PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps
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I have 422 levels right now, I'm not going to be writing individual code for 40+ power creeps
Honestly, I actually think you will be. Not at the start, but your pursuit of perfect optimization will inevitably lead you to the point when your every single PC has slightly modified skills tree and thus slightly modified aspects of behavior, thus effectively becoming unique "characters", unlike regular creeps which all have identical bodies. Otherwise you won't be able to achieve the desired level of optimization, identical builds of PCs won't work as good as highly optimized for given circumstances (rooms, defense/offense balance, neighbors, world location, new secret trade mechanic that will be announced soon).
This process is a bit skewed for you because you already have so many levels without actually going through the natural process of growing new power creeps. But an average player who builds new PCs as he levels up will most likely have unique PCs, not a bunch of identical role-based templates.
Permanent loss in a game like this is ridiculous.
Well, you permanently lose almost everything when you respawn.
I have a question for you: have you ever played a persistent world online game with skills/tech trees where you are allowed to reset without cost (i.e. without some permanent loss of resources like gold, credits, skills points, etc)?
Grace periods won't work, what if someone has to be afk for some period of time?
This is a valid concern. We should probably consider some "free reset coupons" instead of "free reset periods".
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If you want there to be a strong penalty for adjusting power creeps, what about a really long cooldown instead of a permanent loss of power level. Let's say you want to delete a level 15 power creep, how about locking you out of 15 levels for a month. That way, you can change your power creep without permanent loss, but you will have a month of operating inefficiently with fewer power creeps. So there will be a strong reason not to change, but if you do really need to change you can.
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@wtfrank But what if I want to reroll all my power creeps? Or if I have just one power creep?
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@artch You want to reroll all of them? then be locked out of all your power levels for a month.
Lets say I am GPL 100, and I have 3 level 20 power creeps. This means I have 40 "spare power levels". Lets say I delete one of them, then I still have 40 spare power levels but only 2 power creeps. Lets say I then create a level 5 power creep. I now have 35 spare power levels. After one month I get the 20 back, putting me onto 55 spare power levels.
For simplicity the rule could be "power levels are returned when one month has gone by since the most recent power creep was deleted". So if multiple power creeps were deleted at different times, you wouldn't have to have differing level return times and all the complication around tracking that.
So this changes the permanent penalty of a loss of power level, into a temporary penalty that is more severe for the period of the penalty, but in the long run less severe as you don't permanently lose those power levels.
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@wtfrank Forcing a player to wait for a month without access to some game feature is unacceptable. Some players may just quit during this wait. Especially if this is the first player's power creep.
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Lock out of only half the power levels you deleted then?
Or have one level "recharge" every 48 hours?
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I reckon the level drop penalty is a very elegant solution. It's functionally similar to proposals for hard timer lockouts but leaves player interaction as part of the system while scaling the penalty with the player's ability to mitigate it.
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@faff said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
I reckon the level drop penalty is a very elegant solution. It's functionally similar to proposals for hard timer lockouts but leaves player interaction as part of the system while scaling the penalty with the player's ability to mitigate it.
It's not a level drop, it's a malus to your real level. That means the scale of loss gets greater the more creeps you delete and there is nothing you can ever do to fix it. It's bad design and antithesis to fun or strategy.
@artch said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
Honestly, I actually think you will be. Not at the start, but your pursuit of perfect optimization will inevitably lead you to the point when your every single PC has slightly modified skills tree and thus slightly modified aspects of behavior, thus effectively becoming unique "characters", unlike regular creeps which all have identical bodies. Otherwise you won't be able to achieve the desired level of optimization, identical builds of PCs won't work as good as highly optimized for given circumstances (rooms, defense/offense balance, neighbors, world location, new secret trade mechanic that will be announced soon).
Can't get to that point if deleting them costs me a usable level. I will absolutely never delete a single one and thus won't ever develop such optimizations.
Permanent loss in a game like this is ridiculous.
Well, you permanently lose almost everything when you respawn.
I have a question for you: have you ever played a persistent world online game with skills/tech trees where you are allowed to reset without cost (i.e. without some permanent loss of resources like gold, credits, skills points, etc)?
I remember the fact you keep your GCL and code being a big deal. You never lose everything when you restart, and levels are supposed to be one of those things.
Sure, some RPGs have costs for reskilling. NEVER are they the levels you're trying to reskill, and they're typically pretty cheap, in the realm of some credits or a special item you can find.
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PowerCreeps aren't showing up under Room.find FIND_CREEPS or the more specific versions.
The PTR API Reference is out of date too, in particular with some constants usage and stating power creeps have indefinite lifespans.
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I assumed PowerCreeps would have new
FIND_andLOOK_constants. I couldn't find any documentation on what those constants do, it just implied by their name.
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@artch, i fully agree with @Hernanduer when he said "Permanent loss in a game like this is ridiculous," when specifically referring to losing a power level. And to answer you, the games that I've seen that let you respecialize a character do have a cost, but the cost is never a skill point itself... Looks at Mind Wipe Tonic in Ark for an example in a "persistent online game" and Token of Absolution in Diablo II in general... Both of those were wildly successful games and they did have a cost to respec, but neither cost skill points themselves. To draw a parallel, you should make deleting a power creep cost a boatload of Ghodium or any T3 boost. We're not saying a respec shouldnt have a cost, we're saying the cost shouldn't be a power level...
Edit: another comparison: losing a GPL for deleting a power creep would be the equivalent of downgrading someone's GCL for respawning... Both are a horrible idea, and would upset players.
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I don't think the level loss is really that severe a departure from existing systems in the game, but maybe people would be happier with some sort of power Debt system where your level up rate is instead slowed (halved seems to be popular in many games) while you pay off the debt?
Then, rather than losing a level you already gained, your progress to the next one is just temporarily more expensive. The debt could dwindle automatically over a longer period of time, and it would still accomplish the same sort of scaling penalty.
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@hernanduer said in PTR Changelog 2019-02-01: Power Creeps:
It's not a level drop, it's a malus to your real level. That means the scale of loss gets greater the more creeps you delete and there is nothing you can ever do to fix it. It's bad design and antithesis to fun or strategy.
Are you sure you understand this mechanic correctly? It's an actual level drop. When you delete a creep, your real level decreases, the actual number decrements by 1 (as well as the internal counter of total processed power in the account, but it's invisible now). Thus the delete cost decreases too. I can't seem to get your point here.
To draw a parallel, you should make deleting a power creep cost a boatload of Ghodium or any T3 boost.
Physical resources can't be used for that purpose. A player may not be even spawned in the world, but wants to tinker a bit with Power Creeps in his account. We can only use account resources - currently it's GCL, GPL, credits, and tokens. We might use credits, but it doesn't feel natural, credits is another game aspect. And credits can be converted to power very easily, since, I repeat, power will be sold by NPC terminals starting from this release.
And most physical resources are liquid enough too, so I suppose, your point here is that the cost is just too high. What % of a level would you think would be more appropriate? Or some absolute value, without scaling with levels?
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An internal counter separate from the total power processed counter clarifies a lot. We've been assuming GPL was derived directly from total power collected. That's not nearly as bad as it sounded like before.
It's still kinda crazy to think about how much Power Hernanduer would loose if he resets a creep. A single reset for Hernanduer might cost as much as all of the power I've collected so far.
It might be more fair to have the cost of reset scale based on the level of the power creep instead of the GPL of the player.
On another note:
I just noticed the widget to edit PowerCreep names. It may have been there before and I missed it, either way thanks, it worked great.
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We've been assuming GPL was derived directly from total power collected.
That's correct. The internal counter is the total power processed. It's internal because only GPL is exposed to the UI/API, not the raw power processed.
It's still kinda crazy to think about how much Power Hernanduer would loose if he resets a creep. A single reset for Hernanduer might cost as much as all of the power I've collected so far.
But imagine how much power he can process every tick, considering that he will have 40+ Power Creeps working in his economy.
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Edit: another comparison: losing a GPL for deleting a power creep would be the equivalent of downgrading someone's GCL for respawning... Both are a horrible idea, and would upset players.
I don't think this is a valid comparison. When you respawn, you lose everything in the world. You lose time spent to build your previous empire, and now need to rebuild it from scratch. Frequent respawning is discouraged so greatly already, that there is no need to add some additional penalty to it.
On the other hand, if there was no delete cost (or it's too low), rebuilding Power Creeps would be painless. One could do that all the time. Think of it as if someone respawns constantly keeping all his world assets. Not fun.
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I keep wanting to weigh in here and say that I really don't like the penalty, but then I see the reasoning behind it. However, we need to make sure the cost is reasonable and scales appropriately.
There has been some confusion about the cost, since higher power levels cost more. The main thing is that if I reach level 10, then reset, it should cost the same to get back to level 10 as it did the first time. Resetting just effectively moves you back in time.
Some of us were worried that it was instead calculated like
powerLevel = getPowerLevel(powerProcessed) - numberOfResets, which would be really, really bad. That would mean every reset effectively increases the cost of all future levels - I think we can all agree that this would be madness. @artch seems to have confirmed that this will not be the case, although this perhaps needs stating a bit more clearly.HOWEVER
So far I've been assuming that resetting deletes all power creeps. I'm very surprised to see it only affects one. That seems very wrong to me, especially since you can choose to have lots of low level power creeps or one big one. If I'm at level 10 and I choose to have 10 power creeps at level 1, it should not cost me all 10 levels to reset them all!
Similarly, If I'm at level 50 and I create a level 1 power creep and then decide to reset it, I should not be reduced all the way back to level 49.
As @deft-code suggested, surely the cost should be based on the level of the power creep being reset?
This is why the higher-level players feel that this is unfair - because it is! @artch is right that higher-level players are in an unnatural situation, which is true. But they're forced into this situation. Let them make the unnatural situation natural by allowing them to "hold back" on their levels and develop their power creeps gradually, as if they were starting from a low-level.
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Some of us were worried that it was instead calculated like
powerLevel = getPowerLevel(powerProcessed) - numberOfResets, which would be really, really bad.I have no idea where this comes from. Some rumors in Slack probably. The wording is quite clear:
When you permanently delete a power creep (either from the UI or the API) you will lose 1 Power Level in your account, i.e. your processed power decreases.
You lose it for real. You were GPL 45, you delete a creep, now you're GPL 44. Fully identically to the situation when you were GPL 44 some time ago. No hidden variables.
As @deft-code suggested, surely the cost should be based on the level of the power creep being reset?
We might consider something like 4% of a Global Power Level for every level of the creep being deleted. But honestly, encouraging to have a few bigger PCs rather than a bunch of smaller ones is a good thing too.
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Update
New feature deployed: experimentation periods. An experimentation period can be activated for 24 hours, during which power creeps are deleted without cost and without delay. Each player has 30 experimentation periods initially, and we will replenish them from time to time when major balance changes occur.
@artch +1 on the experimental period, great way of handling it as long as spawning the power creep doesn't take longer than the day. If you had to delete all the PC's with one day, then test them out the next day and find out they didn't work so had to use another day it wouldn't be ideal.
Random thought: If you want to start working on goal oriented progress and more onboarding to the game, you could reward all players who reach(ed) 5 GCL with 5 free power levels. That would give players a way of messing around with power creeps and not feeling super locked out. Plays into the "hero" idea where they can get one hero creep, and understand that if they work for it they'll be able to level them up. It's harder to see the value if they don't have a taste of it, and concrete goals are great for player retention.
It's a shift from just a "raw world" type progression, but it's a thought.
