Explaining recent balance tweaks
Posted by Apostate on 11/30/18
So I think I should detail some of the goals behind the recent changes with investigations, retainers, the plot system and roster tweaks, among other things. There's two very general broad goals with these. First, I want to make sure that the staff work load is sustainable and won't cause the game to collapse. Secondly, we want to shorten the gap between the very high end and new players, and I think some of that is being misinterpreted without a full context of how a lot of these changes work in practice.
For investigations, currently it's really weighted on whether we have to write a new clue/new lore, because that takes a far higher amount of staff time. Investigation times are heavily weighted based on how many people have discovered a clue, and this is probably way more forgiving than people realize. A brand new clue, which would take Gm time, takes roughly seven times as long as before to complete. An existing clue that almost no one knows about, and is only known by 3 people, will be roughly equivalent in time to what it would have taken before. The average clue is known by roughly 35 people (out of 1600ish characters), and a clue discovered by that many people would be roughly ten times faster to learn. So along with tagging to help sort clues, we're pushing people towards existing knowledge for sustainability reasons.
Now for investigations and new players, we put in a mechanic specific for them. The first five investigations of a character will have a large bonus that gradually scales down, in order to help get them involved by greatly speeding up the first information they come into contact with. So ideally, new characters will find out things relevant to their interests relatively quickly to help get them involved in stories, and the player base as a whole will be directed more towards existing knowledge that will massively reduce the workload on staff.
Similarly on retainers, I don't see someone having an absurd number of clues as all that problematic, but it was an issue from a sustainability perspective if we have a really wide range of investigations all constantly completing and forcing staff to write more, and almost all of those were new information every single time. So that's getting reeled in, but it was really only intended to impact characters with a very high number of them, and characters who never invested their own xp into them. If you had your own xp removed by accident, just let us know in a request and we'll refund it.
The Plot system is intended as a way for people to track all stories that their characters are involved in, and help create new ones. It's a tool for compiling all the information about a story and tracking its progress until it is finally resolved, so that the story strands can't just be forgotten or lost when roster characters change hands. From a sustainability perspective, this means we'll also be formalizing PRPs in the future, and refining them to the point where players can GM much more readily for each other and help the stories develop with staff oversight, which will greatly reduce workload and help increase participation. Ideally, this helps characters that are isolated be much more readily involved.
Finally about xp, there's definitely been power creep, and as we add coded systems we get more of a feeling for what are good fits for characters to be involved and useful in that, so we'll gradually be tweaking characters around that. Still not entirely decided on how we'll approach that, in whether we give a gloabl tweak to anything below an average xp value, for example.
For investigations, currently it's really weighted on whether we have to write a new clue/new lore, because that takes a far higher amount of staff time. Investigation times are heavily weighted based on how many people have discovered a clue, and this is probably way more forgiving than people realize. A brand new clue, which would take Gm time, takes roughly seven times as long as before to complete. An existing clue that almost no one knows about, and is only known by 3 people, will be roughly equivalent in time to what it would have taken before. The average clue is known by roughly 35 people (out of 1600ish characters), and a clue discovered by that many people would be roughly ten times faster to learn. So along with tagging to help sort clues, we're pushing people towards existing knowledge for sustainability reasons.
Now for investigations and new players, we put in a mechanic specific for them. The first five investigations of a character will have a large bonus that gradually scales down, in order to help get them involved by greatly speeding up the first information they come into contact with. So ideally, new characters will find out things relevant to their interests relatively quickly to help get them involved in stories, and the player base as a whole will be directed more towards existing knowledge that will massively reduce the workload on staff.
Similarly on retainers, I don't see someone having an absurd number of clues as all that problematic, but it was an issue from a sustainability perspective if we have a really wide range of investigations all constantly completing and forcing staff to write more, and almost all of those were new information every single time. So that's getting reeled in, but it was really only intended to impact characters with a very high number of them, and characters who never invested their own xp into them. If you had your own xp removed by accident, just let us know in a request and we'll refund it.
The Plot system is intended as a way for people to track all stories that their characters are involved in, and help create new ones. It's a tool for compiling all the information about a story and tracking its progress until it is finally resolved, so that the story strands can't just be forgotten or lost when roster characters change hands. From a sustainability perspective, this means we'll also be formalizing PRPs in the future, and refining them to the point where players can GM much more readily for each other and help the stories develop with staff oversight, which will greatly reduce workload and help increase participation. Ideally, this helps characters that are isolated be much more readily involved.
Finally about xp, there's definitely been power creep, and as we add coded systems we get more of a feeling for what are good fits for characters to be involved and useful in that, so we'll gradually be tweaking characters around that. Still not entirely decided on how we'll approach that, in whether we give a gloabl tweak to anything below an average xp value, for example.