Explaining Footfall post Release 211

Kirinvar · 2019-01-27T23:34:37.317Z

Then it’s working as intended, i guess.
But it’s good to know for sure.

Thank you for trying it out!

Arkhainn · 2019-01-27T23:35:24.873Z

Yeah, they would have generated normally if entering from A2 first before 211, so it’s pretty useful to verify that it has changed.

Arkhainn · 2019-01-28T00:23:09.850Z

Day 3 results:

Test Subject	Footfall	Repeat	# in 5 days	Days since last visit	Test Subject	Footfall	Repeat	# in 5 days	Days since last visit
1	84	no	1	never	11	33	yes	2	2
2	84	no	1	never	12	21	yes	3	1
3	84	no	1	never	13	33	yes	2	2
4	84	no	1	never	14	21	yes	3	1
5	84	no	1	never	15	33	yes	2	2
6	84	no	1	never	16	21	yes	3	1
7	84	no	1	never	17	33	yes	2	2
8	84	no	1	never	18	18	yes	3	1
9	72	no	1	never	19	28	yes	2	2
10	72	no	1	never	20	18	yes	3	1

Some notes about this round of tests:

First, due to the complexities of scheduling, the first ten visitors (that had never visited before) had to happen a bit earlier than I would have preferred, so I don’t think there had been enough time for the ‘visits in the last 24 hour hours’ counter to go all the way to zero. I think it can be safely assumed at this point that this is an important counter.

Second, when I first unsealed the area and went to check the beacon before the testing, there was 72 there, so I suppose some random first-visitor may have been lured to my test area by the portal icon in the compass (@james , would be fantastic if we could opt out of that in the portal UI ) and ended up stepping on the ‘ceiling’ of the test beacon (it’s buried under a layer of natural soil but that soil is still part of the beacon), no idea when this visitor showed up.

Then, since I’m a crazy person, I decided to alternate the order in which the friends helping with the second half of the test would enter the area. 5 had been away from the beacon for 2 days and generated more (so it seems to go up the longer a particular character stays away) and 5 had been visiting daily.

I decided to alternate because at this point it seems clear that there’s a multiplier based on the number of visits in the last 24 hours.

The ‘tiers’ for the top footfall for new visitors so far observed were:

Post-211	Pre-211	%	in last 24h:
120	60	200%	0 to 5
96	60	160%	6 to 10
84	60	140%	10 to 20
72	60	120%	20 to 30+

Since most tests so far were of about 20 visitors a day, that is all that could be inferred so far.

Now, we can extrapolate that those multipliers would also be applied on top of the ‘reduced’ value for repeated visits in the 5 day period. That is why I decided to alternate between the second-visit and third-visit test subjects, as you can see in the first table above they were giving consistent values, and then when the threshold for the next tier of ‘visits in the last 24 hours’ was hit, both numbers decreased a little.

This round of testing also indicated that the footfall generation of a character goes up the longer the character stays away without visiting.

Interesting results so far, and I think some solid hypotheses can be extrapolated so far. I’m still curious to see what will happen to the repeated visitors after five days of testing. We’ll see.

Incidentally so far the running total indicates that (for isolated beacons such as this one) there was a definite improvement over the pre-211 values.

	Post-211	Pre-211	Pre-211, 24d
Day 1	1680	1200	1200
Day 2	1308	1320	720
Day 3	1075	1200	600
Total	2988	2520	1920

As usual, hit me up with any suggestions for things to test or look out for.

Edit 1:
However, in the hypothesis that the ‘5 day’ timer requires visitors to stay away for the full 5 days before they can generate the ‘full’ amount again, the running total will end up indicating that the current system is better for hardly-ever-visited beacons, with pre-211 being better over time for repeatedly visited beacons (such as popular shops, malls and portal hubs) and pre-211 with the 24 day cooldown being the worst by far. Server resets wiping the timer during the 24 day cooldowns would have evened out that side of the table by a little, but it should still lag behind the other two models for popular beacons.

Edit 2:
Some more maths:

Repeated visits do not decrease the payout after the first.
If we plug the payout for the visitor that came every day to the multiplier table we get:

Base Payout	Bonus	Final Payout
15	200%	30
15	160%	24
15	140%	21
15	120%	18

All of those values have been seen for the daily visitor, some during day 2, some during day 3. So for repeated visitors, the payment floor seems to be 25% of the pre-211 base value, in this case 15c, and then the unpopularity multiplier is applied.

In the same way, we can infer that the increase from the floor of 15c for the visitor that skipped a day was to 24c and the values rounded down:

Base Payout	Bonus	Final Payout
24	120%	28.8
24	140%	33.6

Nice and round numbers:

Base (pre-211)	Base now	%	Days Away
60	24	40%	2
60	15	25%	1

Fiffer13 · 2019-01-28T04:33:01.890Z

To update my totals as of tonight, my beacons were visited nearly daily all week. I got a grand total of 8,483. Which is higher than I expected, although I did connect my store into a settlement right before I started this, so I get 80c vs 30c per foot fall prior to release.

At this point I’d say I am likely to be about where I was before the footfall change (if I include the fact that my main footfall location got a more than double boost due to a change I made). I might be slightly behind still, but I no longer feel I have right to complain.

AeneaGames · 2019-01-28T07:08:30.266Z

In the past 24 hours (and 12 minutes) I received about 6200c on two of my main beacons. This used to be double that amount…

So more tweaking is required!

scrufola · 2019-01-28T09:05:33.623Z

I tried to test something similar. Char A has two beacons in a settlement, Test A1 and Test A2. Both above 10k prestige. Beacon Test A1 is aligned with a guild, Test A2 is not.

I made a new character and joined the guild without touching either A1 or A2 (book is in the same settlement on a different chars beacon). The new character didn’t get any permissions in the guild. If the new character enters A1 (aligned with guild) no coins are generated. If the char then enters A2 (not aligned with guild), still no coins are generated. Is that correct?

Arkhainn · 2019-01-28T09:08:23.094Z

scrufola:

I tried to test something similar. Char A has two beacons in a settlement, Test A1 and Test A2. Both above 10k prestige. Beacon Test A1 is aligned with a guild, Test A2 is not.

I made a new character and joined the guild without touching either A1 or A2 (book is in the same settlement on a different chars beacon). The new character didn’t get any permissions in the guild. If the new character enters A1 (aligned with guild) no coins are generated. If the char then enters A2 (not aligned with guild), still no coins are generated. Is that correct?

If you tested and those were the results, then that’s what’s happening, but I’m not sure if that would be ‘working as intended’ or not.

I didn’t get around to testing the relation between guild beacons and footfall generation (or lack thereof) from guild members yet.

Edit: Was the beacon only ‘aligned’ to the guild, or owned by the guild? That could also be a factor.

Edit 2: Tho in my Test A / Test B scenario, all characters involved in the test belonged to the same guild (tho not all of 'em had it as their primary guild at the time), and the settlement’s main beacon was guild-owned, so in that case they shouldn’t have generated anything… darn. I’ll have to look into all the possible permutations on this later, that’s gonna be tricky.

Edit 3: So, I guess I’ll repurpose the set of 4 beacons, A1 guild owned, B1 guild aligned, and A2/B2 as non-guild beacons, then I’ll need 4 lab rats, 2 with permissions, two without, one pair entering from the 1->2 direction, and another going 2->1. That should about cover it. Then next day I’ll ask them all to switch to a different primary and see if that changes anything.

scrufola · 2019-01-28T19:51:11.159Z

I’ve repeated my test.

Created a new guild with char A
Set guild to auto join
Joined guild with char B (no permissions in guild)
Char B aligned his beacon with new guild (guild does not own beacon)
Created a new char C
Char C joined new guild (no permissions in guild)
Char C walks on the plot with the aligned beacon
Char C can interact with the beacon and no coins were created.

@vdragon I think that’s a bug.

Beacon, as seen from char C

Arkhainn · 2019-01-28T20:24:48.132Z

That’s really odd because aligned beacons shouldn’t even care about guild permissions or anything.

LennonMarx · 2019-01-28T20:32:09.513Z

Arkhainn:

If you tested and those were the results, then that’s what’s happening, but I’m not sure if that would be ‘working as intended’ or not.

I didn’t get around to testing the relation between guild beacons and footfall generation (or lack thereof) from guild members yet.

Just quoting this little bit to shout you out without having to roll up the entire thread. You’re doing great work. Thanks for helping us try to understand this.

That said, this highlights an issue with footfall that I had never considered before: it’s a system that is almost impossible for the community to give useful feedback about. If people have to go to this length to even try to understand how the system is behaving no one is going to be able to articulate well (as in, backed up by data) why they believe the system is over/under preforming. Additionally, this allows for the type of argumentation we have seen recently that just amounts to admonitions of others instead of trying to fix the problem because the person getting X footfall can’t quantify why they are getting X and someone else with a similar build is getting Y, or why someone with a smaller/larger build is getting 2X (unless you go to Rain Man like detail as Arkhainn has been).

It seems like it would be so much easier, from a development and community standpoint, to just have “go kill 50 wildstock for 1000c” type quests instead of this round-about opaque system that no one can speak to intelligently.

scrufola · 2019-01-28T21:48:48.400Z

LennonMarx:

It seems like it would be so much easier, from a development and community standpoint, to just have “go kill 50 wildstock for 1000c” type quests instead of this round-about opaque system that no one can speak to intelligently.

The game offers mainly 4 different activities. Building, Farming, Hunting and Trading/Crafting.

Trading/Crafting makes it’s coins from trade.

Farming (mining, gathering) farms resources that can be sold for coins.

Hunting collectios animal resources and oort stones. Both can be sold for coins.

Building is the only activity that generates new coins. But building also doesn’t generate anything else of value.

It’s suggested again and again that there should be a different way to generate coins or that coins should only be generated by quests or from mob drops. The problem with that is that building would be the only activity that doesn’t generate anything valuable.

You would have to move something valuable to builders, e.g. Oort Shards no longer drop by meteorites but are generated by Oort Collectors that generate shards based on prestige. If you don’t do that, building will no longer be one of the main activities but a “reward activity” that you can only do after you did something else for X hours to be able to afford it.

Whenever you suggest moving coins from building to another activity, you should also suggest which reward you would move to building.

LennonMarx · 2019-01-28T22:11:14.978Z

I have talked about this at length in other threads, I’m not trying to derail the “how footfall works via. Scientific Method” discussion that is going on here. My main point was that the footfall system, as we are seeing here, is also bad for maintenance because we, as players, have no way of telling if it is working right or not vs. a more discrete system.

For example, if you were given a quest to kill 50 Wildstock for 1000c but you only got 500c when you turned it in you would have an obvious “This is broken” screen shot to give as feedback, or you could have discussions like “Item A that is important for whatever reason is selling for Yc, which based on the current average quest payout would take Z days/hours/quests to buy. This is too low/high and is having Z effect on the game.” Compare that to now where a player goes to their beacon that says they get 60c per visitor and they have 857c in the coin box. How did that number get there? Is it right? Is it too low? Too High? Unless you are doing Ark’s calculations every day, you would never know, and it leads to discussions where no one really has any concrete idea of what is going on which then precludes giving any good feedback about how to fix the problem, or if there even is one.

Arkhainn · 2019-01-28T22:16:08.101Z

LennonMarx:

Unless you are doing Ark’s calculations every day, you would never know, and it leads to discussions where no one really has any concrete idea of what is going on which then precludes giving any good feedback about how to fix the problem, or if there even is one.

on that note, bit sick today, not sure if I’ll be able to do day 4 today or not but I’ll try.

AeneaGames · 2019-01-29T00:27:50.571Z

Health more important! Get well first!

Arkhainn · 2019-01-29T02:28:58.289Z

AeneaGames:

Health more important! Get well first!

While on principle I agree with that, in this particular case the discomfort from the inconsistent data would be the greater one, so without further ado:

Test Subject	Footfall	Repeat	# in 5 days	Days since last visit	Test Subject	Footfall	Repeat	# in 5 days	Days since last visit
1	120	no	1	never	12	33	yes	3	2
2	120	no	1	never	13	21	yes	4	1
3	120	no	1	never	14	50	yes	2	3
4	120	no	1	never	15	33	yes	3	2
5	120	no	1	never	16	21	yes	4	1
6	96	no	1	never	17	84	no	1	never
7	96	no	1	never	18	84	no	1	never
8	96	no	1	never	19	84	no	1	never
9	96	no	1	never	20	84	no	1	never
10	96	no	1	never	21	72	no	1	never
11	50	yes	2	3	22	72	no	1	never

Seems like I’ve managed to not get any contamination between tests this time, yay, and also I’ve managed to clear the ‘visitors in the last 24 hours’ counter, so the first 10 visitors confirm the numbers I proposed with the last post:

Post-211	Pre-211	%	in last 24h:
120	60	200%	0 to 5
96	60	160%	6 to 10
84	60	140%	11 to 20
72	60	120%	21 to 30+

Now let’s do some maths and confirm some from last time. Since I know those multipliers, and from the order of visits it’s clear that visitors 11 to 16 were in the 140% multiplier…

Base (pre-211)	Base now	%	Days Away
60	15	25.00%	1
60	24	40.00%	2
60	36	60.00%	3

So we’re slowly filling in those gaps.

And the running total table:

	Post-211	Pre-211	Pre-211, 24d
Day 1	1680	1200	1200
Day 2	1308	1320	720
Day 3	1075	1200	600
Day 4	1768	1320	960
Total	5831	5040	3480

Post-211 still keeping ahead, but places that get repeat visitors regularly (and more visitors in a 24 hours period) would be falling behind a little I believe.

One interesting question that this poses, that my small scale testing hasn’t shed a light on yet, are how many daily visitors it would take to bring the multiplier to 100%, and would it even fall below that? I shall endeavor to set up a new beacon and observe it with a larger number of test subjects in a single day to check for this. I figure 100 or so might give a good indicator.

Also interesting to point out that I only had 6 repeat visitors for today’s tests as I wanted to keep a few of those in the bench so that they’ll be 4 days away tomorrow and 5 days away the next day, so I just filled in the rest with randoms until I could confirm that the repeat visits were all in the 140% multiplier range.

AeneaGames · 2019-01-29T02:38:49.209Z

Arkhainn:

I’ve managed to not get any contamination

You being sick tells me otherwise!

Arkhainn · 2019-01-29T02:50:09.732Z

AeneaGames:

You being sick tells me otherwise!

Well, it isn’t that kind of sick.
It’s just gallstones acting up. Just need to get an appointment to yank the useless organ out and it’s all sorted.

Kirinvar · 2019-01-29T13:58:21.876Z

Hey @Arkhainn,
I took your findings, put them in a spreadsheet and then tried to fill in the gaps based on your multipliers.
What do you think? (Blue numbers are assumptions.)

docs.google.com

Footfall Post-211

Post-211 Town,Payments within the last 24h 60,0-5,6-10,11-20,20-30,31+ modifier,200%,160%,140%,120%,100% Days since last...

Looking forward for your next test to see if it confirms any assumptions.

I wonder if the “Payments within the last 24h” multiplier caps somewhere or if it goes all the way down to 1 coin per visitor.

Get well!

Arkhainn · 2019-01-29T16:20:37.009Z

Kirinvar:

I wonder if the “Payments within the last 24h” multiplier caps somewhere or if it goes all the way down to 1 coin per visitor.

This is one interesting question that I plan on doing a bit of more focused/intensive testing on today.
I think (based on some numbers from previous days when the visitors counter didn’t get cleared to zero) that the 120% multiplier (72 coins if new visitor, at my test beacon) goes past visitor number 30.

But I don’t know if it goes down to under 100% of the pre-211 number, or if it bottoms out at 100% and you only see numbers lower than that from repeated visitors. I’m gonna try and have 100+ characters pass by a new, unrelated test beacon and fill out that table. I guess if even that sample turns out to be too small to draw a conclusion, then I may have to ask for more volunteers here and on discord since I may run out of lab rats to get to ‘portal hub’ numbers for traffic. We’ll see how that goes.

The numbers on your spreadsheet look like good guesses, but I think the 120% range lasts for 20 people instead of the 10 from previous multipliers. In 10 hours or so we’ll get to see the ‘4 days away’ percentage for sure and confirm if it is indeed 80%.

Edit: @Kirinvar got the data for up to 40 people:

Visitors in 24h	Footfall (40c settlement)	%
1 to 5	80	200%
6 to 10	64	160%
11 to 20	56	140%
21 to 40	48	120%
41 to ?	40	100%

I’ll keep testing until at least 100.

MinerDiggerMan · 2019-01-29T17:58:25.041Z

Definitely try to keep the gallbladder if you can.