My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

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Troyen
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by Troyen »

yayswords wrote:
Troyen wrote:I think you're the only person that actually does this?
I might be. The only person out of how many players though? It might not really be saying much.
I guess I can sort of see someone doing this on a second or third play-through (especially since it really slows down actually playing the game). On your very first run though, way back on the original Act 1 beta, were you constantly trying to reload fights to receive max rewards? Or did you just take the fights you found as granted? Someone new might not know that what they encountered is far from the possible combination that provides maximum reward because they're just starting out and aren't aware of what is "normal" vs "optimal" yet because they haven't seen all the mechanics.

If someone wants to spend all their time on a repeat play-through trying to push all the limits and achieve the best possible stats, I'm not sure that's a problem - or at least not a major one. If a significant number of people feel they have to go through all this roll-back lottery trouble just to enjoy the game on their first play-through, then I would argue that's a problem. At some point you cross the line where you're spending all your time tweaking the game to cut down on tiny micro-optimizations that the rest of the game doesn't get finished this year.

(For the record, I do think it would be nice to have a few expensive pre-set items in the shops so there's at least a persistent itemization goal to work towards. But tuning around the assumption people will rollback encounters to get maximum experience seems a bit much.)
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yayswords
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by yayswords »

Actually I believe it was about gold, not experience, about how I have too much gold (despite buying the uber expensive SPR gear) and others don't :)

I agree the game (sub-nightmare at least) should not be tuned around rerolling encounters, but I do think it's a legit thing to do. I just think I should have too many things to spend gold on, not too few. I think that if I can amass a fortune, there should be something to use it on. Something like "buy an attribute point for 5,000 gold" would be a funny goldsink. It is the "permanent" character power that interests me, yet a ridiculously bad trade unless you really can't blow 5k gold anywhere else.
If at first try it doesn't explode, it ain't Jack who wrote the code.
Troyen
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by Troyen »

yayswords wrote:Actually I believe it was about gold, not experience, about how I have too much gold (despite buying the uber expensive SPR gear) and others don't :)

I agree the game (sub-nightmare at least) should not be tuned around rerolling encounters, but I do think it's a legit thing to do.
Sure, there could be more stuff to spend gold on or less gold.

The biggest problem I see with tuning around the assumption everyone will reroll encounters is it's not really intuitive. In order to play the game, you must not simply play the game, but save often and abandon anything that doesn't look like swarms of orange enemies. Now you're not beating things because of mastery of in-game mechanics, but instead by exploiting the limitations of the game engine. Sure, people do that all the time, but making it the "official" requirement for a difficulty seems too much.
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yayswords
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by yayswords »

But it's not like rerolling for the largest pack is the same as hypothetically saving before you finish a fight and reloading that save until you random awesome loot. It's more like saying: It's a greater challenge, but I will handle it. And certainly mastery of combat mechanics is what decides that.

As far as I am concerned though, if it makes the economy easier to handle, the drops could be independent of the pack size.

I guess it was going a bit far saying NM should be tuned around it, although I do think NM could be harder. I think going for the largest pack whenever you can is an investment anyway, even if you only get more exp. Enemies may adjust to your level, so you could call exp whoring futile, but enemies only gain stats with their levels, we gain skill points too.
If at first try it doesn't explode, it ain't Jack who wrote the code.
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jack1974
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by jack1974 »

Just for the records, I think adding the fixed / unique items is OK but not because of difficulty, more like because so the player knows there are specific items that can be obtained through the game, not random. So walkthrough are a possibility, discussions about builds makes more sense (I went with item A+item B to get speed and attack etc) and it makes balancing easier too. But just because of that, I am not adding them based on yayswords (or anyone else) playstyle :)
renke_
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by renke_ »

jack1974 wrote:Ah yes, because time ago I didn't had attack bonus on armors. I wasn't even considering Magic!
Cool will fix it now :)
another issue with the item comparator: currently 1% critical hit difference is weighted as 1 point, identical to e.g. attack and defence. it would imho helpful for the "green" calculation if the weight of critical hit is lowered, like diff/2.
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jack1974
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by jack1974 »

Agreed, reducing Critical Hit importance makes sense.
renke_
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by renke_ »

Black is the new green!

And I'm quite sure why this item was not marked as better: Weird integer divison in python :)

All green resistance values are below 25, so <diff>/25 is 0, the red one is -21/25 = -1 -> all diffs summed are +1+1-1+0+0-1+0=0.

This would work if you use division with real numbers, so instead of 25 as denominator use 25.0 and everything should fine* :)

*) probably, I don't understand your integer parsing. currently it looks like

Code: Select all

int(olditem.getValue(entry)-newitem.getValue(entry))/25
why do your parse an integer [getValue(entry)] to an integer?

should't it be more like parsing the (potentially) floating-point result of the division (or multiplication for dmg/def) to int?

Code: Select all

int((olditem.getValue(entry)-newitem.getValue(entry)/25.0)

same applies for damage and defence and - for some future release - critical hit
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jack1974
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by jack1974 »

Code: Select all

int((olditem.getValue(entry)-newitem.getValue(entry)/25.0)
that would divide the second one only :wink:
you probably meant this:

Code: Select all

int((olditem.getValue(entry)-newitem.getValue(entry))/25.0)
will fix all the other values too, I didn't check carefully that function indeed!
renke_
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Re: My gambling problem - the issues with equipment

Post by renke_ »

oops [there's a reason why no one pays me for programming ^^]
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