A Land Far Away

So, as part of the rewards system, I guess I'll be implementing our custom system for diminishing returns on spawn points.

Broadly, the number of times a PC has benefited from a particular spawn waypoint will be used to decrease the reward offered by it- this should discourage the serial spawn-point existence that detracts from PW immursion.

Now, more specifically- how should we implement it? Certainly, we could increment a counter each time a spawn point is completely killed off/cleared. The spawn system already recognises this, to decide when to start it's timer for respawn (or not, depending on it's settings). However, this could also mean the industrious PC could keep coming back indefinitely and using the spawn point using the "leave only one standing" strategy to avoid consequence. Alternatively, we could increment on each kill from a spawn point, though that would mean a point that spawns 25 tiny spiders would diminish 25x as fast as one that spawned one ogre.

I'm tempted to try to code something that increments on the first kill from a given spawn point, and then ignores all further ones for that particular point, from that particular PC, for a given timespan (allowing the spawn to be finished off, or left alone, with no further effect in terms of dimrets functionality. If the spawn point resets itself (and repopulates it's spawn children), the lockout would also be cleared.

Could be more trouble than it's worth, but seems like the most reasonable behavior to me.

Here's another one though: who should get their dimrets incremented? Anyone who personally (or via a summon/animal companion) kills a spawned child? All party members of the killer, or just ones nearby? What about unpartied "bystander" PCs who are close to the action?

Also, I assume we're planning to use the same formula as with XP reward for dimrets: have it adjust rewards on the basis of the most frequent visitor to that spawn point- however, in the case of a PC5 who has maxed out a spawn, bringing along to brand-new PC1s- should the PC1's get dimret increments, even though the PC5 kept them from getting any reward from the spawn point? Seems a bit difficult to work out.

Also, most of the suggestions before seemed to base on visits / week or month- so should we have some system to decrement the dimret numbers as well? If so, how is this best handled?

Sorry, lots of questions above- interested in feedback though, before I get to carried away implementing things that don't work the way people want.

Keep it simple...each spawn point has a tally for every player. As the tally grows, the return diminishes until it's rewarding 1xp/kill. This is obviously a persistent tally.

indio wrote:Keep it simple...each spawn point has a tally for every player. As the tally grows, the return diminishes until it's rewarding 1xp/kill. This is obviously a persistent tally.

So, a point that spawns 5 rats at once should add 5 marks to the tally, while a point that spawns one dire chicken should add one? Do-able, certainly- but it means the odd player who stumbles once into a multiple-spawn point gets penalized the same as someone who comes back to the same single-spawn position over and over again.

I believe dimrets will sink XP awards to 0 as well if it gets high enough. You'd be in favor of making the dimret records permanent? Certainly easier to implement, though some seemed to want to be able to get full reward if visits were infrequent enough (insert long argument about how much is enough).

Personally, I'm certainly in favor of systems that encourage advancement by means other than static spawn combats- I will likely wait on coding any decrement to Dimret counters, and see how it plays in Beta.

Sounds good. Does the Standards team have any ideas on this?

In case you haven't reviewed the prior discussion:

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... hp?t=27369

A simple implementation is probably fine for now IMO though we may be able to substitute dimrets with a more interesting AI solution.

indio wrote:Sounds good. Does the Standards team have any ideas on this?

To my knowledge, we haven't discussed dimrets at all yet, but it's a bit tough to mobilize the team atm .

My own thoughts on the issue are "where did Ronan's population simulator go to", which seemed to render not the rewards diminished, but the spawns itself, and replacing populations with different kinds of challenges, so the issue of "farming" would be less of a problem. Especially with wandering spawns...

but admittedly I didn't keep too close track on the latest developments there.

Population control is in the works- shouldn't be too bad to code once we've got the database to work with properly.

I'm thinking they are parallel systems though.

AcadiusLost wrote:I'm thinking they are parallel systems though.

I'm not sure this was intended to be the case.