Rethinking upgrade stone costs.

[Penumbra]

I have updated both the screen shot and the excel file in the post. I added the "extreme" case of level 50 and added in flat multipliers for both skill and total level costs, per Purlox's request. This should allow more specific tweaking.

[madcow]

Getting rid of an upgrade cap would kill the need to specialize, which it seems to me is something they want to encourage. Unless upgrading one stat, increased the cost of upgrading everything else too - which would actually make it harder to be an all-rounder.

[Penumbra]

Getting rid of an upgrade cap would kill the need to specialize, which it seems to me is something they want to encourage. Unless upgrading one stat, increased the cost of upgrading everything else too - which would actually make it harder to be an all-rounder.

These are the exact same goals I had. The cost of everything goes up by an amount whenever a skill is upgraded. The fixed cost of a specific skill at a certain level remains unchanged. Tweaking it at this point to incentivize spreading out shouldn't be too hard.

[madcow]

Ahh, okay. I don't personally mind the level 10 cap, but if people want to get rid of it - I'm not completely opposed to that, but a little hesitant to support it. It seems like it would encourage people to grind indefinitely looking for upgrade stones, but I guess if that's how people want to play the game, they can.

I still like the idea of being able to use upgrades on enchantments/spells that are lost on character death - but probably that would be a fairly major upgrade for much further down the line, if it ever happens.

[Penumbra]

I still like the idea of being able to use upgrades on enchantments/spells that are lost on character death

Maybe instead of applying to enchantments/spells, you really want more categories of stats? Like, jump height and cooldowns? That would be the effectively the same as upgrading your enchants. Would be interesting for a Mantis suggestion. 

[madcow]

I still like the idea of being able to use upgrades on enchantments/spells that are lost on character death

Maybe instead of applying to enchantments/spells, you really want more categories of stats? Like, jump height and cooldowns? That would be the effectively the same as upgrading your enchants. Would be interesting for a Mantis suggestion.

Yeah, would have the same result, and that's probably a simpler way to do it really. As it is with 3 stats, I've not really felt like I need to focus my upgrades differently (yet), and just do the same upgrade paths when I die anyways.

[Penumbra]

just do the same upgrade paths when I die anyways.

I find it highly depends on what I am going to do with my new lemming Glyph Bearer and which time period I pick from. Each level of skill gives a different amount of bonus based on how much you started with. Those 10 hp glass cannons gain almost no life, but a tremendous amount of damage. The skelebots, on the other hand, would have very different stats if given the same upgrades. A skelebot with a bunch of health increases, while he can't kill very fast, is great for running past things, like in windstorms.

[LintMan]

It seems like some of the stated goals here are at odds with each other in that it is desired to make getting the last few upgrades very hard to reach but at the same time, not encourage save-scumming by having players invest too much in their character.  IMHO, these are inherently conflicting goals.  The more time/effort to get those last upgrades, the more attached players will be to those characters and the more likely they will be to save-scum.

One solution would be to make the upgrades just not of much use or so unreachable to get, that players don't really care if they get them or not because they don't expect to ever get them, or just don't care.  Either of those is a bit of a sad situation, though, IMHO.

I'm slightly tempted to go in the other direction and suggest maxing upgrades become a lot easier.  As I see it,  the permadeath thing is a focus point of the game --but-- the game takes a whole lot of steps to make it as painless as possible.  Making something very hard to get that is lost on death goes against that.  Except  the upgrades are pretty much the only thing that IS lost on death.  So, there's a fine balance there:

What it all boils down to, what we're really talking about here is how big the death penalty should be.  Once you decide that, it will be easier to scale and balance the upgrade rate.  So I suggest looking into that.   Is the current death penalty sufficient?  Do we need a death penalty at all?  Perhaps it could be reduced from "lose all upgrades" to somehting less, perhaps a partial refund of upgrade stones upon death?  After all, how many players would want to play an MMO where you lose all your levels if you die?

Personally, I'd like to see the character development/RPG-stat aspects of AVWW become deeper, but right now that's all tied to upgrades and lost upon death, so extra gameplay depth here becomes a bit moot in the current system.

[TechSY730]

As I see it,  the permadeath thing is a focus point of the game --but-- the game takes a whole lot of steps to make it as painless as possible.  Making something very hard to get that is lost on death goes against that.  Except  the upgrades are pretty much the only thing that IS lost on death.  So, there's a fine balance there:

What it all boils down to, what we're really talking about here is how big the death penalty should be.  Once you decide that, it will be easier to scale and balance the upgrade rate.  So I suggest looking into that.   Is the current death penalty sufficient?  Do we need a death penalty at all?  Perhaps it could be reduced from "lose all upgrades" to somehting less, perhaps a partial refund of upgrade stones upon death?  After all, how many players would want to play an MMO where you lose all your levels if you die?

You raise a very good point. The purposes of character death and character upgrades are very much interconnected, and if we are trying to tweak the magnitude or role of one of those aspects of the game, the other one should be at least looked at as well.

[bvchaosinc]

The only thing you lose when you die is you upgrades right?

The only reason to upgrade is to die less?

[Bluddy]

I think LintMan made an excellent point. I've been thinking about this, and maybe the whole mechanic of the upgrade stones has to go. I mean, it's not so natural anyway. There's already a mechanism to upgrade your character in the form of the enchants. So why have a mechanism that upgrades your health, creating balancing issues, and can be lost so easily with death causing grind?

Here's my idea: the current upgrades from upgrade stones will be rolled into types of enchants. Enchant variety is always good. These enchants won't be as strong as upgrades can get. So what do you lose with death? How do you make death painful without necessarily making it a grind? You lose the enchants that you carried. You see, the enchants would be similar to spells -- they're stored in the settlement in a personal cache, and to equip other enchants you have to go back to your settlement. I think this alone is a really good idea. Why? Because it allows customized characters.

Right now, say you're fighting something in a cave and there's acid water that you could fall into. What do you do? You simply put on your acid gills. There's no threat from the water. Every character possesses so many enchants that are readily available, that there's no customization of the character. And customization is important -- very much so. To make a procedural game meaningful, you need random situations involving different environmental factors that affect differently customized characters differently. The best example of this I know is Binding of Isaac (which I consider brilliant). You encounter different enemies in different zelda-like arenas, and every game and battle is different because your character has picked up different powerups and is therefore differently customized. It works brilliantly. But in AVWW, every character eventually becomes an amorphous blob that has a hundred enchants and can therefore adjust to any challenge. If the enchants were stored at the settlement, this would mean that every time you head out you have to think about what you're doing and how you're going to equip yourself. More important, this would mean that you have to consider the possibility that you'll die and lose those enchants forever.

The beauty of this idea is that enchants that you lose are not a massive loss, because you collect so many of them. Initially you may be more stingy for example and only use one enchant at a time, not wanting to lose your whole cache in one go. Later on you have so many that it doesn't matter that you lose some, but you'll mix your best ones with less important ones and this is exactly what we want -- we want you to not be super duper strong all the time. Your consideration of possible death will make you reconsider which enchants to take, and I think this is very good. But the important thing is that we're not causing grind by death. We're only causing possible grind if you ran out of enchants and you want some, or if you weren't careful and took all the best enchants.

Now there's a question -- if upgrade stones are gone, what is there to find in stashes? The answer is enchants. Perhaps even some super enchants, or health boosting enchants. Perhaps there's even an enchant that preserves another enchant through one death cycle. Enchant containers will give you a minimal percentage to slowly get another enchant, but the real way to get enchants is through stashes.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I think completely throwing out upgrade stones isn't a good idea, I would rather they stay and get fixed. 

King

[tigersfan]

I think completely throwing out upgrade stones isn't a good idea, I would rather they stay and get fixed. 

King

We're not throwing them away. We do have some ideas about them, but, we don't have exact numbers on them yet, so I don't want to say too much till I have a beter idea of what the numbers are going to be.

[x4000]

Here's the new mechanics:

* Previously, the first health upgrade cost you 16 and then it would go up by a power of 2 from there for each further upgrade (32, 64, 128, etc).  Mana and Attack were the same, except starting at 8 (so then 16, 32, 64, 128, etc).
** Now the fee is flat for all upgrades: it's 20 stones for a health upgrade, and 10 for attack or mana.
** After much discussion on this subject, it became clear that being able to apply 10 upgrades to your character is an important avenue for player choice, but not something that should be prohibitively time consuming to do.  Even if the upgrades past the 8th were a "bad value" to encourage players to consider conserving stones, some players would push all the way to 10 upgrades no matter what and then be encouraged to save-scum to protect that character.
** Further, not having 10 upgrades on the primary character was creating a disincentive to create a stable of other characters for various purposes.
** Lastly, it was tricky to balance the game because if players used a full 10 upgrades then things could be far to easy; but with no upgrades it could be far too hard.  Now we can balance around the general expectation of roughly 10 upgrades being on most characters; and these upgrades being more about choice than they are about a long-term slog through getting thousands of stones.
** The reason for keeping a cost to the upgrades at all is to maintain that sense of loss on death of characters; aside from the vengeful ghosts, upgrades are the one thing that is lost when your character dies.  That has seemed a very popular thing (and in fact upgrades were originally added when beta players felt there was not enough of a penalty for death), but we have been aiming to balance it so that the penalty is noticeable but not harsh.

* Previously, each upgrade that you applied in the health, mana, or attack categories would give you a flat bonus every time you used an upgrade.  That made sense when the costs of each upgrade went up exponentially.  However, now that the costs are flat (not even linear, but literally flat), we chose to instead make the bonuses from each upgrade decay so that they remain balanced.
** Applying 10 health upgrades now gives a maximum 5.57x bonus (so 20% decay) compared to 10x previously (0% decay).
*** With a character of base health 141, that gives the following progression: 141,282,395,485,557,615,661,698,728,752,771,786
** Applying 10 attack upgrades now gives a maximum 1.65x bonus (so 10% decay) compared to 2x previously (0% decay).
*** With a character of base attack 85, that gives the following progression: 85,93,100,107,113,118,123,127,131,135,138,141
** Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 2.63x (so 30% decay) compared to 6x previously (0% decay).
*** With a character of base mana 100, that gives the following progression: 100,150,185,210,227,239,247,253,257,260,262,263
** Cumulatively, these changes do help to encourage players to choose characters with base stats that somewhat mirror what they want the final stats to be -- because the changes you can make to a given character are somewhat less extreme, although still really notable.  The penalty for diversification is also a lot less now compared to what it was, but the penalty for stacking everything into one stat is now a penalty of effectiveness rather than of cost.

* Mana upgrades have been the least useful of the three kinds of stat upgrades for a while.  Part of that is because most of the really high-mana-cost spells that we have planned are not yet in the game.  So some of that is just a matter of intent for later stuff.
** However, to address this imbalance in general, we made it so that mana upgrades also simultaneously upgrade mana regen rates.  Normally all characters have a flat 83.3 regen rate for mana unless they have had some mana upgrades via upgrade stones; given that upgrade stones are the only way to increase mana regen, that makes this suddenly a lot more interesting.
** Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 1.3x bonus to mana regen (so 10% decay on 1 5% boost per increase) compared to 0x previously.
*** So the progression for any character is: 83.3,87.3,91.3,94.3,97.3,100.3,103.3,105.3,107.3,109.3,110.3,112.3.

* The logic for how you find upgrade stones has been changed up somewhat:
** Places that previously dropped 8 upgrade stones now drop 5.  Places that dropped 16 now drop 10.
*** Except in the intro mission, where the caches of 8 are now caches of 50, and the caches of 16 are now caches of 100.  This lets players explore these mechanics a lot more right in the intro mission.
** Places that previously dropped 4 upgrade stones now drop 5, and those that previously dropped 3 now drop 1.
** Now when you kill a miniboss, you get 5 upgrade stones.  When you kill a microboss you get 1.