Drop Money Scaling
 

I think the money you receive from getting kills should scale with your progress as a PKer/raider.

Drop money should increase as your health does when you're off gang tag, and increase with your gang points when on gang tag.

Not only that, I think the amount you receive should depend on who you kill.
If you kill someone with a high hp level or high amount of points, you should get more for it. Likewise, if you just grief noobs all day, you should receive less money for it.

These two formulas would work to that end.

d = r + (h+o)/5

D = r + (p+v)/20

where

r = random number between 10 and 20
p = your points
v = victim's points
h = your health level
o = victim's health level
d = drop money
D = drop money on gang tag

Basically what the formulas are saying is this:
When you're OFF gang tag, your drop money is equal to the normal amount plus 20% of your health level and 20% of the person you killed's health level.

When you're ON gang tag, your drop money is equal to the normal amount plus 5% of your points and 5% of the person you killed's points.

As an example:
Say I have level 32 health and I kill someone with level 40 health. Lets say the normal drop money would have been 15 (since that's the average of 10 and 20).

15 + (32+40)/5 = ~29.

or if I decided to kills noobs all day (assuming level 0 health):

15 + (32+0)/5 = ~21

Say I'm on gang tag and have 100 points for the week and I kill someone with substantially more points than me, lets say 600. Assuming the normal drop money would have been 15.

15 + (100+600)/20 = 50

or if I was raiding against people with similar points:

15 + (100+100)/20 = 35

tl;dr

Basically, all this is saying is: the more you pk, the more money you should get from it, and the harder your opponent is, the more you should be awarded for killing them.

In an era where people are earning between $25-$75 a kill, and where PKing on the streets is a frequent, if not constant, occurrence, I'm assuming between 1 to 2 kills a minute.
that's 60-120 kills an hour.
that's 1.5k-9k an hour of constant PKing.
That sounds like a legit job to me :)

sounds like a good idea
i also think the ranked spar should work in a similar manner, where not every win is +3 and loss -2

I also want to have my cake and eat it too.

The reason PKing pays less than other jobs is because it doesn't want to make you blow your brains out IRL. Originally PKing was just meant to pay enough to cover your ammo costs so that you could keep PKing without having to stop and do other jobs. Obviously it's paying a bit more than that now, but no way should it be brought in line with mining, digging and bouquets.
Unless they've been changed those other jobs were all paying roughly $40 a minute, which is 2.4k an hour. 9k an hour for PKing is way too high.

I agree with your sentiments about not changing PKing payouts
But mostly i'm posting here to say that a high level miner can crank out 9k an hour pretty easily.

Cross-posting because your formulas so offend me.

Dividing by 5 and 20 isn't how you get 5% and 20%.

The formulas that would do what you're describing would be:

(Normal Drop Amount) + (Other Points)*.2 + (Points)*.2

(Normal Drop Amount) + (Health)*.05 + (Health)*.05

But your idea doesn't make sense. I think you should get LESS money for killing someone with a substantially lower level than you. I'd use this formula:

(Normal Amount) + (ln((Their Points)/(Your Points)))*x

Where x is a scaling factor because I don't know anything about the economy.

What this formula does is, if your level is higher than theirs, the natural log produces a negative number, multiplied by the scaling factor, and that gets subtracted from the normal amount. If your level is lower, you get a bigger bonus the higher the discrepancy between your levels. If they're exactly the same, you get a $1 bonus multiplied by the scaling factor. The last case is the one you'd use to balance the scaling factor I think.

For off-gang it would be the same thing:

(Normal Amount) + (ln((Their Health Level)/(Your Health Level)))*y

I changed the scaling factor from x to y to indicate that you should balance both of these equations on a case-by-case basis, as I assume Health Level and Gang Points are independent. I.E. killing someone with a higher health level might be harder than killing someone with higher gang points, so you might want to balance the formulas accordingly.

Also, because you're taking weird natural logs you're going to get weird decimal amounts. I don't know how gscript handles rounding, but you should be able to do something about that, or just truncate the decimals or whatever. Whether you want to round up or down is, again, something that would require more knowledge of Era than I have.

This is a good point, and I wanna say that with my formulas you could change the scaling factors to balance PK income so that you'd get just enough to cover your ammo cost, and it would also encourage you to spend most of your ammo engaging in more balanced fights, as you'd get less money than normal for killing weaker players.

Dividing by 20 is equivalent to multiplying by .05; dividing by 5 is equivalent to multiplying by .2. I see you're proficient in math. Maybe you should work on your reading comprehension.

That wasn't the intent of my formulas. The intent isn't to make the money reward reflect the degree to which the fight is balanced. The intent is to make you earn more money for PKing or raiding more, with a slight + or - depending on who you kill.


Digging shells with a worker potion will earn you about 5k an hour, mining even more than that depending on your level.

And you're definitely focusing on the highest end of what you could earn with my formulas in place.
9k an hour is if you have an extremely high hp level, or if you have a significant amount of gang points. Both of which would undoubtedly mean that you're a skilled PKer or have been playing long enough to have garnered some skill and you should be paid more. Not to mention that was assuming you can kill someone every minute for an entire hour. Most spars last more than a minute, and with the state of PKing as is, fighting on the streets takes a lot longer due to people who run.

I equate my idea with an informal way of introducing PKing levels that increase income as they increase.
The mining system is the same way (The longer you mine, the more you earn), but no one has a problem with Reece (TheKing) making 30k an hour mining.

Rewarding people better for doing boring things in a game is an outdated way of thinking and doesn't make much sense.

I agree that the other jobs are boring. Which is why I only have an AK and don't play Era anymore.

But PKing is already a lot more prone to abuse than other jobs.
Increasing the amount of money it generates just makes it even more tempting for players to abuse.

And with the way your formula is now, adding health instead of using the difference in health, the more players abused and the more kills they got, the higher their health would be and they'd get even more money from abusing.
Eg. 15 + (40+40)/5 = 31
Instead of 15 + (40-40)/5 = 15

If I just used the laptops and netbooks in this house and made macros to walk characters out of the hospital I could make ~20k an hour based on your formula.
There is a more efficient way to abuse assuming you can get all the accounts into one of the old event spar levels. Where you could make ~60k an hour off 4 accounts. If they all had 140 HP it'd be over 100k an hour.

The difference of HP would lead to negative numbers if you killed someone who was a higher hp level than you, meaning you would receive less money for killing someone higher level than you. gg.

also, ban macroers. ez.

Not to mention, there would be a lot of people outside the hospital to kill you and steal your kills.

No it wouldn't. The numbers are reversed in my formula, so that you're subtracting your HP bonus from their HP bonus.

In your formula players with 140 HP killing eachother get $31.
Whereas players with 100 HP killing eachother get $15.

In my formula they both get $15.
And only a 100 HP player killing a 140 HP player would get the maximum.
Which actually makes sense.

That doesn't make sense. The intent is to reward more money to the people who have been PKing the longest.

Just like mining levels reward more money to the people who have been mining longest.

Yeah sorry I misread that part, luckily that wasn't the problem with your formulas, so you should've read the rest of my post I guess??

Okay, then the intent of your formulas was stupid. I think you need to admit that my stuff is a lot better than yours, and it's the closest you're going to get to Work Is Fun.

If PKing can pay for itself, and PKing is all you enjoy, then I don't get your objection to what I've said, other than it would make it so you'd have to actually be good at PKing to get good money from PKing. God forbid skilled players receive more for being good at what they do.

Your formulas aren't better; they're just different.
And the difference is this:

Mine are about getting better over time.
Yours are about people fighting people of the same or greater skill (which means the best players get the short end of the stick, since there is no one higher than them).

The numbers in mine will increase over time, because they're additive.
The numbers in yours will never increase, because they're based on a ratio between your health/points and someone else's. (the only increase you'll see is when compared to someone with fixed health or points)

Mine allow progression.
Yours lead to stagnation.

Mine is the PKing equivalent of mining levels.
Yours is the PKing equivalent of minerals having random values. (you don't get better, faster, more efficient, etc. over time; it just depends how lucky you are.)

Oh nevermind then. I thought they idea was to reward skilled players, and encourage people to PK who wouldn't normally PK by providing them with more of an incentive, rather than just rewarding people who probably already have the biggest lamest guns. And to try and encourage newbies to stay and fight back when they're at a disadvantage instead of just running.

Yea this is exactly what I thought we were doing here.

Alright so assume we went with your difference formula, demisis.
How would it work with gang points?

At this very moment I have 28 points, and blood_warrior_p2p has 487 points.
If I killed him, the formula would look like this:

15 + (487-28)/20 = 38

(normal value) + ((his points)-(my points))/20


If he killed me:

15 + (28-487)/20 = -8

(normal value) + ((my points)-(his points))/20

It doesn't really make sense to lose money for killing someone. It would actually have the effect of discouraging people with a lot of points to raid against people with lower points, reducing the amount of people available to raid.

Not only that, but if trolls were so inclined, they could go into a raid with 0 points and let people kill them to make them lose money.