THE iDOLM@STER > THE iDOLM@STER Platinum Stars

DL Lives

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Setsuna:
Actually most of my concerns have been around acquisition methods - not because the model has no place, but because of the fact they modelled it so badly, on the actual assumption we would play it for a literal infinite hours.

Or for a better perspective, the model used assumes you'll play a given live about a thousand times. EACH.

That's assuming 8 gold presents is enough to get one of every accessory.

(Mathematically it's nowhere close. You need about 16 assuming the game hasn't lied to you re: drop rates, so try closer to 1900 of the same DL live. If you're wondering, nominal drop rates are 4/6 * 3/6 * 2/6 * 1/6 as the C and the S costumes are in the drop list according to the live itself. The %s drop for each additional drop as per above because as you collect items your odds of a double increase.)

How did I draw that conclusion? That's pretty simple - I just modelled on the numbers I have to extrapolate the drop system given the numbers I have.

Amusingly, what makes this worse is the fact that 'paying your way' doesn't even work, because you're subject to some very odd design choices due to the layered very small % rates which effectively cause the cost of pdrops to go near vertical for the DL lives.

The model is dismal simply because the % drop rates are worse than most MMOs. I mean we're talking similar drop rates to Ragnarok Online, and that game was infamous for drops in the 0.01% category with 30 minute to 1 hour (to 8 hours in some cases) drop rates. Under that model (and people camping said bosses 24/7 for years) certain items (like cards at the 0.01%) category did not show up for literal YEARS on servers. From memory, I recall a certain card taking oh, about 5 years to exist once. And this with entire populations camping the poor thing on the dot every 30 minutes.

Even though the spread period is 6 times as long (30m compared to 5m) that's still roughly 10 months straight (And it's a lot more hours than 84, let me tell you).

My emphasis - our nominal calculation ended up with about 84 hours of flat out live play (assuming 5 minutes end to end per week) per live to get all 4 accessories. That's the mathematical average. When 0.01% compounded goes horribly wrong, they can go WAY outside your calculations - namely, cause there's no floor.

The previous results don't matter, meaning that if you spent 50 hours and turned up nothing (I've gone 50 hours at a time without a present dropping, let alone a gold one, so don't be surprised) the next 50 hours can turn up nothing, because previous results don't affect future performance. (It's one of the reasons why mathematically very low % odds can blow out FAR more than they should on paper. You don't learn this in basic probability, incidentally.)

Essentially 'Getting lucky' like in the platinum stars model works for a game with multiplayer aspects (like Diablo, PSO, WoW or any other MMO you can name) as you can buy, trade or downright grind your way out.

In PS, you can't buy (as the p-drops end up working mathematically against you economically due to no floors due to the drop issues I noted) and you can't trade (Or otherwise assist with most social games) as the game provides no option to do so.

Which in turn means there's only one realistic option - Grind it out. You can get back to me once cheating becomes a viable alternative.

At 84 hours of play median? You BETTER hope you're lucky, cause it's known what happens when your roughly calculated odds don't pan out that way. (Namely, the real world requires time to grind to infinity number of plays, and infinity is a very long time)

In MMOs, it's bad enough, but at least you can recruit entire guilds to help you beat said thing until the item shows up.

The closest we have in PS is to play tag team with our save file on a 24 watch system.

The best part? Those odds are calculated per live. In short? I hope you have a literal forever, because when you're done with the 1000 median plays for DL live 1, you're going to have to do it for 2, then 3....

And I personally know there's at least 12 of the things out there.

Which I suspect wasn't the original intention or design, but then again I think when they settled on this model, they forgot to account for some sort of way to compensate for the fact past performance does not influence future performance.

This in turn means the median nominal hours is actually your best case scenario, not your WORST case, and that in turn should frighten you.

For an idea, that's over 2 actual work weeks PER LIVE. (Assuming you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week)

Guess how fast each live is being released at?

You guessed it, every 2 weeks.

In short, they are aware of the median math, and are hoping like all hell you haven't done the numbers.

I don't like the model personally (apart from having to grind through it myself) mostly cause by its very definition, it makes a huge gulf of haves and have nots with no ability to pay your way across without throwing actual thousands of dollars at it - this in turn affects MAD creation and other fan work since there's no way for Platinum Stars to know if you're a player or a creator.

In short, it's a blunt weapon in an attempt to make variable pricing, using a model that's made a few too many assumptions.

Naryoril:

--- Quote from: Yukibro on August 22, 2016, 10:15:44 pm ---I can't say I entirely disagree, since I think the first DL Live's outfit set some expectations that haven't been met so far (namely the fact that it was entirely original and introduced a new costume type). As far as that goes, I can see why you'd be disappointed. But if we're speaking about the lack of variety of the base costumes, that's not the fault of the DL Lives on their own. That falls under the other criticism of having such costume similarities in the first place, so while it is a problem, I feel that DL Lives are doing as much as they were advertised to do while being dragged down by other unfortunate issues we've mentioned already. I don't feel obligated to criticize the DL Live offerings beyond what I said about the first DL Live showing because at that point, I would be complaining more about P Drops and the recolors than the event itself.

--- End quote ---

This.

Imo all these complaints about the DL lives, their existence at all and the original costume from the first DL live is a typical case of "give them a finger and they'll take the whole hand". Imo it's not that the first DL live set unrealistic expectations, it's rather that people jumped to unrealistic conclusions. The second DL live came 2 weeks after the first, the 3rd only 1 week after the 2nd. Now people are complaining about "yet another recolor" for the 3rd, where as i bet 90% didn't expect there even BEING a 3rd DL live so soon.

Personally my current speculation about DL lives is that there will be one with an original costume for every catalog, which means one every month. If my guess is right it will mean that we will have the same amount of unique costumes in platinum stars as we have in im@s 2/ofa in 7/8 months (could be the other way around). Even if it's a new costume every 2 months we'll have almost as many as im@s 2/ofa in a year.

And again: i agree, there are several things to complain about in this game, but complaining about what we get for the DL lives is just... On top of that i still expect them to release meatier dlc further down the line, akin to the ex episodes in ofa, which could help to alleviate a lot of the other issues.

And honestly in a lot of the criticism there is based on double standards. Technically the game is over after the extreme live, and up to that point, there is no grinding, the randomness of the rewards doesn't really matter and the low variety in costumes isn't perceived as such because you constantly keep changing to better costumes up to that point. In OfA people were complaining about "why is there not trophy to get to 5 hearts" "why is there no trophy to reach max level" "why is there no trophy to get all songs to gold" and so on. Namco listened and added such trophies, and now people are complaining about the grinding they have to do to get them... You can't do it right for everyone.

DeviantProtagonist:
I like to think we're allowed to say bad things of what we've reservations with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As it stands, this model is indeed different to how content was distributed in iM@S2 and OfA -- even while Mobage had done this similar, PS is a major console release. I'm very well aware it's Namco, but this is especially scummy when you consider probabilites.

I mean, nobody can tell me to not feel sour as the lack of floor percentages go. I also feel that the first DL Live has indeed set unrealistic expectations, since Namco marketed it as a one-time-shot for something fancy. Something nobody else could probably get.

Kind of misleading from that point, if you ask me.

Naryoril:

--- Quote from: DeviantProtagonist on August 23, 2016, 12:36:34 am ---I also feel that the first DL Live has indeed set unrealistic expectations, since Namco marketed it as a one-time-shot for something fancy. Something nobody else could probably get.

Kind of misleading from that point, if you ask me.

--- End quote ---

It was? Where? You are the first person i've seen saying that they thought the first DL live was the only one. Everyone else was expecting the DL lives to continue on a regular basis, maybe only one per month, but where is the downside of having 3 a month (unless you want every last item in the game for some reason)? From what i have seen most people were thinking "so they want to keep people playing this game for a long time by using the DL lives" when they read about the first one.

I think you were just reading/interpreting things incorrectly and jumped to conclusions.

Setsuna:

--- Quote from: Naryoril on August 23, 2016, 01:10:45 am ---It was? Where? You are the first person i've seen saying that they thought the first DL live was the only one. Everyone else was expecting the DL lives to continue on a regular basis, maybe only one per month, but where is the downside of having 3 a month (unless you want every last item in the game for some reason)? From what i have seen most people were thinking "so they want to keep people playing this game for a long time by using the DL lives" when they read about the first one.

I think you were just reading/interpreting things incorrectly and jumped to conclusions.

--- End quote ---

You aren't helping your case.

I'll name some very valid reasons why you'd want the entire available item set.

Cataloging (Which is what I do, but fortunately I'm more or less it), Video creation, M@D/Mixtape creation, and other derivative works.

You know, the little things that keep the presence of im@s on niconico a thing. Which in turn drives the entire fanbase.

How DL lives are going to pan out by math is a very important point, and as people do the math (even subconsciously or by instinct) a LOT of them are going to abandon any attempt of using PS as part of their production, even though by any definition of the word, PS is a significant improvement over OFA!

Like I said, based off the math and what data I can collect, short of you winning the lottery, you're expected to do 84 hours of live play PER DL live to stand even odds on getting all the accessories.

You could argue you can cherry pick (not all accessories are the same of course) but you STILL have to play the gauntlet - you can't pick which accessories you GET FIRST! If there is, please let us know, because any attempts to rig the present drops would be VERY useful right now.

If your counter argument is 'Well, you can pay for p-drops to do that' the counter reply is 'No you can't, because even if you skip the step of making a gold present drop, you are running a 1/6 (Assuming you don't get glitched and get a random E-F costume or accessory) chance of getting one, because you cannot force more than 1 gold present drop even IF you use 200 p-drops (Which is I might add 60x 3 at 5k yen each + we'll say 20 x1 at say 1 for 2k yen) to do so!

(And to add further insult to injury, it's entirely possible (if relatively unlikely) that 200 p-drops (Which is the maximum) will result in NO gold present dropping period.)

The game (as it isn't an artificial AI) can't tell if you're in it for MAD, cataloging, or just to enjoy the selection, which means it can't pick who to grace with luck (and I mean it in the absolute sense of the word) because of the lack of a floor (because previous performance does not affect future performance).

In short?

Decent design - incredibly bad execution, because they assumed the fanbase would play the game to infinity lives. It's incredibly bad design, because even the likes of ACTUAL slot machines (Which I might add are gambling in every sense of the world) are actually coded to be within 0.0001% within a million spins (depending where in the world you are) with a predefined payout percentage.

That's never going to happen, and unlike actual slot machines (or your average MMO) your average PS player isn't going to get remotely close to infinity (or even a thousand or so) lives in 6 months, and I'd say the median won't even do more than a few hundred.

In short? One standard deviation of unlucky is going to adversely affect the quality of gameplay. Your rough gameplay times to get one DL live unlocked will increase by roughly 33% (on a 84 hour expected, that's only another what, 28 hours of gameplay.)

Sounds okay, until you realise that one deviation is roughly 25% of the entire fanbase by definition of statistics. The second deviation will encompass about 35% or so.

In short? If I'm the median (as based off my numbers) you're expected to do 100 hours of lives to unlock just one of the DL lives' accessory set if you fall into that band..

Don't know about you, but if I heard 100 hours of im@s songs, I don't want to do it in all in one sitting, without eating, sleeping or doing anything else.

Of course if you don't do it all in one sitting (Like anyone who needs sleep, for instance doesn't) you're expected to do so over say a few months.

Then you realize that there's another 11 of them you need to do it for.

Yeah, I think they vastly overshot the expectations of anything close to 'complete' to some number they didn't really think about, probably because they didn't read the number out loud and actually thought about what that actually requires.

Which in turn actually hurts the derivative works, which in turn hurts its niconico presence and fan participation.

Basically, you're looking at it from a purely consumptive, as opposed to derivative, perspective. Derivative works is where the design has knock on consequences, and due to how it works, well, you can't pick who gets lucky and who doesn't, and expecting them all to spend hundreds of thousands of yen on something on bad odds of happening? (And they're not good, due to the aforementioned DL live bug)

Most of them will quit, because most of them (and us) don't have an expectation of winning the lottery.

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