Quality of players vs Quantity of numbers


Pathfinder Online

Silver Crusade

https://goblinworks.com/blog/are-you-experienced/

From my understanding of the blog are you experienced, pathfinder online will have a fairly level playing field, or power curve. So i would like to know what reason is there to try and get the top tier of armor and weapons when all you really need is more people to succeed? Will it matter if a player is immensely more skilled when they are facing a larger group?

Will the settlement with 2,000 or 10,000 players come to dominate the map even when they only log in a couple hours a week for pvp windows, compared the the group with 100 players who play for 10 or 20 hours a week?

It seems unfair that a group who has farmed for the best gear in game to not have a significant advantage compared to players using the starting gears sets.


Well a more skilled player is going to be able to probably take a less skilled player 1v1. How many less skilled players a more skilled player can take out 1v2,1v3,1v4 is really up in the air. If you just throw numbers at it eventually that skilled player will go down that is just simple fact.

As far as the checks and balances go of the "zergy guild" strategy go it's been my experience when it gets to that point the server responds with checks and balances the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I saw this a lot in Darkfall where the juggernaut of a billion players for a time where dominate, but the server over toppled said giant.

And to be honest with you it's up to the community to let the big giant guild survive or not. If we let it go unchecked and it's a game ruin-er that's the servers problem not a development problem to be perfectly frank.

I made a similar post a while back regarding power gap. and here's what they had to say

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ra2k?Power-Gap-Concerns

Here's the difference between EVE and Pathfinder Online.

EVE

In EVE, you have a queue of skills your character will train. If the time required to train one of those skills exceeds 24 hours, you can queue it up but you can't queue anything after that long training time.
So you could pay for a monthly EVE sub, and manage your skill queue, training skills and doing nothing else. (You can buy a PLEX, and sell it on the in-game market for ISK, use that ISK to buy the necessary skill books to unlock new skills to train, all without leaving the busiest market hub in the game). You could, given unlimited time and unlimited PLEX, train every skill in the game to the maximum level.
Skills are prerequisites for using various ship hulls and ship modules. They also have effects on your character's abilities.

So technically you could sit in that market hub paying for monthly subscription time and buying skill books with PLEX and train all the skills you need to fly the largest ship in the game fully equipped with the most powerful modules in the game, and provided you could get to a place where you can fly that ship, and that someone would transfer ownership of one to you, with the modules included, you could board it, and take command, never having flown a single mission on any other ship or used any ship equipment ever in the history of your character.
The limiting factor is 100% realtime, plus your willingness to buy ISK rather than earn it, and your social connections to get access to hulls and modules not regularly sold on the markets. Zero impact from your actual in-game activities.

Pathfinder Online

In Pathfinder Online, you gain XP in realtime which goes into a bank. You can log in and find a skill trainer to exchange banked XP for skills. You could, if you wished, pay for a monthly subscription for a long period of time and never log in, then, when you decide you are ready, log in and start buying training.

You will discover however that even though you might have a huge amount of XP banked, you cannot buy all the training you want. After the first couple of ranks of a particular Feat are trained, you start to run into prerequisites.

Some of those prerequisites are ability score increases, which also come from purchasing training. But you will find that you can't purchase enough of those kinds of Feats without running into other prerequisites. Those are related to earning Achievements.

Achievements reflect things that your character has actually done in game. Some of them are easy to get - a couple of hours of generic adventuring will provide quite a few of them. So you do that, then you go back to the trainers and you can spend more of your XP and get some more Feats. You repeat that cycle, but you start to notice that the time required to get the next set of Achievements you need to unlock the next round of Feats to train are becoming increasingly time consuming to earn.

Eventually you reach a point where the time required to get the next batch of Achievements has become pretty substantial. You've reached the point in the game where you are gated more by what you are able to do while you play than by how much XP your character is earning.
So if you paid for a long period of subscription time, and gained a huge bank of XP, you would not be able to replicate the experience of the pilot in EVE - you can't just train your character and never interact with the world.

The character who starts playing on day one and actually plays the game - going out into the world and doing things related to the kind of abilities that the player wants that character to have - will have a substantial advantage over the character who is created on day one but that is never used and is just a reservoir holding XP.

(This is one big reason I say that Destiny's Twin is cool, but it's not as good as a "second character". Because you have to choose to either do things to earn Achievements with the Main, or with the Twin, but you can't do both at the same time. So you'll have to decide how you want to allocate your game time "doing things in the game" and you can't treat the Twin as just a convenient alter-ego of your Main.)

Why this is good design

The realtime training system pioneered by EVE solves a number of design problems. The biggest problem that it solves is that it allows us to control, absolutely, how quickly a character can unlock certain character abilities. In games where your character gets better simply as a function of your play, things like DPS and XPS are proxies for realtime training. But they're not great proxies because so many different people play the game at different rates and you are forced to make design choices between optimizing for the people at the very top of the power curve who are playing an absolutely min/maxed character in a mathematically optimal way, or for the 99% of the rest of the players who are doing something less "perfect" from a gaming perspective - starting at slightly less perfect and going down to "barely doing anything right".

The MMO community has shown time and again that it is capable of finding ways to level up characters faster than the designers "thought they could". The result is that game systems which were deployed in a half-finished state get pounded by rapidly advancing characters and the blowback is that the content is boring and grindy. (Or worse, doesn't exist at all, and characters run out of things to do and players therefore exit the game).

With realtime training we, the designers, control when you will be gated in to various content and nothing you, the players, can do can speed that process up. So you can be as efficient as you want, min/max to your hearts' content, play 24 hours a day without any sleep, and you won't be able to get ahead of our plan to deploy content.

We can then tune other parts of the design to be more interesting to the vast middle majority of the players rather than having to tune to the most efficient players. The Achievement system allows us to provide you interesting things to do but we don't have to ask you to do them 24x7x365. So if you don't play that aggressively you will find that in general you're able to "keep up" with those who do (there's an economic risk because those 24x7 players will generate more economic activity than the people who don't but we think we can manage that on the backend.)

Goblin Squad Member

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All three factor in: Player skill; Character skills, level and or gear; and numbers. There will be times when you are outplayed. There will be times when you are outclassed. There will be times when you are overwhelmed.

Try to play at your best, pick and choose the right fights for yourself and travel in numbers.

Goblin Squad Member

OP:

They had stated that mechanically a Tier 3 with the best gear could take 4-6 guys, Tier 1, based on a combination of player skills, feats, and gear. With that being said, as well as what Pexx stated, even if someone is considered a Zerg, if their players aren't playing actively it is going to dwindle the effectiveness of their numbers.

I think you will see both sides of the coin in this game, quality winning, and quantity winning, just depending on the situation.

Goblin Squad Member

TEO Cheatle wrote:

OP:

They had stated that mechanically a Tier 3 with the best gear could take 4-6 guys, Tier 1, based on a combination of player skills, feats, and gear.

Ryan in particular has gone back and forth on this. At times he has stated that the power curve is slight enough that low level characters can not be easily slaughtered by a single higher level player.

Then he makes statements, trying to avoid the probability that a low level Zerg can be effective, because if the is true, than the primary deterrent of low reputation is lost and made up shear numbers.

There is no alpha strike / one shot kill, but mathematics will eventually make a one shot possible. I have always predicted 8:1 being necessary to one shot kill a new character, with new characters but based on watching video streams, it might be a smaller ratio.

It is safer to just say, "Everything matters, and at any given time one element of combat will be the deciding factor."

Goblin Squad Member

We should resist any temptation to project what will be at EE based upon what we are currently seeing in Alpha, especially if viewed in proxy. There is a very wide gap between the damage output of a cleric vice the damage output of a wizard, even if the cleric's damage and healing are summed.

There is too much left undone to consider any attempt to bring such details into similar scales just yet, I am confident.

Goblin Squad Member

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Being wrote:

We should resist any temptation to project what will be at EE based upon what we are currently seeing in Alpha, especially if viewed in proxy. There is a very wide gap between the damage output of a cleric vice the damage output of a wizard, even if the cleric's damage and healing are summed.

There is too much left undone to consider any attempt to bring such details into similar scales just yet, I am confident.

The purpose of these boards are to guess, infer, project, interpret, ponder, argue, debate, demand, request, wish for and most importantly to discuss.

Goblin Squad Member

I agree with Bluddwolf on this one.

Goblin Squad Member

Bluddwolf wrote:
The purpose of these boards are to guess, infer, project, interpret, ponder, argue, debate, demand, request, wish for and most importantly to discuss.

I would agree with the correction above.

Debate yes. Argue no.

A debate is communication.

An argument is just two sides yelling at each other with no understanding possible (think congress, middle east, etc)

A debate is good and meaningful. An argument is just noise.

Goblin Squad Member

Sooo hard not to channel Monty Python just now...

Goblin Squad Member

Well if you won't give in...
"I came in here for an argument!"
"Oh, this is abuse."
:)

Goblinworks Game Designer

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There have been a lot of off-the-cuff statements about ratios of newbs to take down a maxed out character that probably deserved more qualifiers than they got at the time.

The mandate I've been working under for the combat system doesn't feature any flat numbers of newbs to vets (e.g., I was not told "make sure 20 new characters can have a chance of beating a maxed out character"). Instead, my mandate is simply that brand new characters can contribute in a fight against a vet (they can't in most MMOs), and that the power curve is smooth enough that the amount of contribution grows pretty smoothly and quickly as you gain more XP.

For an extreme example of a hard target, a level 20 Unbreakable fighter in maxed out Tier 3 gear:
* Has around 1600 HP
* Has around 200 defenses
* Has around 50 physical resistance and 20 to all energy resistances (and might have increased a couple a little further due to enchants)

A brand new character attacking that Fighter:
* Has an average margin of failure on the attack roll of 150, dealing approximately a third of his damage per hit (some hits slightly more, some hits closer to 0)
* Has floored Effect Power, so doesn't even do 33% of the effects on his attacks
* Needs to try out a caster weapon that can do energy damage, because physical damage won't get through the armor
* Will, all told, expect to do around 30-40 total damage per round against the target
* Has 400 HP and minimal defenses (which the Tier 3 character can expect to get through in a round or two)

However, give that character a month to become level 8 and get some lower end Tier 2 gear:
* His average margin of failure is now less than 100, so he'll be up to 40-50% of damage per hit
* His Effect Power is now only down about 50%, so some portion of his effects will often get through
* He can get around 30 physical damage through the armor, and up to 30 points more on an effective energy damage type
* He will, all told, expect to do around 80-100 damage per round against the target
* He has upwards of 1000 HP and better defenses, so it should take the Tier 3 character at least three rounds of dedicated attacks to get through them

And that's the basic math, but actual player movement, secondary effects, teamwork, and other tactics make it only useful in the broadest predictive sense (i.e., I'm really interested in what you guys actually figure out in a many weaker on fewer stronger situation).

Liberty's Edge Goblin Squad Member

T7V Jazzlvraz wrote:
Sooo hard not to channel Monty Python just now...

Heh. I'm sitting in the theatre waiting to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail right now! (Thank goodness for classic movie series in the summer!)

Sovereign Court Goblin Squad Member

Just trying to recreate some of Stephen's numbers based on info we know. Please don't think of this as being nitpicky, but rather as me making sure I understand the system. Not sure if I'm using the most up to date info though.

I assume all bonuses from passives stack. I know effects in the same 'channel' don't (eg. buffs/debuffs), but haven't heard anything about bonuses not stacking with building a character.

Hit points appear to top out at:

400+(40/level in hp)*20+(35/level in Unbreakable)*14+50(Toughness)=1740.

If the fighter wants even more hp he can take Transmuter as his class feature. He'd be sacrificing offensively to get an extra 60 hp, bringing him to an even 1800. He would lose out on dps from using a fighter feature and lose the dedication bonus. Not worth it imo, but it is the top hp build I know of.

Physical resistance:

25+8/major*2+2/minor*4+3(Unbreakable) = 52. If he took Protection Domain as his class feature he could bring that up another 7 if those stack. (Again, sacrificing offense, but at least with this combo he has a very nice resistance boost in return. Throw in some healing ability and that would be a very hard to kill character!) For reference you'd need access to at least 3 minor keywords on a T1 physical attack to do any damage against 52 physical resistance, and 4 minors to do barely anything against 59.

Not quite sure how to get the ~20 energy resistance. From watching streams it seemed like heavy had 5+8/major*2+2/minor*4 which doesn't give 20, so I'm obviously missing something.

By floored effect power I assume that since it's effectively 12 defensive keywords (4 minor + 2 major counting as 4 each) and 1 offensive that's -110%, ie. -100%. So no dots, no slows, etc.

Goblinworks Game Designer

I moved some HP bonuses around for the next build and some of that stuff may not stack, but you're probably right that a fighter that really wanted HP could get up to 1700 rather than my 1600 approximation.

20 energy is from 5 base + 1 per keyword (total of 12) + 3 for Unbreakable's bonus to all. I'm not looking at my spreadsheets though, so I could be off on that.

Yes, that's what I mean by floored.

Right now, passive feats are basically divided into three channels:
* Upgrade
* Armor
* General Passive

Anything that affects the same stat within the same channel will just take the biggest bonus.

The standardized resistance and keyword effect for armor is on the Armor channel. The fixed bonus for the armor feat is on the general Passive channel. All other slotted passives are on the general Passive channel (including role feature). So Protection Domain probably won't stack with the bonus resistance from Unbreakable's fixed effect. Similarly, Transmuter's fixed HP bonus probably doesn't stack with Toughness.

We're looking into whether or not we need to break them out into more granular channels. For the next build, I moved the bonus defense from all armor feats to a keyword effect, because otherwise it wasn't stacking with Lightning Reflexes, Iron Will, or Great Fortitude. That seemed to hit the glaring situations where things were not stacking that should, but we'll be keeping an eye on whether other things that ought to stack aren't.

Overall, though, we do intend to keep you from slotting a lot of things to stack up one really big bonus in any particular stat. So situations like Toughness not stacking with Transmuter is an opportunity for the Transmuter to forego toughness and, say, slot three defense boosters (or the eventual other defensive passives that get added).

Goblin Squad Member

I'm curious, how well does that level 1 and his 6 buddies do when a level 20 caster dumps a fireball or whatever the top aoe spell is on top of there head?

i.e.

How many level 20 casters will it take to one shot a horde of newbs standing around the trainer in town to properly welcome them to the game?

How long will it take to recover there rep and alignment?

Goblinworks Game Designer

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The plan, as soon as we can get the tech for it, is to make training, crafting, markets, and other distracting and screen-hiding interfaces actually temporarily remove you from the world (you click the door and go "into" the building). This is precisely to make it harder to gank people that are unable to notice that they're being targeted.

But assuming newbs are clustered for some other reason, it may only take a couple of maxed out level nine AoEs to drop them all. It does take a couple of seconds to wind up a second one, so hopefully they'll have the presence of mind to scatter after the first one. Two or three coordinated individuals might accomplish it nearly instantaneously, but then they all share in the rep loss.

Successfully killing several newbs at once will significantly tank your reputation. In the starter areas it should also call down some pretty beefy guards. If they get you, you've at least taken some durability loss on the Tier 3 equipment you were using to blow up newbs so quickly (if you're using more disposable gear, it's much harder to kill them before the guards get you).

We think the rep penalties and high chance of death will be sufficient to discourage killing newbs for the lulz, but if we're wrong and it starts to become a problem, we'll look into more direct ways of curtailing it.

Goblin Squad Member

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There are a lot if factors in this beyond DPS vs armor and hit points too. Certain skills and tactics will allow you to pick when and who you fight. That's how small numbers of quality fighters will whittle a zerg down to size.

Think the American Revolution. It wasn't numbers, training, discipline, technology etc. that won us the war. We won because we fought dirty.

Goblin Squad Member

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Andius the Afflicted wrote:

There are a lot if factors in this beyond DPS vs armor and hit points too. Certain skills and tactics will allow you to pick when and who you fight. That's how small numbers of quality fighters will whittle a zerg down to size.

Think the American Revolution. It wasn't numbers, training, discipline, technology etc. that won us the war. We won because we fought dirty.

And the French...(They seriously get downplayed for their contributions to the American Revolution) and the fact that the British forces were extremely thin in the American Colonies. Which is a major statement considering that during that era there were overall not many "redcoats" to begin with.

In other words: Technically the English were the Spartans and the colonist were the Persians.

We won because the French had a first class navy that was disrupting the living hell out of England. And without support from England... well would you want to be stranded on a continent with one million angry yokels?

Goblin Squad Member

Stephen Cheney wrote:

There have been a lot of off-the-cuff statements about ratios of newbs to take down a maxed out character that probably deserved more qualifiers than they got at the time.

The mandate I've been working under for the combat system doesn't feature any flat numbers of newbs to vets (e.g., I was not told "make sure 20 new characters can have a chance of beating a maxed out character"). Instead, my mandate is simply that brand new characters can contribute in a fight against a vet (they can't in most MMOs), and that the power curve is smooth enough that the amount of contribution grows pretty smoothly and quickly as you gain more XP.

For an extreme example of a hard target, a level 20 Unbreakable fighter in maxed out Tier 3 gear:
* Has around 1600 HP
* Has around 200 defenses
* Has around 50 physical resistance and 20 to all energy resistances (and might have increased a couple a little further due to enchants)

A brand new character attacking that Fighter:
* Has an average margin of failure on the attack roll of 150, dealing approximately a third of his damage per hit (some hits slightly more, some hits closer to 0)
* Has floored Effect Power, so doesn't even do 33% of the effects on his attacks
* Needs to try out a caster weapon that can do energy damage, because physical damage won't get through the armor
* Will, all told, expect to do around 30-40 total damage per round against the target
* Has 400 HP and minimal defenses (which the Tier 3 character can expect to get through in a round or two)

However, give that character a month to become level 8 and get some lower end Tier 2 gear:
* His average margin of failure is now less than 100, so he'll be up to 40-50% of damage per hit
* His Effect Power is now only down about 50%, so some portion of his effects will often get through
* He can get around 30 physical damage through the armor, and up to 30 points more on an effective energy damage type
* He will, all told, expect to do around 80-100 damage per round against the target
* He...

Based ROUGHLY on these numbers it would take:

17 lvl 8 characters to alpha strike and one-shot a level 20 fighter.

It would take 5 lvl 8 characters to alpha strike and one-shot a noob.

* We do not have any estimate of damage output by a level 20

Goblin Squad Member

Stephen Cheney wrote:
... it may only take a couple of maxed out level nine AoEs to drop them all. It does take a couple of seconds to wind up a second one, so hopefully they'll have the presence of mind to scatter after the first one.

I was laughing to myself yesterday wondering if I would ever have the opportunity to kite a half-dozen players the way I do mobs, and consistently hit more than one of them with my AoEs. It doesn't seem likely :)

Goblinworks Executive Founder

Nihimon wrote:
Stephen Cheney wrote:
... it may only take a couple of maxed out level nine AoEs to drop them all. It does take a couple of seconds to wind up a second one, so hopefully they'll have the presence of mind to scatter after the first one.

I was laughing to myself yesterday wondering if I would ever have the opportunity to kite a half-dozen players the way I do mobs, and consistently hit more than one of them with my AoEs. It doesn't seem likely :)

A popular way would be to get them all in melee with the same friendly, and then nuke one of the crowd. ;)

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