playtesting new item distribution - r2025

[Timo Pietilä]

Charisma potions used to start at 25. I don't know why that changed that to 15,

I'm believe charisma potions have been shallower than rest of them for at least Ben era, maybe even from beginning of the angband. It definitely is rather old change if it has been changed.

[ewert]

Due to this char's experiences

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=10548

I re-emphasize that I really think we need to change stat gain and loss to straight +-10. Getting to 18/50 with a couple of pots is kinda overpowering. If it worked straight +-10 you would need 5, which would reduce efficacy of stat swap potions by around 60% in where it matters or breaks the system most (the initial boost).

[Derakon]

I'm believe charisma potions have been shallower than rest of them for at least Ben era, maybe even from beginning of the angband. It definitely is rather old change if it has been changed.

My memory of the depths is that normal pots were native to 1500' and CHA pots to 1000', and that's as far back as I can remember.

[PowerDiver]

Thanks to the chest bug, I got !toughness at DL79 and promptly drank it. Only !con or !aug would have been better for me.

It wouldn't bother me personally to have a max depth of 100/127 for them, although I think the idea is that they are supposed to be "upgraded" to stat potions at DL30.

[PowerDiver]

Oh I certainly do appreciate the benefits

Then you have me confused. E.g., CCW is native to DL12. If you think these potions are significantly more valuable than CCW, they should not be starting at DL10. If they are even half as valuable as I say they are, they shouldn't start until DL20.

OTOH, the change to make CHR show up at DL15 baffles me too.

[ewert]

The thoughts when the changes were made were different, because there was so little use experience of them. On a +-1 scale the potions are not that useful, and unless you have 18 base or have atleast two, you never got to see them in 18+ "action". These changes (and they are in testing still, yes?) have shown the problems. I'm not saying they are just fine, I'm saying they should be useful. Or removed ... we have too much useless junk as is, as everyone agrees. Anyways, as the changes were made broad spectrum it was pretty much near impossible to decipher the full ramifications from a few games due to the way the item generation system is done. Now the results are starting to show up.

As for cha potions, don't remember what why or how I changed them. Probably because it is such a useless stat ...

Btw, I thought of changing CCW to deeper lvls. And ccw is 100 AND in stacks, vs. 50 of single stat potions, so is many times more common ...

Lvl either 15-30 or 20-30, and changing stat gains to straight +-10 beyond 18, that ought to take most of the problems away while leaving them useful?

[Derakon]

Lvl either 15-30 or 20-30, and changing stat gains to straight +-10 beyond 18, that ought to take most of the problems away while leaving them useful?

I'd say 20-30 and change stat gains as a first stab at the problem.

[fizzix]

\we have too much useless junk as is, as everyone agrees.

Now hold on here.

The problem with 'junk' is wading through the crappy ego drops to find the few good pieces of equipment. This is solved better by changing the ID methods.

In my opinion, too much junk is pretty much irrelevant for any item that is squelchable. I admit I'm probably in the minority on this opinion but that's ok.


Meanwhile, I'm almost done with my first game with the new distributions and besides the +1/-1 potions I haven't noticed any real problems otherwise. I think that being able to have multiple drop frequencies depending on level could help a lot. But barring that, things seem fine as they are.

However, I do not like how common artifacts are now. Randarts seem about twice as common as before. When I noticed the discrepancy between randart drop rate and standart drop rate, I thought the solutions would be to reduce the drop rate of standarts to match.

Weapons drops are so rare in the early game that something like 20% of the early weapons I found were artifacts. That shouldn't be.

[Derakon]

Weapons drops are so rare in the early game that something like 20% of the early weapons I found were artifacts. That shouldn't be.

I'm in definite agreement. If I recall Magnate's words correctly, there was a bug in the randart generation code that made them rarer than standarts, which was then fixed. But heck, those randart games were fun because of all the limitations I had to deal with. My last game with the bug fixed, though, at one point (somewhere in the 1000'-2000' range, IIRC) I'd found four artifact weapons and only three ego weapons. You can't tell me that's right.

[PowerDiver]

As for cha potions, don't remember what why or how I changed them. Probably because it is such a useless stat ...

You didn't change !CHR. That seems to go way back, maybe to 3.1.0 but I don't have that code any more.

Also, remember that you and I are outliers. If I see 7 potions before DL20 even allowing for luck, some level clearers may see 20 or more. If you don't see many because you dive quickly, that is not a reason to change the distributions which should be designed for people who go at a more typical pace.

I found my first -dTraps, first ?summon, first iron spikes and some more shallow items I forget all beyond DL80, some which only come from chests that deep. It shouldn't surprise a diver to miss out on any particular gain1lose1 entirely.

[ewert]

I have noticed the same with randarts, ego item finds are often obsolete before they appear because of randarts being so common somehow ... Heck just now my priest has F/C/L immunities before statgain. Randarts seem out of whack.

[PowerDiver]

I'm in definite agreement. If I recall Magnate's words correctly, there was a bug in the randart generation code that made them rarer than standarts, which was then fixed. But heck, those randart games were fun because of all the limitations I had to deal with. My last game with the bug fixed, though, at one point (somewhere in the 1000'-2000' range, IIRC) I'd found four artifact weapons and only three ego weapons. You can't tell me that's right.

Part of the problem is Magnate's attack on weak standard artifacts. His reasoning was that by the time you find them, you don't want them, so he upped the frequencies so that you would find them sooner. E.g., if I am managing to read the files correctly, in 3.0 Forasgil had 1.25 * the frequency of Careth Asdriag. Now it has nearly 4 * the frequency. So many things have changed it is impossible to compare frequencies now vs then, but I think this is part of the problem.

I was going to suggest that we just toss in a modifier to make artifacts less common, but I think I see Ringil and Aule etc less than I used to. I think the problem is too many weak artifacts rather than too many strong artifacts, so it's not clear that a general attack on all artifacts would be correct.

[Sirridan]

From my pov, my early/midgame weapon is an artifact, and at the endgame I'm almost always using a ego MoD or SoS (I never see BoC for some reason). I've found Aule once, and one or two endgame quality melee artifacts, but the rest were egos.

Launchers don't count, I almost always found Bard or Belthondring

[myshkin]

My memory of the depths is that normal pots were native to 1500' and CHA pots to 1000', and that's as far back as I can remember.

Yes, that was the case as far back as 2.7.4, and as recently as revision 399 on trunk. Revision 412 made stat potions slightly less common; at this point, !Charisma became 25 to 90. They stayed that way until revision 813, when they became 15 to 90 in response to, oddly enough, a comment from PowerDiver.

[PowerDiver]

Yes, that was the case as far back as 2.7.4, and as recently as revision 399 on trunk. Revision 412 made stat potions slightly less common; at this point, !Charisma became 25 to 90. They stayed that way until revision 813, when they became 15 to 90 in response to, oddly enough, a comment from PowerDiver.

That loon presumably thought the was talking about DL20 or DL25.

That's my story, and I wish I could stick to it, but I'll forget I even said anything about it in a few weeks.