Enmity

[Arcon]

I was gonna post this two days ago, but it got bigger and bigger and eventually expanded into a project. The results of which can be seen here.

In short, I wanted to suggest a new relativistic enmity model. All the suggestions I've heard for fixing current enmity issues revolve around increasing the cap or lowering enmity gain per action. This, however, makes reaching the cap impossible, because the higher you get, the harder it is to accumulate more enmity. Eventually, if you consider a constant VE decrease, each player would settle at a certain balanced VE level, depending on their enmity output, be it from dealing damage, curing or using other kinds of hate tools.

I would really appreciate if someone would take the time to look over the math, since I rushed most of it, but it seems to check out. I would appreciate even more if someone at SE would actually look at it and play around with it, and possibly comment on if the need for a new system is at least acknowledged. This is just a suggestion of mine, I've made the page to play around with it myself mostly, but if someone has a different idea (that doesn't revolve around the previously mentioned cap increase) feel free to mention it.

Details to everything are on the site.

[Catsby]

I like it a lot. If I understand correctly the basic idea is a variable cap, a enmity gain based on what you already have and faster VE. No idea whether it's feasible or not though.

Some time ago I thought that differing caps per monster relative to their HP would be the way to go but I never did any research or prototyping to see if that was better.

[Atomic_Skull]

FFXI used to only have VE. CE was ninja patched into the game somewhere in 2006. I remember when it happened, that week we suddenly couldn't keep Kirin off the DD's anymore and nobody could understand why enmity had started acting all wonky.

[Laciante]

I like the idea, my only concern is regarding the lower end of the spectrum.
If a character were to deal (all other things at default) less than 108 DPS, your chart reads that that character will maintaining a zero enmity balance, is that supposed to happen?
Similarly, at level 10 against a level 12 mob, doing less than 22 DPS is reading as 0 balance.
I know that at 90 no one should be doing that low regular dmg, but I just wanted to clarify.

[Arcon]

I like it a lot. If I understand correctly the basic idea is a variable cap, a enmity gain based on what you already have and faster VE. No idea whether it's feasible or not though.

Actually, the cap itself is not variable (10k by default on the calculator), but the eventual balance people will settle in. It can still be exceeded, by spike damage moves, but the VE decay will eventually settle down to their balance again.

FFXI used to only have VE. CE was ninja patched into the game somewhere in 2006. I remember when it happened, that week we suddenly couldn't keep Kirin off the DD's anymore and nobody could understand why enmity had started acting all wonky.

I actually didn't know that. I didn't even know people knew of two different types of enmity before Kaeko's testing (I knew there were theories about it, but that's it). This is good though, means SE may be willing to change an existing system if the need arises.

I like the idea, my only concern is regarding the lower end of the spectrum.
If a character were to deal (all other things at default) less than 108 DPS, your chart reads that that character will maintaining a zero enmity balance, is that supposed to happen?
Similarly, at level 10 against a level 12 mob, doing less than 22 DPS is reading as 0 balance.
I know that at 90 no one should be doing that low regular dmg, but I just wanted to clarify.

Yes, you are correct. To be honest, I didn't consider that part very much, but it's true that the cut-off point (with D=100 and k=4) would be 107 damage per second, meaning anything lower than that would result in 0 VE balance. However this can be adjusted by changing the k factor. The DPS value needed to reach a positive VE balance is 26.9k.

Note that currently you gain 3.75 enmity per damage (on level 95 mob), meaning that you need to deal more than 60/3.75 = 16 DPS to gain VE. The current system doesn't have a balance, only a constant gain or constant loss, depending on your DPS value (although one could argue that 0 and 10000 are discrete balance values, 0 for VE gain under the VE decay value, and 10000 for VE gain above).

So you'd need ~25 DPS to notice any significant increase in VE (40 enm/s). This corresponds to about k=1. Even though they're different systems, it means about the same DPS is needed to gain some VE. The only difference then would be that the current system caps at 10k, whereas my suggested system wouldn't cap, but instead reach the suggested balance.

As I said, I kinda neglected the lower end of the spectrum (or more like forgot about it), but it can be adjusted to fit that as well. k=2 is also a reasonable value, so is k=2.5.

[Catsby]

This is good though, means SE may be willing to change an existing system if the need arises.

It's hard to see it any other way. Abyssea made it easy to find so many unbalanced or old systems. It was either abyssea or being level 99 and my opinion it's always better to find problems sooner than later.