[Feedback] Item rewards and queue times in MP incentivize resigning

By your logics then the discussion is pointless and the current system is as good as its going to get.

The idea you present by saying nothing is better then something is provably false. A person is going to be inclined to play it to the end if they are going to get something.

 

No. Under my system the elo's would be reset every two weeks. In practice anyone who is dedicated enough will be able to reach over 1000 elo after several elo resets because the player population is never stagnant.

Many top players who keep winning eventually stop trying. Once they have the best cards, what's in it for them to grind their way to the top again? These guys will play MP once in awhile but not everyday. Additionally, once you make it to the top brackets grinding out those 5 wins will not be easy either. One loss and you could lose anywhere from 20-30 elo and get possibly pushed out of the top bracket.

Then give no reward for any elo below 500. Below 500 and you're not even trying.

 

Except I'm not saying nothing is better than something at all. I'm saying it's not a smart use of your time to go after looser rewards instead of resigning earlier (unless you can build a suicide deck I guess). You would still demonstrably get more and better loot in the same amount of time by just forfeiting match ups you know not to be good (because you've played against that team before or your first couple turns have been atrocious) than by playing every match to the finish.

I don't think adding looser rewards in any form can affect the root cause of the problem, which is the exponential reward scaling in multiplayer that require a large amount of wins and therefore time to achieve.

 

So what you are suggesting, is that players will game the system building suicide decks (which as I already pointed out is incredibly easy to spot this form of abuse) or feel that they are "guaranteed" better rewards from first turn forfeiting as this forum is claiming is currently the case.

You are not "guaranteed" to get a match up you can win. In my idea on the other hand you are guaranteed something.

The current gaming of the system guarantees absolutely nothing so saying that they can guarantee they will get something better by not playing it out long enough to get their guaranteed basic chest, is not just complete speculation on your part. In fact I would argue that the only way you can demonstratably guarantee better reward is only if you can guarantee going up against an npc you are sure you can beat.

So even assuming your assumption is correct. Which it very well might be, you still say there are better uses of your time then to play out a match long enough to get the what you view as, too small a reward to justify being there.

How about fun?

I mean that is entirely what this thread seems to be forgetting in all the debates and arguements isn't it? How about making the player feel like they are important enough to give them at least some reward for their time?

In multiplayer you would be hard pressed to find a player who had fun losing, and got nothing, by comparison a player who lost, but got something could probably say they had fun.

The games in general will last 5-10 minutes from my experience, with 5 minutes tending to be when you are absolutely getting stomped one way or the other, and ten minutes being more closely matched. If you play out the game that long, you are generally believing you may have some sort of chance. If at the end, you actually got something you might be less inclined to put the game down in frustration.

Currently I don't play multiplayer much. I consider it a waste of time because if I lose I get nothing and if I get bad matchups I will continue to get nothing. If for losing I got something like a chest with two treasures that could be anything, bad matchups suddenly give me something, a chance for improvement despite the loss. Its not as great, but it is in fact better then something.

To point out, the players you speak of who wouldn't stay to the end, are players who don't play this game for fun. They are playing it to "win" in their minds. What does forfeiting until you get a matchup that guarantees a win offer you as far as fun goes? Sure it gives you a better overall reward but it offers you no gaming experience in the mean time.

Your hypothetical player is not the player this system appeals to. It appeals to the player who legitimately wants to play, but does not because there is nothing in it for them when they had a hard matchup that they might have won.

 

Then again, is this really a problem?

Opponents will gain easy victories. Which might be boring and sometimes annoying, but rewarding anyway.

Intentionally tanking your rating mostly helps when going for 7+ victory chests, for 1 victory chest it's almost always more efficient to try to win the first match. Same for 3 victories.

 

Of course for your other speculation of a loser reward will not solve the problem, let's look at a highly popular multiplayer game. You've heard of it I am sure its called league of legends. Now to forfeit early if I remember correctly, requires 20 minutes to have passed, and a majority of players to agree to forfeit.

Are the losers of these matches offered no reward? In fact they are given rewards, a much smaller amount of reward, but they are still rewarded.

So if you have not figured it out I essentially added the league of legend reward system and customized it to fit into how card hunter is set up. Why? Because it seems to work and it seems to keep players playing.

So how then did league of legends do it just right enough, but you believe card hunter can not do something similar and meet with similar results?

 

Players who play multiplayer for fun will do it regardless, I would think. I can only speak from personal experience but playing a few more rounds past the last gold chest, even when I know I don't have time to go for the epic one, is no problem for me at least.

It seems that someone who games the system, by tanking their rating or forfeiting players they don't like, is a lot more reward oriented and just getting "something" would not change their behavior. I don't think this behavior is that much of a problem in Card Hunter right now, everyone plays for their own reasons and as long as they don't have too much of a negative effect on other player's experience they should be left to their own devices.

I'm wary of giving people an incentive to not resign, even with all the safeguards Ultreos proposed.

As for League of Legends I think its model is in large part responsible for the widespread smurfing and toxic community; I don't think it's a model worth emulating.

 

It's the genre as a whole that is responsible for the toxic community, there is no game in that genre that doesn't have a toxic community, it's part of the hyper competitive team based nature.

 

I don't see this as a massive problem anyone who is just in pvp for the items is doing it wrong and should just grab the first two chests and then move on to pve. pvp is not the optimal way to farm items as much as people like to think that and wasting your time dumping your rating also takes time for that matter so this all seems pointless.

 

As much as I hate daily login rewards...that seems like one system they could replace the current system with, if they were solely interested in reducing concessions.

 

People should pvp for their pvp gear daily login bonus is just not a fix to this honestly and like you i do hate them.

 

Here's the chart:

http://www.rhsmpsychology.com/Handouts/schedules_of_reinforcement.htm

Rewards based on a schedule where the ratio (e.g., number of wins before a reward, or size of reward based on number of wins), or an interval (e.g., the reset timer), is predictable tends to encourage massing your behaviors right around the time you get the reward. And that's what we see, players play only a few matches, get their reward and stop. Or game the system by with strategic resigns. The problem is putting players in a situation where they know they won't be well rewarded on a win. Not much point in behaving at those intervals. It's very odd that carthunter uses a fixed schedule, given that random drops were sort of designed to provide a variable ratio, variable interval schedule.

Let me be clear: I think removing the chest track and replacing it with "brown chest on a win" would be a fine and simple solution, even though it is strictly worse than the current system from a rewards perspective. I'm not advocating for better MP rewards in this thread (though I think it's probably better to have something like "random chance of bonus item/better loot rolls" that happens when you get a win streak and improving the MP rewards more globally to make them closer to parity with SP), better MP rewards is a separate issue. This is just about smoothing out the MP curve to get rid of the weird schedule that encourages play/rest cycles.

 

SwapGoTron is a CHAMPION OF CARDHUNTRIA

Not only i am in for kil-....i mean, Winning Streaks, but i too am a little despondent with this behavior. I usually get a ton of surrenders going my way whenever i open with a Fireball/Frost Cone, but i admitedly only play so much multiplayer because there´s a very specific reward out there. Because multiplayer has high variance on drops (they can be any level), there´s also the possibility you get absolute lvl 1 trash in your golden chest, which makes the whole process very frustrating. The game does not incentivize resigns, its just that there is no real thrill on the games you play other than the golden chests. I don´t expect anything bigger than an uncommon treasure in my brown chests (i don´t complain when i get something better, mind you), which means that all I am doing is a build up for an actual reward, which feels drab when you stop and think about it

Making the rewards smoother, and even possibly improved with winning streaks would make every game relevant in terms of rewards. Instead of having to go through a punch clock sequence where you resign the moment your hand is not up to par (this has happened to me very often, it kind of culls my hype when the victory sign shows up so quickly), there´s now an incentive to play at your hearts delight, which is to see how far you can push your victories and be activelly rewarded many times over instead of aiming for specific goals in your schedule

 

I think you're correct about the chest track essentially encouraging play/rest cycles, and possibly even try to win / chain resign cycles for unscrupulous players. But on the other hand, I think the chest track adds a bit of interest and motivation to what would otherwise just be a featureless and unremarkable chain of games, with nothing special to aim for or to look forward to.

I don't think having a rest/play cycle is a bad thing. I think that aspect of the chest track is fine. I don't think it's a problem if some people just play for 1 win per day, or 3, or whichever special check-point they want to aim for.

I think the only concerning potential problem that I can see is that some people might deliberately tank their rating so that they can easily chain wins to get the pink chest at the end of the track. I say 'potential problem', because I don't think anyone is actually doing that currently. It would be a very bad thing if such a strategy became common place. It would be bad for the people who wait their queuing time just to see the enemy resign right away, and it would be bad for people who get matched against players far stronger than they are just because the strong player had been tanking their rating. But I'm not convinced that people would actually use that strategy anyway. I'm not convinced it would actually be rewarding enough for players to try to exploit it.

There are a few reasons why I think players might not try to exploit it. Firstly, if a player cares about their rating at least as much as they care about items, then they won't try to tank their rating. Secondly, depending on how the rating system values the player's history, it may take a lot of losses to tank the rating down to the point where the player gets easy matches - and even if the player is instantly resigning for the losses, they will still have to wait a significant amount of time for the matchmaking. Thirdly, the matches may be easier to win once the rating has been tanked, but that doesn't mean they'll be quick matches - and it doesn't guarantee a perfect win-rate. If the time taking for the matchmaking of the instant-resign matches is longer than the time 'saved' by not losing quite so often, then there is nothing at all gained by tanking the rating.

So depending on how quickly the rating system responds to a chain of wins and a chain of losses, and depending on how quickly the matchmaking system finds matches, there may not actually be any benefit to deliberately tanking anyway. And what little benefit there may is somewhat offset by the fact that it's generally more fun and interesting to play games than to simply resign over and over, and also that players tend to care about their ratings and records.

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So all in all, I don't think there is any urgent need to change the current system. As I said, I think the current chest track system adds a bit of interest and motivational goal-setting; and that although it may encourage bad behaviour, that bad behaviour is yet to be seen and may never actually occur. I don't think we should worry about it unless it turns out to be a problem in the future - and I don't expect that it will be a problem.

 

It absolutely will become a problem once the game goes live. New players looking for farm will mercilessly exploit this system.

 

Riddle me this:

There is a player on the MP boards that has a rating less than mine, which is 854. The strange thing is s/he has played over 500 MP games, won about half of them and has a weekly win number in 3 figures. These numbers stand out like a sore thumb in the tables and I don't see how their rating can be lower than mine, unless s/he is gaming the ratings system as discussed in the thread.

 

Yep. He's exploiting.

 

I think the main downside of this gaming the system is that people who have opened multiple epic chests (thus have some insane items) also have low MP ratings. This makes new guys (like me!) wind up facing off against them.

Being pub-stomped on a regular basis certainly does not encourage a person to stick to MP, especially when the results of that loss are absolutely nothing for your time. No chest, no XP, no gold. Just lost real life time.

If you have opened a purple, you have shown you can win a LOT, and consistently. There is no reason your rating should ever slip under 1,000 after that point.

 

I would expect someone exploiting the system to usually have more losses than wins. Do wins against the AI not boost the rating by as much as losses against humans? Maybe someone should ask this person what they are doing and does it work. (Or an admin could pull records about them to see for themselves what they are doing.)

If this is indeed a case of someone exploiting the system, it would be interesting to know if it's actually being fruitful for them in terms of items. Is the time spent winning reduced enough to offset all the time spend deliberately losing (if that's even what they are doing).

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Incidentally, I just had a match against a fairly high rating opponent who resigned on the first turn. The match went like this: they used Elvish Insight. My dwarf ducked it and used it back at them. They then resigned. I asked them why and they claimed it was because they had bad cards in their starting hand (my cards weren't very good either, and they couldn't see most of them anyway). Their reason seems very weak to me, because we weren't anywhere near close enough to start fighting anyway. They would have got at least one more set of cards before we started fighting, and they could easily have gotten two sets if they wanted to avoid the fight while they wait for better cards. In any case, they'd decided that they'd lost the match right at the start, and so they resigned.

The point of this story is that people sometimes resign early for legitimate but weak reasons (such as a bad starting hand), and that it is therefore important that even very short games count towards rank - otherwise it would open up a different kind of exploit to the one we've been primarily discussing here.

 

The numbers look loopy, presuming that the games are spread out over a period of time, a 500:200 win:loss ratio isn't that bad, but the 100 plus weekly wins would mean that the previous win:loss could be 400:100 and this weeks 100:100 or 300:100 and 200:100. A win total for the week of 100+ should send your ranking through the roof as well as potentially getting the "20 wins a day" reward for five days. Whatever's going on, it looks to be profitable.

I also refuse to believe that someone who has played 500+ MP games doesn't know what they are doing in terms of ranking / exploiting.

There was a game in the listings last night that lasted 11 seconds and I saw one last week that had a played time of 1 second. I am hoping that the latter one was a glitch...