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Finicky Drops

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Post  Aleron Ives Tue Apr 07, 2009 4:22 pm

Warning! Wall o' text!

As you know, I've been working on new drops for the game. I've been editing and testing off and on for four months now, and I think I'm about at the end of my project. The results aren't exactly what I'd hoped.

Ver.2 seems to have a very unstable drop system, which is probably something that was corrected in GC. In Ver.2, the game seems to get stuck and drop items with similar rates together. I've been doing my tests on Yellowboze, and I tried playing Bluefull to see how a different ID would behave, and I thought it was going to be a fairly uneventful run, but I ended up finding a SH4, Yasminkov 7000V, Twin Chakram, and Psycho Wand (the latter two both in Ruins 3). The thing is, these items all have far worse rates than many of the other items. Items like Summit Moon, Red Saber, and Imperial Pick all have far higher drops, yet I did not get any of those in this run (and as many of you know, you can get multiple Red Sabers, Summit Moons, and Imperial Picks in a single run sometimes).

This seems to be Ver.2's biggest problem; it randomly decides, either upon creation of a team or upon entering an area, which rates are going to be successful, and then you end up getting showered with items in that range. Many revisions ago, when the rates were higher on the rarest items, I got a Lavis Cannon, Sealed J-Sword, and Lavis Blade all in a single run. I don't think it's a cooincidence that they all had the same rate, and all of them dropped together. This is probably why Sega made the rates on Ver.2 so terrible; the random number generator (RNG) is so shoddy, that unless the chances of getting items sucks ass, they'll tend to drop together. Because I've placed all rares well within the range of findability, it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll see at least one above average item in each run. If theories about play time factoring into the drops are true, that will probably further complicate things.

I figured I would point this out to people to see what they think about the whole mess. I fear that there is no way to fully "balance" the rates; it will either remain too difficult or become what some might consider too easy to get the game's various items. I could further decrease the rates, but I don't want to end up making it take months to acquire certain items. I think, since we have so few players now and Ver.2 has so few items compared to the other versions, it might be beneficial this way if all of the items are well within the realm of possibility to find, and people focus more on acquiring their favourite items with good percents rather than trying to acquire the items at all. As I've been moving the rates up and down, it took me around 30 runs to find a Handgun: Guld, but that may just be my luck. Someone else might find one in 15 runs, while another person might need 50... there's no way to know, really. Oh, the joys of randomization.

As it stands, I think I'm going to do one more revision of the drops and then call it good. I could tinker with each ID separately until doomsday and perhaps never strike a perfect balance, and I'd like to get on to the other projects and put this behind me before I go insane from playing offline.
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Post  Wing Tue Apr 07, 2009 5:11 pm

lol. Should I C/P my post here too? xD
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Post  Aleron Ives Tue Apr 07, 2009 6:29 pm

Eh, beats me. I posted it in both places since there are members on both forums that don't use the other.
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Post  furrypaws Tue Apr 07, 2009 6:43 pm

That's a drag. What was this talk of Weapon's Badges before? Could they be made to drop? My idea would be to save them up and trade them in for weapons, but that's obviously harder said than done.

One thing I liked about v2 was it couldn't be spamapalooza for items even if you tried. But at the same time, it was discouraging when you find the same stuff over and over. Granted, I have very little experience with it, so only you know how it works.

You said the same drop rates dropped the same time though. Does that mean if you altered it by one/five/ten, it wouldn't? Like, would a 1/400 drop at a different time than a 1/390? If that was the case, you could arduously change the ones you wanted to be rare to intervals.

What I'm getting though is that PSOPC "spins" the droprates before you even start, and if your droprate is lucky those are the drops you get?

I apologize if I'm not getting this, but it seems like you're in quite a dilema Ives. V2 just doesn't want to be "fixed" it seems. D=

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Post  Aleron Ives Tue Apr 07, 2009 7:58 pm

furrypaws wrote:One thing I liked about v2 was it couldn't be spamapalooza for items even if you tried. But at the same time, it was discouraging when you find the same stuff over and over. Granted, I have very little experience with it, so only you know how it works.
I think the benefit of Ver.2 has been that since 90% of the items were unobtainable, nobody stressed about finding anything and just played for fun. It is very annoying to be forced to use the same equipment for the whole game, though, which is also its main downfall. The downside of boosting the rates somewhat, but not enough to make things easy (indeed, I could boost many rates significantly and it would still take 5 years to find those items), would be that then we would have a GC mentality of "Well, it's possible that this thing will drop, so I just need to spam this area until I find it." As such, people would start becoming uptight and playing the game to "hunt" like they do on GC/BB. If the rates are easier rather than harder, at least people won't spend months or years looking for an item; they can just get it and move on.

furrypaws wrote:You said the same drop rates dropped the same time though. Does that mean if you altered it by one/five/ten, it wouldn't? Like, would a 1/400 drop at a different time than a 1/390? If that was the case, you could arduously change the ones you wanted to be rare to intervals.
We don't have any idea what the 1/xxx rates are on Ver.2, but I think that rates that close together would be grouped and not immune to the effect. When I found those items in my last run, Yasminkov 7000V was at 0xC3 and Psycho Wand was at 0xC1. That's only 2 points difference, but SH4 is much higher at like 0xD3 or something like that, but that's a much better rate from an enemy that rarely appears.

furrypaws wrote:What I'm getting though is that PSOPC "spins" the droprates before you even start, and if your droprate is lucky those are the drops you get?
From what I can tell, something like that is what occurs. PSO picks a range of possible rates that are going to be "lucky", and then it has a better chance of dropping items in that range than items in other ranges. Considering how high the rate is on items like Imperial Pick (0xE1), this is about the only explanation I can find for why Imperial Picks sometimes don't drop. The same could be said for Chain Sawd on Vulmer. It has an obscenely high rate (0xF0), and you can get 10+ Sawds per run easily. (This is Sega's rate, not mine. I lowered the lolsawd rate.) However, sometimes you won't get any Sawds, or you'll get far fewer than normal. If the game isn't picking and choosing which rates will be good, I don't know how it comes up with this effect.

furrypaws wrote:I apologize if I'm not getting this, but it seems like you're in quite a dilema Ives. V2 just doesn't want to be "fixed" it seems. D=
As Lee pointed out, I'm damned if I do this and damned if I don't. Smile

The way I see it, having rares drop fairly easily may not be such a bad thing. Right now there are almost none, so legit players simply play the game over and over with the same equipment. If rares drop easily, it won't really change anything; you can't argue that it will make the game far easier, because super-easy to get items like Imperial Pick, Yamigarasu, and Plantain Huge Fan are already ridiculously strong and allow you to kill things easily. The only thing that will change is that players will have more variety when killing stuff, as they will be able to choose among a larger pool of equipment when they decide with which stick they want to beat Bartles to death.
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Post  Wing Tue Apr 07, 2009 9:42 pm

As long as it doesn't make everything insanely powerful and equip everyone with Sacred Cloths... ; _ ;

xD

I like being special. =P
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Post  Aleron Ives Wed Apr 08, 2009 12:55 pm

Sacred Cloth requires level 171... most people won't be able to equip it when they find it. Razz
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Post  Wing Wed Apr 08, 2009 9:38 pm

Even so. tongue


Last edited by Wing on Wed Apr 08, 2009 10:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post  Aleron Ives Wed Apr 08, 2009 9:57 pm

Well, as has been pointed out in the other topic, PSO resists balancing with all its heart. Mad
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Post  busterballs Sat May 04, 2013 5:46 am

sorry about digging up a old theard but i have a qustion, will rares drop in online quests? Question

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Post  Aleron Ives Sat May 04, 2013 2:04 pm

If you're letting the client generate the drops, then no. The new server-side drop system will eventually allow rares to drop in quests, but it still needs a few more tweaks before it's ready.
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Post  busterballs Sat May 04, 2013 3:21 pm

Thanks

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