Looting Progression Plan

[Laz Man]

2 minutes ago, Roland said:

The fact that we have people strenuously pleading with Madmole to never implement degradation or they’ll probably never play again belies that comment. To some it means so much that they will just keep their best item as a trophy and never use it....

item degradation would probably change the game from a 30 to 40 hour affair to to a 60 to 80 hour affair which is fine if we were at gold right now but given the devs want to add more content to the game, they are probably hesitant to reintroduce something that will take away player time from experiencing all of the content they have planned.  Believe it or not, there is a saturation point for some players and it appears the dev's are laser focused on squeezing their full offerring into that window before they expand on any existing system that is already in the game. (just a guess)

[Boidster]

And modding out repair kits (or, voluntarily not using them if you are as iron-willed as Roland is) gets close enough IMO anyway. Lower quality items wear out faster, higher quality items are more durable, as already coded. The diamond blade mod becomes quite useful. Until the iron tools are pretty common in loot, that stone stuff is looking pretty good, eh?

 

I need to talk to my co-op partner about whether he'd be down with a no-repair game. I wonder if the game supports recursive recipies. As a joke, I'd make the Repair Kit recipe require 2 Repair Kits as inputs. 😄

[Kalen]

5 minutes ago, Boidster said:

And modding out repair kits (or, voluntarily not using them if you are as iron-willed as Roland is) gets close enough IMO anyway. Lower quality items wear out faster, higher quality items are more durable, as already coded. The diamond blade mod becomes quite useful. Until the iron tools are pretty common in loot, that stone stuff is looking pretty good, eh?

 

I need to talk to my co-op partner about whether he'd be down with a no-repair game. I wonder if the game supports recursive recipies. As a joke, I'd make the Repair Kit recipe require 2 Repair Kits as inputs. 😄

Yeah, I've already decided that my next game will be a no repair game also.   Except for vehicles.

 

I'll try out your modlet at the same time.... thanks!

[Roland]

I’m not so Iron-Willled as all that. Twice now I said screw-it and just repaired because I gave into convenience. It was just my stone spear though...I could’ve crafted a duplicate. But yeah, I need it modded out to stay honest. 
 

Pros of no repair are definitely being more excited for duplicate loot and also treasuring mods and books that increase durability. Those things are useless in the default game when you have forever durability thanks to repair kits

 

Cons of no repair are having to switch out mods. Really....that’s it. It is Madmole’s biggest objection and I have to admit that it is a PITA.
 

But just make mod attachments permanent and that solves that.... 👹

[Laz Man]

13 minutes ago, Roland said:

I’m not so Iron-Willled as all that. Twice now I said screw-it and just repaired because I gave into convenience. It was just my stone spear though...I could’ve crafted a duplicate. But yeah, I need it modded out to stay honest. 
 

Pros of no repair are definitely being more excited for duplicate loot and also treasuring mods and books that increase durability. Those things are useless in the default game when you have forever durability thanks to repair kits

 

Cons of no repair are having to switch out mods. Really....that’s it. It is Madmole’s biggest objection and I have to admit that it is a PITA.
 

But just make mod attachments permanent and that solves that.... 👹

Unless weapon durability is so piss poor the player has to change out mods every battle or so i doubt its really that big of a deal....

 

Altho I remember many alphas ago there was a time an SMG would break so fast it was a royal pain to upkeep lol...Like 1 or 2 full mags and it was repair time....

 

[Kalen]

18 minutes ago, Roland said:

But just make mod attachments permanent and that solves that....

Thats what I'd do 

[Boidster]

58 minutes ago, Roland said:

Twice now I said screw-it and just repaired because I gave into convenience. It was just my stone spear though...I could’ve crafted a duplicate.

I figured the no-repair rule only applied to the kits. But I guess that really only would work if the game had no quality levels for primitive items, AS GOD INTENDED.

[SquirrelTeamSix]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

Unless weapon durability is so piss poor the player has to change out mods every battle or so i doubt its really that big of a deal....

 

Altho I remember many alphas ago there was a time an SMG would break so fast it was a royal pain to upkeep lol...Like 1 or 2 full mags and it was repair time....

 

Later game stage horde nights I tend to have to repair a gun once or twice through it. Swapping mods during a horde would be really annoying.

[Roland]

40 minutes ago, Boidster said:

I figured the no-repair rule only applied to the kits

You're the devil. My will is now weakened further...

 

 

[Solomon]

3 hours ago, Kalen said:

IMO, a good degradation system would allow you to repair an item a limited number of times... each time it gets repaired its quality suffers.

 

I get why people wouldn't like that.... but I feel like, in a survival game, you shouldn't be able to find an item and keep it forever.

Item degradation is one of the core points of the game Dying Light and you can find countless people who are posting the most meta ways to avoid that feature completely, its a game where you can always find better gear and even in that case people dont like the idea that stuff just breaks and leaves them with nothing.

 

3 hours ago, Laz Man said:

Take a look at his edits.  Its been a few days since I looked.  It looked like he removed all the gamestage gates on all items that had them and gave a flat 4% at at level 0.

 

Without item degradation its basically 4% RNG I win button.  Why people think that is fun is beyond me...

Because its true actual randomity, in games where you dont have the gameplay made around the idea that the player has to create everything for themselves most of the looting excitement comes from not knowing what to expect. This mod makes sure that you can find from the most basic stone tool to a nailgun in a box, every loot is new and exciting.

 

Literally the only thing i would change about the mod is to limit the tiers so i cant just find T6 gear on day 1 but other than that i enjoy that i really have no idea what will be in a lootbox.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

Unless weapon durability is so piss poor the player has to change out mods every battle or so i doubt its really that big of a deal....

 

Altho I remember many alphas ago there was a time an SMG would break so fast it was a royal pain to upkeep lol...Like 1 or 2 full mags and it was repair time....

 

You'd think, but your brain seems to erase all that time you happily used the thing and links together all the times you had to switch mods over and pretty soon you just feel like that's all you remember doing. It's kind of like when your spouse doesn't remember all the times you did the dishes and only seems to notice when you left that dish in the sink. My go to excuse is "I'm letting it soak first!"

[Solomon]

1 hour ago, Boidster said:

And modding out repair kits (or, voluntarily not using them if you are as iron-willed as Roland is) gets close enough IMO anyway. Lower quality items wear out faster, higher quality items are more durable, as already coded. The diamond blade mod becomes quite useful. Until the iron tools are pretty common in loot, that stone stuff is looking pretty good, eh?

 

I need to talk to my co-op partner about whether he'd be down with a no-repair game. I wonder if the game supports recursive recipies. As a joke, I'd make the Repair Kit recipe require 2 Repair Kits as inputs. 😄

Or if you are good enough with modding you could make items need themselves to be repaired.

 

Essentially make sure that you take out parts of a working AK47 to repair your favorite AK47. This would probably be more immmersion fitting to cobble together weapons than straight up just removing the ability to repair.

[Kalen]

13 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Item degradation is one of the core points of the game Dying Light and you can find countless people who are posting the most meta ways to avoid that feature completely, its a game where you can always find better gear and even in that case people dont like the idea that stuff just breaks and leaves them with nothing.

I'm not sure I'd use this argument.... people are constantly posting ways to avoid the 7 day horde but I don't think we should remove that!

 

I kid.

 

 

[Roland]

7 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Item degradation is one of the core points of the game Dying Light and you can find countless people who are posting the most meta ways to avoid that feature completely, its a game where you can always find better gear and even in that case people dont like the idea that stuff just breaks and leaves them with nothing.

Proof that developers really need to protect players from themselves...

 

7 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Because its true actual randomity, in games where you dont have the gameplay made around the idea that the player has to create everything for themselves most of the looting excitement comes from not knowing what to expect. This mod makes sure that you can find from the most basic stone tool to a nailgun in a box, every loot is new and exciting.

 

Literally the only thing i would change about the mod is to limit the tiers so i cant just find T6 gear on day 1 but other than that i enjoy that i really have no idea what will be in a lootbox.

I'm sure it is exciting. It also isn't the rarity that many people were claiming that they would be happy with. Turns out that "I would be happy as long as there was a very very rare chance of finding a great gun" is actually "I'm loving finding the good stuff right away again". Why are you willing to have T6 gear fenced off from Day 1 but not taking it a few steps further? How do you know that there isn't someone else who will uninstall if there is zero chance at T6 gear on Day 1?

 

I'm sure they would answer your post with "I would be happy as long as there was a very very rare chance of finding a T6 gun"

 

I really am for a rare chance at good guns as long as that is paired with degradation so that whatever you find in the first week isn't a golden ticket to the rest of the game. You talk about the excitement of getting that Blue Steel Mace on day 2 but then fail to mention the pointlessness of opening chests and getting brown, orange, yellow, and green Steel Maces, Baseball bats, and wooden clubs for days 3 on. And when I say rare chance I mean you might get a yellow iron pickaxe from a car during the first week once every five play throughs. Super rare.  Not 4%.

 

4% was vomiting rarity and based on the number of rant threads about vomiting, nobody felt 4% was particularly rare at all...

[Boidster]

10 minutes ago, Solomon said:

This mod makes sure that you can find from the most basic stone tool to a nailgun in a box, every loot is new and exciting.

I suppose if it were combined with flat non-scaled randomness in which zombies spawn in biomes, hordes, and POIs - meaning at GS 4 you might get an Arlene sleeper or a Demolisher sleeper; random! - then it could be fun. Otherwise, to me, it's just a speed run to the winning gear set. I don't know of any other game which has the concept of item levels/tiers/quality and which also allows you to find any weapon of any level/tier at any time. Borderlands and The Division are the two in my own past playlist which were the most loot-heavy and neither allowed that at all.

 

But a person with a different play style, or different endorphin triggers, could absolutely have fun finding an M-60 in the first week and basically never having to worry about any zombie in the game ever again. I could have fun with that, once, to do the speed run.

11 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Or if you are good enough with modding you could make items need themselves to be repaired.

Hmm...I wonder how good you'd need to be really. Repair is just an attribute of the item I think, and it ought to be relatively straightforward to find any item with a repair setting and replace it with the name of the item itself. I may have a new project...

[Roland]

14 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Or if you are good enough with modding you could make items need themselves to be repaired.

 

Essentially make sure that you take out parts of a working AK47 to repair your favorite AK47. This would probably be more immmersion fitting to cobble together weapons than straight up just removing the ability to repair.

I posted the same thing but Laz said it would be problematic if you had several dupes in your backpack. Which would get eaten to make the repair. Really, just making the parts be the repair materials is the same thing. Then you could cannibalize dupes for parts in order to repair. Same thing.

But it still means that found items would be forever.  

[Solomon]

2 minutes ago, Roland said:

I'm sure it is exciting. It also isn't the rarity that many people were claiming that they would be happy with. Turns out that "I would be happy as long as there was a very very rare chance of finding a great gun" is actually "I'm loving finding the good stuff right away again". Why are you willing to have T6 gear fenced off from Day 1 but not taking it a few steps further? How do you know that there isn't someone else who will uninstall if there is zero chance at T6 gear on Day 1?

 

I'm sure they would answer your post with "I would be happy as long as there was a very very rare chance of finding a T6 gun"

 

I really am for a rare chance at good guns as long as that is paired with degradation so that whatever you find in the first week isn't a golden ticket to the rest of the game. You talk about the excitement of getting that Blue Steel Mace on day 2 but then fail to mention the pointlessness of opening chests and getting brown, orange, yellow, and green Steel Maces, Baseball bats, and wooden clubs for days 3 on. And when I say rare chance I mean you might get a yellow iron pickaxe from a car during the first week once every five play throughs. Super rare.  Not 4%.

 

4% was vomiting rarity and based on the number of rant threads about vomiting, nobody felt 4% was particularly rare at all...

Honestly theres nothing else, before today this was the only loot mod made. Now we have @Boidster's loot lottery mod too so people could switch if they want.

 

All i wanted is a mod what makes the looting randomised, so i dont swim in the same stone gear for ages. I think im gonna go and edit that mod around so it progresses like 4%, 3%, 1.5%, 0,5% or find out just which exact setting controls quality tiers and manipulate that.

 

Also on a sidenot due to how this game works theres no such thing as "rare find". In a game like Warframe an item drop with 4% chance is almost impossible to get but here you can go as low as 0.1% and it would still mean that you run a fairly good chance of getting an item from that rarity group because of the number of lootable containers. At 4% you need to find 25 containers to reach the mathematical 100% chance, at 0.01% you need 100 containers but thats like 10 days.

[Kalen]

2 minutes ago, Solomon said:

At 4% you need to find 25 containers to reach the mathematical 100% chance, at 0.01% you need 100 containers but thats like 10 days.

Uh oh.... don't say things like that to a math guy!

[Solomon]

Just now, Kalen said:

Uh oh.... don't say things like that to a math guy!

I know my math is kind of.....busted but you get what i mean even if it would make my math teacher commit sudoku.

7 minutes ago, Roland said:

I posted the same thing but Laz said it would be problematic if you had several dupes in your backpack. Which would get eaten to make the repair. Really, just making the parts be the repair materials is the same thing. Then you could cannibalize dupes for parts in order to repair. Same thing.

But it still means that found items would be forever.  

Yeah i figured you would need to find a way to exclude the weapon from eating itself to repair itself and which one to use up for the repair.

How does reforging sound?

 

We could make a forge recipe what uses up 2 Pistols to make a Pistol. This way the only issue left is the T6 item quality but we could probably just cut that quality out and replace it with an identical pistol what has these stats at base but its untiered like the nailgun (or just make all items untiered and let the perks handle the stats).

[Boidster]

25 minutes ago, Roland said:

I posted the same thing but Laz said it would be problematic if you had several dupes in your backpack. Which would get eaten to make the repair. Really, just making the parts be the repair materials is the same thing. Then you could cannibalize dupes for parts in order to repair. Same thing.

But it still means that found items would be forever.  

So I got it to work, but of course Laz is correct. It takes the 1st similar item in your backpack and uses that. I mean, probably that wouldn't be a huge deal in most cases, 'cause you'd be clicking Repair on your best item so who cares which one is used to repair it?

 

But if you've got two AKs configured for different purposes and want to use a 3rd AK to repair one of them...dangerous.

22 minutes ago, Solomon said:

Also on a sidenot due to how this game works theres no such thing as "rare find". In a game like Warframe an item drop with 4% chance is almost impossible to get but here you can go as low as 0.1% and it would still mean that you run a fairly good chance of getting an item from that rarity group because of the number of lootable containers. At 4% you need to find 25 containers to reach the mathematical 100% chance, at 0.01% you need 100 containers but thats like 10 days.

I cannot conceive of the statistical framework that Warframe uses where "4% chance" is more rare than "0.1% chance", but set that aside. My only comment here is that you should remember that "0.04" in the loot probability tables does not, in almost any case, actually mean a 4% chance. When you open a container there are loot groups within loot groups within loot groups and all of them have probability numbers assigned that must be worked through step by step to get the correct percentage.

 

That mod setting all loot probability tables to 0.04 only makes each tier equally likely regardless of your gamestage. It does not mean that each tier has a 4% chance of popping up. It might be 20% or it might be 0.002% - you just don't know until you inspect the exact container you are opening. Like I did with that Shotgun Messiah Crate exercise. It is a PITA, but I'm workin' on a tool that will automate it for me.

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

You'd think, but your brain seems to erase all that time you happily used the thing and links together all the times you had to switch mods over and pretty soon you just feel like that's all you remember doing. It's kind of like when your spouse doesn't remember all the times you did the dishes and only seems to notice when you left that dish in the sink. My go to excuse is "I'm letting it soak first!"

So your saying Madmole is like your wife? ... 😅😅😅

[Laz Man]

Just looking at it a different way but maybe its possible to get degradation back by getting rid of field repairs all together and replacing it with a pseduo repair/combine feature at the work bench.

 

Recipe: weapon + parts = random durability weapon back to player.

 

Perks can be created to modify the amount of durability you get back.

 

Perk lvl1 - 50 to 100 durability

Lvl2 - 100 to 150 durability

Lvl3 - 150 to 200 durability 

 

[Kalen]

13 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Just looking at it a different way but maybe its possible to get degradation back by getting rid of field repairs all together and replacing it with a pseduo repair/combine feature at the work bench.

 

Recipe: weapon + parts = random durability weapon back to player.

 

Perks can be created to modify the amount of durability you get back.

 

Perk lvl1 - 50 to 100 durability

Lvl2 - 100 to 150 durability

Lvl3 - 150 to 200 durability 

 

I thought about doing that.... you'd use a crafting recipe, right?   The problem I couldn't get around was that the new item would have a quality equal to your crafting skill and not based on the items original quality.   There doesn't seem to be a way to force an item to craft at a specific quality.

[Maxley]

I didn’t realize this pole existed until now. I’m not a fan of the current system but I do agree with the overall plan of game staging the loot. I see now that this isn’t a final version or even particularly close to it so I’m happy to wait and see what the Fun Pimps do. Based on what Roland said above, about having different biomes as well as specific POI’s affecting game stage as well as having sealed shipping containers have better or worse loot depending on the POI they inhabit, I feel much better about the future of loot.

[Marrionetta]

This progression makes perfect sense in ARK. why? because we are in an a simulation of sorts that's inherently designed to be empty, full of resources. If you wanna shot gun, you're gonna have to start with a camp fire and learn how to advance and thrive as you go. 

 

it doesn't make sense here. 

 

The world was already lived in. There are already weapons everywhere, especially considering the likelihood of an American home having at least one gun stashed somewhere in it. It's dumb how I can't physically see a pistol or a shot gun until I hit a certain level. In a survival game where everything counts, that's just straight up @%$#ed. Survival games don't have the luxury of being viewed as RPGs. The whole point of survival is you're being tossed into the frying pan and its your job to get good and make the best of it. but if an almighty game algorithm is literally throttling that ability then it's akin to basically God snapping his fingers and replacing guns in vaults with @%$# literally no one pre-apoc would have unless they're some kinda collector. which would still make little sense for various reasons. 

 

My problem with it is that no matter what, it doesn't make sense. 

 

I'd much rather play ARK then seven days cause Ark does the RPG progression in a way that makes perfect sense. it's far easier to get immersed in Ark than it is in 7 Days. 

 

Maybe to you immersion is a non issue but plenty of us like to lose ourselves in a good book, a great movie series, TV series and finally, a good game. but if a game goes out of its way to break that immersion, then it's not good. it's Annoying. 

 

7 days was incredibly awesome before the loot drought but now all I can think of is how little sense these things make. 

 

No post apoc story in any media has to go thru a stone or primitive age. Cause that's @%$#ed. there's always an axe somewhere around, there's always a gun somewhere near by, there's always a car. the car not working makes sense. there are plenty of reasons it wouldn't work. but the fact that you can't find a single gun in any house till you reach a certain level? 0 sense. 

 

you don't have to agree with me, that's just how I feel. I can only turn off my brain so much. logic is difficult for me to ignore no matter how hard I try. So to me, my enjoyment in any game, be it WWE, be it a looter shooter, whatever, hinges on how immersive it is. The more things make sense, the happier I am. Otherwise it's stupid and silly.