I. Introduction

There is clearly a general misunderstanding about the way in which the Ring Reward Points system works. The system is basically time based, meaning that a hack and slash scenario won’t necessarily earn more points for its players than a more leisurely scripted adventure.

• The concept of activity

The problem with purely time based systems is that they can be easily exploited – it would obviously be nonsense for players to earn points by logging into a scenario and leaving their computer running when they crash out for the night… This is why we introduce a concept of ‘activity’.  In a nutshell we say that as long as you’re doing something that requires you to be behind your keyboard and interacting with the game we can consider that you’re active, and as long as you’re active you’ll gain reward points at regular intervals. I’m not going to list the details of what we count as activity and what we don’t as we will certainly tweak them over time.

• Levels of Reward Points

It would of course be ridiculous for level 1 players in a yubo-bashing scenario to earn the same rewards as a level 200 player in a Kitin hive. This is why we have six different classes of reward points. Since our last document on the RRP system, and following feedback from you and from our testing team, we have improved the way in which we treat levels. Each time the game doles out reward points it now looks to see what kind of actions you’ve performed recently and matches the level of the points to the level of the actions. The level of the scenario is no longer of importance.

• Non-combat actions

In our last document we stipulated that only combat actions would be taken into account in determining whether or not players are active. Following the responses that we’ve received we have upgraded the system to include non-combat actions as well. It goes without saying that the type of action performed has an impact on the level and quantity of Reward Points gained...

• Cheating

We are aware that some players choose to cheat in games via the use of external macro software on their PCs. This will clearly not be tolerated in the Ring any more than it is in the rest of Ryzom. Anyone caught cheating may be banned from the game.

II. Questions & Answers

1. Could you explain the ranking system a little for scenario/author/am, the way i read that the top rated of all these will be ones where people have killed the most things within the level range? [posted by rushin]

With the activation of the RRP system, there will be 2 different ranking systems within the Ring: a player-opinion based system and an automatic system. 
The advantage of the player-opinion based system is that it allows scenarios of absolutely all types to be ranked. The disadvantage is that a concerted group of players (such as a large guild) can easily bias the rankings by voting together for or against any given scenario.
The automatic system is based on the Ring Reward Point system and gives a representation of ‘active time’. The advantage of this system is that it is not easily biased. For a group of players to raise the rating of a scenario they have to spend time playing it actively and there’s no way to ‘vote against’ the scenario of another player against whom one might hold a grudge.

To answer the question - To an extent you’re correct, the automatic rating system will give poor ratings to a scenario in which the players are passive spectators.

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2. It's totally based on the use of combat skills and so means story telling and other non-combat scenarios will provide neither reward for players nor rankings for authors. [posted by thurgond]

As I mentioned briefly, above, we have recently added concepts of ‘activity’ for players who are not involved in combat. This was always planned but had not originally been intended for the RRP system’s initial release.

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3. The "no-trade" aspect means that you cannot use them to benefit your friends as part of a social gaming experience.
These rewards are _more_ limited than the PvP versions, take more time and effort to acquire and will unfortunately lead to "hack-n-slash" scenarios designed only for farming, while social, puzzle and other scenarios are left out in the cold... [posted by aardnebb]

As explained above, the system is time based and not ‘hack-n-slash’ based. As a result there would be a bad potential for exploiting the system if we allowed the rewards to be exchanged between players.
I hope that my above explanation curbs your fears concerning puzzle based scenarios. We clearly don’t want to encourage farming scenarios and we believe that the system that we have implemented is a good solution.

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4. The system is biased towards group play? (...) Yet only one player can go through at a time, I don't get a rating? [posted by raynes]

I’m not sure I understand the question but I’ll attempt to answer none the less.
You will earn points playing alone but you will earn more if there are other players playing with you. The other players do of course have to be active as well in order for you to benefit from their presence.
Your ‘author’ ratings do progress even if there’s only a single player in a scenario. Currently, playing masterless scenarios that you have created yourself also raises you ‘author’ rating even if you are alone. There are arguments for and against this but we are leaving it as is for now.

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5. To me reward is simply as getting high ratings for my scenarios. With this system pretty much any scenario I choose to create will not get much of a rating at all.
What's really going to happen is the exact opposite of what a ratings system should do. The really good and interesting ones will get lousy ratings, while the hack and slash combat ones will get the best ratings. [posted by raynes]

I hope that my previous replies and explanations address your concerns.

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6. I haven’t thought about it enough to know if just time spent = points, up to a time cap would work? It would at least cover all scenario types then without getting hideously complicated. [posted by rushin]

The problem here is that I can launch an empty scenario, log in and go out to the cinema... But we do agree on the basic objective here.

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7. Just completing a scenario should grant at least a point. While this would still favour the hack and slash, it would at least give the RP types something without being easily exploitable. [posted by bradcook]

We hadn’t considered ‘logging in’ to be a sign of activity but it’s not a bad idea… we’ll give it some thought.

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8. I was at least hoping Ringmasters would be allowed to dispense rewards themselves or allocate ample points for rewards where they see fit. For instance if I were to create a mission to steal an object from a tribe:
*Get past the guards by slaughtering them: 1 reward point.
*Get by the guards, manipulate scenery object AND if NPC group 1 Guards is still alive: 2 reward points [posted by calel]

We’ve thought this one through but we don’t have a way to prevent one from creating ‘farming’ scenarios if the author has direct control over Ring Point allocation.

This said, we do have something else in development that is a little similar. Within scenarios we will have the possibility to dole out ‘high score’ points via event triggers, allowing us to keep track of ‘best scores’ and ‘best times’.  In a nutshell, for scenarios that include ‘high score’ or ‘best time’ triggers, it will be possible to see which group of players hold the records.

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9. Frankly I'd rather I had the ability, as a creator, to trade my scenario popularity/success for rewards I can place IN my scenarios to motivate people to play them. If my capability to produce good scenarios was rewarded with Crystals and other rewards I could place IN my RP scenarios that then provide the motivation and compensation for the players who want to do those things.
The risk, of course, is that guilds artificially inflate the rating of their pet designer's scenarios so they can hand out 'kewl stuff' but the current incarnation is just going to encourage crystal-farming scenarios anyway, something I thought we were trying to avoid. :/ [posted by grimjim]

For now we clearly don’t give authors or Adventure Masters any direct advantages relating to their ratings for the reasons that you mention though it is quite possible that we will do something some time in the future. We’ll be watching to see how things pan out with the system as it stands before making a move though.

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10. Roleplayers and non roleplayers don’t have the same interests. So it is quite hard to find a scoring system that is satisfying for both. I thought about a double-system: you create three main scenario categories. The author must choose a category:
- "Roleplay" scenarios, which will be anonymously rated. RRP are given after a time of presence of at least x minutes (15 to 20 minutes should do). After these 15 minutes, the more the players stay, the more they cumulate points until a max time.
- "Action" scenarios, which will be rated with your bashing system (but without the level intervals)
- "Action/Roleplay"scenarios, rated at 50% through the voting system, and at 50% through the bash system. The best would be to have both ratings displayed separately in the Ring terminal screen. [posted by jezabel]

This proposal is interesting. We considered doing something along these lines from the start but we continue to be concerned by the exploit potential of scenarios where players are not active at all.

The compromise that we are working with today allows both RP and bashing actions to earn points though the players in the RP scenarios will still need to do something that we can measure as real activity in order to gain points. I won’t give the exact details here but as an example, interacting with civilian NPCs will generally be considered as measurable activity.