| Text | - For example, if the profile has a wealth rating of 1, then a dirk generated by this profile has a 10% chance to have a base damage of 7, a 15% chance to have a base damage of 8, a 25% chance to have a base damage of 9, and so forth. A dirk from a wealth rating 2 profile will have different possible damages and different chances to get those damages. Mutation is one of the most complicated – and one of the coolest – parts of the treasure system, and there are hundreds of data tables devoted to describing this behavior. These examples just give you a taste of the system.
- Wealth ratings were originally intended to control the quality of treasure – the higher the wealth rating, the better the loot, period. There was no notion of treasure being best for a particular level of player, because the higher treasure was always going to be better for everyone. You can see this philosophy in many places still today – a peerless healing kit is always better in all ways for all characters than an excellent healing kit, an excellent healing kit is always better than a good healing kit, and so forth.
- We also wrote a tool to help us set the treasure profiles for every creature in the game. The tool helped us quite a bit, but because of the sheer number of changes involved we still only managed to get about 2/3 of the creatures done for February. Most of the rest will be changed with the April update, but we’ll probably be dealing with stragglers – quest creatures, mostly – for another several months.
- So now you know in general terms how the treasure profile controls the types of loot that you find. And you know that the wealth rating is probably the most important property of the profile because it controls the fine-grained selection of treasure items as well as their mutation. With that knowledge under our belt, let’s talk some about how treasure has worked historically in Asheron’s Call.Where We Were
Although the basic structure of the treasure system has remained the same for the past four years, the way that we use that structure has changed. The best example of this is the way that we use wealth ratings.
- It didn’t help matters that traditionally each creature and each chest had its own individually named treasure profile and so any changes to treasure would need to modify over a thousand data files. That may sound good on paper – each creature has its own unique profile – but in practice it didn’t quite work out the way you might think. The main difference between two particular golem profiles, for instance, was that one had a 67% chance to drop a gem, and the other had a 70% chance to drop a gem. Unfortunately, the sheer number of data files involved meant that slow, step-by-step change was not feasible for the treasure system – we were really looking at a second creature rebalancing.Our Goals
So between the changing game environment and the maturing of the players themselves, you can see how the treasure system was stuck in a hard place. In order to grow, it first had to change. But how did we want to grow the treasure system?
- We knew that all of these areas would need to be addressed eventually – and some sooner than others – but we also knew that it wasn’t feasible to address them all at once. Spell scrolls we addressed in March, armor types will be addressed in April, and the others we hope to address in the near future.
- But we felt it was more important for us to address the some of the nastier mutation side effects immediately. A good example of this can be seen with the wield requirements on missile weapons. Before February, you could only find 250-wield missile weapons at wealth rating 4 or above. Had we left this unchanged when we adjusted the profiles, you wouldn’t have had any chance to find 250-wield missile weapons until around character level 60. So it was important for us to adjust the wield requirement mutations, as well as other mutations, to account for the wealth rating changes. Table 1 shows the distribution of wield requirements for weapons after the change.
- Of course, changing the treasure profiles on creatures had a lot of side effects. Some creatures saw changes in the types of items or in the number of items they dropped. But the biggest side effects were tied to changes in the wealth rating, and these included both changes in selection and mutation.
- Table 1: Weapon Wield Requirements
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- New players want a consistent world to play in and live in, and they probably aren’t going to understand offhand why all the treasure they are finding just plain sucks and that they should go hunt Olthoi Harvesters. High level players, on the other hand, need high level content and high level content should drop high level loot, and the fact was that once you were past level 60 or so you were pretty much looking at the same treasure for the rest of your character’s lifetime was just not exciting to us, or to you. So somehow, we needed to straighten the system out.
- Now, some players were worried that standardizing the treasure profiles would rob the treasure system of a lot of its richness and flexibility. This is an understandable worry, but in context … Well, you have to understand the scale here. We started with approximately 1200 treasure profiles – roughly one for each creature and each chest. There are approximately 500 treasure profiles in use today, and ideally we’d like to reduce this a bit further, say to 250 profiles. But even 250 different treasure profiles still gives us an awful lot of flexibility and opportunities for individuality among different creatures.
- All treasure generators in AC – both creatures and chests – figure out what treasure they will actually generate based on a treasure profile. This profile controls treasure generation in fairly broad strokes. For instance, it specifies how many items can be generated – perhaps 3 to 5, or 5 to 15. It also specifies what types of items can be generated and how likely each type is to generate. For example, an Olthoi might drop pretty much anything, but an Elemental might drop more gems, and no lockpicks at all.
- It is important to understand, however, that the types of items that the profile can specify are very general. For instance, the profile might specify that a chest generates mostly armor and weapons with perhaps a few gems thrown in, but not which kinds of weapons, armor, or gems.
- In order to assign profiles to creatures in a rational fashion, we correlated each wealth rating with a target level range. Initially, each wealth rating lined up exactly with the main level ranges on the creature distribution map: newbie, low, mid, high, extreme, and uber. However, after reading a good bit of player feedback we realized that we needed to tweak the ranges down a bit, so that you can start collecting equipment for the next level range before you actually get there. These tweaks will go live with the April update, and you can see the effects of these tweaks in Table 4 below in the April section.
- This was originally true for weapons and armor as well, but that all changed with the addition of wield requirements at the beginning of 2002. Wield requirements are controlled by the wealth rating of the treasure profile, so in a sense they correlate to the quality of the treasure. But wield requirements also define brackets of treasure that corresponded to character levels rather than to simple quality. In other words, a 325-wield sword is just not as useful to a newbie sword character as a no-wield sword, and so you can’t really judge the quality of the two swords on the same scale for all characters.
- As a measure of quality, wealth ratings have suffered from somewhat random assignment to creatures over the years. Asheron’s Call has always had exactly six wealth ratings, but when the game first shipped, only the first five were commonly available to players. The lowest wealth ratings were assigned to the low level creatures; wealth rating 4 was assigned to the high level creatures; and wealth rating 5 was assigned only to very special creatures like Olthoi nobles. Keep in mind, however, that the high level creatures at the time were aimed at characters of perhaps level 20 or 30.
- This effort has raised a lot of questions with players. It’s not intuitively obvious to you what we’re doing to treasure or why we want to do it – or what benefit you’re going to get out of it. And changes of this scope are understandably a bit discomfiting. So we’ve written this article to tell you a bit about where we want to go with treasure and how we plan to get there. And, of course, we’d like your feedback on our plans. After all, this treasure is meant for you.Background
Before we start talking about the changes to treasure and our goals for the future, it’s going to be necessary to tell you a good bit about how treasure in Asheron’s Call works.
- Perhaps the most important property that the profile specifies is the wealth rating. There are six wealth ratings – from 1 to 6. The wealth rating of a profile is used in two distinct ways during treasure generation. First, it is used in selection to select the exact item that is going to be generated; and secondly it is used in mutation to determine how that item is going to be changed by the treasure system.
- In terms of selections, for example, a creature that previously used a wealth rating 3 profile would have previously dropped mostly good healing kits. If after the realignment, however, their profile had a wealth rating of 2, they would now drop primarily poor healing kits. Likewise, selection changes also affected what types of weapons , what kinds of armor , what kinds of gems, which healing kits and lockpicks, and what levels of spell scrolls you might find on a particular creature.
- This lead to a situation in which the wealth ratings were all bunched up at the low end and spread terribly thin at the high end, with some just being completely out of whack. We might have gone on this way for years, if not for two factors: 1) a desire to bring new players into Dereth, and 2) the growing issue of high level players.
- Later on, as players reached higher levels and higher quality treasure became more widespread, the middle wealth ratings were pushed both down into lower level creatures and up into higher level creatures . After a year or two, wealth rating 6 was made more available to players through Singularity Troves, which helped the high level issue temporarily, but then the addition of wield requirements confused the issue – because wield requirement weapons occurred at relatively high wealth ratings, but realistically lower level players needed more access to those weapons. And finally, creature rebalancing and redistribution came through like a whirlwind last year and shredded whatever tatters of rhyme or reason may have remained in the assignment of wealth ratings.
- That’s how the profile and the wealth rating control selection, but what about mutation? Well, all crude healing kits are just crude healing kits, but for something like a dirk the selection of the item is only the first step. Once we know that we’re generating a dirk, we still need to figure out all sort of things about it: how much damage it will do, its attack and melee defense modifiers, its speed, its burden, what item enchantments are on it, what creature endowments it casts, if it has cantrips, how much mana it has, its wield requirements, its skill and heritage requirements, etc. Each of these properties is assigned by mutation, and for each of these properties, we are going to consult a table that is organized by wealth rating.
- Well, as we said in the February Rollout Article, our goals for treasure are pretty simple: we want treasure to be useful and interesting. To expand on that a bit, we want creatures in a particular level range to drop loot that could be useful to characters in that level range. Now mind you, that doesn’t mean that every single piece of treasure will be the best you’ve ever seen – that might be useful, but it would very soon stop being interesting. But it does mean that you should have a good chance of finding something pretty darned useful. We want everyone to have good reason to check the corpse of every creature they kill, because they might just find something fantastic.Where We Are Now February
In February, we started the laborious process of cleaning up the treasure system. First, we defined a set of generic profiles for use with all creatures. By limiting the number of profiles that creatures used, we made the entire system easier to work with and we ensured that further changes to treasure would be more feasible and easier to test.
- Introduction
The treasure system is perhaps one of the best gameplay systems in AC. It’s exciting, it’s flexible, it’s addictive, and it integrates well with other aspects of the game. But after four years and a lot of plastering, patching and mending, it was beginning to show its age. So recently we started on a multi-month project to reinvigorate the treasure system.
- Let’s look at an example. The treasure profile used by the Broken Fragment says that when the creature dies, it’s going to create 3 to 5 items. One of those items is going to be either a healing kit or a mana stone or a scarab . The profile also says that this is going to be an item with a wealth rating of 1. So when the fragment dies, it rolls a random number – and let’s say that it decides that one item is going to be a healing kit. Then it checks a table for the possible healing kits that can occur in wealth rating 1, and determines that the healing kit can be either a crude kit or a poor kit chance. It rolls again to decide exactly which kit it will generate.
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