Season #2
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@artch Although you've created the Seasonal world as a competition, I believe it has the potential to be so much more. It's an excellent sandbox to test out new and innovative things, and give you full liberty to try some really creative explorations outside of the realm of regular screeps gameplay.
As far as new player goals are concerned, I think seasonal is a wonderful format to get people started in a friendlier and safer environment without totally messing up the core gameplay of regular screeps.
Alternatively, you could potentially create an entirely separate fully co-op MMO world, but this is a significantly larger undertaking.
@artch said in Season #2 concept:
We have to only stick to ideas that imply that only a few people get significant reward.
As far as paying for season in general, I'd caution leaning too heavily towards the feast-or-famine reward model, as it strongly disincentivizes participation from all those but the most elite, which isn't good for the long term health of the game.
For a global co-op season, I think you might be underestimating the willingness to pay for access keys to a fun and interesting coding challenge as its own intrinsic reward, again, particularly among new players. Doing a marketing push on coding school platforms could potentially do really well.
I'd also suggest that limited edition cosmetics are always an enticing reward. Giving limited rewards as CPU tokens could additionally go a really long way towards converting non-paying players into lifetime subscribers. $10 in access keys as an entry fee, $3.50 in CPU tokens as a reward, plus a limited edition non-transferrable cosmetic. Choosing to scale the reward up or down based on time to goal completion is entirely optional, but a fun incentive to put up for players.
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@artch If you keep the score separately for each type, you could sort them by value DESC. Each index would increase the multiplier to reward having score equally in as much as types possible.
Example: Player AggressiveNoobSlayer wipes everyone and gets 1k score op type A. His score is 1000.
Player FriendlyNeighbour works together and gets 500 A, 250 B, 150 C and 100 D : 500 * 1 + 250 * 2 + 150 * 3 + 4 * 100 = 1850.
Those are extreme examples of the multipliers but make it easy to explain. Also: Have you considered sharing the score between the room owner and player that turns it in? This would prevent an alliance boosting a single player which is the biggest concern with enforcing team play IMO.
This would force me from wiping everyone around me with the proposed rules to actually work together. Please don't forget about the players which actually want to see FFA gameplay, maybe alternating the seasons with FFA and teams?
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@bogden said in Season #2 concept:
As far as new player goals are concerned, I think seasonal is a wonderful format to get people started in a friendlier and safer environment without totally messing up the core gameplay of regular screeps.
I think this is an interesting point. I think the opposite: seasonal should be a competetive environment compared to the tame MMO experience that most people have. MMO is friendly and safe. Seasonal should be more competetive.
The challenge is to have it competative at the high end and at the low end. I think season 1 struggled there. It's not yet clear to me whether the rules proposed will change this: eg. a strong player has little incentive to keep a weak player with a score type the strong player (or a strong players' alliance) already owns alive. The rules heavily favour pre-season organisation, which I think leaves a lot of weak or new players behind.
I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.
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@tigga said in Season #2 concept:
I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.
For non-uniform world, my issue is that it leaves bigger parts of it less-usable and discourages respawning into 'worse' zones. Weaker players are not much affected by that since they don't have codebase with features that would get impacted by that. For 'medicore' players that starts to be a bigger impact.
So from good player perspective 'Center' makes sense, for weak-player there's no difference, for medicore one it's either center/close to center and then respawn into worse area after wipe, or just start in worse area and have a boring/limited play
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@gadjung said in Season #2 concept:
@tigga said in Season #2 concept:
I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.
For non-uniform world, my issue is that it leaves bigger parts of it less-usable and discourages respawning into 'worse' zones. Weaker players are not much affected by that since they don't have codebase with features that would get impacted by that. For 'medicore' players that starts to be a bigger impact.
So from good player perspective 'Center' makes sense, for weak-player there's no difference, for medicore one it's either center/close to center and then respawn into worse area after wipe, or just start in worse area and have a boring/limited play
Why would it be boring/limited? You'd still be competing against others in your neighbourhood and it would be more fair competition and more likely to be fruitful as you're likely competing for similar scoreboard positions.
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@qzarstb said in Season #2 concept:
If you keep the score separately for each type, you could sort them by value DESC. Each index would increase the multiplier to reward having score equally in as much as types possible. Example: Player AggressiveNoobSlayer wipes everyone and gets 1k score op type A. His score is 1000. Player FriendlyNeighbour works together and gets 500 A, 250 B, 150 C and 100 D : 500 * 1 + 250 * 2 + 150 * 3 + 4 * 100 = 1850.
So this is only the final result, but how do we display the ranking during the season? We somehow should display score for every symbol then.
Have you considered sharing the score between the room owner and player that turns it in? This would prevent an alliance boosting a single player which is the biggest concern with enforcing team play IMO.
How exactly would it prevent that?
Please don't forget about the players which actually want to see FFA gameplay, maybe alternating the seasons with FFA and teams?
Absolutely. We have just started to experiment with different ideas, and future seasons will introduce more such experiments. For example, we might want to try some global co-op mechanic in Season #3.
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@artch Chronicle would still show total score (but perhaps periodically cached values in stead of real-time). The type-specific amounts could be shown when you select the deposit structure.
Sharing score with room owner/depositor does not fully prevent in-alliance boosting but it would at least be limited. The "boosted" player would only get half the score from everything he deposits in rooms owned by his alliance mates. This would also result in the small players getting score on the board if an aggressive neighbour forces them to give their score (like what smaykit and I have this season).
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@qzarstb said in Season #2 concept:
@artch Chronicle would still show total score (but perhaps periodically cached values in stead of real-time). The type-specific amounts could be shown when you select the deposit structure.
We cannot display properties of a player in the info panel of an object. Actually, we don't have a place in the UI to display these separate score, it would be accessible only through the API (like
Game.symbols).Sharing score with room owner/depositor does not fully prevent in-alliance boosting but it would at least be limited. The "boosted" player would only get half the score from everything he deposits in rooms owned by his alliance mates. This would also result in the small players getting score on the board if an aggressive neighbour forces them to give their score (like what smaykit and I have this season).
What about scoring in my own rooms?
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@artch before you do a coop season I think you're really going to need to implement a way for player scripts to send messages to each other directly. The public segment is ok for alliances, but it's no good for more ad-hoc interactions, and
creep.say()is far too limited for this purpose.Edit: "public segment", not interShardSegment!
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@systemparadox I don't see how public segments or terminal.send descriptions don't fulfill that role.
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@robalian said in Season #2 concept:
@systemparadox I don't see how public segments or terminal.send descriptions don't fulfill that role.
Public segments are a pain to work with. You have to constantly poll it instead of receiving an event. There's no way for the other side to know that you got the message unless you setup some sort of acknowledgment system and they also poll you.
If you've got two people closely cooperating you can make it work, but it becomes messy fast if you start to involve more people. Everyone has to parse the entire segment all the time, even if most of it is meant for other people, which is a waste, it's confusing, and there's no privacy - everyone can see everything in the public segment. If you've got a large alliance the best option is to designate some as a "master" to coordinate everything, but then that person has to poll everyone else, and you can only read one at a time so now it's really slow.
It's completely useless for ad-hoc communication. If I want to setup something where my bot will automatically negotiate and provide some service for exchange or fee, I can use controller signs or
creep.sayto broadcast this and public segments to provide information. The only way someone else can engage with this is to move a creep into my room and usecreep.say, which is far too limited.Descriptions for
terminal.senddo nothing to help this (as an aside, why can we only add descriptions toterminal.sendand notterminal.deal?). Why do I have to waste terminal cooldown time to send a simple message? What if I don't have a terminal, or any resources to send, or I'm busy, you know, using it to actually trade!!? Or you don't have a terminal, or your terminal is full?Besides,
terminal.sendisn't even an option in seasonal, as it's disabled between players.
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@tigga said in Season #2 concept:
Or old players from joining the season. Personally I feel a player's performance should be measured by how well their code performs, not how many freinds they have.
One way to fix this and turn it more into "global coop" would be to re-enable the market. I'm not really interested in trying to coordinate between a ton of neighbors who live in different time zones & speak different languages. We all "speak the same language" when it comes to the market.
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@dignissi enabling the market would make any coop unnecessary.
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@w4rl0ck Somewhat, but only really true if there isn't the scaling based on how much of a particular element you've processed. Otherwise you still want to drop off in as many rooms as possible, so it's better to be chummy with your neighbors.
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Honestly, I don't need ratings and awards at all. The current season is not very interesting to me.
I don't need a rating or awards or a battle for the first place. I would just like to get an interesting unique event for the money spent.
The current season rules with symbols and decoders look boring :(. The previous season looked more fun.
I am extremely glad that "screeps" came to the concept of seasons. This will allow you to set different challenges for the players and enable the community of players to solve them during this event. But I expected more from these seasons. I'm even ready to completely abandon the reward system and pay more for the Season Pass if there were more classic events and more fun for me.
For example, the event is "zombie apocalypse". The rules are simple, but no less fun. Players build forts and defend the location from zombies trying to survive. As the season lasts, more and more zombie creeps attack the players, which push them closer to the center of the map forcing them to keep the defense for a long time. The larger and stronger the player's account, the more zombies will attack him. Here you can also add a rating by the number of killed zombies. Or to make a team rating, whose team defended longer and killed more zombies, they receive top prizes.
I also really like the concept of the fog of war. I would introduce it into the current game and into the seasons. Personally, it would be much more interesting for me to explore the world from the spawn point and create a world map myself, find other players nearby or some kind of resources. Let's say players do not choose a spawn location, but it is assigned to them randomly and do not see the boundaries of the world and the location of the players, and in these conditions they need to complete some task, say, find rare artifacts, and deliver them to the base. This would make it possible to set up effective ambushes on other players, because they wouldn't know where you came from without exploring the map or tracing the route of your creeps. In this case, it makes no sense to destroy the base of the beginner player, because he is also looking for artifacts and in order to successfully collect them, you can collect them yourself, and take away from other players who have already collected them. If the enemy does not know the location of all your bases, then if you have not succeeded in building defenses, we can hide resources and artifacts in another base that your enemy does not know anything about.
In general, you can come up with many interesting and funny mechanics. I find the idea of the next season very boring :(.
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@doctorcat92 Unfortunately, such ideas are more like separate mini-games that would require way more development time than we can afford within the current budget. The Season World is meant to be just a separate world with GCL 0 every time and a pinch of new mechanics just to give it a unique flavor. For something completely different and new, I would recommend to wait for Arena.
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Per discussions in slack:
Portals should start rare/short range, and increase in frequency towards the end. This helps accomplish many of the goals I talked about previously for smaller maps.
Energy gets very abundant at some points. However, "temple" rooms and power creeps - the two ways to increase energy use - aren't very feasible in season due to the time limits lowering their time horizon. Should seasonal see the removal of the 15e/t cap at RCL8? Or incorporate energy into scoring (eg having to process it first like power) to provide a new sink?
A further idea - being able to change a symbol using energy. It would cost X energy and Y ticks in a lab reaction to turn one tick in either direction per the wheel. This would provide an energy sink. This would allow better solo play, while retaining co op as the most efficient path. Good decoder choice would still be important, as the further away on the wheel the symbol is, the more lab time and energy it takes to make compatible. With a good choice of rate cap on a decoder, it may not be feasible to force 5 different symbols into it anyways.
Finally, a lot of us want to see the convoy lifestyle that would arise from no terminals at all. What if symbols couldn't be sent thru terminal? This would increase the value of locality of decoders. I think this would create an interesting counterbalance to the "maximize remote sources" meta of MMO, which was amplified by the "maximize score gathering reach" of season 1. This would mesh well with being able to modify symbols - with a far decoder, do you pay energy to transport, or to modify?
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Collecting score resources and fighting over score resources is a good CPU/energy sink. Not sure we need anything else.
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Season #2 spawning starts on February 15. The season start is March 1. Get prepared!
We will announce detailed rules and release the documentation on February 15.
