Necman wrote:On a side note unrelated to the mission pack I was wondering what went wrong with weapon rebalancing project?
This one's a bit of a doozy.
Essentially, a while back, I promised two big changes to the grind system:
1. PSO-style grinding (a weapon may go to +100 or +150 where each grind is the same bonus; I will not make every weapon go to +10 but have each grind give different stats).
2. You can grind a weapon's
rank, turning it from C to B to A to S (or the opposite!).
(There's a third: You can raise multiple different stats per weapon: maximum damage, minimum damage/ATA, or PP, where each grinder is likely to focus on one or another. This isn't particularly relevant here, but I haven't forgotten it.)
A weapon in your inventory has the following:
Current PP
Maximum PP
Rank
Grind bonus ATP
So... if you want to create a rank grinder, it's easy enough, just keep a set of bonus stats and add it per rank that you increase. Easy to find room, easy to implement with minimal changes to the game itself.
As implemented, this added a constraint, though: Each rank must add an equivalent amount of stats. For ease of generation, I also made each star within the tier give the same amount of stats (e.g the gap between a 12* and 11* weapon is the same as the gap between a 10* and 11*); this doesn't match the game itself, which likes to make higher rarities give increasing amounts of stats, but I can sorta simulate that. I also tried to make it so that jumping rank would give a substantial bonus (decreasing as you go up--going from 12* to 13* is much smaller than going from 6* to 7*) with the power of math (if anyone wants to see the formulas, let me know! this part was pretty okay).
So I made a nice system for this. It'd generate baseline stats, then you'd put in multipliers for each stat and that'd give you your weapon.
And it ended up being incredibly difficult to tell people how to make it work. How do you determine what are good stats for a weapon? I prefer wider swings between them (if you focus on ATP, I want a lot of ATP and not a lot of everything else, not a 5% bonus on ATP and a 5% penalty on something else), but how far is too far?
So I reworked it. Now you had a base "how good is this?" stat (from 0 to 5), and a 0-5 rating on each stat. Raising a single stat would lower the others, and vice versa. It was very elaborate, very clever.
...But I couldn't figure out how to weight the stats properly. I ended up with pretty much every weapon having a +150 max grind. I couldn't get variance to work in a way that seemed even remotely sensible. I couldn't get the stat modifiers to not make weapons go completely crazy. I never managed to thread that needle between "interesting" and "sensible".
So, long story short, it's on hold for the time being. I need to revisit it, but I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm thinking the modifiers have to only affect
part of the stats, rather than the whole thing--this would cut down on some of the excesses. I do
not intend to use the online stats, regardless; they're also a complete mess, but a boring sort of mess.
Parallaxed wrote:Ohtori Encampment is the best mission ever. You get to fight Daddy Ethan Waber and his friends. Please let me re live the memory of having Daddy Ethan hit me.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of it. Take all those NPC enemies from the story (the Vol Bros, Ethan, Liina, Howzer, Tylor, etc), give them major stat buffs, and force people to fight them all in a row. It's pretty intense!
It's also somewhat tied in with GAS systems that don't exist in the US client.