Gameplay: Grief Forgiveness

**Malorn** · 2011-07-23, 10:22 AM

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a hueristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Death2All · 2011-07-23, 11:20 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a heuristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Because healing your teammates to reduce your grief level in an incredibly complex mechanic that nobody could ever possibly wrap their head around.

However, I do see your point. A person should essentially learn from their mistakes, especially with a forgiveness system in place that lowers your grief over time.

I am really interested to see how the new "revised" grief system works. You're clearly in favor of the old one and it definitely worked. There were some kinks here and there so it will be interesting to see what's changed.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-23, 11:59 AM

I would ask a simple question - What is the problem that grief forgiveness is solving?

I am discussing complexity from a stability and reliability standpoint, not as if the actual concept was somehow difficult to grasp. Complexity and difficulty are not the same thing. Engineers know that you only make something as complex as it needs to be. The more variables you start throwing into it the less predictable and reliable the system and the more likely someone will find holes with it and it will fail to do its job. Simplicity is good.

Death2All · 2011-07-23, 12:07 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

I would ask a simple question - What is the problem that grief forgiveness is solving?

I am discussing complexity from a stability and reliability standpoint, not as if the actual concept was somehow difficult to grasp. Complexity and difficulty are not the same thing. Engineers know that you only make something as complex as it needs to be. The more variables you start throwing into it the less predictable and reliable the system and the more likely someone will find holes with it and it will fail to do its job. Simplicity is good.

I never said there was a problem with it per se. I did however bring up the idea of an additional mechanic to lower your grief through support rather than the traditional waiting for it to slowly tick down.

Originally Posted by DeeTwoEh

Because healing your teammates to reduce your grief level in an incredibly complex mechanic that nobody could ever possibly wrap their head around.

I meant this ironically but now I'm starting to believe it.

Let me stress that that I agree the current systems works fine as I've said before, but in addition it would greatly appease me if there were an added mechanic that allowed you to reduce through via support XP. Either way it goes I could care less. The likelihood of them actually implementing this idea is low I'm sure, but it's worth the shot of expressing the idea.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-23, 12:17 PM

Well, I disagree with adding complexity to the system unless there's a problem that needs to be solved. I think it does its job just fine and there isn't much that can't be fixed by tweaking the numbers a tiny bit.

Also if you're doing support activities your grief will naturally go down faster. Its a lot harder to get grief if you aren't shooting your weapons.

Lartnev · 2011-07-24, 05:33 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Agreed. Grief is a cruel mistress when it should be a fair mistress.

At first I thought that the forgiveness system should work in reverse, you're forgiven unless proven guilty. The reason was simple: players will first need to know they've been teamkilled (I sometimes don't notice in heavy firefights), second they have to know it was accidental, and finally they need to know/remember there's a forgive system on a menu screen. But then there's the opposite scenario where players flag a teamkill as deliberate when it wasn't for vengeance or just general trolling.

When I've seen forgive systems implemented they're undermined by the amount of angst generated by people not using it correctly. In short: I'd much rather see players angry at the system than at each other.

The grief system is designed to hold you to account for your actions. Should you be driving so fast in a crowded courtyard? Should you have thrown that grenade, was the 5 enemy kills worth the grief? etc.

I believe the frustration (and desire for a forgiveness system) comes from bugs or inconsistencies that lead to injustices in the system, just as Malorn pointed out earlier. A couple of cases of my own would be when the Striker used to lock on to friendly aircraft by mistake and when a full Galaxy was shot down but the pilot got grief for "crashing" on the people bailing out.

WarChimp130 · 2011-07-24, 07:24 AM

I don't think it's that complex of a concept. If a player wants to forgive grief they can, if they don't then the system works pretty much exactly the same. Under my system the griefed player never even has to look at it if they don't want and play as always. It simply gives an option to forgive an accidental griefing that incurs a high level of grief.

I don't see how giving an extra option that empowers the player is a bad thing. It doesn't interfere with actual intentional griefing at all and simply exists to forgive accidents.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-24, 12:14 PM

It's not all that complex but it undermines the system, and its unnecessary. If the heuristics are correct then the average joe player that demonstrates decent fire control skills and doesn't go on TK sprees should never be even remotely in danger of a weaponslock and he should have a low, stable grief score that might fluxuate about 100 points.

There is no need for any grief forgiveness at that point because the system works as expected. Then you don't have "please forgive me bro!" or other such stuff. In the middle of a battle people don't have time to be doing that, and the incidents outside of a battle should never be significant enough to cause problems with someone's typical grief score.

It should "just work".

One big advantage and if there's anything I would like to see implemented around this, is SOE statistics (hopefully ones we have access to as well) regarding the grief levels of players, and the grief generated by specific actions/weapons.

I'd love to be able to look at my character's grief score and see a breakdown like a pie chart about where that score originated. Is 90% of my grief from throwing plasma grenades? Running over friendlies? Etc. If you know where your grief comes from you can better correct whatever actions caused it.

Then on the other end SOE and hopefully players as well can look at the overall grief distribution of where it is coming from. Throwing out the outliers (very high grief players) allows them to look at the distribution of grief among the average player, look for anomalies, and then tweak them.

Going along with this would be the ability to fine tune the grief generated from any action in the game. They can use the data + the fine tuning to normalize the grief generation across all actions in the game.

If you put in grief forgiveness or other things it skews results and as stated before...its just unnecessary. If they get the heurstics right you simply don't need it and it will just add additional actions for players to do and social issues ("zomg, so-and-so didn't forgive me after I accidentally hit him!! what an ass!"). There is no problem forgiveness solves that can't better be addressed by fixing the hueristics.

WarChimp130 · 2011-07-24, 05:37 PM

I'd say another issue of concern will be the fact their is no 3rd person vehicle movement in the game. So when you are backing up or turning to the side, it's going to be much more difficult to tell if somebody is around you. Lots of people gonna be getting whacked, lots more grief.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-24, 05:52 PM

If accidental grief due to that sort of stuff is more prevalent then they'd have to tone down the amount you get since it is a more common occurrence.

Or give vehicles 3rd person. I thought they had mentioned vehicle 3rd person, but no infantry in one of the videos.

Then again, Battlefield games don't have vehicle 3rd person and I don't really have issues accidentally running over friendlies.

I think PS warping had a lot more impact on that sort of thing than we might think.

NewSith · 2011-07-25, 01:01 PM

Or, you can make it so that firing upon enemy causes grief to go down. Slower than you got them, but faster then you lose them in idle. Like some sort of buff to griefpoints loss.

BorisBlade · 2011-07-25, 09:52 PM

Originally Posted by WarChimp130

I'd say another issue of concern will be the fact their is no 3rd person vehicle movement in the game. So when you are backing up or turning to the side, it's going to be much more difficult to tell if somebody is around you. Lots of people gonna be getting whacked, lots more grief.

Well they are only removin 3rd person from infantry. No one in their right mind would take it away from ground vehicle pilots. It would be a nightmare to drive in first person. Hop in a deli or marauder and see how well first person goes. Cant see squat, its very hard to maneuver well. Heck basic driving is a pain in the ass in first person, let alone tryin to move in and around things at high speed in combat.