Balance the solo/team drop rates

[haseo]

I know you guys want this game to be grab-ye-mate-and-kill-ze-bosses but for the most part you're just introducing greed, bitching and lowlevels getting hold of insane gear far above their levels as well as killing the actual game experience for new players when they go through entire levels without actually doing anything.

Myself, am a soloplayer, mostly because I want the full game experience and I get this by killing all the enemies, finding all the chests, finding all the secrets - by myself, not by holding hands with people being far above my level giving me everything for free - no, I want to be strong -by myself- so that I can help more when I enter a battle with other players.

So, what would my suggestion be for balancing/evening out the rates ?
First off, balance it entirely on listpoints - only because highlevels joins the map shouldnt loot instantly become superleetmegaawesome if they're actually not doing anythings, and if they do it should only affect their drops in for instance invidual chest.

There's a lot I can say in regards of this subject but all that I need you to understand is that as a starting player who wants to give MS:C a go and plays it a lot -> should not be punished by soloing and clearing levels entirely by him/herself - this person should be rewarded so that s/he can much easier get hold in good gear for his/her level so that s/he can be of more use when playing with friends.

Would also be sweet if all rare/good-loot chests would be invidual so that it's never a deal about whose first on the chest getting the goods.

 

[Thothie]

While there are bonuses for having multiple player's present, these are added to what you'd normally get for going it solo - so you aren't penalized for doing so. The default odds are pretty slim, but usually don't raise more than 20% per additional player. There are a few items that require multiple players of course, but there's not a lot - currently 11 of ~524 items.

And if you get twinked, yer as much to blame as the person who does the twinking. It's not like you *have* to accept or keep the items. Most items also have level limits, and thus are effectively useless until you reach a certain level of skill in anycase.

All of the individualized chests require that you be in the top 75% rating of damage points to acquire any rare items - and most of them will fail to dish out anything but healing/manna potions, and possibly bolts, unless you qualify. Meaning you should always have to do something.

The intent is to eventually convert all the chests to individualized chests, but there's a *lot* of chests to convert, and the formatting between them isn't very consistent. It's easy to mess up chest inventory and they can be difficult and time consuming to test out.

 

[zeus9860]

All of the individualized chests require that you be in the top 75% rating of damage points to acquire any rare items - and most of them will fail to dish out anything but healing/manna potions, and possibly bolts, unless you qualify. Meaning you should always have to do something.

Go fix orc_for and bloodshrine then, orc_for dishes out the goodies to players that dont qualify since the maps release. Bloodshrine dishes out swiftblades to 0 dmg points players sometimes (not sure if this was fixed, but i doubt it since orc_for loot remains with the same problem and it's older).

 

[Thothie]

Meh, couldn't tell ya why. The script says it shouldn't dish out anything but gold to unqualified players. The orc for chests are similar, though some can dish out some random items from the n00b and low treasure lists. Don't see anything wrong with the base...

It's not going to help with these complaints, but I has been experimenting with periodically shuffling the treasure lists over time, in hopes of making them a bit more random. Still need to lag test how much overhead it takes to shuffle string arrays that large, but I suppose it shouldn't be too bad.

 

[haseo]

While there might not be an programmed feature I can but say from personal experiences: compared with teamplay soloing punishes you greatly.

I can do a map repeatedly, dealing great amount of damage, taking out all monsters on the map, and get SQUAT meanwhile joining a game that's packed with players dealing little to mid amount of damage rewards you loads.

Ie, do poorly teamwork -> get good loot anyways, do awesome soloing -> get nothing.

If it was my call I would have the system somethings like:
In the map there's 10 skells each having 100hp - and by dealing 100% dam to each skell gives 1.000 dam points which in turns unlocks NORMAL loot, now each percentage over-kill gives you additional % to unlock rare/non-normal loot.

Pseudo-code.
BONUS = MOB_TAKEN_DAM - MOB_HP;
CHEST_RATES = MOB_HP + BONUS;

So if you deal an additional 50% extra damage it would give you 50% extra chance of getting somethings decent so that if you're doing a boss map where you might only do somethings like 0.5% or 1% additional damage points towards you'd have a better chance of clearing the entire level.
Selecting the right weapons to do extra damage on smaller creeps to get that %-bonus - and that if you want to reward teamplay only make it so that it effects: gold, exp and harder enemies + % on rare enemy loot drop.

This will in turn make players more likely to play the game without their friends instead of avoiding MSC when their friends don't want to play.

I was also thinking that if players play on a big map then maybe have areas counting only damage done within an area to reflect on the kind of loot they will get in the chest spawning there.

For instance if you have an area with a chest and with 10 monsters spawning, now doing heaps of damage to these would improve the rare-rates on this chest but not on other chests using the same system -> so, if you end up in an area with ice monsters and you don't have any fire weapon and do poorly you will only receive the minimal loot, this in turn will push you to farm other areas better to get hold of a decent fireweapon and to come back and redo that area for the loot.

EDiT:// ^ commenting on that last thing ^ This will also even out / eliminate the amount of free loot players normally would get when they enter areas already cleared by other players, not doing anything? no freebies! <- this leads to either players soloing areas OR teaming up and stickin together with other players when they do maps, so win-win if you ask me.

Also it would be awesome if healing would count as DP, I know it could be exploited but how about you restrict the amount of points recieved via healing by mob_max_health minus like 50%for each monster - this means that the healer would have to do more than just heal to get top DP score in a small-mid party but still rewarding him for helping people - shielding others could be somethings like +25% bonus of DP towards monster max hp but lost if the shield breaks just before monsters dies .. or somethings.. like I said, lots of ideas

 

[Thothie]

While there might not be an programmed feature I can but say from personal experiences: compared with teamplay soloing punishes you greatly.

While I'm sorry you feel that way, that isn't what's happening. You simply aren't getting the advantages of team play. You are instead getting the default values.

Now, if we nerfed the spawn chances for going solo, you might have an argument, but that's now how things work.

You should also be glad that the rarer items are averaging maybe a default 1 in 16 chance of spawning, instead of the 1 in 200 (with no way to raise the odds) they used to commonly be.

While we try to discourage solo'ing, to be sure, we've only been doing so by making the multi-player experience more tempting. It's been all carrot, and no stick.

As for the rest...

What you're proposing is a considerably more complicated and lengthy procedure than simply converting all the chests to individualized chests, which would resolve maybe half of your complaint, without having too much impact on our efforts to encourage multi-player.

How long it's going to take us to accomplish that, I canna say. Again, it's tricky to do without risking breaking some treasure chests. I probably need to work up some simpler method of converting them over, but the scripts are so wide and varied in the methodologies they use, having been designed by several different scripters, there's no real easy way to manage the process.

Treasure aside, the game's always been pretty cruel to single play, when it comes to bosses. They are designed to deal with four players of their same tier, so you can count on doing several times the grinding to rank up high enough to deal with them, by which time the rewards they dish out will often not be nearly so beneficial had they been acquired at a lower level.

Also it would be awesome if healing would count as DP

It does, as does ice shielding... But only when aiding other players, or aiding critical NPCs in a multi-player environment. Not that DP's matter in a single player environment. DP's are only used to determine who gets access the final treasure, by ranking - they do not affect treasure spawning odds. So, when you're solo, obviously, you're always going to be considered the top ranking player.

 

[haseo]

I hear you but I think you're not seeing the real issue of having unbalanced solo play.

"Teamwork" in MSC as it is now is that if 1 highlevel joins your serer or you join his/her then it's mostly followed by several other players giving you that 100% chance of super loot despite being shitty leveled as well as you're playing with highlevels whom see themselves as kind when they drop loot from their INV-chests to the lower leveled, what this leads to is:

1) the map is ruined for the player
2) the understanding of the value of weapon X is basically lost.
3) the player will learn that he has always more to gain by following highlevels
4) exploring or trying harder maps oneself is stupid, playing the game oneself is stupid, better join someone elses map and have them carry the entire game
5) joining a clan is awesome, I don't have anything to loose, I don't know shit about the clan but whatever FREE LOOT!!!
6) when people get boosted to the point where they feel that they're not really contributing, they loose interest.

So eventually you're breeding players whom only see MSC as playworthy if they can team up with other players and who'll become very bad players, now imagine if most highleved guys were to leave, this mid/half-good gamers would drop like flies and the game would be completely deserted.

This game is good by itself but it's simply not enough rewarding if you give it a go as a new player - for instance, what was rat-pelts now again? 1 gold? :S the player is learning early that doing hard solo labor is not rewarding - standing behind big levels and landing lucky randomshots with lightning, arrows or blitz attack with swords knives etc, is then instadie on one enemy hit, is, what I don't even...

Basically, whatever direction the game has solo is not just hard, it's punishing - the benefit of soloing only exists if you stick to a few certain maps where the enemies are up against some kind of challenge, like being slow (islesofdread, nightmare_edana etc) , or can't reach you (nightmare_thornlands, ms_snow etc) and farm them only for somethings like arrows or exp.
So the skill element which i LOVE in msc is rarely present, non-existing on harder maps since the enemies have WoW-ish lame ranged autolock/insta-hit attacks, the only skill there is to move back when you're low on HP and let the other players deal/take damage - rarely there's a balancing going on leaning towards skill, but a matter how tanky you can be towards enemies and if you can bring them down before they bring you down.

I like the kiting/poking part when you're up against mid/hard skells but this is removed on the higher leveled skells because they run for the most part faster than you >_<, so to take an example of how I would balance this would be that the skells would have some ability like teleport or insta freeze and then players would simply have to train/learn the timings so that they move around if they know they're about to have a monster teleported to them or get a lot of distance from the hard skell if they're about to get instafreezed so that the ice would break of before the monster is hitting them.

Another thing that would be sweet to have would be protected spawns where monsters can't reach players but nor players can heal or attack - this is good for several reasons.

another thing would be, if you must insist of having mad speed monsters that players can't outrun, don't leave it to tankyness, let people be able to get away by climbing ladders and jumping between high rocks/walls/houses etc and don't give speedy monsters crap like freeze, stun etc because then players will either play supertanky or superchicken by casting spells and kill the enemy without seeing it.

And Pouncer.... sigh... his randoms infinitive spawn + immortality when soloing = mad rage.
If I throw a area of effect spell on myself, let me be able to kill him, if not, remove him or balance him so that he lets go after X amount of time, so that players can still make it by casting a healing circle or somecrap when being up against him, stop bloody forcing teamplay, I can kill the boss just fine but I get pwned by a silly minion.... ook? -_-*

 

[jon50559]

Haseo, I don't think you are seeing the real issue of solo play.

This is a multiplayer game, it is designed to be one and most maps are built around the idea of making use of 2+ players.
Rebalancing a lot of maps and monsters to cater to solo players requires a lot of effort to please a minority.

Choosing to play almost any multiplayer game by yourself puts you at a massive disadvantage right away, and that is way less likely to change in a game with one(1) active developer.

 

[haseo]

Haseo, I don't think you are seeing the real issue of solo play.

This is a multiplayer game, it is designed to be one and most maps are built around the idea of making use of 2+ players.
Rebalancing a lot of maps and monsters to cater to solo players requires a lot of effort to please a minority.

Choosing to play almost any multiplayer game by yourself puts you at a massive disadvantage right away, and that is way less likely to change in a game with one(1) active developer.

I can see that rebalancing is worth it, first off all the community of this game is very small and then you have like 12 US servers, 0 EU, 0 ASIA etc putting lag on me when I play it, also more players = less stability, call upon a bunch of spells etc = server crash, client crash etc so not only do I lag bawlz when I play with more players but the game crashes a whole lot more.

I love games like this being multiplayer and giving boosts when you play with more players but there should be a balance not "if you play alone you're bloody stupid" - The n1 priority should always be to have people WANT to play the game regardless, to get enough rewards to come back to it then make it sweeter to play with other players so that IF you get tired of soloing you find games with players in them - that's imo how a FPS-RPG should be, this is not Quake_MP or CS, this is MSC ^_~

 

[Snebbers]

I actually like playing solo, the only thing that bugs me is the XP considering I don't have many pots and I'm trying to boost my stats to 900+hp before I solo the wall.

When it's 5 players, it's too crowded for me but I don't mind helping people out. The other day a bunch of people were on old_helena and they were struggling so I dived in, summoned my wolf and unleashed hell to give them a hand.

I'll play multiplayer with Failville's Mayor, Broken, Furball and sometimes a few other people. But Self-adjusting maps are a nightmare, looking at orc_for here with 3000+ combined hp.

My drop rates for pots are okay, but I've never seen anything like a Lance of Affliction, Stormpharaoh 's Lance, etc drop when playing solo. If anything, I've seen; bolts, a few pots, health pot, mana pot and any of the following:

- envenomed battleaxe
- shortsword
- quarterstaff (Seriously on orc_for when top of Damagepoints with 5 players?)
- Any other generic level 1, 3, 6, 9 item.

Might just be my luck or the maps I run. Still trying to figure out where to get some good xp at my level (30 at least in everything)

Also excuse my rambling, I'm very tired.

 

[Thothie]

I hate dealing with petty jealousy, but it's pretty much par for the course around here...

You get 200% XP, just playing on line. This wasn't true until 2013. You're lucky I didn't keep my original idea on that, and require at least two players for said bonus.

The spawn odds, on rare items, for single player, have gone from an average of 1 in 200 to 1 in 16 over the past several years.

Be happy. Even as a solo player, you're better off than you've ever been.

That said, it's multi-player game. Deal with it.

So is life, and the folks the play together are always better off than those who insist on being on their own.

...and there's better things to do in life than be bitter about it.

I'm afraid this situation is going to get worse for you as time goes on, rather than better, both in game and out. Hell, even next month's map has a puzzle that requires three people to complete. Sure, you don't have to do it to finish the main quest, but mapper's love to do this sort of thing, and we love to encourage it! There's certainly going to be more items that require multiple players, and the final quest line is pretty much going to lock out anyone who insists on going solo and can't get people to aid them.

So I don't have anymore sympathy for the folks who make life hard on themselves, in this fashion, than those who decide to stick to a single weapon line for "a challenge" and then have the gall to complain about how under powered they are as a result. If you want to take the hard road, fine, but don't complain when the hard road, is indeed, hard.

 

[haseo]

To sum up all my posts:

* When you solo you're struggling but it feels good, the game is not supposed to be easy (imo) but nor should it be evil.

I'm basing the "Evil" on: When you join a game with several players and suddenly there's epic loot everywhere you experience several emotions, usually in this order:

1) Joy: Wow all this loot fuckn' awesome !!
2) Shock: I didn't know it was this easy...
3) Confusion: This was TOO easy, this doesn't make any sense !!
4) Frustration: All those times ive been soloing for good gear and got nothing when I could have just joined one and got everything at once what I don't even...
5) Realization: So torturing me and playing super tight all this time thinking I was good was just meaningless and stupid.

/ end summary

These are the same reasons you're never gonna see all servers full 24/7 and why there's usually just 1 server with many poeple on it and rarely somethings like 2-3 on each server because people want good shit and good shit only comes from playing with others and when for instance 2 highlevel people play a hard map and you have 3 newbies playing with them and the PROs leave the noobs will leave and the feeling they will be having is "fuck this was awesome no way im gonna go back to the shitty lowlvl map thornlands eventhough it's completely right for my level, no i'd rather friend one of these l33t guys and bug the shit out of them on steam to have them play more and boost me".

And I don't know about you, but having the game like this makes my heart bleed.

 

[Thothie]

Well, that's been going on for about six years now, and there's more ninja prevention, exclusive loot, and twinker discouragements than there's ever been before, so somehow I dun think that's the problem. You shoulda been here before the level requirements, individualized loot, and the artifact chests, when we had whole guilds dedicated to twinking dishing out hundreds of unique items every day and you couldn't hardly walk down the street in Edana without risking tripping and impaling yourself on six Hoarfrosts, a half a dozen Felewyn shards, and then strangle yourself on a necklace of Orion bows when you tried to get back up. If anything, we need more viable ways for folks of different levels to play together. Certainly we had a lot more players about when there were no restrictions on twinking whatsoever (not that I'm going to blame that either).

 

[zeus9860]

We just need more maps like the_wall, where loot is a certain thing but random when solo or in group. I like to play solo most of the time, but lately, yeah... i've been forced to join lower levels to get xp bonuses since players around my level are hard to come by. I don't feel like buggering people on steam to come and join me when they really don't want to or have mixed feelings as to what's going on right now with this game.

Orion bows

Dat reskin... HOW DARE YE WASTE IT LIKE THAT.

 

[haseo]

Well, that's been going on for about six years now, and there's more ninja prevention, exclusive loot, and twinker discouragements than there's ever been before, so somehow I dun think that's the problem. You shoulda been here before the level requirements, individualized loot, and the artifact chests, when we had whole guilds dedicated to twinking dishing out hundreds of unique items every day and you couldn't hardly walk down the street in Edana without risking tripping and impaling yourself on six Hoarfrosts, a half a dozen Felewyn shards, and then strangle yourself on a necklace of Orion bows when you tried to get back up. If anything, we need more viable ways for folks of different levels to play together. Certainly we had a lot more players about when there were no restrictions on twinking whatsoever (not that I'm going to blame that either).

Actually ive been playing MS/MSC back and forth for several years now, even before you took over the mod and renamed it to MS:C, I lost the oldest installer but I have MasterSword_v1.2.exe, MasterSword_v1.3.exe and MasterSword_v1.3-C1.4.exe on mah computer and I keep coming back to it (well, ms:c that is) because to me it's almost like Daggerfall (my favorite game) but with multiplayer, and please don't be confused with my posts, I don't come here to bash the game I just want it to be perfect or be close to - otherwise I wouldn't had applied for a dev-seat like 2 years ago and then again offered myself to update the weapon icons the next year (eventhough I was the wrong man for the job).

 

[Thothie]

Actually ive been playing MS/MSC back and forth for several years now, even before you took over the mod and renamed it to MS:C

I thought the name was familiar... A little MSC history correction first...

MSC was brought about by the previous crew, that also adapted MS 1.3 for Steam (ie. MS 1.35). I'd been playing since, maybe 1.2, and had been a thorn in the developer's side by providing "Third Party" additions, including helping Crow work up "Curse of the Bear Gods", "World Walker", bringing those and a few other old maps back for 1.35, and various fixes for the, quite broken, older versions of Helena. I was probably most infamous for providing map patches that allowed folks to join on any map in progress, rather than having to start their own servers to catch up where whoever they wanted to join was before they could get together, crashing several times in the process (which, even with just eight maps, made getting together really difficult.)

Master Sword: Continued 1.0 was finally released by the Lord K lead crew back in January 2004, involving the inevitable character wipe (which was just as well, since J-M had put out a character editor, and half the players had characters with straight 255 stats - that caused all sorts of fun bugs - nevermind the near 100 strong cheat map collection he had linked up). This gave us 11 maps, a whole lotta new features, and a fresh start. The intent was to continue to expand it, but some in house developer drama, involving Con Artist, caused most the dev team to fall apart, and the game nearly never got released at all. There were several really nasty bugs, including a horrid memory leak, early on, that took quite a bit of pleading to fix, and it wasn't too many iterations of code before Dogg didn't want to deal with it anymore, and there was only so much Lord K could do himself.

So, MSC was out for quite some time before Lord K started, in small increments, dropping the project into my lap. First, with a lot of inside info, eventually access to the script system, and finally the source code - which it took a small army of coders just to figure out how to get to compile proper.

I didn't really start rolling out patches until 2006, and then, with the community's support, things just started snowballing... Until you get to the absolutely gigantic (80+ map) world we see today, increasing the number of items, spells, and abilities to match. Not that there weren't a lot of hick-ups in that journey (including some J-M drama, back in 2008, that nearly ended everything).

So far, the only renaming of the project I've done is the revision suffix (1.1, 1.11, and 1.2). Not that such a rapid expansion hasn't changed the game so radically as to deserve a new name, but "Continued" seemed rather appropriate, to say the least. ("Ever Expanding" might be better, but that would just sound perverse.)

[/MSC history]

That all being said... Unless you took a break playing from say 2006 to 2013 (which I don't think you did), you should realize that there are more measures in place to mitigate exactly what you are complaining about than there ever have been before... I mean there was absolutely nothing in place until late 2007 (not even level requirements), nothing serious until 2009 or so... And the sort of things you are compiling about were a lot more rampant back then than they are now. Again, there were people who were, literally, dishing out a hundred or so of the top end items a day - and they weren't even cheating to spawn the items - they just turned it into a full time job. It was just bizarre.

I wasn't exaggerating much with that "Walking the streets of Edana" story. I once made, as I often do, another character to see how fast I could get to level 20, and before I'd even made 50hp, I had tickets for five Hoarforst shards, two Novablades, and a Raven Mace. >< ...and back then I could actually use them all, if not carry them all at once. And yes, as there was no such things as individualized chests, or treasure limits (beyond the fact that a higher level character had to look inside the chest first - and even that was a late anti-ninja addition). And yeah, I could tag around on any map and gather all the booty I wanted. No item reservations also meant I could just ninja anything that dropped from a boss mob to boot, should I be so inclined.

So while a lot of that sort of thing is still going on, there's also been a lot of efforts to mitigate it, and it isn't nearly as bad nor as common as it once was... and again, even solo, you're better off than you've ever been - especially since the JAN2013 patch.

But solo players just isn't the group we aim to please, and even back in 1.2-1.3, the game was really cruel to them. You could grind for a whole year alone before you could take down Calrian reliably. Spawn chances for the Rune Shield were 1 in 4096 (even if it didn't do anything), and with the exception of a few reliable spawns (of which we have more than ever), you could do a map hundreds of times before you got anything - which took a whole lot longer alone.

So don't be jealous just because folks who play together are getting more bonuses. It's no skin off your nose, and things could be, and have been, a whole lot worse.

...and although I've no intention of making things that encourage solo play, we will eventually patch up more of these twink problems, and of course, there will always be more stuff to do - be you solo or in a group.

 

[Thothie]

Orion bows

Dat reskin... HOW DARE YE WASTE IT LIKE THAT.

Heh... Yeeeah, sorry about that (there's a reason it's not in the changelog). It's going to be a *long* time before we get another bow in - they're just way over the top right now - and I didn't want to have the skin sitting and rotting that long. The next bow we *will* eventually get will probably be a more traditional projectile thrower, so the skin wouldn't be appropriate even for that weapon of the distant future. But maybe... Well after that... The skin can migrate to some new magic bow.

Also, that damn Orion bow is being buggy as hell... Maybe I can do something with this client projectile system...

 

[zeus9860]

Heh... Yeeeah, sorry about that (there's a reason it's not in the changelog). It's going to be a *long* time before we get another bow in - they're just way over the top right now - and I didn't want to have the skin sitting and rotting that long. The next bow we *will* eventually get will probably be a more traditional projectile thrower, so the skin wouldn't be appropriate even for that weapon of the distant future. But maybe... Well after that... The skin can migrate to some new magic bow.

Also, that damn Orion bow is being buggy as hell... Maybe I can do something with this client projectile system...

I'm not surprised about the buggy part... it seems to be bugged all the time dating even from when i started playing.

Anyways, you should give us catapult ammo for crossbows then i'll accept the apologies.