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Personally, I think drop rates should be reworked entirely with a clear intention. After that, yeah, any change in drop rates should be explicitly acknowledged and justified, but as it stands, and in 3.4, I'm not convinced there's a goal behind the distribution of objects. If we had a clearly stated idea of what the purpose of the object distribution is, we could evaluate the effect a lot more clearly.
If there are new classes and monsters, there should be a new object balance, and I don't think it should be tied to any particular version of the game (or any variant).Comment
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This is the kind of thing that's easy to say we should do, but hard to do in practice, I think. Like, I can propose some reasonable guidelines, but how would we translate them into rules for drops?
* The player should be encouraged to push past where they "feel safe" and to engage in dangerous (i.e. fun) behavior
* The player should only rarely be able to assemble a "perfect kit" (covering all desirable abilities and with high pluses across the board) by endgame
* The player should never feel like they have to grind to proceed
You can come up with imperfect heuristics that would cover some of these, but good luck making metrics that measure how well we adhere to them.
It's a lot easier to just say "balance was better at X prior version, based on feedback from players who have played both versions", and then to look at what changed since then. ...I guess that means you could say that our "clear intention" should be to return drop rates to something like what they were like in 3.4.
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Philip, historically the way it worked is that item drops were overhauled in 3.1. This led to a very generous drop rate and a lot of complaints that the game was too easy. Myshkin and I both developed monte carlo sims to calculate statistics of objects generated, with the idea that we wanted to see if indeed it is true that item drop rates were different than previous versions.
3.0.6 was the benchmark, not because it was ideal, but because it was a stable version that was prior to a lot of the changes to item drops. We found that indeed 3.1 (and 3.2) were both very generous (probably moreso than 4.feature). So we balanced, I think for 3.3 but definitely for 3.4 to pull the items back down to something akin to 3.6 levels. There were some obvious differences though. In 3.4 you were a lot more likely to get artifacts from uniques and slightly less likely from other sources.
The truth is these questions are really hard to answer in a vacuum. How many stat potions per level *should* we be generating? I don't know. However it is possible to quantify the trajectory that we are, and at least make sure we don't stray too far from something that worked.
If you are able to come up with some metrics for what we should be aiming for, I'd love to hear them! Angband is such a hard game to balance because of the ability to endlessly repeat levels.Comment
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Stat potions are not quite as important. It's "time to finding useful object" that matters, along with "time to finding endgame object", and finally "risk of finding" defined roughly by how many false leads you get prior to hitting a jackpot.Comment
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Fair enough. "The previous balance was fine" is definitely a clear enough goal. I will propose some metrics.
* The player should be discouraged from pursuing safe (unfun) behavior (scumming early levels).
This a restatement of Derakon's first rule, but I think there are fairly clear ways to define it. I would say that unsafe behavior is encouraged when the benefits of repeating levels are diminished. In the interests of this, I propose out of depth object frequency follows exponential decay. 1/2 the frequency for every 2 levels out of depth? This preserves the long tail of out of depth objects, which is a fun feature, without letting players redo dlvl 30 50 times and probably get a ring of speed.
* The player should not feel like they have to grind.
Establish, for each ability, and for certain objects, a point at which we expect the player to start finding it, and a point at which we think a player should have found it already, assuming one clear of each level. For Free Action, this might be dlvl 1 and dlvl 30 respectively, as an example. For ESP it might be dlvl 30-70. 95% of characters should find their first source somewhere between those points. If they don't, new objects need to be introduced, or rarities or native depths need to be changed to satisfy the rule. This metric already seems to exist, but isn't explicitly stated.
One assumption I am making is that there is some plan to stop players from skipping every level between 40 and 85. These plans do not really work without such a mechanism, because they assume linear progression through the dungeon.Comment
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Exponential decay is too strong; it does *not* have a long tail the way the current uniform model does. The issue is the overall frequency, not the out-of-depth scaling factor. I don't understand at all what happens with speed rings. With ego objects, however, the explanation is simple: get rid of junk ego items (res cold, *slay troll*, and the like), and suddenly the good stuff is everywhere.Comment
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The current model does not appear to have any tail whatsoever. It appears to instead be a linear relation with a couple step functions involved.
Personally, I think that the only way to discourage grinding is to make the quality of objects roughly equivalent to danger (i.e. monster) level, and so long as monsters are capped to 5 dlvls out of depth (which I feel is somewhat necessary), then the only way to achieve that is with rapid decay.Comment
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To my knowledge, grinding in hopes of finding out-of-depth objects is vanishingly rare. You grind at or deeper than an object's native level in order to find it. Finding greatly out-of-depth objects is fun, so long as it is unexpected. With the odds of finding out of depth speed rings so high in dl 40-60 as they are now, it is no longer unexpected. And it is worse still because cursed rings are still usable. Cursed speed rings used to have negative speed bonuses.Comment
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PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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Does that count non-vault special rooms as vault loot?Comment
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PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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