PlaneShift
Gameplay => General Discussion => Topic started by: Mouli on January 20, 2014, 02:15:18 pm
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Hello
I've spent some time in the last past day, looting mobs, and I now understand why everyone is learning now differents crafting, We don't have anymore full hunters/warriors... the reason is very simple, you can pay your training with your loots. Exception maybe for the Maulbernaut's slayers that can sell the hide to leather workers.
I can understand that at some point loot were to easy to get (Helms from Onyx for example) but I wonder why in PS it's alway ON or OFF... I've spend 8-10 hours in the last past days and didnt loot any good... some Crapy one named weapons, very few 2 named and no 3 named...
Actually with 40 players online we have 15 armor makers, 10 Herbalists/alchemists, 8 cooks cuz its the best way to get PPS
and 10 Enchanters cuz its the only decent way to train Magic...
I would just want to know if it's a bug (something went wrong in the formula) or a real Aim for the team to remove Hunters/looters from PS ?
Adding the mods on the weapons was a great add but if you make them impossible to loot where is the point ?
Overall PS has been greatly improved... If this point could be a bit more balanced it would be very good for everyone...
Regards
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I make loads of moneys from hunting? At least when I have a hand. lol
It's not exactly something that will make you rich.
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I agree with Mouli that getting rich with hunting is possible. If you kill the right creatures you can easily earn 30k-70k tria per hour, depending on how lucky you are. And someone mustn't be even overly powerful to get rich with hunting.
I play two different characters, the one who is more in hunting and not so much in crafting has much less tria issues, then the crafter character. Training blacksmithing is quite expensive.
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One pure hunter is left out there.
Trying to hunt in the old, honorably way for his living and guild.
And, where necessary, with the help of Magic ;) I have no insight how it would be with armor and weapons, but I suppose, then it's possible as with magic to get decent tria once you can beat the right mobs.
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I don't really earn much tria, but most if not all of it comes from hunting - usually without the aid of any magic. I never took note of PP, as I have a few hundred thousand left that i will never spend. I see there is a big difference between hunting animals and beating up shady NPCs like onyx doggers: The latter gives way more tria and possibly useful rare stuff, while the former only makes sense to supply materials for alchemy, leatherworking or morphing. So we are back to Mouli's point: Loot rates for affixes. I guess that for a while they were just too high indeed. Nowadays double or triple name items are found from time to time, but really powerful ones are indeed incredibly rare. I dont know if that is a good or a bad thing. But I am sure tons of good items are around somewhere in the storage of some players. Maybe we should stimulate trade with those. Maybe my new "book" will help a bit with this.
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the thing is that some player had fun searching, looting, testing, exchanging & selling those rare weapons now this part of is gone... Now its hard to see a shop with looted weapons... and if you can find one you dont even spend 2 min there cuz there is no interesting thing to buy...
@Boni Good idea Boni... when are you gonna sell your old & rares weapons ? :devil:
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I agree with Mouli that getting rich with hunting is possible. If you kill the right creatures you can easily earn 30k-70k tria per hour, depending on how lucky you are. And someone mustn't be even overly powerful to get rich with hunting.
I play two different characters, the one who is more in hunting and not so much in crafting has much less tria issues, then the crafter character. Training blacksmithing is quite expensive.
Okay. I am really tired, but I'm pretty sure Mouli is saying that making money by hunting is hard. I say it's not. So, what are you talking about?
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I think you're doing something wrong, maybe you're hunting after some creature too weak for your skills level or perhaps too strong, but I can confirm two things:
- removing hunting is not the goal of the dev team
- no loot rule, percentage or anything has been recently changed. On the contrary about two years ago many creature parts loot have been made more frequent
However there is always a random chance and maybe you're out of good luck. It seems odd but sometime I feel the same while playing and I'm 100% sure no rule has been changed.
Last if could be some skill level range can have harder time than others finding out the right creature to hunt, in fact some creature stats may need to be reviewed a bit, this task is on our todo list.
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no loot rule, percentage or anything has been recently changed. On the contrary about two years ago many creature parts loot have been made more frequent
I may be wrong Eonwind,
but I was able to loot a full inventory of 2 & 3 named helms from Onyx in one hour (didnt loot the simple named ones) I agree it was too much, but now it would take more than a week... So something changed for sure... Using the same character with maxed Sword, medium armor...
But If you dont trust me, just spend some time looting and count how many 3 named items you got...
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no loot rule, percentage or anything has been recently changed. On the contrary about two years ago many creature parts loot have been made more frequent
I may be wrong Eonwind,
but I was able to loot a full inventory of 2 & 3 named helms from Onyx in one hour (didnt loot the simple named ones) I agree it was too much, but now it would take more than a week... So something changed for sure... Using the same character with maxed Sword, medium armor...
But If you dont trust me, just spend some time looting and count how many 3 named items you got...
I trust you :) ... but you need to trust me too when I say nothing has changed data side :) (at least in the last few years)
the only thing different from before and after is randomness, and always remember random numbers are pseudorandom numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number)
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My character only hunts for loot and does very well. She uses a bow mostly these days and no magic other than CW if healing is needed.
- Nova
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the only thing different from before and after is randomness, and always remember random numbers are pseudorandom numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number)
the only thing that made difference between us two Is that I'm player and I'm still playing this game a lot (maybe too much)...
And if You would play a bit more... you may have noticed the big difference Eonwind...
I know you did a lot for PS and I would add that Its been a long time since we didnt have such an efficient team...
But don't get disconected with the reality, you know its what IRL we are reproaching to our gouvernement...
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I too did notice that looting items with 2-3 good affixes is way harder than it used be. Now I’m considering myself lucky with my gear because I know I couldn’t get anything like it starting out now.
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Nothing changed Denes... :-X
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[edited previous post]
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the only thing different from before and after is randomness, and always remember random numbers are pseudorandom numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number)
the only thing that made difference between us two Is that I'm player and I'm still playing this game a lot (maybe too much)...
And if You would play a bit more... you may have noticed the big difference Eonwind...
I know you did a lot for PS and I would add that Its been a long time since we didnt have such an efficient team...
But don't get disconected with the reality, you know its what IRL we are reproaching to our gouvernement...
Ok Mouli, let's suppose you're right and I am wrong... now try to get in a dev's shoes and suppose you want to debug the problem to solve the issue, if any. Let's start from this facts:
- there is no runtime instrument any devs/GM system admin can use to affect player's good or bad luck, so this cannot be the cause of the problem.
- the ramdomizer code hasn't changed since 1 and 1/2 year and then it changed to fix a bug with some rare modifiers that were never loot-able because of a code bug, so regarding these changes they can only have improve looting. other than that if the problem appeared recently it cannot be related.
- the loot rules table has not changed regarding items and their probabilities, only new stuff was added for a recently introduced monster, plus 1 year ago dropped bows have been made randomizeable (means now you their enchanted version can be dropped while before only normal version were dropped).
- loot rule for monsters haven't changed except a few named NPCs at the camp banished (so you're either trying with them or it's not the problem and other than that the changed loot rule should be richer that the previous one).
- mathscripts regarding player level calculations (used to determine automatically XP, random-levels, etc.) haven't been touched at all.
Now considering a software and data don't change by themselves, tell me where you would logically start debugging the problem, because with the informations I have at hands I have really no idea where to start looking at.
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compiler optimizations? (http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/is-gcc-4-8-a-quirky-mess/) (slashdot) has the server been compiled for a different architecture? has the compiler stack been updated?
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- mathscripts regarding player level calculations (used to determine automatically XP, random-levels, etc.) haven't been touched at all.
Oww, interesting... random-levels, etc? So the loot probabilities are adjusted in a similar manner as experience points? You don't have to answer if you don't want to ;)
On topic: I was never really ambitious with looting, but my feeling is that the "high" loot rates that drive this discussion were observed during a time longer ago than the changes mentioned above. Or am I wrong? I dont see much of a change in the past 18 months or so.
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@Eonwind, I guess in theory you could use the black box approach which we were given to reproduce and compare the current and an year old PS to either support or prove our claims wrong. That, including OS, hardware, database engine, datasets, PS version and whatnot that has anything to do with random and floating point numbers. But that is an impossible mission if you ask me. I’d rather go with rebalancing the system for a desired target.
@Boni, You're right the change are not so new... I dont really remember but it was almost suddently... like ON/OFF.
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compiler optimizations? (http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/is-gcc-4-8-a-quirky-mess/) (slashdot) has the server been compiled for a different architecture? has the compiler stack been updated?
mhm... I'm not really the best person to answer this question... I can only say the server is compiled using gcc on a linux architecture.
- mathscripts regarding player level calculations (used to determine automatically XP, random-levels, etc.) haven't been touched at all.
Oww, interesting... random-levels, etc? So the loot probabilities are adjusted in a similar manner as experience points? You don't have to answer if you don't want to ;)
I've no problem speaking about this stuff, also because you should find a working example in SVN. Of course I can't share the script itself but I can say there is a mathscript "LootModifierCostCap" (should be called by the code handling looting and random item with modifiers) responsible of calculating a character stats based cap cost for looted weapons. I guess the reason for its existence is limiting the probabilities for a newly created characters to loot the best weapon in game. This has never been changed as far as I can tell.
On topic: I was never really ambitious with looting, but my feeling is that the "high" loot rates that drive this discussion were observed during a time longer ago than the changes mentioned above. Or am I wrong? I dont see much of a change in the past 18 months or so.
If the problem has to do especially with weapons with modifiers and the changes are not very recent (older than 18 months) then there could be something wrong going on in the code. It's not very easy for me to debug it.
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Weird. Did a search on "LootModifierCostCap" Found a link (http://searchcode.com/codesearch/view/54681618) containing a listing of math_scripts.sql from what appears to be an older version of the server code.
INSERT INTO math_scripts VALUES( "LootModifierCostCap", "ModCap = MaxHP*10;");
Want the best loot better train up your body development!
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Weird. Did a search on "LootModifierCostCap" Found a link (http://searchcode.com/codesearch/view/54681618) containing a listing of math_scripts.sql from what appears to be an older version of the server code. INSERT INTO math_scripts VALUES( "LootModifierCostCap", "ModCap = MaxHP*10;");
Want the best loot better train up your body development!
Nope :P
you effectively found the test mathscript in SVN, its purpose is only to provide a working example for anyone willing to compile and run the server code, the version loaded in production is very different.
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Thanks for your clarification, Eonwind. So that cap is only to limit the availability of the more expensive affixes to characters with low stats, I see.
I wonder, when large versions of beasties are going to be implemented, will the engine allow to bump up the chances for receiving rare affixes? I think that could have great potential to keep the veterans like Mouli busy ;)
Hope to finally see some big bosses to fight!
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Don't be too optimistic. Not everyone should own an "almost unique" item. ;)
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Thanks for your clarification, Eonwind. So that cap is only to limit the availability of the more expensive affixes to characters with low stats, I see.
I wonder, when large versions of beasties are going to be implemented, will the engine allow to bump up the chances for receiving rare affixes? I think that could have great potential to keep the veterans like Mouli busy ;)
Hope to finally see some big bosses to fight!
mhm... hard to tell ... you know to answer this question I not only have to know that mathscript function very well but also gain a deeper knowlegde of that specific part of the code internals (like I had to do for fixing skill progression and practice point assignments, make tribes ... ...). May it's worth the time to take a look but it will take some time ... just to answer ;D
(but sometime once the internals have been understood improvements or fixes have been straightforward like for fixing the armor damage reduction bug)
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Heheh, I dont want to bother you with silly questions, Eonwind, I was just wondering about the potential of Talad's ambitious announcement. Either way, it is great to see the project is making good progress (where fixing old issues is even more valuable than adding new content). Thanks again for all the replies.
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Might it be possible to see if there has been a change in what people have been looting over the period of time in question? I don't know if you keep this sort of data on the server or not. A quick sanity check might be done by checking a broad metric like the total value of items looted or something like that. Such data might reveal a flaw in the code/hardware/data or in the perception of players.
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Might it be possible to see if there has been a change in what people have been looting over the period of time in question? I don't know if you keep this sort of data on the server or not. A quick sanity check might be done by checking a broad metric like the total value of items looted or something like that. Such data might reveal a flaw in the code/hardware/data or in the perception of players.
It's a good idea! I checked and it's possible but since the server change these logs seems to be unavailable yet. :(
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That metric would have to be normalized though. Obviously the total value of looted goods should be higher back when there were hundreds of players than this fall when there were ~40 on average.
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How about when we recently (less than a year) started looting two hearts or two potions from the same beastie by chance? Could it be that those have something to do with each other?
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How about when we recently (less than a year) started looting two hearts or two potions from the same beastie by chance? Could it be that those have something to do with each other?
I can't say no for sure, but I suspect they are unrelated. It's been reported by a player "double" death events happeed for players too when fighting with NPCs (and if the NPC looting capability would have been enable you'd have been looted twice too :P ). My guess is an extra double looting session is generated as a consequence of 2 death events happening not the other way around. Anyway I hope the engine guys can take a look at the open ticket in the bugtracker.
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How about when we recently (less than a year) started looting two hearts or two potions from the same beastie by chance? Could it be that those have something to do with each other?
I can't say no for sure, but I suspect they are unrelated. It's been reported by a player "double" death events happeed for players too when fighting with NPCs (and if the NPC looting capability would have been enable you'd have been looted twice too :P ). My guess is an extra double looting session is generated as a consequence of 2 death events happening not the other way around. Anyway I hope the engine guys can take a look at the open ticket in the bugtracker.
Hi Eonwind, I think you are right because at the time of my bug report I was able to see Pilfer and Filch dying thrice sometimes and consequently to get 3 loots.