Unofficial "Iron Man" Permadeath Challenge

[Citan]

This is for the dev blog posted here: http://forum.projectgorgon.com/entry.php?13-Dev-Blog-Feb-8-2017

So here's a little contest that tries out the /behaviorreport tech! If you want to participate, here's what to do:


Create a new character (it can be on a guest account if you don't have any slots -- this is an unofficial contest, after all)
Play for as long as you can WITHOUT obtaining items from any other player. Don't buy used items, don't receive items from players, don't even pick up junk off the ground.
Don't take items out of your account-shared storage, or from Guild storage.
The game ends when you die. (With an exception for deaths like "fell off the world" -- those don't count.)
Your score is the sum of your two highest combat abilities.
After you die, use the /behaviorreport command. Take a screenshot of the output of that command, AND a screenshot of your Skills window showing the two highest abilities. Post it here.
The person with the highest score by 23:59 Feb 14 (GMT) wins. (They win bragging rights and nothing else -- this is a test contest!)
Remember, you need a NEW character, meaning one created after this forum post was made!
If there are bugs, please report them in-game so they get into the bug DB!



Thanks, and good luck!

[Easylivin]

http://i.imgur.com/MHGxWkB.png

[Citan]

Oops, looks like the command isn't set to have the right permissions, so you can't use it unless you're an admin. We'll fix that in the hotfix shortly!

[Odi]

Shouldn't you take the screenshot before you die (take a screenshot after each level gained)? After dying, it would keep saying YES and you could keep grinding. Unless it had a count or timestamp instead of a boolean.

[Extractum11]

Ooooh this is fun! Will characters created now count or should we wait until after the hotfix?

[Citan]

It does have a count on the number of deaths. And it should be 1 in the screenshot! :)

Yes, you can create characters now, the data should all be saved already, you just can't view it yet.

[Oxlazr]

Is there some sort of tracker for picking up items of the ground? When I tried this the other day, it seemed inevitable that you'd accidentally click on something that wasn't yours - I'd just immediately drop it if it happened.

Notoriety was an interesting thing to track, also - otherwise you could theoretically grind pigs infinitely to level 70/70 (Sounds super fun, doesn't it?)

Edit: And I've already picked up (and dropped) a green item someone dropped on the newbie island by mistake. Also - things like goblets and plates, as well as mushrooms - it's hard to tell what's already been claimed and discarded.

It might be useful to have a number tracker for how many items you've picked up - accidents are gonna happen. (I'm not sure if behaviorreport says yes or no, or displays a number - the number would be useful, in this instance)

Edit 2: Also had to rebuy a butcher-knife I accidentally sold. Not sure how that factors in either, but some extra clarification never hurts.

Edit 3: Just tested the command. Seems to be working, glad the numbers there too! :D

[Hood]

I'm very excited to try this command and challenge out :D

[Moralis]

Thank you for doing this, i'll definitely be joining up for this challenge. There's one thing i'd like to ask though and that is, assuming that the challenge ends on midnight on february the 14th, in which timezone would that be?

[Hood]

Right, so I tried today but got trolled. Lol, someone must've dropped some Parasol Mushrooms on the Starter Island and I picked them up thinking they were a spawn. Deleted.

[Tsugumori]

Is there some sort of tracker for picking up items of the ground? When I tried this the other day, it seemed inevitable that you'd accidentally click on something that wasn't yours - I'd just immediately drop it if it happened.

Notoriety was an interesting thing to track, also - otherwise you could theoretically grind pigs infinitely to level 70/70 (Sounds super fun, doesn't it?)

...Well it'd be to 50/50 (+ any bonus levels you might get)

[Aedorn]

Right now /behaviorreport identifies (seemingly) all storage as "account-shared". That means if you use storage via Marna, Joeh, etc, then it's basically showing that you took it out of the actual account wide storage and not just character storage.

Does this mean I need to start over? As in, does this get added when the action happens, or is it added separately so a fix to the command would also fix the count retroactively?

Edit: Someone else just checked, and it seems the actual account-wide storage doesn't count towards this.

[Tiamat]

Ninja'd be Aedorn. But EDIT 2 is relevant and hasn't been said yet I think.

So a quick warning/bug: The /behaviorreport command counts every stroage EXCEPT the actual account shared storage... as account shared storage.

EDIT: Fiore, whose iron man character is Aedorn had their counter go up after using Marna's and Joeh's storage. We then confirmed Hulon changed it too. The account-shared did not, as I said, so I am assuming it is programmed in as opposite of what it intended.

EDIT 2: Was thinking, does /tip (player) (amount) effect the competition? I think it should. I know the reward is only bragging rights, but still, some people take competitions very seriously. That said, in order to prevent griefing, I guess that would take a toggle so that you couldn't "accidently" receive tips.

[ShieldBreaker]

...

EDIT 2: Was thinking, does /tip (player) (amount) effect the competition? I think it should. I know the reward is only bragging rights, but still, some people take competitions very seriously.

Interesting, tipping would have to be handled very carefully, If it was a yes/no, then a player could be knocked out of the running by someone doing a Pennoc Quest. If we can see the amount that was tipped in the report, the maker would have to figure out what was reasonable amount to be randomly tipped as part of the challenge. And then hope someone isn't randomly tipping all new players over that amount just to knock out competitors. Obviously the main concern is that a player just get tips from an alt or friends and boost their working capital to help them win.

[Citan]

Tipping isn't counted at the moment, because I didn't have an immediately-available way to prevent griefing. I may just add a special command for this sort of challenge, like "/challengemode" or something, and if you activate it, you can't be /tipped, and you can't pick up items that you didn't drop, to prevent that sort of griefing also. But for now, honor mode not to accept /tips!

Since the tracker for taking items from shared storage is bugged, we'll ignore that one for this little contest; you can use storage and not get disqualified. (And just don't cheat by taking items from shared account chest/guild chest!)

Let's say the contest ends at 23:59 GMT on February 14.

[Hood]

23:59 GMT = 18:59 EST

Follow-up question regarding grouping: It's obvious to me that grouping with a high-level player is a violation of the integrity of the challenge, but to others it probably seems like the perfect opportunity to "play2win" (cheat).

Open Discussion:
I'd be okay with grouping with a fellow challenger, because we'd both have a risk (if I trust them not to sabotage me). I see the merit of allowing grouping because then the mode promotes group play. I even understand that this is a great test challenge, and have grace for its first iteration.

In the future I think challenges should be designated as a Team or Solo challenge so that people understand when grouping is allowed and when it isn't allowed. At the same time, 2 players who aren't grouped and attack the same monster STILL share XP. What do you guys think? What can we do to address this issue in the challenges?

[cratoh]

Should be just run off of endurance maybe. Cos could get max level in no time with a power leveller assistance.

[Niph]

It's not possible to detect all outside help you can get. I could, for instance, clear the way to a boss with one account, clear adds, maybe even damage the boss to 90% and quit the game, then the character in challenge mode on second account steps up and finish the kill. He would get the notoriety, and how can you prevent or detect that without also allowing people to grief you?

In practice, I think we should not have challenges to be "the best", but to show achievements, such as reaching 50/50 in any two combat skills. It can be done the cheat way, but what's the point of cheating if you can't really brag about it because a dozen or so other people succeeded too?

If there is to be challenges with direct character comparison, it must be in situation where the number of players is limited (think single player games). P:G doesn't have instances. However, one could design an area where only a limited number of people can play, such as a steward near a door that teleports you and your group behind the door if the group is 3 or less people (for instance), and the room is empty. This requires coding support, but then you could definitely measure your success with other players. The thing is, there is no direct connection with the iron man challenge we're talking about.

So in the end I don't think electing a best player for this kind of challenge is possible without leaving the suspicion of cheats, but if a bar is set, and you win if you hit the bar, like 50/50 in combat skills, that could work well.

[Oxlazr]

I don't think these challenges shouldn't exist merely because there's potential for cheaters - there's very little incentive for players to cheat when there's no rewards regardless.

I will say, though, that I don't particularly like having short time-caps on these sorts of things, given not everyone can play all day & be competitive due to time constraints.

At anyrate, I'm not grouping with - anyone - for this trial challenge.

Side note, though - We've had a test server in the past - maybe that test server could also be the challenge server to encourage people to play it on before patches hit the live servers (particularly useful if there's major overhauls). It's also a good way for veteran players to pick up bugs and stuff they wouldn't normally notice (while newbies may glance over not recognising it as a bug) as well as addressing balance issues (in particular, by seeing what skills people tend to level in certain challenges)

[Cocytus]

http://i.imgur.com/Xgd9x7v.jpg
Not going to bother trying to level another guy after this.
Sword/Psych 19/18
Endurance 13
Notoriety 9 (380/500)

Died to the Mangler, in hindsight I should have saved my bacon for running away. Oh well.

[Hood]

http://i63.tinypic.com/2z7e7w9.jpghttp://i64.tinypic.com/2n9hqhj.jpghttp://i63.tinypic.com/1fy3b7.jpg

I had some fun with this challenge. I grouped up with a VERY FRIENDLY new player in serbule...just clicked the accept button out of habit. he invited me to Asheron's Legacy! I saw nothing wrong with accepting the guild invite but I quickly ran away so he wouldn't help me kill mobs.

As you can see, I chose Subtype 2 Elf. I didnt actually know this was possible. I rather enjoyed making a vegetable lady.

I chose my skills bc they're the most defensive other than animal forms. I didn't get very high level and I didn't die. Mainly because I just have so much to do on Hood in preparation for the new dungeon. These time restricted challenges are a bit harder to motivate myself to do. If I had 1-2 months and a prize pool reward, I'd be fully in on this.

Also, for a challenge like this, there's really no shame in trying again....since there's no reward other than bragging rights. And I'm happy I got as far as I did. I spent quite a lot of time dreaming about how I'd get Cow Form :cool:

[simplybob]

I made it to 25 sword/ 23 Psych and when I did my screen capture noticed that somewhere along the line I had picked up one item from another player (probably a mushroom that someone had dropped). I was disappointed that I'd let this happen and disqualified myself from the submission. It was a good challenge and I'll definitely try again with the next challenge that comes along. I found that keeping in good food was the hardest part, since I didn't want to distract from the hunt to do much crafting.

[Oxlazr]

I got to about 15 psychology/pig, I forget exactly which - character's still alive and well.

Unfortunately didn't have enough time to play within the window, but it was a fun little test for how these things might work.

And yeah, the food part was definitely the most tedious. I do think these challenges, if at all possible, should allow trade between competing players so not everyone has to cover every angle - but that largely depends on what the challenge is.

The tracker is definitely neat, and I see the very important stat for being milked (specifically as a cow, thankfully) is included.

A few ideas going forward, though:

- Increased non-combat experience and income - if the character is temporary and cannot trade with other players, this hopefully shouldn't be an issue and would mitigate repeating tedious but important tasks each attempt.

- A combat experience multiplier for each unique boss killed solo (Just to encourage people to kill bosses as soon as they can. I found this really helped keep things interesting)

[Citan]

Thanks for the feedback and help with playtesting this! I've made some small tweaks to the /behaviorreport command for the next snapshot, and will be adding some more functionality to make it easier to do these in the future. But I could still use more ideas regarding how to keep egregious "twinking" behavior from running rampant -- it's a shared world, so some level of interaction is going to be unavoidable even in a "challenge" contest like this, but I'd like to come up with some ways to reduce its impact, or at least tell when it's happened. (The most important "twinking" scenario being "a high-level guy goes ahead of you and kills the bosses in a dungeon, so you get credit for killing bosses without being in any real danger." And similar scenarios.) If you have ideas that aren't in the thread yet, please voice them!

Also congrats to Cocytus, who is the winner of the unofficial contest!

[Aedorn]

There's another issue of being able to get a high level BC player to give out a fully modded Extra Skin buff. Basically immortal for quite a long time at low levels.

A thought on grouping: I would think if there was a possible flag to account for grouping with someone X levels above in Endurance. So a character of say endurance 10 would be flagged as grouping with someone too high if they grouped with someone at endurance 20. Or something.

As for bosses: Maybe make an option on the corpse like when you do an autopsy. When it's used, then store the contribution (damage/healing/etc) done, and the level when it was killed. Can weigh level against contribution as a score mechanism. I thought about just taking a screen shot of autopsies on bosses, but there's the potential to fail it at lower levels (or sometimes, higher levels depending on the boss.)

Also, I think it would be cool if this was more continuous. As Hood said, I too had so much to do on my main character I didn't play my alt nearly enough. It's hard to break away!

[Niph]

But I could still use more ideas regarding how to keep egregious "twinking" behavior from running rampant -- it's a shared world, so some level of interaction is going to be unavoidable even in a "challenge" contest like this, but I'd like to come up with some ways to reduce its impact, or at least tell when it's happened. (The most important "twinking" scenario being "a high-level guy goes ahead of you and kills the bosses in a dungeon, so you get credit for killing bosses without being in any real danger." And similar scenarios.) If you have ideas that aren't in the thread yet, please voice them!

The way I see it, is that it's legit to follow a high-level player, or a group of players, to the boss room, and then wait for the boss to repop to kill it. What is not is of course to receive help doing so.

I think some support code already exists to know if you received help:
. A flag that tells when a monster reset health and armor, is back to his spot, with no debuffs, and has aggro cleared.
. A count of how many characters participated to a fight.
And to come: code that links a boss to their minions.

With this support, one can tell if a character did the kill solo, and if so they can receive boss loot, notoriety, quest reward, experience and so on. If they didn't they can just receive the usual trash loot.

With this in mind, I think a /challengemode command could be issued after the character has been created, and before they start killing, accepting money etc.
In challenge mode, a character would receive reward only for solo kills or grouping with other people in challenge mode.
In challenge mode buffs from other players would not land on you (unless coming from other characters in challenge mode).
And so on.

I think it makes sense to accept guild invite, however a character in challenge mode would not get guild credits.

It looks like this may need a lot of development time. :(