Tweaking experience attenuation in Shroud of the Avatar with the aim of removing forced breaks

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Mimner, Jun 6, 2019.

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  1. Mimner

    Mimner Avatar

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    @Chris

    Greetings Avatars,

    I have compiled a study on attenuation with the goal of removing the forced breaks from the system while leaving the spirit of attenuation intact in the process. Here is the abstract to my paper:

    It is well understood that under the current implementation of attenuation in Shroud of the Avatar a high level player can take strategically timed breaks and earn the same amount of experience as a similar player who is leveling continuously. This is due to the extremely fast way the system attenuates experience once a player earns one million experience points within the last hour of play. This slow down of experience gain feels to the user as if the game is forcing them to take a break before progressing further. In this work I recommend a simple tweak to the attenuation system which fixes this issue, but leaves the idea of attenuation intact.

    A link to the final report, as well as a video of the stream I did while researching these results, can be found on my web site: https://sotacalc.com/pages/sota_experience_attenuation.php

    It is my hope that this work contributes in some meaningful way to improving the experience of playing Shroud of the Avatar for high level players.
     
  2. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    After following your link where you explain in "infinite detail" your very scientific study.... well done, @Mimner - I feel compelled to say the following...
    Your video explaining it all is 3 hrs and 45 mins long, and there just ain't no way most of us can handle that.
    Any chance you could do a paragraph and just cut to the chase ?
     
  3. Mimner

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    Thanks for the feedback. The paper and stream were directed toward a technical audience. I will attempt to distill the ideas down.

    The current attenuation system acts very much like a hard cap, with the cap being a little more then a million (~1.3 million). This is great for constraining the gap between hard core and casual players. However, for high level players it means you can earn your hourly experience very quickly, and then can't continue to progress for the remainder of the hour. Pushing yourself to get better at this point doesn't net you any more experience. It just means you can get your hourly allotment faster, which means you have to wait even longer to start gaining exp again. This waiting time feels a lot like the game is forcing you to take a break.

    Wouldn't it be great if the system still attenuated exp, but did so more gradually so that even at high levels you could keep pushing harder and never hit a wall beyond which you couldn't progress? This would keep casual players happy because someone killing twice as fast as you would be earning less than twice the experience, keeping the gap between hard core and casual players from exploding. It would also make hard core players happy because you can always push yourself to do better, and the better you do the more experience you gain. Its a lot like having your cake and eating it too.

    Thankfully such a system is possible. My paper explores the math behind attenuation and makes some suggestions on how we could get there.
     
  4. Spungwa

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    Have not watched the stream, but my understanding of why attenuation exists is not to limit high level players advancing and forcing breaks.

    Attenuation was to allow the developers to make interesting and fast spawning lower level scenes without having to worry about high level players solo steam rolling it for 10s of millions of xp per hour.

    Most games do this by stopping you getting XP from mobs too low or too high for your level. I prefer the attenuation solution because it allows low and high level players to group without there being a penalty to one or the other.

    I personally think attenuation was one of the best global solutions added to the game. Tier 2 - 4 scenes used (some still do if they haven't been revisited) to have very low mob density and slow respawn time until attenuation. This made the new/low level scenes more boring, not good for the game.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  5. Vladamir Begemot

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    I don't understand the math, but the graph looks better when it doesn't flatten out like that. Great, over my head job.
     
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  6. Gravidy

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    This is a terrific proposal, that improves upon the attenuation system, without changing its fundamental intent.

    The "attenuation flag" on the skill window is unlike most things in the design of the game. The beauty of this game's design is that it is a mix of subtle trade-offs, without having hard constraints and limits. Attenuation is seen as a hard constraint (even if it isn't one). A change in the math that would make that constraint much more subtle would improve the attenuation system a great deal.

    @Mimner has done a great job here outlining the difference between the current and proposed systems. This proposed change is well worth consideration.

    Agreed, and Mimner's suggested change would improve on that idea *a lot*.
     
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  7. Mimner

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    @Spungwa I agree with almost everything you say here.

    I remember before attenuation groups were nearly non-existent because this was by far the most efficient way to earn experience. Attenuation solved this issue beautifully, and I would never endorse a return to the days without it.

    True, the current attenuation system encourages high levels mixing with low levels. However, it does so by basically putting a hard cap on how much experience a high level player can earn, so you might as well bring a few newbies along because you're going to get the same experience anyway. So I disagree when you say there is no penalty to the high level players. I feel like this hard cap is the game forcing me to stop progressing. A softer cap like what I suggest will still encourage a mix of higher level and lower level players, because you'll still be able to earn very significant amounts of experience with such a configuration. It will also allow high level players to band together and try to push their limits, there by squeezing out a little bit more experience than they could otherwise. The need for many very high level players to work together is currently lacking in my opinion, and the soft cap is one way to encourage it.
     
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  8. Spungwa

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    As I said, not against your idea, didn't have time to watch it. Just wanted to ensure you considered the other reasons attenuation existed. Sounds like you did.

    Though I disagree with this. From an XP perspective yes, as no need to go to the hardest places to attenuate. But have you tried Owl's Head Sewers. This is challenging even with a full group of high level players. As is the control point with the skeletons (can't remember the name).

    Regards
    Spung
     
  9. Crendel

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    I like attenuation. Our guild will grab 1mil then go hunting dragons or whatever. Even if we dont get a head we got 1 mil.

    The issue with attenuation is raids/dungeon. What I mean is if there is a huge dungeon that takes 3 hours to complete most won't do it more than once unless thefe is spectacular loot.

    And being a tech guy...i don't care how good your doc is, 3.5 hours is not something I would watch unless your executive brief was phenomenal
     
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  10. Kyri

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    @Crendel

    I'm a tech guy too - you didn't understand the proposal. Mimner is proposing a CHANGE to attenuation, not removing it. Hopefully this summary will be of help:

    Current State Attenuation = effective xp gain hard-stop at 1.3 million every hour
    Cons:
    extremely meta mechanic that dictates play style
    attenuation icon = you are now wasting your time killing mobs
    disadvantage to dungeon crawl

    Proposed Attenuation = diminishing xp gain over time
    Pros:
    organic, you can take breaks whenever you want
    xp in zones you want to explore with friends or think are fun instead of lazily wave camping UT all day in pugs; i.e. you could tackle the 3 hour dungeon you mentioned and it wouldn't be a waste even if you didn't get spectacular loot
    hard-cores are still reigned back from out leveling everyone; as an aside the game already does a great job of this with exponential xp skill cost and linear gains
     
  11. Crendel

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    @Kyri thank you, that explains it very well. But diminishing is pretty much the same as attenuation because there is a point where it is the same as 1.3 per hour, for example if you diminish a kill to 10% of xp after xxx hours then that is pretty much the same as current, just extending the 1.3 to one hour to what, 5 in 3 hours?

    I do agree to move attenuation to more than 1 hour if there is ever deep dungeons that take multi hours, but my solution would be to remove attenuation in those places soas to meet the goal
     
  12. Arkah EMPstrike

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    Power creep is a thing where over time, a game adds harder and harder content to keep the top end progressing and challenged. Attenuation is in place to allow some good challenging content without accelerating power too quickly. Sure the skills progress at a slower and slower rate the higher they are, but it totally caps at 200 (no more progression), and some top end people consider lvl 140 a staple already.
     
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  13. Cora Cuz'avich

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    In a recent stream, Atos was talking about removing or raising the attenuation cap in some areas in Episode 2, and potentially testing this by removing it some areas of episode 1.
     
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  14. Sentinel2

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    So something like the closer we get to attenuation the less XP we gain. Kinda like trying to level skills in the game. The closer we get to level 200 in a skill, the more XP we need to pour into said skill.

    That could work. I wonder what @Chris thinks. Or did I miss that conversation in a live stream again?

    Unfortunately, there are only so many hours I can watch livestreams to find that single nugget of information (which should be documented in a standup commentary to begin with ::grinz:: )
     
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  15. Fenrus MacRath

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    Any chance you would like to run down to Vegas real quick?
     
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  16. Mimner

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    What Vladamir said here really gets to the heart of the proposal. The image he refers to is:
    [​IMG]

    This is the total experience someone would gain over time if they were killing mobs at a rate of five times what it would take to just barely attenuate in an hour. In other words, we're grinding extremely hard here. You can see how the current attenuation results in this stair stepping effect, where you gain tons of exp over a very short time period, followed by long periods of very little exp gain. Over time these stair steps wash out and transition to a nice smooth line of constant exp gain, but in this case it takes 36 hours or so before you reach this equilibrium situation. I don't know about you but I don't grind for a day and a half straight.

    The suggested implementation introduces the attenuation much more gradually. As a result you earn more exp than currently, yay! However, that's not the point. The point is that you very quickly transition to a nice straight line of constant exp gain, albeit one that is much less sloped than the line that represents unattenuated experience gain. As a result you'll never experience these very long periods of time where you're barely gaining any experience. If you watched your pool very closely under the suggested implementation you'll notice the exp gain slows down over the first hour, but it will never come to a nearly complete stop like it does now. It will also very quickly settle down to a constant rate of gain.

    So no more forced breaks, but attenuation is still very much in effect. For example, the person burning mobs five times faster than the person who just barely attenuates earns 2 million per hour on average, as opposed to the 5 million per hour they would earn with no attenuation. In other words, you have to kill five times faster to get two times the experience.

    @Chris

    I watched your Monday stream where you spoke of attenuation as basically a band aid and that you will be turning it off for some new scenes which are so well designed that they negate the need for attenuation. I say Bravo! I can't wait to rock out in those scenes. You also said that in the mean time attenuation will remain in place, and may always be there for some current scenes.

    My proposal would require very little developer effort. I've recommended:

    (1) changing the formula for calculating attenuation,

    (2) scaling the base exp for all mobs in the game by a factor of 1.5

    (1) should just require changing a few lines of code, and the technology for (2) must already be in the game because you all used to turn on double experience quite a bit around launch. Please consider this modest change to attenuation, at least to the point where we can go on QA and test it out.
     
  17. eli

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    Each zone should attenuate globally based upon those farming it the fastest.

    Then, getting better than average at a specific scene would be an advantage, the game's diverse content will be able to replace UT, etc.

    Have scene attenuation also drop slowly over time based on avg population, and finding different content becomes rewarded rather than punished as it is now.
     
  18. Dhanas

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    I would prefer a daily xp cap: how it is now, hardcore grinders will outlevel casuals anyway ( this will happens in any case and you can't stop It), because if a casuals has just 2 h for playing daily He can't get more than 2.6kk xp daily while an hardcore player, which can play maybe 8h daily can get 10.4 milion daily. Adding a daily cap instead allow casuals to optimize their game time and gain as much xp as they can in the couple of hours they can play, while hardcore players will be stopped the same at certain point if they go so far gaining xp.
    Another advantage of this system is that ppl can manage their game time how they prefer without Being forced to have stupid breaks when the game decides to, so they can dedicate the time left to other activities.
    Another Thing i would like to see is removing attenuation in pvp zones, since you are going to risk there and there is a chance that other ppl interrupt you to grinding cause they attack/kill you.
     
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  19. Crendel

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    If the loot is not amazingly better. In his new scenes then why would I continually go into a scene that won't let me reach 1 mil in less than an hour? Not a fan of turning atten off if the zone is so fine tuned I will only get 1 mil an hour at a hard grind for substandard loot whilst I can go to the Rise, Tarturus or many of the other 10+ zones, get 1 mil in 35 min and better loot..
     
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  20. Barugon

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    I think they should just go back to limiting spawns so that it's simply impossible to get more than a million experience per hour.
     
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