Challenges fix... I guess

Ideas
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This is one of the things that were supposed to be proposed by the “WBP 2.0” project. Project was shut down for reasons(…), and I am about to quit forums, but I think this idea that we came up with some time ago, can still save competitiveness of CIU’s challenge missions.

Well, challenges have huge problem : abusing of “end session” feature to archieve better scores. Starting with replaying the wave to not miss any “pecking orders” and “early birds”, farming powerups, ending on farming big golden coin drops. (this strategy was discovered recently and is ridiculously tedious, but also effective on dailies) There is also space race, which is another topic…

So our goal was to make challenges competitive and not exploitable by end-session. There is set of changes designed by us, that could help with that.

Daily Challenges:

  1. Enemies spawned by bosses (On waves like Henterprise, Egg City, or Egg Cannon) no loger drop food, powerups and golden coins.

  2. You can no longer use difficulty modifiers (tourist, veteran, SSH etc.) Just like in space race, there is fixed difficulty for each daily challenge.

  3. Drops RNG is the same for everyone playing the challenge. (So for example: all players get one atomic powerup on wave 1, one golden coin drop and equal amount of food.)

  4. Ending session on daily challenge once, disqualifies from leaderboard. (There is a warning informing about that before ending session and after going back) Player can still continue the mission and get normal mission rewards, but won’t appear on the top 10 list.

Change nr 1 is obviously targeted at people who farm enemies spawned by bosses, to archieve higher scores. I don’t think this is something desirable, so it’s better to prevent that from happening.

Change nr 2 is here to make sure everyone can participate, even if they don’t have difficulty modifiers, it also is there to make change nr 3 possible.

Change nr 3 makes player’s score independant on RNG. (Right now one player can simply get random quadrouple coin drop and be 120000 points ahead of the others, only because of that.) Everyone gets the same drops, so better player wins, without external variables.

Change nr 4 makes abusing end session for score on daily challenges not possible. Casual players, who play those missions for other purposes (earning keys, or just for gameplay) can still finish them, even if they are disconnected, or end session, but they won’t appear on top 10 list.

This particular thing might be controversial, because “what about people who really need to end session, or are disconnected”. Well, shit happens. If you get dc-ed when flying daily challenge, then you are not going to win this time, you can try tomorrow. This is a small sacrifice, that we need to make, if we want challenges to become competitive. (We either disqualify disconnects, or we leave challenges unfun for everyone.)

In ideal world, “end session” would allow player to go back to exactly the same moment he disconnected (in the middle of wave), but I suspect this is out of reach for IA to imlement, so the best solution we could come up with was the disqualification.

Weekly Challenge:

  1. Enemies spawned by bosses (On waves like Henterprise, Egg City, or Egg Cannon) no loger drop food, powerups and golden coins.

  2. You can no longer use difficulty modifiers (tourist, veteran, SSH etc.) Just like in space race, there is fixed difficulty for weekly challenge.

  3. Drops RNG is the same for everyone playing the challenge. (So for example: all players get one atomic powerup on wave 1, one golden coin drop and equal amount of food.)

  4. Ending session for the third time, disqualifies from leaderboard. This pretty much means you can end session twice without any consequences, which is reasonable, because weekly challenge is a really long mission. (There is a warning informing about that before ending session and after going back) When disqualified for 3rd end session, player can still continue the mission and get normal mission rewards, but won’t appear on the top 10 list.

Changes 1, 2 and 3 are identical to daily challenges, so I won’t explain them again. Change nr 4 is different, because Weekly Challenge is roughly 3 times as long as dailies, so using “end session” once or twice is acceptable. It should be enough for people who use it for its intended purpose. (Or are disconnected once or twice when flying the mission.)

Alternatively, if “2 end sessions per weekly” doesn’t look appealing, there is another option that could give the same result. “One/two end sessions per day” - so player who used his all his “end sessions” on monday, regains them on tuesday.

Space Race:

  1. Mass Condensers and Speedy Recovery are removed from the game (or disabled for space race).

  2. Drops RNG is the same for everyone playing the Space Race. (Mainly because of atomic powerups.)

  3. Ending session once disqualifies from leaderboard. (There is a warning informing about that before ending session and after going back) Player can still continue the mission and get normal mission rewards, but won’t appear on the top 10 list.

Speedy Recovery and Mass Condenser allow “suicide strategy” that most people don’t really consider a quality gameplay. I don’t think we want this in game about shooting chickens. Removing Mass Condensers and Speedy from the game, or disallowing them on space race, should be good enough fix for that.

Changes 2 and 3, analogical to Daily Challenge. I won’t repeat myself.

So yeah, that’s it. I am not aware about the technicalities, so I don’t know if IA will be able to implement all changes I proposed in this post. However, if we want challenges to actually be competitive, both RNG and end session need to go. Fixing one or the other, won’t help at all. (It can in fact make it even worse, because if End Session is gone, but RNG isn’t, challenges will be even more luck-based than they currently are.) Both those aspects need adressing in one way or another.

In case rewriting RNG is not an option, then the best Stop-Gap solution we could find for that is to remove coin and powerup drops from challenges altogether, and replace them with guaranteed drops before or after each wave. (So, chickens no longer drop gifts, coins and atomic powerups, but those things are given to the player after finishing the wave, and are the same for every participant.)

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In that case there should be a thing which can detect if disconnecting happened because of internet or because of Alt+F4 or disconnect button. Would be too unfair for those with slow internet.

But even like this it still possible to trick the system by disconnecting pc from internet and I can’t think about a solution.

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From what I underſtand, drop RNG is calculated at the moment, not before the wave ſtarts. If it were a ſimple game, I’d ſay that changing this ſhouldn’t be that hard, but given the complexity of CIU it might be a complete nightmare, ſo I wouldn’t count on this changing. On the other hand, as you put it,

Perſonally, I’m not ſuch a fan of the “enemies spawned by bosses no longer drop ſtuff” change, although I certainly ſee where you’re coming from. Maybe I’m adverſe to it ſimply becauſe it’s a change.
That laſt point alſo applies to the “no longer uſe difficulty modifiërs” change. If this change is implemented, I think the mediüm and hard dailies ſhould be increaſed in difficulty, juſt to make up for it.

I think Condenſers and Speedy Recovery ſhould only be diſallowed from the ſpace race, not removed from the game.

The propoſed “end ſeſſion” rules are poſitively vicious, but I think that they’re neceſſary. An alternative would be a hefty point penalty that goes up exponentially each time you diſconnect/reconnect. That way people with crappy connections aren’t penaliſed quite ſo badly, but if you try to do it as a way of life you’ll have a hard time winning.

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Overall I have no objections to the whole topic, but as for weekly challenges I would actually vote for second option:

I think it’s fair that weekly disconnects are reset every day. Back when I used to grind for new spaceship I just played weekly challenge every day and sometimes I had so many disconnects due to my internet. So I really think that having the counter reset every day would be the best. I can only imagine frustration if someone had to use their disconnects in 1 day for a whole week.

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I’ve added this to my list. It will be addressed soon. Some thoughts:

  • Reconnections are currently logged, and I was planning to make them visible in the top-10 as a shaming tool, but clearly actual action needs to be taken against this practice, too.
  • As @Traveller said, the RNG drops are not predetermined, they’re calculated on-the-fly, which makes it hard to anchor down. Even if the drops are the same for each wave (and there are some steps taken to ensure that they are), the order/timing of enemy deaths can affect the outcome. Also, recall that some drops (e.g. keys) cannot be predetermined because they spawn on a timer (at which point they are assigned to a random surviving enemy).
  • Instead of disqualification, what about penalizing each reconnect (or, at least, penalize reconnects exceeding some threshold)? Similar to the way special weapon usage is currently penalized in Space Race. So if your performance is way ahead, you can still survive a few reconnections and still make it in the top-10.
  • Making the game save up-to-the-second progress, although solving a lot of problems, is sadly technically not feasible.
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I guess the penalizing would work.

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Keys are not a concern, as long as they don’t give points, they don’t affect final outcome at all.

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My take is that there is no reason to deny actual resources (score in the case of dailies) for disconnects as one could simply continue playing it as a normal mission despite not appearing on the leaderboard, it becomes less worth playing than any other mission if the player is going for stacking up score for the next tier(s).

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Right. Well, ignoring keys, I might have come up with a way to actually nail down RNG (!)… will need to flesh it out some more, but I’m optimistic.

Good point.

Thresholds for disqualification are going to be objectionable any way you see it, though. Some people might play weeklies in 4-5 short sessions, because that’s what their free time allows.

But, I think I have an idea… disconnections at the beginning of each wave (before any enemies are killed) will NOT count towards the limit. This won’t help with random disconnections, but it will help with players legitimately wanting to split their sessions.

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Huh, actually. Maybe not that, but instead:

  • end session rework: “end session after wave is finished”

So instead of ending session during the wave, clicking that, makes it so after you finish the wave you are playing right now, you are disconnected. (And this has no limit/restrictions, restrictions are only present for mid-wave disconnects)

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I don’t see what the benefit of postponing end session is. Why should we ask the player to predict when they want to end their session? What if they forget? An immediate “end session” button is much clearer in terms of intent (and implementation).

Ah, I think I see where the misunderstanding is: When I said “disconnections”, I actually meant pressing the “end session” button. From the game’s perspective, there is no difference between disconnecting due to a network fault, or pressing the “end session” button (there can’t be any difference, otherwise it’s open to abuse).

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My reasoning for that was:

It might not be that obvious for players when end session is penalized and when it’s not. Plus this solution doesn’t have a risk of: “Player ends session between the waves, but game thinks new wave has already started and punishes him.” But if you are confident that you can make it work as intended, then it’s a good idea IMO.

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Ok, then maybe we just need to change the wording of the button to distinguish between “safe end session” and “penalized end session”.

Will think of some alternatives.

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100% on board for the general changes in topic post, not sure about the weekly ones but I almost never fly those so I’m going to reserve my opinion. Space race fixes are fine, I think.

This is just a general problem, really. Not unique to challenges.

Is this, like, on fights with endless chicken spawns like egg cannon? Because I pointed that out a while back and everyone was like “eh” :joy:

I’d prefer the first option - they both encourage really weird strategies and are borderline useless for normal gameplay.

I’d be on board with this, too, actually, although it’s obviously not ideal.

For the time being that would be a brilliant thing, although I wouldn’t want it permanently.

This is like, three people just this month. What’s going on?

(And sad to see such a noted community member go, best wishes man. :wink: )

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No, it’s for every wave. Basically, you can end session for every wave individually until you get at least 1 pack of gold coins for each wave.
Of course, you can farm those bosses, too.

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Changed in v.50 :medal_sports: Idea

Well, it’s as good as I can make it (for now). There are minor flaws in each rule, but I think that the rule set as a whole should suppress abuse very effectively.

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I remember saying something about ending session in v45,

Also are cawords prevented from showing in yolk star battle? Because @marksam123 said he saw them once?

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They are now, becauſe of cowards. I think they ſhould ſtill appear at difficulties >90%.

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If Challenges 1-3 are dealt with, then penalizing end sessions would become redundant, in my opinion.

And ending session in the small break between waves should not be penalized imo, because it really doesn’t break the game much.

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