2020 PvE Overhaul, Phase 1: Current State and NPC/Mission Reworks

[Kazinsal]

Hey everyone! It's been no secret that the team is working on a PvE overhaul for Discovery (since the game is sorely lacking in that department and has been for the entirety of its life). As the dev who's taken the charge on this, I figured I should probably explain what's coming up in the overhaul, and how it's going to work.

Please keep in mind that anything here is subject to change in its exact implementation and tweaks will be made after the initial rollout. That being said, I don't plan on axing any main features at this point, so it's pretty safe to assume that anything we're doing here is going to happen in some form at some point.

Alright, yellow disclaimer taken care of. Let's quickly go over the state of PvE in Discovery as it stands right now. You have the following options for non-PvP encounters:

• Trading. This isn't really part of the traditional definition of PvE, and to some extent it's outside what I would call the PvE overhaul. It's pretty much its own thing, and it only becomes a PvP encounter when someone actually logs a pirate and you happen to get caught. The good news is you can avoid gunfire by paying the nice, well-armed person staring you down, so we're going to call this "PvP-adjacent".
  
• Missions. For the most part these are totally not worth doing as far as player advancement and money goes except for grabbing a heavy battleship and farming cruisers in a few specific places. This puts it out of reach of a good lot of players, and definitely anyone new to the game, which is bad! Right now, though, even after the nerfs it's still only profitable at the top end, which sucks for everyone who likes flying smaller ships.
  
• Mining. Also kind of not part of our usual thing for PvE, but this one is being left alone for now until we can find some way to make it more interesting and expand it (which may tie into an eventual rework of...)
  
• Production. This currently exists only with POBs and as a result requires both a large time investment (build POB, secure POB, build modules on POB, start building special equipment) and specific buyers (there are a lot more docking modules out there than there are people who want to buy docking modules).
  
• Exploration. Okay, this got totally ruined at some point and now the only thing you can really do is go around and find these anomaly things that no one seems to ever actually do anything with and use a specific ship's specific scanner on them and god I don't even know how this system works entirely but I know it sucks and the only thing it gives you is a commodity that you can either stockpile and use for super expensive super rare capital codenames or sell to other players.
  

I guess technically a sixth would be "shooting random NPC patrols and farming their pilots" but that's literally an order of magnitude lower in profit/hour than even the lowest of the above (the POB production system, which has a profit/hour of "why would you even do this to yourself"). So we're going to call that not a current type of PvE encounter.

So, the current problems are that trading isn't really PvE, missions are only useful for players who are already at the "cap8 battleships" stage, mining is profitable but boring, production is worthless, and exploration doesn't actually make you any money or let you really explore. The first one we're tackling and the one I'm going to talk about here is missions and NPCs in general.

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PvE Overhaul Phase 1: NPC and Mission Payout Reworks

Right now, the game's missions looks like this:

• New player grade fighter missions: Get paid around $100,000 credits + $5k per pilot to kill 10-15 NPCs that will barely scratch your shield. Average mission comes out to $150k.
  
• Hard fighter missions: Get paid around $350,000 credits + $5k per pilot + $10k credit card per kill to kill 10-15 NPCs that might actually kill you. Average mission comes out to $400k, divided by players in your group.
  
• Anti-gunboat missions: Get paid around $1,000,000 credits + $25k per pilot + 10x $10k credit cards per kill to kill 8-15 NPCs that might actually kill you. Duos recommended. Average mission comes out to $2.5m, divided by players in your group.
  
• Anti-cruiser missions: Get paid around $2,000,000 credits + $50k per pilot + 5x $100k credit cards per kill to kill 8-15 NPCs that could very will kill you. Duos recommended. Average mission comes out to $7.5m, divided by players in your group.
  

As you can see, it's simply not worth doing anything other than anti-cruiser missions, and even then you can really only do them in duos after the "instagib and run back for another mission" tactic was nerfed out of existence, which halves your actual income per hour to a point that makes it lower than trading by far (which averages around $35m/hour with a 3.6k transport). Anything lower than that and you're wasting your time.

The solution we're implementing is through a new piece of code that I've written and that we're testing the hell out of called the PvE Controller. One of the primary purposes of the PvE controller is to facilitate NPC kill bounties that scale based on the difficulty of the NPCs you're shooting, the ship type of the NPCs you're shooting, and how many people you're shooting them with. Every kill you or someone in your group scores adds a calculated amount of money to your bounty pool, based on the class of ship, multiplied by its estimated difficulty, and then divided by a group scaling factor. Every ten minutes, your outstanding bounty pool is paid out in full to your character's wallet, so long as your ship value won't exceed the 2 billion credit limit (in which case your bounty pool won't be paid out until you move some cash somewhere else). Naturally, shooting your friends is bad, so you only get kill credit for NPCs if your rep towards their faction is lower than 0.0.

(EVE players: Yes, we're implementing ratting.)

The base value of a fighter NPC is the kill credit that you would receive to blatting some random rank 9 or whatever patrol that has NPC guns that can't hurt you at all and no armour. As the difficulty of an NPC increases, so do its gun types and its armour value, up to eventually being as well-outfitted at rank 19 as a player would be. As a result, the higher difficulty you go, the higher the difficulty multiplier gets. A different set of difficulty multipliers will be implemented for capital ships for the purposes of later PvE enhancements.

"But, Kaz," I hear you say, "group scaling is a part of what makes missions unprofitable!" Well, yes. But that's because you split everything equally under the current system. Under the new system, a more fair split of kill bounties is performed: for example, in a group of two players, the group scaling factor is 80%, so each player gets 80% of the solo bounty value (versus the current equal credit split of 50%). In a group of three, the scaling factor is 60%, so each player gets 60% of the solo bounty value (versus the current equal credit split of 33.3%).

"But, Kaz," I also hear you say, "what about lag? Surely this takes a lot of processing power!" It totally doesn't, and here's why: The only times any actual calculations are made are when an NPC dies to a player, and that's simply a matter of doing a few quick multiplications on numbers that are re-cached for fast access every time the configuration is changed. Every time the payout tick happens, which is every ten minutes, no math needs to be done apart from "player's wallet = player's wallet + player's bounty pool", which takes a fraction of a microsecond for the entire server.

What does this look like? First, another yellow disclaimer: The numbers being shown here are accurate as of May 1, 2020. Actual numbers may vary slightly after rollout and tweaking.

(Concerned citizens: Yes, tweaking. As in, payouts and multipliers etc. can be tweaked live without restarting the server or nullifying anyone's in-progress bounty pools.)

Scenario: You're in a fighter. You pick up a high end fighter mission with a listed payout of $450k that ends up pitting you against two waves of 6 rank 18 VHFs. You're pretty good, though, so you can do it solo. It ends up eating a bunch of your nanobots, but you get away alive and with all kills under your belt on your own. The base payout for a fighter NPC is $50,000, and the rank 17-18 multiplier is 7x, so the payout for a rank 18 fighter is $350k. Your bounty pool has grown by $350k * 12 = $4.2 million for about seven minutes of effort, plus the $450k mission completion bonus for a total of $4.65 million, and you don't have to go deal with any pilots or commodities or anything. By the time you go grab another mission, your bounty pool has been paid out, and you're already well on your way to the next mission zone.

Slightly different scenario: You're taking the same mission, but you're not that hot in the cockpit, so you and a friend are taking them on together. Same payouts, but now there's an 80% (0.8x) multiplier on all the bounties. This means between you and your friend you've each gotten $450k + 80% of $4.2m = $450k + $3.36m = $3.81 million per person. Sure, that's a bit lower than doing it by yourself, but you've also saved a couple minutes and maybe a chunk of your restock costs, so your profit/hour is still around the same and you've gotten someone else in doing it with you.

Our goal is to scale this entire setup to every class of mission at every difficulty level. This means that new players will be able to get a start in the Discovery game universe by just going around, exploring, shooting pirate NPCs, shooting lawful NPCs, taking simple missions, et cetera, and experienced players will be able to make money in different classes of ships both alone and with their friends and faction members.

We've also standardized the armour values on NPCs (except transports and freighters, but that's because we still don't know what to do with those). Rank 1-9 NPCs have no armour. Ranks 10-13 have a 1.3x armour multiplier and a 2x difficulty multiplier. Ranks 14-16 have a 1.7x armour multiplier and a 3.5x difficulty multiplier. Ranks 17-18 have a 2.0x armour multiplier and a 7x difficulty multiplier. Rank 19 NPCs have a 2.5x armour multiplier and a 10x difficulty multiplier. Eventually we will also be reworking and standardizing the weapons the different rank brackets have at the lower ends because currently they're mostly just guns that can't even break through your shield (you need to be in mission territory to fight something actually competently challenging).

We'd like to, in the near future, update the weapons loadouts of NPCs to standardize their DPS across the board. Currently some rank 14-16 NPCs are armed with guns similar to old 4.85 class 7s and some are just doing the Discovery equivalent of shooting at a tank with an airsoft gun. A standardized progression of damage output to better match difficulty ratings will make the PvE system a lot more interesting for new players, and will let them improve their basic fighter combat abilities without getting stomped on over and over in Connecticut.

Oh, and NPCs won't fire infinite countermeasures anymore. Really.

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TL;DR

TL;DR: There's a new system in this update for NPC kill payouts that scales fairly with both NPC difficulty and group size. Killing hostile NPCs anywhere adds a calculated amount of money to your bounty pool, which is paid out every ten minutes. This replaces credit card and pilot drops on capital ships and makes missions actually worth doing at all levels of play from new players all the way up to battleship groups. It also lets us tweak mission and non-mission NPC rewards on the fly in case something goes horribly wrong. A future update will further standardize and improve low level PvE and capital PvE based on the results of this first phase of PvE development.

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Glossary

• PvE Controller: A new FLHook plugin that handles the server-side technical implementation of the PvE Overhaul.
  
• bounty pool: The amount of money you've pooled from NPC kills. Pays out every ten minutes.
  
• difficulty multiplier: A multiplier applied to NPC kills based on their effective difficulty level, calculated based on aspects of their loadouts to estimate danger and rank.
  
• group scaling factor: A multiplier applied to NPC kills based on how many players are in your group. Not a linear scale; ie. is not 1/n where n is the number of players in your group.
  

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Retired, permanently.

[jammi]

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Shiki]

Good. Ill be happy and thankful if fighter missions will worth their time.

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[TheShooter36]

How about capital missions?

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[Kazinsal]

Capital missions and NPCs are part of this as well; instead of dropping credit cards and pilots you just get paid through the NPC bounty system. That way the nice friendly group splitting system can be used instead of everyone equally sharing the sale of the cards and pilots.

Oh, and something else: There's a couple commands in the plugin that are handy: /pool will show you how much you have in your pool and when it'll be paid out. /value is just a general way of showing what your character worth is as it's used by commands and the server to determine whether or not you're nearing the 2 billion credit value limit.

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Retired, permanently.

[E X O D I T E]

To compensate for this, are 100k, 1 mil, and 10 mil cards going to be sold on NPC bases? Right now, the only source of 100k and 1 mil cards is killing NPC caps.

And now, a massive concern.

This system looks god-awful and the solution always was to just remove infinite CMs from NPCs.
I do not look forward to these changes because they somehow make mission running biased towards snubs (hi Haste). It seems like a cool concept, but in practice it completely slaughters endgame credit farming because an EK dual Nova Waran does the job cheaper and faster per cost. For an encore, just give every corp restart a 5ker.

Let me be clear, I appreciate the work and effort put into this, but the new system is making mission farming too easy. I look forward to being proven wrong when the change drops and my dual Nova Waran with a friend back home taking missions still make less than two 5kers/hour, but with the new system and the numbers you have given, I doubt it.

tl;dr everyone buy dual Nova Warans, you'll make more than a 5ker.

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[Lucas]

To compensate for this, are 100k, 1 mil, and 10 mil cards going to be sold on NPC bases? Right now, the only source of 100k and 1 mil cards is killing NPC caps.

And now, a massive concern.

This system looks god-awful and the solution always was to just remove infinite CMs from NPCs.
I do not look forward to these changes because they somehow make mission running biased towards snubs (hi Haste). It seems like a cool concept, but in practice it completely slaughters endgame credit farming because an EK dual Nova Waran does the job cheaper and faster per cost. For an encore, just give every corp restart a 5ker.

Let me be clear, I appreciate the work and effort put into this, but the new system is making mission farming too easy. I look forward to being proven wrong when the change drops and my dual Nova Waran with a friend back home taking missions still make less than two 5kers/hour, but with the new system and the numbers you have given, I doubt it.

tl;dr everyone buy dual Nova Warans, you'll make more than a 5ker.

Hello, someone who actually used this plugin for more than 1 minute here.

Snubs are not even close to the credit rates of caps. At best, I was able to get around 40Mil/Hour in Snub missions, while cap missions in teams got me and a teammate around 85mil/unit each.

So no, snubs will not just be faster. Please test things before you complain

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Last words are for fools who have not yet said enough.

[Kazinsal]

Large denomination credit cards are a holdover from the time before /givecash existed, which is why they were never sold in the first place. They just happened to be the best way to have credit output from high tier missions at the time.

There is a proper scale for larger ships. The bigger the ship and the harder the mission, the more value that ship has when it dies.

We tested this quite a bit at all levels and determined the numbers were a good starting point. As the thread says, we can tweak things further during live testing depending on what we see come out of it, though we are to some extent relying on players to cooperate and help us out with this.

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Retired, permanently.

[Nightowl]

Nice!

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This is a game, a Roleplay-Game!

[E X O D I T E]

To compensate for this, are 100k, 1 mil, and 10 mil cards going to be sold on NPC bases? Right now, the only source of 100k and 1 mil cards is killing NPC caps.

And now, a massive concern.

This system looks god-awful and the solution always was to just remove infinite CMs from NPCs.
I do not look forward to these changes because they somehow make mission running biased towards snubs (hi Haste). It seems like a cool concept, but in practice it completely slaughters endgame credit farming because an EK dual Nova Waran does the job cheaper and faster per cost. For an encore, just give every corp restart a 5ker.

Let me be clear, I appreciate the work and effort put into this, but the new system is making mission farming too easy. I look forward to being proven wrong when the change drops and my dual Nova Waran with a friend back home taking missions still make less than two 5kers/hour, but with the new system and the numbers you have given, I doubt it.

tl;dr everyone buy dual Nova Warans, you'll make more than a 5ker.

Hello, someone who actually used this plugin for more than 1 minute here.

Snubs are not even close to the credit rates of caps. At best, I was able to get around 40Mil/Hour in Snub missions, while cap missions in teams got me and a teammate around 85mil/unit each.

So no, snubs will not just be faster. Please test things before you complain

You know, I'd love to test things, but the mission NPCs aren't spawning on the live server. Video here (processing)

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