Really odd artifact experience

[ctate]

Gnome mage named Zwingli, 28th level ("Evoker"). Deepest trip to date, depth 21 = 1050 feet.

Artifacts encountered so far: NONE.

..... wtf?



(and no, birth_no_artifacts is not turned on)

[takkaria]

Gnome mage named Zwingli, 27th level ("Evoker"). Deepest trip to date, depth 21 = 1050 feet.

Artifacts encountered so far: NONE.

..... wtf?

You playing the development trunk, I suppose? It's not unheard of, anyway -- ajps managed to find just the one by dlev30 in 3.0.9.

[ajps]

You playing the development trunk, I suppose? It's not unheard of, anyway -- ajps managed to find just the one by dlev30 in 3.0.9.

And that was from a scroll of acquirement.

[Bill Peterson]

Gnome mage named Zwingli, 27th level ("Evoker"). Deepest trip to date, depth 21 = 1050 feet.

Artifacts encountered so far: NONE.

..... wtf?



(and no, birth_no_artifacts is not turned on)

Some possible explanations:

Are you diving fast and not exploring levels completely? If you're playing with preserve on you may have left them behind.

Have you killed very many uniques yet? They're the most likely to drop artifacts.

Have you seen very many vaults? That's where many artifacts are found.

Have you found other valuable items? If you've got two speed rings, armor and shield "of Elvenkind" and a Mace of Westernesse the RNG won't appreciate your complaining. You may find that first artifact is under an AMHD.

The RNG works in mysterious ways. I've been playing for about 10 years and your experience qualifies as annoying, but not really odd.

Bill

[ctate]

Are you diving fast and not exploring levels completely? If you're playing with preserve on you may have left them behind.

Preserve is on (it's the default nowadays), but I am exploring every level thoroughly before leaving it. I've only gotten a couple of 'superb' level feelings throughout this play, too. See below.

Have you killed very many uniques yet? They're the most likely to drop artifacts.

18 known uniques, 18 slain. Smeagol, who is known as a potential artifact drop, left me one of my own arrows that he'd picked up, along with 48 gp worth of copper. Imagine my glee.

Have you seen very many vaults? That's where many artifacts are found.

Thanks for reminding me: I've also seen exactly zero vaults to date, not even minor ones. That's also pretty odd; lesser vaults can appear as shallow as depth 5, and I'm down to the low 20s.

Have you found other valuable items? If you've got two speed rings, armor and shield "of Elvenkind" and a Mace of Westernesse the RNG won't appreciate your complaining. You may find that first artifact is under an AMHD.

Some unique dropped a Dagger of *Slay Demon* that I was using until a 'superb' level feeling around depth 14 turned out to be a Small Sword (Holy Avenger). Those are the only really excellent items I've found. My only ego armor is Soft Studded Leather of Resist Cold, and I had to buy that at the black market. Normal bow, normal cloak, normal shield, normal cap, normal boots, no gloves. Sigh.

[Faust]

Smeagol, who is known as a potential artifact drop, left me one of my own arrows that he'd picked up, along with 48 gp worth of copper. Imagine my glee.

I'd have to go back along way to find a version where Smeagol actually dropped anything useful, at least 10 years, maybe even as far back as frog-knows. I remember he nearly always dropped artifacts then but since at least v2.9 the most I've ever had from him is 50 gp. I just got an artifact from wortounge at dlvl 20 and of course promptly died.

[ctate]

You playing the development trunk, I suppose? It's not unheard of, anyway -- ajps managed to find just the one by dlev30 in 3.0.9.

So has excellent/artifact rarity been scaled up recently? Post-3.0.6? That might explain it.

[ctate]

I'd have to go back along way to find a version where Smeagol actually dropped anything useful, at least 10 years, maybe even as far back as frog-knows. I remember he nearly always dropped artifacts then but since at least v2.9 the most I've ever had from him is 50 gp. I just got an artifact from wortounge at dlvl 20 and of course promptly died.

Huh, interesting. By my quick reckoning, there are 15 creatures in Vanilla 3.0.9+ marked explicitly as dropping "great" items: Smeagol (depth 3), Wormtongue (8), Mim (27), Al-Pharazon (55), Saruman (60), Glaurung (70), Feagwath (77), The Witch-King of Angmar (80), Maeglin (81), Cantoras (84), Ancalagon (85), Vecna (92), Gothmog (95), Sauron (99), and Morgoth (100).

Interesting depth distribution, eh?

Of these I've only encountered the first two so far, of course; I'm still far out of depth for Mim even if I started encountering minor vaults. Wormtongue dropped my (Holy Avenger), I think, so at least I have that consolation. Still, it was pretty frustrating not to get any item out of Smeagol, let alone an exceptional one.

[takkaria]

So has excellent/artifact rarity been scaled up recently? Post-3.0.6? That might explain it.

No, but if you're playing the SVN version, then there might be a bug in the item generation routine. I seem to see a *lot* more gold than there used to be being dropped.

[Nolendil]

So has excellent/artifact rarity been scaled up recently? Post-3.0.6? That might explain it.

It's not exceptional, just good old bad luck (unless you stumbled on the bug Andrew mentioned above). It may happen in 3.0.6 too.
My latest character under 3.0.6 has a similar experience : clvl 30 at dlvl 22, all uniques up to Ugluk killed and I found only one artifact (well, it's better than none but it's Narthanc so nothing fancy). My best drop was a Flail (Blessed) from Smeagol, it was nice but it turned out to be the last good drop too (except maybe 2 minor ego items from Wormtongue) so most of my equipment had to be bought.
Anyway, I still hope I'll find time to continue this character and finally find better stuff (or, more likely, die trying )

[Magnate]

Gnome mage named Zwingli, 28th level ("Evoker"). Deepest trip to date, depth 21 = 1050 feet.

Artifacts encountered so far: NONE.

..... wtf?

(and no, birth_no_artifacts is not turned on)

When do you expect to find artifacts?? IME it's *very* unusual to find any artifacts before 1000'. I've reached 1500' without finding any on numerous occasions (almost half my games - at least a third).

This is about as newsworthy as "dog bites man". Get to 2000' and it will be "man bites dog".

CC

[ctate]

When do you expect to find artifacts?? IME it's *very* unusual to find any artifacts before 1000'. I've reached 1500' without finding any on numerous occasions (almost half my games - at least a third).

Historically it's common to find at least the Phial and maybe one of the artifact caps quite early.

Over the weekend the developers noticed that some of the recent object-allocation changes had a side-effect of reducing the likelihood of out-of-depth item drops, possibly by quite a bit. It's entirely likely that I was experiencing the effects of this unintended change. The older logic for that has now been restored.


--
ctate

[Magnate]

Historically it's common to find at least the Phial and maybe one of the artifact caps quite early.

The rarity of the Phial was changed sometime around 3.0.0 - before then I would agree with you, it was very common to find the Phial before 1000', but after that it's been a lot less common.

Over the weekend the developers noticed that some of the recent object-allocation changes had a side-effect of reducing the likelihood of out-of-depth item drops, possibly by quite a bit. It's entirely likely that I was experiencing the effects of this unintended change. The older logic for that has now been restored.

Ah, well that would certainly make a difference. Interesting to know.

CC