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Public listings would be way better if prestige was calculated differently


DarthEndonae

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I think the intent for prestige rating is to help determine which strongholds in public listings are well-decorated, however it really doesn't do a very good job at this at all. I'd really love to be able to check out other players' strongholds through the public listings, but there just isn't a reliable way to sort through all the terrible strongholds to justify having to go through two loading screens for just a chance at seeing an actually well-decorated one. A high prestige score doesn't say anything about how well an individual stronghold is decorated because it represents how many different decorations a player has total, not how many different decorations are used in a specific stronghold. So many strongholds are filled with garbage decos from achievements/conquest/mounts just so the player can reach 100% completion. I think that by making two adjustments to how prestige is calculated, public listings would be a whole lot more enjoyable to use.

 

An individual stronghold's prestige rating should be determined by adding up the prestige rating of all decorations that are used in that specific stronghold in the exact same way that they would contribute to your overall prestige rating. This means that the first use of any decoration in that stronghold would be worth 200 points and any subsequent use of that decoration in that stronghold would be worth 2 points. Right now, prestige rating only shows how many decorations you own as a player, it doesn't really say much about the contents of an individual stronghold. It does not matter how many decorations you own as a player if most or all of the unique decorations are in a different stronghold than the one you're looking at.

 

Decorations given out in large quantities for free including those through achievements (if you can have more than 50 copies of that deco), conquest (crafting nodes), and mounts should only provide 2 prestige even on the first use of that decoration in a given stronghold. The goal here is to grant minimal prestige for the decorations that are most commonly used in strongholds that are just filled up with garbage.

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Let me guess, the decorations you have and like the most, should have the most prestige. 😍

 

EDIT - Prestige doesn't have anything to do with how "well" your SH is decorated. It's more a matter of how many fancy, or rare, or expensive, decorations are there.

Edited by JediQuaker
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A high prestige score doesn't say anything about how well an individual stronghold is decorated

Correct. It cannot *ever* say anything about that, because it is a totally subjective criterion.

 

EDIT: example: unless you know that my Coruscant SH was intended to have an aspect inherited from the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford (England), the big indoor room upstairs will resemble a collection of random junk. It's *meant* to look like that, though. Equally, the balcony has fifty copies of "Temple Chair (Basic)", all carefully placed to serve as seats for the members of an audience watching an event happening on the elevated platform. Are you saying that the thematic consistency there should be penalised?

Edited by SteveTheCynic
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Too complex mate. Just a simple upvotes next to the prestige would be fine. I'd still love a donation bucket where you could reward players with good strongholds, I tend to just mail them a message with credits but I'd prefer it was easier to 'tip' them :)
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Agreed JediQuaker. The way I'd do it is have a little tip bucket where you can leave a review and donate credits or cartel coins if you want, as well as including a low reward daily quest to visit 3 strongholds that aren't your own, to give an incentive to visit other peoples strongholds.
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Agreed JediQuaker. The way I'd do it is have a little tip bucket where you can leave a review and donate credits or cartel coins if you want, as well as including a low reward daily quest to visit 3 strongholds that aren't your own, to give an incentive to visit other peoples strongholds.

 

/agreed.

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Agreed JediQuaker. The way I'd do it is have a little tip bucket where you can leave a review and donate credits or cartel coins if you want, as well as including a low reward daily quest to visit 3 strongholds that aren't your own, to give an incentive to visit other peoples strongholds.

 

I would love this. The lack of an ability to interact meaningfully between designers is a large part of what has prevented me ever publicly listing my strongholds; I just don't care, unless there's a way to actually have a conversation with the people whose work I think is good.

 

The addition of a daily (or weekly, if they feel daily is too much) quest to visit X number of others' strongholds is great, I'd suggest it ought to reward the little box of three random utility decos that otherwise come with meeting your conquest goal. Heck, what would be even better is if they made this box have in it just the Grade 7, 8, 9, and 10 utility decos - which have still never been added to the game. (When I checked my posting history I realized I'd made threads on this like four separate times, I'm mean it's been almost SIX YEARS since grade 7 mats were added to the game, just !@#*!@#*$@$??????)

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i totally agree... most of my strongholds are very practically decorated, once the theme i try to convey, is logically / dramaturgically decorated i continue in other areaS... once i reach 100% completion i m at about 290k prestige which places me in the middle of the ranking, now if i visit a 700k guys place and see that he only has cluttered it up with stuff, i feel unfairly treated, since i put effort and a good bunch of creds to give my places the appearance i came up with... i m getting very good feedback regarding my places in-game from the seldom visitor i might have once in a while... that s why i started openly advertising my Alderaan SH in /1 now ( as a Vineyard/organic farm, chil-out retreat), so people will actively go and visit (had up to 5 visitors the other day, yxaaaay ^^) , also there is people who actively visit strongholds for inspiration or as a past-time, so a guestbook would be a great idea...

And if you re a visitor... don t always fall for the highest ranking, there s places far more cleverly and minimaly decorated than Dartch Clutter s SH

Edited by Dimitir
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Do people with more than the maximum number of strongholds and more decos than the limits still get Prestige for all that? If so, the system is borked and needs fixing.

 

Especially after Bioware swore up and down that the decoration inventory wouldn't be additive during the server merge, but instead based on the highest totals.

 

I used to love working on collecting decorations to increase my SH prestige, until suddenly it was impossible to get more than 50% as much as server-merged decorators.

 

I hope they'll start allowing duplicate strongholds and double the decoration limits. It would be a great way to level the playing field without penalizing people who have more.

 

I'd love to have an Upvote feature on strongholds, as long as there isn't a downvote, and as long as the vote is Legacy-wide, so people can't create-vote-destroy alts to inflate their numbers.

 

A tip jar sounds interesting. Personally, I'd rather have a Public storage box that would let people take one thing out per day, even if they're not in my guild or on my friends list. I'd fill it up around the holidays, put stuff in there that might interest new players, and so forth.

Edited by Xina_LA
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Do people with more than the maximum number of strongholds and more decos than the limits still get Prestige for all that? If so, the system is borked and needs fixing.

 

Especially after Bioware swore up and down that the decoration inventory wouldn't be additive during the server merge, but instead based on the highest totals.

 

Yep, decorations were absolutely made additive with the merge, completely opposite of what we were told would happen. So for example, in my case the servers that were merged for me were the three west coast ones, so the decos I had at 999 prior to the merge are now 2997. That's just extra +2s of course, but they certainly do add up. Though honestly it's impossible to tell how accurately that's even calculating into prestige without more hours of painstaking math than I'm willing to do.

 

It would be impossible and unfair at this point to try to roll back to pre-merge totals, because people will have placed decos, they will have added a lot to their count since then, and etc (even assuming there was a record of what the pre-merge totals were). But at minimum decos in excess of 999 is an absolute bug that ought to be remedied; all of those should be pulled down to the 999 cap. That at least would mean that others are technically able to match the number, which would be impossible if they're trying to match 2997.

 

Honestly I think making decos additive would have been the right thing to do regardless, because people paid for all those server transfers, often many times, and for a lot of those years they weren't at all cheap. I did many years of obsessive and meticulous cross-server shopping specifically to acquire hard to find decos that could only be traded person to person via obsessive monitoring of Trade chat and not on the GTN (looking at you Oricon raid decos, and the astronomical prices I paid for you :mad:), and that was a lot of real life money put down to enable it. Additive would have been a fair route in my opinion, but what absolutely wasn't fair was that it was the opposite of what they said would happen, so some people didn't realize they were going to have that choice/option before them.

 

If I had my dream, the cap for all decos in game would all be 999 (no more of that silly 1/5/10/50 nonsense on random decos), and anyone server-merge-bugged with a deco count higher than 999 should have that number slashed down to the correct 999 cap.

 

I'd love to have an Upvote feature on strongholds, as long as there isn't a downvote, and as long as the vote is Legacy-wide, so people can't create-vote-destroy alts to inflate their numbers.

 

I agree that I think an Upvote without a Downvote would be important. Someone so selfish they want to game the system to falsely arrange to have themselves mega-Upvoted is annoying but oh well, kind of comes with the terrain of the modern day. I'm willing to accept that's a possibility, as long as they can't also flipside vindictively Downvote anyone else.

 

In my dreams I'd love to see a system that let people give something like a 1-5 star rating across a few categories, to ultimately land at an overall rating for a SH. Categories like: Theme, Variety, Design.

 

Sometimes I see strongholds where it's clear someone has an excellent sense of symmetry and color palette, but I see nothing at all in them as regards a theme or setting they might be trying to evoke, it's just a sequence of the same plant-crystal-flag perfectly symmetrically balanced. I might give that person kudos for design, but critique their lack of theme and variety. Conversely I've seen people do delightfully creative things in evoking obvious themes without the slightest hint of symmetry; I love it when I can walk into a SH room and say "this is obviously supposed to be a kitchen / beauty station / treasure vault." We're all working with the same set of tools, so seeing which people can make the same tools look and feel different and intriguing is very cool.

 

Then again, a system that allowed that sort of granular reviewing I think would also require something else we've often asked for: info plaque decorations, like the ones you can hover over on the Manaan planet instance, something decorators could use to make very clear what a room or overall SH is supposed to be. While of course being able to figure out the theme even without a plaque is a testament to decorator's skill, it would be more fair to let everyone tell you upfront and then let people judge based on the goal.

Edited by JediBoadicea
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Everytime I see someone with over a million prestige I think back to that server merge. I didn't get any extra decos from that and it makes me sad the boards are skewed. There's about 50 decorations you can get with a reasonable amount of credits only up to 999 so that's an extra 200,000 prestige some people have per server that was merged.

 

But it's happened now, can't do anything about it. Unless there's a prestige adjustment in future, which I very much doubt, we are where we are.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
Let me guess, the decorations you have and like the most, should have the most prestige. 😍.

 

Seriously? The reason I posted this, as I explained in the post itself, is that public listings are a huge waste of time because there's no way to tell which strongholds are actually decorated and which ones are filled up exclusively with decorations given out from achievements and conquest just so they can reach 100%, which used to be needed in order to get the conquest bonus.

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Let me guess, the decorations you have and like the most, should have the most prestige. 😍

 

EDIT - Prestige doesn't have anything to do with how "well" your SH is decorated. It's more a matter of how many fancy, or rare, or expensive, decorations are there.

 

But that's not true in the slightest. For example, the Revanite Walker is a very rare decoration. The Irrigated Garden, the one that used to drop from the Ossus world bosses, is another. Ranked season decos are uncommon, perhaps even rare by some standards. The 999 Ancient Ossan Statues from achievements are worth as much prestige as the Revanite Walker , the Irrigated Garden, and the Commemorative Meat Tree you could buy for 1 credit from the Rishi Trader. That's a problem, imo.

 

I think that prestige should depend upon:

1) Source difficulty: MM ops and ranked pvp should be higher than decos which can be bought. Achievement-granted ones somewhere in between depending on the difficulty of the achievement. Cartel Market ones can have some adjustment for bronze/silver/gold/platinum rarity, but in general should be lower prestige than MM ops/ranked pvp ones. Decos bought with Prefabs can be scaled according to premium/prototype/artifact/legendary.

2) Max # allowed: Some decorations, like the Reconstructed Hypergate, have a maximum limit on the number you can own. Those should rank higher than ones for which you can own 999.

3) Hook: Centerpiece hook decorations should grant more prestige than a small hook.

4) Interactibility: If a deco can be interacted-with, for example, the multi state mainframe terminal (a deco from Battle of Rishi FP), this would grant more prestige than, say, the republic computer terminal (which comes from Boarding Party FP).

5) Animation: If a deco is animated, or makes sound effects independent of activation, this should count more than, say, a lamp that hangs on the wall.

 

This isn't necessarily a comprehensive list of everything that could go into the prestige point value of a decoration, but it could be a place to start. At least then a player could have a reasonable conclusion that a stronghold with 200k prestige had rarer, more valuable decos than one with 100k prestige.

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  • 4 months later...
Agreed JediQuaker. The way I'd do it is have a little tip bucket where you can leave a review and donate credits or cartel coins if you want, as well as including a low reward daily quest to visit 3 strongholds that aren't your own, to give an incentive to visit other peoples strongholds.

 

This is a great idea!

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Seriously? The reason I posted this, as I explained in the post itself, is that public listings are a huge waste of time because there's no way to tell which strongholds are actually decorated and which ones are filled up exclusively with decorations given out from achievements and conquest just so they can reach 100%, which used to be needed in order to get the conquest bonus.

You'd think that the " 😍 " at the end would give you a clue that I was kidding. 🙄

 

But yes, you are correct, there's no way to tell. Which is why most people don't give a crap about prestige. 🙂

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Agreed, and I like a lot of the ideas in here. I have voiced to my guildies how I wished there was a way to leave comments on a nice SH. I put a lot of time an effort into my strongholds but they're never in the top three prestige rankings so I rarely see people in them. In fairness, only one is public atm, but once athers are complete I plan on opening them as well.
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But that's not true in the slightest. For example, the Revanite Walker is a very rare decoration. The Irrigated Garden, the one that used to drop from the Ossus world bosses, is another. Ranked season decos are uncommon, perhaps even rare by some standards. The 999 Ancient Ossan Statues from achievements are worth as much prestige as the Revanite Walker , the Irrigated Garden, and the Commemorative Meat Tree you could buy for 1 credit from the Rishi Trader. That's a problem, imo.

 

I think that prestige should depend upon:

<snip>

 

Snipped out the rest for space. I don't disagree with you, but I would go in a more simple direction. Instead of trying to assign different values to different decorations I would rather go with a single value for all decorations that is not dependent on the number of copies one has. As you correctly point out, 999 Rishi meat trees are worth the same as some rare decoration in the same quantity: 100+998(2)=2096 total prestige points. I would rather that all decorations, for example, give 100 points for the first copy and nothing for additional copies.

 

There are currently 3135 decorations listed in the Decorations window (some of those are not available in the game or are bugged). If every decoration provided 100 prestige points (whether one copy or 999) then the max prestige would be 313500. Doing this would be a much easier way to identify that someone has many unique decorations rather than multiple copies of one. Comparing the current system to my proposal those 999 Rishi meat trees would be the same prestige as ~21 unique decorations (2096 vs 2100). If every decoration is only counted once, and each decoration gave the same point value, then it would be easy to see that someone has more unique decorations simply by looking at their prestige. Doing this would also knock down those people that took advantage of the server merge to get an inflated prestige total.

 

Of course, this would not solve the problem of people filling their stronghold with meat trees and chairs, but that is where a rating system would come into play. I would also love a comment system, as well.

 

 

Agreed, and I like a lot of the ideas in here. I have voiced to my guildies how I wished there was a way to leave comments on a nice SH. I put a lot of time an effort into my strongholds but they're never in the top three prestige rankings so I rarely see people in them. In fairness, only one is public atm, but once athers are complete I plan on opening them as well.

 

Mine are rarely in the top three, often in the top ten, sometimes top five, and it is a rarity to have a visitor. I do not think I have ever had more than two visitors at once. Visiting strongholds just does not seem to be a thing anymore, but I occasionally go tour some strongholds for inspiration. Like you, I put in a lot of time on mine. All of my strongholds have a theme that I try to keep appropriate to the space, so no meat tree farms in mine, and all are open to the public except Manaan, still being worked on, Coruscant, being redesigned, and Alderaan, do not have it. But when a stronghold is done I stop even if that means it is not at 100%. I would rather have something that looks aesthetically pleasing rather than decorations put up haphazardly just to get to 100% completion. For example, my Rishi stronghold is at 82%. While I might tweak some things I consider it pretty much done because to put in anything more would make it cluttered.

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Mine are rarely in the top three, often in the top ten, sometimes top five, and it is a rarity to have a visitor. I do not think I have ever had more than two visitors at once. Visiting strongholds just does not seem to be a thing anymore, but I occasionally go tour some strongholds for inspiration. Like you, I put in a lot of time on mine. All of my strongholds have a theme that I try to keep appropriate to the space, so no meat tree farms in mine, and all are open to the public except Manaan, still being worked on, Coruscant, being redesigned, and Alderaan, do not have it. But when a stronghold is done I stop even if that means it is not at 100%. I would rather have something that looks aesthetically pleasing rather than decorations put up haphazardly just to get to 100% completion. For example, my Rishi stronghold is at 82%. While I might tweak some things I consider it pretty much done because to put in anything more would make it cluttered.

 

I have found ways to hide decos behind things so that the stronghold is completed, but not cluttered. I can't stand having my strongholds cluttered, lol. I only have one public right now because it's the only one I'm wholly satisfied with, lol.

 

I also like to mash the various trophies together to create interesting wall art. It uses up several hooks and gives the place something unique without making it look cluttered. Trophies also get hidden behind banners and such to fill deco hooks. My agent is stealthy in heer decorating, lol.

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I have found ways to hide decos behind things so that the stronghold is completed, but not cluttered. I can't stand having my strongholds cluttered, lol. I only have one public right now because it's the only one I'm wholly satisfied with, lol.

 

I also like to mash the various trophies together to create interesting wall art. It uses up several hooks and gives the place something unique without making it look cluttered. Trophies also get hidden behind banners and such to fill deco hooks. My agent is stealthy in heer decorating, lol.

 

I can not stand it when a stronghold is at 100% and it will not let you replace a deco, you have to pick it up first, so I will always leave at least one spot open. Most of my strongholds that are public are between 95-99% completed. The only ones below 90% that I consider finished (or relatively finished) are Rishi and Umbara (Umbara has such bad hook placement, why are there so many hooks on top of the train?).

 

I did get quite the surprise the other day. Right after I logged in three people showed up in my stronghold. The most visitors I have ever had at once.

Edited by ceryxp
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I can not stand it when a stronghold is at 100% and it will not let you replace a deco, you have to pick it up first, so I will always leave at least one spot open. Most of my strongholds that are public are between 95-99% completed. The only ones below 90% that I consider finished (or relatively finished) are Rishi and Umbara (Umbara has such bad hook placement, why are there so many hooks on top of the train?).

 

I did get quite the surprise the other day. Right after I logged in three people showed up in my stronghold. The most visitors I have ever had at once.

 

You know, I've seen more visitors of late as well. I was playing with a friend last night and we were on Skype. We were in my SH between running stuff and suddenly my friend was like "What the hell?! Who is that?!" She didn't realize the stronghold was public. It had a visitor and startled her.

 

What server are you on? I play on Star Forge. If we're on the same server I'll have to come take a look at your strongholds.

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I did get quite the surprise the other day. Right after I logged in three people showed up in my stronghold. The most visitors I have ever had at once.

A few weeks back, I ran across someone putting together a guild-organised tour to give people the "50 peeps in your stronghold with you" achievement (as well as the lesser ones). After a bit of floo-flah about getting as many people as possible all set up on their TeamSpeak server, off we all went. Three Ops groups and a bit of handwaving for people whose max-occupation stronghold is only 50 (e.g. Coru/DK)(1), and manual invitations to three group leaders who have top-tier keys to your stronghold (and can therefore invite the whole Ops group), and *very* quickly you end up with *everyone* in the groups in your stronghold.

 

But yeah, I had the same thing one day. I was doing I can't remember what in my SH and suddenly, as I opened my cargo hold, POOF, there's a cheevo popup out of nowhere. What the ...? Click. Oh, I see.

 

(1) It's possible to be at 51/50. You go in, you invite some people who have enough rights to invite the rest, and then you *leave* the SH. When the SH is maxed out on occupancy (50/50, say), you go back in. You are always allowed in to your own stronghold, even if it's notionally full.

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You know, I've seen more visitors of late as well. I was playing with a friend last night and we were on Skype. We were in my SH between running stuff and suddenly my friend was like "What the hell?! Who is that?!" She didn't realize the stronghold was public. It had a visitor and startled her.

 

What server are you on? I play on Star Forge. If we're on the same server I'll have to come take a look at your strongholds.

 

I am on Star Forge. I will send you a message with my character's name.

 

 

A few weeks back, I ran across someone putting together a guild-organised tour to give people the "50 peeps in your stronghold with you" achievement (as well as the lesser ones).

 

But yeah, I had the same thing one day. I was doing I can't remember what in my SH and suddenly, as I opened my cargo hold, POOF, there's a cheevo popup out of nowhere. What the ...? Click. Oh, I see.

 

I have seen those too. A while back there was someone trying to put one together on SF, and I had posted that I would help, but nothing ever came of it. Basically, the same thing happened to me, too. I was probably doing something at the GTN or storage and up popped this achievement window.

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