Suggestion Shrines (again)

[kiadmowi]

Round 2 everybody; Don't know if everyone has gotten the chance to try out the new shrines but if you haven't, I hope this sheds some light on how they feel.

Starting off with the good, group grinding now being viable is a breath of fresh air and will definitely bring about some nice nether ganks in future, albeit that 10 mobs spawning per wave with 3 players feels a bit overwhelming. (10 blazes are loud man)

Down to the bad we have the fact that looting was intentionally removed from affecting all shrine mobs, regardless of if double drops triggers or not. From my 3 player group's experience this felt like 1 drop per mob even with double drops, a very noticable step backwards from previous grinding. This effectively means that a group of 3 players will sit at the same shrine for twice as long to get the same amount of loot as a solo grinder would have gotten before the changes.

The ugly (and this might just be me) is the loot bundles that spawn every quarter of the shrine's health. It doesn't really feel rewarding for a group to look around after a quarter health mark is reached only for one person to click it and slowly watch 13 blaze rods pop out to split amongst the group. Physically seeing the drops actually drop from mobs, especially when double drops triggered, felt more interactive and simultaneously rewarding.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the shrine's health increasing with player groups but I'd imagine it'd become pretty stale when you've been sitting at the same shrine for over 10 minutes with a group of 5+ people.

Also just wanted to mention that waiting for one last mob to spawn to deplete the shrine's health only for the entire wave to despawn once you do so feels bad ;(

I know for a fact this post seems whiny, so I'll end it off by saying that your effort does not fall on blind eyes; we truly appreciate the work you do despite our crying and shouting.
(also since this isn't exactly a suggestion but more feedback to an implemented suggestion I'll move it to general discussion if an admin asks)

 

[jakeman5]

There are improvements that need to be made but we are starting to head in the right direction.

 

[FoxyBearGames]

Agree with looting, I think that it should have some affect on the drops, even if it be less than what the enchantment itself would normally grant. Thirteen blaze rods per shrine might also seem low, but when you go to all four it does come out to 52 in total which I feel is probably around where it should be.

 

[Magpieman]

Down to the bad we have the fact that looting was intentionally removed from affecting all shrine mobs, regardless of if double drops triggers or not. From my 3 player group's experience this felt like 1 drop per mob even with double drops, a very noticable step backwards from previous grinding. This effectively means that a group of 3 players will sit at the same shrine for twice as long to get the same amount of loot as a solo grinder would have gotten before the changes.

Looting has never worked on mythic mobs which all mobs spawned from shrines are, it's one of the limitations of mythic mobs. Having said that there is little point in implementing work arounds to make it work as we would couple this with a nerf to drops resulting in the same average drop rate. It also just adds a disadvantage to the very new peeps who haven't gotten looting 3 yet (although this is fairly niche). The exception to looting working on shrines was the bug with double drops. The reason for this was it was adding vanilla drops to the mythic mobs drops, thus looting was working on vanilla drops.


While I understand it is anecdotal evidence I can confirm it is not true that 3 people will give less drops than 1 with bugged double drops assuming we understand the extent it was bugged. Going off of kiadmowi's numbers for the bug you would receive 2.5x drops as opposed to 1.5x. 3 players in the new system gives just over 2x what 1 person would get with no double mob drops. Then once you add the 1.5x of double mob drops it comes out to more drops than the bugged version.

Physically seeing the drops actually drop from mobs, especially when double drops triggered, felt more interactive and simultaneously rewarding.

People requested having it show up in your inventory, but this can cause all sorts of problems and isn't super clear what's going on. So instead thought this was a cleaner solution. While the current problem may be confined to ghasts, we plan on using shrines a lot in the future and drops falling into the void, lava, ocean depths etc. will be frustrating so this should solve the problem in the future too.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the shrine's health increasing with player groups but I'd imagine it'd become pretty stale when you've been sitting at the same shrine for over 10 minutes with a group of 5+ people.

Also just wanted to mention that waiting for one last mob to spawn to deplete the shrine's health only for the entire wave to despawn once you do so feels bad ;(

Again neither of these should be the case, but is possible as we were forced to push this early today before we could do any heavy testing. The health increases directly with the number of mobs and all shrines should be vanquished at the end of the fourth wave of mobs. The only limiting factor should be the spawning cooldown of mobs and this should remain the same regardless of the number of players. So as long as you aren't super slow at killing mobs, should be just as quick to clear a shrine solo as it is to clear it with 6 players. We will do some further testing to ensure it is working as intended.

Bringing 6 people to a shrine will result in 3x the loot of soloing. This further stacks with double mob drops (1.5x). To prevent solo grinding from being strictly worse you do have to kill 6x the mobs to get 3x loot, but these nether mobs are trivial to kill. We will reiterate, again and again, a handful of players are not supposed to be able to supply a 100+ player alliance. If that were to be the case you might as well be playing a mini-game/kit server.

edit: Can confirm one bug that we are fixing currently is the first wave is not spawning correctly or taking as much health from shrine as it should. This may have caused some of the issues you have experienced.

edit 2: Another bug with rounding was causing you to need to wait for a 5th wave to do the last 1 health of the shrine.

 

[kiadmowi]

Agree with looting, I think that it should have some affect on the drops, even if it be less than what the enchantment itself would normally grant. Thirteen blaze rods per shrine might also seem low, but when you go to all four it does come out to 52 in total which I feel is probably around where it should be.

Think you're missing a bit of information; you get the loot bundles every quarter of the shrine's health, meaning 4 loot bundles in total, 52 rods per shrine.

Now, while that doesn't sound bad, keep in mind that it takes 3 people about 2 waves for one quarter, meaning you have to spawn about 8 waves in total, i.e. twice as many as you would have to wait for while grinding solo before the changes, to get an amount that is marginally higher than the 40 average you could get from grinding solo before, hence:

This effectively means that a group of 3 players will sit at the same shrine for twice as long to get the same amount of loot as a solo grinder would have gotten before the changes.

and while this also might not sound bad, consider that it would not sustain two 100 player armies fighting regularly while the grinding would still largely fall on the same shoulders as before.

 

[FoxyBearGames]

Think you're missing a bit of information; you get the loot bundles every quarter of the shrine's health, meaning 4 loot bundles in total, 52 rods per shrine.

Now, while that doesn't sound bad, keep in mind that it takes 3 people about 2 waves for one quarter, meaning you have to spawn about 8 waves in total, i.e. twice as many as you would have to wait for while grinding solo before the changes, to get an amount that is marginally higher than the 40 average you could get from grinding solo before, hence:

and while this also might not sound bad, consider that it would not sustain two 100 player armies fighting regularly while the grinding would still largely fall on the same shoulders as before.

If I am being honest, 52 rods per shrine is insane compared to what I would normally get, granted you did bring 3 people with 1.5x mob drops but that is still plenty of blaze rods per shrine. Also do keep in mind that previously you still got about the same amount of items as a solo grinder provided you didn't have double mob drops, (about 20 blaze rods reversing the math that Mag gave) as you do now. The more major change that you are more concerned of is the fix to double mob drops, which is understandable considering the bug was probably in for months on end before getting patched or noticed. The other change you are a concerned of is the scaling feature, which I think may need tweaked depending on how much it is used due to it being diminishing. It's merely a tradeoff of time for the players who choose to grind together as opposed to individually at different intervals than one another. I will be trying out the new shrines for myself at some point soon though as I would like to experience them for myself to see what the numbers really are like, as I only have access to the ones on the post right here.

 

[SilentStormSix]

I love watching blaze rods fly out of the loot bundle i just punched

 

[Cthan]

If I am being honest, 52 rods per shrine is insane compared to what I would normally get, granted you did bring 3 people with 1.5x mob drops but that is still plenty of blaze rods per shrine. Also do keep in mind that previously you still got about the same amount of items as a solo grinder provided you didn't have double mob drops, (about 20 blaze rods reversing the math that Mag gave) as you do now. The more major change that you are more concerned of is the fix to double mob drops, which is understandable considering the bug was probably in for months on end before getting patched or noticed. The other change you are a concerned of is the scaling feature, which I think may need tweaked depending on how much it is used due to it being diminishing. It's merely a tradeoff of time for the players who choose to grind together as opposed to individually at different intervals than one another. I will be trying out the new shrines for myself at some point soon though as I would like to experience them for myself to see what the numbers really are like, as I only have access to the ones on the post right here.

For a 1 person town sure that's more than enough but when you have a town that has 30-40 members that show to fights it's just simply not enough. From what i've experienced with the new system, especially with ghasts is that the drop rate is quite frankly dog shit. Out of 16 ghasts we were 3 tears in total, which I don't think I need to tell you isn't good. Blazes are also very bad for drop rates 16 blazes usually got us 7-12 blaze rods most of the time less. I think this update was meant to be helpful but in my opinion it has been grinding harder. I'm not sure why the drops are so significantly low but it's not really worth to go with your team to grind or even grind solo as of right now, grinding solo before this change was sooooo much better.

 

[kiadmowi]

Just tried grinding solo and whether or not it's just my preference it felt more rewarding than the group grinding attempt. I chalk this up mainly to the deminishing returns for every additional player in one's group, since it almost feels like it's punishing you in efficiency for coordinating a group to grind at the same time instead of staggering multiple solo grinders' grind times. Along with realizing that I tried to keep track of at least the blaze shrine drops (since ghast drops are a bit harder to concretely measure because wild ghasts are a thing), and out of 4 shrines the average rods per blaze seemed to be just slightly over 1.

First shrine: spawned 5 waves, 20 blazes, 21 rods
Second shrine: spawned 5 waves, 20 blazes, 22 rods
Third shrine: spawned 4 waves, 16 blazes, 15 rods, but I believe it didn't drop a fourth loot bundle when the shrine was depleted unless I'm blind and deaf
Fourth shrine: spawned 5 waves, 20 blazes, 19 rods, but seemingly also did not drop a fourth bundle

The shrines that spawned 5 waves must have had this bug

Can confirm one bug that we are fixing currently is the first wave is not spawning correctly or taking as much health from shrine as it should. This may have caused some of the issues you have experienced.

though I found it weird that one happened to take enough damage to deplete in 4.

While I don't feel like a direct comparison is justified because of the extra wave and what I believe is loot bundles not spawning, I think it's fair to say this is an unnecessarily large nerf considering double drops brings you just over 1 rod per blaze.

Having said that there is little point in implementing work arounds to make it work as we would couple this with a nerf to drops resulting in the same average drop rate

I suppose what we're asking for then is a buff of shrines' average droprates regardless of looting or not. Perhaps there's somewhere inbetween the flood and drought of pot mats that lets people wage wars without dreading the grinding it would bring just because they don't have double drops.

Going off of kiadmowi's numbers for the bug you would receive 2.5x drops as opposed to 1.5x

Small side-note to this: this was going off the assumption that shrine blazes drop 1 rod without double drops, since which I was told they actually have a 75% chance of dropping that one blaze rod. (I had always just chalked up the 25% 0 drops happening as double drops dropping 0)

 

[FoxyBearGames]

I suppose what we're asking for then is a buff of shrines' average droprates regardless of looting or not. Perhaps there's somewhere inbetween the flood and drought of pot mats that lets people wage wars without dreading the grinding it would bring just because they don't have double drops.

I feel that increasing the drops you get as you bring more people might be the solution, because this seems more like an issue with large alliances than it is with smaller ones, and with how it is now setup it will become a matter of having individual people go on their own at different times rather than having them grind together.

 

[Cthan]

I just don't see how it's even worth going to nether where you waste ai's, have a huge risk of getting ganked and killed just to waste like 10 minutes and get 30 pots worth of mats. There needs to be a change because this grinding is not good for anyone other than small towns / solo players. There needs to be an increase in loot drops for the amount of people you have not just an increase of mobs and the same drops as if you were solo grinding, if not what's the point in even bringing your team (the whole point of this update btw.)

 

[FoxyBearGames]

I just don't see how it's even worth going to nether where you waste ai's, have a huge risk of getting ganked and killed just to waste like 10 minutes and get 30 pots worth of mats. There needs to be a change because this grinding is not good for anyone other than small towns / solo players. There needs to be an increase in loot drops for the amount of people you have not just an increase of mobs and the same drops as if you were solo grinding, if not what's the point in even bringing your team?

Yeah that's why I suggested increasing the amount of drops as you bring more people as it greatly increases the risk of being spotted and such

 

[Cthan]

Yeah that's why I suggested increasing the amount of drops as you bring more people as it greatly increases the risk of being spotted and such

Yep

 

[Cryptite]

Just FWIW, even though everyone calls it the "double drops buff", it's important to note that it is not double drops. It is a 50% chance to drop double loot which is mathematically not at all the same as just 2x drops.

It's also worth noting that Shrines are only mostly working as designed as of this morning and perhaps further so with one likely one extra update later today.

Any estimation of how Shrines are buffed/nerfed from yesterday is likely wrong and misleading because there were a variety of bugs with them. Give it a day or two before making your final judgements; too many people are jumping the gun right now and are also evaluating this change against having had completely broken extra looting double drops from before.

 

[FoxyBearGames]

evaluating this change against having had completely broken extra looting double drops from before

@Cthan @kiadmowi It's worth noting that it may feel like a nerf solely because of this bug, when in reality the numbers we have now are what the numbers should have been before the change

 

[Silver911]

@Cthan @kiadmowi It's worth noting that it may feel like a nerf solely because of this bug, when in reality the numbers we have now are what the numbers should have been before the change

remember the bigger fish buff foxy? couldn't go to a tourny without some cov boio winning.

 

[jakeman5]

too many people are jumping the gun right now and are also evaluating this change against having had completely broken extra looting double drops from before.

We were asking for buffs when there was this "broken extra looking double drops". We took a step backwards.

 

[Cryptite]

We were asking for buffs when there was this "broken extra looking double drops". We took a step backwards.

You were two steps further ahead than where you should have been. You got buffs in the Shrine update, but I think there were assumptions being made that Shrine buffs would be overt, when they are more in line with the economic reality we're pushing for.

 

[kiadmowi]

To be completely fair 40 rods on average from a single blaze shrine was insanely good, whereas the current ~16 rods per blaze shrine feels abysmal, hence

Perhaps there's somewhere inbetween the flood and drought of pot mats that lets people wage wars without dreading the grinding it would bring just because they don't have double drops.

Maybe something along the lines of 1.333... items per mob without double drops and the resulting 2 items per mob with double drops would be a fairer middleground.

 

[SayreSlayer]

just make money printers like its darkrp on gmod