Patch 43a - 03/01/16 - Fair and Balanced

[Jack]

At this point Town Invasion rewards have seen a lot of changes. Every change has been an effort toward making the rewards fair and balanced. Town Invasions are supposed to be very rewarding, because they draw players together for an hour or two each day to work toward a common goal.

My goal has never been to make the rewards of town invasions stingy or hard to get, but to balance them over all the players attending and make sure everyone gets a nice reward from it. Some of the changes have missed the mark, some were just overall too rewarding.

Our first iteration of the town invasion reward system worked like so:

• Players who did enough damage to the boss got 10 platinum.
  
• Mobs had twice as high of a chance to drop a single platinum.
  

Obviously this reward system wasn't very good, because it just encouraged people to turn up to kill the boss. Worse still, sometimes people who spent the entire invasion helping out, didn't get a reward from the boss, because they were too late to find it, or did too little damage.

So the next iteration worked like so:

• Damage was tallied over the whole invasion to determine who got between 4-12 platinum after the boss died.
  
• Mobs had a flat chance to give a player platinum when killed (multiple players could get platinum from the same mob).
  

This system was the most popular so far, because nearly everyone who participated would get the platinum at the end. However it was highly exploitable, and there was a good reason why. The more people who participated in the invasion, the less total damage was required from each player to earn the final reward. We started to see the number of players on the final damage list go up and up, with 30+ different characters participating. However this wasn't totally accurate. Players were "entering" more characters into the town invasion, because they realised they could double, triple, quadruple... well, earn 12 plat for every character that could deal a lot of damage in a short time, really. The real story was that some people were earning close to (or even above) 100 of platinum per invasion. This caused the value of platinum to quickly sink to a low of 3k per. So the system was scrapped due to the exploitable nature.

Prior to this patch, our system now works like this. Each mob has a minimum chance of 0.5% to give platinum, or 1.5x the chance that they normally give. Multiple players can earn their 2 plat from the same mob. The idea being that players are rewarded for staying at the invasion from beginning to end.

However, I can agree this is the worst system so far. For one, it requires a lot on luck whether you get platinum or not. Secondly, it favors platinum being given out in the early levels while in the later levels where there are much less mobs, it's harder to get platinum, despite the increased rate of drop. Thirdly, some invasions give out far more platinum than others simply due to the base chance of the mob dropping plat. I've seen some entire invasions drop less than 20 plat, while others dropped nearly 200.

So to rectify this, we'll be moving to a new system, and one I hope that will work to keep things fair and balanced in the invasions. Onto the differences:

• Platinum drops are now guaranteed. Each level of an invasion will give out a set amount of platinum (not counting normal "corpse" platinum drops).
  • Level 1: 20 drops of 1 platinum.
    
  • Level 2: 25 drops of 1 platinum.
    
  • Level 3: 20 drops of 2 platinum.
    
  • Level 4: 25 drops of 2 platinum.
    
• If there are 250 mobs in the first level, and first mob in the level has a 20/250 chance of dropping platinum, the second will have either a 19/249 or 20/249 chance, depending on whether platinum dropped off the first mob. The less platinum which is dropped, the higher the chance the next mob will drop it, and vice versa. This guarantees at the end of a level that the invasion level has given out exactly the amount of plat that was intended.
  
• When an invasion is scaled up to have more mobs, the amount of platinum given out will too.
  
• Since the amount is now flat, players are almost guaranteed that the more work they do at the invasion, the more platinum they'll get.
  
• The highest damager of a mob will receive the chance for the platinum drop, instead of everyone who attacked it.
  
• Highest damage uses "scaled" damage, so if multiple people attacked a mob, the person who is more likely to get the platinum is the one who did the most total damage after bard/tamer/direct scaling. This means simply running around "tagging" every mob at an invasion won't be as effective as someone else is doing the majority of actual killing.
  
• The calculation for eligibility for the rare drop at the end of the invasion is unchanged.
  
• Bosses will now explode and leave gold piles again instead of gems/plat.
  

I hope this system will turn out to be the most "fair and balanced" one we've had and discourage multi accounting practices or "cheesing" of invasions to get more plat.

As always, I keep logs of how platinum is distributed and will adjust as necessary.

This patch is now live.