Developer-Notes--2

Mayday said:

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minim said:

Nomatter how that is implemented it would kill the use of (L) guns and flatten out the hunting MU even more. It would soon drop below 100% lol

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Nah, if (L) guns were still more useful they would still be used more.

Also, some of the (L) guns could be replaced by more and better (L) attachments for the unl. guns

Thank you Mind Ark for this information and the community for your posts. Now i have something to read at work

Bertha Bot said:

There is no such thing as a “personal lootpool” for individual avatars, and there is no system in place which tracks each avatar’s returns over time, or which provides compensation to individual avatars. ... Overall this is a very positive thing and an important part of the Entropia virtual universe concept, as it allows those participants who spend the time and effort to approach their activities within Entropia Universe in a smart way to improve their chances of becoming successful, just like in the real world.

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So it's official, it's gambling.

Thanks for finally clearing that up.

No compensation for losses, no more use playing? Where is your vision? Personal lootpool makes much more sense, keeps players happy, you could even attract a real bank (if MindBank was trashed as a path to follow) to use the deposits to generate profit, making the game a unique advertising front for what is actually a bank account (with the assurance that you have the right to recup deposits minus what you spend on markup) ... I thought you were smarter. Turns out you're just another gambling site.

Daniel Steps said:

So it's official, it's gambling.

Thanks for finally clearing that up.

No compensation for losses, no more use playing?

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No, you are completely and utterly misinterpreting the whole thing and reading stuff that is not there into it. Just like a lot of others in this thread have.

It's really hard to put it not offending...this must be one of the most negative and least intelligent community there is. Everyone's screaming 'gambling' if you did not manage to break even or profit believing in a false theory you won't do it now either. Don't tell me everyone of you was waiting for the 'compensation ATH'...

Nighthawk said:

No, you are completely and utterly misinterpreting the whole thing and reading stuff that is not there into it. Just like a lot of others in this thread have.

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"There is no such thing as a “personal lootpool” for individual avatars, and there is no system in place which tracks each avatar’s returns over time"

And how can you read this into something else?

If you talk with some more experienced players, they will tell you that in the early years of the game, Eco mattered quite a bit, and if you were Eco enough, you would succeed as a hunter. At some point, MA changed the loot system in a very obvious way. People who had been profiting consistently suddenly were not, and the HOFs started getting bigger. Some players adapted to this system, and found ways to take advantage of the fact that no matter how inefficiently they hunted, they still got 80-90% of their tt back, and even used this knowledge to their advantage angling for high markup in the hofs that would inevitably come to balance their returns. Over the past year, several friends and I conducted a series of experiments shooting different amounts of ped into the ground to see if it affected returns. In the course of six or seven of the largest tests (those with 500 or more ped "wasted"), our ped was returned each time in a hof. The best result was my first attempt (not the first overall) where I shot 1k ped in the ground and received an 8.8k Argo the following day. I have kept this information relatively secret until recently, because I no longer believe such experiments would provide the same results.

Somewhere between two and three months ago, MA again adjusted the loot system. Perhaps there is no personal loot pool now, as they say, but I believe myself and my other experimenters proved within reason that they at least did exist until the rebalance. Maybe this new system is simply a return to the original one where Eco was the only thing that mattered, or maybe it's something new entirely. Only diligent testing will uncover what new secrets the loot pool holds.

Uvas said:

I knew it! No "personal" loot pools. It would be a horrendous amount of resources used up for that...

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Maintaining a hidden PED (PEC) stack in the inventory would be a "horrendous amount of resources used up"??
They keep track of ammo and decay for every shot, armour decay for every hit (ever been in a flock of rippersnappers?), that is way more resource hungry than a personal loot pool.

Actually, keeping track of TT_VALUE_OF_AVATAR_ON_LOGIN minus TT_VALUE_OF_AVATAR_ON_MOMENT_X is dead simple, and uses next to no additional resources.
Buying ammo/bombs is just a conversion, doesn't change the total TT value on your avatar, only thing you got to keep an eye on is dropping of items and P2P trades (personal & via auction)

Smoerble said:

People who know how programs and randomness works, do not believe in a personal loot pool (because of several reasons).

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I do know how programs and randomness works, and i do believe in a personal lootpool.
For a good reason: If they distribute loot not based on your spendings (personal loot pool), they either do it randomly (which would be gambling) or based on efficiency (highly unfair towards everyone not being able to buy a modfap and a mod merc)

What MA wrote there is hopefully intentionally worded in a misleading way - it is the most discouraging statement i have read from MA ever.

The stupidity of EU players are mind boggling, truly.

Tho they decided to do the good thing and reveal that no personal pools exists, and, possibly, stopped big depositor deposits, as they, or some, smarter ones, have realized that by depositing and shooting mindlessly is not the way to earn money now.

Yes, there is hunting, crafting and mining loot pools.
NO there is NOT personal loot pool.
NO this is not gambling, there are strict regulation that decide whether a logic behind any game is considered to be related to gambling or not. If you were smarter, you'd go and try to license "non gambling" ( LOL ) online poker over in Sweden and you'd find out.

I'd go with quotas. No one has even thought about them.
That's one of ways to deal with pools. You have given a quota from pool, you can suck it dry and then you are given new quota from current situation of the pool basing of your skills, modified by your equipment. globals, hofs and aths are pure random, if u can meet global giving threshold conditions, u are given one.

ill stop drinking now.
cheers and get lucky.

If you are playing slot machines long enought you'll get the ~95% return or whatever it is. WIthout personal 'loot' pool. I do believe this is the most convenient to design a game like EU. Now it's not exactly like a slot machine since you can play the $5 dollar slot using a different amount of money and you also have markup on the outcome. All there is to know.

sledgehammer said:

Over the past year, several friends and I conducted a series of experiments shooting different amounts of ped into the ground to see if it affected returns. In the course of six or seven of the largest tests (those with 500 or more ped "wasted"), our ped was returned each time in a hof. The best result was my first attempt (not the first overall) where I shot 1k ped in the ground and received an 8.8k Argo the following day. I have kept this information relatively secret until recently, because I no longer believe such experiments would provide the same results.

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And this is but many of the things that is wrong with this game. Some algorithm setting apart a portion of the playerbase that can do stupid shit in game and get it all paid back.

sledgehammer said:

If you talk with some more experienced players, they will tell you that in the early years of the game, Eco mattered quite a bit, and if you were Eco enough, you would succeed as a hunter. At some point, MA changed the loot system in a very obvious way. People who had been profiting consistently suddenly were not, and the HOFs started getting bigger. Some players adapted to this system, and found ways to take advantage of the fact that no matter how inefficiently they hunted, they still got 80-90% of their tt back, and even used this knowledge to their advantage angling for high markup in the hofs that would inevitably come to balance their returns. Over the past year, several friends and I conducted a series of experiments shooting different amounts of ped into the ground to see if it affected returns. In the course of six or seven of the largest tests (those with 500 or more ped "wasted"), our ped was returned each time in a hof. The best result was my first attempt (not the first overall) where I shot 1k ped in the ground and received an 8.8k Argo the following day. I have kept this information relatively secret until recently, because I no longer believe such experiments would provide the same results.

Somewhere between two and three months ago, MA again adjusted the loot system. Perhaps there is no personal loot pool now, as they say, but I believe myself and my other experimenters proved within reason that they at least did exist until the rebalance. Maybe this new system is simply a return to the original one where Eco was the only thing that mattered, or maybe it's something new entirely. Only diligent testing will uncover what new secrets the loot pool holds.

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I fully agree. I`ve done very similar tests myself with even more peds and was compensated by hofs soon after. If you check the tracker you`ll see two consecutive 3k drone hofs in 2 days time.

If MA states otherwise they`re either lying or they`ve changed the system recently, thus depriving some people of the amount stashed in their loot pools.

Daniel Steps said:

So it's official, it's gambling.

Thanks for finally clearing that up.

No compensation for losses, no more use playing? Where is your vision? Personal lootpool makes much more sense, keeps players happy, you could even attract a real bank (if MindBank was trashed as a path to follow) to use the deposits to generate profit, making the game a unique advertising front for what is actually a bank account (with the assurance that you have the right to recup deposits minus what you spend on markup) ... I thought you were smarter. Turns out you're just another gambling site.

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Nope, the absence of a "personal loot pool" does not automatically make it "gambling".

In fact, those who have been throwing money at the system to chase a big win, in the belief that the system will protect them from foolish decisions, have been gambling. The false belief in the "90% safety net" prompted them to forsake skill and decision making, two key elements that mitigate against a definition of gambling.

This announcement from the devs is the actual safety net, reminding players to consider their actions very carefully if they want to improve their success rate. The fact that you can improve your returns by correct decisions is a powerful indicator that this is not a casino.

As for "eco", there are many elements to Entropia that are generally not included when people discuss "eco", and as a result, they are overlooked when making decisions that would improve overall efficiency.

Most eco is not always most efficient. Check out this wiki on PED .
(Do follow the links re Veblen and Giffen )

I predict a positive shift in market values if enough people adapt correctly to this new info

Oleg said:

Developer Notes #3

Legion had it right all along!

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The HORROR!!!

Smoerble said:

My feeling is, that MindArk today tried to set the expectations right, because this results in way more happy and way more satisfied customers.

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You think?

Nighthawk said:

No, you are completely and utterly misinterpreting the whole thing and reading stuff that is not there into it. Just like a lot of others in this thread have.

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Perception is reality, Nighthawk. If more folks now think the "game" is even more like gambling because there is no personal loot pool, than that "reality" (even if false) is exactly what will be relayed to others via word of mouth.

Daniel Steps said:

So it's official, it's gambling.

Thanks for finally clearing that up.

No compensation for losses, no more use playing? Where is your vision? Personal lootpool makes much more sense, keeps players happy, you could even attract a real bank (if MindBank was trashed as a path to follow) to use the deposits to generate profit, making the game a unique advertising front for what is actually a bank account (with the assurance that you have the right to recup deposits minus what you spend on markup) ... I thought you were smarter. Turns out you're just another gambling site.

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There is a thread in the mining section, it is sticky, so at the top, its been there for years, its called "mining loot analysis", the guy even wrote a paper about how loot in entropia works from a statistical point of view, it seems a lot of people could learn something from it.

https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forums/showthread.php?132510-Mining-loot-analysis

or for the paper itself:
https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/647/514

The statement on efficiency is arrogant to say the least. When I've started, weapons had the following visible stats:

- max damage
- tt condition
- durability

Faps had no visible stat whatsoever except tt condition. I won't word any conclusion.

And wtf is that efficiency in mining? With what was more efficient avatar x to get a tower of good markup having bombed until then maybe 20% of what I did, while my highest all time high loot in mining was 2800? I've unlocked MS naturally 3 times. I might be EU's most overdue tower looter ever. Efficiency? lol

Same goes for crafting. I understand that when Etopia discovered the duster coat and had 1-2 succeses of 11 clicks he was inefficient? Or that when my only click ever looted of masher one UL was a near succes I was inefficient for who knows what reasons, while I heard about avatars looting bps with dozens of UL wep clicks?

Efficiency it's a nice discussion to be had in what regards hunting, for the other two professions is a sorrow joke.

As for personal lootpool, is more or less not interesting for me since a constant @90%tt return due to a viable rng is pretty much same thing, only a matter of personal perspective.

Infinity01 said:

But I guess there is a collective loot pool.....

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And here goes my favorite lootpool theory which I cherish for all my years in game.

Collective mob-/mineral-/crafting product-specific lootpools (e.g. 50k ATH on Levi's doesn't affect neither Daspletors nor Daikibas lootpools in any way). Every such a pool have subpools: imagine a 50, 5000 and 50000 liter tanks which are filling up simultaneously from the same pipe with obviously greatly different speed. The size of the pool and the tanks is different for different mobs, e.g. for argos the size of the 3rd tank was about 18-19k until recent loot adjustment, and now is about 4.5-5k.

The first tank is from where you get 50-500% of the cost to kill the mob (all the numbers are loose, just to give the idea of the mechanics), but not greater that the size of the tank (thus - those weird 49 pedders). From the second one come out greater batches, although depending on the activity on the mob these can be too small to make it to the hof list even being a 3-digits (there is no technical difference between globals and hofs, and we know it observing 50ped hofs at especially dead times). Every time this tank is getting full - it empties most of it's content on the guys who were peeing in the pipe at that moment, either in one go or in portions (the latter is when we see several globals/hofs on the same mob/mineral/handicrafts for different people at the same time). The third tank poops with 5-digits, and though most of the time it works on its own the same way the 2nd one do, sometimes MA may flush it manually when they feel it's the right time - during events, RL conventions, etc, although even then they don't control who will get it (they could, but what the point?). [*]

The recent argo event is a good illustration how it works and why I don't blame anyone after cycling 8k+ peds ammo without globals while usually get at least one after 300-400 peds - too many people were sucking from the pool at the same time, many of which were doing it much faster than I did, having more opportunities to become that guy who added the last drop to the 2 or 3 tank and made it flush out. So this time it was a pure gambling and I didn't hope for anything but concurrence of circumstances aka "luck".


*) while I don't believe that MA does or ever did "target" ATHs to certain players, I can't fully rule out the possibility that players from whole world regions may be excluded from access to the "third tank" - why give an ATH to someone for whom it's a 5 years salary and he most likely will withdraw it in a blink, and - most importantly - his success won't bring the desired kind of newcomers. Such a method is too bad to be true but too good to not use

,

I played on the high eco path for years. Like others, I too had done experiments over the years and come to beleive in a personal loot pool theory.

However, straight from MA's mouth they say I am wrong. I have no choice but to believe them and try to go back to finding out what "high eco" means.

That is, if I want to get the most ped return. Perhaps I'll find I'm happy with current "not quite as eco" returns I'm getting, enough to pay for my entertainment.

In any case...


Happy hoffing all.

Welcome to the sandbox

!

008

i dont belive this statement....

i will still my believe in my 90% since my Excel say that

oke checked now 2011 using Foeripper maxed and got 90.66992 wtf u say now

minim said:

No matter how that is implemented it would kill the use of (L) guns and flatten out the hunting MU even more.

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That's a bit narrow-minded imo. If old-style weps that deliver a maxed dps similar to Korss were maxed at profession levels around 60 say, and old-style weps that deliver dps similar to LR53/59 are maxed at say 80, there'll be plenty of people still using the L stuff for higher dps, but there'd be better goals to skill towards to. At the moment it's pretty much skill to 100, which for most people is unrealistic, or accept you'll be using SIB/L forever.

Daniel Steps said:

So it's official, it's gambling.

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I don't see what MA have said that makes you think it's more gambling after the announcement than it was prior to the announcement. They've said (a) making good choices affects your results, and (b) 'lootpools' aren't personal. Statement (a) means the game is much less of a lottery than it would be if a player shooting with 2.0 dpp does as well as a player shooting with 3.0 dpp. And with regard to (b) if you now think it's essentially a fruit machine that lots of people play, in the long-run that's no different to a fruit machine that only you play. Also it means new players have a chance to hit it big early too, it'd be hugely unfair if they didn't, for instance any new players who geared up specially for the Argo Scout event would have been wasting their time and money otherwise.

I think both (a) and (b) are very good news. To people who disagree, I suggest playing this.

Mikass said:

I fully agree. I`ve done very similar tests myself with even more peds and was compensated by hofs soon after. If you check the tracker you`ll see two consecutive 3k drone hofs in 2 days time.

If MA states otherwise they`re either lying or they`ve changed the system recently, thus depriving some people of the amount stashed in their loot pools.

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Shame I missed these tests, or you didn't publish the results. The only serious attempt at documenting such a test that I can recall was Konve's mining one, which didn't yield any corrective HoFs.

It's hard to assess your tests and results without seeing the details, but if you're confident of the results, maybe a more productive way to look at it would be to find an explanation that fits your results and also fits MA's statement, before calling it a lie. Perhaps your exceptionally inefficient play in those two days put you on a much more volatile loot distribution than normal, and perhaps the worst-case efficiency loot distributions payout a worse-than-normal return but not as low as a traditional eco calc would suggest.

Anyway, if you outline what you did to produce these HoFs maybe the community can all analyse it, and maybe someone will be crazy enough to try to reproduce the results.

sixty said:

The stupidity of EU players are mind boggling, truly.

.................... smarter ones, have realized that by depositing and shooting mindlessly is not the way to earn money now.

.

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What a crock of poo.

So you are saying that when you pick up your gun, run out into the field, you are confident that you will hit good loot?

Personally I think that you have "zero" clue what your returns will be when you enter the hunting field and being your hunt.

It is simple as this, you use a gun that you know wil take down a mob...click the loot button and wait for it to open.

However the stupidity comes in when you don't know when to stop. I used to have a 200 ped rule, if no global then stop. even so with 1000 peds that give you 5 chances, and if all 5 x 200 ammo runs are really bad...then what? Blame oursleves?

please do not talk smart unless you got evidence please.

Rick

Well, saying I shot the ground and then I got an 8k hof doesn't mean very much.

What about the guy that didn't shoot the ground and hit the 8k hof.

I think I'd rather be the second guy.

Efficiency is the new word for Dynamic

Kerham said:

And wtf is that efficiency in mining?

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Well, the LVL 13 amp stats say that it has the best "efficiency" ... sooooo, maybe everyone should just use them instead and lose 100 times more, go figure...

oh and I want to say something else.

I come home from a hard stressed out day at work, I log in for some entertaining hunting and to relax. I don't want tons of spreadsheets, and analysis...been doing that all day at work.

I want to buy some ammo, go out on a mob I KNOW pays and has paid many times before and hunt it. If the systems decides that it wont pay, we have done nothing different.

Just becasue you lose, doesnt make you a thick hunter, just makes you an active hunter.

Rick

Dev note 1 - Loot from 3 mains professions is not linked.

Dev note 2 - There is no individual loot pool.

Suggestions for Dev note 3 :
- There is a lootpool for every mob. Or:
- There is one unique loot pool.

Suggestions for Dev note 4 :
- Impacts of skills variations on loot waves.

Can't wait...


I can't see how saying there is no individual lootpool makes suddenly EU a (total) gambling game. (?)
To compare with RL : there is no pre-defined destiny, everyone can succeed with knowledge, hard work, relations, good decisions. Luck is a very small portion of success in RL.

I've been sayin this for years, it's simply not NECESSARY to track everything in a system to set up odds. OFC eco counts, why would mod mercs exist otherwise and why would MA have limited so much. Imp/Mod faps, i2870, i can go on and on. I don't need to rig a game of die to get a 1/6th odd. The universe we live in isn't trackin my every dice roll. Mu and cost to kill compared to another andhte system unfolds itself. OFC u get outliers, things that trigger odd phenomenon in the system, doesn't make it law nor necessarily repeatable. Having a database that tracks all and acts accordingly to even ur loots even with silly decisions is just not even fair, by any logic, why would it be.

Whatever algorithm they use to give the "odds" can get stuck on some variables and give some funky results. You see it sometimes when u change a weapon, chip in/out, change some variable and suddenly ur on fire.