riperiperi / FreeSO

Re-implementation of The Sims Online.
http://freeso.org
Mozilla Public License 2.0
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Update JobBalanceTask.cs #273

Closed Akzelius closed 10 months ago

Akzelius commented 10 months ago

In the present day boards take ~3:25 to complete, jam ~4:10, potions ~4:15 and the other five single money objects ~4:05. But the values used to balance payouts are way off for all these objects except boards, you can see in the existing code that those are all listed as going for closer to or even above 5 minutes. Something must have happened with the way animations are rendered since chomper did the old timings, but they have been stable at these current times since before I started playing over two years ago.

Why should we be happy with these approximate timings you might ask, since chomper's are listed so exactly? Well exact timings of SMOs are difficult to measure for various reasons such as the human factor of starting and stopping the clock or the fact that the sequence of animations always vary in completion time by a second or two every time. I think that compared to the way off current values the approximate timings I listed above are definitely good enough for rebalancing the SMOs to a point where they will be as good as equal to each other, any imperfection is tiny enough compared to those we have currently due to the big gap between reality and what was listed. And there's no stopping anyone from finding a good method of making more exact time measurements to update them again later. :)

Since the community has become used to the SMO's current payout levels I also proposed to adjust the base completion time downward so that the ratio between it and the average completion time of all 8 objects listed remain the same. This should have the effect that most SMOs continue to pay roughly the same while the outliers - mainly boards but also potions and jam to some extent - are adjusted toward the average.

riperiperi commented 10 months ago

When this was brought up in the past, I said that it would be important to back a change like this with timings for each job object, including any variations that might come up due to randomized animations. Another key thing is how long they take to complete at high and low skill levels, as they tend to use different animations to show the sim being better/worse at doing the task, and I'd imagine the failure animations might take longer.

You can force a sim's skill level in sandbox mode with the MOMI machine object.

You should provide a source for the numbers being changed. Replacing it with different numbers could just result in more inaccuracies.

Akzelius commented 10 months ago

Fair points even though I think an approximation closer to reality would be more balanced than keeping the old "exact" values that are plain wrong in 7 of 8 cases. But I can understand why long-term fixes grounded in more data are preferred. I'm closing this pull request because I simply won't have the time and patience to do multiple timings for every object 20 times over for each skill level - that's hours if not days of work that I'd have to leave for someone else who's able and willing

riperiperi commented 10 months ago

It wouldn't need to be for each skill level, just min and max, to get an idea of how it might vary.