Current state of rare purges

[Olyn]

Here's my initial thoughts on this, along with a couple of spitball ideas to add to the discussion:

I don't like the weekly thing as much because it could cause active players to lose their suit of eq to a vacation or an extended power/internet outage or something.

As someone already mentioned, this is a tough thing to balance because some players like to have one character at a time and it sucks when a piece of gear they want is never in and they rarely come across another player who has it. On the other hand, we don't want players who prefer to maintain several characters at a time to feel like the system punishes them unfairly.

The current iteration of the monthly rare purge compares time played against the rarity of the item. It takes several more hours of playtime to keep the vorpal sword than it does to keep a swiftbird. One option is to drop the monthly requirements for those more "common" rares considerably. That would mean you still need a decent time commitment to your character to keep the rarest, most sought-after stuff (uniques, important rare set items, etc.) but you don't have to worry nearly as much about your spiked garde or bone bracelet.

We introduced the Magic Item awhile back and there's room for this to expand. Magic Items are kind of tweener items that are more important than common equipment but not quite rare. These items require no special play time to keep and players can hold any number of them, but they're still too powerful to go in sacks and therefore can't be stockpiled. Changing some low-end rares to Magic Items would prevent them from being purged at all. Candidates for consideration here would be Swiftbird-tier weapons and spiked garde-tier armors. It might be nice to see more Magic Items and more awareness of Fireforge, sharding, and augmenting anyway.

We have the ability to accommodate others' ideas to allow for multiple ways to meet play requirements. I'm not sure complexity is the answer, but we could move to a point system where playing your character is just one way to earn points. Here's a rough outline of what that might look like: Players see dedication points on their score. These points are reset monthly, but could allow a few (not all) "extra" points to carryover from one month to the next to reward going above and beyond when time permits. Playing for an hour gives you a dedication point. PK adrenaline counts as 2x or 3x or whatever dedication points. Every x cabal currency earned adds a dedication point, etc, etc. A system like that means a player who wants to just sit back and grind out hours still can, but a player who's engaging in the game in other, more interactive ways, earns his faster. A PK'er is going to easily get his time from adrenaline. Sitting around playing poker will earn you those Herald chips and count extra, as does engaging in groups for killing endgame mobs to earn relics. Finishing quests also gives relics and we could look at adding some relics onto those new bounties that are already quite fun and satisfying to chain. Cabal players would still get their currency from doing their cabal duties. Basically, more engagement means more dedication points which means you keep your rares with less hours than the current system.

[Kalist19]

I don't take any offense guys, it's totally fair to have different opinions.

I do want to clarify one thing though and I probably should have earier. Over the month I'm able to log in quite a bit but it's in different ways. I'm able to log in on my phone sometimes but this would only be for lowbies out of pk. I'm able to log in at work sometimes but this would only be with lowbies to muck about or explore. I'm only able to log in my 'good chars' at home, for limited opportunities.

I have a ton of chars but I only have rares on one (I do have rares on a second but most are pretty common and are always in. I didn't even mean to get any rares on them but they just kind of fell into my lap).

When I talk about logging in all my chars for 'life support' - that literally means log on for 5 mins once a month and quit out. These guys have no rares at all. I'm doing it for the fun of keeping them alive for 15 years and if I feel like playing some specific class I probably already have it at 50. Definitely don't want or expect them to keep rares at all. These guys I usually log on at work, or on my phone, etc. So having all these guys does not detract from playing my 'good char' because I wouldn't log that char on in those circumstances anyways.

I really like your ideas Olyn. I would be a big supporter of any system that gives bigger credit for fighting.

I know it's a tough balance between letting people with limited time stay competitive VS see the best rares out of circulation because some jackass hiding in Escimir scripts for a pile of time per month. At least the fighting thing wouldn't help those types of people out at all.

[Lorne]

Yes to anything PVP related, as this is when you have a risk of losing your rares. (Ok sure, you can teleport from PVE and die, but that's just stupid).

So yes to cabal/coterie currency, aggressive adrenaline, being in a cabal etc.

I don't like PVEing giving bonuses to the quota. This can exacerbate the behind-kaddar-faerie-healer theory.

[Davairus]

OK so we are leaning toward something PVP related.

[Grayden]

How about if you have initiated pvp via murder command during the month, the time requirement to keep rares would be half. Even those not as interested in pvp would then have more incentive to face a warlord in the arena.

[Lorne]

That can be easily abused. Can just "murder" your buddy and flee. It can be multiplier with a time, but not an automatic discount.

[Davairus]

I think there is a mathematical way to do this. Basically, the MUD is a population. There is an average number hours played every month. 90% of those people should fall within 2 standard deviations of the average. The rest are hoarding and need get purged. That would be the best way to do this in my opinion, instead of trying to guess an arbitrary number that was maybe fair once upon a time 20 years ago.

Heres how things look right now roughly. 174 players have 103841 minutes of AR. Thats 596 minutes each. Thats 10 hours played on the average. If we add another week to that, at this rate, that's like, ~13 hours. This means that in the current system, the average player is barely avoiding being purged. We are purging the bottom 50% of people who play. This is clearly severe. If we were to apply a poisson distribution to this, and take 2 variances, it means you keep your rares if you play 8 hours. That is tough to binge play at the end of the month, but clearly most people prove over a month it is doable.

For the calculation I made here, I ignored people who have zero mins logged in that month and new (ie under level 15). That is the physics guys side of me, reckoning it up and making guesswork. I did not ignore the person who has played like 170 hrs, and you can see that level of play has not appreciably affeccted the final hours, even though the median is quite small comparitively. But if we do a more sophisticated system, it could ignore hours played over a certain amount.

I think this way, we also would need no abritrary way to see if people were PK active or not, as it is competing for most time on AR, and that means just trying to get people to quit out (e.g. by killing them) is in your interests, as the average hours would drop and make it easier to keep rares as you get kills.

I think we take a risk if we go this way, because we will find out who plays AR just to keep rares. It is obvious after all that most people seem to be just going for the minimum to keep rares. We dont really know what would happen with a dynamic minimum, that is new and uncharted territory. Perhaps we could still require at least a 6 hr min. But, we could show how things are progressing on the players page, so people are well aware if they are looking to get purged and how much they need to play to not be purged. And this becomes a competitive thing and not an arbitrary thing.

http://abandonedrealms.com/players/index.php?sort=mplayed

[Grayden]

I love when you talk nerdy to me, you deserve a mint on your pillow.

Despite being an idiot most of the time, I do well with math and statistics.

Averages are greatly influenced by outliers as you started to adress that by dropping those low numbers but you really just want to drop the top and bottom 10%, average what is left, then anyone with less than 10% of that average gets purged of rares. That should be fair representation of our population.

By gods see what you get though, it still needs an objective eye.

Trust me, I have a piece of paper that says I am smart.

[Kalist19]

Sounds like a great idea to try. You could always tinker with the number of rares available too if it seems like they are simply being boarded away.

[Davairus]

Got this from the website yesterday.
Remember some people roll more than one character.

[Vhrael]

Executor of Valour - 3 hrs for the month, lol

[Davairus]

Yeah if you had not seen the murderous throngs of evil at 50 as a good-align character that probably would look low. But that is probably 3 hour solid of fighting and getting gangbanged. Who the fuck cares though

[Vhrael]

Mokoto isn’t in that data...?

[Dogran]

Haha, I had two characters purged.

[Kalist19]

Ouch.

Looks like 10-14 hours (or less!) might be a more reasonable target? I still really like the idea of a “pk modifier” - more risk = more forgiving for time cutoff.

Like Davairus said before, that 3 hours of Trovo fighting a mass of evils at 50 is probably more valuable than someone scripting training/farming for 20 hours...

As it currently is there is a point at which you realize you won’t make the time cutoff and you simply give up (ie not even log in) - which is the opposite of what we want. We want people to log on. Even if it’s a Hail Mary at the end of the month where you might squeak it in if you get a pk, better to log in and try for it than to just sit on the couch bc there’s no chance. 🤷🏼‍♂️

[Erlwith]

I thought the easy solution was just gamble / go keeper if you can't hit the hours?

Judging by how many people log in 50s and stay logged in at the top of the month purge, I think most people would prefer not to allow less activity to = more rares. If anything it seems obvious to me purges are great for surges in activity.

[Davairus]

Why are you trying to speak for everybody?

[Vevier]

I was pretty upset when i didnt keep some of my rares with the amount of playtime that I put in this month. I would be in favor of lowering the cap for hours while keeping the scale that we have now (which, for example, currently allows you to keep a swiftbird but not a vorpal at a certain amount of hours).

Gambling is a good solution for some people, but rares are a big part of the game. Sets are another big part, but many by design are made of low level items that need to be engraved out for competitive play. I had my pk hayday in thews and chromatic metals because I could engrave in high quality rare items. Besides, half the fun is getting the cool item and showing it off.

[Erlwith]

Sorry Dav, I don't want to speak for everyone. I was just looking at the connection between rares being available in game and people (50s) being logged in.

[Bladefury]

Or stop bitching and log more hours. 20+ hours a month will let you keep any rare if you cant log on for 20 hours a month which doesnt even equal an hour a day and your bitching cause you lost rares then you're dumb and did it to yourself. whining about losing things they didnt meet a requirement to keep smh.