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How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Sun Sep 15, 2024 4:33 pm
by Glyph
So here's a random thing I've been musing recently - with the way HMW is currently set up, the aim is to get all 10s in every stat to be able to reach L10 (or, yes, L11 for dual tactics, but that's more by oversight than by plan!).

But to me, "all 10s" is pretty boring because every bot ends up with the same stats. Really the only variability is which tactics to use (for alts/flavour; we understand that they're not equal), and a little bit by weapons.

If you look at actual TF Tech Specs, back when they were a thing, you'd hardly ever see a bot with all 10s outside of faction leaders (even G1 Optimus had 76 of 80 points, G1 Megs had 71 of 80). This obviously goes for nearly any game too - you don't max out every stat on one character, you specialise in a couple of key areas.

So here's my (open-ended) question - assuming the stats all actually did something useful and you could still get to max level, what do you think be a good balance might be? 60 points + tactics at max? 70? How much would make different builds feel distinct?

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 7:49 pm
by sprockitz
It is hard to say since this isn’t the case but I think 70 could be reasonable. Would be interesting if build A beats B 70-30, but B beats C 70-30 and C beats A all 70-30. Obviously with a lot more than 3 options but could be neat to design against certain builds.

The other option is really scaling things better to make later upgrades prohibitively expensive. Since upping 1 level doubles xp and each upgrade is double the last going from level 1-2 is about as hard as 9-10. If these were scaled you could solve the problem of everyone maxing out without an artificial limit. Early upgrades should’ve been way easier and later ones way harder imo.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Sep 19, 2024 11:21 am
by ashe5k
The only builds that have felt different on my team are the repair builds to be honest. Before I rebuilt the whole team I was mostly single function bots and they didn't do a whole lot. The dual mechanic added a lot but even with Ram and Avoid and strafe they still feel very samey.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Fri Sep 20, 2024 3:34 pm
by Bun-Bun
If you wanna go by old G1 standards, most characters averaged in the 40's-50's in the stat totals.
"team Leaders" were a bit more (50's-70's) and of course Leaders were just OP.

Perhaps decreasing the XP cost of low upgrades and increasing the cost of higher ones as previously suggested would help but also limiting the total number of upgrades available at each level or maybe even Rank (to make that stat more usefull)

Something I proposed... I dunno.. a long ass time ago (6 years, just checked my notes) was to add a "Size" stat that would effect the other stats with positives & negatives. I wrote up a whole thing on the old RDD FB page but since FB got rid of Notes its probably a dead link (yep just checked)

Went into the old files and found some of what I worked out. I was mostly concerned about weapon damage at the time and the chart reflects that.
HMW Size Chart.png


I think it would have been a fun way to differentiate builds and be another XP sink.

Doesn't matter though. Ryan is never going to do anything more with this place.

I don't suppose you could be convinced to make a whole new game Glyph? I think I might be able to get the old RDD crew back together for that ;)

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2024 11:15 am
by Glyph
Ooh, that's some interesting stuff there Bun-Bun! *saves for perusal*
Size classes is something I thought about a few times, would be good to let players e.g. advance through Scout, Warrior, Voyager, Leader, Commander, with each bringing some bonuses. Always good to have more reasons to level up rather than hoarding XP to stay at the top of the bracket (obviously this isn't a thing at L10/11 in the same way as the early game).

But yeah, this is all assuming that different builds actually had meaningfully different strengths, of course. That the game becomes incredibly grindy and repetitive once you hit L2-3, especially if you don't play at (relatively) busy times, is its own separate problem that I think turns off a lot of potential new players, but not really what I meant here. I guess I was mostly seeing where people fell on the "I want to max everything!" versus "I want lots of different build types!" axis.

Bun-Bun wrote:I don't suppose you could be convinced to make a whole new game Glyph? I think I might be able to get the old RDD crew back together for that ;)

Ha, I'd sooner try to get something to happen with the game that already exists! :lol:

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2024 12:03 pm
by Bun-Bun
Glyph wrote:Ha, I'd sooner try to get something to happen with the game that already exists! :lol:

Right. Well good luck with that.

Stroll through some of the post from 4+ years ago and see how well that went for us back when we still had something approaching a decent player base AND Admins that gave a damn.

*edit* There was a point around that time the the RDD were praying ( or would be if we were a praying lot) that you would come back to light our darkest hour.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2024 12:42 pm
by Glyph
:lol: Would have loved to, was sorta banned at the time (thanks OS). Apparently the ban stopped working for a bit, but then came back. Had to ask Ryan to lift it in the end.

There was an implicit "if possible" on that last comment. I appreciate the vote of confidence, mind.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2024 2:06 pm
by -Soundwave-
My question then is, if you wanted a Soundwave persay Using something in his stats, but of course that isn't really going to level you up. In my case, I'm going to be accused, (if anyone is left to) of playing a level too low for my character. What do you do?

And Glyph, I still have copies of Tammuz's stats pages. Though I don't think we finished the armor, mostly just the weapons.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2024 2:19 pm
by Bun-Bun
I have many Tammuz notes...
I may even be able to find them still lol

Also, there's probably still good data in the various "Bun-Bun's Lab" threads across the HMW forums

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Wed Oct 09, 2024 3:15 am
by Glyph
Always interested to look at people's notes & ideas :)

-Soundwave- wrote:My question then is, if you wanted a Soundwave persay Using something in his stats, but of course that isn't really going to level you up. In my case, I'm going to be accused, (if anyone is left to) of playing a level too low for my character. What do you do?

Not sure if I'm completely understanding your question, but I figure anything that costs XP should be included in your level. In (current) HMW's case that would mean making anything in your stats that you buy, that you don't just automatically get, cost XP and count as an upgrade that then counts towards your level.

HMW's an odd bird. Most games have you either level up whenever you hit a predetermined XP total and get all your upgrades at once or keep buying skills/upgrades as you go and not really bother with broad levels. The second one works great for single-player games, but not well for matched multiplayer as you need some kind of level brackets to match players together. HMW tries to have it both ways, and makes it really hard to match character levels as there can be so, so much difference between two bots 8 upgrades apart but technically the same level - both in terms of performance and how much XP they had to spend to get there.

My initial question was less to do with levels than build options, though - mostly looking for more interesting things we could do than just "get all your stats to 10", and having progression cap out at some point before that. That said, I've long thought that level-by-XP would work better overall and make it easier to get some level of balance and extensibility; even if you keep level-by-upgrades, I'd like to see some things (bonuses, tactic/gear availability and so on) work off level requirements rather than minimum stats in order to give players an incentive to level up rather than hoard XP. But that also said, there's a lot of things I'd do differently if I was making a game from scratch, but (a) it's not my design, it's Ryan and Vir's, and (b) HMW's been around for over 20 years now and trying to suddenly turn it into a completely different game probably wouldn't go down that well! :lol:

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Wed Oct 09, 2024 5:45 am
by ashe5k
Might put some juice back into it.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2024 8:18 am
by Glyph
Another idea to throw around and bounce off the forum...

What if your bots could retire and be replaced with new ones? As an alternative to invoking the dreaded R-word, maybe a "start a new run" option could be available on a per-character-slot basis.

The top 20 bots on the high score table all have over a billion XP each - they're all maxed out, they're never going to need to try new stuff, nobody's realistically going to catch up to them as long as they're played, and if the game did switch to level-by-XP they'd jump straight up to the cap so would never even see any new content that got added mid-tier. A retirement option wouldn't force players to start over, but would give them the option to play through again with a new character if they wanted to. (As distinct from resetting an existing character to a lower level and getting complaints about their millions of spare XP...)

Personally I'd want the retired bots to still be viewable in some kind of Hall Of Fame, not just disappear; they've worked for that XP total after all, and represent the game's most ancient addicted dedicated players. Heck, maybe there could even be an option to bring the character back to your team (at a cost) if you have a free slot, for an exhibition match or mission event or something.

Thoughts?

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2024 11:26 am
by -Soundwave-
Glyph wrote:Always interested to look at people's notes & ideas :)


My initial question was less to do with levels than build options, though -
I understand, I was thinking that if you're using stats as they were meant to be, via the toys box grids.

I could with my XP copy what Soundwave had for stats and end up at whatever level equal to how much xp was spent. And if he didn't end up at 10 or 11. (back in the day) there would have been accusations of under-level play, based on I have the XP to be 11, and I'm not using it.

I just thought I'd throw it out there. At this point I'm willing to give anything a try. Are we going to get the chance to try?

I'll dig up what I can find tonight off my external drive.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2024 2:33 pm
by Glyph
Ah, I see. Yeah, I'm kinda spitballing on what could be rather than where things are. There'd need to be viable alternative builds and preferably other things to spend XP on for it to work, of course. I think I said somewhere else that some fundamental flaws in the design weren't really apparent when most people were sort of 5-9 with lots of different builds, but only really came out when the few remaining players ground their way up to L10/11 and oops, suddenly every bot is basically the same.

The under-levelled thing was always an overblown complaint IMO, since that extra XP wasn't doing anything. Sure, I get the annoyance with someone keeping themselves at the top of the level bracket and hoarding XP until they can jump to the top of the next one, but since the game allowed it that was good (if cheesy) play on a meta level; I think infamous cases like Stanformers and his permanently top-of-L1/2/3 strafers contributed a lot to the general frustration, but as (I think it was) Burn said, that just made him an obstacle to overcome like an end-of-level boss.

It is an issue that level-by-XP immediately gets rid of - you can simply flip the current setup around and say that you go up a level at <whatever> XP and get 9 upgrade points to spend. Then everyone's at the same place until they get enough XP for the next level and 9 more points (which is ironically the same as if everyone was saving up 9 upgrades' worth of unspent XP!). If that's too wide of a bracket, you can cut the levels in half and have a 20-level system with 4/5 upgrades per level. (And no, before anyone suggests it, that doesn't mean you should get a million XP per % of damage :P)

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2024 2:39 pm
by Glyph
Uh, I got sidetracked. Responding more directly, I don't mean you should necessarily copy a canon character's statline or that people should just stop upgrading at some number of points even if they have XP to spend - rather that progression would cap out earlier so that all-10s just can't be a thing. In conjunction with the retirement suggestion, it'd also encourage multiple shorter runs (but still long enough to be an achievement!) and maybe New Game+ options rather than having to grind out hundreds of millions of XP over years and years to achieve that top level.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2024 2:55 pm
by -Soundwave-
Glyph wrote:Uh, I got sidetracked. Responding more directly, I don't mean you should necessarily copy a canon character's statline or that people should just stop upgrading at some number of points even if they have XP to spend - rather that progression would cap out earlier so that all-10s just can't be a thing. In conjunction with the retirement suggestion, it'd also encourage multiple shorter runs (but still long enough to be an achievement!) and maybe New Game+ options rather than having to grind out hundreds of millions of XP over years and years to achieve that top level.

I wasn't gonna copy it, I just used him for a reference. But yeah. I get you.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2024 12:08 pm
by Psychout
Glyph wrote:(b) HMW's been around for over 20 years now and trying to suddenly turn it into a completely different game probably wouldn't go down that well! :lol:
All of us who have had the time and ability to enact change have hit this wall, either through player pushback or coding limitations. I wasn't lucky enough to be on the staff when you had the helm G, but for my part I ended up focusing on ways to use the system and add in extra things for everyone to do, but this became unsustainable and I just... burned out. :(


I personally love this idea, making the stats matter instead of 'get a gazillion xp asafp' could make the game more entertaining, although the dump stats would need something other than alt unlocks and weapon pre-reqs.

Within the current framework however, they could reduce the existing upgrade combination requirement that levels a character up automatically, alter the missions so flavour texts stop at L10, and any L11-inclusive missions become cookie-clicker style texts inviting people to make a bigger number.

Players then have the choice to keep playing at a level where they could compete with others who want realistic tech specs characters (e.g. RPG nerds like myself), and those who just want the big numbers could just carry on in some kind of weapon-waving contest ad infinitum. And we have 12 on a team so nothing stops people from doing both...

Downside is the current XP level caps require resetting to kick in and only go in one direction, and I'd wager most here have legacy altmodes that they wouldn't want to lose (especially as you custom made mine!)

Just thoughts.

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2024 1:25 pm
by Glyph
Hey Psychout, good to hear from ya :)

Keeping the 11+ missions as pure number-goes-up clicker missions is an interesting idea. When proposing the retirement plus hall of fame thing, I did imagine that - even if they wanted to free a slot - some would want to just keep playing until they beat whoever was at the top of the HOF before retiring!

I hear you on the legacy alts, too. Never liked being at the mercy of the (obviously now broken anyway) alt rotation as to whether I could keep my bot's chosen look. If I ever got the opportunity, I'd definitely want to add options to restat without losing the alt mode!

Re: How many upgrades is too many?

PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2024 7:55 pm
by Burn
Glyph wrote:What if your bots could retire and be replaced with new ones? As an alternative to invoking the dreaded R-word, maybe a "start a new run" option could be available on a per-character-slot basis.

Bit late to the party on this one, but let's face it, there's not that much incentive to visit the site at all.

After he left, Vir set up a boxing kangaroo game, **** fun it was. This was actually something he implemented. After reaching a certain rank and after so many battles, the kangaroo would retire and you'd have to start training another one.

Bit frustrating to start all over again, but it happened to everyone so everything was fresh.