As far as commemorative items you can buy, it's a possibility for next year, we'll have to see what we do.
I loved the little gift shop thing for the drinking festival for kind of this reason.
I'd also like to echo what @Dicene said, although my schedule can be more flexible than many people's, I'm still doing stuff for that pesky 'day job' thing. Having an A/B format makes participation feel more worthwhile, because then you don't have to compete with people who can put their whole day into the thing. Part of the reason I get especially frustrated with some of the events, too, is because I only have a chance to participate in a few so it becomes pretty disappointing to get into an event finally and find it's being cheesed with stuff like the coins or passive damage abilities in what's supposed to be a PVE event. The A/B format would probably alleviate that to some degree.
I also like @Dicene's idea of a display, personally what I would do is use the daily announcement code, and repurpose it to show when you log on, what the TOA events of that day are. I actually have a bit of an inkling the proper times displayed MIGHT be harder than it sounds, but I don't think it'd be too hard to at least display the day's schedule this way.
Even for someone like me that enjoys hunting because I'm a mad person, I agree the three hours can be dicey. And for someone that doesn't enjoy hunting I imagine its a borefest. Not to mention how a lot of people were cheesing it, coins, walling themselves in with the summoned creatures and buddies to heal them, etc.
Would also probably be a good idea to do a brief bashing dps rebalancing before the next one. When you've got artifacted Diabolists change to a profession to bash, you know something is amiss...
Would also probably be a good idea to do a brief bashing dps rebalancing before the next one. When you've got artifacted Diabolists change to a profession to bash, you know something is amiss...
The weird thing is Anette hits like a brick sh*house to the point I can one-shot through stages of Magglix or other "bosses" without damage reduction (and a few WITH damage reduction like Gromgar or Lakhild) and I still don't feel I can compete with the monks. Like holy hell.
The advantage I get over single beefy mobs entirely evaporates when it's a sheer numbers game. I kind of feel the points awarded should consider this in some way. It doesn't feel like they do.
while I support the A/B idea to allow more people to participate, I just want to point out that it doesn't really close the gap between the people who can commit to making every game (or every A version in that case) because they can arrange to not compete with other players. A lot of the top ten in a lot of the games are the same people, it would be fairly trivial for people like Risca and I to arrange for one of us to only do A games, and one to only do B games.
As far as individual game feedback, for the future can we not make scout/stalk/similar skills work on the souls in soul trap? it trivializes the game, and nobody who places in that game is using the clues other than to point them to an area with souls in it.
I'm not positive because I've not been in one of the events, but if you can still summon souls off balance like in great hunts the reason monk probably blows everything out of the water is you can combo/summon/burn the rest of your combo while off balance and double down on kills. Most combo classes can't do this; your combo happens all at once and isn't 4 actually separate commands, so if you one shot a soul with the first slash of dsl, the second slash is still wasted. Not the case with monk.
I'm not positive because I've not been in one of the events, but if you can still summon souls off balance like in great hunts the reason monk probably blows everything out of the water is you can combo/summon/burn the rest of your combo while off balance and double down on kills. Most combo classes can't do this; your combo happens all at once and isn't 4 actually separate commands, so if you one shot a soul with the first slash of dsl, the second slash is still wasted. Not the case with monk.
I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but yea, you can summon offbal. Or just have a buddy sit there and summon for you too. I'd do two things:
1] Make it so summons need balance
2] Make it so only killing your own summons rewards points.
Don't think I didn't notice the groups of people summoning memories for their buddies.
while I support the A/B idea to allow more people to participate, I just want to point out that it doesn't really close the gap between the people who can commit to making every game (or every A version in that case) because they can arrange to not compete with other players. A lot of the top ten in a lot of the games are the same people, it would be fairly trivial for people like Risca and I to arrange for one of us to only do A games, and one to only do B games.
If they made the B side based on the number of games you participate in automatically this would basically nip this one in the bud, and that wouldn't be hard to do since they already record this internally, I believe, in some fashion.
Tiered level of competition were a good thing. I'm not sure why we eliminated them. It's nice to have an avenue for lowbies and midbies to have a chance at something beyond the dailies. We can't really logically split up the walking artifact shops from the general populace because some of us (*cough cough* me *cough*) have characters whose artifact investment is mostly non-useful to anything even REMOTELY related to these competitions, but at least we can give some shot for the new and less established players to snag a bigger win.
The timing of the bashing events - 3 hours is a long chunk for ANYONE with obligations that isn't fortunate enough to work from home with a highly flexible schedule (like Kabaal and I enjoy), but instead of just making these shorter, maybe we can do a variety of lengths. Some shorter, some the same, some longer. I can't believe I'm encouraging this, BUT, some folks seem to dig the endurance thing and it gives people who step in a bit late a chance to get caught up or to hope someone has to drop out. There's value to the longer ones, basically.
I already made a comment about how crappy the timing of these events are for a large block of people, but I'mma reiterate that. I don't know if that was a volunteer-availability issue or something else, but it needs some tweaking.
Edit - Oh, and can we PLEASE run the events with a little more communication?
Blurb is about to initiate in 2 minutes. To join: blah. To check your rankings: blah.
Event initiatiates.
Blurb will start in 5 minutes. Make sure you join before then!
Blurb starts in 1 minute, last call!
Blurb starts.
Standing in the arena twiddling thumbs for 15 minutes or more with ZERO idea of when anything is going to happen is incredibly obnoxious.
Given Horror Hunts are one of the most repeated games in the ToA ... I really think the advantage it offers to certain classes over others is inherently unfair. I also don't know if there is a way to fix this.
A+B games don't really help that much because the people like Cyr still get to game them. Everybody makes the A event? Well, sit it out and plan for the B FFA that doesn't have Risca in it. If you have to register for one set or the other instead of picking the game that better suits your schedule for that day, then you greatly benefit from being the last to choose a side so that you can pick that side that gives you better matchups. The end result maintains schedule-based advantage while just adding more layers of complexity to it. If you add an A/B/C game setup this gets even worse and the players with all the time in the world get to cherry pick their setups.
And then with that you have the parts where their volunteers and staff are basically spending this entire week setting alarms at all hours of the day to maintain multiple events, even though the multiple events still end up favouring the people with all the time in the world and so don't resolve that situation well.
The problem with things like this is really just that event timing will never be favorable for everybody. There's a 4 hour spread across the US alone, and that 4 hour spread makes a lot of things awkward. A 9am event on the east coast is a 5am event on the west coast. A 9pm event on the west cost is a 1am event on the east coast. When you're trying to work around workday/schoolday schedules it's already borderline impossible to pick solid times and that's JUST in the US. The only really solid timeslots I can think of are the 6pm/7/8/9 and 7/8/9/10. Maybe 8/9/10/11, but that's pushing it. Outside of those timeslots you're starting events in the west coast workday or the east coast late night. But those timeslots are floating at about 11pm-1am in the UK and then 9am-11am in Australia.
There is basically no good way to schedule lots of events over a full week. Somebody will get screwed.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Someone will get screwed, but you can change up the times instead of having a set schedule for each day's run events. Spread it out a little more. That opens up the potential for more people to land on a time they can participate in instead of shutting some folks out for almost everything. Screw EVERYONE just a little bit so most people get to play. :P
Still, though, the volunteer availability is the bigger issue and one harder to resolve.
The Memory Match games - these are stupid. They are WAY too easy to automate. Which means that from this point forward, the top contenders in these are always going to be those with the best ping and systems. They aren't really fun without automation, either (in the way that a gem hunt is and it's less possible for coding to completely overwhelm non-coding participants in a gem hunt).
Gem hunts have the exact same thing going for them as memory match games; they are trivial to automate if you have a mapper and a clue and it is pretty much impossible to really compete against anybody who has both of those things unless you also have those things. There's a reason you always see the same people winning them.
Pretty much everything in a text game is going to be won by the person with the best system to automate it, because computers are really really really good at handling text input and their reaction speed is so much faster than a person's. The only real exception to this is a thing like a quiz or maybe a bashing contest. Systems are going to dominate anything where reaction speed and memorization are concerned. That is just how it is.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I've never automated a gem hunt and I've won more than a few of them.
So, no? Whereas the people in the memory match at the top were all automating.
Edit - Gem hunts benefit from human logic. Memory match does not. I know a lot of weird areas where people are less likely to go. You COULD code around that, but it isn't as reliable as automation for the memory match.
I'm not exactly sure where you got that every person who placed in the memory match automated, I didn't, Theophilus didn't, several others didn't, Ultrix who won it, doesn't fully automate it, etc. and It's easy enough to deal with Gemhunts like that by building an autowalker that only autowalks the area you're in, and then you choose the next area to go to.
The Memory Match games - these are stupid. They are WAY too easy to automate. Which means that from this point forward, the top contenders in these are always going to be those with the best ping and systems. They aren't really fun without automation, either (in the way that a gem hunt is and it's less possible for coding to completely overwhelm non-coding participants in a gem hunt).
Gem hunts have the exact same thing going for them as memory match games; they are trivial to automate if you have a mapper and a clue and it is pretty much impossible to really compete against anybody who has both of those things unless you also have those things. There's a reason you always see the same people winning them.
Er, I placed third in a gemhunt when I was like 18 ingame still and my only map were the ingame ones.
Gemhunts so automated. I know I will get an earful of condescension from a few friends about it, but I still swear it's worth at least trying some more pighunts. Even if I still didn't place, I maintain that having automated players in a pighunt would be less frustrating from a player experience standpoint - because there is balance to deal with, and RNG that requires you to actually move several rooms to chase pigs (so you can't just autosquint). The pigs are stubborn, too, and if you just try to run around grabbing once and letting go to be more "efficient" (which is what Khizan suggested most automaters would probably do), you actually might get aced out by someone who isn't automated. You definitely wouldn't get as much of so and so running through 6 rooms a second and literally grabbing the gem you were about to get and being several rooms out before you can gurgle in righteous indignation.
I didn't say every person who played automated? I said the top people clearly did. There was a pretty big difference in how quickly automaters racked up points.
Edit - Man, reading comprehension. I'll rephrase with shorter sentences. Gem hunts benefit from automation, but automation does not grant an absolute win because human logic throws in a variable that is harder to code around. In memory match, automation grants a win if you have the better system and ping than your competition. Manual memory match will never -win- against automation, whereas in a gem hunt, manual can win against automation.
I think these suggestions for dealing with automation in gemhunts/memory match are a solution looking for a problem because demonstrably, people have manualled them just fine and placed.
Fwiw, I came into the memory match 20 mins late. and completely manualled it to place 7th. I manual almost everything actually--soul trap, soul hunt, whatever. I do attack and summon souls on balance recovery, but that's pretty much it.
Krysaliss, if I weren't in a ring with them, it'd be a hard sell to me that say, Ultrix memory match isn't automated. Especially since Ultrix is a professional level coder. But they don't. They just have whiteboards, or paper, and the right knack for it.
Krysaliss, if I weren't in a ring with them, it'd be a hard sell to me that say, Ultrix memory match isn't automated. Especially since Ultrix is a professional level coder. But they don't. They just have whiteboards, or paper, and the right knack for it.
I got an instant nostalgia hit of playing Ultima or old adventure games and having whole notebooks full of notes on them scrawled out.
This is basically how some people get by in these things. I have a whole scratchpad of stuff from when I was bothering @Septus about PVP when I was trying to visualize the different routes.
Yea, okay, Jules. Someone already said Ultrix partially coded the memory match. So, I'm not buying that one. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't think so.
And again. Placed is NOT the same as at the top. Caelya was manualing and managed to beat Kabaal, but only because Kabaal didn't finish automating his system until midway through the event. After that his points racked up crazy fast comparatively and at the same rate as Ultrix.
And to be clear (because apparently I wasn't), it's totally possible to beat out automation in a gem hunt. I've done it many times. It's not as easy to do so in a memory match. Variables are different.
I am curious how this one pans out. It is just that the argument from the gurus in our ring is basically the opposite - that gemhunts are trivial to automate in a way that ensures that the best autowalker wins, but that memory matches, particularly any memory match with duplicate sets, would be a lot trickier to code. I can't speak for everyone, but I am definitely reading your posts, though. I am just surprised that from your end, the gemhunt is the thing where the manual guy can make a dent, and memory match is the event more subject to "eh, screw it, this is too automated, why bother". See, for me, I HATE memory match, but not because I perceive it as "too automated". I hate it because it's asking me to remember things as quickly as possible and arrange them in the right order, and I am not at all good at that.
You hate it for exactly the reason that automating it is beneficial @Jules, but to say that there aren't people who can manual it well seems provably false; some people have better memories than others (mine memory is a sieve, a friend of mine can easily recall what people would consider very small details with great clarity some time after they were relevant). Likewise with the gemhunts, some people aren't as good with exploring or noticing items in a room quickly, so automation is beneficial, but others such as myself, I'd argue, take to this kind of thing (I love exploring the game world!)
Moreover, and the root of the problem here, is that anything applied to defeat the kind of automation that helps people be very successful in these events, is going to have a stronger effect on the people trying to win them without automation then on those using automation, especially since as we evidently saw with the AFK checks (if the forums are any indication), people can code around such means anyways; so then it's only catching the people really bad at scripting anyways and possibly impairing people manualling.
Oh, I agree Anette (about automating memory match, and why you'd want to). But I mean, people can just turn on the afterburners in a gemhunt. It really is ~6 rooms per second for the top guys with the right arties/skills turned on with no stopping, no inefficiency, no slow human input, no balance used ever (unless you hit a wall, which any decent autowalker should be ready to handle, I am sure).
EDIT: the speed is so insane it can actually be really hard to react in time to say, chain people in the PK gemhunts. One of those, I was sitting in a room spamming blah blah chain person, hoping they'd run through. They finally did, and I missed them by thousands of a second (or something like that). If nothing else, I'd love to see walking speed slowed down significantly. Now, I could have tried triggering there, but I actually think I might have still missed.
Ultrix has made it clear she does not fully automate the Memory Match, she has not made it clear to what degree it is (or isn't) automated. An efficient autowalker is easily the best way to win or place in a Gemhunt Variant, regardless of any anecdotal evidence you have. Either way it is not impossible for a manual input player to win/place in either event, it is just significantly harder than it is for someone with good Automation, and short of banning automation, there is not a ton that can be done about that effectively.
Memory match is memorizing the values stored in 36-100 different locations and being able to place them relative to each other. This is possible to do with just your memory but most people can't do it. I've won every memory match Ultrix has ever started in Antioch and I do it with pen and paper.
It's also fairly trivial to automate. Gemhunts are only easier to automate because they're generally a spinoff of a bashing script; if you have a script that walks every area of a room looking for horde/undead/etc to kill, it's fairly easy to modify that script to walk every room of an area looking for gems.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Memory match is memorizing the values stored in 36-100 different locations and being able to place them relative to each other. This is possible to do with just your memory but most people can't do it. I've won every memory match Ultrix has ever started in Antioch and I do it with pen and paper.
It's also fairly trivial to automate.
I think the tripping block for automation with memory matches as opposed to gemhunts for many people (and lets face it, people wouldn't complain so much if it was easy to automate, like a gemhunt), is it requires some fair programming chops. That said if you know your stuff, it's easy to make an associate array you populate with stuff as it comes up.
But my central point from earlier still stands, I think: until and unless automation becomes necessary to succeed, this discussion is a solution looking for a problem. And it provably is not.
[edit]: I never don't have to fix the HTML in the notices this forum software generates v_v
Pretty much everything is "trivial" to Khizan. And it probably really is. But it makes him a crappy barometer for what is and isn't trivial for "players" collectively. What you say about the memory match checks with what someone mentioned on ring the other day. Can be done, not nearly as easy to actually do for most people.
And there is definitely a huge problem. It's just a problem that might not have a good enough solution. It's not that automation is "bad", or "doesn't require skill". It obviously does. But the reason admin cares a lot about extreme automation (I think), is because it's on that list of things that can definitely make players quit/give up on engaging with significant chunks of the game content, and possibly the game itself if things are bad enough. Like me. I've never really got involved with, much less remotely excited about a gemhunt since the day that person ran by in a blur... and I haven't engaged with the ToA at all really, other than to help people out, and to do the Infestation (group circle thing), which was amazing. Most newbies who have tried their hand at the various games very quickly realized how over their head they were and quit almost immediately, or at the very least, decided to look at each event as more "check box, took part". Sometimes, you can sort of drag that out a bit, and it will take people longer to realize they're in well over their heads, and you'll still have turnover, but not as fast. None of that is exactly good. So barring punishment, you want to try to find ways to make people feel like they can make some kind of dent where you can, even if they're not going to be "winners". You want to make the experience of playing the game feel less futile/frustrating, and help people feel like they can continue to progress, even if they are not "in the top ten".
Comments
(Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
Tiered level of competition were a good thing. I'm not sure why we eliminated them. It's nice to have an avenue for lowbies and midbies to have a chance at something beyond the dailies. We can't really logically split up the walking artifact shops from the general populace because some of us (*cough cough* me *cough*) have characters whose artifact investment is mostly non-useful to anything even REMOTELY related to these competitions, but at least we can give some shot for the new and less established players to snag a bigger win.
The timing of the bashing events - 3 hours is a long chunk for ANYONE with obligations that isn't fortunate enough to work from home with a highly flexible schedule (like Kabaal and I enjoy), but instead of just making these shorter, maybe we can do a variety of lengths. Some shorter, some the same, some longer. I can't believe I'm encouraging this, BUT, some folks seem to dig the endurance thing and it gives people who step in a bit late a chance to get caught up or to hope someone has to drop out. There's value to the longer ones, basically.
I already made a comment about how crappy the timing of these events are for a large block of people, but I'mma reiterate that. I don't know if that was a volunteer-availability issue or something else, but it needs some tweaking.
Edit - Oh, and can we PLEASE run the events with a little more communication?
Blurb is about to initiate in 2 minutes. To join: blah. To check your rankings: blah.
Event initiatiates.
Blurb will start in 5 minutes. Make sure you join before then!
Blurb starts in 1 minute, last call!
Blurb starts.
Standing in the arena twiddling thumbs for 15 minutes or more with ZERO idea of when anything is going to happen is incredibly obnoxious.
A+B games don't really help that much because the people like Cyr still get to game them. Everybody makes the A event? Well, sit it out and plan for the B FFA that doesn't have Risca in it. If you have to register for one set or the other instead of picking the game that better suits your schedule for that day, then you greatly benefit from being the last to choose a side so that you can pick that side that gives you better matchups. The end result maintains schedule-based advantage while just adding more layers of complexity to it. If you add an A/B/C game setup this gets even worse and the players with all the time in the world get to cherry pick their setups.
And then with that you have the parts where their volunteers and staff are basically spending this entire week setting alarms at all hours of the day to maintain multiple events, even though the multiple events still end up favouring the people with all the time in the world and so don't resolve that situation well.
The problem with things like this is really just that event timing will never be favorable for everybody. There's a 4 hour spread across the US alone, and that 4 hour spread makes a lot of things awkward. A 9am event on the east coast is a 5am event on the west coast. A 9pm event on the west cost is a 1am event on the east coast. When you're trying to work around workday/schoolday schedules it's already borderline impossible to pick solid times and that's JUST in the US. The only really solid timeslots I can think of are the 6pm/7/8/9 and 7/8/9/10. Maybe 8/9/10/11, but that's pushing it. Outside of those timeslots you're starting events in the west coast workday or the east coast late night. But those timeslots are floating at about 11pm-1am in the UK and then 9am-11am in Australia.
There is basically no good way to schedule lots of events over a full week. Somebody will get screwed.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Still, though, the volunteer availability is the bigger issue and one harder to resolve.
Gem hunts have the exact same thing going for them as memory match games; they are trivial to automate if you have a mapper and a clue and it is pretty much impossible to really compete against anybody who has both of those things unless you also have those things. There's a reason you always see the same people winning them.
Pretty much everything in a text game is going to be won by the person with the best system to automate it, because computers are really really really good at handling text input and their reaction speed is so much faster than a person's. The only real exception to this is a thing like a quiz or maybe a bashing contest. Systems are going to dominate anything where reaction speed and memorization are concerned. That is just how it is.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
So, no? Whereas the people in the memory match at the top were all automating.
Edit - Gem hunts benefit from human logic. Memory match does not. I know a lot of weird areas where people are less likely to go. You COULD code around that, but it isn't as reliable as automation for the memory match.
Edit - Man, reading comprehension. I'll rephrase with shorter sentences. Gem hunts benefit from automation, but automation does not grant an absolute win because human logic throws in a variable that is harder to code around. In memory match, automation grants a win if you have the better system and ping than your competition. Manual memory match will never -win- against automation, whereas in a gem hunt, manual can win against automation.
And again. Placed is NOT the same as at the top. Caelya was manualing and managed to beat Kabaal, but only because Kabaal didn't finish automating his system until midway through the event. After that his points racked up crazy fast comparatively and at the same rate as Ultrix.
And to be clear (because apparently I wasn't), it's totally possible to beat out automation in a gem hunt. I've done it many times. It's not as easy to do so in a memory match. Variables are different.
Memory match is memorizing the values stored in 36-100 different locations and being able to place them relative to each other. This is possible to do with just your memory but most people can't do it. I've won every memory match Ultrix has ever started in Antioch and I do it with pen and paper.
It's also fairly trivial to automate. Gemhunts are only easier to automate because they're generally a spinoff of a bashing script; if you have a script that walks every area of a room looking for horde/undead/etc to kill, it's fairly easy to modify that script to walk every room of an area looking for gems.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I think the tripping block for automation with memory matches as opposed to gemhunts for many people (and lets face it, people wouldn't complain so much if it was easy to automate, like a gemhunt), is it requires some fair programming chops. That said if you know your stuff, it's easy to make an associate array you populate with stuff as it comes up.
But my central point from earlier still stands, I think: until and unless automation becomes necessary to succeed, this discussion is a solution looking for a problem. And it provably is not.
[edit]: I never don't have to fix the HTML in the notices this forum software generates v_v