New Methods of XP

I know I'm opening up a big conflict on adressing this issue, but it shouldn't really be ignored because the way I see the +vote system there is a big flaw. The flaw is that it encourages short scenes and running around to find as many different people as possible whether you would really ICly be there or not.

The reality is that some of the best scenes on the game encompass many hours and usually has just 2 or 3 people involved. Is 3 XP really worth something where a character grows signficiantly?

Case in point: Yoda and Luke on Dagobah. If this tried to happen on the game, Luke would have been an old man and still unable to force toss more than just a few rocks. Yoda-Luke-R2 would have taken 11 weeks to gain one level each. In the movies however Luke's abilities grew immensely because he was so concentrated on learning the ways of the Force.

We need a way to represent how small groups can be just as useful in storytelling and growth as large massive XP-whore scenes where everyone and anyone show up to watch two people play Sabaac, battle in tanks, and brawl in a bar, for example. Everyone makes a few shallow poses and then wait for the nom all function to rain in the XP. After 45 minutes people run off to their real IC lives. Most of the characters involved did not experience anything that would push them to grow personally, yet they gained XP representive of such.

Again consider the situation where Luke is in the Death Star trench. His friends are dying all around him and Vader is breathing down his back. Still he launches the torpedo and saves the day. Is this scene really worth 3 XP when a player risked his character's life? Most of the PCs from that scene all died. Luke realistically gained several hundred XP.

I'd like to see a system where staff grant additional XP for being in risky situations. Risky situations are exciting and heroic. Its how heros make a name for themselves. Risk should equal reward.

Also it would be nice to set it up where logs can be sent. If Luke and Yoda send in really powerful story logs about learning of the Force they should get something representive of that. As it stands right now most Force education is nothing more than one PC keying in the advancement room that they trained another. In 6 levels of Force skills I only RPed about learning the Force twice. Personally I was very disappointed that my IC teacher was not really interested in teaching beyond a few simple lessons.

Maybe change the way the activty XP bonus works? If two players are active for four hours together in RP, why not take that into account? If the two players RP for one hour together seven times for the week, is only 3 XP good represention of two people meeting randomly for one hour once a week?

In the movies we have characters who are in small groups traveling to two or three planets. Look at Queen Amidala. Naboo, Tatooine, and Coruscant made up her entire story in Episode 1. Before then we have reason to believe she had only seen Naboo.

Meanwhile we have people running around seeing the entrie galaxy in the course of a week trying to track down random new people to get a +vote. These +votes then compensate for the scene were they save the princess from assissination while nearly having their head cut off. It shouldn't have to be that way.

I agree there should be a better mechanism to reward quality over quantity. It sort of bothers me when people talk about getting less than 100 xp in a week as a slow week for them. I only RP when I have the time to devote to a good scene, and I don't just randomly show up to scenes that are pretty much just boring. (I also don't +vote for people who don't contribute something meaningful.)

My biggest concern with staff rewards for RP is that it's easy to make accusations of nepotism, and it doesn't really negate the whole "run around and get as many votes as possible" problem--that is, if you get a staff reward of 50 xp in a week for a really kickass scene on Tuesday, you can still run around and get a bunch of +votes from random XP-whore scenes, so you just end up leveling up even faster.

EDIT to add: Before anyone brings it up: Limiting the number of +votes available, while it seems like an obvious solution, doesn't help and really just ends up making sort of a +vote clique, where everyone in a given group will RP and vote for each other first, and will probably only RP with other people in the hopes they get votes for it.

I think the old +vote/cancel command would be a good start in discouraging this sort of thing. Brings it back.

In a game that is dependent on skill advancement, which in turn is dependent on xp, it does in fact make it extremely tough to find a good system to reward XP for RP that doesn't involve scene-whoring.

An idea that I had pondered at one time and would like to put out there: Those who play Force Users know that to advance in the Force levels you were required to have a +teacher who would provide those lessons. Now, while it reached the point at times where some people would just go +teach for no reason at all, it at least put into place a sort of encouragement to do that RP.

Anything we can do to encourage RP over XP gains is the real aspect. That's why I'd put forth that any skill above say, level 10 or so in that skill requires some teaching to occur. Now obviously the issue of needing 'teachers' for these skills comes up but perhaps an aspect of if you are 'tought' it's 100xp for a level but if you self learn it's 2-300 xp or some such, I don't know, I'm just putting ideas out there. But if we reward RP of quality rather than quantity we'll be on a good path to help grow the story of the game.

Is scene whoring that bad? Is having lots of RP with different people that bad? What behaviour are we trying to disincentivise here and can it b done without disincentivising the actual desired behaviour?

Yeah, scene whoring is pretty much terrible. Not only does it ruin good events--people will show up with their friends and sit around posing about the latest inane gossip, not interacting with or really caring about the event, and usually making events an annoying headache of spam where little of interest happens--it encourages vapid RP where people show up for a few poses, say 'oh yeah I voted you all' before anything worth a vote happens, and then leave before anything remotely interesting happens. Any RP that scene whoring encourages is not generally a good kind, so much as a stop on the road to leveling up.

I don't think +teach would work very well, if for no other reason than a lot of skills simply wouldn't have teachers, and I don't really feel like it's terribly interesting RP, especially for the less combatty skills. Politics? Law? Wealth?

When +vote/cancel was implemented, it was encouraged that people only +vote for people they felt merited it, and I think it worked for a while. Then came the great data fire of 2009, and we lost all that. I think that, and storytellers rewarding XP for awesome scenes, would help encourage good RP.

Lots of RP with different people was the reason I originally set us up with unlimited voting. However, "vote orgies" -- 10- or 15-person bar RP without much focus beyond showing up, punching the card, and getting the vote -- do lower the quality of RP. I want to encourage people to make their RP good, to actually catch other players' attention, to earn that little "wow".

Here is a thought, though--and I'm just floating this out there--

Theoretically unlimited votes per week; max of 1 vote per player you RP with; but you can only "store" say 5 votes at a time. If you're in a 10-person scene, you vote 5 people. The next day, your votes have regenerated and you vote more people. But you focus your votes where you notice the good RP.

Thoughts?

Terrible idea to give admin free reign to hand out XP. Even if they didn't abuse it, the rumours would start immediatly that X or Y only got their XP by <censor> Gulp in his <censor> with the <censor>. If the staff can +vote for someone the same as anyone else, beyond that I'm really not convinced anything good will come from that.

Gulp: Same thing that would happen in any cap system, people would just roll over the +votes. 'Oh, I ran out today, I'll vote for the rest of you tomorrow'

I agree completely that implementing a +teach system for all skills would be a bad idea, but I think finding ways to encourage people to do quality scenes is good as well.

Another thought that crosses my mind, is we have a nice Wiki system. Perhaps what we could do is tie the wiki to the game. Have a command like +logs and if you have a good scene, you can submit it via +log/submit that links the wiki location. Then players can go through and read the logs and do +log/vote or some such to vote for logs that they feel represent the quality RP, those involved in the log get a very moderate (10 xp or so) little bump. Not the 50xp POTW joke. That needs to stay gone. But this at least would be supported (ideally) by people reading logs /and/ it encourages people to submit logs so the wiki doesn't fall into defunct.

I like that idea, Gulp. It's limited without being so limited it just creates voting rings. There is the risk of overflow, but I think that's negligible.

I wouldn't be so sure about a +log/vote thing. Linking something to the wiki to give it more of a use would be nice, but two problems come to mind:

One is cross over of IC vs. OOC. It's great to read over peoples logs, and I love doing that, but lets say two or three people do this amazing scene with great RP...but has sensitive IC information in it. I'm not saying everyone does this, but there are people that will take what they read OOCly as ICly later. Or let it affect their IC actions while coming up with a way to justify it OOCly aside from having read the log. It's like with IC spies -- once your cover is blown OOCly, and lets say you are spying on people, you kind of lose your edge because there are some players that will limit what they say if they know you are present. Or know that they are not in a secure local and someone could be +hiding.

Question for Paradox, though: do you mean anyone who reads the log can vote for the people involved they thought did excellently in RPing? I kind of like this idea, but...I'm not sure how many people will want to vote for someone (even a player who RPed exceptionally well) when the player reading the log wasn't specifically present in /that/ scene.

Edit: Simply a lot of confusing typos. Sorry.

The objective is to get people to use their judgement when voting, to vote for RP they feel merits it, rather than necessarily voting for the person. Your friend, halfheartedly tossing out a few poses on a bad day -- is it disloyal to wait until you get into a great scene with them?

I haven't heard any ideas that I think represent a total improvement, though +vote/cancel would be helpful and has few serious cons (if they would unvote you because they hate you, they probably aren't voting you at all). But I'm interested in brainstorming until we come up with something -- or if we can't, that's fine too, but at least we will have tried.

How would you feel about supplying short reasons for +votes, similar to +noms? A sentence or so. The top 5 or so players who achieved the most votes in a given week could get a "profile," with selected reasons showcasing some of the reasons why their RP was so rewarded. It could provide an element of communal accountability, and it could also recognize our most tireless RPers and give them an added nudge of encouragement.

Those are the pros; what are the cons?

Well, there is always editing of a log too if you want secrets kept. I know for myself if I was having a super sekrit spy RP I wouldn't post the log. Simple as that, no matter how good it was. I would post a different log I did.

As for what I envisioned, each player gets one vote a week, they vote for the log they like. You're right there is the problem of players voting for themselves. So maybe each week only one log wins the 'vote' and that log gets rewarded or some such. This is in no way a sleight against admin, don't want them to take it that way. But the more we can have in the players hands the better.

RE: Gulp

The cons, a sentence or so isn't that bad. But the +nom system on DH called for it. How many people actually used it? There'll be a substantial drop in the amount of people voting if there's anything other than a quick vote-toss associated with it.

A cap on Votes is also very icky. Maybe perhaps if the vote cap were variable? We have activity monitored, let's be honest someone who is very active would need more votes than someone who isn't. So if I'm in the top ten activity, I get ten votes. If I log on for one hour a week, go to a massive scene, I can't vote for everyone.

The goal I think is to have enough votes to reward everyone who deserves it, but still have players have to make a choice about the vote.

Wouldn't it be logical than to just get rid of voteall? I mean than people have to think to acuatly vote in the scene I mean if you didnt enjoy the persons RP or they didnt do anything in a big scene why would you spend the key strokes to +vote them?

Voteall is not an official command.

It's a macro that players have added for themselves which basically dolists everyone in the room and +votes them all.

We generally deemed it pretty difficult to discourage; we have never approved of its use, but it's kind of hard to suppress given the way the voting system works. If we somehow prevented it, people could still just manually type a vote out for everyone.

Manually typing a vote for everyone involves thought and might give them pause on someone as they're typing the name and realizing "Wait... he only posed ONCE!"

Exactly, it requires thought.

After a 4 hour RP session when I'm dead tired, I like typing +vote and going to bed rather than +vote =think...think...think...

Personally the more I think on it, the more I believe activity related vote quotas makes sense. Take a 4 week activity average and have it dilly out a proportionate number of votes. Because if I'm out and RPing and being active, I'll need those votes. And If I'm idling around doing nothing? I dont' need 10 votes for the 1 scene I do all week.

Agreed, but maybe manually typing a reason along with that vote would do the same job. And a +voteall that gave duplicate reasons for 8 different players is something we could catch rather easily.

Gulp,

I like your idea of the XP store system where you only get 5 votes a day. If this were the case then while Luke-Yoda-R2 are stuck on Dagobah because the X-Wing has a flat they could still enjoy something for their continous daily RP. Each could get up to 42 XP a week so only 3 weeks per level.

Having only 5 votes in a 10 person scene means if you want to be the fortunate half of the group then you have to work for it with meaningful and awesome poses. Sure some might vote for the other five the next day, but a lot are going to forget, or are going to run out of votes again because they came across an even more nifty scene. I think creating this sort of carrot system will encourage better quality RP.

If we're concerned about voting circles, then create something where if the same two people vote for one another the reward decreases over time. So in a week they get 3,3,3,2,2,2,1 XP per vote or something.

I'd still like to see one daily 5 XP vote where its the best RPer of the day and requires at least two sentances. The 5 XP votes are then displayed at the end of the week to see who the best are and encourage more people to find those top players.

Can we also bring back the newbie bonus and increase it in lenght? A month is not enough to really get someone hooked. Maybe two?

How about we create a system where special points are awared for those who are able to recruit new people to the game. I know For worked hard getting new players onto the game and giving them scenes and should get some kind of appreciation for all she did for Dark Horizons.

We have always granted 100 XP per new player recruited who is active after a month. That won't change, though we will try to publicize that award more directly.

We could just make it "1 level" -- on the principle that older, more established players at higher levels will be able to do more to hook newbies and help them have fun, and if they're reaching levels where it's hard to advance by ordinary means, maybe they need added encouragement to take on a mentor role.

Will the recruitment rewards already received translate over to DH2?

I seriously doubt it (And if they do, someone needs to apply a whiffle bat)

Alrighty. I'll hold off on inviting these twelve or so friends interested in Star Wars MU*s until after the launch.

Ah! Important thing to consider: Staff should make sure that returning players can't give out recruitment bonuses.

I wonder what happens with past players that have been away a long time and are re-invited to the new game. How long must someone have been idle for them to qualify as a new player?

I know some people hate it, but I think admin giving out XP is a positive thing. I mean, its one way to reward participation in plots/roleplay/etc. The problem is that it can degenerate into people whining that they wern't in on the 4-6 pc limit of the plot. There isn't even anything admin can do about that either, even if its totally fair, people will whine. But its a staple of tabletop and roleplaying. I don't see it happening on DH, but I saw someone attack it above and thought I'd give it a defense. Probably the only way to implement it on DH (not that it'll happen) would be to ensure that no one person could get more then a certain amount of XP from participating in plots each month. But even that would have problems, so...I dunno, perhaps you all have a point.

Some of the other ideas discussed here are probably more practical for DH, like the idea of giving out reasons why your voting for people. Suddenly, it becomes much harder to justify/troll for XP in a 20 person scene.

I think the best intermediate idea is to let Storytellers vote from their ST accounts. They'd have to provide reasons for those votes, of course.