Percentile-based payout model for Ball Race

[Rin]

@The_Sink_God

My concern with this then (albeit a much smaller concern) would be that unit rewards in Ball Race would no longer be static.

Let me clarify that, one of the major benefits of my proposal is indeed making the unit rewards static (relative to one’s skill), instead of not static (as you perceived). In the old system, how many units you earn is mostly not decided by your skill, but other players’ skill within the same game. For example, when playing with rookies, your unit earning per round can be up to *2.7x times more than what you earn when you are playing with pros, even if your time did not change at all.

*2.7 = (200 + 750) / (200 + 150)

However, with the percentage-based model, this is no longer the case. If, for example, getting a 12.34 seconds on a level gives you 500 units for being in the 10th percentile, it is very likely that even if in the next month, getting a 12.34 second on the same level will place you somewhere very close to the 10th percentile, and give you something very close to 500 units. By using a percentile in a 10k pool, this model effectively reduces noise introduced by individual variance. That is, the distribution of those 10k records should look pretty much the same for as long as there is no major change.

With that established, I think argument you provided in the first paragraph no longer stands.

@The_Sink_God

It’d be very odd for Ball Race to be the only game in TU to have a percentile-based score system, don’t you think?

Well, technically, this system can be ported to Zombie Massacre and Acceleration (when out) as well. Even though I am not sure about ZM, I do believe Acceleration will benefit greatly from this system (for almost the same reason).

Also, being unique (or odd) is not really a valid counterargument. You cannot dismiss ideas just because they are different from existing ones.

@The_Sink_God

Having to make somethig like this for other gameworlds will (like I said before) exponentially increase the amount of work needed to make it happen, further increase server load, and further destabilize the scoring system.

In contrast, I believe adding this system to other gameworlds (when applicable, so obviously not Little Crusaders) should be much simpler then creating the first implementation as there should be a lot of reusable code. Even if there isn’t any reusable code (which is unlikely), it definitely does not require exponentially more work. In the worst case, they just had to write the similar logic twice.

@The_Sink_God

These aren’t as immediately critical issues but I think they’re important to mention as they can be especially jarring for new players that want to get into the game. Inconsistency in what they earn for completing the level and different methods of scoring in different game worlds would be confusing just to marginally improve the experience for one.

Ok, here is where I think you might slightly misunderstood what I am saying. Again, my English is far from perfect, so I apologize again if I created confusion.

What I proposed, is not a scoring system. As title said, it is a payout model. Existing scoring system (time), achievements, and leader boards, should stay the same. My proposal only affects how many units are given out. (Use global percentile instead of ranking within the game)

There should be no confusing even for the first time players. For example, the payout popup may simply say: “Your time xx:xx is in the y th percentile globaly, thus you get zzz units”. I believe people are intelligent enough to understand that even if it is their first time playing.

---

I know, you are going to come up with some other minor drawbacks within my proposal. However, I think you underestimated the great benefit that this percentage-based payout system can bring. This is not me whining for more units. This is me suggesting a system that can psychologically improve players’ feelings.

As we all know, Ball Race is inherently competitive. However, competitive games do not need to be frustrating when losing. Usage of clever design can mediate such negative feeling. For example, I think Tower Unite’s units/exp system is excellent for this goal - no matter what place you got (or even failed the round), you always get some units/exp. This creates a sense of accomplishment to combat the frustration that may arise.

I don’t know how much experience you have with Ball Race, but I believe that most ball race players, when in a game with pros, think that they hoped that those pros are not there, so they can get better ranks in the game and thus gaining more units. I personally find myself thinking that all the time. I do not think such thought is a positive thing to have - players should be glad when playing with better player instead of feel resentful. This is the reason that I first think a new payout system is needed in order to reduce such feeling.

Truthfully, there are many ways to solve this issue. Overall, as long as the unit payout is less dependent on players within the same game, this issue should be resolved. Thus, I perceived a lot of alternatives:

1. Cutoff time points
   • This is the first idea I came up with. However, it suffers a lot of issues as mentioned in my thread (hard to adjust & makes shortcut less shortcut-y).
2. Use remaining time to determine how many units to give
   • It is really hard to determine the relationship between units and remaining time.
   • It makes death too punishing
3. Use z-score
   • The actual distribution of a given level is not necessarily normal. Attempts where there is no death will have very different time compared to attempts where there is one death. Thus, z-scores does not really make sense on those weird shaped distributions.
4. Use percentile, but with leader board data
   • This will avoid the usage of storing new data. However, the score on the leader board will only increase. That is, unit payout for a exact same run will decrease as time goes.
5. Use percentile, with all attempts (instead of best ones)
   • This immediately solves issues created by those 4 former approaches:
     • The cutoff time (or the payout distribution) is automatically and dynamically updated as players are playing the game
     • There will be attempts with death in the record, thus how punishing death should be is automatically accounted for
     • Percentile always makes sense no matter the shape of the distribution
     • The unit payout is always stable, as you are always comparing with other attempts instead of best recods
   • It also provides 5 additional benefits as described in my thread
   • This, however, creates the problem that a scaling amount of data is required to be stored.
6. Use percentile, with last 10k attempts ← My current proposal

Seriously, I went through a ton of brain storming to get to this point. All problems that I can think of has already been ironed out. Again, if you still really want to point out some minor flaws, please reread the benefits of this proposal and consider that whether this flaw outweighs the benefit. Even if you do not think resenting pros is a bad thing, please note there are at least 5 other benefits I mentioned in the thread. I think improvements like making players less focused on melons, organically give more rewards to harder levels, and give players better feedback all very significant benefits of this proposal. Please don’t ignore them.

Thanks for reading.