exactly. it can be exploited but that is easily controllable
Mercs of Mikunn - 3 Year report: The Once Secret BGS mechanics and how to figure out exploits
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
- Start date
exactly. it can be exploited but that is easily controllable
If the BGS isn't addressed this year I doubt it'll come anytime soon. FD has their internal plan on what to do next and won't deviate from it too much.
And considering this entire years updates come for free I wouldn't scream too loud either. Ask yourself if EA would do the same or if Star Citizen goes live this year, to which you can utter a Not bloody likely.
And considering this entire years updates come for free I wouldn't scream too loud either. Ask yourself if EA would do the same or if Star Citizen goes live this year, to which you can utter a Not bloody likely.
Well, I believe Frontier can. We just have to persuade them its needed.
I've been thinking more about that transaction vs. value problem.
One way to make the transaction system less exploitable is by making it finer grained. Turning everything into individual transactions.
It would require more data storage, but would remove the exploit of breaking up tasks into smaller and smaller transactions.
If delivering 100 units of X would always count as 100 transactions, selling them at once or in 1 units at a time would be the same.
The system would have to remember how many wanted ships got destroyed - making handing in the bounties of 10 ships for 10,000 cr as effective as one bounty of 100,000 cr. *
Things could be made more interesting by adding a modifier depending on what is needed in the system or what would have more impact on the influence of a faction.
This could affect exploration - every object of a system scan or detailed surface scan - would be one transaction, but some objects would be basically useless (for example icy objects) while others would increase the influence quite a bit (high metal planets, earth likes).
This could even allow for more diverse effects on the BGS, with some actions affecting more the INF of a faction and others affecting primarily the various states of a faction.
*) Edit: the 10 bounties could have more effect than just handing in one bounty, but the same effect as handing in 10 individual bounties or all 10 at once. Add the different effects per transaction it could increase INF differently than reducing the lockdown state.
One way to make the transaction system less exploitable is by making it finer grained. Turning everything into individual transactions.
It would require more data storage, but would remove the exploit of breaking up tasks into smaller and smaller transactions.
If delivering 100 units of X would always count as 100 transactions, selling them at once or in 1 units at a time would be the same.
The system would have to remember how many wanted ships got destroyed - making handing in the bounties of 10 ships for 10,000 cr as effective as one bounty of 100,000 cr. *
Things could be made more interesting by adding a modifier depending on what is needed in the system or what would have more impact on the influence of a faction.
This could affect exploration - every object of a system scan or detailed surface scan - would be one transaction, but some objects would be basically useless (for example icy objects) while others would increase the influence quite a bit (high metal planets, earth likes).
This could even allow for more diverse effects on the BGS, with some actions affecting more the INF of a faction and others affecting primarily the various states of a faction.
*) Edit: the 10 bounties could have more effect than just handing in one bounty, but the same effect as handing in 10 individual bounties or all 10 at once. Add the different effects per transaction it could increase INF differently than reducing the lockdown state.
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It already does - the daily bounty report includes the number of claimed bounties.
Missions are already submitted one at a time.
Disaggregating exploration data so it didn't matter if you turned in a page or one at a time should be easy (and Frontier presumably have an interest in *not* encouraging people to repeatedly generate small transactions)
Trade has already been mostly disaggregated and that could be continued (though I think rewarding mixed-commodity loads up to a point is a good thing)
It's just bounties and bonds where
- you don't have an option to split them up
- the optimal behaviour is so counter-intuitively different to the behaviour the game hints at it feels like a bug.
I don't buy the "black box" arguments on that one - absolutely, the BGS should remain undocumented in its specifics and reward research and thought. But you could apply the same argument to the rule:
"handing in combat bonds during a war reduces that side's influence".
Black box, very easily discoverable by research, not particularly intuitive so rewards experts ... also would I think be considered a bug by 99%+ of players if it ever got implemented.
Certainly it's possible to sit in an engineered ship/wing in a RES or CZ and invincibly rack up bounties indefinitely. But that's a problem to be solved in the NPC encounter design - CZs especially need a redesign anyway to have more interesting scenarios than "brawl in random bit of empty space" - not in the BGS. In the transactional model it's even easier to do because pretty much any ship is capable of dropping into a CZ, splashing an Eagle or Taipan, and jumping out. With a bit of luck with CZ locations and careful use of nav locks, you could even skip most of the delays on flight time.
Automatic disaggregation of bounties (so still transactional, but a bounty is a bounty whether it was for an Eagle or an Anaconda) should be practical.
Hidden mechanics are often due to a feature not intended to be core gameplay. The BGS - that is "Background" sim - was likely supposed to just simulate a dynamic environment. We only see facade of this software development - games are a bit like theater, if you knew what was happening behind the stage you wouldn't believe the story anymore.
That the discovery of the workings in the BGS is gameplay people embrace is nothing peculiar - ED is kinda a sandbox after all and players always like to come with things to do by themselves. That is the point of a sandbox.
You don't even need a sandbox - it was completely sufficient to hand players rocket launchers to have them invent rocket jumping.
That the discovery of the workings in the BGS is gameplay people embrace is nothing peculiar - ED is kinda a sandbox after all and players always like to come with things to do by themselves. That is the point of a sandbox.
You don't even need a sandbox - it was completely sufficient to hand players rocket launchers to have them invent rocket jumping.
I would be forced to disagree with you here. (please bear in mind I'm an advocate for balanced mechanics rather than any particular means of achieving that balance). The transactional mechanics force a cmdr to be highly active (if repetitive) in order to min max. travel, activity, travel, dock, cash repeat - as i mentioned before this has a natural sanity limitation. For bounties and bonds in particular it is far more passive, Sit , let the ship pew. - and if the healies are any indication any "NPC Encounter" solution for a sole cmdr wont work for a wing.
its also important to consider that value/transaction balancing should be quite different for different activities. And such balancing isnt always in terms of time/effort vs rewards if there are other factors at work.
Take murder for instance. It is a powerful BGS tool which may not be directly matched by another BGS activity but comes with external non BGS costs such as notoriety and potential rebuy costs. There are still some tweaks that should be done here for BGS purposes to close a few loopholes, but I'm quite happy with the direction.
I think, and I could be wrong, that the system counts how often bounties got handed in and not the amount of ships destroyed that resulted in the bounty transaction.
Turning the system into a truly - and fair - transaction based system would require to store more information. Not sure if that is something FDev wants to do or can do without a performance hit. (But I think it would be worth it as it would make the BGS more "realistic" and more logical.)
Every information that gets stored increases the complexity and cost (storage, access time …) of the database. I guess FDev tries to optimize the database for the BGS by turning many things into one before it gets stored.
Using value for BGS manipulation is using a single number as a way to guess the amount of actions done to get to that value. Certainly makes things easier for the system, but results in problems if the values for activities change (bounties increase, higher paying trading…).
I'm pretty sure that it counts individual bounties - the numbers always seem plausible for that.
I see lots of "X bounties = X000 credits" in the less-travelled systems, and while it's certainly possible that someone killed 3 skimmers in 3 trips, it seems unlikely.
In my experience, no. Rep calculations get that right.
I think instancing makes this totally impossible. For instance FD has missed to "anticipate" the amount of ships in a system. Or the amount of goods being traded. And so on. We will never have absolute numbers here, just statistics.
I agree with a lot of what you've said, but I still view all of this as a problem with encounter design combined with engineering, and not really for the BGS to solve. And certainly not for the BGS to solve by "the optimal approach drives you mad" [1], which seems like terrible design to me...
If it's possible for a player ship to be so tough that it can sit unattended in a combat area racking up kills without risk - or for two of them to sit paired with healing beams and a brick on the "fire" key - which is certainly currently the case ... then as with the old "park a turret boat next to a capship" trick that Frontier closed off years ago, this should be treated and fixed as an issue in its own right rather than because of any potential BGS side-effects.
Putting per-player caps on bounty/bond influence would be a more practical short-term fix.
Longer-term, getting rid of zones where you can be guaranteed an indefinite stream of enemies is probably the solution - replace CZs with transient POIs (through the USS mechanism, if nothing better is available) with a fixed scenario to either attack or defend a key ship, or assist in a skirmish, or other similar tasks. Then you'd need to move around from site to site anyway, and often have more of a strategy than "none" ... it'd be more interesting in general, too.
[1] For *bounty hunting* this needn't even be the case - if you hang around near most outposts there's a reasonably good stream of weak smuggler/pirate NPCs who can be shot down outside the NFZ one at a time with ready access to hand-in. Generally that's going to be far more efficient than heading to a RES and back...
Now were talking!! This is kind of my ideal where you fly to a station, sign up for a war faction, telepresence to a CQC type instance and fight for one side or the other. Objectives could be built in, could provide a solo or multiplayer experience. Would intergrate CQC into the game. You would lose access to your engied ship for the duration and have to fly whats available - either the SLF types or the stock military vessels. Far better than the current violenceball approach of now.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Absolutely 100% with you there - and the current system took a long time to get balanced!
And between activities.... currently, after two reductions in its impact murder and bounty drops have the same effect except murder is negative, or they would if each bounty gained counted as a transaction in the way each murder does. War bonds are similar to bounties and are not automatically counted until dropped. This is why so many wars against controlling factions have been won by murder monkeys farming authority rather than actually fighting in a CZ. The changes to the impact of murder have been initiated to provide a bit of balance. If a value-based approach was adopted, one necessary consequence would be that bounties would need to be standardised and balanced against war bonds - or the way to win a war if you were the controlling faction, would simply be to go into a res and farm pirates, since the pay outs from BH are always higher than combat bonds. So a likely outcome would be a fixed and much lower payouts for bounties. Then how do you balance against murder - which doesn't have an obvious value to measure?
Maybe 2 years ago we had a lot of internal discussion about the way the BGS worked, intially being hostile to it being transactional - but the more we thought about it, the more sense it made in terms of creating something balanced and not affected by every minor change to the rest of the game.
If I had free rein I would make a few small changes....
- Make each bounty claimed or combat bond a transaction when dropped, not each drop
- Make a data drop without a surface scan have no impact and one with a new discovery worth 5x
- Increase the value of missions to the BGS by a factor of 3 to make them the dominant factor in moving the BGS and effectively levelling the playing field by effort
- Increase the number of "BGS points" needed to reach the cap for a system by a factor of 5, or even 10. Its absurdly easy to change influence currently.
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Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
We talked about this when were having our internal debate on transaction v value. What about fines.... pretty easy to load up a cutter with something of very high value and then float about in front of stations getting scanned. Its feasible to rack up a fine of >200,000,000 in one move. That's a lot of bounty hunting or trading!
This thing is still working ?? I thought FD fixed it in some ways!
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Currently its a -1 transaction and hence pretty trivial But if there was a switch to altering influence via value of activities rather than transactions it woud rapidly become an issue.
Which brings to mind another issue - there may have to be some repricing to balance between different faction types that have different illegal goods (and what about Anarchies)
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