions were added to the game) and trivial to add a set-data-field call to the action of the combine button on success. (the game already does something [sends a tell to the player] when they get a skill up, adding another thing to the list of things to do is simple) The reason this shouldn't be done is that it is INVITING abuse. The RNG works well (from developer comments TOO well) and does precisely what is intended. It provides RANDOM skill ups.

Hook a mouse up to a paddle bar which provides food on a set "pay schedule" where it gets food every 5 pushes and it will eat and be fine...

Hook the same mouse up to a random pay schedule paddle bar, with increasing pushes required over time, and the mouse will work itself to death trying to win. (That is, with food pellets uneaten around it, simply trying to get more and more food, by "winning" over the RNG.)

Slot machines.

EQ Tradeskills (and mob lewt drops in general).

There for a reason.

[olhoss]

While I understand the issue of adding flags to the code, the fix I offered is because the random nature of the skill ups is a) bad to begin with and b) makes a HUGE difference at the high end as far as the amount of resources (time and materials) where the differences in "luck" is enormous.

Given the same attribute (int/wis) it is not right that 295 to 300 should take one player 700 combines and another player 8 combines, and that is what happens currently. No amount of "it-evens-out" argument is valid there.

[Maevenniia]

Itek, you've just confused me...

If your little mouse gets a food pellet for every 5 bar presses, this is a good thing?......so if a counter system were set up to guarantee a skill up afetr a max 100 clicks of the combine button, wouldnt this be the same?

whereas the mouse that works himself to death on the random # of bar presses seems very similar to tradeskillers that wear their fingers to the bone doing hundreds of combines, depedent on the random RNG....

[Itek]

hehe...

good / bad for the mouse feeding system depends on perspective...

from the mouse viewpoint a constant pay schedule is nice...

from the perspective of the owner of the paddle (who gets a penny each time the mouse hits the bar) ... letting the mouse kill itself while you get a bigger payday seems a reasonable answer..

People play slot machines (random payout) because they think they can win. Even when, intellectually, they know they can't. When they do it solely for entertainment it's good clean fun. When they become addicted... not so much.

If there were a constant increment to the next skillup, say skill/5, for how many combines you needed to do... a lot of the interest in tradeskills would decline. This isn't just my opinion, you can feel free to validate my statements by checking psychology of gaming research papers through google scholar.

Random payout = longer and heavier play. It works for casinos and it works for SOE and they would be foolish to change it.

[Bara]

Itek, you've just confused me...

If your little mouse gets a food pellet for every 5 bar presses, this is a good thing?......so if a counter system were set up to guarantee a skill up afetr a max 100 clicks of the combine button, wouldnt this be the same?

whereas the mouse that works himself to death on the random # of bar presses seems very similar to tradeskillers that wear their fingers to the bone doing hundreds of combines, depedent on the random RNG....

Players = mouse. SOE = B.F. Skinner. We all better hush up before we all get electric shocks from failed combines.

[Maevenniia]

Ok, I get it. Doesn't mean I have to like it

Plus, the counter could be set higher...say to a max of ... 300 or 350.

High enough that you would likely skill up due to the RNG, but at the same time would be a way to have mercy on the poor suckers that do experience really, really, really bad streaks.

[Roanne]

Would you also be willing to accept code that guaranteed you couldnt skill up again within a number of combines after a skillup?

[KyrosKrane]

Yes and no. The purpose of the cap on attempts would be to reduce the worst-case scenario, not to make skilling up easy. Getting multiple skillups in a row is not detrimental to the game; if anything, it creates a memorable experience and a pleasant experience for the user. Contrast this to the feelings of anger and despair people express over 1000 combine dry runs.

Let's say that the cap is set at ten times the average chance to get a skillup at a particular skill level, using an average prime stat. In this case, there would be no need for a minimum cap -- the max cap doesn't make skilling up easier on the whole, it just says you can't go for absurdly long stretches without a skillup.

For example, let's say at a particular skill level, on average, it would take 20 combines to get a skillup. If you go 200 non-trivial combines without a skillup, then on your next non-trivial combine, you'd get a guaranteed skillup.

The obvious exception would be that one insanely lucky bugger who gets from 0 to 300 in exactly 300 combines, but I've never heard of anything remotely like this. Having said that, if we cap the worst-case, then it's also fair to cap the best case -- you can't get more than X skillups in a row, where X is defined by some corollary to the formula above.

[Lejax]

Adding a small (seemingly small) counter to ensure a skill up after a limited number of trials, is a mathematicly BAD IDEA. BAD. For the above reasons.

But in the case of EQ tradeskills, there would never be that player-defined initial seed. It would always be 0. And the bell-curve nature of your example might not apply to what would happen behind the scenes in EQ either.

I really don't see how just resetting the counter back to 0 and have it start counting back up is exploitable. I'm not saying it isn't; I'm just saying that your example isn't a very good analogy.

[Gaell Stormracer]

I agree with Lejax. Your example is just a bad starting point.The nature of that function with the triangular distribution is the core of the exploit you described and bears no resemblence to the proposal of a counter with reset. That the code does not currently support a "skill-up" event notification WOULD seem to be an issue, but there clearly is some such code because the Title system is based directly on hitting certain skill levels, so this would merely be a generalization of that.