Keep Task and Participation Tracking

Participation Tracking Changes

The participation tracking mechanic for all tasks, including keep takes, will be changed. While it was always a minor issue, it got to the point that some people explicitly abuse it and not just some minor behavior change (e. g. before the nerf to siege / door damage participation people would seek out abandoned siege weapons or doors while participating in the keep take).

Instead of tracking the exact amount of damage against things and giving them different weights (e. g. 100 damage against doors is the same as 1 damage against players), there will be a point system and you get a fixed amount of points for certain actions if you do them in the context of the task and each action is only awarding these points once per person per task.
The actions giving those points are the same that give participation right now (existence, death, kill, heal, damage against players, damage against guards, etc.) the major change however is that afterwards it won't matter if you killed 1 person or 1000, only the first kill will award participation points which determine your share of the pool. It also remains that anyone in your group doing an action will also give you credit for it as long as you are in range.

In the end that means that there won't be as huge differences in the awarded rp as there can be right now, the abuse potential will also be greatly reduced at the cost of no longer rewarding those that do the "most".

Keep Task Changes

The keep task will no longer start on server launch / automatically, instead once a tower is taken by a realm that does not own the keep a keep task for that keep will start unless there is already an active keep task. Depending on how this variant goes it's possible that we will add ways to move the task to another keep or that there will be a certain minimum player requirement on the attacker side to trigger a task.

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:20 PM by Vlas

So your punishing me for making an effort in defending and taking keeps and rewarding those that do nothing , as in we get the same reward is that right?

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:32 PM by Sepplord

sounds as if participation RP for just leaching into the task (aka dying once in keeprange) will increase

Before you would get a few points and bascially not get much participation because you only have a fraction of points compared to someone being active the whole time.
Unless there are thousands of different triggers to collect a point for at least.

For example: if there are 10 different triggers, the maximum the active person can get is 10points, while the task-tagger will have 1/10 for driveby shooting a guard in a tower once?

The abuse you are trying to combat with this change must be enorm, because the nerf of rewards for actual succes and effort sounds harsh

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:35 PM by

gruenesschaf

Sepplord wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:32 PM
sounds as if participation RP for just leaching into the task (aka dying once in keeprange) will increase

Before you would get a few points and bascially not get much participation because you only have a fraction of points compared to someone being active the whole time.
Unless there are thousands of different triggers to collect a point for at least.

For example: if there are 10 different triggers, the maximum the active person can get is 10points, while the task-tagger will have 1/10 for driveby shooting a guard in a tower once?

The abuse you are trying to combat with this change must be enorm, because the nerf of rewards for actual succes and effort sounds harsh

The actions will still award widely different amounts of points, for example dieing will be only a fraction of killing something and variants of existing actions will be tracked individually (deathblows in addition to just kills for example), but yes in order to tick all the boxes you would just have to do all things once.

And yes the abuse can lead to quite a huge amount of participation for 1 action in particular and another one that is also rather undesirable, however, special casing those would also affect certain things negatively.

A potential middle way could be to still track certain things that would not be abusable, for example player kills, however damage or heals can't just be tracked as is.

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:38 PM by Prometheus

Nice, so this basically means you don't need to put any real effort into anything, killing 1 guard is the same as killing 100, doing 1 point of damage to a door is the same as placing a ram and sieging it, killing 1 player is the same as killing 100, etc.

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:38 PM by ExcretusMaximus

Vlas wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:20 PM
So your punishing me for making an effort in defending and taking keeps and rewarding those that do nothing , as in we get the same reward is that right?

No, they're fixing an exploit where people would sit in the lord room of keeps and towers and get the lord to 5% then intentionally reset him, farming him for as long as they could before people showed up, and getting massive rewards for it.

Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:40 PM by Sepplord

gruenesschaf wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:35 PM
Sepplord wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 9:32 PM
sounds as if participation RP for just leaching into the task (aka dying once in keeprange) will increase

Before you would get a few points and bascially not get much participation because you only have a fraction of points compared to someone being active the whole time.
Unless there are thousands of different triggers to collect a point for at least.

For example: if there are 10 different triggers, the maximum the active person can get is 10points, while the task-tagger will have 1/10 for driveby shooting a guard in a tower once?

The abuse you are trying to combat with this change must be enorm, because the nerf of rewards for actual succes and effort sounds harsh

The actions will still award widely different amounts of points, for example dieing will be only a fraction of killing something and variants of existing actions will be tracked individually (deathblows in addition to just kills for example), but yes in order to tick all the boxes you would just have to do all things once.

Thanks for the clarification, that reduces my concern and sounds like a good midway

Sun 27 Oct 2019 11:16 PM by shintacki

Sounds like another thing to make new players and new toons even harder to rank up. Not necessarily a good thing but I don't imagine were really seeing tons of new players anyways so whatever.

Sun 27 Oct 2019 11:30 PM by Strikejk

Ok lets be honest here.

I knew about the exploit (never abused it myself tho) and I know why you are doing it and what you try to combat with it. But how you try to do that sounds terrible at best to me, at least the way you described it.
Just hitting every door, every player and every guard once (basically like feather mobs in sidi/galla/midthingy) to ensure you get full credit is a terrible idea for various reasons, especially if you don't track how much damage is done.

Example:
Scenario 1: 10 guards stand around, you can focus damage 1 guard for 1000 damage and get 1000 points rewarded. You did your rvr job well.
Scenario 2: 10 guards stand around, you bomb all out of CC in order to ensure you hit everyone with 1 damage so you get full credit. You only did 10 damage in total and made it suck for everyone else.

Before the change, the guy in scenario 1 gets more RvR credit. After the change scenario 2 gets more RvR Credit.

And this will be the same for doors, guards, siege weapons, enemy players, etc. All will run around and try to hit every feather mob to get full credit - eh sorry, I meant hit every player and npc to get full RP credit.

Is this really what we want?

---

A second big problem, people who actually do the majority of damage to enemy players, will probably get less RP then some dumwit who blows AOE into the zerg with minimal damage. Also the people who do the majority of AOE damage will get the same as the dumwit who spams grey aoe in order to get credit ticks for everyone.

This change will lead to player play the game in bad style that nobody really wants if they could choose.

Sorry but there must be a better option to resolve the cheese problem vs lords cause that "solution" is worse than the cheese itself.

Edit: If you look for a quick n dirty HOTFIX in the meantime, if possible, disable that you get RP credit for doing damage to lords and that you dont get RP credit to heal damage taken from lords.

Mon 28 Oct 2019 12:07 AM by

gruenesschaf

Strikejk wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 11:30 PM
Ok lets be honest here.

I knew about the exploit (never abused it myself tho) and I know why you are doing it and what you try to combat with it. But how you try to do that sounds terrible at best to me, at least the way you described it.
Just hitting every door, every player and every guard once (basically like feather mobs in sidi/galla/midthingy) to ensure you get full credit is a terrible idea for various reasons, especially if you don't track how much damage is done.

Example:
Scenario 1: 10 guards stand around, you can focus damage 1 guard for 1000 damage and get 1000 points rewarded. You did your rvr job well.
Scenario 2: 10 guards stand around, you bomb all out of CC in order to ensure you hit everyone with 1 damage so you get full credit. You only did 10 damage in total and made it suck for everyone else.

Before the change, the guy in scenario 1 gets more RvR credit. After the change scenario 2 gets more RvR Credit.

And this will be the same for doors, guards, siege weapons, enemy players, etc. All will run around and try to hit every feather mob to get full credit - eh sorry, I meant hit every player and npc to get full RP credit.

Is this really what we want?

---

A second big problem, people who actually do the majority of damage to enemy players, will probably get less RP then some dumwit who blows AOE into the zerg with minimal damage. Also the people who do the majority of AOE damage will get the same as the dumwit who spams grey aoe in order to get credit ticks for everyone.

This change will lead to player play the game in bad style that nobody really wants if they could choose.

Sorry but there must be a better option to resolve the cheese problem vs lords cause that "solution" is worse than the cheese itself.

Edit: If you look for a quick n dirty HOTFIX in the meantime, if possible, disable that you get RP credit for doing damage to lords and that you dont get RP credit to heal damage taken from lords.

It would be slightly better (or worse, depending on how you look at it), the one hitting a single guard once that at some point dies and the one hitting a million guards once each time where at least one dies at some point and the one killing 10 guards solo would receive the same participation points: some for having done guard damage and some for having participated in killing a guard, actually the solo person would get some more because he was also hit by a guard. It would be better in there being no point in running around just tagging things but worse because there would be no additional reward after having participated in the kill of one guard already.

Ofc it's not what we want but we also don't want something that's as easy to abuse. A possible alternative would be to just remove npc and door damage from counting, however, that would negatively affect people who actually raid keeps. Sure we could now change it to only count having participated in a guard kill and ignore guard damage entirely but then we are encouraging the tagging behavior.
The alternative would be to leave it as is, maybe slightly adjust how npc damage weighted, and just punish people who abuse it. However, that requires that someone is around to notice the abuse. Automating something here also wouldn't really be feasible as a small group engaging a tower lord and disengaging because of inc or some other reason and then reengaging would not really be distinguishable from someone who just disengages and reengages in order to abuse it. Given that it would be somewhat hard to monitor, the consequences would have to be rather severe and for most probably out of line just to heavily discourage even attempting it, however then there is still the issue that judging whether a particular occurrence was abuse or not is sometimes not really clear cut. Also even if it wasn't intentional abuse (by all or at least by everyone but the person causing the reengage), just making the mob disengage and reengage (for example someone outside the range pulling aggro), would already lead to more potential participation on everyone and these unintentional reengages would then at least become questionable as well.

A possibly workable middle ground could be to cap guard / lord / door damage at the highest amount of damage done to players by someone in the given task, e. g. if someone did 20k damage to players in the rvr task, the most guard / lord / door damage that would count would be the first 20k. However, that could lead to cases where that damages counts for nothing at all if no player is involved in a given tower raid for example. It really is all just trade offs, I don't really see any solution just work 100% of the time that doesn't at least have weird edge cases and so the it's just to take the least bad option.

Mon 28 Oct 2019 1:35 AM by Mavella

How many people are going to get massive free ranks off of stupid task abuse before you actually roll their rps back?

Shall I remind everyone of Stunbot? I'm assuming this abused by far more people but at least probably didn't award such ludicrous amount of rps.

Where's a punishment?

If this change also stops the task from bouncing between the far keeps where people just farm suiciders good riddance.

Mon 28 Oct 2019 2:40 AM by easytoremember

Mavella wrote: ↑
Mon 28 Oct 2019 1:35 AM
If this change also stops the task from bouncing between the far keeps where people just farm suiciders good riddance.

Run around and get jumped by groups or hide underneath your guards, tough choice

Mon 28 Oct 2019 1:15 PM by wizzlemcdizzle

why not just remove all benefits from keep taking unless the keep actually gets taken?

Back in the olden day, i don't remember getting rewarded for things like this anyway.... it seems to me the whole rewards system for RVR participation is fairly broken anyway. I do like free RP's and all, but sometimes i get a chuckle when i get a tick for participation that i wasn't expecting and see a few thousand RP roll in for seemingly nothing... half the time i collect RP's i'm not even sure why i'm getting them....

RP's used to be earned by killing players...... IMO bump the RP totals for killing players, and remove the majority of the incidental bonus / reward stuff all together.

BG / Groups involved in a completed keep / tower take maybe get some RP's, but again, it seems like promoting PVE for RP play in general.... if we want more players to be out there killing eachother, give us some bonuses for that rather than PVE keep take stuff..... ESPECIALLY if it's being abused.

My 2cents..

W

Mon 28 Oct 2019 2:35 PM by Hector

I think In their quest to make casuals gain RPs easier, the RP reward system was so messed up from the beginning. From suiciding on keeps to taking flags to dropping TWF on guards, this has created a server where 9 months in there are hundreds of rank 8+ players. It’s kind of stupid but I guess if this is the goal of the server it’s right on par.

My concern here is that there is SUCH a wide gap in starting vs existing players here that a change like this really makes it difficult to accept without some kind of rr wipe

Mon 28 Oct 2019 2:55 PM by Roto23

Strikejk wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 11:30 PM
Ok lets be honest here.

I knew about the exploit (never abused it myself tho) and I know why you are doing it and what you try to combat with it. But how you try to do that sounds terrible at best to me, at least the way you described it.
Just hitting every door, every player and every guard once (basically like feather mobs in sidi/galla/midthingy) to ensure you get full credit is a terrible idea for various reasons, especially if you don't track how much damage is done.

Example:
Scenario 1: 10 guards stand around, you can focus damage 1 guard for 1000 damage and get 1000 points rewarded. You did your rvr job well.
Scenario 2: 10 guards stand around, you bomb all out of CC in order to ensure you hit everyone with 1 damage so you get full credit. You only did 10 damage in total and made it suck for everyone else.

Before the change, the guy in scenario 1 gets more RvR credit. After the change scenario 2 gets more RvR Credit.

And this will be the same for doors, guards, siege weapons, enemy players, etc. All will run around and try to hit every feather mob to get full credit - eh sorry, I meant hit every player and npc to get full RP credit.

Is this really what we want?

---

A second big problem, people who actually do the majority of damage to enemy players, will probably get less RP then some dumwit who blows AOE into the zerg with minimal damage. Also the people who do the majority of AOE damage will get the same as the dumwit who spams grey aoe in order to get credit ticks for everyone.

This change will lead to player play the game in bad style that nobody really wants if they could choose.

Sorry but there must be a better option to resolve the cheese problem vs lords cause that "solution" is worse than the cheese itself.

Edit: If you look for a quick n dirty HOTFIX in the meantime, if possible, disable that you get RP credit for doing damage to lords and that you dont get RP credit to heal damage taken from lords.

So as it is now you can't cc guards in the zerg anway. Thanes.....

Mon 28 Oct 2019 3:22 PM by Forlornhope

Roto23 wrote: ↑
Mon 28 Oct 2019 2:55 PM
Strikejk wrote: ↑
Sun 27 Oct 2019 11:30 PM
Ok lets be honest here.

I knew about the exploit (never abused it myself tho) and I know why you are doing it and what you try to combat with it. But how you try to do that sounds terrible at best to me, at least the way you described it.
Just hitting every door, every player and every guard once (basically like feather mobs in sidi/galla/midthingy) to ensure you get full credit is a terrible idea for various reasons, especially if you don't track how much damage is done.

Example:
Scenario 1: 10 guards stand around, you can focus damage 1 guard for 1000 damage and get 1000 points rewarded. You did your rvr job well.
Scenario 2: 10 guards stand around, you bomb all out of CC in order to ensure you hit everyone with 1 damage so you get full credit. You only did 10 damage in total and made it suck for everyone else.

Before the change, the guy in scenario 1 gets more RvR credit. After the change scenario 2 gets more RvR Credit.

And this will be the same for doors, guards, siege weapons, enemy players, etc. All will run around and try to hit every feather mob to get full credit - eh sorry, I meant hit every player and npc to get full RP credit.

Is this really what we want?

---

A second big problem, people who actually do the majority of damage to enemy players, will probably get less RP then some dumwit who blows AOE into the zerg with minimal damage. Also the people who do the majority of AOE damage will get the same as the dumwit who spams grey aoe in order to get credit ticks for everyone.

This change will lead to player play the game in bad style that nobody really wants if they could choose.

Sorry but there must be a better option to resolve the cheese problem vs lords cause that "solution" is worse than the cheese itself.

Edit: If you look for a quick n dirty HOTFIX in the meantime, if possible, disable that you get RP credit for doing damage to lords and that you dont get RP credit to heal damage taken from lords.

So as it is now you can't cc guards in the zerg anway. Thanes.....

Exactly, and now they're going to be more encouraged to play this way. Which is NOT a good thing. CC is there for a reason and even in zerg fights is important. That's how you can combat an 80 man zerg with less that 30. This is not possible when every mez that gets laid out gets instantly broken by a dumb ass immediately AOEing the clump. This is a terrible change,

Mon 28 Oct 2019 4:36 PM by Sepplord

Forlornhope wrote: ↑
Mon 28 Oct 2019 3:22 PM
Exactly, and now they're going to be more encouraged to play this way. Which is NOT a good thing. CC is there for a reason and even in zerg fights is important. That's how you can combat an 80 man zerg with less that 30. This is not possible when every mez that gets laid out gets instantly broken by a dumb ass immediately AOEing the clump. This is a terrible change,

How is this behaviour more encouraged now? You don't get more contribution for tagging more guards, you don't get more contribution for killing more guards. From THAT POV the change is really good as it equalizes the bonus between people who tagged 20guards and the ones that tagged only 2

Mon 28 Oct 2019 10:13 PM by Tyrlaan

It´s about time they combat the abuse of killing (bugged) archer guards to maximize RvR participation task extra bonus. Poor Animists who abused it the most. 10000+ extra RPs every 30 minutes just from casting shrooms below archer guards...

IMO participation bonus should be just that, a bonus. If you want RPs scaling with contribution, most ways to participate already give those. Damage to guards and siege don´t - for a reason. Soil, branch and snow should increase the extra bonus though - ´cause there´s no other purpose to them at 50.

Guard tagging is encouraged anyway with the guard tasks. But these tasks have RP rewards diminishing very quickly, on a daily reset not 30 minutes.

Mon 28 Oct 2019 10:16 PM by Riac

take out the bonus all together, shits dumb and just encourages ppl to act dumb.

Tue 29 Oct 2019 2:10 PM by Katraz

Welcome to Socialism.........
Any questions?

Tue 29 Oct 2019 2:36 PM by Strikejk

First off I want to thank you to delay such an important change.

And I also want to ship in my idea of a possible solution, basically a hybrid of both systems.

1. You have checkboxes for everything, like you said in your opening post. So for damaging, getting damaged and killing guards/npc's. Damaging siege equipment and doors. Damaging, killing and getting damaged by players, etc. All these can be done once per task and reward a baseline of points. This is in order to give people a base set of points but not as much as people who do the boatload of work but also more than the people who just suicide on keeps.

2. You get additional points for damage against enemy players.
3. You get additional points for damage against doors and siege equipment, however these have a lower weight due to the much higher damage and a reasonable cap to avoid abuse.
4. You get additional points for damage against guards/lords, also with a slightly lower weight but with a reasonable cap to avoid abuse.
5. Points need to be shared between group members so healers & buffers also get their share
6. Healing/Rezzing TBD - could be like number 4.
7. Determing a reasonable cap - If possible make this dynamic based on the amount of player damage. This way people who do the most damage to other players will always get more RP's than someone who farms damage on guards/lords/doors, even if there are low amount of enemy players available. This is an rvr game and people should always know that the best way to earn RP is to fight other players and not some cheese with some NPC's who barely fight back at all. (And let's be real, the cheesers don't like it either cause it's boring AF to them as well, but they do it cause its profitable)

This way people who just suicide on a keep get almost no rewards. People who participate in tasks and are somewhat active but don't do much also get a baseline amount of RP (also the people with limited time at their disposal). And the people who do the boatload of work still get more RP's for their work.

In short comparison:
People who suicide on a keep, get less reward
People who are half afk participating (or only come in for a short period of time), get slightly more reward
People who do the boatload of stuff, get slightly less reward
People who cheese by farming damage on lords, guards & doors, get much less reward due to the cap

Thanks for reading and I hope this provides some ideas on how to implement a better system.

Tue 29 Oct 2019 3:31 PM by Wakanidoo

With all the last bad changes in the game, no doubt for me now, Abydos the Killer of Uthgard is part of the Phoenix staff.
R.I.P. Phoenix.
Amen.

Wed 30 Oct 2019 4:47 AM by Tyrlaan

I liked it more with automatic keep tasks. Very noticeable in the off hours with low pop. Everybody had a location to go to/look for enemies. Now there´s simply no active task anymore, no keep to flock to.

But also very odd during rush hour when zergs are taking towers (and keeps) left and right but just because the first tower raided after a completed keep task happens to be Seelixh at some remote DDB or Glen tower the task has a keep nobody in their right mind would actually try to raid.

Wed 30 Oct 2019 5:09 AM by Politician

Only been playing this shard for about 5 months now (and my first time back since live 2003-09)... I have noticed a population decrease and IMO will even cause more of one now! Now people making new toons and what not will have a harder time competing since getting "ranks" now will be even harder! And hours when the population is super low, whats the point of playing? WAY TO GO, Dumb change IMO!

Wed 30 Oct 2019 5:11 AM by inky2019

This is far one of the worse changes the devs have made imo. This is not a way to gain new players to the server only to help lose more. What is the advantage to a new player ? Something like this should have been done at the launch of the server not a year after launch.

Wonder how much the population is going to die off due to this totally unproductive change ?

Wed 30 Oct 2019 9:22 AM by desp

Congrats guys!
You killed this server fast and deadly!

Wed 30 Oct 2019 10:28 AM by pegasus30

We ran around for 30 mins last night. All i saw was a fgh that would kill us 2, instantly OR no one at all. We tried going around Bled, EV, DC, Beno and even hunting grounds because we were so desperate. We gave up finally. Maybe my timing was bad or people went different direction but ive never seen the server that empty. Whatever it is, just put back auto keep task for now. This is just like Live when i left it last time.

Wed 30 Oct 2019 12:15 PM by oldmanukko

ok, it's only been a few hours and i understand what the devs are trying to prevent and i appreciate your efforts. really do. but, i think this "fix" against those who are taking advantage of /tasks hurts the people who are actively participating in RvR and try, way more.

Wed 30 Oct 2019 2:28 PM by Cash

Seriously, I agree that getting RR11 while purposely avoiding real RvR is stupid but I'd rather bust zergs that are farming RPs than not have anyone to fight... and giving people a way to fly through low RR and get the basics to compete was the best decision you guys made. I really think it's simple, either cap bonuses that don't come from player kill or actually completing a keep take, OR have those rewards scale down with higher RR... you can still cheese your way through low RR but the higher you get the more you have to fight real people... many would play toons to RR6 then reroll

Wed 30 Oct 2019 4:00 PM by Tommylad

Well this Keep Task nerf is up there with anything Mythic or Broadsword is famous for. With the Defend blah keep or Attack blah keep task option it was much more likely that people would get involved in RvR. Now prob not so much, but more to point it just seems a pointless nerf.

Wed 30 Oct 2019 5:55 PM by jackatom74

I am glad that we are trying new stuff, but I already miss the tasks automatically rolling. This gave people direction and got them moving around to different areas they might not normally frequent. Now in low pop times it seems like we stall at points when no tower is being taken so not task is assigned.
As for the exploit with the damage to the tower captains maybe just remove there ability to be worth rps. You already get a reward for taking the tower .

Hoping you find a better solution. Good luck!

Thu 31 Oct 2019 9:22 AM by Prometheus

Well I did some testing with the new changes to participation tracking I think it's about 1/10th or lower than what it used to be, I just wanted to experiment to see how much fewer realm points you would get for sieging a tower and killing guards, I killed probably 10 or more red guards and received 294 realm point bonus for the participation, I think as it is you don't have to worry about people just randomly sieging a tower or killing the guards, I know I wouldn't waste my time doing that again, probably should just remove the participation realm points all together for the guards and sieging if it takes that much to get a minimal reward, on the other hand, I do like the extra bonuses you get now for participation for killing other players.

Thu 31 Oct 2019 9:27 AM by

gruenesschaf

Prometheus wrote: ↑
Thu 31 Oct 2019 9:22 AM
Well I did some testing with the new changes to participation tracking I think it's about 1/10th or lower than what it used to be, I just wanted to experiment to see how much fewer realm points you would get for sieging a tower and killing guards, I killed probably 10 or more red guards and received 294 realm point bonus for the participation, I think as it is you don't have to worry about people just randomly sieging a tower or killing the guards, I know I wouldn't waste my time doing that again, probably should just remove the participation realm points all together for the guards and sieging if it takes that much to get a minimal reward, on the other hand, I do like the extra bonuses you get now for participation for killing other players.

The way it works here, and all participation thingies have always worked, is an rp pool is filled by (primarily) player kills and any action you do gives you participation points (e. g. 1 damage = 1 point), at the end the percentage of the total participation points you earned is how many % of the rp pool you will receive. It's basically zero sum as you don't get realm points directly from participation, therefore if some action now yields fewer participation points (like dmg vs guards) while other actions yield the same amount as before, those unchanged actions are now worth more (like killing players in this case).

Thu 31 Oct 2019 2:00 PM by shintacki

Keep task participation doesn't count towards the Complete Realm Tasks task. Is that intentional?