Poll: Vanilla item quality drop rates

[fizzix]

Ehh, there's far too many uniques to make each of them always drop something worthwhile. Besides, Angband is all about the irregular rewards -- the game's more addictive when you don't know when you're going to get that item you want.

I'm testing out a version that gives only two artifact rolls instead of 4 for great items, and adds 2 rolls for any item on a unique monster. Monsters that had great drops will have essentially the same artifact chance, but the uniques with good drops will have a higher chance of dropping an artifact. Overall this change makes artifacts about 10% more common, but we'll see how it plays. It's important to note that there are only 60 artifacts created in a full clearing of 100 levels (including all vaults and monster drops) and over 120 uniques, so there's still going to be plenty bum drops.

I'm a little worried about increasing overall artifact drop rate at all, but the clearer kills far more uniques than most players, so it might be ok? we'll see.

There is a lot of tweaking on this test version, much of it inspired by feedback here. I'll see how playing goes, and then we can talk about what might be appropriate for 3.5 and what was a terrible idea.

[getter77]

Is it somehow possible to enable both Artifacts AND Randarts? That'd pretty well take care of a large pool to draw from alongside Ego stuff.

[fizzix]

Is it somehow possible to enable both Artifacts AND Randarts? That'd pretty well take care of a large pool to draw from alongside Ego stuff.

The actual number of the pool of items is not relevant. What's relevant is how many times per game you upgrade a slot multiplied by the number of slots. (11 slots, i'm guessing an average of 5-6 times per slot = 66 times) You can have thousands of artifacts weapons, but the vast majority of them will be worthless if you find ringil or deathwreaker. Either you order them from weakest to strongest to ensure every item is an upgrade (which completely kills the random nature of roguelikes) or you live with the fact that a good amount of killed uniques are going to drop junk.

[Nick]

Is it somehow possible to enable both Artifacts AND Randarts?

Play FAangband

[getter77]

Ah, now I think I get it a bit better! Hmm, the only other thing I could think of to spice it up then is to go beyond the usual slots---things like potions, scrolls, rods, staves, and maybe other things getting a crack at the Ego and/or Artifact game. But then that would throw off the little ID checklist per type ingame...so maybe not.

[fizzix]

Ok, so I figure I should mention the changes that I'm testing out based on the poll feedback.

There were two significant changes (and one smaller change). The first was to flatten out the good and great curves, while keeping the basic allocation the same. Here is the proposed curve along with older ones for historical reference

	 * 3.0.0:   good = MIN(75, lev + 10);      great = MIN(20, lev / 2); 
	 * 3.3.0:	good = (lev + 2) * 3;          great = MIN(lev / 4 + lev, 50);
         * 3.4.0:   good = (2 * lev) + 5;           great = MIN(40, (lev * 3) / 4);

The proposed chances are:

        int good_chance = (33 + lev);
	int great_chance = 30;

The chance of getting a great item (i.e. an ego) is the same regardless of level. And the good chance is flatter producing more good/great items at lower depths and less at higher depths. This change by itself would be a pretty bad idea, but it comes in cojunction with another large change.

Ego allocation is now level dependent. Each ego has a minimum level and a maximum level along with an allocation chance. This allows for us to tailor the chances for ego items appearing as you descend. As an example, let's say there are only three weapon egos, slay orc, fire brand, and westernesse.

slay orc has allocation 90 with level range 1-15
fire brand has allocation 9 with level range 5-40
westernesse has allocation 1 with level range 5-99

According to the allocation formula, at dlevel 5 you have a 90% chance of getting slay orc, a 9% chance of fire brand, and a 1% chance of westernesse. At dlevel 20, it changes to a 90% chance for fire brand and a 10% chance for westernesse. And at dlevl 50, only westernesse weapons are found. This way we can make weak egos preferentially created at lower depths but vanish completely at higher depths.

I did a bunch of simulations to test these changes and the results look encouraging.

The third minor change is to boost unique drops at the expense of great drops. Uniques drops are considered as if the unique was either 15 levels OoD or 2x OoD, whichever is lower. Furthermore, unique drops get an extra 2 rolls for artifacts. To compensate, great items only get 1 extra roll instead of three. Unique good drops get 3 rolls. Unique great drops get 4 rolls (same as before). 8 squares on vaults get 2 rolls (down from 4). This tends to move artifact generation towards uniques, but I don't have exact numbers on how much yet. I'm not sure if I'll push for this change, it does not depend on the other two.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I think that all sounds good fizzix, makes sense.