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Developer-Notes #12 - Loot-2.0 Follow-Up

The Jetman said:
not on caly but check the turrelion Sea wraiths out on cyrene, 10hp with 10hp regen
Click to expand...

Are those only to be found in the maze there? I'm on caly at the mo and had thought about those, but they are a bit too violent with their regen maybe.
But yes, that is the sort of thing I am looking for, so that I can decide when to deliver the final blows, as it were...
Thanks :)

On the comments towards DoA: she has the best grasp of statistical theory in my opinion and a few people have backed this up. It is a very simple truth that you have to be statistically relevant when doing anything repeatedly chancy. This is why it is best to try out runs with "cheap rolls of the dice", but that are still clean rolls without problems of overkill etc.

Also, very simply, I only expect a few multis per hundred mobs/clicks/drops and the rate appears to halve or so for every higher multi-type. And personally, I need about 50% of loot to be from multis in order to break even. On 100x1 ped mobs this may be about 50 peds from non-multis, plus multis of maybe 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 10, 10, 20.
Additionally I see half a chance of 40 peds, a quarter of a chance at 80 peds etc, so if I am only on 90% on several runs I don't mind if every 400 mobs I get a 40-pedder.
 
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StarGlider said:
In 30 rolls, I would imagine I would roll a few 6 or a few 5. So, going by the dice theory, would you expect after 30 rolls, not 1 of them would be a 5 or a 6?
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The probability of 30 rolls in a row yielding 4 or less is simply (4/6)^30=~0.00052%.

Now, EU is a bit more complex than a dice roll.
 
Antrace said:
i read some post last days and some players believed that faster you kill a mob better the loot is. so i think MA is referring to this timer not to the personal play time.

i think they have setted a optimal cost to kill for each mob and closer you are better the loot is (not in quantity ped, but in quality)
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Just did some reading again and this part pretty much says it all on how it goes.
"There is no inherent “kill timer” for each creature; Optimal Loot is calculated based on costs, not on time."

So there's no need to kill it fast but there's need to kill it cost effectively but on the other hand kill it as fast as one can and cost effectively seems on point and so the better the loot will be.:wise:

Did a few small runs yesterday(like 1 to 1.5 hour) on prototype bots and it went pretty well so what i wrote above seems to hold true so far :laugh:
 
I wonder if MA thinks damage enhancers considered cost effective or efficient :scratch2:
 
Erza said:
Just did some reading again and this part pretty much says it all on how it goes.
"There is no inherent “kill timer” for each creature; Optimal Loot is calculated based on costs, not on time."

So there's no need to kill it fast but there's need to kill it cost effectively but on the other hand kill it as fast as one can and cost effectively seems on point and so the better the loot will be.:wise:

Did a few small runs yesterday(like 1 to 1.5 hour) on prototype bots and it went pretty well so what i wrote above seems to hold true so far :laugh:
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i agree with u, sry perhaps i didnt explain well my though
 
sorry I skipped most of the calculations, but I couldn't help noticing that this is effectively the announcement that the loot engine considers markup when generating loot at kill time.

this admission is probably not going to help with the lucky/favored avatar theories :rolleyes:
 
Bertha Bot said:
To best achieve Optimal Loot:
  • Be sure to have the Hit Ability and Damage profession requirements maxed (10.0/10.0) on the weapon your avatar is using.
  • Avoid over-amping (using a weapon amplifier that adds more than 50% of the maximum damage of the weapon to which it is equipped).
  • Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.
In general, the lower the cost to kill a creature, the higher the proportion of loot composition will be Optimal Loot. There is no inherent “kill timer” for each creature; Optimal Loot is calculated based on costs, not on time.
Click to expand...

i been doing exacly
  • Be sure to have the Hit Ability and Damage profession requirements maxed (10.0/10.0) on the weapon your avatar is using.
  • Avoid over-amping (using a weapon amplifier that adds more than 50% of the maximum damage of the weapon to which it is equipped).
  • Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.
and i get 30% less return as be4
 
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Optimal loot:
Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.

Once we have finished with absolute tt payout observations, I'd be interested in optimal loot quality (or not) going by the above statement.
It also says elsewhere there is no 'timer', so can we get some idea about how much loot quality is destroyed by healing? Is it healing costs which somehow go into the quality calculation, or also just equipping a healing tool or so?
Otherwise I see no need for the second half of the statement if time itself is not actually considered.

Have still not decided on a mob to do a test on - I'd prefer something other than argo for this (as I want a regen mob), but I don't want something as high as atrox either. Hmm, feffoid maybe - I'd prefer lower if possible.
 
Optiomal Loot

Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.
Click to expand...


I wonder if MA is looking at hots from resto chips as overhealing or interuptions to damage somehow as the hots tick.
I would hate to think I am being penalized from getting optimal loot because my hots are being considered heals while dealing damage. I use my mod resto ALL the time.
 
[*]Be sure to have the Hit Ability and Damage profession requirements maxed (10.0/10.0) on the weapon your avatar is using.
[*]Avoid over-amping (using a weapon amplifier that adds more than 50% of the maximum damage of the weapon to which it is equipped).
[*]Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.


I would ask to any programmer: is it possible that MA tracks every avatar and every mob he is killing and before give loot it will check if he healed (and how much), overshooted, or whatever other things that should have influenced the loot quality?
 
Mac said:
I wonder if MA is looking at hots from resto chips as overhealing or interuptions to damage somehow as the hots tick.
Click to expand...
If we take the MA's quote literally then it doesn't apply to resto chips at all. Suppose there's something keeping track of the damage dealt, to detect if it's continuous. For the resto chips it'll always report uninterrupted shooting. If so we should exclude whole class of healing tools from this formula? Neah, fishy... I don't think it works that way.

So how else could it work? By considering the healing cost as a negative indicator? Goes something like this: at first we look at fap decay and add something to the loot to compensate for it. Then we look at the same decay again and replace the high MU part in the loot with shrapnel as a punishment for using FAP? Strange, very strange...

Unless maybe someone can figure out some other way to set up a system that corresponds to the MA's description... I'm starting to doubt this description itself is correct. Seems to me something important is missing, or maybe explained in the wrong context or sth :scratch2:
 
jetsina said:
Optimal loot:
Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.

Once we have finished with absolute tt payout observations, I'd be interested in optimal loot quality (or not) going by the above statement.
It also says elsewhere there is no 'timer', so can we get some idea about how much loot quality is destroyed by healing? Is it healing costs which somehow go into the quality calculation, or also just equipping a healing tool or so?
Otherwise I see no need for the second half of the statement if time itself is not actually considered.
Click to expand...

I think that once again you're overthinking that (as it was proved that many other things initially said were overthought here and indeed they were proved to be much more simple).

I read it as just minimize killing costs; interrupting damage dealing to heal would indirectly increase killing costs in all mobs that have regen (since by taking breaks to heal instead of doing damage you would allow them to regen more, needing more damage, so higher costs).

So, in my vision, is all about indirect effect, not direct... as in combat healing is not bad as per se, but is only bad because it lets the mob regen more, which forces you to dish more damage (to cover for the extra regen), though costs more to kill.
 
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DoA said:
I think that once again you're overthinking that (as it was proved that many other things initially said were overthought here and indeed they were proved to be much more simple).

I read it as just minimize killing costs; interrupting damage dealing to heal would indirectly increase killing costs in all mobs that have regen (since by taking breaks to heal instead of doing damage you would allow them to regen more, needing more damage, so higher costs).

So, in my vision, is all about indirect effect, not direct... as in combat healing is not bad as per se, but is only bad because it lets the mob regen more, which forces you to dish more damage (to cover for the extra regen), though costs more to kill.
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You seem to believe regen is not compensated in loot. If you believe that then your logic makes sense. Otherwise...
 
Fifth said:
You seem to believe regen is not compensated in loot. If you believe that then your logic makes sense. Otherwise...
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There are two totally different algorithms.

Quantity wise (TT value) regen may or may not be compensated (I still think it isn't, but I have no strong evidence for this so I may very well be wrong).

Quality wise (optimal loot, which I translate in 'higher rarity loot') you want an as low as possible cost to kill (without any other factors considered) and here nothing is compensated... is basically a DPS race.

The thing about healing is clearly mentioned only in the optimal loot (quality wise) section.



On a more general view, I read the whole loot 2.0 as:

Step 1: Loot value is determined (TT value) and here pretty much everything is compensated (they mentioned ammo, decay, healing costs, armor costs, etc), maybe not entirely, but still quite a bit, with a small (maximum 7%) boost to the high-efficiency weapons. So having higher kill costs is not necessarily so bad in this regard.

Imagine something like (obviously oversimplified): loot_return = kill_costs * (92.5 + efficiency/10)%, resuling in 92.5% return rate at 0% efficiency and 99.5% return rate at 100% efficiency.

Step 2: Once the loot value is determined, determining the loot composition follows, and the lower the cost to kill, the more rare loot you'll get. And here it matters if you're minimizing your costs or not.



That post clearly states exactly that... minimizing costs to kill moved from affecting loot quantity (in 1.0) to affecting loot quality (in 2.0):

Charlie|MindArk said:
Let's see if I understood the question correctly.

There is no separate added "punishment" for not using a maxed weapon. The downside of using non-maxed weapons is still just a consequence of not doing the full damage potential and missing a few extra shots.

Using weapons that you do not have maxed skills for now has a considerably smaller negative impact on the "loot value" than it did in the past. Not dealing the full potential damage with each shot used to negatively affect the "loot value" returns greatly but now primarily negatively affect the "loot composition". For the "skill misses" (not evades) these still do affect your "loot value" returns negatively as they did in the past.

However as stated in the Dev notes #11
"A special hunting bonus pool will be implemented that will distribute funds from various sources, including skill misses, PVP, marketing and special events, which will improve overall loot returns for all participants." So the decay and ammo usage generated by missed attacks can sometimes find its way back to you.

With that said MindArk still always recommend using maxed out equipment for better results but the downside to not doing so is now smaller than before.
Click to expand...



So by not minimizing your costs (aka overprotecting with armor, in-combat healing or whatever you can think at) you won't (necessarily) get (much) lower return rates, but you will just get more shrapnel / common loot and less rare loot (items).
 
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Antrace said:
[*]Be sure to have the Hit Ability and Damage profession requirements maxed (10.0/10.0) on the weapon your avatar is using.
[*]Avoid over-amping (using a weapon amplifier that adds more than 50% of the maximum damage of the weapon to which it is equipped).
[*]Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.


I would ask to any programmer: is it possible that MA tracks every avatar and every mob he is killing and before give loot it will check if he healed (and how much), overshooted, or whatever other things that should have influenced the loot quality?
Click to expand...

It is possible. All the checking and calculations will happen locally on your pc and a bunch of numbers will be passed over to MA server which will calculate result and pass it over which again is locally converted to show you your loot.
 
Divinity said:
It is possible. All the checking and calculations will happen locally on your pc and a bunch of numbers will be passed over to MA server which will calculate result and pass it over which again is locally converted to show you your loot.
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thanks, it makes sense.

but i see another problem then.. i dont like when calculation are made on single players pc. ..

i'm not an expert but it seems easier to ... crack

cheers
 
Antrace said:
thanks, it makes sense.

but i see another problem then.. i dont like when calculation are made on single players pc. ..

i'm not an expert but it seems easier to ... crack

cheers
Click to expand...

not really, you just need to do a server check whenever you get a multiplier
 
Antrace said:
thanks, it makes sense.

but i see another problem then.. i dont like when calculation are made on single players pc. ..

i'm not an expert but it seems easier to ... crack

cheers
Click to expand...

Which is why MA is anal about software that has access to memory and locks your account the moment they see anything suspicious.

As they say in software security, everything in this world is hackable. The goal is to make it so expensive for someone to hack that the gains from hacking the system are overshadowed by the cost to hack it. :)
 
DoA said:
There are two totally different algorithms.

[snip]
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So you're saying it does actually work as I proposed. Double check healing decay and (as you pointed out) the 2nd pass can totally ignore regen.
Alright, we certainly can't say it's impossible. Possibly maybe...
 
Divinity said:
It is possible. All the checking and calculations will happen locally on your pc and a bunch of numbers will be passed over to MA server which will calculate result and pass it over which again is locally converted to show you your loot.
Click to expand...

As a software engineer with experience in the game industry, I disagree. It would be far too easy to exploit locally. I could easily make a memory trainer that told the server whatever I wanted. With almost all MMOs (and especially with real-world money involved) everything is done on the server. You can actually see this in EU hunting, that's why you get the "failed" messages. Every shot, every fap, every time you interact with anything, you submit a request to do so to the server and it responds with a result. All tracking and calculations are server-side. The client is little more than a fancy output window.

That being said, your answer is still correct in that it's most definitely possible to track every detail of the hunt and they would need to do so to calculate the loot. It's unlikely the data is kept in memory for very long, however, and it's not likely stored.
 
Detritus said:
As a software engineer with experience in the game industry, I disagree. It would be far too easy to exploit locally. I could easily make a memory trainer that told the server whatever I wanted. With almost all MMOs (and especially with real-world money involved) everything is done on the server. You can actually see this in EU hunting, that's why you get the "failed" messages. Every shot, every fap, every time you interact with anything, you submit a request to do so to the server and it responds with a result. All tracking and calculations are server-side. The client is little more than a fancy output window.

That being said, your answer is still correct in that it's most definitely possible to track every detail of the hunt and they would need to do so to calculate the loot. It's unlikely the data is kept in memory for very long, however, and it's not likely stored.
Click to expand...


I agree on this that the failed messages do imply that every hit is being acknowledged by the server, else the issue of failed would not happen to begin with. One of my "Duh" moments really cause I also agree with your exploit comment since we had to implement server side authentication ourselves for an rng dice based game which initially we had thought of keeping client side. :)
 
Ahhh... Either MA's statement is clear as mud or I suspect this will be the most intense global dpp nerf this game has ever seen.
 
Atrax said:
... this is effectively the announcement that the loot engine considers markup when generating loot at kill time.
Click to expand...
Yes, certainly seems that way. Don't know about the rest of 2.0 ('cuz I prolly don't really understand it) but this idea is brilliant. :yup:
 
Atrax said:
sorry I skipped most of the calculations, but I couldn't help noticing that this is effectively the announcement that the loot engine considers markup when generating loot at kill time.
Click to expand...

Fifth said:
Yes, certainly seems that way. Don't know about the rest of 2.0 ('cuz I prolly don't really understand it) but this idea is brilliant. :yup:
Click to expand...

Not necessarily MU, they may simply go by rarity, since, generally, the items with MU have a higher rarity.

So something like shrapnel < very often < often < common < uncommon < rare < extremely rare (or whatever denominations were on Entropedia for example); I think that's the way they do it and it would make much more sense instead of constant on the fly analyzes over MU and so on.
 
How I understand loot quality algorithm so far:
The system figures out what your gun is capable of, and divides mob's hp by your dps (however this is computed). This is the "optimum" cost to kill. Any increase in real cost to kill vs optimum cost to kill, will result in a decrease in loot quality (even though loot quantity will still be based on a different algorithm, as long as you're skilled enough for said gun / weapon you should get within 7% of max available).

I still have some questions about all this loot 2.0:

- is there any penalty (on either the loot quality / quantity) in the new loot system for changing weapons (using multiple weapons) to kill the same mob? (other than the max 7% variance based on weapon efficiency)

- does the hot from restoration chips and HoT faps count as interrupting damage dealing? or are we only talking about lowering overall dps compared to weapon base dps

- if the optimal loot is based on keeping as close as possible to weapon's dps (as little regen as possible, as little overkills a possible) resulting in the lowest possible cost to kill for that weapon setup, what happens when the user uses two weapons (i.e.: melee users or whomever uses a tagger or finisher).
 
good questions bogdanc. I would imagine it's the total costs irrelevant of what weapons etc are used. So if someone used tagger, main and finisher then their total costs for all three would be factored in.
 
To best achieve Optimal Loot:
Be sure to have the Hit Ability and Damage profession requirements maxed (10.0/10.0) on the weapon your avatar is using.
Avoid over-amping (using a weapon amplifier that adds more than 50% of the maximum damage of the weapon to which it is equipped).
Minimize healing costs and the need to interrupt damage dealing to heal.

In general, the lower the cost to kill a creature, the higher the proportion of loot composition will be Optimal Loot. There is no inherent “kill timer” for each creature; Optimal Loot is calculated based on costs, not on time.


To me: they have set a optimal cost to kill for every mob.
When we kill a monster they calculate our cost to kill that is a sum or a function of weapon decay+amno cost + heal cost + armor decay (i dont know if it is a simple sum or some costs are more important than others).

And at the end we player cost to kill (PC) is compared with optimal cost to kill (OC).
PC/OC = xxx% -> more close it is to 100% better is the loot (in quality).
 
Antrace said:
In general, the lower the cost to kill a creature, the higher the proportion of loot composition will be Optimal Loot. There is no inherent “kill timer” for each creature; Optimal Loot is calculated based on costs, not on time.
Click to expand...

This could simply mean that optimal loot will be optimal loot, and if it cost you less to kill that mob then of course that optimal loot will be a larger % of overall loot.
 
Detritus said:
As a software engineer with experience in the game industry, I disagree. It would be far too easy to exploit locally. I could easily make a memory trainer that told the server whatever I wanted. With almost all MMOs (and especially with real-world money involved) everything is done on the server. You can actually see this in EU hunting, that's why you get the "failed" messages. Every shot, every fap, every time you interact with anything, you submit a request to do so to the server and it responds with a result. All tracking and calculations are server-side. The client is little more than a fancy output window.

That being said, your answer is still correct in that it's most definitely possible to track every detail of the hunt and they would need to do so to calculate the loot. It's unlikely the data is kept in memory for very long, however, and it's not likely stored.
Click to expand...

Imo build up for loot is a ongoing process, and when we meet certain criterias loot is payed out.
System doesn't "remember" any value other than those that are active, this is why MA can't see what
loot we should have got when we e.g ctd.
Might be several layers and levels for this, since we can get a bonus at certain circumstances.
 
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