Exp. & Rank Mechanisms Section 3

Rman Ponders Kage's Remarks

 * Quoteing Kage:


 * "and personally, i think getting rid of rank as an actual factor would be prudent - i recommend keeping rank just to give the player a general idea of the overall effectiveness, but not making it so combat effectivess goes up step by step."


 * Rman: I'm not sure I understand.


 * a.) "Combat Effectiveness" = Based on Player Choices in deployment / maneuver & measured by enemy damage and casualities.


 * b.) "Rank" = Based on Cumulative successful choices in combat


 * c. ) "Benefits of Rank" = ?


 * I guess ''c" is where I could use clarifying.

Slye_Fox Offers

 * unit ranks in warzone incesses accuracy/commanders compliment.


 * I have also notesed that a small group of heros can do better than a large group of rookies

Stratadrake Continues
* QUOTE: "For example, you could sacrifice ten of your best units to almost take out some super enemy tank, and then some other player with a machinegun viper wheels comes by and takes one pot shot, and in getting the kill gets the experience."


 * A well-known form of abuse that is more common in RPG's. Real-time RPG's specifically, whichever character strikes the killing blow is rewarded with all (or most) of the experience, which means that if you swap in a low-level character come kill time, you can build up their levels faster that way.


 * I've almost always been of the opinion that experience should not be rewarded on a "per-frag" basis, primarily because of the above -- but more along the lines of actual involvement in combat . . . let's face it, a unit doesn't earn hardly any combat experience by just sitting there....


 * To that end, a more fair solution could be to award experience points based on actual damage inflicted. I.e., if a unit causes 50% damage to an enemy unit, they earn 50% of that unit's total "exp. points". Thus forth if an enemy unit is nearly dead, the experience value for killing it is nearly zero.


 * Of course there are two important things to keep in mind:


 * Using the right weapons against the target earns more experience, because the weapon inflicts more damage...


 * If the target receives repairs of any sort during combat, its experience value effectively increases based on those repairs....


 * And of course experience could be computed in many different ways -- cost being one of them.


 * A Dragon/Hover/MG would reward more experience than, say, a Bug/Tracks/MG due to the superior chassis, but not nearly as much as a Dragon/Hover/Gauss because a MG isn't nearly as threatening as that Gauss cannon....

Kage Expands on his POV

 * no prob - the benefits of rank were not discussed here because it doesn't matter in my idea - they can be whatever we want them to be.


 * all i was talking about was the way experience was accumulated, and how the current exp is used to make a difference.


 * in the current wz model, experience is accumulated in the form of kills. you don't get the benefit of a kill until you get a certain number of kills that will make you go up in rank. thus, there is no difference in combat effectiveness between having 1 kill and having 2.


 * in my model, experience is only accumulated during battle, and during battle, the experience is continously accumulated. the variable holding the experience would easily go into the hundreds of thousands if it was an integer. unlike the wz model, in mine, the benefits of experience are immediately available - you don't have to wait to get enough experience for a rank increase before you get extra benefits.


 * and finally, the amount of experiece gained in any given second is calculated from the danger a unit is in (a seperate calculation), and its combat performance (scoring hits - another calculation).


 * if both threat and performance are high, then experience accumulation is high, though if one or both is low, then exp accumulation is low as well. rank would simply give any easy way for the player to judge a unit's effectiveness, but affects the game in no way.


 * if i were to recommend benefits though, it would be, as strata pointed out, increases that are rational. if it came down to it, an experienced gunner couldn't increase the caliber of his shell, or the velocity at which it was launched, thus increasing the damage. he could however, aim at more vulnerable areas. that isn't the same as increasing damage however. and since warzone has an ultra-basic "all for one and one for all" armor and hit point based system, there are no vulnerable areas to aim at.


 * therefore, increasing damage would be an effect i think should be taken out of the veterancy equation. better aim, and in many cases better reload time (wouldn't work for auto-reload systems in wz) would be 2 great effects of experience.


 * if there were different armor strengths on the different sides of vehicles, then experience could be used to determine "how smart" a unit is. if it had low experience, it might tuck tail and run, leaving it's generally weaker rear armor exposed.


 * if more experienced though, the unit might do a defensive retreat, going in reverse so as to leave the stronger front armor facing the enemy, even though a little speed is sacrificed.


 * if we used a ballistic system where hit/miss is completely eliminated, and a bullet simply "goes where it goes and hits what it hits", then speed and manueverability would play a large part in warfare, as it does in real life. an inexperienced crew might just remain stationary, or move very slowly just so that they could get a steady shot off, while an experienced crew would be in constant motion, swerving left and right so they'd be harder to aim at, thus increasing their survivability signifigantly.


 * (tank warfare has never been about getting 20 tanks in a group and sitting there taking potshots - realistically 5 tanks that were moving around constantly while the opposing 20 were stationary would almost always win the fight).

Rman likes

 * Gotcha now, Kage.


 * Makes perfect sense.


 * As does Strata's comments.


 * You both have, in a real sense, defined a schema that is far superior to WZ's present mechanics.

Stratadrake continues delving

 * The key issue with experience relates to what Kage says.


 * From an RPG standpoint, most RPG's have two key stats about one's character: Raw Experience and Level.


 * You collect experience almost exclusively by killing things and winning battles, but only when the experience level reaches certain thresholds does the character's level increase -- and with it, the fruits of said experience.


 * Current WZ has a similar thing only it's "kills" and "rank". A unit's "rank" increases only at certain kill thresholds, and only when rank increases do the benefits (whatever they are) materialize....


 * Whereas in real life, experience is non-quantizable and the benefits of which cannot be modelled by formula or algorithm.


 * That said, an experience system may be more effective or "realistic" where the benefits are continuous -- gradual of course but nonstop.


 * Of course the most easily programmed benefit for this would be accuracy. That's not to say there can't be others though....

Kage elaborates

 * we can always dumb down unit pathfinding - a green unit will literally bump into things like mountains, where as a hero tank could weave between buildings as if it were water flowing past them.


 * ooh! and here's one! why not make it so green vtol actually miss the rearming pad most of the time, and have to take off again so that they can land in the right place

Troman jumps-in

 * I like this one. (Missing Re-arming Pad)


 * If we are to make unit experience to play a more important role in WZ, then this idea is definitely worth considering. Well, maybe not "most of the time", but make them miss the rearm pads more frequently than trained units.


 * QUOTE: "we can always dumb down unit pathfinding - a green unit will literally bump into things like mountains"


 * Not sure if I'd like to have such units on my side. It could be just too annoying. Make them look/act less experienced, but bumping into objects and slowing down the entire group/creating ant-tail, ... I don't know.


 * I do think that experienced units should build a more compact group and stay together to become more effective, but rookies bumping into objects and maybe getting stuck for some seconds might be too annoying for a human player.