Risk, Reward, Probability and Difficulty

[Renen]

Currently lots of people dislike the fact that there's an RNG element in drops. Many have reported that they done a specific fight (ifrit) many times and not gotten any reward.

So why not implement a following system:

Option 1: Increase the probability of the desired item dropping, and also, increase the probability of the person getting a negative buff should they fail. Make it on a sliding scale.
Example:
Currently you have a 5% chance to get a weapon drop from ifrit.
Increase that chance to 60% and in return, the player has an 80% chance to receive one of the following debuffs (all unremovable):

1) Slow'd by 25% for an hour.
2) Poisoned to take damage in combat for an hour.
3) All actions 10% less effective for an hour.
etc.

Can have different buffs, and can allow player to adjust both percentages.

Option 2:
Allow players to "buff" the boss in exchange for increased drop rate.
Example:

1) Increase hp by 5% for 2% drop rate increase
2) Increase Damage by 5% for 5% drop rate increase
3) Decrease time allotted to win by 5 min for 5% increase
etc.

Thoughts?

[rina_inverse]

*pull a couch*
*grab popcorn*

People wont stop whining

*sit down and eat popcorn*

[Renen]

*pull a couch*
*grab popcorn*

People wont stop whining

*sit down and eat popcorn*

Lol rina.
What do you think about idea itself tho?

[Zehira]

*pull a couch*
*grab popcorn*

People wont stop whining

*sit down and eat popcorn*

lmao ^^

[Kirito]

Just got to admit, this is a perfect title... it could definitely get a dev to look at it...

[Shougun]

I think your debuff [option 1] idea could work for a particular dungeon or something that has fitting with debuffs/diseases and such, but I think players might get annoyed at trying to do any dungeon content and then unable to successful do content in general afterwards because of it. Thus secluding it to a singular event should probably work for a way of increasing drop rates at greater risk (as well as really making the dungeon unique if it was fitting like I said "diseases" or something).

The second option is like a difficulty slider, thats always been an effective tool . I just hope that the devs will consider AI patterns and not just do flat rate buffs like hp + X %.

One of my suggestions:

RNG over a large data set = amount of attempts SE would like a player to take before getting the reward.

I.E. 50% drop, expect players to try twice (its a bit generalized math but close enough).

Instead of using RNG for certain drops it can easily be turned into a token system, something SE has already had planned [100% token drop rate on failure to loot rare item]. Unfortunately the awesome drops are not turned into a token system, you can only buy lesser drops with the tokens.

I think one of the reasons they didnt do a token system for the harder drops is because often when the rates are converted to a fixed number you will find they had planned for some people to do it many hundreds of times (and you just got lucky). So they dont want you to realize how "big" the grind actually is. That and there is a psychological effect to chances that some people find addicting.

Its why I like promoting the progressive percentage system. Pick a general % you want. Now pick lower then that and start players on it, as they fail the run increase the % at a growing rate until they succeed, restart %. Never will your run be useless even if you didn't get anything, you will always be more likely to win than the last time.

You can make the reward a token that can be switched out for a particular item. So rather then 100 tokens = item, re-denominate for the fact tokens are now rare. (You can just use 100% tokens on rare items and ignore a chance system but like I said players might be disheartened to see some gear costs 500 runs - to hide that you can use the progressive %'s I suggested which rewards effort but is still a bit on chance as well).

[Kirito]

I think your debuff [option 1] idea could work for a particular dungeon or something that has fitting with debuffs/diseases and such, but I think players might get annoyed at trying to do any dungeon content and then unable to successful do content in general afterwards because of it. Thus secluding it to a singular event should probably work for a way of increasing drop rates at greater risk (as well as really making the dungeon unique if it was fitting like I said "diseases" or something).

The second option is like a difficulty slider, thats always been an effective tool . I just hope that the devs will consider AI patterns and not just do flat rate buffs like hp + X %.

One of my suggestions:

RNG over a large data set = amount of attempts SE would like a player to take before getting the reward.

I.E. 50% drop, expect players to try twice (its a bit generalized math but close enough).

Instead of using RNG for certain drops it can easily be turned into a token system, something SE has already had planned [100% token drop rate on failure to loot rare item]. Unfortunately the awesome drops are not turned into a token system, you can only buy lesser drops with the tokens.

I think one of the reasons they didnt do a token system for the harder drops is because often when the rates are converted to a fixed number you will find they had planned for some people to do it many hundreds of times (and you just got lucky). So they dont want you to realize how "big" the grind actually is. That and there is a psychological effect to chances that some people find addicting.

Its why I like promoting the progressive percentage system. Pick a general % you want. Now pick lower then that and start players on it, as they fail the run increase the % at a growing rate until they succeed, restart %. Never will your run be useless even if you didn't get anything, you will always be more likely to win than the last time.

You can make the reward a token that can be switched out for a particular item. So rather then 100 tokens = item, re-denominate for the fact tokens are now rare. (You can just use 100% tokens on rare items and ignore a chance system but like I said players might be disheartened to see some gear costs 500 runs - to hide that you can use the progressive %'s I suggested which rewards effort but is still a bit on chance as well).

I have an idea to solve the problem that is a bit similar but with no tokens... My idea is that bosses (in extreme mode at least) only drop very rare items, there are no common drops that you may encounter on the normal or hard mode of the boss fight.

On a hard run you have a low chance or running into very rare items, a higher chance of running into rare and a drastically higher chance of running into common drop.

For normal difficulty run you have near impossible chance of running into very rare item, a low chance of running into a rare item and a high chance of running into a common item.


Now for the extreme run, if there is 1/10 chance of getting a very rare item and you get no items from the boss in the run, the possibility of getting an item from that category in the next run is 1/9, and so on for the continuing runs until you get an item... also if you lose the dungeon and you won the previous run without getting any items you probability of getting the item won't reset...This would make extreme version fights the place where parties would hunt the very rare items... it would also promote retries if you don't get the item in one run...

Now for normal or hard modes of dungeons...
In extreme dunegeons you can only get items from very rare category, so if you're unlucky for a run you won't get any items from the boss...

But for normal and hard dungeons you will also have to chance to get rare and common drops... Since the common and rare drops provide you a higher probabity of getting an item than the rare drop it would be almost impossible for you get any very rare drop on those runs...

Also because of this system (the one I'm explaining), it would seem like you could only get one item per boss, which would be annoying for players looking for numerous items in order to sell or just have. So in order to compensate for them, depending on how well you did in the normal and hard runs you can get as much as five item slots, each slot running the same 1/2 or 1/5 probability for the common or rare items...
what do you think?

[rina_inverse]

By "buffing the boss" you will make the battle drag, and yet theres no guarantee that youll get it
By "debuffing yourself" you will make the post/pre battle drag, and yet theres no guarantee that youll get it

waste of time I say

EDIT
best solution IMO is to cancel any waiting time between battle
more battles, more chances

[Renen]

About buffing i kind of agree... However you can only use the "less time to kill boss" buff for example.

As for debuffs I disagree. You can have a normal battle, and a one with debuffs.
For all those people who can already beat the battle with eyes closed, they can add the debuffs option.
For those who are in a pug and are unsure, they can opt to have chance of debuffs at 0

[shane239]

I think we should see what their new system has to offer first off fully before throwing out solutions although yours sir is defiantly interesting!