Gaussian scaling for the effect of skill (awkward to expert)

[Cogliostro]

So I was happy before. A simple happy man. I used to think that when my character is an expert, that means he does whatever the task is about 2X faster than normal speed.

Today I did some tests, since I was curious, and guess what? It's all lies. The truth is that, currently, an expert character is ~128% as efficient. That's right folks! Being a super ultra high expert builder, smelter, manufacturer is worth you about 20-30%, most of the time even less. Wait, but what if you're only like, efficient or something? You don't want to know. Forget about it. I dunno, stuff is just depressing with these Cantr people. It just is depressing a lot of the time, I don't know why they hate the players so much.

And we were talking about encouraging the emergence of specialist crafters and builders... 28% is all you get, Johnny. Deal with it.

I mean if we were total idiots, we'd rebel and get that all set to 500%. I'm sure we could. But, in-game result? All it would do is make everything in the game get made 5 times faster. I.e. there're still no specialist crafters and builders, and people still don't care about your newspawn, and you are still equally useless at anything you try, even if you're a proud expert.

This is because "useful" and "useless' are relative categories. You're useful or useless compared to other people. That's the important part for us players, and it's not implemented. At all.

This suggestion is to address that. The requested change:

Add differential scaling to the effect of skill on the speed-of-work as follows:


Awkwardly, 0.2X (the new Awkward is 1/5 of the current Awkward)
Novicely, 0.5X
Efficiently, 0.9X
Skillfully, 2.2X
Expertly, 3X (the new expert is 300% of current Expert)

Having done the mult, we can rescale the value back, so that the current maximum speed of work in the game actually remains unchanged, or almost unchanged with a certain boost heavily centered around Expert and with little effect on skillful, to no boosting effect below. What changed - the differences between how much awkwards suck and experts rock.

How this is supposed to work: given the linear scale of the current implementation where "awkward" is some value and "expert" is some other slightly bigger value, we apply on top of it these scaling factors, which ONLY take effect when you make the big leap from say "Novice" to "Efficient". For simplicity, there is no continuous nonuniform scaling function to code; it just works in steps, progrssively increasing the multiplier based on a very rough and simple approximation on top of the current linear style distribution.

Big, big request guys, no complaining in this thread about how if you're not an expert in something you should be an expert in something else in equal measure, or else it isn't fair. Life isn't fair, Cantrian starting points are not fair either. They are random. But it is our responsibility to build the underlying possibility of "being in a whole different league" as an expert baker, compared to somebody of normal skill. This is the purpose of this particular suggestion, and nothing to do with fairness adjustments. Thank you.

[Ryaga]

Before this, You'd need the stats for newspawns fixed so you get less wild results and more near the middle.

[Doug R.]

Your conclusion about your test data is wrong. The highest expert, I am nearly certain, operates at 150%. You must have a very low level expert.

What changed - the differences between how much awkwards suck and experts rock.

So, you're proposing even more incentive for players to kill off characters that don't spawn with expert skills? I say no to this suggestion just based on that. Give that the lowliest awkward would then increment at 10% of the normal rate, whereas the highest expert would increment at 450% of the normal rate, that's a difference of 45X. Newspawns will be left abandoned all over the place. The game will grind to a halt. Big NO.

[Cogliostro]

Doug, what players do with their characters is out of our hands. We can't stop them wanting to play buxom blonds or Conan-barbarian heroic types. It's up to them what they want to play as, and what they accept to play as, and what they reject. Agreed?

Now having established that, what I'm asking for is to increase DECISIVELY the relative differences between expert characters (who were spawned like that or else got there through hard work) and awkwards, who didn't. This makes experts valuable to everyone and specialist workers become a worthwhile thing. It does also make awkwards poorer, but it's a deductive fallacy to argue that just because of that "newspawns will be left abandoned all over the place".

They are left abandoned all over the place right now, but for completely different reasons. If you look into the center of what I'm suggesting we do, you'll see that it is all designed to retain players, encourage them to form attachments to their character, and through that, to "train" new roleplayers out of them.

[Ryaga]

Your conclusion about your test data is wrong. The highest expert, I am nearly certain, operates at 150%. You must have a very low level expert.

What changed - the differences between how much awkwards suck and experts rock.

So, you're proposing even more incentive for players to kill off characters that don't spawn with expert skills? I say no to this suggestion just based on that. Give that the lowliest awkward would then increment at 10% of the normal rate, whereas the highest expert would increment at 450% of the normal rate, that's a difference of 45X. Newspawns will be left abandoned all over the place. The game will grind to a halt. Big NO.

Not if it was fixed so stats weren't so all over the place. Newspawns would have specific things they're good or not good at.

[Doug R.]

A much better way to implement this would be a "quality system" for items.

I disagree with your conclusions. I've seen countless newspawns punch themselves and never speak again, and if skills began to matter beyond fighting and strength, this would be magnified. Players can do whatever they want with their characters, but it would be foolish to enact a system that would encourage poor behavior.

[Cogliostro]

I disagree right back. First of all, combat skills are the exception to all this and maybe shouldn't be touched by the change. It would obviously be unbalancing if expert combatants suddenly always did 300% damage.

If you think about it, the same exact people who punch themselves now and then never speak, will do so under the new conditions. The rest will be enjoying the new possibilities of specialization and all active characters can look forward to the rewards of "mastery" in their chosen fields. Today we give them no tangible reward, reasoning that new players might cherrypick the character they play. What do I, a character finally reaching "expert", have to do with some new player somewhere? Where's the logic? Where's the reason? I don't know.

Fact: you aren't stopping the self-punchers by making the skills linear and so nerfed that being expert isn't that much better than awkward.

Fact: We aren't magnifying the self-punchers at all by altering the relative skill relation.

Quite simply, the self-punchers are doing what they do due to a false impression that the game works how I SAY it should, when actually it doesn't and works how you say. If they knew there was no point to having better skills (what you argue for), then they wouldn't self-punch. They would quit the game.

[BZR]

What does your suggestion have in common with Gauss?

[Cogliostro]

Just an allusion to the normal distribution, which is classic among all the nonuniform arrangements of data. It's also known as the Gaussian distribution.

[Rebma]

I really don't find any problem with the current effect of skill. It's noticeable...*shrugs*

[Doug R.]

I feel the ideas presented in the following thread are superior to the idea presented in this one and would accomplish the same thing, but in a much more elegant way.

http://forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?t=13850

[Cogliostro]

I agree with Doug. However, it's also orders of magnitude more complex to implement than what's suggested here.

[Peanut]

I agree with Doug. However, it's also orders of magnitude more complex to implement than what's suggested here.

So you're saying that quick and easy half work is possibly better then long and difficult full work?

[Cogliostro]

Hard to say! But my suggestion here is a real cheap shot compared to the one with true item quality. What's clear (to me) is that something semi-urgently needs to be done about the underlying problem. Either this way, the other way, or a totally new way. Doesn't matter so long as we kill for good a few heads on the many-headed hydra "eating" up our new players like hotcakes.

[Ryaga]

Honestly I've never worked with Cantr's code or anything similar, but in most implementations of inventory in games that I've seen, that have been clean and well code, it's usually very simple to add a field to items. I've got a feeling just from the development times described that the inventory and other systems in Cantr were coded very rigidly.