heRO SvN Update

[Darkblade]

Fighting 2000 monsters have a 56% chance of obtaining at least one (or more) 0.03% drop item. I think this is a fair success rate to take since it's kind of close to "half the time you get it really fast, and half the time it takes you beyond statistical average to get a card/infiltrator."

2000 hydra = hydra card

I am not usually a stickler when it comes to math, but the above information is incorrect.

Fighting 2000 monsters would have a 0.03% chance per monster killed at dropping a card. Increasing the number of monsters killed does not exponentially increase the chance at a drop, it remains 0.03% for each individual kill.

2000 hydra = 2000 chances at 0.03% per hydra (not 2000*0.03)

Unfortunately I am forced to work with numbers and percentages on a quarter-hourly basis in my current line of work on the side.

The point you were making about the cards still stands and is valid, even with 0.03% drop rate.

[GM-Ayu]

If you look at each individual monsters, yes all of them got 0.03%. But now, what if you calculate by "what's the chance of continuously fighting a monster and NOT getting a card?" Now it becomes a dependent event thus starts allowing multiplication. Chance of not getting a card is 0.9997 (99.97%). The next monster also not getting a card is also 0.9997 (since each monster's card drop rate doesn't affect each other.) So for both monsters to not drop a card, you do multiple each other.

You get 0.9997^2 = chance of not getting a card in 2 monsters.

So let x be number of monsters you have to kill. From the above, we can easily see that if you look at the entire group, you can calculate what's the chance of all of those monsters not dropping any card at all (notice this formula isn't about how many cards you can get, but chances of not getting a card.) So the generic equation is:

0.9997^x = (desired chance of getting NO cards)
0.9997^x = 1 - (desired chance of getting AT LEAST ONE card)

(note: getting at least one card is the inverse of getting no cards.)

put 0.56 in the desired chance and x is roughly 2000.


Calculating chances of getting one card is too complicated since you got issues of "what if 2 cards dropped in sample group?" It's a lot easier to calculate chances of having no cards, and just take the inverse. The formula stands accurate together with what you said, and all of the below are equivalent statements.

2000 hydra = 2000 chances of a 0.03% card = 56% of getting AT LEAST ONE card

[JJJ]

*cough* again what about the mosco quests? in yes? no? maybe so?



EDIT: and ya what about the other quests? XD

[Darkblade]

2000 hydra = 2000 chances of a 0.03% card = 56% of getting AT LEAST ONE card

2000 hydra = 2000 chances of a 0.03% card = 56% probability of getting AT LEAST ONE card.

That I can agree with

otherwise you get players stating "YOU said if we kill 2000 hydra we will get at least one card"

[GM-Ayu]

Hm missed Aurial's post

Your last wall of text was dedicated to describing how one of the assassin BG weapons was better than a carded infiltrator. Then you turn around and say that isn't the main issue. So, what's the real problem then?

Because it's a multilayer problem...? (at least to me). Tech of trunk/stable being main, then you have prizes some being Ok and some are insane (besides the katar, glorious rings are pretty up there...), and all the team related issue.

This sense of releasing updates only to appease newer players is redundant.

I'm... not too sure how you got that idea (apologies if my tones sounds that way). If we are focusing on appeasing new players, we would've kept GR and Angeling in OCA instead of taking them out.

Anyone serious about participating in BG's will at least have tried to gear up for WoE and PvP in general. Otherwise, they can look forward to getting steamrolled.

Precise problem is that being steamrolled is a darn fast way to reset the BG clock to get another game started, especially on small population, the lack of randomization may allow the same group of people to keep "playing." Honestly a setup of "ok whoever starts on north side just suicide so we can rank up the points and start a new round for more points fast" introduce serious flaws with the current design that isn't much of a flaw for official's population. When you got methods to control things like that, especially at north american night time, what equip do you need?

Ideally speaking, yes you passed the pvm part already. But as a GM, I of course try to think of the best way possible to screw the system up. When the team if fixed and you have suiciders (and just like how you can buy people to leech, and how all the "pvpers" across different threads keep bringing up the bench-warmers, hey probably not too hard to pay them to temporarily move to 'benchwarm' the BG instead and click the "waiting room" chatroom to start BG hm?) you don't need the "stepping stone pvp equip" anymore.

@"striking a balance" issue:

It's not so much how come one keeps spending so much time in pvm compare to pvp in regards to BG issues.

It's an issue of how come one event gives rewards that allows you to jump right to the end (see the bypassing the "skipping stone equipment" above). PvM you need skipping stone equipment to really jump to earn access to end game pvm equipments. WoE with the much needed recent adjustments, still doesn't give you things that are immediately ready for the go. BG however, once you got enough, you jump right to the end.

So how come BG you go to the end, PvM/WoE you don't get something of that type of value?

@Battleground armors

BG1 and BG2 differ here. BG2 (KvM) first:

BG2 equipment has no slot and directly gives % reduction again. Though they have no def naturally, they always have a demihuman reduction % which for simplicity's sake, you can count it as a built in def for pvp, but saves you against AD and it's giving you def that works on normally def bypassing stuff. Also, completing the set gives you marc effect directly. The whole set costs 3600 roughly again, same as the weapon counterpart.

BG1: it's really nothing much compare to wings actually (up to you to decide if their visibility keeps them in check or not)

BG1 + BG2 Accessories: the medallions if it's not for slot and still working with glorious rings, glorious rings easily are best accessories with strong elemental resistance and fair amount of bonuses to boot.


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Personal opinion: I personally just think RO seriously isn't meant for GvG play without woe rules... randomized team is disastrous. RO is made with how you walk in knowing what your team is doing, what class to pick and work an unique strategy with the team. Randomly throwing strangers together tempts trouble (refer to mass pvp in toh: "strategy? what?") and introduce way more luck than skill (similar to 1vs1 type of pvp: most of the time you are just hoping that you are lucky and aren't matched with your class's natural worse enemy) . You really need to know who you are playing with so you can make sure that one class can look after the weakness of another. That's my personal outlook on how pvp functions in RO game.

Fixing BG to fit this, you'll need organized team in each time, in which case automation becomes difficult cause it's not practical for the npc to wait until both sides got the same classes signed up or something. It's a lot easier to have a GM do this part instead so 2 sides get in with a team that they want. But by then it's now a GM hosted event, instead of the automated pvp godliness that BG is supposed to be.



"So Ayu, why do GMs never host 5vs5 PvP tourneys if GM hosting PvP Tourneys is your mentioned solution to the pvp problems?"

For reasons I rather not talk about and why the last pvp tourney is in February, and the one before that last Oct 2008, just say "Ayu's fault" and leave it like that for now =(


And if I still sound like finding 'excuses' so I can be lazy or 'a conspiracy against pvpers cause everyone knows Ayu hates pvp (which I do)' I really don't need to type a post that takes me 2 hours to write. There are certain things we want to do yet can't do for one reason or another.

Anything really going off topic from the thread... Aurial if you still want to chat to me directly about it, I'm sure you still got contacts with your old guild, many of them has my MSN.

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@J J J: I am personally guessing no none of them are in... or they are commented out by default for one reason or another. Can always verify when test serv is up again I guess.

[JJJ]

bahh if they're commented out can i go over them and get someone to have them put in? a lot of the quest are rather stable so theres no harm in having them

[Nidsrule]

Just for arguments sake, I was referring almost exclusively to the BG1 gear list. I'd have to agree that the glorious ring is quite overpowered, but the rest of the gears seem quite fair. I was under the assumption you would only release the first lot of BG's in a similar fashion to what iRO did (in itself removing the issue of the glorious rings), while releasing KVM later down the track. heRO would have trouble enough getting things going for one set of battlegrounds let alone spreading the PvP population over both arenas. Other than that though, I disagree that the weapons/armors are overpowered.

You mentioned the concept of buying wins as being an issue (especially if you assume this would allow quick runs). Simple solution to stop people benefiting from quick runs is to add a quick modification to the script. Adding a simple account based timer after a player finishes a round of BG (at the point in the script where the players are warped from the map) and a subsequent check at the sign in stage, to make sure this timer is expired before it lets people continue, would prevent people farming in the way you present it.

As for the issue of there being no easy way to implement WoE damage mechanics (I haven't checked the battleground script releases in a long time, so I assumed by now they would have caught up with it all) it becomes not so much an issue of balance in terms of gears, but an issue with eA not having everything coded as intended in the official release. That or the battlegrounds script that has been released hasn't been added to the SVN version you are upgrading to and I'm well aware you don't like to fiddle with things like that yourselves blah blah blah. It just annoys me that you don't present this as being the main issue (if it is the case) instead of saying the gears/mechanics are broken beyond repair.

The "issue" of it giving a free ride is still rubbish imo. Whether you make it trans only or give it a high level cap, there are ways to force a decent competition. Sure it would require proper testing (this kind of thing cannot be tested efficiently on the test server, imo) and simply removing any rewards during that period takes away the worry of people finding any exploits with it, but the way you have presented your argument against battlegrounds in general seems pretty weak.

In the end it would be possible to mod the script in very minor ways to remove the issues you have mentioned but I have no idea why you refuse to do so. I'd love to know the thought process/arguments that went on behind coming to a decision regarding battlegrounds.

I don't want to get back into the discussion about GM hosted PvP. It doesn't work. That and it once again limits things based on the GM's time table/mood. This is where we get back to the concept of a lot of the updates being focused on new players (I don't really see the GR/angeling card thing a fair comparison because compared to most servers, gaining OCA's on heRO is FAR too easy).

The major changes in RO's end game content (battlegrounds, infinity tower, instances dungeons) are either taken out completely, seemingly without any effort to modify their gameplay mechanics to suit heRO or are modified to the point where they are no longer like their original concept. It would be nice to see some end game content that isn't limited by set starting times/constant GM supervision to be able to run smoothly. BGs, instances, infin tower; they were all designed to fill this criteria yet this is never maintained through modification or even the stage in which you guys decide whether it'll be added or not.

Once again I'd love to hear how you guys come to a decision on whether a concept should be added or not, as well as hearing what the real issues are when you decide not to add content. As far as I'm concerned it's only a real issue if you can't make modifications yourselves to make it work. To say that the items are too overpowered as the main reason not to add battlegrounds doesn't seem like a fair reason to skip the concept entirely. Same applies to the "issues" of randomized groups and "easy wins".

In summary:

- The gears are fine as long as you are willing to remove the ones that ARE ridiculously overpowered, or at the very least, modify them.
- Simple changes to the script whether it be adding tighter level restrictions and/or adding a cooldown timer would remove some of the balance issues you have mentioned.
- Making all these new end game concepts to be purely GM run does not make them fun (and really only makes things harder on yourselves).

If I missed any important points, let me know.

[Zaratus]

I would like to throw a few thoughts some things too.

GR Card first:
First of all this deal will make a GR card to a "kind of" MvP Card. If somebody would be selling a GR card now, it would reach MUCH higher prices than it used to before. Just because it is almost unreachable - IF somebody would sell it. So let's assume that a GR card is almost impossible to get, since I can't remember ANYBODY who got a GR card by killing GR (if somebody did, sure, mention it).

Now let's see how many GR are there and how long the spawn time is (assuming the spawn rates are right and not failing).
4 GRs at 30, 60, 120 and 240 minutes. The 240 minutes is only reachable for guilds with castle, if the 120 minutes teles in Hidden Dungeon you are (maybe) having huge problems fighting them. Assuming enough people would farm them and kill them instantly (for example a sniper who is able to keep it from teleporting), you can kill 4+8+16+32 a day. In theory. So you could kill 60 a day (if the spawn rates are fixed). This value might be a bit high due to searching it and stuff, so let's say if people try REALLY hard they can get like 50 a day. Assuming to your battlegrounds calculation, it would take 40 days that there is a 56 % chance that another GR pops up from farming it (the chance of a GR popping up, not that a special person gets the card). This is a best case scenario based on calculations, in the reality this will be way worse. Even if enough people would camp GR it would probably still take way more than 40 days to kill 2k GRs (any opinion on this? I would suppose more like ... 60-70 days, and then it is still only a 56 % chance that only one of the people farming gets one).
But basically this proved that it is POSSIBLE to get a GR card by farming GR. So why is there a problem in removing the GR from OCA?

The problem I see is that (as Albus mentioned) that there are already too many GR cards floating in this server - basically due to fishing. So maybe the problem isn't that there is a GR card in OCA, it is that OCA is too easy to get on this server. By removing the possibility to get those "easy" GR cards the ones existing increase enormly in value. That doesn't sound fair. It would be like taking Alice Doll out of hatter or something like that. Everybody who already got one is lucky, everybody else ... *shrug* poor guy. It doesn't sound right to make a card which is already VERY present on the server to a MvP card.

Additionally new guilds already have it really hard in WoE (look at NE, Revenga) and this changement will make it even harder for all guilds who don't already have one or several GR cards.

This changement definately comes too late, the damage is already done (by fishing). Though I do understand that it can't be a solution to keep flooding the server with GR cards. So what to do?

In my opinion the problem is more the fishing itself which produces too many OCAs additionally to almost free pots and money by loots than the GR card out of OCAs. So why not changing the fishing system to reduce the OCA droprate *enormly* and keeping GR and angeling in OCAs? I know that many players might kill me for that but honestly I prefer having still a chance on epic cards on few OCAs. The server is flooded with OCAs due to fishing anyways, a thing that should be changed in my opinion. And if it is right that if mining gets nerfed in the next SvN, why shouldn't fishing get a nerf like that mentioned here too?

Another idea would *maybe* be to reduce the spawnrates of GR or/and increase their number so it can be killed more often.

I was mostly referring to GR card here, but same applies for angeling card, though this isn't as "gamebreaking" as GR.

Battleground:
Just an understanding problem. If I understand it wrong, BG isn't implemented since it would be too easy to get the "overpowered" items by setting up fights due to not enough people online? So the "PvM"-weapons are on the one hand WEAKER and on the other hand HARDER to get than battleground? I must admit that this sounds stupid for a small server.

Edit: I haven't looked into the battleground items yet but if it possible to reduce the flood of those items as Nidsrule suggested I wouldn't mind it I think XD Though it would be nice if somebody had a good link to the battleground stuff and system so I would be able to inform myself.

[Darkblade]

the more sound solution would be to do the following:

create a new item "waterlogged card album"
remove the high-end cards from its drop list
replace the OCA dropped in fishing with this new album

*edit*
forgot to add the "remove the high end cards" part

[Zaratus]

That would be a good idea too.