Badges? I don't have to show you any stinking badges

[Kylinn]

Oh, I hope we're not doing away with per-Breath badges. Since our characters have to start over from scratch and lose the CP they gained from the badges with each new Breath, it's only fair that they should be able to try for new ones again.

[Pikanchion]

[saulres]

If you get rid of per-breath badges, then the lifetime ones have to have additional threshholds added.

[Teksura]

[Tathers]

Thanks for the update.

[D-Rock]

We still doing a character reset at Breath 3.5?

[Repth]

Good job. Can't wait to see the new Valhalla.
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hi

[Ellimist]

How far away do you think it will be, roughly?

A few weeks? A few months? A year?

[Kylinn]

[Teksura]

[Sweedee]

[Arimith]

What if we keep the current system, but just don't award CP for career badges. If you want to get the CP, you have to earn it every breath.

Leave career stats as purely bragging rights.

[saulres]

[Arimith]

Could link it to xp.

What if every 10,000 xp gives you 5 cp? gives people a reason to keep getting xp once maxed and doesn't restrict the bonus to people doing weird things that they normally would never bother with.

Total xp = Cumulative total bonus cp
10000 = 5
20000 = 10
30000 = 15
40000 = 20
50000 = 25
60000 = 30
70000 = 35
80000 = 40

If this makes too much cp available, this could also scale up - maybe increase the difference by 1000xp each stage:
Total xp = Cumulative total bonus cp
10000 = 5
21000 = 10
33000 = 15
46000 = 20
60000 = 25
75000 = 30
91000 = 35
107000 = 40

[Teksura]

I've split this off since it's turning into a thing. So, let me give everyone a big history lesson. Just to give you an idea of what went into this: Writing this post explaining the state, history, and reason behind all of this took me about an hour and a half.



Nexus War ran for about 3 years with 19 achievement stats. In that time, not one single person came anywhere near successfully grinding out all of them, even if you exclude the HP healed badge which nobody managed to get. Remember that nobody grinded all of the stats because it's going to come up later quite a lot.




When we started breath 1, we pretty much just copied over the original thresholds from Nexus War even though we knew that our breaths would be a lot shorted than the 3 year run of Nexus War. Adjusting this was pretty low on the priority list since we were more focused on things like getting pets working.


Breath 2 came about and this introduced the problem of accomplishment badges. Up until this point, we had never come up against a situation where characters face a reset or "lose" CP in the deal. There was a lot of discussion on this one single point. Those discussions evolved in pretty much this way:


Bob raised the problem of how we should deal with accomplishment badges. If we should link them to breath stats or carrier stats. There were pros and cons to both. Carrier badges would mean that many characters would be punished for doing what they do. If you played your main as a raider this breath and gained CP badges for damage dealt and kills, then you'd better play them as a crafter next breath. Breath badges had a number of problems which ranged from a big "screw you" to anyone who was close to a badge before a reset, to encouraging people to re-grind the same stats over and over again.

I had originally offered the solution of allowing characters who earned their accomplishment CP badges to simply start the new breath with that CP. After all, what harm does it really do if a character starts with that CP? Realistically speaking, if you were to go through the trouble of grinding out 2 different stats all the way to 1000, that just means you start with enough CP to get your combat tree at the start. That's just an 800 XP head start skill-wise. AND you should also remember that, at the time, the CP limit was based on the banked CP, not the CP spent. So you would ONLY be able to spend that accomplishment CP on mortal skills. You'd still need 70 more CP worth of mortal skills before you could tier up to tier 2. At the time, I had a lot of support for this idea because after about a month or so it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference anymore and people dead set of accomplishment grinds could still do happily do more grinds.

Bob disliked that idea. He argued that it would be unfair to new players for older characters to have any sort of advantage at the start of the breath. I'm not really sure how that's different from older characters having an advantage over new characters at all other times, that wasn't an issue I pressed (this discussion took place at a time when I would go out of my way to try and accommodate Bob) so I really can't explain that one.

I offered the alternative of holding onto the CP until the character was maxed out, then giving it to them.

Bob said "no".

I had also offered the idea that your carrier stats actually give you a discount on the badge threshold. I think I had says that every 100 points (that's the badge before the first CP badge) you had in the carrier stat at the start of the breath would mean that you'd have a 5% reduction in the required number for your breath CP badge. So, if you shot 500 targets last breath, you'd only need 375 and 750 targets shot for your badge in the new breath.

Bob said "no", and determined we would be going with the carrier badge only system for breath 2. He used the logic that people who wanted to grind could always find something else to grind for, since nobody was able to grind everything in all of Nexus War. The discussion was closed on this matter after that and it really wasn't fought since we were more concerned with "make it work" as opposed to "make it work well".



Breath 3 work started, and the discussion re-opened. This time, I was able to point to my characters who were pretty raid heavy. Many of them had earned accomplishment badges in breath 1 just from normal play. I focused on this as a case example when pitching the problem with the system we were using, since anyone who was not specifically focused on grinding stats would become adversely affected by the system. You can only raid so many times before you pull together 1000 kills and then get no more rewards for killing people with a character who is supposed to be killing people. I argued that the mechanics would encourage retiring the character and rolling a new one if you happened to have gotten the second accomplishment badge from any stat just through normal play. Either that or encourage drastic changes in the way you play your characters (want to play as a well learned Wizard who has read a lot of books? Well, tough. Go fix some knives if you want any CP).

Bob did agree that this was a problem this time, and offered the current system where we get a carrier badge and also a breath badge.

I had argued to Bob that this was not a real solution and only served to throw extra CP at grinding. Older characters still permanently lose out on the opportunity to gain carrier CP when the new breath kicks in, thus putting them at a disadvantage.

I revisited all of my previous suggestions: Holding the CP until level 30, reducing the thresholds, all of it. I don't recall ever getting a reply on the matter.


4 months into breath 3, Bob saw someone else on the suggestion forums had proposed the idea where the CP is simply held until level 30. He said at that point that he wanted to go with this idea for breath 4 and onward, saying he really liked the idea. I was a pretty hurt when I discovered he had said this. It really sounded like he believed it was a new idea and not something that his lead dev had been pitching to him for two friggin years. Didn't really do a lot of good for our relationship when I realized how little attention he actually paid to our discussions. But that's neither here nor there.




So the history alone is very old and complicated and frustrating.





But then aside from the history itself is an even more complicated and frustrating issue.


Back in NW, there was a sort of weird disdain focused towards players who would minmax their characters. You'd see certain "cookie cutter builds" like the Archer Nexus Champion or the Carbon Core Divine Champion, and although this became less and less distasteful towards the end of NW, it's still something we wanted to avoid here. There should be no "one true build" for any given class. This means that you should not be capable of buying every single skill which would be good to support your build. That means putting limits on your access to CP. Having both breath badges AND CP badges is just free CP for a new character. Rather than getting 25 CP for a grind, you end up with 40 CP. That makes it a whole lot easier to pick up those extra skills and lead to those cookie cutter builds where you are sort of forced to grind for all the skills rather than making choices. And that's how NW ended up after a while. Vets may remember the Freemasons as a faction heavily dedicated to helping its members (and even non-members who would be allowed into the stronghold just by asking) grind any stat they like by any means necessary. The game had devolved to a point where in order to remain competitive, you had to kick it with the Freemasons for a while to grind out some stats as quick as you could.




I really don;t want to see NC devolve into that. So, we have a giant mess.


Honestly, the only solid solution I have is to do away with accomplishment badge CP entirely. But as saulres points out, even that has massive problems: It kills the end game for some people. That's also why we can't switch over to a breath badge only system.


We COULD perhaps tie some of the lore into certain accomplishment badges. Like, gain a free piece of lore for every badge you gain. Although this does sort of encourage people to get 10 or 50 of every basic stat just to grab those easy to get pieces of lore, and since the lore is intended to be tradable so people can pursue lore easier it runs the problem of people basically zerging the lore by creating new characters over and over to collect a bunch of the easier badges.






CURRENTLY my #1 proposal is a sort of hybrid of some of the older ideas. Basically, you have some of the CP from your lifetime badge carry over into the next breath, but not all of it. To gain the rest of it you have to reach your new threshold. Using my targets shot example above, you have someone who shot 500 targets in the breath before. At maxout, they gain 5 CP for having done that. If they want the other 5 CP for that, they need to shoot 375 targets. If they then go on to shoot 1000 targets that breath, then they get the full 15 CP.


But EVEN THAT has a massive issue for us currently since we are trying to do quick and simple changes for 3.5 rather than re-writing the entire system.



So we're basically stuck looking for a quick and dirty fix for breath 3.5.
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