15 replies to this topic

[SimpleGuy]

I tried to search "XP" and "XP Awarding" but the forums didn't really turn up anything. It's happened a few times now in a DM game where in the middle of a match I will randomly get a "You've been disconnected from the host" message and essentially lose a good ten or more minutes worth of edge-of-my-seat about-to-poo-my-pants experience. I understand there's probably some sportsmanship rationale behind it (i.e. don't ragequit) but I was wondering if this was an issue already addressed somewhere and I haven't been able to find it or if it is up for discussion.

I play on US East servers and generally have 50ish ping, but who knows maybe this is the weekend my ISP decided it was fun unplugging Ethernet cords. It's just frustrating when I have a good time and don't have anything to show for it.

[DarkPulse]

Yeah, I definitely dislike this. It seems to only save XP upon map-change.

If a player does leave early, or get knocked off a server for some reason, they should at least be awarded the XP and HP they accrued up to that point.

[Nitris]

I can understand it is frustrating, and I have had this happen to me as well, however I think it is primarily a technical reason for only being awarded your earned EXP and HP at the end of a match- something to do with authentication and server synching. It may well be possible to do it mid match, but could cause lagspikes and such. I am no expert here, and personally think there are far more important things that need to be looked at before this anyway.
Also as an unintentional feature I guess it helps to discourage ragequitting and/or poor sportsmanship. EG: Leaving a game just because you are getting stomped or "are on a team of n00bz" etc.

[DarkPulse]

Nitris, on November 09 2012 - 03:47 PM, said:

I can understand it is frustrating, and I have had this happen to me as well, however I think it is primarily a technical reason for only being awarded your earned EXP and HP at the end of a match- something to do with authentication and server synching. It may well be possible to do it mid match, but could cause lagspikes and such. I am no expert here, and personally think there are far more important things that need to be looked at before this anyway.
Also as an unintentional feature I guess it helps to discourage ragequitting and/or poor sportsmanship. EG: Leaving a game just because you are getting stomped or "are on a team of n00bz" etc.

While that much is true, I'd say the bad pretty much outweighs the intended "good" of the penalty.

[[HWK]Deuy]

If you intentionally leave a match early through the exit menu, it should sync your account and you get all the points you've earned.  I think this is just an issue when getting the disconnected from host error.  It's not intended and should get fixed, so it might help to write up a bug report (the more the merrier).

I think to discourage quitting matches early we'll just award bonus points for completing a match or something.

[DarkPulse]

[ADH]Deuy, on November 09 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

If you intentionally leave a match early through the exit menu, it should sync your account and you get all the points you've earned.  I think this is just an issue when getting the disconnected from host error.  It's not intended and should get fixed, so it might help to write up a bug report (the more the merrier).

I think to discourage quitting matches early we'll just award bonus points for completing a match or something.

That would be a pretty good idea; a decent sum of XP + HP just for completing the match, win or lose. Though how much that should be is a tougher question, especially considering that people who play are also going to gain HP and XP as well - especially if it's boosted.

I'd say maybe 100 HP and 750 XP, flat-fee, assuming they're there start to finish_ (The losing side/players are obviously not going to fare as well as the winning ones in a game). Players who join later should get proportional amounts.

That said, I'm pretty sure that leaving early does forfeit XP/HP earned (or perhaps it simply doesn't tell us what we got and "silently" adds it_) so you guys may want to double-check just to be safe, if this isn't meant to be an intentional penalty.

Edited by DarkPulse, November 09 2012 - 05:56 PM.

[Nitris]

DarkPulse, on November 09 2012 - 05:53 PM, said:

[ADH]Deuy, on November 09 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

If you intentionally leave a match early through the exit menu, it should sync your account and you get all the points you've earned.  I think this is just an issue when getting the disconnected from host error.  It's not intended and should get fixed, so it might help to write up a bug report (the more the merrier).

I think to discourage quitting matches early we'll just award bonus points for completing a match or something.

That would be a pretty good idea; a decent sum of XP + HP just for completing the match, win or lose. Though how much that should be is a tougher question, especially considering that people who play are also going to gain HP and XP as well - especially if it's boosted.

I'd say maybe 100 HP and 750 XP, flat-fee, assuming they're there start to finish_ (The losing side/players are obviously not going to fare as well as the winning ones in a game). Players who join later should get proportional amounts.

That said, I'm pretty sure that leaving early does forfeit XP/HP earned (or perhaps it simply doesn't tell us what we got and "silently" adds it_) so you guys may want to double-check just to be safe, if this isn't meant to be an intentional penalty.

Good to know Deuy, thanks, but as DarkPulse said, I'm fairly certain that of all the matches I have left intentionally I have not gained any EXP or HP.



A thought on the EXP&HP for completing a game:
How about a set amount is provided for each team and split evenly between all players left. EG: (warning, contains hypothetical numbers, don't get panties in a twist)

A 6v4 game ends. Both teams get a pool of 6k exp, and 1k HP to spread between them, so the team with 6 players get 1000EXP and 166HP each, and the team with 4 players gets 1500EXP and 250HP each.
This is (of course) added to whatever the players already earned through gameplay.

The reason for the pool and the even split for the team is to give those 4 players an incentive to see the fight to the end, even though they are at a large disadvantage. The winners with more players aren't going to be upset because they already will have a larger total EXP and HP for simply winning the match (and likely getting more kills, and so on).

The only thing I can see being an issue with this kind of system is late joiners. Say someone joined that team with 4 players but only 30 seconds before the game ends. Have they earned that extra EXP and HP_ Some may call foul.
Maybe there needs to be a system for "time spent on server" built in to the rewards for completing the match... But then that isn't much incentive to get players joining games in progress is it_
Hmm. I need to think on this some more.

Edited by Nitris, November 09 2012 - 06:16 PM.

[TheChaffeemancer]

Nitris, on November 09 2012 - 03:47 PM, said:

Also as an unintentional feature I guess it helps to discourage ragequitting and/or poor sportsmanship. EG: Leaving a game just because you are getting stomped or "are on a team of n00bz" etc.

However, penalizing people for not wanting to be in a game that isn't fun is a good way of making people not want to play the game.

[SimpleGuy]

Thanks guys for the responses!

[ADH]Deuy, on November 09 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

If you intentionally leave a match early through the exit menu, it should sync your account and you get all the points you've earned.  I think this is just an issue when getting the disconnected from host error.  It's not intended and should get fixed, so it might help to write up a bug report (the more the merrier).

I think to discourage quitting matches early we'll just award bonus points for completing a match or something.

Thanks for clarifying, I'll write up a report when I have time.

[Nitris]

TheChaffeemancer, on November 09 2012 - 07:30 PM, said:

However, penalizing people for not wanting to be in a game that isn't fun is a good way of making people not want to play the game.

You can't win them all, and noone truely finds losing "fun" so what can you do_

[TheChaffeemancer]

Nitris, on November 09 2012 - 08:30 PM, said:

TheChaffeemancer, on November 09 2012 - 07:30 PM, said:

However, penalizing people for not wanting to be in a game that isn't fun is a good way of making people not want to play the game.

You can't win them all, and noone truely finds losing "fun" so what can you do_

There's a difference between losing and "Oh, you can't do anything because half the team quit and the other half likes to stare at a corner, enjoy your 4v1 fights."

[Nitris]

TheChaffeemancer, on November 09 2012 - 08:37 PM, said:

There's a difference between losing and "Oh, you can't do anything because half the team quit and the other half likes to stare at a corner, enjoy your 4v1 fights."

Agreed, however this is all moot because:

[ADH]Deuy, on November 09 2012 - 04:40 PM, said:

If you intentionally leave a match early through the exit menu, it should sync your account and you get all the points you've earned.  I think this is just an issue when getting the disconnected from host error.  It's not intended and should get fixed, so it might help to write up a bug report (the more the merrier).

[thepeopleselbow]

Eh if we're getting shlacked, I'll either stick it out and get some cheap kill pts, or bail and not care what I'm missing.  Only time it bugs me to not leave with what I've earned is when RL stuff comes up, like running out of time, dinner, doorbells, etc.  That's when it sucks to lose your progress.

[kreel2]

I don't see the problem actually.

If you have to go before the ending of a game well, too bad, but it won't happen often, if you're a regular rage quitter it's only fair to not get anything for having been useless to your team (or not good enough to keep up until the end in dm for that matters).

I've seen things working this way in other games and, despite similar complainings not that many players decided to leave in the end. And when they did it wasn't because they didn't stacked enough xp points, it was because they weren't having fun.
The problem here isn't that you should be getting anything if you leave early, it's that you shouldn't lose the connection to the host to begin with (and it happened very often to me as well, I know how annoying this is).
We are beta testers, I'm expecting a stats wipe for the launch, I'm not interested in getting a couple of points if I'm disconnected (but we should already be able to test things up to see if the game feels unbalanced for any reason, so I for one appreciated the free meteor points just for that purpose).
This is a serious issue and I'm expecting it to be solved for the launch, or a lot of players will stop playing this game, and gaining some xp as opposed as to how things are working right now won't cut it by a long shot anyway.

This is a beta, there have been days I didn't found anyone around (well it could have also been a server issue), so it shouldn't come at a surprise if there are quitters right now, but I'm expecting regular players to stick around for a longer time after the official release.
On the other hand I have the impression that the hawken points are gained too slowly though, but that's another matter entirely I guess.

Edited by kreel2, November 11 2012 - 11:19 AM.

[Makhaon]

In these types of situations, I'm all for encouraging certain behavior through rewards rather than penalizing behavior, especially when sometimes those things cannot be helped. (game goes over an hour, real life circumstances, game crashes, etc.)

Maybe there could also be a public stat for how many times a person leaves games. If it can't be determined who quits and who crashes this stat might be too harsh on those who have bad connections and crash out frequently.

Edited by Makhaon, November 12 2012 - 09:51 AM.

[Skylead]

I ran into a dev this weekend that said that the current implementation grants you the XP that you earn, but not the Hawken Points if you quit early. That being said I would like to see partial returns come back. Last beta weekend if your team was performing poorly then the bad players getting camped would leave and usually be replaced by slightly more competent people.

This led to a lot of comebacks and also didn't punish people for getting over their heads with veteran players. With the points only on completion mode I think they feel the need to stay the whole match more and actually make the whole experience less fun (I want to be challenged, you don't get better by taking advantage of players you can steamroll)

Edited by Skylead, November 12 2012 - 10:08 AM.