Reworking credits

[Bananas]

Thought we should have a giant thread on credits and what to change related to them. As it stands, I would say the entire system could use some tweaks and changes.

Things to talk about would be: silo, ref, harvy, damage, kills, repairing, etc.

Let the shouting begin!

[Idiotas]

Hmmm.

remove the 1 cred when ref is destroyed

reduce repairing creds, increase kill creds

Dunno if this also gives you creds, but repairing your teammates and getting some creds for it also increase teamwork.

[DoctorB0NG]

Personally I feel that the 1 credit per tick after the ref is destroyed gives everyone too many credits. With that being said, if people aren't getting credits from a ref, there needs to be a more lucrative way to get credits.

As it stands repairing buildings gives a TON of credits and repairing vehicles, infantry and killing vehicles, infantry doesn't really give many credits.

My suggestion: remove the 1 cred/tick and decrease building repair points while increasing vehicle/infantry kill/repair points.

[Ruud033]

I think the credit system definitely needs reworking. At the moment, when your ref dies you have limited options:

1. Stay in your base as an engineer and repair stuff (which sort of makes you a defensive player suddenly)

2. Go and kill people (does not do much at all but its something)

3. Go kill vehicles (does a little more than killing players)

4. Go whore other buildings with the rocket launcher or free infantry

I'd like to see a bigger credit reward for killing other players as I personally think it's sort of intuitive to do when you're low on credits and have to do 'something' to win the game or whatever, keep the enemy off your own base..

[HaTe]

Raise infantry and vehicle damage/kill credits/points earned by 50%.

Have a dead refinery give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds.

Decrease points/credits for damaging structures by 25% and decrease points/credits for repairing structures by 50%.

Have the silo give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds.

[XD_ERROR_XD]

This may sound very stupid (and it may very well be), but just a random suggestion: What about adding a credit cap, like in Tiberian Sun?

We take the maximum credit count of Tiberian sun (2000 per refinery, 1500 per silo) and increase it to like... 4000 per refinery and 2000 per silo? Because let's face it, even with a low credit count, maps with base defences tend to be very credit-farm friendly. There needs to be an effective way to balance this... I just don't know how.

[Gaysha]

My suggestion: remove the 1 cred/tick and decrease building repair points while increasing vehicle/infantry kill/repair points.

Greatly support this. Changes like this would make me (primarily sniping player) actually go out and repair teammates' vehicles WAYYY more often. As it stands, most of the time i only have to wait 20-30 seconds in the base with an engineer repairing this and that before i can afford a new sniper. The passive, fast and easy income encourages selfish play. This would also make camping-no-good sniping players (the ones who sit in a corner somewhere and barely does anything for the team.) less viable, as you dont earn anything when you are not fragging. This'd force them to get out of their tent and do damage.

The credits system should primarily reward teamplay, i dont think you should get anything passively with a dead refinery and no silo.

I enjoyed the low-income games in oldren where you had to do advanced economic teamwork, e.g: Pooling money on players in order to afford gunner and then sharing the wealth for more gunners. Arty + several engineers.. That was building team cohesion and money mattered. The best games ive had in renegade has been low-economy, underdog games.

If someone loses one of the last vehicle/expensive chars in renx today, it doesnt really matter. In oldren you had several people who knew exactly how important those last few units were, and did alot of work just to keep them alive. This is what i would like to see more of.

Everyone was interested in increasing and protecting the wealth of the team.

With a silo now in renx there is alot of opportunities for advanced economy-oriented teamwork and the easy&passive incomes straight-up murders that.

I may be saying things everyone already knows but its nice to put it into words i guess..

[HaTe]

Raise infantry and vehicle damage/kill credits/points earned by 50%.

Have a dead refinery give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds.

Decrease points/credits for damaging structures by 25% and decrease points/credits for repairing structures by 50%.

Have the silo give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds.

Would you agree with this then too, gaysha? Or would you change something in this? Just trying to figure out the best solution with everyone's input involved. So far this is what I have, but if anyone feels differently, I'd love to hear them out.

@error; I'm just not sure that that is realistic in the RTS FPS genre. It's not a bad thought, but I believe that if you're good enough to earn over that credit amount, then you deserve it. At least by earned credits. Having it capped at like 5000 for passive credits I can see possibly working, but I just don't think that the majority would like that decision over just nerfing the current passive credit system.

[Gaysha]

Have a dead refinery give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds.

Im only torn with this point. Ideally i like the idea of 0 passive income when ref is down. With 1 tick every 2 seconds you need to wait 16 minutes to purchase a 500 without doing anything at all. 13 minutes to buy a gunner, then you are rich for the rest of the game.

I kinda miss having to work for each and every credit and really taking care of what you purchase in low-eco games. When you dont get anything for free it feels way more rewarding.

On the flip-side i think this would chase away some newer players as it would be such an extreme leap from the current system. (losing a character you spent 10-15 minutes actively earning cash for by a quick headshot is so ruthless, its not something people are used to.)

I have a feeling few would be happy with what i would ideally want. Sooo.. ultimately its best to have some passive income. At least for now.

[HaTe]

I agree with that post 100%. My ideal solution would also be 0 passive credits from a dead refinery. That's just because I love the competitiveness of that. But in Renegade, servers that utilized little passive income died off rather quickly for the most part. Servers that allowed an influx of credits seemed to do well and last the longest, generally. I think we need to balance the two, for competitive and casual gamers. People just quit if they can no longer make a difference, and they often feel that way when they can't purchase any advanced units because of their income being mostly halted. For the casual gamer, more credits are needed to be effective, because they aren't quite as efficient (I mean that respectfully, and it's true in any game really).

[salarite]

remove the 1 cred when ref is destroyed

reduce repairing creds, increase kill creds

My suggestion: remove the 1 cred/tick and decrease building repair points while increasing vehicle/infantry kill/repair points.

100% this.

[Pharcyde]

remove the 1 cred when ref is destroyed

reduce repairing creds, increase kill creds

My suggestion: remove the 1 cred/tick and decrease building repair points while increasing vehicle/infantry kill/repair points.

100% this.

This is true, getting one credits each 2 seconds isn't what the game has been made for.

I dont need credits when we are losing.

[TheOlsenTwins]

An idea to prevent from credit stacking is to reduce the income for a player when he is over a specified limit.

For example if he is over 7500 he only gets half the income.

It could be implemented that the rest goes to the team, or to a team colleague with the lowest credit count.

(Or also that the rest is just lost, just throwing out ideas to discuss..)

[RoundShades]

I agree with that post 100%. My ideal solution would also be 0 passive credits from a dead refinery. That's just because I love the competitiveness of that. But in Renegade, servers that utilized little passive income died off rather quickly for the most part. Servers that allowed an influx of credits seemed to do well and last the longest, generally. I think we need to balance the two, for competitive and casual gamers. People just quit if they can no longer make a difference, and they often feel that way when they can't purchase any advanced units because of their income being mostly halted. For the casual gamer, more credits are needed to be effective, because they aren't quite as efficient (I mean that respectfully, and it's true in any game really).

I appreciate him of all people saying this. If the passive income was lower but not completely gone, as well as credits in general lowered, starting by the easiest ways such as structure damage/repair, then it would help the overflow of credits currently ingame, while not completely turning off new players who can't get a foot in the door in their first few games.

I also believe someone (him?) said that currently for building damage/repair, the damage/repair credit income difference is 3/2 when in old ren it was 4/2. That leaves more nerfing for repair income, than for damage income. As long as that comes with some moderate income from kills, getting 10-40 credits a kill won't feed too much income, you usually get 6 kills a life so even on advanced infantry that is only a meager 200.

[Ap2000]

I've never tested it, but does damaged dealt to a building's computer give more or less credits than doing the same % of damage from the outside?

[NodSaibot]

I've never tested it, but does damaged dealt to a building's computer give more or less credits than doing the same % of damage from the outside?

Same, I would guess. Credits are calculated from damage to a building's controller from what I can guess. So...

[RoundShades]

I can back the ally credit trickle at 7.5k credits. After you cap out, the credits can trickle to "The Advanced Guard Tower" which is scripted to divide credits put in between players.

I still think the slow trickle of credits currently, if using the pre4.03 mutator is 1 credit per 2 ticks, is enough without being abundant, in combo with higher kill credits.

Honestly, all the characters are being test tweaked, and so far I think great progress has been made. I felt the balance between different character costs, whether the character has a "use for it", and if he was played at all or ignored as an inferior choice, has been eliminated from every evaluated character so far. I think the shotgunner, gunner, and officer are all where they need to be in the latest mutator, where you buy them for a particular use, and they accomplish it, with various other balance levers limiting them instead.

I believe the discussion for improvement right now envelops: Make every character fun/useful to play, Make matches more consistent in duration and progressive against stalemates, Make the peripherals for the game keep players such as leaderboards and download links and wikis and server browsers and maybe eventually Steam or another platform, and aid and abet content injections for the game such as modders making mutators and maps.

We don't necessarily want to change gameplay itself at all, tank wars and infantry skirmishes and attack defend are all fun. We think those four areas above would improve the potential for RenX to the old and the new crowd.

[Ryz]

Good ideas here above.

I'dd basicly suggest:

More credits for doing stuff (either damaging as repairing, capping and killing)

Less credits for camping (is there a mechanism to see if someone is point / creditwhoring a building, guess no)

Less credits for doing nothing so basically the standard ref income can

[RoundShades]

Forum votes I know are possible if you script the mainpage to pull data from the website, it can be displayed ingame from what I have seen of other games. It could also be placed in the launcher for the game.

"Value Buildup", is one reason I sort of like total-cost-adjustment. Let's say, if refineries generated 1 credit a second instead of 2, dead ones generated 1 credit every 2 seconds, and cost of cheap things were similar while cost of 350 were 250, 400 were 325, 500 were 400, and 1k were 650, and credit gain for kills were adjusted to 20 credits a kill. That may be too massive a change to gain support, but a lighter version of that is for ALL YOU SERVER OWNERS TO START MATCHES AT 0 CREDITS. Because currently, they start with enough to buy a chemtrooper, officer, and mcfarland. And we all know what those are like...

From my experience, it is very possible to teamwork as randoms, and most veterans don't intentionally join together on teams, they get randomized and then switch channels to whatever they got thrown on with the 3 other random people who got tossed into it. I often don't get on TS when I play, I either lone wolf for a common objective, join the tank siege in front enemy base and repair, or follow around and point-guard for someone else who is doing something like sniping or attacking vehicles at our entrance or trying to infiltrate and plant explosives.

[HaTe]

I don't think there is a real reason nor strong demand to alter the passive credits again right now. Sure some people will argue against it after just a few games or a week of playing with it, but I think that the way it works now is fine, and we can revisit it in a month or so if there is a large group that does have an issue with it at that point.

[HaTe]

HaTe,

Do you not care if those people playing that few games or week are new players and they don't come back?

As I understand it, and I may be wrong, this is all being done with mutators on the server, so it is really up to the server operator without any strong guidance from the developers.

So perhaps the player base will simply fragment with those who feel they are pro level and those who may not be able to make running head shots but can still be tactical, heal, place c4, and drive vehicles.

Also a factor is those who are actually going to do the work and how they want to mold things.

If those people are new to the game and are not coming back solely because of the passive credit system allowing 1 credit per 2 seconds for a dead refinery, then perhaps it would raise more concern. I do not believe that is the case at all though.

It is done with strong guidance from the developers. There is a group on the forums labeled as "Community Developers." It is our job to to try and find out what the community wants most to be changed, and then discuss it in private between ourselves and the developers. Some of the mutator was made by a CD or 2, but the majority of it was made by a developer. It is just much simpler to make into a mutator at the current time, rather than putting it all into a patch.

I notice you're on the dev community, what features/fixes have you volunteered to code/model/animate? I haven't been able to find a task list of any sort yet.

I individually do not code/model/animate. I am a balance enthusiast, and I have been this way since the original release of Renegade back in 2002. As a team, we have a list in private on the things that we discuss. The mutator consists of the majority of the solutions we have come up with so far to help remedy and try to balance the game to the best of our ability. As of right now, the mutator is the best list to use if you wish to see a task list (we do have an internal one as well, but it is kept private for now while we are discussing it. Perhaps we can release it once the discussions have finalized). There's also a topic you can find in this section that asked each person to rank their top most wanted balance changes in order. That was the starting point of what the community recognized as the biggest issues, and we used that to prioritize our internal discussions.

For the record, I was also the one who came up with the numbers in how the current credit system works in the mutator right now. The only discussion that took place at all was indeed over the passive 1 credit/tick for a dead refinery, but in the end that option still won over 0 passive income for a dead refinery for one major reason. That reason was the fact that we looked to learn from the past. Renegade servers that had little passive income died off quickly, while servers with more passive income thrived. We did not want too much passive income (as it was in the previous beta release), but we did not want very little passive income neither. The 1 credit per 2 seconds was a compromise. It was previously 1 credit tick per 1 second, and we recognized that that wasn't at a good place. We have since increased active income and decreased passive income, so that players need to earn what they receive more.

Here is the full list of credit changes from Beta 4 that were included into the mutator change:

- Raised infantry damage/kill credits/points earned by 50%

- Have a dead refinery give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds

- Decrease points/credits for damaging structures by 25% and decrease points/credits for repairing structures by 43.75%

- Have the silo give 1 credit tick every 2 seconds

I encourage the discussion on this continue, but as of now it just doesn't seem like the demand is very high to continue this discussion. That's why I'd rather revisit it in a month or so after people have had an abundance of games on the system to use as reference, rather than just a loss or 2 that could be fresh in their minds. If we change things on a weekly basis with such small samples sizes, then we could easily be changing something that is the best option. We're all a team here on this (I and everyone else is doing this because they want the game to succeed. No one is making any money at all out of this, or has any ulterior motive).

[RoundShades]

There was quite clearly too many credits in a match previously. Game start, having enough for some really powerful utility classes, chem trooper and mcfarland, is also a bad call. Honestly, it is near-perfect now, and servers would benefit starting with 0 credits.

Otherwise, I would also say, that there are definitely more pressing issues than credits. There is a lot of new things to add to the game to improve it much more than credits or balance can help. I too am convinced, that right now, balance is being done justice with the current server operators testing in mutators.