Umulak2 - Coming Soonish?

Thothie

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I think MSC Community was talking more specifically about the fact that the scaling system, when applied to chests, can be extremely cruel when a low level player joins your run and nerfs the chests by scaling down some of the monsters. This can create an anti-teamwork atmosphere where high levels don't want low level players to join their run.

Yeah, that is a prime problem with the system itself, it doesn't let very low and high level players work together as one would hope (even if not for the affect on the average, it still just makes a map previously borderline playable for lower levels, absolutely unplayable). Again, without an actual leveling system, this is hard to arrange. Have some ideas, but most of them involve a whole lotta scripting, such as assigning level values to every item, monster, and monster ability, then "leveling out" the damage input/output. (Also may require some more work on the mapper's behalf, as they may have to assign relative monster tiers to each mob.)

End result would be that low and high end players would be just about equally durable, with somewhat similar damage output, save the high end ones would have a lot more tricks up their sleeves, so client-unique loot wouldn't have to depend on levels, but only the number of players and their individual levels (hopefully after improving our AFK system yet more).

Not something you'd want to apply to every map though, as again, epic MMO level scaling effect would go by the wayside.

As it is now, these maps have so many monsters, that if you have some nub join ya for a little while, it usually sways back pretty quickly if you can get them to leave, but yes, ideally, you wouldn't want the player to, and they'd be an asset rather than detriment.

(Though, in regards to the specific complaint in question, if it was a flat chest, instead self-adjusting, it probably would have had a 1/200 chance and a minhp req, the old fashion way, regardless of who you brought along with you, and thus be even stingier. It was designed to be pretty cruel, just, not for so long, even if it's less cruel in the current alpha. Plus the chest doesn't rely on tier for its uniques anyways, just for number/type of random loot table instances.)
 

zeus9860

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While this has been changed in the upcoming patch, it should be pointed out that this "complaint" is almost exclusively made by cheaters. It's really not hard to defeat a level VI monster in a server full of 1000 hp players, but I could see how someone might have a hard time when they use alts to artificially inflate the HP in a server so they can cheat extra XP and higher drop chances for themselves as a solo player.

Boy oh boy, let me tell you (and everyone else who shares a similiar mentality) why you are wrong on so many levels...

Dat one intro:
We are living in 2019 and people still consider the use of alts = cheating. When in most of the cases, if not all of them, people use them to actually manage to play the game in the best possible way.
Game lacks population, people do what they have to do to get the content they are seeking in their virtual hands. You can't play some of the self adjusting maps on the highest tier without getting crashes/overflows or disconnects caused by an active group of players, while you can reach the highest tier in a map using alts and have none of the previous issues occur. I like challenges, i use alts to boost tiered maps and try to solo them, you are calling me a cheater for trying to play the content a map has to offer without having to get myself pissed every run i make on that map with random people.

One dimensional logic:
"BUT BUT, THE CONTENT/GAME IS MEANT TO BE PLAYED WITH PEOPLE".
If you think like this with the mod in its current state, gtfo and go breathe some oxygen, seriously. Mod is unstable as hell and it will just get worst with every update. When i see stability improvements made to the mod, i will change my mind on this specific statement. Untill then, playing with alts = best course of action for this mod. Or play with alts and 2-3 players max which i also did at times, even limited to this amount of active players, the game still sh*ts bricks and becomes unplayable. This isn't the only factor at the end of the day, the lack of players is also a big issue.

One dimensional certified users:
Of course, i can't expect much of an adequate response from people who afk all the time in a server or people who play solo (with cheats) offline to test things. If you guys actually bothered playing with a group of 5-6 players properly set for a map, most of the time, there will be issues occuring that make the gaming experience actually frustrating.

One dimensional logic continued:
Even if by some miracle you guys somehow managed to block access to alts, what is stopping the player from bothering other players to get ingame and go afk for them? The only thing changing is server stability (non alt characters usually add more strain to the servers) and actually forcing people to bother other people to get something done. Sure going AFK is a bad thing in gaming, in this very case, the judgement should come from the player/players carrying the afk/afkers. Hence the reason most online games have the option to report afkers and at times a passive system that kicks innactive players after X time. The only thing you would achieve with this is to actually force players to give up playing the mod in the current state it is in.

Conclusion
It is easy to point the fingers at stuff but actually processing the reason as to why people do it is a completly different story.

You guys have a warped sense of fun/enjoyment (unless you enjoy seeing other people in pain, then you are sadistic), the requirements you place in these things aren't for players to play them, they are instead for masochists. And you guys back this up by labelling the use of alts "cheating". Which is a stupid/weak argument at the end of the day with the sole purpose of defaming players that opted to do it, given all the circumstances stated here, plus all the other ones that i didn't bother mentioning.

This is MY EXPERIENCE from the last time i played this mod, if i was to jump in right now, the gaming experience would remain the same as i described, i can't play most of the maps that require 5+ players without getting disconnected upon someone joining, if it isn't a disconnect, it is a crash or an overflow. My experience is equally felt by almost every other active player that play this mod, this much is a fact.

Bonus round
Also don't get me started on the stupid @ss drop rates on these new items lately. Who in their right minds would play undercliffs like 1-100 times to get items for ONE player with the help of 4-5 other players? I have better things to do than spend half year worth of free time running the same dungeon hundreds of times to see the rest of the group get some new pixels in their hands that aren't even worth the effort but people still want it anyways.

tl;dr for the stupid/lazy
Hardcore masochist mode: play with others in 5+ groups = 99% broken game which leads to a garbage gaming experience that makes you want to cut your own wrists or punch the damn screen
Easy/player mode: play solo with alts to replace "active players" = 50% broken game which leads to a much better gaming experience, playing with 2 other players while using alts = still doable most of the time, alts + 3 active players = masochist territory warning
If you were a player trying to get sh*t done, what would you do? Pretty sure the options speak for themselves, one is a reliable way of doing things, the other one isn't.
 
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Thothie

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Prob should just delete this, but it does beg the question, the same one I have whenever I see a rant like this in any game I've played or worked on (seems every game, even the best from Unknown Worlds, has at least a dozen - not that we, unlike them, don't actually deserve it)...

Why are you even here, Zeus?

Although the funny thing is, I think if we actually had a professional grade, super polished, perfectly balanced, and wonderfully aesthetic game... While we'd pick up a whole new fan base, we'd lose all of our current one. "Charm" and all.
 

MS:C community

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I think MSC Community was talking more specifically about the fact that the scaling system, when applied to chests, can be extremely cruel when a low level player joins your run and nerfs the chests by scaling down some of the monsters.
Yes, this was the point exactly. In fact, it is so bad, that a single lower tier monster already ruins the average. The example I gave was with tiers V and VI:
If you kill 99 tier VI monsters and one tier V monster, the 'average tier slain' is (99*6 + 1*5) / 100 = 5.99 which gets rounded down to five.
But then I got hit on the head with "Five is the max the reward system handles anyways".

OK, good job cherry picking one single example, Thothie. Let me spell out the rest for you:

If you kill 99 tier V monsters and one tier IV monster,
the 'average tier slain' = (99*5 + 1*4) / 100 = 4.99
which gets rounded down to four.

If you kill 99 tier IV monsters and one tier III monster,
the 'average tier slain' = (99*4 + 1*3) / 100 = 3.99
which gets rounded down to three.

If you kill 99 tier III monsters and one tier II monster,
the 'average tier slain' = (99*3 + 1*2) / 100 = 2.99
which gets rounded down to two.

If you kill 99 tier II monsters and one tier I monster,
the 'average tier slain' = (99*2 + 1*1) / 100 = 1.99
which gets rounded down to one.

When you've played 99% of a map at tier N difficulty, and 1% of that map at tier N-1 difficulty, the chests all get lowered to tier N-1. How is this reasonable?

It seems blatantly obvious to me that the value for 'average tier slain' should not be rounded down, but just rounded.

Broken.

Edit: And let's not forget this one, also related to ramping chests (of course), reported by yours truly over two years ago:
chests/rand_dynamic (underpath) sometimes shows a completely different inventory. Very hard to reproduce, but it all happens in the same run and it'll either show some fairly generic-looking inventory (very common) or an inventory that is more geared towards the average map tier, in which case the chest will also have the tier number appended to its name, which is visible when viewing the chest contents (very rare).
Same chest, same run, opened once, saw an inventory (pic #01), grabbed 75 gold, opened again, saw a different inventory (pic #02).

And yes, I know the inventory on pic #02 is completely empty, but the second time this bug happened to me (with another chests/rand_dynamic chest), it wasn't. Haven't figured out how to reproduce this one yet, though, but the chest names (compare the two images) should indicate that something is, in fact, broken.

Edit 2: Clicky #01, clicky #02.
I'm sure I have more similar screenshots, but they're hard to find in my folder of 500+ generically labelled MS:C screenshots...
 
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Thothie

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System randomly adds 0.1-0.5 to attempt co compensate for that effect on the chest's end. Already acknowledged and explained at length that the system is kinda boned when lower level players come in, regardless. It's also true, while the triple-chest in question doesn't care what tier it is, some others do (though I think all such chests at least have artifacts available at III+ and just improve their odds).

Similarly, if you are below 25% of the average damage points, most chests assume you were AFK or did next to nothing for most of the map, and give you only generic loot (in some cases, potentially nothing). ...and, like everything in the game, all chests sometimes just bugger out entirely.
 

zeus9860

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Prob should just delete this, but it does beg the question, the same one I have whenever I see a rant like this in any game I've played or worked on (seems every game, even the best from Unknown Worlds, has at least a dozen - not that we, unlike them, don't actually deserve it)...

Why are you even here, Zeus?

Although the funny thing is, I think if we actually had a professional grade, super polished, perfectly balanced, and wonderfully aesthetic game... While we'd pick up a whole new fan base, we'd lose all of our current one. "Charm" and all.

Well, pardon me for not being a goody goody person like some people around here that do it just to stay on your good side, i'm not that type of person, i prefer exposing the core problem rather than daydream around one small detail that actually benefits the leftover playerbase. If i see someone spitting in my direction, do not expect me to sit idle and watch, it won't happen.

I lurk these forums like many other people do and only bother to reply to something when i see the intervention being somewhat necessary. If you don't like the drama, simply avoid mentioning subjects that could trigger it. It is as simple as that, really. You guys often like to point fingers at very small things served in a large plate when there are much bigger issues served in that same plate.

Labelling alt users as cheaters for boosting xp or drop rates, people who say this, are either clueless or butthurt/lazy for not being able to do it themselves (and then proceed to consider people who use alts as bad people that are ruining the game). There are 2 sides of the coin and you limit yourselves to one side only (hence the 1 dimensional perspective), completly discarding the perspective of the actual player. What i stated previously is a fact, the drop rates mixed with the many stability issues this game as when playing with groups of players = masochism. You (in this case, Oyster, but this applies to you aswell Thothie since i know you share a similiar opinion on this) are literally calling me a cheater for cutting down on the frustration this game has been the last time i played. I stopped caring about XP a long time ago, i never bothered maxing my main character even with the benefits of using alts and the benefits of increased xp rates playing on FN, the only thing i bother with is getting the new items and proceed to quit after a tedious and painfull grind.

The use of alts has always been a thing included in this game, from all the way back since i started playing in late 07/early 08. The purpose of using alts is to ease the burden this game delivers upon the player or to start a fresh new experience with new people or solo. People using alts to actually try and enjoy the game as how it should be, get labelled as cheaters, doesn't sound that fair to me. To be honest this to me sounds like people are trying to split the community into groups, the whole "Team whine" scenario repeating itself again for a very stupid/selfish reason that has no basis. Might aswell dub everyone that uses alts for increasing storage capacity as cheaters, since they are "cheating" core mechanics of the game that limit players to a certain amount of data, which everyone in this community (including the devs) are part of the problem.

Anyways, I heard you like fun facts, so here are some fun facts to add to your ever-growing list:
-in 97 undercliffs runs i got: 1 chaos axe (in the first 25 runs) and 1 shadow lance in the 97th run (at this point i quit the map and then quit the mod shortly after), plus a bunch of charms and some other rare drops found in other maps (aob x3, acid lance x1, spider axe x3, winter charm x2, shadow charm x9)
-all of these 97 runs were done with 7 or 8 players in the server (a good portion of the early runs were done with alts mixed with 2-3 players, untill the stability issues started impacting my experience negatively, which forced me to resort to use mostly alts onwards);
-all of these runs were done with a minimum total hp of 4k+, eventually increasing past the 5k+ barrier by the time i did 60 runs;
-the many crashes/random kicks/overflows i got aren't accounted for in the total amount of runs, i could easily add another 50 runs to the total based on these issues alone, fun times, i know;
- friendly reminder these are the statistics for me alone with this many "people" helping all the time.

There are plenty more to mention, but i'm not gonna bother right now.
 

Thothie

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So, WAI then? Good to know. (Though maybe a bit more generous than intended.) Never mind the question as to what you intended to do after you got the last item in the game. Also that whole rant does little to answer the original question. If you hate the game so much, then...

PS. Since someone demanded I reiterate this, yes, once a map is in game we more or less reserve rights to it. We do try to keep the original vision, and usually changes are minor optimizations, exploit, and bug fixes. Multi-map or dynamic quests may similarly find themselves running through older maps. If the mapper is still around, we generally run those changes by them and see about a compromise if they don't like them. Did make fundamental gameplay changes to Tundra without checking in recently, probably being the most extreme case of that, though I think Kfotress holds the record for being unrecognizable from its source material (originally having no lighting and being much more bareboned - but did run that past Annoying).
 

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Nice to hear you're working on a map, Dridje.
+2 Nice salty vibes in this topic.
 

zeus9860

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So, WAI then? Good to know. (Though maybe a bit more generous than intended.) Never mind the question as to what you intended to do after you got the last item in the game. Also that whole rant does little to answer the original question. If you hate the game so much, then...

The answer you are seeking is right there in the second paragraph, or at least most of it. Dunno what else you are expecting as an answer, unless you want the original "Waiting on the next patch" mumbo jumbo with a small hope that things will get slightly better this time around. Then that is all there is to it.

Yes, of course i hate this game so much that i ended up spending hundreds of euros with donations to help replace stolen content that this mod was heavily relying on, or having the original plans of creating community contests with game/money/coupon rewards (remember those? I was the one person who came up with this idea. Someone in this community simply "took" my idea from a steam chat back then while i was still planning things and decided to take it as their own idea, host it before my planned date and didn't even bother to give credit, i'm not going to mention who this person is to avoid that extra drama, but you know who you are... even with this idea being taken away from my hands, i still supported the events with rewards) or the one time i tried to bring some content creators back into the mod (which i failed to do so but at least i tried). Do not misjudge my hatred for something that it isn't. First thing on the hate list is people who setup the drama and expect things to turn out all nice and clean after rigging the outcome.

Again, the moment you negatively categorize people in the community without a valid reason to do so, you are asking someone to fuel the drama flames once again. And that is where i come in at times, you guys setup the drama plot, i'll be the fuel that keeps the drama alive for as long as it is necessary. This is a vicious cycle this community has created long before i was even involved, the issue here is that the majority of people have completly left this game behind, while i'm still lurking with a few other old players. Even if i was gone, someone would eventually replace my spot and do the samething. This is something you will have to live up with for as long as you setup the drama.

That image displays only 1/3rd of the truth sadly. I'll leave the other 2 for your imagination!
 

Thothie

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So, you're just here to fan flames? Okay, at the moment, yeah, I admit I'm not really helping in that department either, and probably shoulda wiped the thread awhile ago, but eh, that's not something we really need help with... Still, yes, ya did at least get donate us some models, so I know ya don't truly hate the game, it's just that's all I'm getting out of your current post content. What idea did anon steal from ya though?
 

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Nice to hear you're working on a map, Dridje.

Thanks Kermit for staying on the topic while there's a battle between the God of Thunder and God of Writing in here.
 

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Will we be able to hug the mummies? Also will there be dynamics to the map, such as lighting torches that hurt the ever so annoying mummies or even just some buttons to push to make things move? Having things to bring the map to life to where its more than just a background to fight in is always nice, to me at least idk if other people care about those things anymore.
 

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Will we be able to hug the mummies? Also will there be dynamics to the map, such as lighting torches that hurt the ever so annoying mummies or even just some buttons to push to make things move? Having things to bring the map to life to where its more than just a background to fight in is always nice, to me at least idk if other people care about those things anymore.

Pretty sure someone would have a fit if you could kill enemies with map entities.
 

Thothie

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We have plenty of functions for that (and do it once or twice in game) - though sadly it won't get you XP. Granted, one could always add some extra rewards for solving a puzzle or what not, or maybe give the player's some options (murder-plow for XP and loots, or end it quicker with a trap that blocks said loot - bugger being that players may not agree on which path to take).

Was kinda hoping Dridje would take his caravan escort quest idea to Thornlands_North, though sadly I know it'd involve scripting to work real well.
 

Dridmar

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Oh shit I remember that idea. Well, maybe when I make Thornlands_North_West I'll do that.
 

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[moved to its own topic]
 
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