Mission Complete Rewards

Azoth658

Hi All,

I looked at the hot topic for feedback to check as I'm sure this has probably been mentioned before and couldn't find it so here goes.

After completing a mission quite often instead of getting one of the available rewards on the node I and many of you out there end up receiving the dreaded 20 ISO reward. With the introduction of Command Points I've noticed how soul destroying this random reward instead of the node based rewards can truly be. (Second to last Sub Event on ISO 8 brotherhood cleared 8 times before obtaining my 25th Command Point).

Surely it would not be detrimental to the experience or to D3's sales line to make it so until you obtain all the rewards on a node you are guarenteed to earn something from the reward stack. I mean PVP is a great example of this because as a minimum you are going to walk away with 70 ISO, which you can clearly see in the node reward potential if you sit there long enough to scroll through every reward.

Then tied with this can it be made so that if I click the reward image it instantly scrolls to the next reward so I can quickly check what is left on a node?

Hope others feel the same and D3 are listening as this would hopefully be a quick and cheap fix.

Unknown

Got to be the single most popular request. To be fair, if you use the search function and search "20 Iso" it finds you every post that uses the word "ISO" and doesn't filter to just ones that say 20 Iso.

The excuse the devs use is that it's too integral to the coding to reprogram the 20 Iso issue out of the game.

To make matters worse, it was confirmed that even if you've only taken one of the 4 prizes the chance of getting the 20 Iso is 50%. Meaning if you don't get the 1CP on your first attempt at 1/4 odds, you have worse odds (1/6) on your second attempt.

Crazy!

Azoth658

Grantosium wrote:

Got to be the single most popular request. To be fair, if you use the search function and search "20 Iso" it finds you every post that uses the word "ISO" and doesn't filter to just ones that say 20 Iso.

The excuse the devs use is that it's too integral to the coding to reprogram the 20 Iso issue out of the game.

To make matters worse, it was confirmed that even if you've only taken one of the 4 prizes the chance of getting the 20 Iso is 50%. Meaning if you don't get the 1CP on your first attempt at 1/4 odds, you have worse odds (1/6) on your second attempt.

Crazy!

Now I'm only an amateur programmer but couldn't they mitigate some of the current pain change it so that each pull of 20 ISO increased the odds of pulling a true reward.

Oh well there are always going to be some crazy things when so many things are updated and changed.

Unknown

Azoth658 wrote:

Now I'm only an amateur programmer but couldn't they mitigate some of the current pain change it so that each pull of 20 ISO increased the odds of pulling a true reward.

Oh well there are always going to be some crazy things when so many things are updated and changed.

You're echoing the thoughts everyone else expressed!

If it's any consolation, once you've pulled 2 out of 4 rewards if you still don't have the 1CP your odds of getting it next time return to the original 1/4 (with 20 ISO still remaining a 50% chance). If you have all three rewards and are only missing the 1CP your chances of getting the CP on your next run are supposed to be 50%. So we have a crazy system where your chance of getting what you want dips before it then increases.

It seems like a really easy fix, I'm not sure how many of us truly believe the excuse about the coding. I realise they have to do more testing than someone sitting at home playing with an amateur project would, but I really can't imagine what could possibly be dependent or co-dependent on the prize randomising process that would error when this is sorted. I guess we just have to choose whether we believe the excuse and try to put up with it.

Azoth658

Very good points.

I wonder if they could make that first reward a specific one with the others randomised? That could fix the issue on the rare rewards where you would spefically grind a difficult node like CPs at least; without them having to fix the larger frustration of 20 ISO.

abmoraz

Azoth658 wrote:

Grantosium wrote:

Got to be the single most popular request. To be fair, if you use the search function and search "20 Iso" it finds you every post that uses the word "ISO" and doesn't filter to just ones that say 20 Iso.

The excuse the devs use is that it's too integral to the coding to reprogram the 20 Iso issue out of the game.

To make matters worse, it was confirmed that even if you've only taken one of the 4 prizes the chance of getting the 20 Iso is 50%. Meaning if you don't get the 1CP on your first attempt at 1/4 odds, you have worse odds (1/6) on your second attempt.

Crazy!

Now I'm only an amateur programmer but couldn't they mitigate some of the current pain change it so that each pull of 20 ISO increased the odds of pulling a true reward.

Oh well there are always going to be some crazy things when so many things are updated and changed.

You are assuming there is some mechanism in place for recording all of the 20ISO pulls for each of the several million players on the 10 PvE nodes active at any given time. As a professional programmer, I can assure you there is almost certainly not. My best guess at the code flow is that it goes something like this:

if (firstWin): return awards.pop(randomInteger(len(awards))) # return a random award the first win
elif remainingAwards > 0 and randomInteger(0..1): return remainingAwards.pop(randomInteger(len(remainingAwards))) # return random award 50% of the time each subsequent win
else: return "20 ISO" #give 20 ISO the other 50% of the time

I highly doubt they record all the 20ISO wins. The DB space would quickly become restrictive given the number of events, sub events, nodes, players, and the amount of times those nodes are repeated. It is probably exponentially larger than you are thinking.

The math behind the method they are using (1 reward the first time, 50% chance each subsequent time) is kind of surprising.
In order to get 1 of the 4 rewards (any one, not a specific 1) you have to win 1 time.
In order to get 2 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 3 times (1 + 1/.5 = 3)
In order to get 3 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 5 times (1 + 1/.5 + 1/.5 = 5)
In order to get all 4 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 7 times (1 + 1/.5 + 1/.5 + 1/.5 = 7)
(note: all games rounded to the nearest whole number. The actual probability has decimals)

Does that mean beating a node 7 times will give you all 4 rewards? no. You could get them after 4 battles (1 in 8 chance), but you could conceivably beat the node 20 times and not get all 4 rewards (1 in 524,288 chance).

If they switched to the "replace any award won with 20ISO", the probabilities change as such:
In order to get 1 of the 4 rewards (any one, not a specific 1) you still have to win 1 time.
In order to get 2 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 2 times (1 + 1/.75 = 2.3333)
In order to get 3 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 5 times (1 + 1/.75 + 1/.5 = 4.3333)
In order to get all 4 of the rewards, you have to win (on average) 9 times (1 + 1/.75 + 1/.5 + 1/.25 = 8.3333)
(again, all games rounded to nearest whole number)

So, you can see, that the current method gives you a much better chance of winning all the rewards (and therefore guaranteeing you get the one you want) in less battles than if they went the straight "If you draw something you already got, get 20 ISO instead".


* note, all calculations were done "back of the envelope" and are approximations. I may be off slightly.

Unknown

Good post abmoraz. I hadn't done the maths to realise that replacing taken rewards with 20ISO instead of fixing 20ISO at 50% would have that negative effect.

I would be being generous to myself if I even called myself an amateur programmer, but is there any reason you can think of why a third option couldn't exist where all 4 prizes are given before 20ISO is handed out? (Ignoring for the moment that the developers may have an ulterior economic motive to not implementing the change.)

Would it be as simple as this?...

if (firstWin): return awards.pop(randomInteger(len(awards))) # return a random award the first win
elif remainingAwards > 0: return remainingAwards.pop(randomInteger(len(remainingAwards))) # return random award if any remain
else: return "20 ISO" #give 20 ISO if no rewards remain

I may be wrong, but it seems deceptively simple. If I'm reading right I've taken one condition out of an else if and changed the function dramatically.