掲示板 Forums - [DISCUSSION] Adventure mode

While I've got a pretty good feel for how I want to implement this in the site, I'd love to get some feedback as I start preparing for the next, March beta.

If you haven't yet read about it, this is adventure mode:

Adventure mode

This is the rebirth of the genki point, daily challenge, and kao manga system. It will be a choice when new users enter the site (study mode or adventure mode), and toggle-able at any time, keeping with the new focus on full customization over motivational systems. Here's the basic rundown:

• Levels instead of points. Start at 1, goes up to 100. Past 100, thinking about a reset with a prestige system built in.
• Levels are, like levels in rpgs, easy to level up initially, harder as you go on. All activities into the site feed into it, although emphasis on studying. On the backend, this will be the genki point system. Point numbers will be adjusted to boost quizzing points, lower non-quiz points (currently, long-time users can get a TON of points through games/etc because the points ramp up based on how much you've played until then).
• Level bar will be prominent in the dashboard, with a bottom-right popup when you get more (point accrual will not stand out too much, but help push users towards the next level)
• Daily challenges will still exist, but instead of the kao manga points now, they will be a percentage boost onto the current level. For example, a bronze challenge will be a 10% jump in points, silver 20, gold 30.
• So, what do levels get you? Two things!
• My Kao. Kao-chan will start as an egg, hatch at level 2, then evolve every 5 levels (5,10,15,etc...). Final form at level 100. Without getting too complicated initially, users will have choices along the path to choose variations to their Kao so not everyone has the same version. Prestiging past 100 will tie into this. This character will be what greets you on the dashboard, and appear in other places on the site.
• Kao manga will also periodically be unlocked through levels at a different rate. (Don't worry, more pages are being written.) To be honest, not as much time was put into the manga pages because an extremely small fraction of users were progressing through the challenges enough to reach the later pages. This new system will let everyone enjoy the pages regardless of how they utilize the site.

While the system for genki points is already in place so not too much needs to be actually done, the level balancing is what concerns me the most. Here are my goals, and what I'm thinking. I'd love to hear your feedback!

Goals

• Provides a continual, near-term goal
• Same speed of progression regardless of Japanese level (an RPG will usually require more xp per level, but the monsters drop more xp as they get stronger. There isn't really a "stronger" metric here - I want someone to be able to advance even if they never choose to go for N2/N1 level materials, for example)
• Since some users study 20 terms a day and some study 300, while the person doing 300 should advance more, I don't want them to advance at 15x the rate of the "average" user. I also don't want a fixed "you cannot get any more points beyond this"-style stamina system. However, since we are doing original art for this, so I want to try and make it so a person doesn't run out of levels to reach (too quickly).

The initial plan will be Levels 1 through 100. There is a plan for 101-200, and it'll be similar to prestiging in video games but I don't want to give away any more than that.

Plans

Egg at Level 1, Baby Kao at Level 2. After that, Kao growth at 5, 10, 15, 20, and so on.

Level advancements from 1 through 20 will be incrementally larger, but low enough to show faster growth for new users.

After that, probably fixed amounts of points for each level after that, or a very small required increase (maxing out at some point)

To regulate those who want to study a lot more, but keep them from clearing more than a few levels a day at max (past level 20):

1st level of the day will require x amount of "work" (where work is some amount of points earned through activity on the site.)

2nd level will require 2x.

3rd level will require 3x.

4th+ level will require 5x.

Let's pretend that each level requires 100 points of experience for the sake of this example.

User 1: studies 100 points worth a day.

Day 1: Level 1 -> 2

Day 2: Level 2 -> 3

Day 3: Level 3 -> 4

and so on. In other words, the first 100 points of any day are enough to get another level.

User 2: studies 300 points worth a day

Day 1: Level 1->3 (first level requires 100 points, 2nd requires double that, 200 points. From the user's perspective, it'll still be 100 points, but it'll accrue at half speed)

Day 2: Level 3->5

etc.

Power User 1: 600 points a day

Day 1: Level 1->4 (first requires 100, 2nd requires 200, 3rd requires 300)

While I'm not sold on the actual numbers, there'd be diminishing gains the more you study, so the system would encourage you study regularly, but not obsessively.

If not this, the only other system I can think of it basing the points as an average of that particular user's daily load. While there'd be a minimum, if user A does 20 terms a day, and user B does 300 terms a day, then they'd each need to hit their average for a day to get a level.

I'd love to get any comments or feedback on this!

Just throwing out some thoughts I had occuring assuming an open "everything goes" style approach to see what could work and what makes sense or is just overly complicated :) For all I write below I assume that a system will be in place that awards each user with the same reward when they reach their individual goal (which can be a higher or lower amount of daily reviews/activities, dependent on whatever metric is decided upon to determine this).

General thoughts about reaching max level/prestige:

Without knowing what is planned for prestiging, I could imagine having a prestige (i.e. level 100) happening once or twice a year would have a nice touch. For example, the levels could be spaced in a way that if one does whatever is deemed a feasible daily goal for the individual, one would reach level 100 after a total of either ~180 or ~360 days. The act of prestigeing would then also coincide with a form of (half-)anniversary of daily studying worthwile celebrating and looking back at what one did accomplish over that time (e.g. cumulative stats? # of new words learned/mastered, % of X common terms now known, etc. compared to what it was when the user was level 1 the last time).

Idea/thought 1: Prestiging every X days, with increasing level up costs

For this to work one could use an exponential formula that would increase the XP needed per level very slowly at the start and faster towards the end. Assuming the average user would get 100 XP per day when doing all their goals and getting from level 0 to 1 is to require exactly 100 XP (i.e. guaranteed level up on day 1), the formula to reach level 100 after X days could for example be:

For ~360 days (actually 358.6): (0.99^(-2.18*(-1)))*100 .

For ~180 days (actually 179.6): (0.99^(-1.08*(-1)))*100.

The 100 in both formulas represents the amount of XP per day the average user would get if they reach whatever is defined as the appropriate individual goal. The progression the user would experience for the "~180 days to level 100" formula would at the beginning be a little bit less than 1 level per day (i.e. level up on day 1, no level on day 2, then 1 level a day until day ~20); from day 20 onwards it would be alternating between a level each 2 days and a level a day until towards the end it will be a level every 3 days. For the 360 day formula it would ramp up a bit more quickly and towards the end it is rather 7 to 8 days per level.

Instead of having the page calculating that all the time, one could of course just calculate this once, round up/down to nice numbers guaranteeing the distribution of days for next level most desired, and hardcode that into the site.

Idea/thought 2: Constant level up/XP rate, but encouraging extra work

Alternatively to the exponential formula and 180/360 day idea, one other thought I had if it couldn't just also be a system where, if the user does exactly what is allotted to them as "personal goal", they would get XP for 95% of their next level, which could encourage a user to do that extra round of reviews or games or [...] to get the last 5% missing for the full level up (e.g. "hey look, you just need to do this small amount of extra stuff today to get the next level today already, why not do some extra Japanese today?"). If they don't care or just don't have the time for this today, they will not really miss out as they will have a guaranteed level up the next day and be 90% done for the level after that.

This kind of approach would, if consistenly doing daily goal + a little extra, mean a prestige every 100 days, so nearly once a Quarter

Thought about individual daily goal and guaranteed reward:

The definition of what needs to be done to reach one's individual daily goal could also be triggered by a flag/goal "Do all reviews in all your schedules today". This assumes that the amount of schedule based reviews a user has reflects the users own learning pace and personal goals. After that is reached, adding a new schedule with some new terms as "doing some extra" should not invalidate reaching the original goal.

Drawback I can immediatelly think of would be that this could penalize users that have a lot of reviews piled up for one reason or another, so will need to take into account (and encourage) daily review limits or allow schedules to be frozen and thus be ignored for determining if all schedules were done for the day or similar

I definitely agree that there should be some measures against extreme power-leveling - some people see numbers go up and try to "optimize" the process. This is fine for games, but Renshuu should be more about learning.

Thanks for waiting. Here's a few things to chew on as we narrow down the best way to approach this.

1. I don't want to spoil what will come with prestiging, but in terms of levels, the required amount of work will be whatever was set for level 100, not any more.

2. I intend to use the daily challenges as a way to encourage doing things outside of their normal work.

3. The main goal is beginner/normal users. Once users buy into the system that renshuu has they tend to stick around. It's getting them to that point.

4. I am particularly fond of limiting non-studying points to a fixed percentage of a level, so there will not be too much reason to "game" the system and spam other areas of the site.

5. I think having someone hit 100 after roughly 100-180 days of usage is great, less if they are really pushing it. If I end up with the problem that average users are hitting that too fast and getting to prestige too quickly, then I will happily deal with that "problem" when it comes.

6. While I am interested in the idea of a level being tied to schedules being finished, there are a large number of non-edge cases that cause issues here:

• Beginners don't have schedules to finish - they are only learning new terms. So there is nothing to finish.
• I do want the reasonable possibility of 6-10 levels in the first week if they are getting into it. I prefer faster progression at the beginning, with it leveling off after that.
• Anyone that is off for a few days is going to be demotivated if they then have triple the work needed to get to their goal. Yea, there are a thousand ways to micromanage your materials, but the average user should not be expected to do that to enjoy this basic system.

After thinking through everything that was posted, I feel like this is going to be a good start. Will probably reset at the end of the beta, so we can do balancing as things go:

1 level = 100 xp

Stage 1: first 10 levels - same rates for everyone

You'll be able to get up to 150 xp based on quizzing. This will curve down to 100xp as it approaches level 10

**this will be a fixed amount of questions answered for each level.

You'll get up to 45 points per day (15 for each daily challenge). This will curve down to 10 per challenge as it approaches level 10

You can get up to 30 points per day for site participation. This will trim down to 10-15 per day approaching level 10.

Stage 10: personal leveling - after 10 levels (expected - 5 to 12 days of studying)

100 xp will be evaluated at 1.xx (I'm thinking 1.02 to 1.05, but need to look at the graphs) times the number of median?? questions correct over the first set of days.

Example: You do 100 correct questions a day on average (high, but good number for example)

100 xp = 102 correct questions each day you study for the following 10 days.

If they don't increase their average, then they'll never quite get 100 each day, unless they do a daily challenge, shiritori, etc.

This rating would be re-evaluated every 10 days.

Like McFluffington said, if this was a competitive game, we'd need more balance, but this will largely be for self-reinforcement of your work. As the system evolves, we can add additional things.

I'm still trying to think of the best way to allow branches in the evolutionary chart without killing my wife over having her make a million different variations of each permutation of kao-chan elements. I don't want it to be purely linear, though - I think it'll be great to have a choice from time to time to help differentiate your character.

The tricky thing with "add-ons" is that we are planning to have Kao-chan grow from l1 to l100, so he/she will start a baby, and become a ??? in the end. It's not a static shape where something can be added on like that. Colors are doable, and maybe a set of facial expressions that can be done really quickly. Anything around the character but not attached to it could also be done, and/or background. It'll all depend as well as how much of an effect the system has. If it really helps a lot of people, we'll naturally be more inclined to add more to it.

The biggest thing, though, is that we want the visual progression to show growth along with the user's growth, so the idea of the character literally aging and growing is an important one.

Typo in the config file. It's been updated to 74. ALL levels have been designed (yesterday), and they'll be going through a final check today before going up. The last several stages are really amazing.

The points are as noted (although there might be an error), but just like the study points, there are diminishing gains after a certain point. It's much lower for non-quizzing stuff. You can get 30% each day from non-quizzing stuff, then each 15% for the same amount, then 7.5% for the next, and so on.

Crossword puzzles are currently not counted, sorry :(

Last levels are going up tonight!!

Evolution seems to be stuck at level 70. Every single page I visit just gives the same "You've reached level 71" loading bar and lander. It's hard to get anything done when everything I do triggers this.

Visit the forums, it loads, read a thread, it loads, go to dashboard, it loads, try to quiz, it loads at the start and end, submit a post, it loads. Could you please take a look?

Just a suggestion: Could you make a setting that allows you to not see peoples' kao who are a higher level then you are? I wouldn't say seeing them spoils it, but there is certainly a preview of what's happening next before you get there. There could be a question mark or something like that there.

Maybe not more blurring... Can you make it so that they are grayed out, like the kao coins? That way, you can't tell the colors.