So how are we feeling about "junk"?

[Magnate]

Way back in the 3.0 series, there was a consensus that the game generated "Too Much Junk" - both real junk (items with no purpose) and relative junk (items obsolete by the time they dropped). So since 3.1.x a lot of things have been done to address this:

1. All the utterly pointless items were removed (broken sticks, skulls, shards of pottery etc.). Apart from robbing some players of atmosphere, this had no effect on gameplay.

2. Fewer items were dropped, and more of those turned into "good" or "great" items - not so many daggers (+0,+0) at 4900'. This had two significant consequences: too many ego items and artifacts, and not enough consumables.

3. Lots of standarts were tweaked to make them more likely to drop at a depth where they are useful, and more likely to be useful when they drop. There have been fewer complaints about "junk artifacts", but otherwise little effect on the overall issue. Randarts should now drop with almost identical frequency to standarts, but both egos and artifacts may still be too common.

4. Consumable drops were completely overhauled, possibly making them a little too common. Not sure if this is still true in nightlies, or if it's about right.

So, any observations?

[TJS]

I've just been playing angband-r8d5f723f3e (from 25th Nov) with randarts.

I didn't find any randarts at all and only a sword of *slay demon* up to around level 45. After that I was swimming in randarts and found on average 2-3 per level I'd say after that. I'd make them a lot rarer.

I think that artifacts and egos should be just as likely on earlier levels, just of a lower quality to the deeper ones. The early levels are often the most difficult anyway. Also it is hard to get excited with a new game when you know you aren't going to see any artifacts, egos or vaults for ages. Just churning through orcs and resting all the time.

I think that weapons and equipment are generated far too often at deeper levels at the moment. Is there a power test to see how useful something is for the level it is generated that it needs to pass? So for example if an armour of resist acid is generated at level 98 it would fail the test and nothing would be generated at all (or at least have a far less likely chance of being generated).

I'm still wading through 10-20 pieces of equipment on each later level.

Unique drops weren't great. Sauron dropped a metal cap of light (+2) and a shield of resist lightning and nothing else.

The randarts are great fun by the way. I particularly like the changes to Dragon Scale Mail as well which actually make them exciting when you find them rather than junk (I wore a Balance DSM or Permanence for a lot of the game). I'm finding the game much more fun, although I'd say it is a bit on the easy side now.

[ewert]

Now I'm not playing the master branch nightly, so dunno about the randart changes at the moment.

Overall, from quite a few winners after consumable changes, I feel:
A minor downtune of some high end consumables (10-20%) like the top healing potions, *destr* and ?banishes (both) could be in order. Or people could change their habits into not JUST hoarding them, but actually tackling the tough uniques at relevant levels (so the consumables get consumed pre last two fights too).

Minor uptune maybe with utility rods concomitant, again not much (the RNG plays tricks), and this with a very big "maybe".

I feel weapons/armor/ammo is okay now. You find stuff, but are not swimming in it. Auto-id at clvl40 makes it mostly moot to reduce it in iVanilla, you'd only reduce the chances of getting the top3 weapons with a good ego (which takes time still, IMHO quite spot-on amount of time unless veryvery lucky) or killer ammo.

Early levels I think I'm way too disconnected with "casual" or new-ish players to really comment on it. Myself I feel okay about it, only change would be to put stat changes back to +-10 after 18, not the current random one which results in getting lots (~30) for first past 18 stat (swap) potion, giving a too big boost if you find a couple early enough.

All in all, maybe most important change IMHO would be to slightly decrease the top 5 end game consumables, *healing*, life, banish/mass banish and *destr*. Rune is rare enough.

[fizzix]

1. All the utterly pointless items were removed (broken sticks, skulls, shards of pottery etc.). Apart from robbing some players of atmosphere, this had no effect on gameplay.

I think this should be handled with squelch. I thought junk items should help you tell what monsters are nearby, but others seemed to think terrain should be used for this instead, so I've worked on that with minimal success so far.

2. Fewer items were dropped, and more of those turned into "good" or "great" items - not so many daggers (+0,+0) at 4900'. This had two significant consequences: too many ego items and artifacts, and not enough consumables.

Equipment drops are way too low on the first 20-30 levels. At the higher levels they become too common, mostly because drop_good monsters cannot drop anything except for equipment.

This is the biggest junk problem currently in the game. Ewert's patch that allows ID on pickup after clevel 40 is strongly recommended. I haven't heard much talk about this, and I may be the only person to play test it, but I liked it.

3. Lots of standarts were tweaked to make them more likely to drop at a depth where they are useful, and more likely to be useful when they drop. There have been fewer complaints about "junk artifacts", but otherwise little effect on the overall issue. Randarts should now drop with almost identical frequency to standarts, but both egos and artifacts may still be too common.

I've been keeping track in recent games where my artifacts come from. I generally find about 50% more artifacts from normal monsters than uniques. This is not terrible at all, but I wouldn't mind the artifact creation chance to be boosted if the dropping monster is a unique (or penalized if it's not).

4. Consumable drops were completely overhauled, possibly making them a little too common. Not sure if this is still true in nightlies, or if it's about right.

!Life is still extremely rare. Stat gain seem about right. I still think the +1/-1 potions are too common or show up too early. Seeker arrows/bolts may be too common, but I'd rather see branding spells be removed than mucking with them. !Healing and !rmana are more common it seems. But I feel they should be. Food and mushrooms are too rare. Bolt and ball wands/rods have too small a window of usefulness, unless I find one early they're almost always squelched immediately (this could just be a play style thing though). -detection seems reasonably common now (I feel it should be as common as PB6). -healing needs a slower recharge time and an easier activation level to be useful. -restoration is almost never of any use. -curing and _curing are still completely useless. That's about it for now.

[d_m]

Ewert's patch that allows ID on pickup after clevel 40 is strongly recommended. I haven't heard much talk about this, and I may be the only person to play test it, but I liked it.

Takkaria was also talking about something like this awhile ago on IRC. I like the idea.

If you give me a patch I will test it out and then put it into staging if I can get other devs to agree.

[bulian]

1. All the utterly pointless items were removed (broken sticks, skulls, shards of pottery etc.). Apart from robbing some players of atmosphere, this had no effect on gameplay.

I never saw this but don't think I'm missing anything either.

2. Fewer items were dropped, and more of those turned into "good" or "great" items - not so many daggers (+0,+0) at 4900'. This had two significant consequences: too many ego items and artifacts, and not enough consumables.

3. Lots of standarts were tweaked to make them more likely to drop at a depth where they are useful, and more likely to be useful when they drop. There have been fewer complaints about "junk artifacts", but otherwise little effect on the overall issue. Randarts should now drop with almost identical frequency to standarts, but both egos and artifacts may still be too common.

I only played one game with the nightlies using randarts, but my favorite macro is still k-ay. Equipment at lower levels is a little too uncommon and at higher levels still pretty common. Identify on pickup would be a nice feature.

4. Consumable drops were completely overhauled, possibly making them a little too common. Not sure if this is still true in nightlies, or if it's about right.

With r2041, !rmana seems too common - mages or priests shouldn't end the game with >20 leftover. ?Rune - if I find more than one per game I'm amazed, so most of the time I leave these on the ground. This could be bumped up. !healing/*HEALING* - a little too common, !Life a little too rare. If !Life were eliminated I wouldn't miss it. ?Banish - about right. ?MassBanish - a slight increase would be welcomed.

I don't know if rods fall in the consumable category, but these don't seem quite right. Most rods except for detect XX ones and identify aren't worth a slot. Reducing the variety of attack rods and increasing the frequency of what is left might help. Rods of mapping are too rare or too deep.

Edit: A clarification: I would support ID on pickup of equipment but not consumables.

[Lord Fell]

Re: Junk Items (s: which is a fragment of skeleton vs. s: which is a monster that is a skeleton for example) and Terrain... I think that making junk occasionally pop as a terrain note is "better" simply because of Squelch. I mean, you're not going to pick up and carry pottery or bones around, so it will get squelched by everyone. However, special floor squares that pop up with "there is dried blood here" or "most of a skull grins at you from the floor" messages brings back that flavour missing from newer versions.


re:Auto-ID at level 40... I assume that the reason for this is that by the time any race/class combination is level40, getting items ID is a trivial thing; access to spells or devices that cast Identify is guaranteed by this point (and long before). I think though, that this slightly bypasses the Inventory Management aspect of the game. If you're a class that doesn't get the spell, you have to have staffs, rods, or scrolls... this frees up an inventory slot. Also, if you get some item drops, but need to escape because you've got a stream of dragons descending on you, this gives you "free rounds" to decide which ones to take (assuming you can't take everything).

[fbas]

Re: Junk Items (s: which is a fragment of skeleton vs. s: which is a monster that is a skeleton for example) and Terrain... I think that making junk occasionally pop as a terrain note is "better" simply because of Squelch. I mean, you're not going to pick up and carry pottery or bones around, so it will get squelched by everyone. However, special floor squares that pop up with "there is dried blood here" or "most of a skull grins at you from the floor" messages brings back that flavour missing from newer versions.


re:Auto-ID at level 40... I assume that the reason for this is that by the time any race/class combination is level40, getting items ID is a trivial thing; access to spells or devices that cast Identify is guaranteed by this point (and long before). I think though, that this slightly bypasses the Inventory Management aspect of the game. If you're a class that doesn't get the spell, you have to have staffs, rods, or scrolls... this frees up an inventory slot. Also, if you get some item drops, but need to escape because you've got a stream of dragons descending on you, this gives you "free rounds" to decide which ones to take (assuming you can't take everything).

I recall in Moria you would find inscriptions on the ground occasionally (presumably left by some other traveler?). You could leave inscriptions in the ground too. They fade after time so "FBAS WAS HERE" degrades to "F?AS ??S ??RE" and eventually disappears. I always assumed they indicated some creature was nearby.

Having not seen inscriptions in the dirt in Angband, I guess they were taken out. But this might fill the role of fragments as tell-tale signs of nearby monsters or activity.

[Magnate]

I've just been playing angband-r8d5f723f3e (from 25th Nov) with randarts.

I didn't find any randarts at all and only a sword of *slay demon* up to around level 45. After that I was swimming in randarts and found on average 2-3 per level I'd say after that. I'd make them a lot rarer.

That's unlucky: the randart rarities were adjusted in b6ede4b which was built from the 27th. See https://github.com/angband/angband/commits/master for what's in nightlies.

I think that weapons and equipment are generated far too often at deeper levels at the moment. Is there a power test to see how useful something is for the level it is generated that it needs to pass? So for example if an armour of resist acid is generated at level 98 it would fail the test and nothing would be generated at all (or at least have a far less likely chance of being generated).

Thank you - that's an excellent suggestion. I'll see what takk thinks, but I like the idea of wearables having to pass a certain power threshold before being considered "good" or "great" relative to dlev. Obviously we'd need to make sure that a simple cap of telepathy can still drop, but it should be easy enough to sort something out. An early idea for 3.3's nightlies, I think. Ticket #1080 is related so I've added a note to that.

Unique drops weren't great. Sauron dropped a metal cap of light (+2) and a shield of resist lightning and nothing else.

... and of course, uniques drops could be configured to pass a target power rating (though we would of course then need to calculate power for non-wearables).

The randarts are great fun by the way. I particularly like the changes to Dragon Scale Mail as well which actually make them exciting when you find them rather than junk (I wore a Balance DSM or Permanence for a lot of the game). I'm finding the game much more fun, although I'd say it is a bit on the easy side now.

Agreed. Glad you like the changes.

[Magnate]

Takkaria was also talking about something like this awhile ago on IRC. I like the idea.

If you give me a patch I will test it out and then put it into staging if I can get other devs to agree.

http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1094

(Yay - I'm the 4th person to pass 2000 posts!)

[PowerDiver]

Way back in the 3.0 series, there was a consensus that the game generated "Too Much Junk" - both real junk (items with no purpose) and relative junk (items obsolete by the time they dropped).

This whole attack on junk was really bad. Instead of allowing for different players to use different playstyles, it enforces particular choices on everybody. The better solution is *more* drops, but better squelch and ID.

I dislike objects dropping in stacks. Simply increase drops and increase frequencies of things you want more of.

The changes to standarts have made the game easier while reducing the total number of objects actually used. When you boost or change the depth on one item to make it not junk, that just changes a different item [or set of multiple items] you would otherwise have used into junk in those games when it appears.

Now we have people clamoring for improved egos. It is important to avoid an arms war where alternatively egos and then artifacts are improved in attempt to make each more relevant.

[Derakon]

Since this is turning into a general feedback thread (again...), I just want to say that egos on DSMs are too good and too common currently. DSM of Permanence is awesome stuff regardless of what dragon type was used (keep in mind that bog-standard Robes of Permanence are competitive despite being on the second-worst body armor type in the game), and DSM of Speed is just insane. But also, I typically find that well over 50% of the DSMs I find are egos. Far too many. They need to be toned down and made less common, IMO. Though at the same time, you could try making the base type more common for the lesser flavors, so players are more likely to find e.g. red DSM when it might actually be used.

[d_m]

Takkaria was also talking about something like this awhile ago on IRC. I like the idea.

If you give me a patch I will test it out and then put it into staging if I can get other devs to agree.

I just checked with Takkaria on IRC and he is fine with it so it will probably go into the code after 3.2 comes out.

[d_m]

Since this is turning into a general feedback thread (again...), I just want to say that egos on DSMs are too good and too common currently. DSM of Permanence is awesome stuff regardless of what dragon type was used (keep in mind that bog-standard Robes of Permanence are competitive despite being on the second-worst body armor type in the game), and DSM of Speed is just insane. But also, I typically find that well over 50% of the DSMs I find are egos. Far too many.

This is probably true... I currently have a dwarf warrior about to face off against Sauron who's been wearing Blue DSM of Speed +10 for most of the game because.... well... it's hard to beat

[Magnate]

This is probably true... I currently have a dwarf warrior about to face off against Sauron who's been wearing Blue DSM of Speed +10 for most of the game because.... well... it's hard to beat

Yes. This is limited by the current ego item mechanics: any given ego type currently has only one frequency, regardless of what item it's on. That said, DSM of speed seems to be more common than boots of speed, which makes no sense at all, since boots are more common than DSM.

But yes, I think we are heading to a general overhaul of egos in 3.3 - *not* to start an arms war (Eddie is right about that at least), but simply because their generation needs modernising. In general I will indeed aim to make DSM egos less common than other egos.

I'm not going to rehash my defence of the artifact changes again. Artifacts are special, and most people seem to agree that more of them are useful now. I removed SHOTS from Haradrim for 3.2, basically so that it does not make itself and Umbar no-brainers. I daresay there will be other changes, but first we need to fix the fact that too many egos and artifacts are still dropping.

I don't agree that the attack on TMJ was bad - it was started in response to a tremendous amount of noise on rgra, and with the exception of Eddie most people wanted the code improved to make drops generally more appropriate (see contemporary comments about disappointing unique drops) instead of more fine-grained squelch.

I am actually a big fan of squelch, and if I had the skill and the patience I would put my energies into designing and coding a squelch UI to beat even NPP's. But I haven't, and in any case it's not either or, it's both and.