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Post by Ood on Jun 6, 2014 18:48:42 GMT -5
This is now the fourth iteration of this post, for previous threads see below: Feedback & Suggestions (3)Feedback & Suggestions (2)Feedback & SuggestionsWell, it's now Build 101, in the past weeks many things have changed, and also remained the same. At this point I hope I don't need to beat the dead horse any longer with 'the game is boring' talk. I think (or perhaps just hope) Rob and Tim are doing their best to create a game that can keep one entertained for sustained lengths of time. The main subject of this feedback thread is something different. Alts, Altboxing, Mules, 'Duping', etc.
Well, it's starting to get pointed out more (see Justin and Zub's posts here and here respectively), but to be honest the problem has been there since items, storage, and most of all trading were first implemented ( Build 52). The following hypothetical situation demonstrates the problems nicely. Players: Player A has one account. Player B has 2 accounts one main, and one 'alt'. Player C has 10 accounts one main, and 9 'alts'. Storage situation: Player A is limited to the storage he or she can find or purchase through the market at market price. Player B can have the same amount of storage as player A at half the level on each account. Player C has more storage than player A even if 0 storage items are used on any account. Module situation: Player A is limited to meld rolls, purchase rolls, or drop rolls on modules. Players B and C can trade between accounts relatively safely for little cost (at least currently) by rigorously checking offers and liquidate price to reroll modules until a desired result occurs. Drop situation: Player A only gets one drop. Player B (with some scripting or playing skill) could potentially get double drops on large/valuable kills. Player C (with some scripting skill) could potentially get multiple drops or (with some playing skill) at least double drops on large/valuable kills. Which player above is at the biggest disadvantage? Which players above are following the rules? Which players above are benefiting from non-game related aspects of the game? I hope the answers are obvious. Note: I assume scripting is illegal, but without hard evidence and at the game's current stage, I doubt much can/would be done about such a situation.What is there to be done about these problems? In the end it all comes down to changing one of two things. Trade or Drops. As one of the design foundations of grid is (or seems to be): The more the merrier. Grouping should always be at least as fun and rewarding as soloing. I doubt the thing to change will be the drop system. That leaves the trade system. How can trade be modified such that it becomes not worthwhile to have multiple accounts, not worthwhile to trade with alts for better rolls/more storage, and still retains the idea of not being not worthwhile to try and craft everything?
I phrase it 'not worthwhile' because unless the game is heavily moderated, people are going to have multiple accounts. It's an inevitability, the way to stop or discourage such behavior is to make it not worthwhile to do it. I suppose that is the million dollar question, to which I unfortunately do not have much of a solution in mind. Perhaps all of us together can come up with something. |
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Post by Justin on Jun 6, 2014 21:15:39 GMT -5
The pairing of the 'core aspects' that Rob has chosen is a recipe for disaster that results in what this topic is about.
Before I go on, we can't forget Rob's argument (I believe it was he who mentioned this, at least): This problem should go away when there are more players in the game, as people will constantly be buying/changing offers on all the items and alts won't be able to keep up. However, scripting bots to auto-change their offers when they're being contested might happen in the future, so that might not be a reliable stance.
Limited storage + auto liquidate is the most prevalent issue with this. I've seen this happen ages before I even thought of other ways the market could be abused.
Let's say we're fighting a region boss right now, and from one of the towers drops a highly desirable module. Too involved in the fight, most players ignore it and continue to attack other towers. However, one player decides to put up a liquidate offer of 0.0001 (or the minimum highest offer) 99 times for that module, with the intent of robbing it from players who die before sending it to long term.
The player being rewarded is the one who backed out of the fight and used the market - not the players actually participating in the fight. This can even encourage 'experienced' players to try to kill new players who happened to grab loot that they didn't realize was valuable.
Right now the most common 'duping' I see is players connecting a bunch of minerals together on their main without making a path connecting to Origin, and then gathering all their alts at the area which would allow them to connect all the minerals. This causes all of the alts to get the loot aswell, and then they can trade it to the main by melding up to a level w/o buy offers on it.
This can theoretically be done on every enemy in the game, and you already mentioned this.
Using an alt to put buy offers on low level items that nobody else has the space to hoard is another way of abusing. I can regrettably admit that I've done this, and managed to get a 14 shield augment and 15 health augment from buying 6-12s on an alt.
I see this as an opportunity, if players are actively playing, to gain higher level tanks at a rapid rate, by buying the tanks that those players can't keep. Again, this is possible without actually playing the game or even coming online.
I doubt this makes much sense, but because of the market it's possible to make 'pure' alternate accounts. So, someone could unlock a thunderbolt, augment it highly and get modules for it, and then possibly sell that account only for that tank. Of course the only benefit to this would be saving time from multiple trades and losing coins to taxes, but otherwise it's not appealing (to me at least). RWT potential with this.
The only solution to all of this that I can think of is copying runescape's grand exchange.
A major issue with Grid12 trading is that players can make trades while they're offline. Instant trading is nice but gives way too much freedom to abuse. The grand exchange in runescape does not immediately send successful trades into your inventory, but in a 'holding' area that you can pick up the item at later (while online). This slightly slow downs trading on mules.
Another issue is the infinite amount of trade offers you can put out. If the grand exchange method that I just mentioned is added, it gives players the opportunity to trade items to alts and using that as storage. Limiting the amount of active trades possible would prevent this.
You'd still be able to buy a large amount of items within one trade (should that still occur in Grid, or should it stick with one item at a time?), but even if you sign on to claim your items, you'll also have to set up that trade again by raising up the number like it currently is in game.
The issue of all items that players aren't able to keep for themselves being able to be taken by alts of other players still exists with this, but at least it makes it a lot more difficult to manage multiple alts.
There's still the pay-to-access market that would eliminate all of this. Even for as low as $.50, it'd demotivate those who would try alting.
TL;DR - This is a big issue, you get more rewards by not playing and using the market than playing and not using the market, and this is enhanced by people abusing alts. Here's a somewhat poorly explained suggestion.
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Post by Ood on Jun 7, 2014 9:09:10 GMT -5
Another issue is the infinite amount of trade offers you can put out. If the grand exchange method that I just mentioned is added, it gives players the opportunity to trade items to alts and using that as storage. Limiting the amount of active trades possible would prevent this. Justin, I agree with most you said, except for this point. Limiting the number of active trades for different items would only further encourage alting. If I want to buy 6-12 CD, Hornet Mod 1 2 3, 6-12 Storage, and Kraken Mod 1 2 3, but only have a small number of unique item trade slots available I either have to make a decision on what I can live without, or alt the other trades I need. I think the current market is a somewhat 'unregulated' version of Runescape's Grand Exchange as it stands now. I don't think adding restrictions to it is the way to go, as it can frustrate players immensely to have to pay to access, pay to trade, pay pay pay, everything you click on you pay, I don't think we want that. The way I see to make it less abusable, would also be very frustrating, make it a blind system. You see only your offers to buy and sell, if you hit liquidate you get the best price available. This encourages players to make buy AND sell offers on their items at what they think is a fair price. Right now it's very much a buy offer only game, things are mass liquidated on death with rares being the only thing liquidated by choice. It'd also be very frustrating, particularly for new players, because you don't know the 'market price' of anything, you have to make up your own mind for what things are worth. As Rob has said, many of the problems WILL be remedied by having more players, but, the advantages are still there. You can circumvent limited storage by having alts, and until people start scripting bots on the market (this is also bad), you can still trade across accounts fairly easily. Perhaps off topic, but I think auto-liquidate on death is currently another major flaw of the system. |
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Post by rob on Jun 7, 2014 15:10:17 GMT -5
I agree that there are many ways to abuse alts right now, but (to reiterate) I think most will become much harder if there are lots of players. We could further implement a "fuzzy liquidate price" that shows you the approximate price (within say 2%) you'll get for a liquidate, to make it harder to know that you'll liquidate to a particular buy offer. We could also require a certain amount of grinding (leveling) before allowing storage space items to be used. Also, module rolls are going away. You'll choose which bonuses you get when you install the mod.
Why do folks dislike liquidate-on-death? I think it serves two cool purposes: it ensures a steady supply of items for sale, and it generates coin income, even for newbies.
Justin, after consideration, I'm not very worried about your example of someone dropping out of a fight to put in a buy offer for an item that just dropped. With lots of players, a high, legit buy offer will already be in the system. And it's not robbery anyway...if you die, you lose the items regardless of what buy offers anyone puts in.
The currently-abused "almost connect a bunch of minerals and dupe them with 10 alts" technique will be much harder to pull off on a server full of 50-100 strangers. Someone will prematurely connect the minerals before you can get your alts organized.
Alt-duping will probably always be with us in some form, but I think the ease of abuse that we see today won't be what we see in the future.
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Post by Justin on Jun 7, 2014 16:08:02 GMT -5
The problem I have with liquidate on death (which would probably also go away when the game has a larger playerbase) is the fact that it all can go to one person now.
If I've been clearing a region, with 3 towns in it and dozens of supply caches, I'll probably have a few pages of level 7+ tanks.
Right now, the highest buy offer on 7-12 are as follows:
7 - 0.0000226
8 - 0.0000226
9 - 0.000154
10 - 0.000156
11 - 0.0162
12 - 0.00188
So, if I were to die twice at a subcommander or regionboss later on in the region, all of the 7-12s that I didn't send to long term (I have all tanks and don't really see the point in keeping them for any reason besides gaining coins now) could easily go to a person who beats the offers with the lowest possible increase, put the quantity at 99, and if they have automeld+the appropriate storage (or enough alts) they can get all of those tanks for themselves.
With a few pages of those 7-12s, I assume a person would be able to get at least a level 15 tank.
So, at most, I gained .5 coins from that death, but the person who receives all that I lost can start selling the 13+ tanks for...
13 - 0.0722
14 - 0.165
15 - 0.601
16 - 1.17
17 - 3.01
(I doubt they'd get this high but 18 is 7.45)
Actually, I'm rather surprised by how low those numbers are. Leaving out the fact that people might pay more for one of those tanks if a person states that they're selling the tank in chat (not everyone is constantly buying things), it seems to show the effect of auto-liquidate already.
Before unmeld was added, once you melded up to a higher level tank, all the tanks that were used to create it no longer exist and are taken out of the market. This prevents inflation in a way. However, unmelding actually makes a level 20 worth dozens (or a lot more) of the tanks preceding it, causing them to be easily obtainable.
Auto liquidate sending all those tanks to one person, and then having them meld up to a 20 allows them to still keep all the other tanks. Since not many people play the game, there are way too many tanks that exist and once a person gets there hands on an incredibly cheap high level one, they have all the tanks before it aswell if they unmeld.
This will also easily go away when more players are 'on the grid' because there'll hopefully always be a need for tanks as players compete through the game and/or the market to unlock them all, but since players aren't constantly being introduced to the game now, it's an unbalanced rate of tank-gain vs. rate of player-gain.
Edit: Now that I read this over, I'm realizing how insignificant of an issue this would be once this game is released. It just bothers me how low the community has priced things when coins are so easy to get. But that too will probably solve itself when more players actually play the game.
Epiphany: Most of my issues with the game right now all fall back on the lack of players.
The people who play now have everything they need and don't have anything to spend coins on besides modules and rare items. Even then, those people are also very fairly inactive (unless I'm just so inactive myself that I'm never around at times when others are online). It's a lot easier to get the common items from general clearing w/o purpose than getting to the 50%+ of a region and receiving rare high tier loot, because it's hard playing this game alone. So the market, or simply the trash (no offer, deletion) gets all the low level items, but the rare items aren't going into the market. Then, with the alts that people have, the low levels are accumulating and becoming high level tanks, while nobody has the coins to buy them or nobody wants to spend their rare coins on the 'common' high level tanks (that aren't actually common but are just a product of alt-ing).
A lot of speculation, I'm not sure if that's what's occurring but it makes sense to me as I type it.
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Post by Ood on Jun 10, 2014 10:32:12 GMT -5
To be quite frank, I'm not sure even opening the game up (removal of invite codes) would generate that many more regular players. There's been extremely little forum activity in general as of late, and even less requesting of invite codes. Even with a perfect market system, no one will want to play a game regularly when the fun dies after 5 to 10 minutes. The static nature of the game takes away from my gaming experience, and the abuse of alts takes further away from my gaming experience because I play on one account, right now there's little reason for me to play this game other than the potential I see it having.
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Post by Justin on Jun 10, 2014 22:24:57 GMT -5
To be quite frank, I'm not sure even opening the game up (removal of invite codes) would generate that many more regular players. There's been extremely little forum activity in general as of late, and even less requesting of invite codes. Even with a perfect market system, no one will want to play a game regularly when the fun dies after 5 to 10 minutes. The static nature of the game takes away from my gaming experience, and the abuse of alts takes further away from my gaming experience because I play on one account, right now there's little reason for me to play this game other than the potential I see it having. I had typed out a long response, clicked outside the screen accidentally, and backspaced, so I lost it. It was a few hours ago but I still felt it necessary to give at least some part of my response. I do agree that this game can get boring rather quickly. There just isn't enough variety in the game yet, but that is something that will change over time. I disagree with you mentioning the lack of activity on the forum/requesting of invite codes. We only have two sources to gain testers - Word of mouth, and realm (although this is also word of mouth). Most testers who have ever played this game have come from realm. And we already got the 'best batch' way back in the early builds of the game. Over time you run out of resources when mining the same source for material. The realm community is unpleasant and not meant for this game. It isn't. At all. Realm = Permadeath. Risk. Realm = Grinding. Endlessly for loot. Realm = 'Skill' (which is mainly aiming and progression). Realm = Progression. Leveling/maxing. Grid12 = Barely any risk, besides limited storage. Grid12 = Grinding is still in this game, but without risk, so it doesn't feel as rewarding. And there's only 3 types of loot. Upgrades, unlocks, and storage. Grid12 = Memorization. Once you learn how to do something, you can repeat it the same exact way over and over again and get the same result, because there's no random-ness. Grid12 = No progression. I don't know how advertising works, so I can't make any suggestions for that, but that's the jist of what I typed. We don't have a lot of forum activity because our testers from the past few months have treated each other like shit. You can't enjoy the game when you hate everyone you're playing with. |
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The more the merrier. Grouping should always be at least as fun and rewarding as soloing.
