Coming Soon: Discussion Thread (2020)

[Steve]

I may have just being lucky while you weren't Steve, because i myself looted many good things on same days you were posting your graypeaks reports.

*shakes his cane at the young whippersnapper*

[gedweyignasia]

There really needs to be an expansion on what is considered an appropriate CR area. Or areas have their CR reviewed and bumped up a fair bit.

This is something that's under review as well. The experience should get smoother and smoother as we iterate.

[yyj]

Also can the loot system be looked at?

I was told by a dev that the loot you get depends on your class, and that you are supposed to find stuff useful for other classes, not yours, to encourage trading, but who trades nowadays?
Forum trading is dead, and epic shop items are usually better anyway, this is why I make alts myself, I find some stuff that is 100% useless to my mains, I try to sell it in many ways, I end up giving stuff away or making alts to use the items.

[Tanlaus]

My personal experience is twofold. On my epic character I’ve run the same area (ruins of Oghrann’s and it’s interior) almost every evening since the loot change. I’ve found it is definitely a better experience in terms of rewards.

One thing that really has changed quite a bit over the two-ish years I’ve been playing on the server is that a lot of stuff that used to sell for quite a bit of gold (like +4 items) sell for less than half the amount now, sometimes less than a quarter.

This, I think, is mostly due to an aging population of long time players who can roll up new toons and just give them too tier gear from day one. Everything in the middle becomes devalued.

A proper item level restriction would help with that in my opinion. But people may find it unpopular. Can sell things for more as an epic toon, but have to buy them for more as well. Hard to say. Not a hill I’m willing to die on in either direction.

I have been steadily leveling a non RCR’d non muled UD character to get a sense of the loot table from a new character’s perspective. Mid teens now. I definitely have better gear that I could have afforded when I started, but that is mostly due to things being so cheap on the AH. Had +4 weapons early on, pre-teen. Felt a little too OP to me but I’m not going to arbitrarily restrict myself in a way a brand new player would not.

I did struggle of a few early levels, like around 7 to 9 or so, where the areas that were still a challenge and have good XP had dropped to small amounts of coin and nothing else via chest tiers, and better areas were simply too dangerous.

That may be somewhat unique to the UD as there are less areas to play in and maybe not quite as smooth a curve on loot drop off, but I can see it still making life a bit difficult for new surface players as well.

So I suggested opening up the level range at lower levels a bit.

As far as complaints about the RIG go, personal hope/goal is to add more interesting non-OP items to the loot table (like +3 stuff with interesting properties) that we can see more of. That’s more long term once we see what is actually in the loot table and what isn’t. I’ve been surprised lately to find a few epic items that I did not know were even lootable anymore. Nothing I could use but still. That’s more of a project for once the loot table is properly organized.

[Steve]

It's reassuring to hear that others have found the system to be generous, since it probably needs to be scaled back a bit.

I’m sorry to write that I can but question the change, or at least, agree that some serious adjustments must be made.

Do you have a suggestion as to how much gold a chest should provide based on CR and what % of the time an epic store item should appear based on CR?

I already did!

To reiterate: I think that 10 hours of RL IG investment in a CR 27 Area should provide, in the minimum, an Item on par or of any Epic NPC Merchant. Considering most players need a L30 toon even be anywhere close to a CR27 Area, there are already hundreds of hours invested into the game.

However, I will concede my opinion to an idea that the Rebalance has made it nearly guaranteed that from Level 1 to 30, any Player is likely to have found and fitted their toon out with total epic gear by reaching 30.

But, I’m NOT talking about or interested in the Gold farming aspect. I think it degrades the experience of the Server, and definitely cuts away at reasons to Roleplay. Role-play used to be the means by which we players gained Epic Items. Now, it’s just a time vs numbers game, as it is being presented.

Please don’t concretize a paradigm of loot-farming-for-gold-selling. It is a tedious, OOC act being asked of us, in place of having a great experience of discovery and reward.

Essentially, I’m suggesting tone down the gold, tone down the Item production overall, and make it rare yet reasonable to find something epic.

Or, set Item production to 5%, set gold coin production to 1000%, and add my suggested crafting system. That way, we players can just grind gold equally, and create our own epic Items and rewards through an equal system.

Because really, how can you actually make a random item generation system that is fair to all who try to use it? Maybe an idea of fair or democratic rewards is not the idea here. That’s fine. But then even though you’ve improved the system with a Rebalance, it actually didn’t make it better! Because previously, before the rebalance, many players STILL looted epic items galore, and the rest of us just had to sit back and drool.

Well, except for those Items that were upgraded and rewarded by DMs, for which we should all be striving to experience by fostering more DMships through “sending up” players to staff.

[gedweyignasia]

It's reassuring to hear that others have found the system to be generous, since it probably needs to be scaled back a bit.

I’m sorry to write that I can but question the change, or at least, agree that some serious adjustments must be made.

Do you have a suggestion as to how much gold a chest should provide based on CR and what % of the time an epic store item should appear based on CR?

I already did!

You didn't give me a table, you told me what the thought process you'd use to create that kind of table would be.

[gedweyignasia]

I think that 10 hours of RL IG investment in a CR 27 Area should provide, in the minimum, an Item on par or of any Epic NPC Merchant. Considering most players need a L30 toon even be anywhere close to a CR27 Area, there are already hundreds of hours invested into the game.

But players don't stop looting once they've equipped themselves. So if you get an Epic Store item every 10 hours and there are 6 epic characters active on average, every 24 hours you're creating 14.4 Epic Store items. In a month you have 432 more Epic Store items that will never be sold to merchants or disappear from the economy. If your playerbase is about 230 people, that gets out of hand pretty quickly.

I want to give players meaningful rewards, but it's not as simple as it sounds.

[yyj]

Visited Nashkel Lich cave, level 30 character, the three chests had:

43gp, Potion of Greater Bull's Strength.
1138 gold.
50 gold and a fire agate.

[Steve]

You didn't give me a table, you told me what the thought process you'd use to create that kind of table would be.

Well, you didn't ask for a table, did you?

But players don't stop looting once they've equipped themselves. So if you get an Epic Store item every 10 hours and there are 6 epic characters active on average, every 24 hours you're creating 14.4 Epic Store items. In a month you have 432 more Epic Store items that will never be sold to merchants or disappear from the economy. If your playerbase is about 230 people, that gets out of hand pretty quickly.

I want to give players meaningful rewards, but it's not as simple as it sounds.

Actually, a massive amount of Players DO stop looting once they've equipped their toons, because what is the purpose in more looting at that point? Gold? Gold is useless on BGTSCC, because far too quickly one has amassed enough gold to purchase a small amount of options (gear, guild hall, then just gifting it away) and then there are no more options to spent it...and one can't ever lose it either, since the Server has no interest in that aspect of Role-play.

Additionally, a plethora of players just LEAVE the Server once they've equipped their Toon, made Level 30, and seen all the Areas and killed all the Bosses. Boom, done. Find another game, with better graphics, more rewards still to discover and collect, etc.

Your equation is not applicable, since every epic toon online in a 24 hour period is not out looting. Well, now, maybe they are because they're being "promised" better returns from this Rebalance.

The point really isn't 10 hours as I've done, or 30 hours as you say Ged, or 100 hours as was probably more likely in the past, the issue is that it is too random to be making the current state better FOR ALL. All that seems to have been done, is the system was "beefed up" but some are scoring better results, than others, and some in a ridiculously small amount of time out doing it, while others put in hours and have no worthwhile result.

Look, I'm not even really with an issue about the frequency you have determined is best for epic loot drops, and are tailoring in this beta period. My real issue if with this paradigm shift that PCs go out and loot grind trash Items for 1400gp per item, so as to amass tons of gold for...what? To buy their Epic Gear from a NPC Merchant? Okay, fine. That's a plan. But then why not just forgo the worthless-except-for-its-1400gp-value-Items and just place more 1400gp in the Loot drop table, and save us the silliness of the thing? And then, have Epic Items in Chests be super rare, no, be EPIC RARE, just like before, and not advertise that ALL PLAYERS are going to see an improvement.

Because that just not a true result.

I've noticed you don't ever touch on the subject of crafting like I keep posting about, but THAT is what players want, and to use their dragon's hoard of gold for.

[Hoihe]

You didn't give me a table, you told me what the thought process you'd use to create that kind of table would be.

Well, you didn't ask for a table, did you?

But players don't stop looting once they've equipped themselves. So if you get an Epic Store item every 10 hours and there are 6 epic characters active on average, every 24 hours you're creating 14.4 Epic Store items. In a month you have 432 more Epic Store items that will never be sold to merchants or disappear from the economy. If your playerbase is about 230 people, that gets out of hand pretty quickly.

I want to give players meaningful rewards, but it's not as simple as it sounds.

Actually, a massive amount of Players DO stop looting once they've equipped their toons, because what is the purpose in more looting at that point? Gold? Gold is useless on BGTSCC, because far too quickly one has amassed enough gold to purchase a small amount of options (gear, guild hall, then just gifting it away) and then there are no more options to spent it...and one can't ever lose it either, since the Server has no interest in that aspect of Role-play.

Additionally, a plethora of players just LEAVE the Server once they've equipped their Toon, made Level 30, and seen all the Areas and killed all the Bosses. Boom, done. Find another game, with better graphics, more rewards still to discover and collect, etc.

Your equation is not applicable, since every epic toon online in a 24 hour period is not out looting. Well, now, maybe they are because they're being "promised" better returns from this Rebalance.

The point really isn't 10 hours as I've done, or 30 hours as you say Ged, or 100 hours as was probably more likely in the past, the issue is that it is too random to be making the current state better FOR ALL. All that seems to have been done, is the system was "beefed up" but some are scoring better results, than others, and some in a ridiculously small amount of time out doing it, while others put in hours and have no worthwhile result.

Look, I'm not even really with an issue about the frequency you have determined is best for epic loot drops, and are tailoring in this beta period. My real issue if with this paradigm shift that PCs go out and loot grind trash Items for 1400gp per item, so as to amass tons of gold for...what? To buy their Epic Gear from a NPC Merchant? Okay, fine. That's a plan. But then why not just forgo the worthless-except-for-its-1400gp-value-Items and just place more 1400gp in the Loot drop table, and save us the silliness of the thing? And then, have Epic Items in Chests be super rare, no, be EPIC RARE, just like before, and not advertise that ALL PLAYERS are going to see an improvement.

Because that just not a true result.

I've noticed you don't ever touch on the subject of crafting like I keep posting about, but THAT is what players want, and to use their dragon's hoard of gold for.

And due to limiting possible loot to epic areas at level 30, getting a full set of gear becomes almost mandatory to obtain loot.

Like, most areas I would go to for loot require AC around 50, or more than 50, to avoid spending too much on healing or mirror image.

This remains true in a party too, unless you got a bunch of archers or very high damage dealers.

[gedweyignasia]

I've noticed you don't ever touch on the subject of crafting like I keep posting about, but THAT is what players want, and to use their dragon's hoard of gold for.

I tend not to talk about crafting because, while ostensibly a roleplay mechanic, I think it would mostly be treated as another power mechanic. I personally believe that it would either be able to make items of inferior quality to the best available and be dismissed as "useless" by most players or it would be able to make items of equal or better quality to the best available and annihilate what's left of an economy where +4 items are already being dismissed as bad loot. I can't envision crafting adding much RP that Master Alchemist and the fetch quests haven't already, and I like to spend my dev time doing things that I think will create more opportunities for RP. I don't think this would be a popular opinion and it's impossible to do more than speculate, so I shut up about it because I'd rather not make a lot of people angry.

I like working on things that provide quality-of-life improvements, create meaningful consequences for players' actions, put players off of "auto-pilot" where they used to sleepwalk through things, or create "meet-cute" type opportunities for characters to RP together and create a meaningful connection when they might have otherwise just gone about their business. I've had the most luck with quality-of-life fixes (except that one time I made it so auto-emote players couldn't talk by accident, sorry guys), but this is the first video game I've ever worked on so I'm still learning.

It's hard to design something that encourages people to play it the ways you intended. You create a hedge maze and players either walk right through the hedges, think it's a wall and walk away, or share an OOC map. You add a 5gp toll to cross a bridge and players Dimension Door past the tollbooth or take another transition which is IC'ly a 30 mile longer route. It's tricky, because you envision the way people would act, and then because you didn't properly guide them to the easiest solution they'll do something very hard or because you didn't prevent them from doing something "extraordinary", they'll use it as if it were a mundane ability because they aren't completely immersed in the setting. I don't mean this as a criticism of the players; they're not playing "wrong" or something. It's just challenging to design content.

Edit: You can skip that last paragraph, this video sums it up better than I could.
https://twitter.com/JUSTINtime4aLAF/sta ... 1799775232

[Steve]

I like working on things...

First and foremost, I appreciate the fact that you are here and giving attention to BGTSSC, which does keep it a Living Permanent World. I am being critical of the experience being advertised, and in no way being critical of you.

I like working on things that provide quality-of-life improvements...

QoL is great. Whether quality of life for the player, or quality of life for the Character, I say yes, yes and yes. Please.

...off of "auto-pilot" where they used to sleepwalk through things....

I understand this desire. Absolutely. But isn't making a Rebalance that requires 30 odd Loot Runs a sort of "auto pilot" concept at root? It is no longer "I'm going to get lucky this time...THIS TIME!" but a "...just need to get. through. this. 29th. time. of. circle. grind-fest."


Like I said, it appears that the new Rebalance is designed to get players to grind loot to sell to a merchant, amass gold coin, then spend it on Items (low/mid/epic) found at NPC Merchants. Additionally, the Rebalance has been designed to produce more Items appropriate to the CR of the Area and the Level of the PC(s), like Epic Items for Epic Areas, but that is still as ever a crap shoot. Lastly, the Rebalance was made so that above-appropriate-CR Level PCs cannot gain much other than a pittance of Gold Coin if running Areas below their Level.

IMHO, only the last item in that list is working as intended, and does positive results to "annoy away" OOC grinding in Areas without intention of RP. The first two add another OOC auto-pilot to playing BGTSCC, and add an even more wild randomness to the expectation of Loot production.

But then again, the Rebalance is still being tweaked. So, I can hope for a better, final outcome. Cheers.

[zhazz]

Just a random thought here. One that I, now that I've had it, find strange I didn't have before.



(Skip down to the summary if you want a tl;dr version)



Rebalancing the loot system in a vacuum is unlikely to work out the way we want.

All the rebalancing has done is make changes to return of investment when doing loot runs.
The lower boundary has been raised slightly, and the frequency of "good" stuff increased a lot.
I put good in quotes since, aside from a few named items, the vast majority of items considered epic by the RIG are still undesirable.

For a rebalance of the loot system to truly feel worthwhile, there need to be changes made across most other systems too.

The Epic Shop, for example, will need to go away.
While it is a great tool for helping characters get decent items at a semi-predictable rate, it is also a hindrance on the loot system. It is much easier, and more manageable, to aim for e.g. 500,000 gold to buy an item from a shop; than it is to hope that the right item drop for you. The Epic Shop devalues epic drops, since the items at the Epic Shop are far superior in 99% of cases, and more reliable.

Next there are the available character builds.
Again the Epic Shop shows it face by semi-dictating what kinds of builds are feasible to do. While some builds will be made for RP reasons, most builds focus on being useful in some way. Currently the best way for a non-RO character to be useful, is to not be bad in combat. How does a player achieve that? By optimizing the attributes, so they end on even numbers with +3 or +4 items. Since the Epic Shop is the only reliable way to know what can reasonably be obtained, these builds are created using the Epic Shop items.

That also has the downside of finally finding a great item from the RIG, and now feeling like your character is sub-optimal, since an attribute is now uneven. Only way to fix that is to RCR back to 20, and grind back to 30. That is a hassle that a lot of players don't want to deal with, and so they stop the itemization of their character at Epic Shop items, meaning every item beyond that is worthless to that character. Aside from listing it for trade and looking awesome for having found it, or to store away on a mule for some future alt character that likely won't ever be made.

Then we have the areas themselves.
As has already been mentioned several times in this thread, and several other threads, the CRs of areas currently feel off. While some areas are obviously meant to be much more difficult for some characters than others, it does present an issue with too limited a number of appropriate areas for everyone.

The rebalancing has done well to get epic level characters out of early level dungeons. But at the same time nothing has been done to make more areas available to the epic level characters. It has happened several times to me, and those I regularly play with, that we enter a place, only to find the big baddie there already dead, and the chests it was guarding now inaccessible.

While it can be frustrating for a low level character to have an epic level character killing all the monsters on their search for chests in a low level area, it is far worse for the epic level characters. The low level character only has to wait a 4 to 7 or so minutes for monsters to start re spawning. During which time they can run around to the now "free" chests left by the epic level character.

For the epic level character, however, when going to an epic area that was just recently looted, it means going somewhere else or waiting around for up to an hour for the big baddie to re spawn. Given how spread out the epic areas are, going somewhere else can easily mean another 10 or 15 minutes spent. Not to mention consumables and spells wasted for nothing, and now needing to be changed to match the new area.

This at least is an issue that will start to resolve itself with the server split, and more areas being added.

Then we also have the loot system on its own.
It could do with a bit more deterministic approach. Every area should be able to drop the everything on the loot tables. No disagreeing there. But it would help a lot, at least in my opinion, if the drop rates for certain items were adjusted per area based on thematics.

Want to get a weapon that adds cold damage? Better go to the Frost Giants or the White Dragon.
Want to get an armour with fire resistance? Better go to the Fire Giants or the Balor.
etc.

Not advocating for a style of looting, where you know in advance what you are going to get. But at least copy a bit of the deterministic approach from the Epic Shop, and allow players to decide what area to go to, based on what kind of items they wish to find.

Lack of ways to spend gold in a meaningful way also comes to mind.
This has also been mentioned several times before. Gold has no value beyond a set limit determined by each player. Usually somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 gold in the bank.

There are no ways to spend gold on crafting, housing, repairing equipment, taxation on Duchal lands (or equivalent), research, or guild/personal projects. The latter two (research and projects) can happen with DM involvement, but currently there aren't enough active DMs to make such a feasible means for everyone to spend gold.

Lack of ways to make gold outside of adventuring.
Unless your character has a high Appraise skill, and is charging a fee for buying stuff cheaper, there are no ways to make gold outside of adventuring. I am excluding wand/potion/scroll making here, since these are tied to a feat, rather than a Skill.

There are ways to make gold through RP, but these require at least two or more players to come to some sort of an agreement. This, however, is not a stable means of making gold, such as through an NPC.

There was mention previously in a different thread about adding items to the game solely used for trading and crafting. That would obviously help, if implemented in a sensible manner, where it is neither tedious nor "too good" to do.


Summary
For a rebalancing of the loot system to work, it needs to happen in tandem with a major change to the economy of the server. Otherwise it is just one cog changed in a much larger machine. The cogs in the machine doesn't need to be changed. The machine itself needs a complete overhaul.

Obviously such a complete overhaul isn't feasible to do, which is why each part of the machine is being changed in turn. That does, however, have the unfortunate side-effect of that change feeling out-of-place or out-of-tune with all the rest. The new gearbox has gearing to go 300 mph; but the engine, tires, and aerodynamics of the car are not up to the task.

In short:
For a rebalancing of the loot system to be successful, it requires a paradigm-shift on the server, with most other parts of the server being changed to support this paradigm-shift.

[Snarfy]

One thing that really has changed quite a bit over the two-ish years I’ve been playing on the server is that a lot of stuff that used to sell for quite a bit of gold (like +4 items) sell for less than half the amount now, sometimes less than a quarter.

This, I think, is mostly due to an aging population of long time players who can roll up new toons and just give them too tier gear from day one. Everything in the middle becomes devalued.

A proper item level restriction would help with that in my opinion. But people may find it unpopular. Can sell things for more as an epic toon, but have to buy them for more as well. Hard to say. Not a hill I’m willing to die on in either direction.

I would die on that hill Being one of the few players that probably remembers it, I'm not sure why the level restriction was ever removed in the first place... and while it was slightly aggravating at the time, there was something very satisfying about leveling up and watching all that red-colored gear become equip-able. Sadly, I think we're way past putting that cat back in the bag, and even if we did, like you said, it would be hugely unpopular.

The Epic Shop, for example, will need to go away.
~snip~ The Epic Shop devalues epic drops, since the items at the Epic Shop are far superior in 99% of cases, and more reliable.

<insert futile +1 here>. This is another one of those things that's probably not feasible at this point, and even more unlikely than my wishes for re-introducing level restrictions on items. Le sigh.

Lack of ways to make gold outside of adventuring.
Unless your character has a high Appraise skill, and is charging a fee for buying stuff cheaper, there are no ways to make gold outside of adventuring.

Sad but true. I'd wager the number of appraisers being rolled up has increased dramatically over the last year, and the new loot system runs the risk of exacerbating this issue, as accumulating hundreds of thousands of gold via adventuring(only to watch it vanish into the epic shop, most likely) can be a really tedious process.

In short:
For a rebalancing of the loot system to be successful, it requires a paradigm-shift on the server, with most other parts of the server being changed to support this paradigm-shift.

Agreed. Like you said, the rebalance, in and of itself, isn't necessarily going to shift the paradigm significantly in any direction. And everything else sounds like a heap of work and headaches for our poor devs

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As for my experience with the changes... I'm still mostly on the "I don't like it" side of the fence, but I also don't completely dislike it. A few pros/cons:
Pros :
- One of my characters has more gold than he's ever had.
- I'm visiting areas other than the lands/dungeons surrounding FAI when I loot.
- I found three items that my character can actually use.
- I discovered some areas and scripts that I did not know were even there before.
Cons :
- I'm spending the vast majority of my time in only 3 or 4 areas, and it feels mostly OOC(since I can only find treasure in certain places)
- I spend next to zero time in areas and dungeons that I used to visit regularly, IE: cloakwoods mines to Haunted House, orc caves, lions way dungeons, hilltop to FAI + literally every cool dungeon below my CR threshold are collecting dust in my brain.
- I spend less time in general on my characters who are not my main, simply because they are not as solo-friendly in CR appropriate areas. One of my characters(my UD one) I've stopped playing entirely.
- I'm finding less of the rarer consumables(potions) on the numerous vendors that used to get me out and about. The vast majority of sellers are visiting the guy at farmlands I think. The NPC just inside CK has way less goodies to peruse, and even the FAI dwarf seems to have less. *Edit* - equalizing vendor payouts might help in this regard.

... the end, for now.

[Ariella]

I need all the Mudds locations!. Who knows what maps they are one beyond BG, FAI, Soubar?