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| Hitting 5000 - How will they hold you for Reach? | |
| Posted By: FyreWulff <mkidder@gmail.com> | Date: 12/29/09 7:58 a.m. |
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So, hooray. I've finally hit the 5000 exp mark for Halo 3, at which point I swore to my clan I would retire off of Halo 3, but it's more like I'm just going to take an extended break from the game. Maybe I should rename my tag to FavreWulff Rex. Anyway, I'm using this as an easy excuse to start a topic on what people would like to see, or expect for Reach's experience system, and/or perhaps discuss what they didn't like with Halo 3's. I think I'll go over the Halo 3 system critiques and problems and then go over the possible Reach solutions. EXP matters less and less the more you have. When I first started playing Halo 3, quitting or being booted from a game really hurt. That run from 1-100 felt like forever. Going from 100-600 for Staff Captain felt like an eternity. Then somewhere between there and 5000, it didn't hurt as much or care as much to get dropped or booted. I mean at this point, at 5000, dropping or quitting from a game makes me lose an entire 0.02% of my EXP. So while at first it's a good deterrent to keep people from just dropping from games, the longer a person plays, the less effective it is. Plus side: Compared to Halo 2, it has done a much better job of preventing playlist bleeding. For any of you that played Halo 2 BTB, you know that it was a quitfest. Even if my team was WINNING, people would start quitting about five minutes into the game. 2 years later, it hasn't become an epidemic in Halo 3 yet. What they could do for Reach: I'm not really sure at this point. I can go over some ideas that have been posted already on Bungie.net, PA, GAF, and here.. Banning people temporarily for quitting: I've seen this one come up a few times. I don't think it would work or be fair though. I shouldn't be banned from matchmaking for my router being flaky. And the response to it would be people going AFK until the game ends, which would be even worse than the current situation. Surrender option: This one I like. The basic idea is your team can surrender/forfeit the game, without anyone having to quit (and having to go through the annoying process of the game finding another host). This would have to have no penalty, and could be controlled by only letting a team do it after certain criteria (score spread, etc). Quitting loses a % of EXP: I think some other games do this. The gist of this would be that at first, you'd barely lose EXP, but the longer you played, the bigger the penalty would be. At my current EXP, a 1% penalty would mean losing 50EXP under Halo 3's system. Would losing 50 games worth of wins in Halo 3 deter you from betraying or quitting? I know it would, but losing 50 games would be pretty drastic. My idea: quitting drops your EXP gain: I'll cover this more in the latter parts of the post. In my theoretical Reach, EXP doesn't come solely from winning or getting ties and is in more than one point chunks. In the overall system, you'd lose your EXP "multiplier" if you quit. Say you could earn 100 EXP for a win, because you haven't quit at all for 10 games. Quitting would drop you back to a cap of 10-15 exp. This makes quitting still hurt at any time, but also prevents people from deranking. Note that these numbers are just an example to show how much the cap would drop. Ranks and Trueskill are too closely tied together This is a problem. Partly due to the Halo community and gamers in general. Partly because of Bungie's design. I mean, we've all seen it. People are (I don't even know why) afraid of "getting gold bars". I personally think the gold barred ranks are more awesome than General, because Force Colonel sounds cooler. Anyway, people think that if you 'gold bar' you suck, because you can't raise a level. Despite the fact that all the general ranks have golden accents and that 5 Star General is the same thing. There's also the fact that you stop 'advancing' if you don't keep trying to raise your Trueskill levels. This subverts the original point of Trueskill (to get you into good games) and makes people treat it like an RPG level that has to be grinded. Of course, it doesn't act like an RPG level at all, so people get pissed off that they can't just grind it out. Halo 2's system isn't the answer, either. For the first fact, it's based off ELO, and basic ELO is terribly broken. Two, having ranks nobody can get doesn't make those high ranks special, it just compresses the rank spread and results in more hardcore players playing more casual players. Bungie fixed most of the 'not getting anything for playing anymore' by adding playlist ranks. Playlist ranks were a Good Move(tm) to keep giving people feedback for playing. It doesn't matter if your Trueskill has topped out, you can still get new ranks by playing your favorite playlists, and can get all the way up to a Playlist 5 Star General but still be a global Staff Captain. For non-hardcore players, a 5 Star Playlist General won't happen due to the time investment, so basically the ranking up is endless now, even if they only play one playlist. So now that I've hit 5000exp, the only way to keep gaining ranks under the old system is to get a 45 and a 50, and once I would get a 50 I'd have "topped out". However with playlist ranks, this doesn't happen. This means I don't have to go through the pointless torture of getting a 50 by rolling the dice and seeing how many times I have to play standbyers or bot flooders (it's the reason I had stop playing SWAT even though I love the gametype) What they could do for Reach: Completely unhook Trueskill from EXP. In fact, hopefully for Reach they just stop showing TS completely and go with an entirely EXP based ranking system. This would seem to better serve what I though the original purpose of the military ranks in Halo 3 were meant for: to show how familiar and long a person was playing the game, not really how good they are. Second accounting ensures it can't be used as a measure of how good someone is. This fixes numerous problems. First, the issue that people boost/grind to a 50 in a playlist and never play it again, even though it's impossible to ever "lose" your 50 (You'll be a 50 forever in your service record). This results in the population dropping out at the top end of a playlist because they don't want to "risk their 50" anymore. Secondly, the issue that people think they can actually lose their General rank. As said before, you are permanently a 50 in your service record once you hit it in any playlist. It doesn't matter if you have the worst losing streak in Lone Wolves and drop to a 35, you'll still show as a 50. An only-EXP system (much like CoD or Gears) removes loss anxiety completely, because the only way to go is up. The better players will still go up faster though. Bungie's Response: It's already been stated by Shishka that their future projects would unhook Trueskill and EXP, so they may have already decided to completely disassociate them with each other for Reach. The games of Halo 3 matchmaking are too long.
I don't know why Bungie decided to make the games so long for Halo 3. I thought the 12 minute time limit for everything in Halo 2 was perfect for "long enough to have fun, but not too long to make it boring". Combine that with the fact that you only get 1 exp for winning and you still get EXP for getting a tie... and you have a lot of pointless 20 minute slayer games in Neutral Bomb. Add to that the raising of Team Snipers from 25 to 50. I hated Team Snipers in Halo 2 because it took so long. Team Snipers to 25 in Halo 3 was just right - long enough to felt like you played a game, but over before it got boring / turned into hide and go seek. Now that it's up to 50, once one team gets to about 35 points they just start turtling and the game drags out into eternity. And it's a proven fact that the longer a game is, the chance of quitting out goes up. This is why I'm glad there's no matchmaking in ODST, since Firefight games can easily go into hours the quitting would be rampant. The shorter the game is, the more likely people are going to stay in it and play until the next one, instead of quitting out so they can get into another one faster. What they could do for Reach: Since under a hidden TS EXP-only system, Ranked would need to be different. The solution here would be to keep all the long games in Ranked and have shorter time/score limits for Social. Keep the epic length games to the hardcore side and LANs, kthnx. This would make Big Team playlists a lot more friendly, too. At the current rate, most BTB games can be 20 minutes a piece, which results in an entire 3 exp for an hour of play. No wonder Team Slayer and Social Slayer are the most popular, most of those games seem to last about 4-5 minutes, which is about 12 EXP for the same amount of time investment, ignoring the fact that they are Slayer for a moment. Which one of those two playlists do you think people would rather play even if they were both 100% slayer? For the time investment for each EXP point, it seems to be a very low reward I haven't actually brought this one up myself, but was pointed out to me by friends and my brothers. They like CoD's system because you get points for participating. Now, we know why CoD gives you bonuses everywhere: because every single game can be joined in progress. This means that you have to be rewarded for doing everything because you could be dumped into a team 30 seconds away from losing. Gears goes about it by having a theoretical max amount of EXP you can get from each game for your performance. What they could do for Reach: Take the best of each system, and add some unique Halo twists to it. Have a cap per game of possible points, like Gears. But show points bonuses during the game like CoD. Example: Each assist gives you one point. For every X amount of assists a team has, they get an extra EXP point. Capping a flag gives an extra EXP point for everyone on the team (win or lose) and a bonus one for the flag capper, and an extra bonus if you never die/drop the flag between grabbing and capturing it. Weapon sprees would be another EXP point. I could go on with ideas but that's for another post. At the end of the game, there would be a EXP earned by the team, say 100 for easy math. the 100 was gotten through 2 awesome flag caps, some good assists, and one of your guys getting a Killtacular, amongst other things. If you haven't quit out, you get the entire 100. If you've quit recently, you only get 30 of that EXP to reflect the earlier idea of quit cap penalties. Of course there would also be a exp multiplier for how fast the game was. This would deter flag/bomb holding. Think of it like Halo 3's campaign metascores: you can earn points, but the longer you take, they start to lose multiplier. Well, I'm going to stop here since I don't want to make this post too long, but I'd like to hear people's criticisms of Halo's (or even Gears/CoD) EXP system, and what would hold your interest and keep you playing. Would you want armor variants earned via EXP? Emblems? Would you want something similiar to CoD's challenges, where you get armor/emblems/what have you for completing certain tasks in Campaign and Multiplayer? Or do you just want it to be there as an indicator of how familiar someone is with the game? Also ignore for the moment the problems of boosting/second accounting, because those have to be solved with different tools.
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